Very long story ahead!

Yesterday in the evening a friend of mine (calling him F from now on) became the target of something new to me...
Apparently one can fake his phone number through some fishy ways and call people with that number. Someone (we think we might know who it was, the why is at the end) did this yesterday to F.
Here's the whole story:
We were just talking together on a TeamSpeak Server (a program to talk to others on the internet) when suddenly another friend said: "F, why did you just call me three times in a row?" That was the first thing that was a bit suspicious. After that, F got calls from random numbers (even Afghanistan, we are German), and they said something like "Have fun with the police coming to your house". Then there was silence. 10 minutes later his phone rang and there were a ton of pizza delivery services in his town that apparently got pizza orders from him. Then there was silence, again. Suddenly someone with a hidden number called him, a woman's voice said they were the police and if F doesn't stop calling the police there will be consequences. F then told her what was going on but I think she didn't really care. She then wanted to know where F lives, but I told him not to say that, because if it is the police they can find it out by themself and if it's not, they don't need to know that.
Now, a short break: There is some fake information going around about where F lives. I can't remember when we found out but the attacker thought he would actually live there. No idea what happened at that location...
Now back to the story:
Time went by, nothing really happened. Suddenly F shouted: "There are blue lights outside! The police is here!" He muted his microphone and (the following is what he told us what happened) went down to the door (remember, he is 16) and there were two police men. They were asking about why he called the police. F explained what we knew until then, about number spoofing and stuff... They sent a more technical person to him, he understood what F was trying to explain. The police men drove away and he came back to tell us what happened. (Now we get back to what I heared myself.) The mom came in, screamed something that I couldn't understand, and F went offline. We searched who the attacker could have been. And we are pretty sure we found him. That guy connected to our Minecraft server (that's where I know F from) with his real IP, and his main account, which made it easy to search. He also got a static IP which means it doesn't change. We also got some information that in the recent days this guy was talking about VoIP spoofing and such stuff. Another friend of mine, a bit older, found some proofs and I think he will go to the police.

That's it. Thanks for reading.

I got a urgent call from a lead dev in another department. Needed data and services and her deadline was yesterday. I never heard of it, but worked late and got it done in 2 days. Delivery success, they had cake, speeches and praised my work apparently... I wasn't invited and didn't get any cake.

So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.

So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.

Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….

My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.

After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …

So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???

Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...

Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.

First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself

Another unrealistic deadline from our non-software developer PM.
He agreed to client upon delivery of a complete system consisting of 4 micro-services in Node and 4 front-end Angular application integrated with each micro-service accordingly.

Project Delivery date is December 31. I have told him It is impossible to deliver complete solution on December 31.
Now he wants me & my team to come to office even on weekends.
What an idiot !

Just a random thought.. instead of sending stickers (or the stress ball for that matter) from USA to someone in India, why can't there be distributed 3D printing services spread across the globe, so that it's just a matter of delegating the delivery to local deliver services in the country/city? Sounds like an idea? 🤔

Ordered some fucking computer glasses (which filter out the blue light). Been having red eyes and excessive fatigue these last months, plus sneaky headaches.

We're in 2018, and fucking delivery companies still think that people are at home waiting for their parcel. They came yesterday, fucking saw I wasn't there, they left a fucking delivery notice when my parcel does not require a signature!! I mean, what's the use of a P.O box if it's only there to host spiders in summer?

Plus on that stupid delivery note they've put a QR code - "please use the given code or scan this QR code to change your delivery options" - which is unreadable, AND they didn't give me the fucking code.

Be flexible for fuck's sake, and evolve with your time. I hate Slowtzerland for that - conservative, late, immuable. Especially in "social" services. 99% of the population is away from home from 6 to 18, time to fucking print that in your brain and get on with it.

Now I might wait until Saturday so I can get them glasses...

Following my first rant, my boss had the brilliant idea of running the old and the new architecture in parallel. I had advised that it won’t be ideal since the same Scala code was ingesting into 2 different Kinesis streams and one was running an old KCL written in Java where as other was consumed by a Firehose delivery stream(eventually we will be ingesting it into Firehose directly). I had told few manual + automated tests on Code as well as from a functionality of the new architecture and a set of tests for checking the integration of the new Producer code with Consumer.

The statement I got from my boss was “This is the test, we test it on production in parallel”. My boss had a brilliant idea to fucking test the new code on the production directly but running them in parallel without accounting for undefined behaviour it might cause in the current production system. I mean my boss should get a Nobel peace prize for shattering our mental peace.

Anywho, we started the deployment today at 5AM in the morning. I had all the aws services deployed. Was just waiting to deploy the new Collector code which we did at 5AM. Immediately after 5 minutes the system went bonkers, there was fire, blood, demons and I was smoking a cigarette with the biggest “I told you so smile” on my face. I’ve just written an email to my boss and have told him calmly that “Listen motherfucker, 90 percent of the software companies aren’t idiots to focus on testing and quality. We need to start spending time on testing and quality else we’ll again be in the same soup after few weeks again”.waiting for his reply

Facebook owner Meta Platforms, 2,564 job cuts in Menlo Park, San Francisco, Fremont, Sunnyvale and Burlingame
Google, 1,608 layoffs in Mountain View, Moffett Field, San Bruno and Palo Alto
Salesforce, 1,151 staff cutbacks in San Francisco
Twitter, 900 layoffs in San Francisco and San Jose
Cisco Systems, 673 job cuts in San Jose, Milpitas and San Francisco
Grocery Delivery E-Services (HelloFresh), 611 layoffs in Richmond
Amazon, 524 staffing cuts in Sunnyvale and San Francisco
Intel, 490 job cuts in Santa Clara and San Jose
Rivian Automotive, 448 layoffs in Palo Alto
Lam Research, 400 staffing cuts in Fremont and Livermore

!dev

I hate every private package delivery service!
I ordered two things from the same shop. The first delivery came on Monday and because I wasn't home I got a notice which said I have to get the package from the pickup shop right around the corner. So far, so good.
Second delivery should come on Wednesday. I wasn't home again, so I got a notice to get the delivery from the pick up store....30 MINUTES AWAY!
Because the delivery should be quite heavy, I organized a friend with a car to help me.
At the pickup store I I got the package and it wasn't as heavy as I expected.
At home I opened the package and noticed that stuff is missing. In my order email a discovered, that there should be two package.
Slightly pissed off I drove back to the pickup store to get the other package, but it wasn't there.
Because the the delivery guy brought it to another pickup store...30 MINUTES AWAY IN THE OPOSITE DIRECTION OF MY HOME! WITHOUT A NOTICE!
And of course the shop was closed at this time :[
This wasn't the first time stuff like this happened with private delivery services. I cannot understand why people are ranting about the state postal service and prefer those private companys.

!dev
Please enjoy this customer review I intercepted. Guess the company type and name that requested the feedback.

"______ drivers liberally show how bad it is to work for these companies.
Three quarters of all packages arrive damaged.
They park wherever they want.
No regard for traffic, people, property nor parcels.
Redefining rock bottom.
Not this delivery. Always. Everywhere. For a strong decade now."

The move by Amazon to increase prices of Prime seems to me to be a negative move.

Now I’m not saying the increase hurts me financially or anything but it forces people to make a decision where there wasn’t one before.

With a few seconds of though it is easy to see that what we are paying for is their Amazon Prime Video, because there is no change or update to the Prime delivery services.

So now you have to think...

“Is Prime Video worry this increase?”

I don’t know about you, but personally I see Prime Video as a “me-too” product that adds little or no value.

I’ll keep Prime because I order a lot of shit, but others without this frequency of purchase may decide to leave.

Seems like forcing people to make this decision may not be a good move for Amazon.

I like ups. They are one of the biggest airlines in the world, deliver incredibly fast over incredible distances, but

Fuck their website!
At least they've updated the design but the functionality is just garbage. I wanted to track a package that is on its way to me. And I wanted the delivery person to know that he could put the package in the garage if nobody is home. I had to register for two different services (God knows what's the difference) and even then ups somehow knew an old address (I believe I managed to get stuck there In the past) which I couldn't remove. I found the option to tell the delivery person to put the package in the garage in some random menu but I don't know if it is for the right address or package.
Why is it so fucked up? Everybody else (DHL for example) has a decent site on which all the stuff is easily manageable.

Have a question about email service providers. Specifically inbox delivery and warmup. Over the years I gathered a ~200k email database of players from my projects. I cleared them by using debounce.io and now I have 100k clean emails. That means I can send a mass newsletter and bounce rate should be good. Now my main question is what email services provider should I use? For email client I thought of setting up sendy.co, for hosting it use sendybay.com and for smtp use pepipost.com But the problem with sendy is that it sends emails without any delay. Like 2-3 emails a second. Is there a difference in terms of inbox delivery and domain reputation wether I send all emails in bulk with sendy or should I try to keep low profile and send lets say 1k a day? I have friends who use amazon ses and they are able to send even 100k a day, given that emails database is cleared(valid working emails) and bounce rate is low.