I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

One day I developed a simple website for a goldsmith who I already new for a year or so.

We discussed everything and agreed on a feature set, price and a deadline when it should be ready. Based on this we signed a contract and I started my work.

Unfortunately at the same time I lost most of my childhood friends. I moved to a new city and started to study computer science, which was awesome on the contrary.

This is where the horror began.

I was totally occupied by the studying, my partner, myself and by the shit of life.

It knocked on my door. The horror decided to pay me a visit.

"Had a look at your calendar recently? Just saying..."

Shit! The deadline came closer and closer everyday and the pile of work undone grew with it. At that point I had to do something. I don't know what it was or how I did it, but somehow I managed to finish the project just in time. I was totally not proud of it, but it featured what was required.

The day before I contacted my client, the horror knocked on my door again. He said:

"You really should have a look at your hard drive."
"Why? everything seems allright."
"Well, then look closer."
"Fuck."
"Right."

Well, there are backups at least, I thought to myself. I'll just recover the last state. That was an annoying thought, but nothing serious. That's just one or two days of w... - Wait, what? Where are my backups? What the actual fuck? Why is the zip file broken? Why doesn't the flash drive work anymore? FUUUCK!!

I was lost. It was a complete nightmare.

Each time my telephone rang the following days, my heart skipped a beat. Finally my client's name appeared on the display. I answered the call, my hands shaking.

"Hey there! I'm calling to discuss the website project with you."
"Well, about that..."
"Yeah, I know you put a huge amount of efford in it so I'm really sorry to say that I on the other hand can't effort the money. Actually I'd like to simply forget about this whole idea."

Seriously? What the fuck just happend? I suddenly noticed a sticky note infront of me reading:
"It was really fun to see you suffer, but I have to go! See ya
- The Horror"

"Hello, are you still there? Do you hear me?", yelled a voice through my phone.
"Uh, yeah. You know, that project was a lot of work and... but you know what? It was actually a pretty fun exercise and I'm doing well over here, so because it's you I'd agree."
I heared a reliefed sigh from the other end of the line.
"Really good! I owe you something! Bye!"

What. The. Fuck.

AI steal my jobs? I'll become AI's client, and put them into nightmare.

When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.

Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".

What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.

Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.

Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.

I did this for 4 months.

The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.

So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.

I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.

In the end:

- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.

- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job

- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.

So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.

3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.

1) Starts a company that builds cloud systems
2) Takes a bunch of jobs and thought you'll be happy for a while
3) IoT era smashes in your face
4) 72% of your existing clients ask for IoT revamp
5) With a lot of hacking you made a small portion of the projects possible with some Raspberry Pis
6) Client bought a bunch of arbitrary parts from Shenzhen and now you have to deal with kernel overlays and shits that you didn't even heard of
7) Made it work for the second time and told yourself it'll never happen again
8) Last customer happy so they tell a bunch of friends and now they're asking for more
9) Stares into void, wondering how you gonna end this nightmare

Hey guys,

this rant will be long again. I'm sorry for any grammar errors or something like that, english isn't my native language. Furthermore I'm actually very sad and not in a good mood.

Why? What happened? Some of you may already know - I'm doing my apprenticeship / education in a smal company.
There I'm learning a lot, I'm developing awesome features directly for the clients, experience of which other in my age (I'm only 19 years old) can only dream.
Working in such a small company is very exhausting, but I love my job, I love programming. I turned my hobby into a profession and I'm very proud of it.
But then there are moments like the last time, when I had to present something for a client - the first presentation was good, the last was a disaster, nothing worked - but I learned from it.

But this time everything is worse than bad - I mean really, really worse than bad.

I've worked the whole week on a cool new feature - I've done everything that it works yesterday, that everything gets done before the deadline of yesterday.

To achieve this I've coded thursday till 10pm ! At home! Friday I tested the whole day everything to ensure that everything is working properly. I fixed several bugs and then at the end of the day everything seems to be working. Even my boss said that it looks good and he thinks that the rollout to all clients will become good and without any issues.

But unfortunately deceived.

Yesterday evening I wrote a long mail to my boss - with a "manual". He was very proud and said that he is confident that everything will work fine. He trusts me completly.

Then, this morning I received a mail from him - nothing works anymore - all clients have issues, everything stays blank - because I've forgotten to ensure that the new feature (a plugin) and its functionality is supported by the device (needs a installation).
First - I was very shoked - but in the same moment I thought - one moment - you've written an if statement, if the plugin is installed - so why the fuck should it broken everything?!
I looked instant to the code via git. This has to be a very bad joke from my boss I thought. But then I saw the fucking bug - I've written:
if(plugin) { // do shit }
but it has to be if(typeof plugin !== 'undefined')

I fucked up everything - due to this fucking mistake. This little piece of shit I've forgotten on one single line fucked up everything. I'm sorry for this mode of expression but I thought - no this can not be true - it must be a bad bad nightmare.
I've tested this so long, every scenario, everything. Worked till the night so it gets finished. No one, no one from my classmates would ever think of working so long. But I did it, because I love my job. I've implemented a check to ensure that the plugin is installed - but implemented it wrong - exactly this line which caused all the errors should prevent exactly this - what an irony of fate.

I've instantly called my boss and apologized for this mistake. The mistake can't be undone. My boss now has to go to all clients to fix it. This will be very expensive...

Oh my goodnes, I just cried.
I'm only working about half a year in this company - they trust me so much - but I'm not perfect - I make mistakes - like everyone else. This time my boss didn't looked over my code, didn't review it, because he trusted me completly - now this happens. I think this destroyed the trust :( I'm so sad.
He only said that we will talk on monday, how we can prevent such things in the feature..
Oh guys, I don't know - I've fucked up everything, we were so overhelmed that everything would work :(
Now I'm the looser who fucked up - because not testing enough - even when I tested it for days, even at home - worked at home - till the night - for free, for nothing - voluntary.

This is the thanks for that.
Thousand good things - but one mistake and you're the little asshole. You - a 19 year old guy, which works since 6 months in a company. A boss which trusts you and don't look over your code. One line which should prevent crashing, crashed everything.

I'm sorry that this rant is so long, I just need to talk to you guys because I'm so sad. Again. This has happend to frequently lately.

While this wasn't technically a real client, it's still one of the most insane requests I've ever had.

I chose to specialize in software engineering for the last year and a half of my degree, which meant a lot of subjects were based around teamwork, proper engineering practises, accessibility, agile methods, basically a lot of stuff to get us ready to work in a proper corporate dev environment. One of our subjects was all about project management, and the semester-long coursework project (that was in lieu of a final exam) was to develop a real project for a real client. And, very very smartly, the professors set up a meeting with the clients so that the clients could tell us what they wanted with sixty-odd students providing enough questions. They basically wanted a management service for their day-center along with an app for the people there. One of the optional requirements was a text chat. Personally not something I'm super interested in doing but whatever, it's a group project, I'll do my part.

The actual development of the project was an absolute nightmare, but that's a story for another day. All I'll say is that seven juniors with zero experience in the framework we chose does not make a balanced dev team.

Anyway, like three months into the four-month project we've got a somewhat functional program, we just need to get the server side part running and are working our asses off (some more than others) when the client comes in and says that 'hey, nice app, nobody else has added the chat yet, but could you do voice recognition okay thanks?'.

Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.

This was a fucking basic-ass management app with the most complicated task being 'make it look pretty' and 'hook up a DB to an API' and they want us to add voice recognition after sitting on their ass for three months??? The entire team collectively flipped its shit the second they were out of earshot. The client would not take no for an answer, the professor simply told us that they asked for it and it was up to us whether we delivered or not. Someone working on the frontend had the genius idea of 'just get them to use google voice recognition' so we added the how-to in the manual and ticked the requirement box.

What amazes me about all that is how the client probably had no idea that their new last-minute request was even a problem for us, let alone it being in a completely different ballpark in terms of implementing from scratch.

Absolutely hate these "moving up", "stairs of success", "we are so diverse!" stock photos all over the internet.

You feel like you are being subtle, fuck no. Unless your target audience is stupid as as fuck, this photos looks dumb and over the top. And what is up with this "diversity" all over the place? don't get me wrong, I am all for diversity. But learn how to apply it properly.

"Looks like we need a picture of a student. Oh no, we need to be diverse. Add 15 kids of 15 different ethincity in the same picture to make sure we looks diverse. Phew!"

And the animations. Holy fucking shite. Why is it that a cheap website immediatly means that your website needs to have 100 different animation in the front page.

Seriously, picture rolling from here and there. Text coming out of nowhere.Everything being squeezed and rotated. God damn it!

This is another reason I fucking hate these 1 click websites and shite like that. This fucking website was created with WiX and my God, it's a fucking nightmare.

Good news is client is recreating the website.

Got my first serious project about a year ago. Made it clear to the client that we are developing a Windows app. After around 80-100 hours of work client just goes "how about we make this a web app?" Got a "financial support" instead of the agreed payment. Got around 4 times less money than agreed upon. They never ended up using some parts of the software (I ran the server so I knew that they weren't using it)

I once had a nightmare explaining to the client that he cannot use a 30+ MB image as his home page background. Average internet speed in my country is around 1-2 MB/s. I even had to do the calculation for him because he couldn't figure out the time it took for the visitor to load the image.

Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.

Well, I helped a client get their website back from being redirected to a microsoft scam website. Even though the restoring process was a nightmare, it feels good to get things working like it was suppose to :)

#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

Fun issue

Swedish client is unable to enter a currency conversion rate in a field and submit. 'Not a float' well we can clearly see that it is a float when he does it (0.5 for example), not an issue for us though.

Reproducing was a nightmare, eventually it boiled down to the fact that the framework we were using had automatic locale checks. Now because our numeric fields are actually weird text fields (front end nonsense), it was converting the period to be a comma (Swedish people would write 0,5 normally). And if you actually entered 0,5 the range check (0.01-1000) failed because it couldn't parse the comma (no locale check on that one)

Godamn facepalm. Really confused the hell out of us when we saw the error, had to go diving through library code. To top this off, locale checks are supposed to be disabled as of about 2 years ago

In revenge against our oppressor :PHP: on slack is now an alias for the shit emoji

!devButAlsoKindaIsDev

Alright, time to do some explanation.

TL;DR: JavaScript is a fucking nightmare. May god help every web developer out there. Essentially, I was gone because of JavaScript.

Q: where tf are you bruh
A: in your mo-uhhhhh alright, so I was chosen to be the main developer for an interactive promotional video for my school (every year the school holds something called an open day, where kids from 8th grade can come to the school and have a tour in the school first hand. Because of the coronavirus (just gonna call it “the rona” from here) this is now impossible so we are losing the interest and the first impressions so the school decided to make an interactive virtual one). They asked me if I want to do it and I said yes.

Boy, was that ever a mistake... (hint: it was a huge mistake)

So the guy who talked to me and asked if I wanted to do this was my grade’s manager, and he gave me the phone number of my PM. So we talked and stuff, and then this happened: (bruh = PM)

bruh: I’ll send you the API and documentation for the thing that we are working with! They have lots of examples and stuff and they’re Israeli too!

Me: Okay! What language are we talking about here?

bruh: JavaScript.

Me: (questioning life choices) Okay!

I didn’t write any JavaScript for the last 3 years or so. It had to be done because I promised and I can’t let down people who count at me and ask me to show where I shine.

So, what was the objective for me? Build a Firebase client that sends the user’s score and choices to Firestore after he chooses something in the interactive video (for example, go to chemistry or go to physics) while learning JavaScmeme (ECMEMEScript) as I go.

Deadline? A week and a half.

After working almost 12 hours a fucking day, I made it work. Sorta. In order to reconcile with small exceptions and edge cases in the interactive video, I had to hard-code some IDs in the code. I had no choice, since I couldn’t allow myself to spend more and more time to make my code more dynamic than it was because I simply didn’t have time. The code absolutely STINKS but it works.

Today is the day where we (aim) to finish all of the cosmetic things that we need to fix. All of them are non-essential for everything to work, but we want to make this thing presentable because we want to put this on the school’s website.

CONCLUSION:

JavaScript is literal shit. Dynamic weakly-typed languages are cursed AF and need to die in a fire.

TL;DR: Fuck Wordpress and their shitty “editor”.

Client told me the Wordpress editor was unusual slow on their site. I inspected the network traffic, while fiddling around in the admin pages. What I found was an even worse nightmare than expected. Somehow the fucktard of an “engineer” decided to implement the spell check module, to parse all other text areas on the page - even the fucking image sources. The result is a browser sending a GET request to fetch the images from the server every time an author triggers a keyup-event. Disabled the spell check and everything was back to budget-ineffective-feces-Wordpress normal.

Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.

(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)

I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.

Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.

Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.

Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).

All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.

Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.

Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?

Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)

What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.

And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.

Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.

Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.

Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
.
.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).

It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.

What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.

Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.

Depressed since yesterday.

Updated all our clients Dialers. Stellar performance. Suddenly one of 15 can’t hang up three way calls.

It’s one of our biggest clients. And they just started. We upgraded the dialers so the answering machine detection would improve for them and it did, along with vast performance upgrades as well. Suddenly, this issue.

2 days in they pull the plug until we fix it. The issue is sporadic and we cannot reproduce. No one else is having the issue. I can’t even debug it properly as it’s a third party dialer with no customizations on it. I found out where the error is, but no idea the workflow they got it to happen with or why. It’s so frustrating. It happens using the dialer native interface, and our integration via api calls. The channel doesn’t get sent to the command for some random reason, and only sometimes.

So even if it’s fixed they don’t trust the system. Now they are losing the full integration we have with the crm and dialer and it’s going to be a mess of data for them. All because of this one issue. They love the CRM though...

If they had just stayed on one more day I’m sure I could have found it. Now I have to play forensic scientist and look through old data, without being able to see the client code that was causing the issue.

Just threw some cash down to be able to talk to the dialer engineers and hopefully see what’s up. What a nightmare. And I have so many other projects for the platform due so soon...

Sigh. Super depressing.

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

So we had this legacy Objective-C codebase for a mobile app that was actually pretty good: I'd inherited the codebase and spent the past several years gradually improving it and I was actually quite proud of the work I put into it. So of course management decides to scrap it (with NO consultation from the engineers) and outsource a complete rewrite of the app in C# for Windows Universal.

Let me tell you. That code was without a doubt and without exaggeration the *worst* code I've seen in my close to 30 years of experience as a developer. I mean they broke every rule in the book, I'm talking rookie mistakes. Copypasta everywhere, no consistent separation of concerns, and yet way too many layers. Unnecessary layers. Layers for the sake of layers. There was en entire abstraction layer complete with a replicated version of every single data class *just* to map properties in pascal case to the same property in camel case. Adding a new field to a payload in the API amounted to hours of work and about eight different files that needed to be modified. It was a complete nightmare. This was supposed to be a thin client, yet it had a complete client-side Sqlite database with its own custom schema (oh and of course a layer for that!) completely unrelated to the serverside schema, just for kicks. The project was broken up into about eight or nine different subprojects, each having their own specific dependencies on various of the other subprojects in such a tightly-knit way that it made gradual refactoring almost impossible. This architecture was so impressively bad, it was actually self-preserving!

Suffice it to say it was a complete nightmare, and was one of the main reasons I ended up leaving that company. So just sayin', legacy code isn't always bad. :)

I recently made a meme of our nightmare client (only posted internally of course), and a coworker even made her into a Slack emoji. How do you let off steam when you're developing for the devil?

The billing system on an enterprise project that I've inherited is a nightmare. The client complained that an aged receivable was being reported as 31-60 days overdue when it should be 0-30 days overdue. I checked the system, and discovered that an account had multiple invoices. One was due in May and one was due in July. The system took a large payment, fully paid the invoice due in July, and partially paid the invoice due in May. That seems wrong.

I checked the code and confirmed my suspicion. The system is ordering open invoices by their creation date, not their due date. The invoice due in May was created after the first invoice, but had a much smaller window to pay. I'll bet anything the original coder assumed all invoices would have the same window to pay.

Well.. Free and stunning in one sentence in the internet??? 😂 😂 😂. Wix is my biggest nightmare, As I have to do a website for a client with wix... I even proposed js+wordpress, but no, he wants wix...

My worst nightmare just came true. Been working with a difficult client for the last 3 months (1.5 months longer than the project was supposed to last). The client has essentially questioned and made me justify every decision I've made about implementation.

Today, as I'm nearing completion on the project the client pointed out a piece that isn't being accounted for correctly.... and they were right. Going to take me several hours to make the correction. 😣

A client wants me to build his website. He want a WordPress one, with a tool named Elementor to let him build stuff and upgrade the website by his own.

Seriously, Wtf is this shit !? That's a pure nightmare to work with !

Best: learned a lot of new things: vueJS, ES6, Bootstrap, CSS3 transitions and transforms, use of some cool JS libraries...

Worst: an awesome web page turns a nightmare because of endless "upgrades" that the client wanted (I'm aiming to finish it soon)

A while a go, we got a Feature Request by our client, which was a bit of a stretch. and by a bit of a stretch i mean horrible shit which is totally unusable, a technical nightmare to implement with almost no accessable data.
well, the pm gave me the Ticket. when I First read it, I wanted to puke.
since the pm wasnt in a good mood, i just wrote a large comment on where to implement that Feature to be a much less pain in the ass.

many discussions with the pm and the Client later, i Had to implement it the way, they wanted. so i started.

after one and a half week, i was almost ready, just a few hours left and the nightmare would be over
what i didnt know is that the Client came over to discuss a few things with my Boss
suddenly my Boss walks in and asked, how much im ready
then He told me THE message

i should should Revert everything ive done the last 1 1/2 weeks and implement the Feature the way, i told was better

worst friday ever

GODDAMN I HATE WIX!

I feel angry. I feel like smashing the developer's face who programmed this piece of shit editor. Everything I touch there just breaks and moves on its own. I fix the header, save, come back the next day and everything is shifted 5 pixels. WTF!?!

Plugins that they developed in-house aren't even compatible with their own systems. Custom code disappears suddenly. Editor doesn't allow two people to edit at the same time, resulting in lost work.

Seriously FUCK WIX.

Don't ever even consider touching this nightmare of an editor.

I could literally have hard-coded the entire site in React or Vue faster than building it in this editor, but my client wants the ability to edit things on their own later.

WIX: Not even once.

Client doesn't trust SendGrid. They're having their IT department deploy their own SMTP servers. This should be interesting.

Unemployment week one.
Tired of unsuccessful HR and engineering talks with people who don’t know what they want.

When you answer their questions they got pissed because they had something else in mind. Sorry I don’t read in people’s minds asshole.

Others try to be smart and give you some fancy acronyms. Yeah because that’s most important in coding - to memorize useless acronyms.
I responded with acronyms I know and they got pissed more cause my are more funny and cover all of theirs. Thanks KISS 💋

Some of them are like I am fucking smartest asshole on this video chat and you can’t have been working with all of those technologies, yeah I just typed hello world for 15 years in one language and stupid /REST shitty software like you do it in your one job in your lifetime.

Others are asking for cv, talking about this fancy great project that in fact you know how it will look like cause you’re experienced motherfucker who can pick up nuisance but still lets get hired first and then think what to do next with this shitty crap. So they respond after two weeks that client changed their mind and if you want to fill some quiz about your hiring process.

There are also ones that got impressed so much they’re talking 1 hour that you will be our next cto and then ending process with email that there were better candidates and also post same offer on job board next day 🤦‍♂️

I think I just skip this shitty nightmare and concentrate on some personal project until I spend all my savings.

I just need to concentrate on one thing and not get distracted with 1000s of voices shouting “pick me” in my head.

Fuuuuuuck
If you got offended fuck you unless you like it.

After working in one project in a big happy days bubble without distraction for couple of years I underestimated how fucked up people are in real world.
We’re making hell by ourselves on this planet we don’t need much help.

My total nightmare begins with:

"Can't you just ... " -client

Many of you commented on my previous rant regarding my first ever freelance gig that I would definitely be back with even more to rant... here I am.

What was supposedly a 1 to 1.5 month long project became one that is stretching beyond 3, if lucky, else 4 months long. Requirements and scope evolving more complex and with variations more intense than pokemon evolutions.

I fucked up. I signed a contract that nobody would have. I didn't plan or protect my ass enough to prevent such shit from happening. I severely underestimated and hence under quoted. This is one of the nightmare situations a freelancer could be in (in my opinion). I mean it could only get better... Right? I'm preparing myself for one hell of a payment at the end of the project. Brace yourself, payment is hopefully coming as fast as the number of seasons it took for winter to come in GoT.

On the bright side, I'm currently working on a new project with a client that is indeed much much better than this first. I mean he is a nice person and communications thus far has been nothing short of great.

I guess it's good to start with your expectations rock bottom, that way nothing else can be worse, I hope.

Everytime I applied long leave, my client and PM will plan for important feature, but they say start the sprint and for other new people i have to give KT, and they will take care. I know how that will screw up the system. So at the time it's nightmare​ late night at office, in office time KT, no weekends, stand-up for 1hr(every time QA will ask, what we get after this sprint). Stupid clients changing the requirements after stand-up.

Everytime code base screwed and need to refactoring. So as much as possible core functionality I'll complete and only bug fixing for newbie. I hate those days.

As a POC I removed all client specifics from a project and made it reusable. Thousands of lines of code. In a day. From a project I knew nothing about in a language I previously used only in school. And it compiled and ran in the end.

Ripping out so much useless code felt great, possibly as good as creating something new, fresh, innocent. I improved on performance and maintenability and found some errors in the process.

After a successfull POC it was time to do it properly. That was a nightmare. A horror movie you want to see through. In the end I felt even better.

So I was looking into phone app development again (as you do) and I'm working on a simple QoL app for me and my SO that will help us automate some home management and finances stuff. Naturally I delved down the rabbit hole deep and wanted to have push notifications so we don't have to check the app periodically to know when certain things happen... Oh boy... Why is mobile development so convoluted, especially if you don't want to rely on Google Services...

It seems that the most accepted way of doing this is Firebase (FCM). Well me being me, I refuse to use google services for this and I prefer self hosted solutions (for data privacy reasons) which eliminates most products out there.

It also didn't help that my framework of choice is Flutter/Dart, because fuck Android Studio and the insane buggy XML stuff and fuck Android and it's constantly changing APIs...

Well In the end I decided on a rather simple solution and self hosted an AMQP service (RabbitMQ in my case, as I have some experience with it already) and implemented a foreground service in android platform specific code on top of my flutter project to kickstart it and made my phone a queue listener... This now means I can push notifications from my server to the Messaging Queue and it will be pushed into my App automatically!

One thing I found out on this journey was that Android now kills most background services and enforces foreground services to have a visible notification in the status drawer... which I actually approve of. It's a bit annoying that you can start a reliable background service, but I'm absolutely on-board with long running processes started by my apps are constantly visible...

Long story short, I love reinventing all the wheels, especially if it's for free and private... And I also went to sleep at 2AM again because this took longer that I'd like to tune... but it works, and it's google free...

I'm thinking of trying to package this up as a flutter module later, but first I want to do testing on battery life and the general life cycle of the service. RabbitMQ says they have the client library optimized for long-lasting connections and it should be just using a tcp socket, which should pretty much be what all the push notification services are doing anyway. I'm also not completely satisfied with how the permanent notification looks.. it isn't collapsible like some of the other ones from other apps and it's about 2 lines high instead of single line... which is something quite annoying and I'm struggling to find any relevant docs on how this is done other than possible making a custom Notification Style... but I just can't believe that everyone is doing that.. there must be a built-in somewhere -_-... Ugh Android is hell...

Anyway, if any android devs here have some hints, tips and tricks on how to handle this type of background/foreground process stuff and I'm doing something wrong let me know, cause googling this shit is a nightmare too!

After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...

So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.

Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.

Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...

So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.

Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).

We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).

I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...

Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks...

ArseHole, for simple CRUD, my client suggest to use WordPress. Then they added payment and booking system. I asked why still using WordPress????? It's nightmare to work three peoples on functions.php file.

Fuck off. Go fuck yourself. 😣

Fuck Oracle, fuck you oracle! The stupidest shittiest worst nightmare company with the most user-unfriendly, productivity-killing, illogical, stupid pile of software garbage products ever! And unfortunately I want to extends my worm-fucks to all Oracle employees and maintainers and to the whole fucking community of shit that made up oracle-community and to every conscious being who ever liked, enjoyed or have found the slightest genuine interest of any product tagged "oracle".

I installed the pile of shit a.k.a Oracle 18c and imported a dumb file locally, everything was working in the slightest amount of the word (fine) before it turns to nightmare. I created a C# client to call a stored procedure in that shit of a database engine. I kept getting error related to the parameter types, specifically one which is custom type of Table of numbers. It turns out that the only of doing this is through that shit they called (unmanaged driver), the "managed" doesn't support custom types. So I had to install another package of shit they call (odbc universal install) "universal my a$$ by the way", at that moment, where everything just crashed and stopped working. I spent 3 hours trying to connect to the fucking database to no avail. I shockingly found a folder in my desktop folder called (OracleInstallation) and all windows services related to oracle installation "suddenly" got somehow (re-routed) to that folder.
In conclusion, fuck oracle.

Solo client developers are a fucking nightmare to deal with - especially the lil pretentious patronizing douchebags who talk shit about you and act like they are a better programmer than you to their whole company to make themselves look better and to break up relationships. I wish I had your address so I could ruin your life you stupid waste of space cuntface McGee.

Over the last week I've slowly grown to fucking hate IMAP and SMTP. You'd think after so many years we'd have come up with better servers to manage email but no we still rely on fucking decades old protocols that can't even batch requests.

To make things worse I need to attach to IMAP through node and that has been a nightmare. All the libraries suck ass and even the ones tailored towards Gmail don't work for Gmail because Google decided one day to fucking out the header at the bottom of some emails and split into mimeparts. Also why the fuck is fetching email asynchronous? There's no point at all since we requests are processed line by line in IMAP, and if the library actually supported sending asynchronous requests it wouldn't require a new object to be created for each request and allow only a single listener.

Also callbacks are antiquated for a while and it pisses me off that node hasn't updated their libraries i.e. TLS to support async/await. I've taken to "return await new Promise" where the resolve of the promise is passed as the callback, which let's me go from callback to promise to async/await. If anyone has any other ideas I'm all ears otherwise I might just rewrite their TLS library altogether...

And this is just IMAP. I wish browsers supported TLS sockets because I can already see a server struggling with several endpoints and users, it would be much easier to open a connection from the client since the relationship is essentially:

Client [N] --- [1] Server [1] --- [1] IMAP

And to make the legs of that N : N which would fix a lot of issues, I would have to open a new IMAP connection for every client, which is cool cause it could be serverless, but horrifying because that's so inefficient.

Honestly we need a new, unifying email protocol with modern paradigms...

Oracle 11g DB or whatever version it was!! You need a fucking windows machine to install it, doesnt install on Linux or Mac!! I am a MySQL/Postgres guy, working on it was a nightmare, permission issues, and you need the oracle instant client on your system to communicate with windows, which works after a zillion errors!!

Client Server Warehouse Management Systems.

The is a software nightmare...

I got my first client at upwork almost a week ago and the experience has been awful so far, not because of this client but because of the codebase, it's so bad, it is running DEBUG=True on production and if I turn it DEBUG=False things break for some fucking reason that makes no sense (I don't think that's true but the previous developer states it). The website is running on pythonanywhere which is weird, bootstrap is a nightmare, the database needs to be in sync all the time using a manage.py command that executes tasks received through a webhook from a Hubspot shit that has all the information. Just adding a simple edit/verify profile on that site is such a fucking nightmare. The whole project its full of holes and things that are just screaming to break, its like a fucking house of cards that falls to the ground the second I edit something and it looks like its my fault. I'm thinking of telling the client that I will no longer work on this project