So a few days ago I felt pretty h*ckin professional.

I'm an intern and my job was to get the last 2003 server off the racks (It's a government job, so it's a wonder we only have one 2003 server left). The problem being that the service running on that server cannot just be placed on a new OS. It's some custom engineering document server that was built in 2003 on a 1995 tech stack and it had been abandoned for so long that it was apparently lost to time with no hope of recovery.

"Please redesign the system. Use a modern tech stack. Have at it, she's your project, do as you wish."

Music to my ears.

First challenge is getting the data off the old server. It's a 1995 .mdb file, so the most recent version of Access that would be able to open it is 2010.

Option two: There's an "export" button that literally just vomits all 16,644 records into a tab-delimited text file. Since this option didn't require scavenging up an old version of Access, I wrote a Python script to just read the export file.

And something like 30% of the records were invalid. Why? Well, one of the fields allowed for newline characters. This was an issue because records were separated by newline. So any record with a field containing newline became invalid.

Although, this did not stop me. Not even close. I figured it out and fixed it in about 10 minutes. All records read into the program without issue.

Next for designing the database. My stack is MySQL and NodeJS, which my supervisors approved of. There was a lot of data that looked like it would fit into an integer, but one or two odd records would have something like "1050b" which mean that just a few items prevented me from having as slick of a database design as I wanted. I designed the tables, about 18 columns per record, mostly varchar(64).

Next challenge was putting the exported data into the database. At first I thought of doing it record by record from my python script. Connect to the MySQL server and just iterate over all the data I had. But what I ended up actually doing was generating a .sql file and running that on the server. This took a few tries thanks to a lot of inconsistencies in the data, but eventually, I got all 16k records in the new database and I had never been so happy.

The next two hours were very productive, designing a front end which was very clean. I had just enough time to design a rough prototype that works totally off ajax requests. I want to keep it that way so that other services can contact this data, as it may be useful to have an engineering data API.

Anyways, that was my win story of the week. I was handed a challenge; an old, decaying server full of important data, and despite the hitches one might expect from archaic data, I was able to rescue every byte. I will probably be presenting my prototype to the higher ups in Engineering sometime this week.

Happy Algo!

I worked on a greenfield project a couple of years ago. The company had an old solution written in Omnis (heard of it? Yeah, me neither) with an SQL database. My team was to create a completely new web based system... on top of the old database, so the customers could keep their existing stuff.

The dba was an intelligent man, one of the nicest people I've met, and over the course of fifteen years he had made a remarkably terrifying monstrosity of a database. Some years before me they wanted to "future proof" the system and make it "easier to switch to new technologies". So they moved the entire business logic into the database...

I used a tool to create a visualization of said database when we started. It had no views, only tables and sprocs. Look at it! Tables and sprocs are rectangles (well, dots) and any connections are drawn in grey lines. There were no foreign keys, so a tables only visualization only yielded a collection of independent rectangles without a single line.

Now, the stored procedures were bloody MASSIVE. A single procedure that only registered a new interested party and attached them to a property had 2500+ lines and over 150 parameters.

Also, this dba added features and fixed bugs by logging into the respective customers production server and writing SQL.

That database is the stupidest thing I've ever seen a developer do.

FML. An overreaching supergenius "architect" and a database team:

A: "We have decided that apps should use mysql. Install a MySQL so we match cloud"
DBA: "we don't have an image or experience with MySQL. We have mssql and Oracle "
A: "ok, use mssql in data center and mysql in production cloud"
DBA: "that's... not going to work well"
A: "just do it!"

...

Me, reading this shit, sends email: "ignoring the fact that we have more than 500 queries in this application which will need to be checked and most likely rewritten, how are we supposed to test the mysql queries without production access?"
A: "just use mssql local and MySQL in cloud"
M: "... Just to make sure I understand, you want us to write queries for mssql, test them locally, and then write separate queries, with a separate SQL connection abstraction that deploys to production? Again, how are we going to test this?"
A: "no, use same queries, should be fine"
M: "they really won't, they're different dialects"
A: "do the needful, make work!"

If karma were a thing, this person would have long since exploded into a cloud of atomized blood.

Worst legacy experience...

Called in by a client who had had a pen test on their website and it showed up many, many security holes. I was tasked with coming in and implementing the required fixes.

Site turned out to be Classic ASP built on an MS Access database. Due to the nature of the client, everything had to be done on their premises (kind of ironic but there you go). So I'm on-site trying to get access to code and server. My contact was *never* at her desk to approve anything. IT staff "worked" 11am to 3pm on a long day. The code itself was shite beyond belief.

The site was full of forms with no input validation, origin validation and no SQL injection checks. Sensitive data stored in plain text in cookies. Technical errors displayed on certain pages revealing site structure and even DB table names. Server configured to allow directory listing in file stores so that the public could see/access whatever they liked without any permission or authentication checks. I swear this was written by the child of some staff member. No company would have had the balls to charge for this.

Took me about 8 weeks to make and deploy the changes to client's satisfaction. Could have done it in 2 with some support from the actual people I was suppose to be helping!! But it was their money (well, my money as they were government funded!).

This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.

I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍

TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂

Well, it wasn't fun, but I switched jobs this month. And sadly, it was mostly because my old company started building custom applications for our larger customers. Now, normally that wouldn't be too bad (other than the fact that it distracts us form working on our main product...) but... it was decided that we would use the back end of our user-generated forms module as the data storage layer. Someone outside of my department thought it would be a great idea, and my boss kinda just rolled over without a fight because he always just figures he can "make it work" if he works hard enough...

You shoulda seen the database and SQL code...

Because of that decision, everything took at least 3x as long to write and there was always the looming possibility that the user could change the schema on a whim and break the app.

I think the reasoning behind it was to try and keep the customers tied to the aging flagship product (with a pricy subscription model), but IMO, it was not with it. Our efforts could've had much greater impact somewhere else. Nobody seemed to care what I thought about it though...

I had to start over as a front-end dev, but I'm trying to look on the bright side and seeing it as an opportunity to sharpen my skills in that area. I'm already learning a lot. And although it's a little scary at times, it's also so refreshing to work at a place where I know I'm not the smartest guy in the room.

To the future!

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

Worst one I’ve seen so far is when I was working for my previous community another developer joined to help me, without the permission of me or the other lead developer he pushed a client-side update. We didn’t think it was a big deal, but once we began reviewing the code it became a big deal... he had placed our SQL credentials into that file that every client downloads. All the person had to do was open the file and could connect to our SQL which contained 50k+ players info, primarily all in-game stuff except IPs which we want to protect at all costs.

Issue becomes, what he was trying to do required the games local database on the client-side, but instead he tried connecting to it as an external database so he decided to copy server-side code and used on the client.

Anyways, the database had a firewall that blocked all connections except the server and the other lead dev and myself. We managed to change the credentials and pull the file away before any harm was done to it, about 300 people had downloaded the file within an hours period, but nothing happened luckily. IP to the DB, username, password, etc, were all changed just to keep it protected.

So far this is the worst, hopefully it doesn’t get worse than this :/

Had to implement a search feature for a client so I did and told him to check it out (it was a LIKE SQL statement)

He tested it out by typing in iPhone and Phone (there was an item called iphone in the database) and he was amazed about the fact it worked for some reason.

A real answer from him:
"it's working.. how is it working?
each item is tagged to multiple keywords without the user doing anything"

I said it's just a text search but I guess I should've said I'm using an advanced AI to extract all possible terms related to the item title.

Today in development: discovered that it's possible via combination of keys to rename a database in SQL Server Management Studio without as much as a dialog box to confirm.

Shout out to the 2000ish users in production that discovered this delightful nugget of info with me.

Lessons learned:

A) Don't trust Microsoft to create software that makes you confirm potentially catastrophic actions

B) Make sure your user hasn't been granted ALTER DATABASE permissions without your knowledge before you start using it.

During a design meeting, our boss tells me that Vertx's MySQL drivers don't have prepared statements, and that in the past, he's used a library or his own functions to do all the escaping.

"Are you kidding me? Are you insane?"

I insisted that surely he must be wrong; that no one would release a database library without built in support for query arguments. Escaping things by hand is just asinine and a security risk. You should always use the tools in the database drivers, as new security vulnerabilities in SQL drivers can be found and fixed so long as you keep your dependencies up to date.

He told me escaping wasn't as tricky as I made it out to be, that there were some good libraries for it, and insisted Vertx didn't have any built in support for "prepared statements." He also tried to tell us that prepared statements had performance issues.

He searched specifically for "prepared statements" and I was like, "You know they don't have to be called that. They have different names in different frameworks."

Sure enough, a short search and we discovered a function in the Vertx base database classes to allow SQL queries with parameters.

This is a public service announcement with a threat at the end of it:

"Do not, I repeat, do NOT attempt to write web applications, or any particular sort of application that works with a relational database (damn near more than half of applications) without a PROPER grasp and knowledge of SQL.
I do not want to see you reaching out for an ORM either, no, you need to learn to properly design a database or to properly interact with them AT most before you even attempt using an ORM OR designing an application from the beginning, shit will only hurt you in the long term I promise, learning SQL can go a looooong fucking way and most DBA's I know make way tf more than people think they make, it might even be an interesting career choice"

If you do not follow the above advise, and I see your ass reaching for building a web application without the above knowledge I will be under your bed at night, putting oil in my hairy body before I jump into bed to you and leave you confused for the rest of your life.

Build to learn, YES, but for the love of Chamberlain and Boyce PLEASE do not neglect SQL. I have seen such neglect REACH production and I am currently wishing I had these mfkers close to me.

I promised a friend to have a look over his dads website to add a small blog. No big deal, I've got it on my drive, can reuse it just need to adapt it to the environment.

I take a look at what I'm working with and I see the most terrifying piece of "Please, take my data" code I could possibly imagine (And I've seen passwords, in plain text in a script tag). I quote "function queryDB(mode, val) {
var query=" ";
if(mode==="findProd")
query="Select * from Products where ProdNam=" +val;
... (same shit for different cases)
sendQuery(query) ;
}

He literally built the query on the client side sent it to a php script (without validation) and inserted it into the database.
You could literally call window.sendQuery with any sql query and get the result printed into the console.
And other than the plain text passwords guy that wasn't some kid someone knew, this was a "Webdesign" Agency.
Now I took the entire thing offline, called my friends dad, explained it to him and try to sort this out. I would not charge a good friends father but that hack will get a quite hefty bill since my hourly rate just tripled.

And the worst thing : If I publicly name that asshole or warn the people in his portfolio I can, according to Google, be sued. (But, and I assume thats vague enough not to count as bad mouthing, if anyone of you has a customer from Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany with a preexisting page, please have a look at the database interface)
I will call that agency tomorrow, ask for a detailed explanation for why they apparently let trained monkeys write their code and anonymously warn everyone in their portfolio about those flaws...

I don't know if I'm cursed or if there are just that many bad devs but it seems that once a year I have to stumble over some "mistakes" that make me question my sanity.

Beware: Here lies a cautionary tale about shared hosting, backups, and -goes without saying- WordPress.

1. Got a call from a client saying their site presented an issue with a third-party add-on. The vendor asked us to grant him access to our staging copy.

2. Their staging copy, apparently, never got duplicated correctly because, for security reasons, their in-house dev changed the name of the wp-content folder. That broke their staging algo. So no staging site.

3. In order to recreate the staging site, we had to reset everything back to WP defaults. Including, for some reason, absolute paths inside the database. A huge fucking database. Because WordPress.

4. Made the changes directly in a downloaded sql file. Shared hosting, obviously, had an upload limit smaller to the actual database.

5. Spent half an hour trying to upload table by table to no avail.

6. In-house uploads a new, fixed database with the help of the shared hosting provider.

7. Database has the wrong path. Again.

8. In-house performs massive Find and Replace through phpMyAdmin on the production server.

9. Obviously, MySQL crashes instantly and the site gets blocked for over 3 hours for exceeding shared hosting limits.

10. Hosting provider refuses to accept this was caused by such a stupid act and says site needs to be checked because queries are too slow.

11. We are gouging our eyeballs as we see an in-house vs. hosting fight unfold. So we decide to watch a whole Netflix documentary in between.

12. Finally, the hosting folds and enables access to the site, which is obvi not working because, you know, wrong paths.

13. Documentary finishes. We log in again, click restore from backup. Go to bed. Client phones to bless us. Client’s in-house dev probably looking for a cardboard box to pack his stuff first thing in the morning. \_(ツ)_/¯

# Retrospective as Backend engineer

Once upon a time, I was rejected by a startup who tries to snag me from another company that I was working with.
They are looking for Senior / Supervisor level backend engineer and my profile looks like a fit for them.
So they contacted me, arranged a technical test, system design test, and interview with their lead backend engineer who also happens to be co-founder of the startup.

## The Interview

As usual, they asked me what are my contribution to previous workplace.
I answered them with achievements that I think are the best for each company that I worked with, and how to technologically achieve them.

One of it includes designing and implementing a `CQRS+ES` system in the backend.
With complete capability of what I `brag` as `Time Machine` through replaying event.

## The Rejection

And of course I was rejected by the startup, maybe specifically by the co-founder. As I asked around on the reason of rejection from an insider.

They insisted I am a guy who overengineer thing that are not needed, by doing `CQRS+ES`, and only suitable for RND, non-production stuffs.

Nobody needs that kind of `Time Machine`.

## Ironically

After switching jobs (to another company), becoming fullstack developer, learning about react and redux.
I can reflect back on this past experience and say this:

The same company that says `CQRS+ES` is an over engineering, also uses `React+Redux`.
Never did they realize the concept behind `React+Redux` is very similar to `CQRS+ES`.

- Separation of concern
- CQRS: `Command` is separated from `Query`
- Redux: Side effect / `Action` in `Thunk` separated from the presentation
- Managing State of Application
- ES: Through sequence of `Event` produced by `Command`
- Redux: Through action data produced / dispatched by `Action`
- Replayability
- ES: Through replaying `Event` into the `Applier`
- Redux: Through replay `Action` which trigger dispatch to `Reducer`

---

The same company that says `CQRS` is an over engineering also uses `ElasticSearch+MySQL`.
Never did they realize they are separating `WRITE` database into `MySQL` as their `Single Source Of Truth`, and `READ` database into `ElasticSearch` is also inline with `CQRS` principle.

## Value as Backend Engineer

It's a sad days as Backend Engineer these days. At least in the country I live in.
Seems like being a backend engineer is often under-appreciated.
Company (or people) seems to think of backend engineer is the guy who ONLY makes `CRUD` API endpoint to database.

- I've heard from Fullstack engineer who comes from React background complains about Backend engineers have it easy by only doing CRUD without having to worry about application.
- The same guy fails when given task in Backend to make a simple round-robin ticketing system.
- I've seen company who only hires Fullstack engineer with strong Frontend experience, fails to have basic understanding of how SQL Transaction and Connection Pool works.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer relies on ORM to do super complex query instead of writing proper SQL, and prefer to translate SQL into ORM query language.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer with strong React background brags about Uncle Bob clean code but fail to know on how to do basic dependency injection.
- I've heard company who made webapp criticize my way of handling `session` through http secure cookie. Saying it's a bad practice and better to use local storage. Despite my argument of `secure` in the cookie and ability to control cookie via backend.

I run update without where on mysql console on production database Today.

CLASSIC

Just because I needed to fix database after bug fix on the backend of the application.
I thought I wrote good sql statement after executing it on my local machine and then everything got bad.

Luckily it was only one column with some cached statistics data and I checked that it was not important data before I actually started fixing stuff but still ...
Almost got hard attack afterwards.
Made a script to fix this column and it took me only 15 minutes but still...

Bug was caused in part I got no unit tests and application grow after 3 years of development from simple one for one customer and volumes of documents around 50k to over 40 customers and volumes over 2mil per month, don’t know how many pages each, just in one year after we completed all needed features.

I have daily backups and logs of every api operation but still.
I think this got to far for one backend developer.

I got scared that I will loose money cause I am contractor and the only backend developer working on it.
I am so tired of this right now I think I need a break from work.

Responsibility is killing me so hard right now.
It will take a week to get back to normal.

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

It was the last year of high school.

We had to submit our final CS homework, so it gets reviewed by someone from the ministry of education and grade it. (think of it as GPA or whatever that is in your country).

Now being me, I really didn’t do much during the whole year, All I did was learning more about C#, more about SQL, and learn from the OGs like thenewboston, derek banas, and of course kudvenkat. (Plus more)

The homework was a C# webform website of whatever theme you like (mostly a web store) that uses MS Access as DB and a C# web service in SOAP. (Don’t ask.)

Part 1/2:

Months have passed, and only had 2 days left to deadline, with nothing on my hand but website sketches, sample projects for ideas, and table schematics.

I went ahead and started to work on it, for 48 hours STRAIGHT.

No breaks, barely ate, family visited and I barely noticed, I was just disconnected from reality.

48 hours passed and finished the project, I was quite satisfied with my it, I followed the right standards from encrypting passwords to verifying emails to implementing SQL queries without the risk of SQL injection, while everyone else followed foot as the teacher taught with plain text passwords and… do I need to continue? You know what I mean here.

Anyway, I went ahead and was like, Ok, lets do one last test run, And proceeded into deleting an Item from my webstore (it was something similar to shopify).

I refreshed. Nothing. Blank page. Just nothing. Nothing is working, at all.

Went ahead to debug almost everywhere, nothing, I’ve gone mad, like REALLY mad and almost lose it, then an hour later of failed debugging attempts I decided to rewrite the whole project from scratch from rebuilding the db, to rewriting the client/backend code and ui, and whatever works just go with it.

Then I noticed a loop block that was going infinite.

NEVER WAIT FOR A DATABASE TO HAVE MINIMUM NUMBER OF ROWS, ALWAYS ASSUME THAT IT HAS NO VALUES. (and if your CPU is 100%, its an infinite loop, a hard lesson learned)

The issue was that I requested 4 or more items from a table, and if it was less it would just loop.

So I went ahead, fixed that and went to sleep.

Part 2/2:

The day has come, the guy from the ministry came in and started reviewing each one of the students homeworks, and of course, some of the projects crashed last minute and straight up stopped working, it's like watching people burning alive.

My turn was up, he came and sat next to me and was like:

Him: Alright make me an account with an email of asd@123.com with a password 123456

Me: … that won't work, got a real email?

Him: What do you mean?

Me: I implemented an email verification system.

Him: … ok … just show me the website.

Me: Alright as you can see here first of all I used mailgun service on a .tk domain in order to send verification emails you know like every single website does, encrypted passwords etc… As you can see this website allows you to sign up as a customer or as a merc…

Him: Good job.

He stood up and moved on.

YOU MOTHERFUCKER.

I WENT THROUGH HELL IN THE PAST 48 HOURS.

AND YOU JUST SAT THERE FOR A MINUTE AND GAVE UP ON REVIEWING MY ENTIRE MASTERPIECE? GO SWIM IN A POOL FULL OF BURNING OIL YOU COUNTLESS PIECE OF SHIT

I got 100/100 in the end, and I kinda feel like shit for going thought all that trouble for just one minute of project review, but hey at least it helped me practice common standards.

I really hate PHP frameworks.

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

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

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

> Unknown column type "tinyint" requested.

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

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

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

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

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

> Type tinyint already exists.

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

> Type to be overwritten tinyint does not exist.

Are you fucking kidding me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I start to wonder if I should just use columnDefinition.

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

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

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

Once I maintained one of the most used and fucked up codebases on the market with almost 1M+ daily users. (cannot say more, sorry).

It's written in PHP and is absolutely terrifying,
the first time I saw some lines of code I was about to scream and cry.

- spaghetti code
- no indentation
- random SQL query unoptimized
- unused vars
- Code is split among several files with no logical reasoning
- Mixed procedural and oop programming
- Unsanitised user input (yes, you got it right)

No test environment, no backup database, every commit goes straight to production.

It's a real disaster but the company prefers to keep it as it is without refactoring or anything else.

Just to make it clear:
It's not hatred against PHP, it's against the code's current status and the older programmers which used to work on it.

Me : So cool ! My new graphQL APIs are working so good !
Also me : ‘order by <text field> take 50 skip 10000’
Me : Hmmmm.. 2.3 SEDCONDS ?! WTF. Let’s add an index !
SQL : Sorry bro, can’t add index on nvrachar(max).
Me: OK. Here you go, you are nvrachar(128) now. Add my index !
SQL : Ok
GraphQl :<same query > Here : 90 milliseconds
Me : ‘order by <text field> desc take 50 skip 10000’
GraphQL : Sorry bro : 3 seconds. (Yes, slower than without any index)
Me : Do I fu7cking need to manually add ASC and DESC indexes ? WTF IS GOING ON !
I should’ve learnt a bit more about databases. ☹. And now I don’t have time to refactor a prod database as “needed” .
/me needs to buy DB audit. Company is still a bit small to have a DBA full time.

Me, working hard on a SQL project with a deadline that is half what it should be with no support from the other people on the project and was mostly made with with data I imagined would be in there cos no one could get me any fucking shit done (i.e. effectively designed, built, tested, fixed, upgraded, documented on my own for an entire weekly/monthly/ad-hoc analysis process that would output various reports for internal/external/management)

Manager - man who is a known waste of space but for some reason is in charge of the smallest part of the project, shouldn't have been fucking involved fucking management guzzling stain magnet...

Manager: Hey, do I need to refresh the database?

Me: .................

Me: .................

Me: ............I dunno, do you think we should refresh the database that this entire project is reliant? I mean...why do we need up to date transactions to analyse? Wait....you telling me it's not been being refreshed this ENTIRE time?

Manager: No....you never said I should. So should I?

Me: ..................I never said you should!?!? Are you not in the meetings talking about dependencies?????? Do you think i should have up to date trans or just run this with old stuff????? Why would you not update it!??!!?!?!? Its transactions...... (Desperately trying not to punch through my screen, through his, into his throat)

Manager: ..............

Me: .................

Manager: I think i'll refresh it and add it to the job?

Me: ....................(goes back to work cursing with music in so I think its quiet but who knows).

Tard, don't know how he even gets to work without someone holding his fucking hand.

Happy ending, I don't work there anymore :p

Sad ending, his spirit of tard follows me to my new jobs and possesses someone (or three sometimes)

I always thought wordpress was ok, not great not terrible, from a coding perspective. Now every new framework I have worked on makes me see why Wordpress is on 40% of the internet.

Now I love wordpress not because of what it did do, but because of all the really stupid things it managed to avoid doing including: over abstraction, trend chasing, using "new transformative technology" that disappears in 2 years, breaking plugin economy with updates and making devs start over, making everything OOP for the sake of making everything OOP, making adding on a bit of code take multiple files of multiple formats and boiler plate code, boiler plate code, compiling dependencies, composer, twig, laravel, one page applications, react, angular, vue, javascript only stacks (MEAN), not letting you control sql queries, protected/private scopes and design that doesn't let you fix or alter bad code others did, and the list goes on and on.

Wordpress did a lot right, and devs should try learning from it instead of making more problems to solve. Sure it's not elegant, but you known what it does do? Focus on a solving a problem. Then it does. Without inventing new ideas or concepts to inject into the code and create new problems.

And you know what else? Hooks are actually very well implemented in Wordpress. I've seen it done much worse.

Honestly my main gripe with the entire platform is a slow moving to OOP for no reason and the database design should separate post type into different tables, the current design makes it less scalable for large data sets for multiple reasons so I'd fix that.

Without a doubt it has to be the internal company search engine/file finding tool @thewamz and I wrote.

The company has a wide UNC network with files scattered all over the place and they need a way to keep track of where the files get moved to (they can and do get moved). The original tool was written in Java/Tomcat and didn't use any frameworks or utilities beyond custom written ones, no orms, and the SQL was just raw strings. The program didn't take into account that files might be moved or deleted so it never removed anything from the database, it just kept adding files and never removing them.

It however never stores files itself, just links to files elsewhere on the UNC network.

It took six months to get it into what might be a stable beta or release candidate state. The user interface is good, very simple and intuitive, the whole thing was rewritten in python/django, there were issues with utf 8 (and mysql not fully supporting utf 8 in its own utf 8 mode), we added a regex search mode (which was sorely lacking), the search used to take up to fifteen minutes however we sped it up to less than a minute (worst case when a user simply puts "^$" as the regex search). It has a multi threaded design which does some checks to ensure it doesn't spawn too many threads and get stuck in constant Gil switching. Still some bugs to fix, like moving the processing of results returned by the server in a web worker so that the content widget doesn't lock up processing millions of search results and moving the back end to use asynchronous python might gain a performance boost. But on the whole I think the system is ready to replace the older system that all the users are frustrated with and constantly complain about.

However the annoying bit is... How to actually get the new system online, while I am responsible for the development of tools and their maintenance, I am not responsible for their initial deployment and that means I have no idea when (or even if) my new tool will even ever be released :/

Im fucking fed up with overbloated "all in one" ORMs.

For shit I cant find simple ORM that would literally just do fucking CRUD for me.

Thats all I require for some small project, yet still for few tables I have 2 choices:
a) do it without ORM and write models with raw SQL (which I usually end up doing, as its just more fault tolerant and works better)
b) install overloaded ORM that I wont use even 1% of features

Guys, why the fuck nobody created anything small, tiny and yet usefull? I know my SQL sucks and that is reason I want to use ORM in the first place. But when Im just forced?

Best what I found in terms of ease of use, and beeing not too heavy was RedBeanPHP.

A freaking ORM that will create database on the fly. It's awesome, sure. It's usefull, sure.

BUT STILL ALL I NEED IN SMALL PROJECT IS 1% OF THAT FUNCTIONALITY.

Does literally every single ORM dev want to feel their dick when they list out features list?

There should be allways proper tool for proper job. Its like using symfony for creating onepage website with contact form. WTF.

This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.

Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?

1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"

- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...

- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.

2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.

- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.

- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.

3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.

4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"

Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.

Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.

My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.

TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.

So.. I'm migrating a physical server to a virtual (Hyper-V) one.

The physical server is running Windows Server 2008 R2 with IIS6 and Windows SQL Server 2012.

I've set up a VM with Windows Server 2016, IIS10 and Windows SQL Server 2017.

I'm testing with just moving 1 db at a time (we have about 20, 1 per client running this software and a few others) and I've already imported all of the IIS sites.

So the database import and IIS import went smoothly and was surprisingly without hassle but now I'm trying to run the website that I imported the database for and it is throwing 503 Errors at me.
I've been trying to find out the cause but for some reason IIS isn't making any logs.
It's not any 64/32bit system problems (they're both x64) and I can't seem to find anything wrong with the imported config.

Anyone got any ideas?

Was hired on after my schooling was done as a web dev building a front end site. Finished, made it pretty, and was kept on to help the business build their backend inventory using a CSV file into an online catalogue.

Problem is...don't remember jack shit about PHP/SQL/anything past writing basic JS functions and pretty bullshit.

Running an apache server? No problem. Creating database schema's? Sure. Past that? I have no idea wtf I am doing, have until August to figure it out, am having major imposter syndrome, and can't walk out of this place without getting the project done. Feels very hopeless right now, though I am trying my best to learn.

FOR FUCKS SAKE. I HAVE THE RIGHT URL FOR THE SQL DATABASE. WHY WON'T IT SHOW SAID DATABASE IN THE SERVLET FROM THE URL!!!! It conects to IntelliJ without any issue, so why isn't the servlet running it?

God am I really going to go to stackoverflow for help? I need sleep.

I just realized what a horrible fate I escaped several years ago.

I was just finishing bachelor s degree, when I was offered to write my diploma under teacher, who works in Bitrix.

I was given first tasks how to make web site on my own l, I liked it pretty much in the beginning, I installed sql database, made simple registration, login. And then I was offered to try CMS bitrix (which is essentially proprietary local version of Wordpress). With words, that I will see how much easier to work in this way.

I found myself not trusting it, something was fishy. I could not understand why, am I as beginning dev in it, could not use it for free? Why could I not making deving in it, without paying big sum per month(it was big for student-me at least).

I went to work with computer graphics during diploma then, and made minecraft analog in c# (at that time I played minecraft too much)

Now I am working with modern open source world wide supported frameworks. And recently saw a web site made by bitrix devs... They went into production without... https. And I think they are the same ones.

had a uni exam in databases (just closely didn't make it😒)
it didn't even have sql in it!?

questions about ER diagrams and draw a diagram, functional dependencies with given dependencies, find candidate key and what not, work on a b-tree (miserably failed😣), datalog (who the fuck cares about datalog? the least expected topic) and transaction management/serializability

whose idea was it to not include sql?? isn't it one the fundamental parts of relational databases?