I hate people who think that building software is all about one click away and generating things. I got told to complete the task faster than the speed of light.

Fancy me some rant time? Let's name that cunt, "Bob".

"
Hey Bob, I got questions for you. Are you sure you were in your mum's womb for 8-9 months? Are you the kind of twat who honk at people as soon as the traffic light's turning green?

Building software takes time, the CI/CD takes time, TestFlight takes time, approvals from the Google Play store take time, approvals from Apple App Store connect take time, Unit testing takes time and every fucking thing you can name takes time!

It's just like sex, nobody wants to be with someone who can only last in bed for 0.000000000001 nanoseconds, the longer, the better, (but not too long).

It is also like building houses, which takes months to build not hours. As from my experience so far, something tells me that you are not the kind of person who would understand how to build a house but a sand castle which takes only hours to build.

Relentlessly, you bombarded me with a pile of bollocks and a pile of nonsense is not going to fasten up the compilation of the software.

"

Just scored my personal red flag bingo in new project:
- engineers who work there for 20+ years
- their own in house build tool
- "we have Jira so it means we are agile"
- "we have Jenkins so it means we do Ci/cd"
- git adoption is "in progress"

So my department is "integrating CI/CD"

Right now, there's a very anti-automation culture in the deployment process, and out of our many applications, almost none have automated testing. And my groups is the only one that uses feature branching - one of the few groups that uses branching at all beyond "master, dev"

So yeah... You could see how this is already ENTIRELY fucked from the very beginning.

First thing they want to do is add better support for a process... Which goes directly against CI/CD.

The process is that to deploy to production (even after it is manually approved by manager), someone in another department needs to press a button to manually deploy. This, as far as I can tell, is for business rule reasons rather than technical ones.

They want us to improve that (the system will stay exactly the same with some streamlined options for said button pressers)

I'm absolutely astounded at the way our management wants to do something but goes in exactly the opposite direction. It's like the found an article of what CI/CD was and then took notes on exactly what not to do.

Excerpts from "Bastard devops from hell" checklist:

- Insistently pronounce git with a soft "G" and refuse to understand people not using that pronunciation, the same goes for jithub, jitlab, jit lfs, jitkraken etc.

- Reject all pull requests not in haiku format, suggest the author needs to be more culturally open minded when offending.

- increment version numbers ONLY based on percentage code changed: Less than 1% patch increment, less than 5% minor increment, more than that major version increment.

- Cycle ALL access keys, personal tokens, connection strings etc. every month "for security reasons"

- invent and only allow usage of your own CI/CD language, for maximum reuse of course. Resist any changes to it after first draft release

PM: this is our super fancy new CI/CD pipeline, it's the greatest. i expect you to learn and understand all this in no time.
devs: so i have to spend some more time on this topic because it's completely new to me and requires some learning...
PM: nooo, that's a super easy task with zero effort, my braindead hamster can do that in no time, so can i, and so can you! let's assign 1 story point for that.

~ 3 months latèr ~

also PM, after he has started developing as well: so i'm realizing there are many things that i have to learn, and it takes me some time. i haven't developed with C++ and <other tool stack> for a longer time. by the way, you guys don't need to check for any quality right now, we need to deliver fast. it's okay, when you have memory overflows, your code is completely crappy, poor architecture or memory overflows, it doesn't matter.

he even has a subtask for migrating his code from VS project to our new project structure, since he refused to learn our pipeline right from the beginning and created VS project instead. シ why is this a subtask? this job can be done in no time, my left vanishing twin named Klaus who has dislexia and hates vim can solve this task in 20 seconds!!!!11

(and still no PR, not even a feature branch in our repo)

I miss when my job was just about coding, I could spend entire workdays writing C# or TypeScript while listening rock or metal with few meetings in between, being very passionate in programming and computers sometimes I found was I doing so engaging which I spent more than my 8 hours workday on company's code base trying to improve it and my older coworkers were very happy with my code.

Then a "promotion" happened, I went to work directly with a client, a huge enterprise which is working on renovating his internal software and here the fun stopped. Long useless meetings are a regular occurrence, there are absurdly long procedures to do everything (for example since CI/CD is leaky we have to do dozens of workaround to get a microservice deployed) and having very little written documentation this gives an huge advantage to people which actually enjoy to spend their entire workdays on a MS Teams call over "lone programmers" like me which actually feel significant fatigue in doing that (alone sometimes I was able to log 12+ hours of programming daily between work and personal projects while after 3 hours of PP I feel drained) since the information passes in meetings/pair programming and I dread both.

I feel which my passion is still there, I still enjoy coding, tinkering with Linux and BSD, broadening my knowledge with technical books and having passionate conversation about tech but I dread my job, sometimes I try to look at it under a more optimistic eyes but most of the times I just end disappointed.

Installed SonarQube and Snyk on the CI/CD of a 2.5 year old project that only had a linter enabled previously.

Practically zero problems found. One minor problem (same code in different branches), a few false positives, and a few possible problems in dependencies that I have no control over.

Now wondering:
Am I really that good or are those tools just shit?

Management has been promising we'd leave .NET framework for 2 years now. Never fucking happens. A new ASP.NET project was just started last week and yup, OF COURSE, its .NET Framework 4.8.

I'd even be happy with one of the earlier .NET Core versions at this point for fucks sake. I have no clue why tech leads are so happy to create a brand new project on a deprecated framework version.

And yes, I have checked thoroughly. Our whole infrastructure works with .NET Core onward. People are just too lazy to learn new stuff.

Stuff like switching to .NET 6, actually doing unit testing, improving our CI/CD pipeline, refactoring problematic codebases, etc. -> all this stuff is the kind of things they promise me I can work on later whenever I'm so bogged down with work that I'm looking for a light at the end of the tunnel. All empty promises.

Ideally we should be on .NET 6 since its LTS and just stay on the LTS versions as the year goes on.

them: welcome new project members, this is our CI/CD pipeline which is completely different from the rest of the company, there won't be any great knowledge transfer, we just expect you to be able to know and use everything. but also, we expect you to work on your tasks and don't waste any time.
me: okay, so my tasks aren't going as fast as expected, because I need to invest some learning so i can set up my project correctly.
later: some help would be nice, i'm stuck right now
coworker: *helps me to fix my problems, which were partly due to misconfigured build servers* i know it's a lot, and unfortunately, for this topic sources on the web aren't so good. i can really recommend this book, this will give a deeper understanding of the topic.
me: okay, yeah i mean, tbh, i'll read the book if the project invests some time for me so i can learn everything that's required, but this won't happen. also, some initial workshop on the topic or anything would have been nice.
coworker: well, i mean, i am a software developer. for me, it is normal that i learn all that stuff in my free time. and i think that's what the PM expects from us.
me: okay, that's fine for you, i mean, if i'm interested in a topic, i will invest my private time. but in this case, PM would just expect me to do unpaid labor, to gain knowledge and skills that i can use in this specific project. i'm not willing to do that.
coworker: ...
me: ...

it's not that i don't want to learn. the thing is that there isn't any energy left by the end of the day. i'm actually trying to find some work life balance, because i don't feel balanced right now, haven't felt since i started this job.
also, this is only one of several projects i'm working on. it's like they expect me this project has top priority in my life. if it wasn't so annoying on different levels, maybe i'd have a more positive attitude towards it.

also, at the moment i find it fucking annoying that i have to invest so much time in this dev ops bullshit and this keeps me from doing my actual work.

if they are unhappy with my skills, either they can invest in my learning or kick me out. at this point, either is fine for me..

Central team: No, your team must be doing something wrong. Our pipeline is super-configurable and works for any situation! You just have to read the docs!

Me: Where are the docs?

Central team: Uhh, well, umm... we'll hook you up with a CI/CD coach!

Me: Okay, cool. In the mean time, can you point me at the repo where all the base scripts are?

Central team: Sure, it's here.

Me, some weeks later: Yeah, uhh, the coach can't seem to figure out how to make our Prod deployment work either.

Central team: That's impossible! It's so easy and completely configurable!

Me: Well, okay... but, here's the thing: your pipeline IS pretty "configurable", in the sense that you look for A LOT of variables...

Central team: See! We told you!

Me: ...none of which are actually documented, so they're just about useless to me...

Central team: But, but the coach...

Me: ...couldn't make heads or taisl of it either despite him literally being ON YOUR TEAM...

Central team: Then your project must just be architected wrong!

Me: Well, we're not perfect, so could be...

Central team: Right!

Me: ...but I think it's far more likely that the scripts... you know, the ACTUAL Python scripts the pipeline executes... while it took me DAYS to get through all your levels of abstraction and indirection and, well, BULLSHIT... it turns out they are incredibly NOT flexible. They do one thing, all the time, basically disregarding any flexibility in the pipeline. So, yeah, I'm thinking this is probably one of this "it's you, not me" deals.

Central team: Waaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!!

I know you, youre out there somewhere, coding, feeling like shit, putting your best, listening to coldplay, in the server room, your basement ... I know you veryy well

Did my first complete CI/CD from jenkins build from scratch and it's a huge win for me

absolute CI/CD bastardization 🤡

devops - im sick of everyone mis-using this term

it seems like everyone in the industry (even famous ppl and youtubers, not just recruiters) have clung to this word and use it as a blanket statement and it pisses me off. two parts of the word, dev (you know, development) and ops (operations, keeping shit going). yet ppl use this whenever there's more than one machine being used or something. like it's in aws must be devops, it's a cluster of machines must be devops, it's a lot of ci/cd so it's clearly devops.

if youre not keeping a system alive, debugging it, fixing errors in the environment -and- creating said environment then using the operations work to influence your development, how is it devops?

you made a build server with some kind of orchestration tool. how is that deovps?

you have a ci/cd pipeline that's in aws. how is that devops?

you built a cloud cluster in aws/gcp/azure but hand it off to another team that monitors it and pokes and prods. how is that devops?

Idk why but it feels like lately i've such a pessimist approach to any new-tech (barring languages)
Any new framework or wrapper or CI/CD handler and without even seeing beyond description my instinct goes "fuccccccccck this, I hate it, it'll break things"

I wonder if theres a way to fix this mindset T__T or am I just getting old idkkk

Cloud CI/CD is just someone else’s bash script.

we want you to be
- full stack developer (you do everything front end, back end)
- dev ops/SRE (you can sort out the deployment CI/CD pipeline, cloud platform services AWS/GC/Azure whatever)
- architect (you can design the software as well)
all in 1, you gotta be multiple roles/departments
good luck getting this experience on the job (hell in a startup is not for everybody and certainly not for me)

also why the fuck companies who aren’t startups ask for this idk

not sure if i missed any roles/competencies so far , don’t forget you need like >=3 years of experience possibly in every field for entry roles and more for anything higher than that

Laziest habit? Anything done between 1pm-4:30pm and 4:59pm-8pm. During that time, habits include unnecessary refactoring, poking the CI/CD containers, editing already made prototypes in gimp inkscape, pasting stackoverflow topics to youtube, bouncing from macOS, windows and kde distros in search of zen/rice, adding a calendar emoji on my slack :), making useless automation scripts, building on every variable's value change, tinkering pixels, shades, gradients (and their angles), dimens, anim values, anim curves, opacity, blurs and just nuking the ui just to copy paste an old one, 60% just chatting in code alongs, changing key bindings (from ide to OS), and ultimately zoning out on a podcast about cyber security. And of course: waiting for ++ and comments

Question for devs who work in large multi-team environments:

A) What is your code review process like? Does a senior review it once and then it's off to QA or do you have "levels" of approval?

B) If you're launching a feature that depends on another team how are you coordinating it? Do you just talk over a ticket and then hit merge and deploy at the same time or like what's your process like?

C) What CI/CD tool do you use? Also what code hosting platform do you use? Github/GItlab/etc.

D) Are you currently happy with the CI tool you're using? If not what are some common issues you're facing?

Best:
Seeing ALL the members of my team finally coming into their own. One person tackled our entire not-at-all-simple CI/CD setup from scratch knowing nothing about any of it and, while not without bumps in the road, did an excellent job overall (and then did the same for some other projects since he found himself being the SME). Two of my more junior people took on some difficult tasks that required them to design and build some tricky features from the ground-up, rather than me giving them a ton of guidance, design and even a start on the basic code early on (I just gave them some general descriptions of what I was looking for and then let them run with it). Again, not without some hiccups, but they ultimately delivered and learned a lot in the process and, I think, gained a new sense of self-confidence, which to me is the real win. And my other person handled some tricky high-level stuff that got him deep in the weeds of all the corporate procedures I'd normally shield them all from and did very well with it (and like the other person, wound up being an SME and doing it for some other projects after that). It took a while to get here, but I finally feel like I don't need to do all the really difficult stuff myself, I can count on them now, and they, I think, no longer feel like they're in over their heads if I throw something difficult at them.

Worst:
A few critical bugs slipped into production this year, with a few requiring some after-hours heroics to deal with (and, unfortunately, due to the timing, it all fell on me). Of course, that just tells us that next year we really need to focus on more robust automated testing (though, in reality, at least one of the issues almost certainly would not - COULD NOT - have been caught before-hand anyway, and that's probably true for more than just one of them). We had avoided major issues the previous three years we've been live, so this was unusual. Then again, it's in a way a symptom of success because with more users and more usage, both of which exploded this year, typically does come more issues discovered, so I guess it tempers the bad just a little bit.

Ahh, management. They now decided to implement yet another clown role. Release manager…

😬

I am leaving. I just must leave this workplace!

They have so many roles now and it’s getting increasingly difficult to avoid them. I thought we were flying low before to avoid the radar (we use ci/cd, all automated, deploy all days of the week, so we are good. I mean, we go from business need to implement with (some) quality in minutes. Yes, we make mistakes and we fix them rapidly and continuously).

It will be difficult to stay. I really thought I would enjoy it here but management is making it pretty clear that they are not serious about software. They want fancy titles and pretend to work.

Fire em all I say! No one will notice that they are gone. 🤷🏼‍♂️

My brother works in fintech sector. He had created an Options strategy after months of hard work and deployed the strategy in production via CI/CD.
However, the strategy didn't deploy automatically on Monday and few trades didn't happen leading to loss. His boss came down firing at him as to why strategy was not deployed.

Turns out the IT team had changed the password on Friday evening as per their routine password updates.

Hello, fellow developers, i am having a question in mind that confusing me about my career choices.

At first i joined a company as a full stack developer with 6 months experience in MERN, MySql etc.

Now i have completed nearly 1 year in this company but they are always assigning me to full DevOps CI/ CD projects. And i agree i am learning a lot of new things and completed the given works too.

BUT , the question is , should i completely shift as devops engineer or software developer? What might be a better career in long term?

Ps: in CI/CD i did almost all works in Typescript using CDK and sometimes a little bit in python (not good in python but learning)

ik i already bitched about this but

"gitlab - a complete devops platform"

NO! NO YOURE FRICKIN NOT!

are ppl using gitlab as infrastructure and having to hire ops ppl to keep it up? is there more to this bug ridden, 9 year open, 12 year closed w/o solution, hey we better work on wording things to help ppl 'feeeeel' better instead of doing real work, excuse for a ci/cd system doing something major i'm not aware of and competing with aws/gcp/azure or bare metal chef and puppet instances? *deep breath*

im ok...im fine

Utility libraries, because I actually get to see my life improve because I have them. Creating new projects becomes easier because I put parts I reuse somewhere else.

There was an old config file generator/manager I kept using for a while, some string conversion libraries between formats, some REST/WebRTC API wrappers, I have a web audio API I create tunes with in various projects. CI/CD scripts for laziness so I never have to know how to set anything up again. Lately the thing I'm most happy about is I turned some free text saving service into a makeshift database and it's been working well for about half a dozen projects now. Wouldn't handle large amount of users but can't beat free and easy.

I also find merit in prototypes/old projects, because I can reference random things I did in them in newer unrelated projects. Things too small to warrant their own utility library, argh!

Need advice about switching to contracting.

TL;DR;

So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.

Now the full story:

Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.

Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.

Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.

Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.

So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.

Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.

Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!

Working with rails in ci/cd environment is always soo painful. Developing is a joy, but operating it is the pure horror :'(

At work I have to multitask on way too many projects and to make it worse there is a lot of red tape and I have to waste a lot of time surfing buggy documentation websites, switching VPNs and praying for CI/CD to work rather than writing code in the fucking editor and for me repetitive tasks and context switching are productivity killers since they prevent me to enter in a state of flow and I keep daydreaming or distracting myself.