Stupidest client ever:
I once had a client that requested me a new website, all went well and get paid.
After a month our two, he called and requested a change on basically all pages. I sent him a estimate of 2h, he approved, signed a contract and I've made the changes. He never paid me that changes. After 2 months ignoring my calls and emails I've rollback to the pre-changes website. He called me anything you can think off and that I would be sorry for done that... I was like... WTF??
- Pay me and I'll put the changes online.
He replied:
- you will be sorry. See you in court.
We went to court because of FUCKING 200€...
Court decision? The client was obligated to pay me the 200€ and all the court expenses...

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]

Root: Fleshes out missing data in some factories. Tests affected code and finds the change breaks some specs (but shouldn’t).

Root: Reaches out to spec author.

Root: Messages thundercunt (the ticket’s code reviewer) on slack about the specs and the reaching out. No response.

Root: Works on another ticket while blocked.

Root: Logs off.

Root: Talks with spec author chick in the morning. Decide to pair on specs later.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Gives update in standup. Mentions factories and broken specs. Mentions pairing with spec chick.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Pulled off tickets in favor of prod issue. Gets ignored by everyone else diagnosing prod issue. Investigates prod issue by herself. Discovers prod issue isn’t from bad code, but bad requirements — code works as requested. Communicates this with details. Gets ignored by people still diagnosing prod issue. Tries again. Gets ignored. Gives up. Works on non-blocked tickets instead.

TC: Still no slack response.

Hours later:

TC: Comments on PR telling me I broke specs (how did I not notice?), that I need to reach out to spec chick and work with her, and that I can’t resolve the ticket until it’s fixed and passes code review.

TC: Still no slack response. (21 hours later at this point)

TC: Logs off. Still no response (25 hours at this point)

———

Ignoring the prod issue for the moment…

I broke specs. No shit.
I need to talk with spec chick. No shit.
I can’t resolve the ticket. No shit!

Bitch, I told you all of this 21 fucking hours prior, and again 3 hours prior during standup. But no, I clearly “don’t communicate” and obviously have no bloody clue what I’m doing, either, so I need everything spelled out for me.

And no, I didn’t resolve the fucking ticket. Why the fuck would I if it still has pending changes? Do you even check? Ugh!

And what the fuck with that prod issue? I’m literally giving you the answer. fucking listen! Stupid cunts.

Why is it all of the women I work with are useless or freaking awful people? Don’t get me wrong, many of the men are, too, but I swear it’s every single one of the women. (Am I awful, too?)

Just. Ugh.
I can’t wait to leave this sewer of a company.

Oddly still a good day, though. Probably because I talked to recruiters and sent out my resume again.

New guy at work asks me for a code review. 16 lines added, and I have 4 comments, all about readability. Only the major stuff because I went easy on him. I even ignored a missing semicolon.

Guy comes to me and explains that code review is about if code works, not what it should look like. "You want me to write it your way, and we'll have endless arguments if that's how you do code reviews. But I'll do your requested changes." Reduces his entire code to two lines, which make a lot more sense.

Later, I ask him why he used "void 0" anyway. I was wondering if he's thinking of security aspects or if there's another reason. His answer: "because it looks cool and nobody else does it".

*PM on drugs*

PM: The destination list on our Infinity Rider app is not updating even after the user changes their pickup location.

Me: ???

PM: Infinity App not updating after pick up point change.

Me: Not really sure what you mean... Can I get a screen record?

PM: {{sends screen record}}

PM: You see it's showing results of old search. Not good!!!

Me: {{Watch media half way through and saw the obvious}}

Me: Results on available destination are relative to the user's current location and not the pickup address.

PM: Why would that be? Not good enough!

Me: You actually requested that implementation after I had previously made the destination recommendation list relative to selected pickup address.

PM: Please revert immediately!!!

Me: Hmmm... You told me the reason why that implementation was needed was to prevent users from selecting interstate addresses because they could.

PM: Ooh true. You can leave as is.

PM: {{proceeds to delete all older messages but last}}

Me: (⊙_⊙)

{{ 4 hours later }}

PM: I think we need to look into this implementation a second time.

follow on from my last rant.

I've finally gotten my new Jira project. Only thing I seem to have access to change is the Kanban board columns. Still has 50+ fields when creating a ticket etc.

Asked the support team handling the request if this was a mistake. He said no, i'll need to open another ticket to have those changes requested.

Opened and got a reply. Currently there are 2 versions of Jira running. They are working on consolidating them atm and won't help me right now until this is done. I've been asked to re-open my request after the consolidation is done in March 2019.

5 ... fucking ... months, so I can have a competent ticketing process.

He pointed me to a page explaining the move and listing all the changes taking place. Well lets look at the changes they are making that are so critical:

Change 14: Rename "More info" status to "Needs more info".

... Oh pardon me. I didn't realise such critical show stoppers were being addressed. Please do continue. Don't mind me, i'll just be over here taking 4 hours to create an Epic and 6 stories. As you were

When I was in school I had some guys walk up to me and asked:

G: Are you Feeno?
Me: Yes, what's up?
G: We need our FY project on school management system done.
Me: Okay?
G: How much will that cost us?
Me: *confused because I was still a freshman. At that point the only programming language I knew was elementary qbasic. I couldn't even write a hello world program without the help of Google*
So played along because yes we're talking about money here.

Me: It will cost you guys N amount of money (*improvised deep voice*).
G: Okay. Fair price.
* Right there they transferred half the requested amount to me. *
Holy moly! This guys aren't joking around. I don't know shit! They clearly mistook me for a senior student whose first name is Feeno, to me that was a nick referred to me by my friends.

I'm in this one for sure and it's a do or die transaction cus I'm returning no fucking money. I told my friends what had happened and they insisted I return back the money to the students and admit I can't deliver the project they were requesting.
Fuck all of yah! I'm keeping this money. Same afternoon I visited the school library with the intension of writing the code using the help of YouTube tutorials. I didn't find anything useful for qbasic as I thought I could write a full fledged school management system using qbasic.

I was lucky enough to find an existing source code on Codeproject, God bless that Indian guy. The source was in PHP and the tutor gave a step by step guide to setup XAMP and MySQL. I really don't know PHP but I guess source code modification is a natural skill to all programmers as I was able to modify the code to meet the requirements of the students (i.e school name, logo and other minor changes).

Most of what I learnt in programming came from modifying the source of that project. I learnt how to connect a PHP source to a MySQL database, I learnt about functions and their usage, I learnt the basics of HTML, I really learnt a lot and I would say that the speed at which I learnt was proportional to the amount of pressure I received to deliver.

That was how my journey as a full stack developer started. By chance maybe.

this happens way too often in our company

PM: did you made that change I requested?
me: yeah, its on the live server now, why?
PM: I cant see it...
me: *wtf, I specially forced the JS to reload to eliminate problems with cache* could you send me a screenshot?
PM: *sends screenshot*
me: I dont get it... I can see the changes in my browser *dev feeling intensifies* ... refresh the site and try again
PM: oh... suddenly its there, ...anyway, thanks! it looks great!
me: *facepalm*

turns out our managers just dont refresh websites, they want changes to take place immediately

Sometimes I have really loose the will to live and find myself face palming multiple times.

I added live chat software a web frontend for a client. Very easy job that consisted of pasting in some embed code. The actual software is very good and has native ios/andriod apps - something specifically requested.

I got a call from my client about an hour ago, saying there is a "serious issue with the live chat".

My client stated the live chat won't work when his staff go home. He asked me what my solution to this was.

Saying "wtf" many times to myself I directed him to a settings within the chat software i.e. an "away mode" where an email is sent when no chat agents are available.

This apparently wasn't good enough and said I hadn't followed his brief of "adding life chat software to the website", which I had.

After a lengthy discussion I found the root of his frustration. He'd signed a contract with a client of his own, stating there would be 24/7 support via live chat on the website.

Obviously there a huge difference between adding a chat widget to a website and committing to having it manned 24/7 :)

After a further 10 minutes of trying push the blame on myself, the client insisted of having the chat software "appear" as someone was always online, even when they are not (people need to sleep ya know!).

Bu design, the chat software requires at least one agent be logged in before the chat status changes to "online" - why wouldn't it.

After a little while I was seriously wondering why I'm involved in this conversation. I jokingly stated: "Well you could always install Andriod/iOS app on your phone, login and permanently leave it running in background. You'd get lots of notifications, but the site would say the live is always online".

The latter was something I said in jest. To my surprise the client said he'd do that on his own phone going forwards. He actually thanked me for my "resourcefulness", lol.

I'm looking at the same dashboard now and there are 407 pending chat requests - his phone must literally be blowing up notifications :)

Put in 22 hours of work (straight through) and an end user requested changes the next day.

Fuck you, I'm out.

When a co-worker requested changes on a PR giving the reason "I am a fan of'".
No because it will optimize the application, or make the code more maintainable. He's just a fan. Like I went to work to look for fans.

We had a sprint where we removed some fields from the signup page, in order not to "scare users off" with the amount of information requested. Quite a few changes in frontend and backend alike.

Only now in the final day of the sprint (where we're supposed to deploy the changes) do we realize some of that information is actually required by the payment processor, and likely for very predictable *legal* reasons which I even questioned during planning.

Client (on Tuesday): I was X features on my website before the weekend!
Me: Sure thing, I can do that. Just a reminder, my rates are $Y/hr and the changes won’t go up until I’ve been paid in full.

(Thursday morning)
Me: Here’s the changes you’ve requested on the test environment, please review. Also here’s the invoice for my work, as soon as that’s paid I can upload the changes.

Annnnnddd silence since then... I’m glad that I don’t have to count on just one client’s payment, but if you wanted before the weekend and I have it all set up, please don’t ghost me.

If you're going to request CRITICAL changes to thousands of records in the database, and approve it through testing which is done on an exact replica of production, then tell me it was done incorrectly after the fact it has been implemented and you didn't actually review the changes made to the data or business logic that you requested then you are an idiot. Our staging environment is there to ensure all the changes are accurate you useless human. Its the data you provided, I didn't just magically pull it from thin air to make yours and my job a pain the ass.

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

------------------------------------

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

I work for a web agency.
Over the last 18 months a company asked us about 5 different quotes for rather minimal changes to their website.
While being minimal changes, estimating costs for them still requires several hours of work for research, meetings, correspondance and writing the damn things. They never even gave us a response (neither positive nor negative), except once where they told us that they wouldn't pay for project management because their instructions are so clear that PM isn't necessary.

As a response to the last one, after several months, they send us a 10 pages long pdf with requirements for a new website (or a "restyle" like they call it, even if it has absolutely nothing in common with the current one).
We inform them that we can't permit ourselves to continue studying new solutions for free and therefore tell them that a detailed offer would cost them something like 300$, and that amount would then be discounted from the eventually accepted job. We also roughly estimate a price range of about 15k - 20k for the new website.

We get an email back, from the CEO (until now it was a secretary), with essentially 3 arguments written in condescending form:
1. he brags about his revenue being over 9 billion $$$ a year, and that being a part of a global holding for which "communication is essential" (sic.) means that they need to coordinate and "can't simply accept an offer" [even if it's 400$, for specific change exactly requested by them, I guess...]

2. 15k is too much [... for the website representing this 9 billion dollar holding on the internet, for which the requirements are written in the 10 pages long pdf]

3. He asks for a meeting

We accept the meeting, we go to their office.

When we arrive there, the secretary informs us that the CEO will not participate. So we talk the her and the head of the "Communication Dept" in videoconference.
I explain them that if the sum, which we thought would be appropriate (~15 - 20k), is too high, the Pareto principle would allow us to, theoretically, achieve about 80% of the features and quality for about 20% of the cost. Their genuine response is:
"So your estimate was wrong! You can do it for much less!".
I try to explain them that the most money in a project goes into "attention to detail".
The "Communication Dept." person, who is "doing this job since too much time" (sic.), refuses to believe and insists that "details" don't exist on the web.
I tell her: "In any kind of work, the more effort you put into something, the better it tends to get, with diminishing returns".
She insists: "I don't understand this".

So now I'm here, doing the 6th offer, free of charge, for a 5k website, for a company that generates 9kkk revenue each year, trying to define a "Definition of Done" that works out.

FML I guess.

Sorry for the long post.

Got some requests about changes in design some weeks ago. Did the most of what I can do, but something wasn't possible, so I told them that I cannot do what was requested.

They still ask me to do it.

Me: “here’s a demo of the backend functionality you requested. We’ve got more work to do to make this production ready. Let me know your thoughts or if we need to make any changes, otherwise I’ll hand this off to the UX team, we’ll be ready to go live next month after other they deliver the front end”

PM: *telling stakeholders* “The new thing is done and ready for go live”

Me: *privately to PM* “who told you that the thing was ready for go live?”

PM: “You did”

Me: “I suggest you go read what I wrote a little more closely”

My boss just called me and asked to write a email informing our clients to not to download the update we pushed this very evening because Application is crashing when you will open that particular page.

What went wrong? One of our senior Developer, let's call him Mr. X, is totally against of testing the app before deploying it to clients. He believes that as i have created the application, i know exactly what to change to accomplish a requested feature or bug in application.

When a ticket assigned to him about a bug in the application, he simply make some changes in code, create the package and send it to test department. How do I know? He even boast it in front of us.

Most of the time it works but not every time like today. And I am pretty sure my boss is not going to ask a explanation about this to him.

I have great respect for him. It's okay to have confidence but testing before sending it to anybody will not make you junior. Will it? Being a senior You are making others to be careless about his job.

That's what happen today. Mr. X failed so does the testing department. So am I. I am the head of testing department as well.

I am not blaming him. I just cant. It was our job to test app thoroughly. I am feeling pretty bad now. His confidence made me vulnerable. Say his confidence made me clearly a fool. Lesson has been learned though.

OMG, more changes requested by a client for their website. Co-worker is wondering why they're doing these requests and is asking my boss if the design confirmation process has been skipped.

I'm a junior developer, and this is my only experience so far. I don't know shit how to deal with these stuff. I just wanna focus on development right now. Have a proper team to guide me. Be in an environment where I can get strong technical learning. I don't know how to deal with all these politics yet.

I wanna walk out but I can't. I can't be selfish to my wife and let her be the only source of income, seeing as she even has it worse and wants to get out of her workplace too. I've done it before, can't let it happen again.

Sorry for the drama. I gotta vent out.

#10

After I did some work on this nightmare codebase, the client kept switching goals. He Changed the task a few times, so I always told him that he will have to pay for all changes.
After a time he requested another change, so I stated that he has to pay the first invoice I sent him first. He started bitching around, that I didn't complete the work yet and so on. I saw where this was going. He didn't wanted to pay me, so I cancelled the work for this bitch.

😤

Read my revenge in #11

Everything about the company is a mess. The only thing that is decent is the people. And by that I mean they aren't shit.
Workflows are fucked.
Clients are fucked. You're pressuring me to get this shit production ready before new year's eve and you still don't know what the text should say and want to make changes to the UI? The fuck?!
Design is a complete shit show. There is a design team. They only make a fucking psd to show clients how an interface would look like. No mobile version (but it's still expected to work!), no markup. Resolution is fucking inconsistent and whenever a change is requested, they are nowhere to be seen so I have to actually do designing on top of having to use this worthless fucking framework I hate it so much.
Codebases are turbo-fucked because of said framework.
Databases are an inconsistent, fucked up mess. No foreign key constraints because every single fucking table is using the MyISAM engine.

And the thing that really makes me incredibly angry is all the "custom systems" look the fucking same at the database level. Like 30 fucking useless tables made for stupid HR workflows that make no fucking sense.

Sometimes I like to look at my PR and think "Damn, that's some beautiful code, I can't wait for someone to review it".

Then the review comes and see a bunch of requested changes. =/

Some Project Manager outsourced a redundant RADIUS setup with MySQL backend. We got 2 copies of a daloradius appliance running on Ubuntu 10.04. Once I saw this, I started to get a bit suspicious and requested to audit the system and database redundancy. With the system in production, and without getting back any documentation, I got into the VMs using the default root password. This was not even the worst part, as I found. One server was using a local MySQL instance, while the other was also using the first one's MySQL instance. When I reported this, I was told to comment clearly any changes to the configuration files, which resulted in commenting the word SHAME above each change.

My over promising boss is upset that something that used to work doesn't work now because support decided it had to be changed. We took it apart to rebuild it and it's only partially finished right now. Says he can't show it to clients like this. Well no we told you it wouldn't be ready for the deadline you forced upon us, even before the requested changes, but instead of listening you tell us not to argue and just get it done.

In flutter , there’s something called TextButton.icon. Which render a button look like this :

(👍🏼 Like Button)

But there’s this tiny twat decided to use countless of nested column in a nested row and containers just to create a fucking button! This particular class contains 1438 lines of code! Most of the code are redundant and nested fucking shit.

I want to punch this guy so hard but I do not intend to start a ww3 with china.

That means I have no choice but refactor it as I implement a feature requested by the product team, every components break. It is like a land mine field here. One changes , the entire application crash.

So there are useless mother fucking Sherlock fucking holmes kept telling me that “don’t worry about refactoring now , just complete the task.” , like seriously “how in the name of mother fucking god of all arseholes can I complete my task when I can’t change even one component?”

These people are fucking genius. Their intelligence resurrected Einstein and made him die the second time.

I remember at a company that I was working as a Drupal developer, I had finished building a website (both designed and developed it) using Drupal 7. I was very satisfied with the result and the way the company was operating, I had to show it to the project manager and he would say if it was OK to show it to the boss and then I would contact the client to say that we are finished.

When I showed it to the PM, he provided some changes from his personal "I know everything" book and after I made them, we both went to the boss' office. Keep in mind that I had built the website following the clients notes and preferences (custom sliders, certain color swatches etc.) and I was on point.

So, after we entered the office, we sat and I was pumped to hear good news. But, not a minute passed since the page loaded and the boss was clearly unhappy with the result, and more specifically with the changes that the PM provided (not even my fault). When he finished talking, I tried to explain that I followed exactly what the client said and executed accordingly, without the changes that the PM had put on the table. Suddenly, the boss' face was angered and turning red(ish). He started shouting at me and saying that I was not experienced enough to know what I am saying (I was 21 years old at the time), and that they had the experience to criticize if the website was ready or not and if the client would like it, pointing out that I wasn't capable of knowing what the client needed.

I was bursting in my chest, I felt a fire burning with anger and righteousness, but I turned my face down and apologized. It SUCKED! It felt SO bad. I took the notes that he said (which changed 90% of the website's design) and after that I called the client.

I felt some kind of vengeance when the client started shouting at the PM, when he saw the website. He yelled and said that, the design that the boss chose, was not remotely close to what the client had requested.

Next day after I finished the website with the design I had provided, the boss was looking at me like a (proud) wet cat, saying 'well done' but not another word, while entering his office.

Well, at least the client was happy at the end! That's all that matters, right?

ideal sprint fallacy.
total days 10 , total hours(excluding breaks ) 8 hrs per day= 80 hrs per dev

code freeze day = day 8, testing+ fixing days : 8,9,10. release day : day 10
so ideal dev time = 7days/56 hr
meetings= - 1hr per day => 49 hrs per dev

- 1 day for planning i.e d1 . so dev time left . 6 days 42 hrs.
-----------
all good planning. now here comes the messups

1. last release took some time. so planning could not happen on d1. all devs are waiting. . devtime = 5 days 35 hrs.

2. during planning:
mgr: hey devx what's the status on task 1?
d: i integrated mock apis. if server has made the apis, i will test them .
mgr : server says the apis are done. whats your guestimate for the task completion?
d : max 1-2 hrs?
m : cool. i assign you 4 hrs for this. now what about task 2?
d : task told to me is done and working . however sub mgr mentioned that a new screen will be added. so that will take time
m : no we probably won't be taking the screen. what's your giestimate?
d : a few more testing on existing features. maybe 1-2 hrs ?
m: cool
another 4 hrs for u. what about task 3?
d : <same story>
m : cool. another 4 hrs for u. so a total of 12 hrs out of 35 hrs? you must be relaxed this sprint.
d : yeah i guess.
m cool.
-------
timelines.
d1: wasted i previous sprint
d2 : sprint planning
d3 : 3+ hrs of meetings, apis for task 1 weren't available sub manager randomly decided that yes we can add another screen but didn't discussed. updates on all 3 tasks : no change in status
d4 : same story. dev apis starts failing so testing comes to halt.
d5 : apis for task1 available . task 3 got additional improvement points from mgr out of random. some prod issue happens which takes 4+ hrs. update on tasks : some more work done on task 3, task 1 and 2 remains same.
d6 : task1 apis are different from mocks. additionally 2 apis start breaking and its come to know thatgrs did not explain the task properly. finally after another 3+ hrs of discussion , we come to some conclusions and resolutions
d7 : prod issue again comes. 4+ hrs goes into it . task 2 and 3 are discussed for new screen additiona that can easily take 2+ days to be created . we agree tot ake 1 and drop 2nd task's changes i finish task 2 new screens in 6 hrs , hoping that finally everything will be fine.

d8 : prod issue again comes, and changes are requested in task 2 and 3

day 9 build finally goes to tester
day 10 first few bugs come with approval for some tasks
day 11(day 1 of new sprint) final build with fixes is shared. new bugs (unrelated to tasks. basically new features disguised as bugs) are raised . we reject and release the build.

day 2 sprint planning
mgr : hey dev x, u had only 12 hrs of work in your plate. why did the build got delayed?

🥲🫡

I was once handed a very old PHP project that I had to make some changes to. I thought it would be a piece of cake. But the moment I looked at the code, I knew it wasn't going to be easy. It was so poorly written, it took me hours to figure out what was actually going on. Now these were the times when I was already quite disturbed mentally and emotionally, and this shitty PHP code only made it worse. At one point, I was like, fuck this shit I'm gonna quit this job.

Thankfully, the client soon emailed that the requested changes weren't needed anymore.

I personally have nothing against PHP. I have created some amazing stuff with it. But it's the programmers that don't follow the best practices that piss me off. I mean, how fucking hard can it be to write clean code. You might save your time today by taking shortcuts but you'll make life hell for the people who might have to maintain your code in the future.

Web Ops Director: [looking at a screenshot of changes she had requested] This looks good. Oh by the way, revert that red color for heading text.

Me: I’m not reverting anything because there’s nothing for me to revert. I didn’t touch that text color. The website has always looked like that.

Director: [shocked pikachu face]

So we released to production today (Friday), not my decision.
All pages work fine expect for the one page which I added a new feature.
It worked fine in Chrome and Edge. But after release a customer who requested the feature said it doesn't work for him. Screenshot showed he was using IE.
Horror time.. it was evident that it has to be the changes to the JavaScript I did, but why does the whole page doesn't work.

So I started debugging. Nothing works on that page in IE11, it doesn't even load the fucking script file. Then I dared to change mode to IE10, it actually gave me an error in my script file. The bad IE has actually picked a mistake that other browsers didn't.

So, the mistake is fun part too.
I had the following jQuery (or Jake Weary) call
$.getJSON(
'/url',
{
argA: a, argB, b, argC:c
},
function (){
// did something
}
);

In second argument, I accidentally typed comma instead of colon. Chrome and Edge ran the script perfectly passing all the arguments.IE 11 failed to load script without giving any error and only IE 10 gave an error of expecting a colon.
I do not know which browser to blame.

PS I didn't try in Firefox, safari, etc.

I really hate PHP frameworks.

I also often write my own frameworks but propriety. I have two decades experience doing without frameworks, writing frameworks and using frameworks.

Virtually every PHP framework I've ever used has causes more headaches than if I had simply written the code.

Let me give you an example. I want a tinyint in my database.

> Unknown column type "tinyint" requested.

Oh, doctrine doesn't support it and wont fix. Doctrine is a library that takes a perfectly good feature rich powerful enough database system and nerfs it to the capabilities of mysql 1.0.0 for portability and because the devs don't actually have the time to create a full ORM library. Sadly it's also the defacto for certain filthy disgusting frameworks whose name I shan't speak.

So I add my own type class. Annoying but what can you do.

I have to try to use it and to do so I have to register it in two places like this (pseudo)...

Types::add(Tinyint::class);
Doctrine::add(Tinyint::class);

Seems simply enough so I run it and see...

> Type tinyint already exists.

So I assume it's doing some magic loading it based on the directory and commend out the Type::add line to see.

> Type to be overwritten tinyint does not exist.

Are you fucking kidding me?

At this point I figure out it must be running twice. It's booting twice. Do I get a stack trace by default from a CLI command? Of course not because who would ever need that?

I take a quick look at parent::boot(). HttpKernel is the standard for Cli Commands?

I notice it has state, uses a protected booted property but I'm curious why it tries to boot so many times. I assume it's user error.

After some fiddling around I get a stack trace but only one boot. How is it possible?

It's not user error, the program flow of the framework is just sub par and it just calls boot all over the place.

I use the state variable and I have to do it in a weird way...

> $booted = $this->booted;parent::boot();if (!$booted) {doStuffOnceThatDependsOnParentBootage();}

A bit awkward but not life and death. I could probably just return but believe or not the parent is doing some crap if already booted. A common ugly practice but one that works is to usually call doSomething and have something only work around the state.

The thing is, doctrine does use TINYINT for bool and it gets all super confused now running commands like updates. It keeps trying to push changes when nothing changed. I'm building my own schema differential system for another project and it doesn't have these problems out of the box. It's not clever enough to handle ambiguous reverse mappings when single types are defined and it should be possible to match the right one or heck both are fine in this case. I'd expect ambiguity to be a problem with reverse engineer, not compare schema to an exact schema.

This is numpty country. Changing TINYINT UNSIGNED to TINYINT UNSIGNED. IT can't even compare two before and after strings.

There's a few other boots I could use but who cares. The internet seems to want to use that boot function. There's also init stages missing. Believe it or not there's a shutdown and reboot for the kernel. It might not be obvious but the Type::add line wants to go not in the boot method but in the top level scope along with the class definition. The top level scope is run only once.

I think people using OOP frameworks forget that there's a scope outside of the object in PHP. It's not ideal but does the trick given the functionality is confined to static only. The register command appears to have it's own check and noop or simply overwrite if the command is issued twice making things more confusing as it was working with register type before to merely alias a type to an existing type so that it could detect it from SQL when reverse engineering.

I start to wonder if I should just use columnDefinition.

It's this. Constantly on a daily basis using these pretentious stuck up frameworks and libraries.

It's not just the palava which in this case is relatively mild compared to some of the headaches that arise. It's that if you use a framework you expect basic things out of the box like oh I don't know support for the byte/char/tinyint/int8 type and a differential command that's able to compare two strings to see if they're different.

Some people might say you're using it wrong. There is such a thing as a learning curve and this one goes down, learning all the things it can't do. It's cripplesauce.

When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.

Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.

When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.

Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!

Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?

When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:

1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.

Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).

Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.

When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:

(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".

Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.

There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".

It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?

Todays "WTF Bitbucket?"

You can mark a PR with "Requesting changes" even if it was already merged but you haven't refreshed your page.

The whole PR page is loaded with a dozen independent requests but you cannot reload a single "widget" (e.g. Activity) without refreshing the page.
And then you do an API request "mark PR with request for changes" and the server accepts that, even if the PR is merged. Why? Nobody looks at a merged PR with Requested changes. You would expect a warning "cannot mark request changes, PR already merged" but no, Atlassian fucked up here again.

The new "PR experience" is shit. Just loading everything in a separate request does help nothing if I still have to reload the page to get an updated PR view.

We need to update the slang "script kiddie" to "prompt enginot" or something.

So my boss's boss or someone even higher up drank the generative AI kool-aid and hired a 40-something kid to generate images for the marketing teams (or something like it).
Naturally, things soon went to shit.
The bloke already left, having staid less than six months on the job.
Guess who got to handle all the shit-is-currently-on-fire the kiddie left behind?

First impression: apparently, muggles tried to slak him some very broad descriptions of what they needed, and at first he actually tried to summarize those bark-speech pseudo-words into an actual prompt.
It does not seem to have gone for too long, though.
After users requested changes to the AI outputs, he would update the prompts, all right. And the process seemed to go fast enough... until reaching near-to-completion status.
Then users would request the tiniest changes to the AI output...
And the bloke couldn't do it.
Seriously. Some things were as simple as "we need this slider to go all the way up to 180% instead of 100%" on a lame dashboard and *kid. could. not. do. it.*.

In many cases he literally just gave up and copied the slak history into the AI prompt. No dice.

Bloke couldn't code a print('hello world') into a jupyter notebook cell, that's what i'm saying.
Apparently, he was "self taught", too. And was hired to "speed up the process of generating visual aids for usage in meetings and presentations". But then "the budget for this position was considered excessive" (meaning: shit results from a raw idea some executive crapped some day) and "the position was expanded to include the development of Business Inteligence Dashboards and Data Apps".

So now it is up to me (and my CRIMINALLY UNDERPAID team) to clean up his mess and maintain/fix/deprecate DOZENS of SHODDILY DESIGNED and MOSTLY USELESS but QUITE ACTIVE "data vis" PIECES OF SHIT.

Fuck "AI prompters", fucking snake oil script kiddies.

Marketing Person: [email] The feature you worked on is setting our customers’s statuses to “transactional.” We can’t send them marketing emails.

😒🙄

Me: [email] My code is not doing that. It checks to see if a contact exists in our mailing list. If it does, it adds the contact to the new list that you requested. If it doesn’t, it creates a contact and adds it to the list. Newly created contacts default to “onboarding.” For already existing contacts, I’m just adding them to the list and I’m not changing anything else. Here’s a blog post from the marketing software company that explains how a contact could get marked as “transactional.”

Later in the day, Marketing comes over to my desk and brings over the Product Manager. He asks the same question. 😡 Oh hell no. You do not create a gang up on me and hope the social pressure changes my answer.

Me: Like I wrote in my email, my code isn’t wrong and it’s not malfunctioning. It’s doing what you requested: add users who submit their email on x form to the new x list. In the marketing software, you can even check each contact and see when their status got changed to “transactional.” It wasn’t from my code.

I really hate marketing sometimes. Especially when they think they know how my code works. Excuse me, do you have access to our git repo? Can you read the code and point out the supposed problem? I didn’t think so. So don’t go accusing me of making a mistake or doing my job wrong.

My Cat-magnets make me smile every time I look at them!

OfferZen gives the best swag for developers in South Africa!

Someone raised a PR for the opensource project "fast XML parser". Since this was a major change, it was difficult to review. I asked for the purpose and requested to break it into multiple PRs, where 1 PR should have related changes only. And any good change but unnecessary change can be avoided to scheduled for later.

We had long arguments for a month or two.

I don't know why but instead of breaking the PR, the contributor keep updating his PR for every commit someone made on the original repo.

He also stopped contributing for other changes, and commenting on other issues. (Change in the behavior)

Finally after 5-6 months, I had to close the PR as it was not active, having conflicts and not as per guidelines.

We often give access to a product owner from the customer on our Jira to keep up a good communication and everyone stays up to date as everything is on the board and not hidden in emails or paper notes on the desk of the guy that is on vacation.

So far, so good

Our customers really like this as they can comment on tickets and they are integrated in the workflow because they can push into the backlog and can review finished tasks.

It is just getting better for everyone so where is the rant?

One project is just a dump of shitty mixed content tickets. But how? They look really neat. There are tickets like "fixes from meeting 20th of may" which are initially well structured with approximately 4 subtle changes to the UI and some explanation and screenshots.

PM says: Good ticket. There you go ticket, into the customer review loop of doom.

20 comments and 13 status changes later. Point 43 from comment 17 is referenced in comment 20 to keep on hold as a third party needs to give feedback, point 7 is still not solved correctly as dev 2 was not aware that it was already discussed and changed in the ticket "Call from 25th of may" where in addition the resolution of points 5-12 were requested with an additional excel file to import.

By now we have the 8th of august and literally 17 of these kind of tickets.

I guess we need to improve the workflow and request a new product owner. But this far I just table flip everytime I get one of these tickets assigned.

People always say thet you should not quit your job before you have the next job lined up, but what if you plan to do freelance? This is my dilemma.

A bit of context (rant).

My current job is my first official job. Small company, VERY HIGH staff turnover rate. I have been here for 2 and a half years. My commute on a good day is < 20 mins, and money is relatively good.

During the last 6 months, all devs above me resigned, which lead to the system maintenance being passed on to the few devs left. Our biggest system is a legacy system (Windows CE), and new clients are actively signed up and new features requested. The codebase is not even worthy of being called spaghetti, changes break every client, I need to wash my hands every couple of minutes. Seriously, I would rather maintain obfuscated code. It is like a bunch of highschoolers wrote the system, though I think they would have done a better job.

Management is nice and understanding, but the state of the codebase is killing the spirits.

I fill my nights and weekends moonlighting to keep my mind off of the 'daymares' at work. I have never been a team player, and thrive on my own. I have been thinking quiting and going full freelance/contract the last couple of months. Should things not work out, I can always go job hunting (see issue in par. 1)

Today, a colleague requested a merge with 5 commits, but only 3 changes. He must be a wizard or an idiot.

The feeling when you make the requested changes to a website only for it to be disposed immediately because someone decided to push an older Backup to the FTP Server.

Like I have all the time in the world to do it again FML.

How do you deal with a client in which you have to frequently explain the changes they requested back to them?

first some background. I'm an intern coming in on the end of my internship (tomorrow's my last day). I've been working on a reasonably important project, more specifically a restful API. We have automation set up so that any commits to master on GitHub are pushed out into a live, accessible version. Some guy (let's call him dumbass) joined our team last week, and has had a few ideas

Dumbass: *opens pull request to my repo*
My boss: *requests changes*
Me: *requests different changes*
(All this before even testing his code, mind you)
Dumbass: *makes requested changes*
Me: *approves changes*

A day passes

My boss: *approves changes*
Me (not even 10 seconds after my boss approved changes): *requests more changes*
(Still haven't tested his code, I just ran A PEP8 compliance test)
Dumbass: *MERGES CHANGES TO MASTER*

Literally EVERYTHING breaks because he was importing a module that's not available

We don't notice until later that day (I'm still working on writing the tests for the automation, for now changes get put on live version even if everything breaks -- tool is still in beta, so everyone working on it (a whole 3 people) knows to TEST THEIR SHIT BEFORE MERGING TO MASTER.)

WHY EVEN BOTHER WITH THE PULL REQUEST IF YOU WERE GOING TO MERGE TO MASTER YOURSELF ANYWAY??!??!??

My frustration cannot be properly conveyed through text, but let's just say this guy's been there a week, I already didn't like him, and then he fucking does this.

Taht moment when you finally have time for that github project, when you done all your changes requested, and you're proud that your local tests are all green... you commit into that project, you push it real hard , long and passionately deep...

and then i apparently hit travis in the nose... Cause he keeps running for -

After my third "requested changes" I've officially lost all dignity I held. Spend hours working, wrong solution. Revert, not working. Fix, removed functional code. I think my brain is just broken. Or maybe this project is just massive and I just can't wrap my head around it properly. Or maybe I'm just clueless. One day I'd like to be at a level where you hear an issue and immediately know the solution, where the problem lies in the code, how to fix it, and how long it will take. Hell, I'd settle for even one of those right now. The learning process is so stressful.

We have an internal nuget package that wraps up the IConfiguration+ConfigurationBuilder for various .net core console/service apps (TL;DR, because people got creative), and it has a dictionary property for the common sections we use. AppSettings (for backward compatibility), ConnectionStrings, and ServiceEndpoints. If the need arises, I can add methods to return any type of object (no one has requested yet, we try to keep configs dead simple)

ex. var myDatabaseConnectionString = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["MyDatabase"];

Code review for someone who updated a .net framework app to .net core and they wrote their own IConfiguration wrapper for accessing the appsettings.json file, so I pointed out that we already had a library for that.
In the reply, he said he couldn't use our library because it had an 'AppSettings' property and since his appsettings.json file didn't have that section, he didn't want to cause a runtime exception.

OK, WTF...I even sent him a link to the documentation (includes explaining the backward compatibility part)...why the frack would you think because a property exists and you don't use it, that would cause some kind of runtime exception?
We have dozens of .net framework apps migrated to .net core with zero code changes and no one ever brought this up as a concern (because, why would they?)

Deep breath...ahhh...I respond that not having an AppSettings section in the appsettings.json file won't cause an exception, if you don't have one, don't need it, you don't have to use it.

He went ahead merged+committed his code anyway with his own IConfiguration+ConfigurationBuilder plumbing.

Code addiction is real kids...it's real.