Me: So i've cloned the iOS project, i've run carthage, but it won't build.. Have I done something wrong?

Devs: Oh read this doc on github, we do loads of custom stuff. The depenedncy manager can't do it all by itself. You need to run `./scripts/boostrap.sh`

Me (another day): I've switched branches and i'm getting all these errors. Any ideas?

Devs: Ah this happens when someone modifies xyz. Read this pinned slack message. Run `./scripts/bootstrap.sh` again.

Me (another day): I've switched branches again, getting different errors, re-running boostrap didn't fix it.

Devs: Ah yeah, this happens when someone modifies abc. You need to run `./scripts/nuke.sh` and then boostrap when this happens.

Me (another day): Guys When I try to run the prod app its not building any ideas?

Devs: Ah yes have a look at this confluence link. You need to run `./scripts/setup_debug_release.sh`, then nuke, then boostrap and you'll be good.

Me: .... ok

Devs: Oh btw very important! do not commit any changes from `./scripts/setup_debug_release.sh`. It will break everything!

Me: ... no i'm sorry we have a much bigger problem than that. We need to talk ... like right now

To write 1000 lines of JS, I need 1 cup of coffee.
To write 100 lines of documentation I need 100 cups of coffee.

For some reason time stops when I open confluence

Me: Hi Guys, theres no docs on our custom push notification / deeplinking implementation. I've tried to work backwards from a QA testing doc to add new links. Can someone tell me if this is all ok? It seems to behave a little weird.

Dev: Looks ok, but we've moved to the braze platform for sending notifications. You'll need to trigger braze notifications now. Test that it works ok with that <confluence-link>

*hour later*

Me: I've tried the debugging tool, both with my payload and one of the samples from the link. It displays on the phone, but tapping it doesn't trigger the deeplinking.

Dev: No it works, try one of these <screenshot of samples I used>

*hour later*

Me: Tried it again on the real device to make sure, as well as on develop and master. Not working with those samples or mine.

Dev: No it does. It comes in here in this library <github link to line of code>

Me: ... Nope, debugged it, it doesn't get passed the next 'if' check on the next line as its missing a key/value. The whole function does nothing.

Dev: Oh do you want to send a braze notification?

Me: ..... you told me I had too .... yes I guess.

Dev: ok for a braze notification it works different, send this <entirely different sample no where on the link>

Me: ...... but ..... this is only for braze notifications ..... why .... all the samples have deeplink url's .... but they don't ....... are you ..... FFS!!!!! !@#?!

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

┻━┻ ︵ヽ(`Д´)ﾉ︵ ┻━┻

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

┌П┐(ಠ_ಠ)

Confluence is good they said
Confluence is awesome they said
Confluence is cloud based and fucking great...

Confluence is starting to lag like it's the 1990's and my keyboard strokes are taking seconds, literal seconds to catch up..

KEYBOARD LAG!! in 2020!!! fuck this JS bullshit.

Team quarterly capacity planning:

- Confluence document created with a big table (+100 rows) by product / business. Each row is something that needs to be worked on for the coming quarter.

- Row 1 could be an Epic with 15 tickets attached. Row 2 could be adding a single log to our analytics. No consistency.

- For each row, we create a separate confluence document with the "technical details". 75% of the time these remain blank. 1% of the time there is something useful, the rest its a slightly longer version of the description from the bigger document.

- Each row gets a high level estimate by the leads. 50% of the time without sufficient background info to actually do get it accurate.

- These are then copied into the teams excel spreadsheet, where it will calculate if we are over/under capacity.

- We will go backwards and forwards between confluence and excel until we are "close enough" to under capacity without being too much.

- Once done, we then need to copy them into the org/division's excel spreadsheet. This document is huge, has every team on it and massive 50pt text saying "Do not put a filter on this document".

- Jira tickets + Epics will now be created for each one, with all the data be copied over by hand, bit by bit, by product. Often missing something.

- Last week, at the end of this process for Q2 (2 weeks late), 6 of the leads were asked to attend a 30 minute meeting to discuss how to group the line items together because we had too many for the bigger excel spreadsheet.

- This morning I was told business weren't happy with one of our decisions to delay one line item. Although they were all top priority (P0), one of them was actually higher than that again (P-1?) and we need to work it back in.

... so back to step 1

- Mid way through Q2, a new document will be created for Q3. Work items that didn't make the cut will be manually copied from one to the other. 50/50 whether anything that didn't get done on time in Q2 will make its way to the Q3 doc.

- "Tech excellence" / "Tech debt" items (unit/UI tests, documentation, logging, performance, stability etc) will never be copied over. Because product doesn't understand them and assumes therefore that they are unimportant.

==================

PS: I'd like to say this was a rare event for Q2, but no. Q4 and Q1 were so bad, we were made assurances from the director of engineering that he would fix this process for Q2. This is the new and improved process (I shit you not) that has resulted in nothing tangible.

Tech support: we need to install backup software on your laptops.
Devs: what for?
TS: to backup all your important files, like word docs, excels, etc.
Devs: we don't use those. everything is on git/confluence/etc
TS: my boss told me to install it everywhere, so I have to do it.
Devs: well just disable it. uses too much tam, disk time and such
TS: whatever.

So he installed it on each laptop separately, took half a day, then we just disabled it and proceeded with our tasks. Now we get a question every other week why nothing is being synced from our computers. "We paid for the system and we want you to use it".
yeah..

Post my vaccination break, I login to work today and this is waiting there for me..

My designer just dropped this note in our channel where we have our entire team including directors (my manager),

"I wanted to specifically give kudos to Floyd for creating the Confluence page for XYZ feature requirement.

It's so elaborate and very well structured 👏🏻"

And my Tech director adds to it and appreciates my efforts.

My TPM kept praising various new initiatives that I started and how it made him happy to see the progress + how everything was organised.

My skip level manager kept appreciating the work entire previous week and even in a meeting we had just before I started typing this post.

I feel like I have settled really well in this new org + started gaining trust of teams and leadership.

I need to continue the momentum before I start leading the product independently (a few more weeks should be good).

Now two things I am expecting in return, is good amount of international travel + good timely hikes.

And what's interesting is that my employer is known for these exact two things.

So fingers crossed.. 🤞🏻

A senior engineer with about 8 experience in my team and company for almost a year now. Believe it or not, still hasn't setup local dev environment.

Every time we ask this person to set it up / refer to guide in Confluence / or just use the docker image the person says ok.

Starts sending code for pull request. The code would not even compile in most cases just from a quick scan. When questioned how was this tested, answer would be more or less 'oh my local setup not working, could you test it out for me.'

Doesn't know how to write tests. Fairly recently instead of storing string values in a list, (I swear am not kidding) decided to come up with 20 string variables.

8 years plus experience! I think this is retarded even for a fresh grad.

@netikras since when does proprietary mean bad?

Lemme tell you 3 stories.

CISCO AnyConnect:
- come in to the office
- use internal resources (company newsletter, jira, etc.)
- connect to client's VPN using Cisco AnyConnect
- lose access to my company resources, because AnyConnect overwrites routing table (rather normal for VPN clients)
- issue a route command updating routing table so you could reach confluence page in the intranet
- route command executes successfully, `route -n` shows nothing has changed
- google this whole WTF case
- Cisco AnyConnect constantly overwrites OS routing table to ENFORCE you to use VPN settings and nothing else.

Sooo basically if you want to check your company's email, you have to disconnect from client's VPN, check email and reconnect again. Neat!

Can be easily resolved by using opensource VPN client -- openconnect

CISCO AnyConnect:
- get a server in your company
- connect it to client's VPN and keep the VPN running for data sync. VPN has to be UP at all times
- network glitch [uh-oh]
- VPN is no longer working, AnyConnect still believes everything is peachy. No reconnect attempts.
- service is unable to sync data w/ client's systems. Data gets outdated and eventually corrupted

OpenConnect (OSS alternative to AnyConnect) detects all network glitches, reports them to the log and attempts reconnect immediatelly. Subsequent reconnect attempts getting triggered with longer delays to not to spam network.

SYMANTEC VIP (alleged 2FA?):
- client's portal requires Sym VIP otp code to log in
- open up a browser in your laptop
- navigate to the portal
- enter your credentials
- click on a Sym VIP icon in the systray
- write down the shown otp number
- log in

umm... in what fucking way is that a secure 2FA? Everything is IN the same fucking device, a single click away.

Can be easily solved by opensource alternatives to Sym VIP app: they make HTTP calls to Symantec to register a new token and return you the whole totp url. You can convert that url to a qr code and scan it w/ your phone (e.g. Google's Authenticator). Now you have a true 2FA.

Proprietary is not always bad. There are good propr sw too. But the ones that are core to your BAU and are doing shit -- well these ARE bad. and w/o an oppurtunity to workaround/fix it yourself.

I think I'm falling in love. With TDD.

I used to be very skeptic about it. You know, the usual reasons: it takes longer to deliver, constant "flow" interruptions, etc, etc. But ever since I've tried it I'm nothing but happy about my choice :)

I'm moving forward, I'm not making any regressions, I'm no longer afraid to make any changes in my code as I know tests will show what exactly I break,.. And most importanty, I have all use-cases with corner-cases defined and "explained" in the code... No more do I have to search in Confluence for how this exact scenario should behave. Everything is here. Everything's in the tests.

It's amazing!

Yeah, it DOES take longer to deliver so if you're hardcore Agile living by "Ship it as soon as it compiles" TDD might be too slow. But if you prefer knowing when your code is covering all the use cases w/o any errors -- TDD is the way.

Fuck Confluence

I just had a chat with the CEO (I'll call him John) of the company I work at. I was trying to get a real alignment on what I need to do to be a valuable resource to this company. They promoted me (without a raise in pay) to a different (management) role, and I do not know what I need to do to be the best in this role.

During the discussion, the CEO failed to provide any usable metrics, or a way to track those, except for phrases like "higher productivity" and "higher quality". How to track? No idea.

So, at this point, me being the idiot I am, wanted to make things explicit:
*Me: Okay, so what if I request for a 20% raise six months from now, what metrics will you look at to decide whether to give me the raise.

(My last raise was a big one, more than 100% or so, more than a year ago. That was a dev role, and I was paid 2 cents earlier, so the doubling to 4 cents wasn't really a big deal.)

John went on a long rant on how people just expect raises every year, inflation, etc. All good and fine.
But then he mentioned something strange.

*John: ...and you know, for the last three years, there has been a race to retain resources. During this race, many companies, including us, had to pay people WAY MORE THAN THEIR VALUE to retain them. These people are going to be the first to be fired during cost-cutting as they are the most expensive resources at the company without any proven value. These people should not expect raises to come soon, and if they do expect that, they need to prove the value themselves.

Now, I, being a simpleton, am wondering how is it fair for an organization to pay someone "more than their value" to retain them once so that they can just be fired two years later. How did the company decide the value of such employees to begin with?

And all this is ignoring the fact that in the company there are no metrics, no KPIs, and performance of a person is how much the CEO likes that guy. How TF the people who joined a year ago and never interacted with the CEO prove their worth?

Developers are building PowerPoints and configuring JIRA/Confluence/Laptops of Sales team, project managers are delegating management to developers and decision-making to the CEO, Technical architect is building requirements documents, Business Analyst is the same person as the QA team lead (and badly stretched), and the Release Manager is the Product Technical Admin that cannot write one sentence in English. And then we got 3.8 hours in meetings every DAY. Why TF are Dev Managers in "QA KPI Meeting"? Why are "developers" writing documentation on "How to create meeting notes at <company>"?
And, in this hell-storm, how does one really demonstrate one's value?

"oh, I put this in our Confluence years ago, haven't you seen it?"

Oh, fuck you.

How to make boat loads of money: wirte some janky corporate SaaS platform with the worst UI possible.

Hired a new BI developer. She tested reasonably ok in SQL, and certainly showed good strengths in visualising data, plus had a good attitude in the interview. We hired her. She broke her laptop the first day. We got her another then she complained the camera didn't work but didn't realise the lever in front of the camera was to move the privacy shutter off and on.

Assigned her some work of taking queries that are used in a BI tool that targets the transactional database directly, and re-jigging them for Snowflake which we're using as a data warehouse now, aggregating all our data into one place. Yet, she's struggling to understand why the SQL query she's pasted in doesn't work as-is.

I go over it again; the source schemas and tables are this, but in Snowflake we've named them this. She then bemoans how much work that is to change them all - I say use find and replace. She then struggles with Snowflake syntax errors and asks for a guide on T-SQL to Snowflake. I show her Google and say "this is what I did when I hit these problems - search for 'Snowflake equivalent to T-SQL getdate()' or 'how to get current date in Snowflake' but she still doesn't understand. I ask if she's every had to work between T-SQL and MySQL or MySQL and PostgreSQL or Oracle and so on and she says yes. I say the syntax isn't the same, is it? And she goes oh, now I understand.

She scored reasonably in her SQL test but I'm now concerned there's something fundamental missing in her grasp of SQL. I gave her a detailed demo of the tools, I explained in the interview and on her start about our move to a data warehouse for all our apps, and put her through some training plus gave her time to work through our Confluence pages - not expecting she'll remember everything, but more to ensure she recalls they exist and what the general contents are.

Anyhow, that's my rant.

Found this gem today while looking through confluence.

Goals:
Can the candidate use Slack?
Ask follow up questions if missed anything.
Ask the questions that tell a lot about someone without directly asking it (i.e. Have you ever met someone famous? (Telling what the candidate values in life) What are your hobbies? (Telling if candidate has a work life balance). If you were a crayon, what color would you be and why? (Highlights prominent aspects of candidate’s personality) Please don’t just use these, be creative.)

A crayon???? Das when I hang up

*in Sprint planning listening to my PM creating tasks*

PM (to Team): So this will be an MVP we can expand on in the future. Do let me know upfront if any tasks should not be in the Sprint.

Team Manager (to PM): Let's see... Yeah I think you've nailed it... Good.

Developer (to Team): Guys, I see the task for the frontend team to integrate machine learning doesn't have any details.

PM (to Developer): Ooh machine learning! Good catch!

PM (to Team Manager): This was one of the tasks we really needed this quarter, will we still be on track?

Team Manager (to PM): Yeah no worries we'll add it as part of the MVP design in Confluence.

PM: Okay assigning the task now. *Assigns to Developer*

*Team Manager goes on 1 month vacation*

Me (thinking to myself): Wtf

Fuck Confluence and anyone telling me to write anything there. From now on, documentations will be in the repo, written in Markdown

Project managers who distribute a task instruction like "add button on page x" into 20 ticket comments (each minimum 1000 chars), 1 pdf from the client, 2 unrelated tl;dr confluence pages, 3 lengthy bullshit management emails (at least 5 people in cc) and end up sending chat messages every hour...

Big-time Microsoft fan who claims they've been using licensed versions of Windows since Windows 3.0. Still has all old versions of Windows on different machines / hard-disks. They use only Microsoft Surface devices. They still use Nokia Lumia (with Windows Phone 10). They were working with an organization that used Office365 for enterprise email and collaboration. They used Microsoft Teams for team collaboration when the rest of the organization was comfortable with Atlassian tools like jira, confluence and bitbucket.

One fine day, news spreads that the organization is moving into GSuite for enterprise email and collaboration. They are devastated. They quit citing personal and family reasons, but we knew the real reason.

Leaving my current job, after being there for 10 years straight after uni, in 2 weeks! I have now been taken out of development and have to somehow write confluence docs of all my knowledge... Fml

OMG you fucking little cunt!

Previous issue with this co-worker we hate eat other but can maintain minimal contact due to covid. Last interaction was actually nice, we joked a bit.

He teaches me how to do the build and ‘updated’ the confluence page. By update he striked through one paragraph.

Been doing these for week and now others what builds done all the time and since I am not an asshole they can approach me to do this but now I spend all
day long doing builds.

Work on a classified app so it has to
be burned on a disk, taken to a ‘secret machine’ and deployed. Takes about an hour and people are like. Can you rebuild it? I forgot to commit something?

So I updated the page to flush out the directions. Did not remove one thing only added things simple things like do a ls -lah in the dist folder to make sure the are built correctly. Things like check to make the symlink works, bolded words.

He was not at standup so I figured he was out of the office today and was going to ask him to review tomorrow.

Fucker goes in to make changes while I am making changes and doesn’t think to msg me telling me?

He is removing things and moving things which is fine just let me know! What a dick!!!!!

Screenshot of all the activity today, I am
in blue. I will spend all day watching the page to make sure I get the last fucking edit!

Confluence by Atlassian.

IT department of client still doesn't get its shit together. Previously, I've ranted that they insist I access their GitLab through a fucking RDP.

Me: requests an account to their Confluence space

Them: give me a Confluence account. Naturally, Confluence requests that I confirm my email. That needs to be confirmed in the inbox of my.name@theircompany.com. Mail servers hosted by Azure, using Outlook.

Me: ok, let's configure my Outlook, 2FA as they configured to demand it from me... install MS's authenticator app, ok so far so good... Now I'm ready to login and find that email from Confluence and... ERROR 500 INVALID LICENSE

Fucking hell. You just love your siloes so much you actually make it impossible to access it and feel good about my own good will.

About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.

When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.

My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"

Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.

Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.

The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.

Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now.

Why the hell does enterprise software get away with not having basic, logical, functionality?!

A hierarchical page structure should allow you to name multiple pages the same as long as they're under different parents.

Every FREE documentation platform understands this, yet atlassian fucking confluence can't figure it out.

As I am now in a leading position in the middle of a agile transition:

has anyone got a source for a project done completely with user stories?

I am searching a real life example with already finished stories an active backlog and a documentation.

I just can't wrap my head around it. When and what do you document? In which Form do you document? How are you writing user stories with more content like diagrams and such?

(we use jira and confluence but just started with stories)

I read some articles on the topic and watched some talks but sill don't get the picture.

Please delete your browser cache.

Wtf is up with this shit?
Maybe I'm just having a streak of bad luck, but in recent days, I ran into this particular issue time and time again.
First with one of our own products - the user appearently not always was shown the newest version due to stuff being cached in the browser.
Fair enough, we had our web-dev find a solution to that, which he did. Until this is rolled out, the only resolution is to clear the browser cache.

I also ran into this same issue on multiple other fronts. For example, there's a remote connection to one of our clients I had to establish via browser. The backend was a bit unresponsive, and somehow I ended up in a situation where my login was rejected. The only solution? Clear your browser cache.

Then we have confluence and jira in the company. Same issue. All of a sudden, I could no longer log in. Worked fine in another browser.
Delete your browser cache.

Is it just that most frontend developers out there are incompetent at what they do or is this stuff broken by design? I don't recall having to clear my browser cache very frequently - in fact, I'm pretty sure I haven't done it for years on one of my PCs at home. What changed?

Ah well, maybe it was just a streak of bad luck. But still ...
/Rant

So I guess I really need some sleep. I'm rushing to finish a project for work and literally wrote the same documentation twice. I realised after I tried to save it and it said "Pagename already exists". Its almost fucking identical. I'm so stupid.

I was never a big fan of Github to be used within a company. So about 3 years ago where I used to work I implemented all the tools from Atlassian. Like litteraly all of them. And first I was stunned of the possibilities I had with Jira, Confluence, Bamboo and Bitbucket! But while self-hosting all thoose services you always felt, that Atlassian just bought all thoose companies and "threw them together"
BUT with newest features of Gitlab, I think they outperformed everyone! I absolutely love what they offer, even as a free service. They integrate all features in one product where you would otherwise relay on different products.
Whats important to you when it comes to VCS?

I administer Atlassian stack instance (among zillion other things, of course). Once I've got an issue about login problem:
"I can login to Confluence, but not to Jira, could you help me?"

Looking into projects configuration, into user's permission groups in Crowd (both apps are connected, it will be important in a moment)... Everything looks good. Wtf?

Suddenly, I've got this idea:
"What username do you use in Jira?"
"My username."
"What about Confluence login?"
"My email."

Realization in 3... 2... 1...

Wait for it...

Just a little more tension...

"Nevermind, thank you!"

Remember, guys, always give them a chance. Plan for the worst, but hope for the best. And I wish you all only such issues! :-D

Confluence WYSIWYG editor for tables on wiki pages. Forget about git and GitHub idiosyncrasies, "at the end of the day" project documentation in Confluence and Jira is the real challenge.

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

My companies org is in a serious state of disrepair when it comes to project management.

Everything is tracked via conference. Each level of management (CTO, EVP, SVP, BP, S DIRECTOR, DIRECTOR, S MANAGER, MANAGER) all have a different tracking page that all say slightly different things.

To organize things there's a technical project manager who isn't just new to the team, he's new to the field. He's not technical, or experienced in project management. He's never worked within a scrum before.

He's dictating how to organize the teams scrum, and he's getting it very wrong. Decided to organize efforts in all the confluence pages by creating another one for him, again it's different.

When the work in confluence page 3/16 isn't done by a due date anybody knew about, the engineers have to hop on a call and get a Micky mouse solution out the door by the of day so upper management doesn't think the projects off the rails.

In the mean time I've taken a small group of more junior devs and shielding them. We have a side scrum that we manage and is going great, and I'm blocking the BS.

CORPORATE SUCKS. Golden handcuffs are a thing. I might set sail for greener pastures once i don't have to pay back my signing bonus if I leave.

At the company I work they just updated confluence to a version with new UI. The new blue tone for the navbar is just FUCKING UGLY!
Don‘t seem to be able to change the theme of it anymore either...
Soooo I made a firefox plugin to fix it xD
Cuz why not.
And I learn‘t how to create firefox addons^^

The feeling of dread as still a semi-junior sysadmin when an app doesn't work after an update.

I got stressed, triple-checked everything that I changed and that I followed all steps of the documentation of the upgrade process, then, as a last step before going over in half-panic mode to my boss, I try to restart the stupid java app and it starts working.

Wtf. Why. Why didn't it work the first time I started it? D:

At my previous company, we used tools from all over the place. We switched between tools at will. Sometimes, some team would decide to use some tool while the rest of the company would use something else. The worst part was that there was no Single-Sign-On (SSO) either. Everyone would need to have an account on all of these said tools. It was chaos.

I realized that being integrated into one environment (even though would have the cost of a vendor-lock-in) was the best option to have because in that case, we wouldn't have to deal with operational hurdles like having integration from one tool to another. They would just come baked-in with the whole environment. That's how GSuite (formerly Google Apps for Work), Atlassian and other players succeeded - they gave a complete suite of services / software that integrated well with each other. You could jump back and forth between services without having to bother about integration with other tools. They'd all be there wherever you wanted them to be. Even cloud providers so that opportunity and built on it - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes (in itself).

Another example is a company that used Jira, Confluence and Hipchat but for some dumb reason used Gerrit for their code review / hosting. Eventually, they realized that managing the integration with the Atlassian tools was far more expensive than getting bitbucket and migrating completely into the Atlassian environment.

It's always the integration that matters. Everything else is secondary.

So we have a confluence page all about best practices (there’s not even a lot in it) but when you check the repository, most rules are not followed 😭

We had a production outage directly caused by our team not following a change procedure correctly. Now we're under a microscope and in a "get well" program.

They took over the daily standup for this high priority program and are organizing efforts in confluence instead of jira.

Now we have a confluence doc of what everyone is working on with someone changing the text status in a table by hand every morning along with the comments in a note section...

Out company standard tools, which we are all supposed to use... (JIRA, confluence) .... IT had blacklisted docs.atlassian.....

Company has 0 automation, but there is confluence page for every imaginable process you can think off. Wow

Writing documentation is one of those tasks that most developers don't like doing. Especially when it comes to writing in say a Word/PDF file, an online wiki, or Confluence. It's time consuming and a pain in the ass.

But even if you don't like it, at least write comments in your source code! I hate having to keep writing "Write the PHPDocs for this class/function" in every pull request that I review. It's wasting my time writing such comments when it's such a basic thing to do when writing source code.

Confluence. Somehow they decided it was a good idea to remove the markup editor, and now your can only use the WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG editors suck. So I have to memorize a crap ton of keyboard shortcuts instead of just writing confluence markup which was apparently very similar to markdown. Argh

So, I got a task to modify a component from another team in another country.

Me: Ask the team for the repo link and explained what I was going to do.

idiot: You don't have access to our repo, I can do the fix next week and upload the code to confluence....

What the actual fuck. How can you even go there?!?

Project Lead: The DevOps department just got a GitLab instance installed on our internal network. We're gradually going to move all our projects onto it and move away from BitBucket and Jenkins really soon.

Me: Awesome!

Project Lead: We're still using JIRA and Confluence for issue tracking and documentation though because the higher ups said so.

Me:

draft article in atlassian confluence

oops it lost your image when publishing

fuck u atlassian

Stop restyling confluence and bitbucket taking more space in an ugly fashion. Don't fix what ain't broken. **#*#*#

I'm developing an app based on user stories and stuff. The business team used Trello to share them with the devs. Everytime they changed a comma, they'd upload a new file. We got to the point where a simple 1 page story had like 15 versions..
So a couple of days ago I suggested my project's PO she could use Confluence for that, I explained her the benefits like how it'd be easier to track changes and the best part: no 30 effing word files.

I checked it today and turns out she started using, but instead of writing stories on pages, she just downloaded everything from Trello and uploaded the documents there 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Honest question: Is Jira really that bad?
Iam using Jira. It is not blazing fast nor is the UI amazing but I wouldn't rate it so badly.

That said, when the UI gets cluttered it's mostly company-internal stuff that fills up space (not only Jiras fault). I also don't use confluence.

But I see so many rants on it, is this just people jumping on the hate-hype-train?

//long rant ahead!

I need to plan a Wiki with SharePoint for not connected Sites.
Im now in dispute with my CoWorker since 3 Months, this is how the conversation goes. My two bosses are involved in this and also unhappy about SharePoint.

[C refers to CoWorker, M for me]
C: Hey, we finished SharePoint with Selfservice Storage Rooms. They even have a Wiki.

M: Okay cool, will check it out

C: Well we need to also plan the Wiki inside, I already asked our Department Head and he agreed, that you will be the one.

M: Okkkkaaayy, normaly it's your job to do such things, but welp, I will look into it, if we can work with it.

(2 Weeks pass)
M: I checked SharePoint out and tested everything. The Wiki is a Nogo, we need a other solution or programm for ourself a Wiki Integration/Engine. Did you maybe check out Confluence? It has also a SharePoint integration plugin.

C: We wont do Confluence, too expensive (already overspent the budget for SharePoint in six digits 🤬). Also we wont add to SharePoint Custom Code, it needs to stay standard.

M: Thats impossible, SharePoint Wiki is shit and also handels sites just like documents, no brain behind! Also you overspent the Budget and now it's my Problem?!

C: You need to do the best out of it.

(3 weeks passes and we get a meeting with the department heads)

M: Alright I made a UseCase and documented where the essential flaws are in SharePoint Wiki and why we cant use it.

Boss: Ok if it's impossible to use, then we will stay on our Fileserver for Documents and wont use SharePoint.

M: Thats not my Point, my statement is, as status today, SharePoint Wiki is not the right solution, code or buy software to it.

Boss: We will do a Prove of Concept, if it doesnt work then we will aboard it.

M: Well it is only some missing essentials, like hierarchy and Groups for the Pages, Example Confluence has this. If we could built in this features in SharePoint, everything would work out.

C: (angry) I told you that we wont use Confluence!

M: (calm) I said we need Features, not Confluence. Please mind the consent.

(3 weeks passes, and one more meating with bosses)

M: alright here again is a analyses, why already in Theory the current SharePoint Wiki wont work. It's already flawed in the core.

Boss: Yea SharePoint is crap, I checked out confluence and thats a real Wiki.

C: Well I dont know anything about Confluence and never looked at it. But if SharePoint is a fail we need the Proof of Concept.

M: Why do we need to do a Proof of Concept, when it already doesnt work in Theory! Thats nonsence and unlogical.

Next meeting will be in 4 weeks and I will give him the FUCKING PROOF OF CONCEPT. I will be a Bastard and build behind CoWorkers back a Confluence Wiki to show the Departmentheads how to built it right.

I hate CoWorker now, he makes a part of my loved Job a hell, I will goddamn cuk Coworker to space, that fucking Cukatron of lazyness and shit 🤬. I provide the Solutions and you just say no, how dafuq will the project advance, if you always say NO! Are you so unflexible and fixed on your Castle of Ignorancy!

Started new contract recently, their main product is aiming to be some kind of automation holy grail for business, basically low code nonsense integrating with most of the industry standard tools like sap or confluence. Their entire infrastructure is setup manually, slowly transitioning from on premise to AWS. No infra as code, no playbooks, not even scripts, just "engineers" painstakingly clicking the UI. They don't seem to see the irony of being automation company that doesn't use automation, but I'm having a good laugh at least.

Hey, I've got a question for my non-profit nation-wide project.

What free knowledge-base (confluence analog) would you recommend? Currently team i 6-8 members but it's likely to grow soon -- we are all volunteers.

I'm so used to confluence when it comes to writing docs that I haven't even researched the market for anything else :D

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Many years ago, when most of you were toddlers, different web browsers were...different, and the most different of them all was Internet Explorer. Web applications were not automatically cross-browser compatible and it took a lot of adaptation/tweaking to make a webapp, or even a simple web page, work and look the same across different web browsers. Some web pages/apps only worked on a specific browser and poorly, if at all, on some other browsers. Now, in 2024, we're there again. Atlassian's Confluence works without a hitch on Edge, but often fails miserably on Firefox. Too bad. I don't like Edge, but am forced to use it just for Confluence. So, once again, I have separate web browsers for different tasks.

Fuck undocumented shit!
I was wondering how to use this one method of the "interface". Googled the name of the program and the specific method.

Got two results.

From the same page.

It's a comment complaining that this shit is undocumented and doesn't work.

If you build something that others use, please, motherfucking please, document your code.
At least some auto generated javadoc, how hard can it be?
You are using the atlassian suite for everything and you have confluence so use it already! The only documentation that actually exists it about a hundred years old, totally useless and covers about 1% of what your product can do.
I like your product but fuck me sideways your documentation sucks balls! Fuck!

That needed to get out.

I am the responsible for the atlassian Suite at work, as I maintain the systems, set them up, and stuff.

One day, our crowd (the authentication and authorization application) just went crazy. At like lunch time it could not connect to the AD anymore. No reasons. Throwing XSRF errors (cross site scripting), because http would connect to https. "won't do it, fuck you" it told me. Out of the blue. Noone changed anything. And yea, seriously. Noone did.
It just refused to connect (as connecting to AD is connecting yourself with you own api. And refusing yourself talking to yourself). It runs behind a proxy. Therefore http/https. Well, this worked for years. But out of sudden not anymore.

Yea. Fuck you.

It was reported some hours later, at like 3pm, as people could not login to the applications using crowd as authentication and authorization server.

Tried to debug the system, where nothing was did, to make it work. At best time to fail.

First workaround: if you are logged into one of the other applications of atlassian, just refresh the site, so your SSO token gets a refresh and you are signed on again.

Then I searched more and more. And more.
But nothing worked, nothing helped.

So I addressed an emergency maintenance, take down the whole Suite, restart crowd, to apply some changes to it's settings, not knowing what happening then, because all connections of SSO will then be released. Sent out the mail like 30 minutes beforehands.

While waiting for the window, I just typed my credentials... And redid, and redid, so to type and being bored.
Three minutes before the window...

It just worked again.

Well. Wtf. Serioudl
Just came back.

No Intrusion, no changes at all. Just came back, as nothing has happened.

Kind of best part of this story... A headhunter messaged me on my way home to offer me a job as an Atlassian Suite SysAdmin for a company, at kinda the double of my salary.

At first I was thinking to go there, and when someone then asked me sth about Atlassian just start to laugh and then leave still laughing...

But then I very nicely respond that I dont want to cry at work. And wished him best luck.

I am doing some bad upgrades now on our Suite. Very painful.
And I looked into the start scripts. Some Look like the untalented intern tells another one to write scripts. Seriously wtf.

Today I followed the guide to Update a confluence and change database to Postgres. Didnt work, Postgres error.
Try it again, jquery won't load. Next try, tomcat not starting anymore. Did same thing. Every fucking time.

Yea. Maintenance window to get a nice new export soon. Will only take an hour.

To switch database in confluence, you need to set it up very fresh. And then Import your export.
Export takes an hour at our system.
Importing maybe the same time. Hope it will work (hint: Nope).

Oh, can be nice also. Just tell the Bitbucket to migrate databases, there is a fucking setting for it. Enter new database, ready, go, finished.

At least they don't raise costs very much every kinda year.
Oh sorry, yes, they do.

Is there any alternatives to Atlassian's Confluence and Jira?

We used to use GitHub projects and wiki, but "the business" wanted a more formalised process and access controls on kanban boards and backlogs.

We started using Jira and Confluence last month, but Jira have been incredibly slow with a horrible interface also Everytime I create a new issue it feels like I'm wasting a lot of time compared to the time needed to setup an issue on GH and add it to a project board, plus the entire team is used to using markdown which doesn't work great on Jira.

I've looked for some alternative but I wonder what you are using out there!

I am having an introspective moment as a junior dev.

I am working in my 3rd company now and have spent the avg amount of time i would spent in a company ( 1- 1.5 years)

I find myself in similar problems and trajectories:

1. The companies i worked for were startups of various scales : an edtech platform, an insurance company (branch of an mnc) and a b2b analytics company

2. These people hire developers based on domain knowledge and not innovative thinking , and expect them to build anything that the PMs deem as growth/engagement worthy ( For eg, i am bad at those memory time optimising programming/ ds/algo, but i can make any kind of android screen/component, so me and people like me get hired here)

3. These people hire new PMs based on expertise in revenue generation and again , not on the basis of innovative thinking, coz most of the time these folks make tickets to experiment with buttons and text colors to increase engagement/growth

4. The system goes into chaos mode soon since their are so many cross operating teams and the PMs running around trying to boss every dev , qa and designer to add their changes in the app.

5. meanwhile due to multiple different teams working on different aspects, their is no common data center with up to date info of all flows, products and features. the product soon becomes a Frankenstein monster.

6. Thus these companies require more and more devs and QAs which are cogs in the system then innovative thinkers . the cogs in the system will simply come, dimwittingly add whatever feature is needed and goto home.

7. the cogs in system which also start taking the pain of tracking the changes and learning about the product itself becomes "load bearing cogs" : i.e the devs with so much knowledge of the product that they can be helpful in every aspect of feature lifecycle .

8. such devs find themselves in no need for proving themselves , in no need for doing innovative work and are simply promoted based on their domain knowledge and impact.

My question is simply this : are we as a dev just destined to be load bearing cogs?

we are doing the work which ideally a manager should be doing, ie maintaining confluence docs with end to end technical as well as business logic info of every feature/flow.

So is that the only definition of a Software Engineer in a technical product?

then how come innovations happen in companies like meta Microsoft google open ai etc?

if i have to guess as a far observer, i would say their diversity in different fields helps them mix and match stuff and lead to innovative stuff.

For eg, the android os team in google has helped add many innovative things in google cloud product and vice versa.

same is with azure and windows . windows is now optomissed to run in cloud machines when at one point it was just a horrible memory hogging and slow pc OS

for small companies, 1 ideology/product/domain is their hero ideology/product/domain .

an insurance company tries to experiment with stuff related to insurances,health,vehicles,and the best innovations they come up with is "lets give user a discount in premium if they do 5000 steps a day for an year".

edtech would say "lets do live streaming for children apart from static videos"

but Android team at google said , "since ai team is doing so well, lets include ai in various system apps and support device level models" ~ a much larger innovation as 2 domains combined to make a product

The small companies are not aiming to be an innovative product, they are just aiming to be a monopoly product. and this is kinda sad

atlassian confluence you sack of shit I make a page/document, you tell me one of the images is broken after saving

well fuck, how the fuck does this shit happen?

I assume you make oodles of cash from all the fucking companies who use your products and apparently there's no competitors with the level of integration from all the garbage of confluence, jira, bitbucket etc. At this rate maybe you can outdo Gamefreak in terms of ratio of profit to incompetence/laziness.

I was trying to setup a Confluence install on my root behind a Apache Proxy..

I tried all the Atlassian Configs, my own Configs, but nothing works for Tomcat. I redirects you to the infinities of universe. My Apache Configs are all correct.

If you access Confluence directly it also works.

Tomcat you Ass start playing nice with the proxy fucker!

I hate Tomcat now. Go die!

started a new Confluence home page for a web app project we just kicked off at my company. for those that dont know confluence is a collaboration tool. people sometimes compare it too sharepoint but its not. this is basically the only thing on the home page now. Shrute'd!!

Confluence WYSIWYG-editor shall burn in a thousand hells. This thing pretends to be smart, yet all its autoformatting achieves is to enrage me. I don't remember dropping so many f-bombs in such a short time frame.

I hoped to ease to the pain by writing markdown, yet I can only write markdown in a new insert markup window which does not even comprehend nested lists. And don't get me started that it wants to push its Confluence Wiki syntax first. Why does it need to reinvent the wheel?

Why can't I disable the WYSIWYG feel of it and just write plain old markdown?

Confluence, you are part of the problem!

I rather keep the documetnation inside the git repostory inside of md files. But no, confluence shall be our source of soon to be outdated documentation.

Sigh.

Creating a ticket plus confluence page for every open source library I want to use to get approval to use it. Of course only to allow usage of the minor version, so in js Land the request is outdated after 2 days, before someone had to chance to approve it.

-Recently started a new job so I’m new to the infrastructure-

Spent the vast majority of the day trying to SSH into one of my company servers to sort some random bug out on the website & the connection kept being rejected despite the day before it working when passing the .pem key into the SSH along with the ip & my username, nothing new there.

Anyway, everyone’s mad busy so I don’t wanna bother anyone to ask why, so I check confluence, no documentation for SSHING into our scheduler or the code the server I need to access. Never-mind.
Spend another couple hours trying debug it on my own, no luck. Never-mind.

Finally seize my opportunity and ask for help; ‘Oh the server IP changes daily so you need to run a task through our scheduler that you need to SSH into to return the list of IPS and that dynamically changes so that’s how you get the IP’

Oh ok. Why is there no documentation for that again? I mean. Thats generally some pretty important information you’d pass onto your starters.
At least I can say I won’t be making that same mistake again.

is it sane to choose Notion instead of Confluence and Shortcut (Formerly Clubhouse) instead of Jira, or do I come as a total hipster?

Or better yet, instead of Shortcut or Jira, choose Todoist?

So I graduated last year learned everything I would need to succeed in the job world. I got to my first rotation, I solved a total of 6-7 jiras in the past 6 months. I got to my second rotation, my new team is pretty much all remote and it’s been 2 weeks that i have been sitting idle. Their code base is not on git they’re not organized as my first one and I’m confused as to what they do, there’s not really any confluence and the deployment of code is done via uploading a jar. I really want them to adopt a structure like my last team or something similar because but I don’t know enough how to implement a new deployment process. I feel like sitting idle is the worst so I’m gonna start to see if I can implement a proper structure for them but who knows if they’ll even use it.

!rant

New startup - our backend stack is php, js, mysql, mongo & redis

Can you guys recommend nice-to-have internal tools that could make out lifes easier? We’ve been using confluence so far and thinking on grabbing a jira license.

Any advice is helpful 🤪

Considering that Markdown exists and Readme files are rendered by default in GitLab, Github, and so on

Why devs insist on documenting stuff on Confluence?

Searching in Confluence sucks so bad it was faster for me to check out a branch of my code to find a url in a comment for a particular user story than it was to type the query, go through pages of unrelated results only to give up and hope I got the details right.

What the hell am I!? I wonder if you guys can help me...

I've been programming most of my life but I've never actually been a developer by title or job role. I thought maybe if I list what I do and have done someone here could help? I'm sure there are more of you in a similar boat.

- C# and VB dev for some quick DBMS projects to help me understand and mine databases and create a nice simple view for project teams to show findings from the data to help make certain decisions.
- Automating a lot of my colleagues work with Python and if very restricted then just VBA macros in Excel and MSP. This did also include creating tools to gather data during workshops and converting the data for input into other systems.
- Brought Linux to the office with most team members now moving over to Linux with the peace of mind to know that though they do need to try solve their own problems, I can help if need be.
- Had to learn AWS and then implement an autoscaling and load balanced data center installation of a few Atlassian toolsets.
- Creating the architecture diagrams documentation needed for things like the above point.
- Having said that, also have ended up setting up all the Jira/Confluence etc. servers we use and have implemented so far whether cloud (Azure/AWS) or on prem and set up scripts to automate where possible.
- Implemented an automated workflow view in SharePoint based on SP list data and though in an ASPX page, primarily built in JS.
- Building test systems in PHP/JS with Laravel and Angular to help manage integration between systems. Having quite a time right looking into how to build middleware to connect between SOAP and REST API's, the trouble caused more by the systems and their reliance on frameworks we're trying to cut out of the picture.
- Working on BI and MI and training a team to help on the report creation so that I can do the fun creative stuff and then set them to work on the detail :)

Actually it seems safe to say that it seems that though I've finally moved into a dev office (beforehand being the only developer around) I seem to be the one they go to when a strategic solution is needed ASAP and the normal processes can't be followed (fun for someone with a CompSci degree and a number of project management courses under the belt... though I honestly do enjoy the challenges)

But I always end up Jack of all but master of, well hopefully some at least. let's not even get started on the tech related hobbies from circuit design and IoT to Andoid / iOS and game dev and enjoying a bit of pen testing to make sure we're all safe at work and at home.

As much as I don't like boxes, I'm interested to know if there is in fact a box for me? By the way, the above is just a snapshot of my last two years minus the project management work...

It's outrageous that Atlassian are discriminating Firefox! Our intranet is based on Confluence and works in Edge, but in Firefox the page turns blank after a few seconds, once the blue progress bar reaches the right end. Mozilla should sue Atlassian. Or is it the other way round?

My word. The way how bad and patchy the Atlassian Server SDK is documented makes development of JIRA and Confluence plug-ins an absolute horror story.
Nothing fucking works the way you'd expect it to, the development server takes upwards of 5 minutes to simply refresh a page and oooh the shit ton of money this wacky piece of horseshite costs my employer makes my head explode.
But the worst thing is:
We just have to fucking make some easy stuff we could completely just use static pages for to talk to JIRA's REST API, but someone in management made using confluence an acceptance criteria, cause some asshats somewhere else in our company made a custom confluence space - based thingy for another customer "and that's cool"
Fml

Confluence saved all the info boxes I added without the freaking info I put in them.

Now I didn't become a dev solei to avoid paperwork but the lack of paper was appealing...

I'm stuck in a support gig because it pays more than any of the dev jobs I got offered and I do is write is docs on Confluence.

Please no "Money isn't everything" comments. I agree but the dev offers I got, I couldn't live on

So I work at a small company and we are currently talking about introducing critical path analysis for our projects.
Are there any recommendations or tips/do's/don'ts that are good to know when starting with this??

On a side note: we use Jira in combination with Confluence so if there are any useful integrations with that possible please let me know. I already saw some interesting add-ons for it.