Got hacked in a day after deploying my first site. 😑 I just started developing. Well, I am thankful for that person to point it out to me otherwise I wouldn't have known.

Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

Marriage is basically deploying your relationship to production.

The CEO asks God:
"God, how much time do you need to create the earth?"
God: "uh, 10 billion years I think"
CEO: " You have only 7 days. Well 6, the last one is to fix everything gone wrong after deploying"

And here we are

*You can't make this shit up*

Recruiter: Hi, I saw your profile on LinkedIn and I think I have a great programmer opportunity for you today! Can you tell me a little bit about your experience?

Me: Sure, I mostly work with JavaScript and C# and have several years of experience in designing, developing, and deploying enterprise-level applications in production environments.

Recruiter: Hmm, um OK. Have you ever created programs using InDesign or Microsoft Word?

Me: Excuse me?

Recruiter: You know, anything like pamphlets or event brochures?

Me: Are you talking about physical paper programs such as those that accompany events/conferences?!

Recruiter: Yes! What else would I be taking about?

Me: I'm in the software development industry, so I thought you were talking about programming in that context.

Recruiter: Oh no! Those positions are for the men, sweety. I mean, I wouldn't expect any women to know that other techy stuff...

*Hangs up*

"Don't deploy on Friday" is a public admittance that your company either has no CI/CD pipeline, or that all your devs are retarded rhesus monkeys who only wipe their ass if the product manager wrote it as a spec.

If the saying was: "Don't port your whole API to GraphQL on a Friday", or "Don't switch from MySQL to Postgres on a Friday", I would agree.

But you should be able to do simple deploys all the time.

I deployed on Christmas & New Year's eve. I've deployed code while high on LSD, drunk-peeing 2 liters of beer against a tree after a party. I've deployed code from the hospital while my foot was being stitched up. On average, we deploy our main codebase about 194 times a week.

If you can't trust your deploys, maybe instead of posting stupid memes about not deploying on Fridays, you should fix your testing & QA procedures.

And here comes the last part of my story so far.
After deploying the domain, configuring PCs, configuring the server, configuring the switch, installing software, checking that the correct settings have been applied, configuring MS Outlook (don't ask) and giving each and every user a d e t a i l e d tutorial on using the PC like a modern human and not as a Homo Erectus, I had to lock my door, put down my phone and disconnect the ship's announcement system's speaker in my room. The reasons?
- No one could use USB storage media, or any storage media. As per security policy I emailed and told them about.
- No one could use the ship's computers to connect to the internet. Again, as per policy.
- No one had any games on their Windows 10 Pro machines. As per policy.
- Everyone had to use a 10-character password, valid for 3 months, with certain restrictions. As per policy.
For reasons mentioned above, I had to (almost) blackmail the CO to draft an order enforcing those policies in writing (I know it's standard procedure for you, but for the military where I am it was a truly alien experience). Also, because I never trusted the users to actually backup their data locally, I had UrBackup clone their entire home folder, and a scheduled task execute a script storing them to the old online drive. Soon it became apparent why: (for every sysadmin this is routine, but this was my first experience)
- People kept deleting their files, whining to me to restore them
- People kept getting locked out because they kept entering their password WRONG for FIVE times IN a ROW because THEY had FORGOTTEN the CAPS lock KEY on. Had to enter three or four times during weekend for that.
- People kept whining about the no-USB policy, despite offering e-mail and shared folders.
The final straw was the updates. The CO insisted that I set the updates to manual because some PCs must not restart on their own. The problem is, some users barely ever checked. One particular user, when I asked him to check and do the updates, claimed he did that yesterday. Meanwhile, on the WSUS console: PC inactive for over 90 days.
I blocked the ship's phone when I got reassigned.
Phiew, finally I got all those off my chest! Thanks, guys. All of the rants so far remind me of one quote from Dave Barry:

!rant

I built a decently large project at work, and everything works perfectly. It's beautiful, it's fast, it's light, it's organized and clean, and deploying is a breeze. I'm very proud of it.

The biggest reason, though, is that it uses exclusively technology I had never touched before:
• React
• Redux
• ES6/Babel
• Webpack
• Express.js
• Material Design
• Apple lappy (I'm a linux girl)

I was completely new to all of these, including my dev machine. Every single aspect of the project was outside my skillet.

But it went from my first experimental `import React from 'react'` to production-ready in three weeks. I'm really proud 😊

Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.

In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.

Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.

I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.

"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop

"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"

(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)

Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.

During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.

And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.

NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.

Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT

SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE

Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK

"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS

being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.

So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?

You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)

This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS

* gays away into the night

A couple of weeks back, I met some of the kids from my old school. They had joined together to form a small team and were designing and deploying websites for local businesses.

Turns out that they were mailing each other and using Dropbox to manage the source code. This had been going on nearly for an year.

I spent a couple of hours showing them how to use git and gitlab. Basics on committing, pushing, pulling, branching and merging.

I will never forget the look on their faces! They had seen God and its name is Git.

Languages without a fully implemented type system.

Granted, it has been a fad for a quarter century, but everything points at one simple fact: Types matter in programming.

In dynamic languages, you tend to see that testing suites explode into thousands of tests, many of which wouldn't even be necessary if you had some type safety.

You see that languages like JS are forked into more typesafe dialects, like Typescript. Python got typehints since 3.6, and PHP added typehints for methods, then typehints for properties, and will soon even have compound types.

Maybe most languages will never reach the level of Haskell or Scala, and that's totally fine, but I think the direction languages are moving in is pretty much set in stone: No ambiguity, more safety. Code should fail before deploying, not after.

Hey, Root? How do you test your slow query ticket, again? I didn't bother reading the giant green "Testing notes:" box on the ticket. Yeah, could you explain it while I don't bother to listen and talk over you? Thanks.

And later:
Hey Root. I'm the DBA. Could you explain exactly what you're doing in this ticket, because i can't understand it. What are these new columns? Where is the new query? What are you doing? And why? Oh, the ticket? Yeah, I didn't bother to read it. There was too much text filled with things like implementation details, query optimization findings, overall benchmarking results, the purpose of the new columns, and i just couldn't care enough to read any of that. Yeah, I also don't know how to find the query it's running now. Yep, have complete access to the console and DB and query log. Still can't figure it out.

And later:

Hey Root. We pulled your urgent fix ticket from the release. You know, the one that SysOps and Data and even execs have been demanding? The one you finished three months ago? Yep, the problem is still taking down production every week or so, but we just can't verify that your fix is good enough. Even though the changes are pretty minimal, you've said it's 8x faster, and provided benchmark findings, we just ... don't know how to get the query it's running out of the code. or how check the query logs to find it. So. we just don't know if it's good enough.

Also, we goofed up when deploying and the testing database is gone, so now we can't test it since there are no records. Nevermind that you provided snippets to remedy exactly scenario in the ticket description you wrote three months ago.

And later:

Hey Root: Why did you take so long on this ticket? It has sat for so long now that someone else filed a ticket for it, with investigation findings. You know it's bringing down production, and it's kind of urgent. Maybe you should have prioritized it more, or written up better notes. You really need to communicate better. This is why we can't trust you to get things out.

*twitchy smile*

At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

"Avoid deploying on Fridays".
Today is Friday.
Today I had to deploy.
Today I won't go home :(

Senior Management: We are severely disappointed in the timeliness of the two apps you built this year. You had budgeted 3 months for one and it took 4 months and the other was budgeted to take 4 months and took 5 months. We understand that we doubled the requirements halfway through and but that doesn’t take away from our need for you to deliver on time. We provided you with two extra devs on the project! We know they were novices and you had to train them from the ground up during the project, that doesn’t matter. The extra resources should have helped you but your lack of leadership ability is what caused them to hold you back. We know our other team with a budget of 6 months took 2 years on their project and was still unsuccessful but that is a different scenario! That was a pre-built 3rd party ERP plugin, way more complicated and nuanced than simply building and deploying something from scratch. Yes we’re aware your projects were the only successful tech projects at the company this year, that’s just luck and coincidence. The next app we need you to build in 6 months, no questions asked. It needs to consolidate and tie together our 3 different ERPs. Everything that we need out of these products that they don’t do out of the box we need you to wire up. We will decide the exact requirements in a month or so, for now just get started. Yes your apps changed the way we do business and allowed us to complete projects smoother than ever before while saving millions of dollars in wasteful and archaic processes that is OLD NEWS. Stop bringing it up. The successes of yesterday are the status quo of today. Don’t expect any new resources either, you clearly can’t handle them. You will now be giving status updates to 3 different managers as a corrective action to your missed deadlines in order to ensure the timeliness of future deliverables.

Dev: …

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

Elon Musk makes a front end website containing a single alphabet in html and everyone loses their mind. Meanwhile me deploying with heroku to host the awesome fb-like rails app I made and no one gives a fuck to open it

Me: Boss, your new project is ready, we've tested the technical aspect but we're waiting on your approval before deploying, will you test it?
Boss: yeah sure, I'll test it in 5

*2 weeks later*

Boss: why isn't that project deployed yet?
Me: you haven't tested it, and we haven't gotten approval
Boss: oh right, I'll go test it right now!

*2 weeks later*

Boss: I NEED that project to go live RIGHT THIS MOMENT!!!
Me: sure, have you tested it yet?
Boss: nope, but I need it
Me: well, I'll put it live, but me and my colleagues are shifting responsibility to you, since you haven't tested it. Are you sure?
Boss: yeah, yeah whatever...

*put product online*

*2 days later*

Angry call from boss, bugs have been found, tell him that he approved the state of the product and that the bugs will go on the to-do list...

Boss is extremely pissed, but recognized his mistake...

Now, the boss actually tests everything thoroughly at the moment we tell him to! No more bugs, complaints, and I got a raise!

How deploying servers could be like 😂

It's Friday and guess what?

We are fucking deploying on prod!

I realize I've ranted about this before, but...

Fuck APIs.

First the fact that external services can throw back 500 errors or timeouts when their maintainer did a drunk deploy (but you properly handled that using caching, workers, retry handlers, etc, right? RIGHT?)...

Then the fact that they all speak a variety of languages and dialects (Oh fuck why does that endpoint return a JSON object with int keys instead of a simple array... wait the params are separated with pipe characters? And the other endpoint uses SOAP? Fuck I need to write another wrapper class around the client...)

But the worst thing: It makes developers live in this happy imaginary universe where "malicious" is not a word.

"I found this cloud service which checks our code style" — hmm ok, they seem trustworthy. Hope they don't sell our code, but whatever.

"And look at this thing, it automatically makes database backups, just have to connect to it to DigitalOcean" — uhhh wait...

"And I just built this API client which sends these forms to be OCR processed" — Fuck... stop it... there are bank accounts numbers on those forms... Where's that API even located? What company?

* read their privacy policy *

"We can not guarantee the safety of your personal data, use at your own risk [...] we are located in Russia".

I fucking hate these millennial devs who literally fail to get their head out of the cloud.

Somehow they think it's easier to write all these NodeJS handlers and layers around some API, which probably just calls ImageMagick + Tesseract on the other side.

If I wasn't so fucking exhausted, I'd chop of their heads... but they're like hydra, you seal one privacy breach and another is waiting to be merged, these kids just keep spewing their crap into easy packages, they keep deploying shitty heroku apps... ugh.

😖

Modern software has gotten so bad that it even gets sluggish at times on late 2018 flagship devices. Slow, cheap hardware like is usually developers' and fanboys' excuse, particularly when it comes to Windows stuff? Like hell it is.

Software "engineering" has become so.. terribly inefficient. I'd dare any developer worth their salt to rewrite their program to make it work on an early 2000's machine. After all, those can run pretty advanced GUI's, have a reasonable amount of hardware (just think about how large a gigabyte of RAM really is) yet should be able to make for a reasonable limitation set.

Hardware limitations are the mother of optimization. Not every person on the planet has a 32-core Xeon workstation with 64GB of DDR4 RAM and a GTX Titan in it. Whether your application performs reasonably well on your machine shouldn't be the metric. Try deploying it on that laptop you tucked into a shelf years ago and reevaluate.. please.

And definitely you Slack!! Slacking off, is that what inspired the name of that pile of junk?! 😡

Stop fucking deploying to production and testing there !

Team lead my ass 😠

Work your ass off for a month, packaging new software and deploying them. No one says anything.

One of our guys uploads a new autoupdating food menu provided by another company to our intranet. Takes a few minutes.
”OMG! You should be rewarded!”
”Employee of the month!”
”IT award of the month!
”Have my babies!”

:|

It’s Friday the 13th! Anybody deploying new code today?

So I worked on getting a server ready for about 30 hours last week to be ready for a deploy on Monday Night (last night). Not only did I work on it for 30 hours, we had two other architects and a senior engineer working on it too. We got everything done Friday and it was ready to go with a simple cutover on Monday night.

The only thing left to do was deploy a link change Monday night on the existing landing page. My part was the backend servers and application that had the complicated SSO system and the other part was just a link to get to the SSO. I asked the person responsible for deploying the landing page's link if he was ready about a dozen times. He kept saying he was deploying X (the code name for the project deploy) and that is all he was doing.

Now jump to that night. They have decided that a single landing page wasn't enough and they were going to deploy a full CMS. Well no one knew what the hell was going on and they didn't realize that the landing page was hosted externally on another host. After arguing for two hours they delayed the deployment for multiple days. 24 hours later they are still trying to figure out the CMS on a host.

30 hours and four senior engineer's time wasted to get everything done for the deadline all to be canceled because of on jackass's lack of planning. WTF

i hate everything about programming except programming.

i hate version control, i hate agile, i hate package managements, i hte deploying, i hate clients. I hate that i cant get shit done.

Bought six mini NAT vps's for quite cheap for one year and now deploying them all into VPN servers.

This is very fun 😊

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

Don't mind me, just deploying to the Google Cloud!

5 years ago, in my first week of starting this particular job, the CTO casually mentioned they'd been struggling with a bug for years. Basically, in the last few days of the year, it seemed that records were jumping a year ahead, with no rhyme nor reason why. Happened every year, and wasn't linked with them deploying new code. (Their code was a mess with no sane way to unit test it, but that was a separate issue.)

I happened to know immediately what might be causing it - so I ran a case-sensitive search in the codebase for "YYYY", pointed out the issue, explained it, then committed a fix all in about 2 minutes.

I was told I'd officially passed my probation.

(Search for "week year vs year" if you're curious & the above doesn't ring any bells.)

Friend: I just love the adrenaline rush caused by bungee jumping
Me: I just love the adrenaline rush caused by deploying untested code to production server on a Friday night

I'm unbelievably angry. So please bear with my venting.

QA guy and I are stuck working the entire weekend. A few months ago our company decided to promote an account manager to a Product/Project management role with 0 experience and offering them 0 training. They have no experience working with devs and have been making our lives hell. I work easily 50-60hrs per week and they still budget projects according to 40hrs/week meaning they're stealing my time not to mention they're incorrectly setting the client's and company's expectations.

They now have complete control over roadmaps, client communications (this wouldn't normally be bad except that they're having technical discussions with the client with 0 tech experience), timelines, etc. and since their experience was in account management they are now working with devs but making decisions that exclusively put the client first at all costs, even if it means everyone else has to work weekends while they go on vacation!!!!

I've approached them several times to offer help on budgeting time or to propose that we do a Q4 planning so that we can improve the product instead of stay in a shitty position as we are. I'm responded with "You deal with what's in front of you. It's my job to look at the bigger picture."

They mismanaged a $500,000 project and our CEO got wind of it because the client called him while he was travelling. He in turn gave shit to our Directors who in turn chewed the QA guy and I out. "You need to be more meticulous when deploying. How could you let this happen? We're eating shit because of this. You need to work over the weekend to make up for this", etc.
I'm now directly responsible for having delivered something that wasn't up to standards even though I was already putting in the overtime.

This is honestly fucking ridiculous. How can I be blamed when I'm truly doing the best I can and putting as many hours as I can while edging toward burnout.

I love what I do but I hate feeling extremely pressured to turn down friends and family like this. Maybe I'm just too easy going and need to say no more. Who fucking knows. I know that I'm angry with the company right now.

What do you all think? If you read this rant, thank you. Feels better to write it out.

Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”

4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”

Re-deploying to the Apple App Store after making a "minor" change to your app

A few days after deploying a big important Website into production, I wanted to copy the whole thing including DB back onto our test server for future testing/bug fixing if something comes up. (Last changes were done on production server before going live)
So I opened SSH, removed everything on the test sever aaaaand then I realized I was connected to production...
Took about an hour to get everything up and running again. We didn't tell the client and hoped it would not be noticed.

One time I had this conversation with my then PM:

PM: …so in total we need like 3 extra pages; the leaders profile, event showcase and lastly a contact page.

Me: Sure, already on it.

PM: Make it simple and quick, I told the client the updates would be live in an hour.

Me: Okay.

*{5 microseconds later}*

PM: Also the page headers need to be different from the other pages.

Me: Yes, you told me that earlier.

PM: Okay, just needed to re-emphasis.

*{sad disturbing minutes later}*

PM: I don’t know if deploying on azure would be better than having the website on AWS. The pages seems slow.

Me: Yep.

PM: Or maybe we separate the asset files from the main site using a CDN.

Me: You right.

PM: The other projects on AWS seems to perform better in terms of SEO. Don’t you think?

Me: I think.

*{this dude literally just lent me a jacket and won’t allow me put it on}*

PM: So after we are done with this update we need to inform the client about the benefits of switching servers to AWS. I believe they will agree or won’t they because the event is close by?

Me: {{pointed both hands at my PC hoping they’ll get the message}}

PM: Oh you done?

Me:

I had to explain what version control was to the dinosaur last week. (Our cto, for more context check last post)

So we've been having issues getting our infrastructure dude to do deployment because he is sick of the treatment he gets here and has basically checked out.

Deployments then fell onto the dinosaur. After struggling for an eternity to figure out app settings (any junior dev could figure this out) he finally deployed, however it was from qa branch.

I gently reminded him that we were deploying from master and that all changes in qa should be merged to master when testing phase is over.

He informed me that 'he doesn't think that's a good idea because if we merge to master and there's problems then it's fucked forever and there is nothing we can do'

I stood there with my mouth hanging ajar until I finally managed to squeeze out 'that's literally what git is for....' 🤡

Be me, new dev on a team. Taking a look through source code to get up to speed.

Dev: **thinking to self** why is there no package lock.. let me bring this up to boss man

Dev: hey boss man, you’ve got no package lock, did we forget to commit it?

Manager: no I don’t like package locks.

Dev: ...why?

Manager: they fuck up computer. The project never ran with a package lock.

Dev: ..how will you make sure that every dev has the same packages while developing?

Manager: don’t worry, I’ve done this before, we haven’t had any issues.

**couple weeks goes by**

Dev: pushes code

Manager: hey your feature is not working on my machine

Dev: it’s working on mine, and the dev servers. Let’s take a look and see

**finds out he deletes his package lock every time he does npm install, so therefore he literally has the latest of like a 50 packages with no testing**

Dev: well you see you have some packages here that updates, and have broken some of the features.

Manager: >=|, fix it.

Dev: commit a working package lock so we’re all on the same.

Manager: just set the package version to whatever works.

Dev: okay

**more weeks go by**

Manager: why are we having so many issues between devs, why are things working on some computers and not others??? We can’t be having this it’s wasting time.

Dev: **takes a look at everyone’s packages** we all have different packages.

Manager: that’s it, no one can use Mac computers. You must use these windows computers, and you must install npm v6.0 and node v15.11. Everyone must have the same system and software install to guarantee we’re all on the same page

Dev: so can we also commit package lock so we’re all having the same packages as well?

Manager: No, package locks don’t work.

**few days go by**

Manager: GUYS WHY IS THE CODE DEPLOYING TO PRODUCTION NOT WORKING. IT WAS WORKING IN DEV

DEV: **looks at packages**, when the project was built on dev on 9/1 package x was on version 1.1, when it was approved and moved to prod on 9/3 package x was now on version 1.2 which was a change that broke our code.

Manager: CHANGE THE DEPLOYMENT SCRIPTS THEN. MAKE PROD RSYNC NODE_MODULES WITH DEV

Dev: okay

Manager: just trust me, I’ve been doing this for years

Who the fuck put this man in charge.

Deploying is never fun... :/

Marriage is basically deploying your relationship to production.

Yes - I fucking hate xcode too.

These are the main reasons:-

(1) Why the fuck make people go into Terminal to run pod install to build something? this is absurd.

(2) There are always fucking problems with the provisioining profile - like wrong fucking profile, or expired profile - which fuck wit came up with such a convoluted way of deploying? and then you to have to login to the apple develope and agree to some new fucking terms with some other bull shit crap.

(3) Swift 4 is out when nobody has been learnt swift 3.... What the fuck??

Fuck Apple!

Tried deploying a new nginx server today, wrote the site config manually.

"Alright, done! Let's restart the service and look in the browser how it looks"

# systemctl restart nginx
> Process exited with error code.
"Fuuuuck..."
# nginx
> Unexpected } on line 13.

# vim /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/thatconfig.conf
"Wait wtf.. there's nothing wrong with the curly braces.. they're all opening and closing as they should..."
*takes another closer look*
Line 12, missed a fucking semicolon 😑
Append semicolon, :wq, # systemctl restart nginx
Works like a charm 🙄 all because of a stupid semicolon.

Until now I thought that the semicolon jokes were just lame.. but damn you semicolon, you are indeed the superior hide and seek player 😅

Deploying code to production 5 minutes before you leave work #nofear

We have a pretty simple rule in our team:

Do not deploy to production on Friday.

Well thanks to the client being very slow to reply to me, they only signed off on launching the app at 15:30 on Friday, for a big campaign the app was built to facilitate starting Saturday.

Guess who had to bite the bullet and launch a new app into production at 15:30 on Friday.

Guess who got a text from his boss at 19:30 that there was a critical change required tonight.

Guess who was making code changes and deploying to production at 21:15 on Friday night while drinking Gin and tonic...

Nb This was a project only i was assigned to and came in as a rush job at the last minute.

Deploying something to production without testing it first because it "should" work.

me: the source code is currently store on GitHub and we use GitHub Actions after each updates to compile your code into binary before deploying to your servers
client: storing source code on GitHub (external server) is insecure and breaks compliance
me: so i guess you will need to have a copy of the source code on all your servers and build them directly there (too cheap to have a separate build server) instead of using GitHub Actions
client: yeah
me: keep in mind that all your certificates and tokens are going to be store as plain text in all your servers so if a hacker gain access to anyone of your servers, they will have access to everything.
client: yeah, this is in compliance to our security policy

all the brave souls who are deploying today -- raise your hands!

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server.

There is no technology on Earth that speaks worse of Microsoft than is this crap. Nothing they ever made (not even Comic Sans) is as bad as Sharepoint.

No proper editor. Everything is slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. To run it you need a state-of-the-art server. There is no way to make the UI modern, as Sharepoint itself is built upon 1995 era HTML. Tables in tables in tables in tables in tables. And even if you do a web part that's readable, it will be wrapped in shit and presented to the client anyway.
It's so easy to break too. Most of the time I was just watching why the fuck it didn't work. Huge problem with caching as well. Deploying any change requires 10 minutes of manual labor.

I get why companies want to use it. Out of the box it's got quite a few very nice features, and aside from the problems setting it up, and hardware requirements, it works decently well.

But I won't come near it unless I'm paid 100$ per hour or starving to death.

Living life on the edge: Deploying right now.

On holiday next week.

Qualifications and experience require to start a WordPress consultancy/brand agency:
• Be a marketing/people person.
• No technical requirements required.

Hate seeing others get clients and delivering half-assed solutions and deploying outdated and even insecure versions of everything.

Nothing screams panic like accidentally deploying an older, broken staging build, that also run outdated database migrations on start, straight to production

Friday
13th
last month
full moon
17.40

who's deploying today? :)

I find it annoying when non-tech savvy people criticize the Parler devs for using AWS because "it's Amazon they had it coming", I don't know the devs or company behind that website, I've never used it, but wtf man do you have any idea what's involved in building, deploying and maintaining a platform like that or any other similar? ffs you would barely be able to write an HTML blog by yourself and you dare judge devs for using AWS. fuck off.

I agree with the sentiment, it sucks, if my platform was removed from AWS I probably would keep it that way because I don't have the money to afford the hardware nor am I somewhere that's readily available and that's what is really sad it would suck that just because Amazon doesn't like you or you don't have the influence to fight it you and your userbase can go fuck off. Very bad precedent, it is discouraging.

Sometimes, being the only fullstack dev with access to a lot of systems gives you the ability to introduce functionality that:

A) prevents future errors

B) introduces new validations to users to make sure A) is prevented.

C) apply these changes to different projects

But most importantly...

D) without a single person in management getting involved or having to sign it off.

It's like running a company you own, but without owning it.

Granted with such power, comes the trust and responsibility of deploying changes with the adequate testing being done prior and handling change management, but fuck, sometimes I wonder if "god mode" for lack of a better term, is too much, or just enough to get the job done without the politics.

deploying app 101: never deploy anything on a friday unless you want your saturday to be another monday

Typos kill, kids! And deploying to production.

Instead of "for item in items" in my script, I accidentally did "for items in items". Thus, an exponential loop has been entering things into the database for the past few hours before I found the place to fix it.

By the way, this runs on cron every minute. So there are processes still running exponentially right now, possibly 180+.

Yeah, I'm setting up a a test server instead now.

I didn't really find the usefulness of Docker until I used Docker Compose. Deploying our architecture with a simple 'docker-compose up' FeelsGoodMan.jpg

The story of the shittiest, FUCKING WORST day of work.

TLDR: shitty day at work, car crash to end the day.

So, let tell you about what could possibly be the worst day I had since I started working.

This morning, my alarm didn't work, woke up 30 minutes before an appointment I had with a client.

Arrived late at the client, as I start deploying. They don't have any way to transfer the deployment package to the secured server. Lost 45 minutes there.

Deployment goes pretty well. My client asks me to stay while they load some data into the app. Everything's pretty easy to work out. Just need to input 3 CSV with the correct format (which the client defined since the beginning).
I end up watching an Excel Macro called "Brigitte" (I'm not fucking kinding, could'nt have thought of that) work for 4 hours straight. Files are badly formatted and don't work.

Troubbleshooting thoses files with a fucking loader that does not tell you anything about why it failed (our fault on that one)

I leave the client at 7:30pm, going back at work, leave at 9pm.

At this point, I just want to buy some food, go home and watch series.

But NO, A FUCKING MORRON OF A BUS DRIVER had to switch lanes as I was overtaking him. Getting me crushed between the bus and the concrete blocks.

Cops were fucking dickheads, being very mean even tho I was still shaking from the adrenaline.

In conclusion, the day could have been worst. The devs at the clients are pretty cool guys and we actually had some fun troubleshooting. At work, there was still one of my colleagues who cheered me up telling me about his day.
And when I think of it, I could have got really hurt (or even worst) in the crash.

A bad day is a bad day, tomorrow morning I'm still going to get up and go to a job I love, with people I love working with.

Very big rant (sorry about that if someone's still reading)

Flight attendant: Is there a doctor onboard?
Dad: *nudging me* that should've been you
Me: Not now dad
Dad: Not asking for a Software Engineer are they?
Me:Dad, there's a medical emergency happening right now
Dad: Go see if "Deploying code to production" helps.

TIFU by deploying not one, but two major releases to production at 5pm on a Friday. I trusted my testers, so one of the applications had a major bug in it. I just worked through a child's surprise party. hope the testers are having a lovely evening with their loved ones.

“PHP is evil” is not just a joke.

PHP is usually percieved as a language which is not so consistent and has some opinionated historical aspects but allows rapid development because it’s easy. They say PHP doesn’t focus on that “purist shit” such as concepts and “just gets things done”.

Hovewer, this is not true. PHP lures you in and lies to you promising saving time on development, but everything, and I mean EVERYTHING written in PHP is doomed to turn into a bloody mess sooner or later.

You have to be an AI to manage the growing PHP codebase and add features without breaking anything. With every feature it gets harder and harder. If you’re still a human managing a human team, you have to enforce guidelines. Automatic error preventon measures are made of code themselves so the cost of deploying them ona late stage can be ridiculous. And you never deploy them on early stage because you want to “save time”. Your people have to spend more and more time everyday checking on that guidelines. Your development process only becomes slower and slower. If you try to push things, your project will crumble to dust.

To make PHP at least decent, you have to figure out all this by yourself on an early stage. When you’re done, you spent a lot of time creating the buggy, ad-hoc, unspecified and unsupported alternative of what works out of the box in other languages. And you still code in PHP and still have all its disadvantages in your project’s DNA.

PHP is evil because it promises and never delivers. PHP is evil because it lies to you and it already fucked over so many of us.

If you want to code in PHP, do it under your pillow. Code your own silly projects.

If your project has the word “production” somewhere in its plans, PHP is not the way to go.

Amen.

Just released version 1 of my first API! For this project I did everything the way I wanted to, no shortcuts! I documented the shit out of every endpoint and parameter. Everything is throughly tested and it’s dockerized. I also have metrics for each endpoint (with Grafana in the frontend, which I love) as well as alerts in case it would go down for some reason.

I prepared all of this before deploying it out into the wild and damn, it feels so good. Probably no one will use it but I don’t care. It’s one of those projects where you have to force yourself to go to bed at 2 AM.

Just some thoughts. Don’t really have any techie friends so figured maybe someone here recognizes that feeling. Also I wrote it in Python, such a pleasant language.

Deploying to production with ssh and git pull on a screen session.

So a few months ago, I had this massive feature to add to one of the projects I look after. That’s usually not a problem, turning a sprint into a month+ but what ever, this feature was going to save hours of data entry and is extremely needed!!!

Come to present day, this feature hasn’t been used once, and probably won’t be for another 6 months. I just love deploying “needed” things that don’t get used.

on the first day of christmas my PM send to me

There's a bug in your B-tree

on the second day of christmas my PM send to me

two threads deadlocked
and a bug in your B-tree

On the third day of christmas my PM send to me

Three servers crashing
two threads deadlockd
and a bug in my B-Tree

on the Fourth day of Christmas my PM send to me

Four clients angry
Three servers crashing
two threads deadlocked
and a bug in my B-tree

on the Fith day of Christmas my PM send to me

Five SCRUM meetings
Four clients angry
Three servers crashing
two threads deadlocked
and a bug in my B-tree

On the sixth day of Christmas my PM send to me

Six deadlines waiting
Five SCRUM meetings
Four clients angry
Three servers crashing
two threads deadlocked
and a bug in my B-tree

on the Seventh day of Christmas my PM send to me

Seven machines learning
Six deadlines waiting
Five SCRUM meetings
Four clients angry
Three servers crashing
two threads deadlocked
and a bug in my B-tree

on the Eighth day of Christmas my PM send to me

Eight repos compiling
Seven machines learning
Six deadlines waiting
Five SCRUM meetings
Four clients angry
Three servers crashing
two threads deadlocked
and a bug in my B-tree

on the Ninth day of Christmas my PM send to me

Nine interns asking
Eight repos compiling
Seven machines learning
Six deadlines waiting
Five SCRUM meetings
Four clients angry
Three servers crashing
two threads deadlocked
and a bug in my B-tree

on the Tenth day of Christmas my PM send to me

Ten Features requested
Nine interns asking
Eight repos compiling
Seven machines learning
Six deadlines waiting
Five SCRUM meetings
Four clients angry
Three servers crashing
two threads deadlocked
and a bug in my B-tree

on the Eleventh day of Christmas my PM send to me

Eleven products deploying
Ten Features requested
Nine interns asking
Eight repos compiling
Seven machines learning
Six deadlines waiting
Five SCRUM meetings
Four clients angry
Three servers crashing
two threads deadlocked
and a bug in my B-tree

on the Twelve day of Christmas my PM send to me

Twelve DBs updating
Eleven products deploying
Ten Features requested
Nine interns asking
Eight repos compiling
Seven machines learning
Six deadlines waiting
Five SCRUM meetings
Four clients angry
Three servers crashing
two threads deadlocked
and a bug in my B-tree

If you think deploying on a Friday is bad try deploying on a Saturday. :,(

I am good as Front End developer, using JavaScript I can do the job, the whole job. Developing, Styling, designing and deploying the web applications is my daily job for few years now...
Today I quit my job for a new position as Back End developer using a new programming language I totally know nothing about it!!!
I am not sure about my decision... but I would like to take the risk....

enough is enough
to all the fucker ass morons deploying mini js frameworks with ambiguous names and undocumented functionality all fucking minified and using at least 20-30 of them on each page
dafuq you need a different slider for every section ?

I just love how liferay keeps finding ways to surprise me...

Customer: need to fix this security issue
me: ok
me: fixed. Testing locally. Works 100%.
Me: testing on dev server. Works 100%
qa: testing on dev server. Works 100%
me: all good. Deploying to preprod
customer: it doesn't work
me: testing preprod - it doesn't work.
Me: scp whole app to local machine. App works 100%.
Me: preview loaded liferay properties in preprod via liferay adm panel. All props loaded ok.
Me: attach jdb to preprod's liferay to see what props are loaded. Only defaults are used [custom props not loaded according to jdb]

me: is there some quantum mechanics involved..? Liferay managed to both load and not to load props at the same time and the state only changes as it's observed...

A new head of operations joins a small company.
— Okay guys, I’m planning for the long run. I need 500 warehouses across the country — we might need that capacity. We will build them rather than renting them — Amazon does the same thing, so we should too. We also need our own shipping fleet — FedEx has that too, so it’s a battle-tested approach. We might need that capacity. We need a future-proof solution.
— Uh… That’s kind of dumb. Are you kidding me?

A new head of engineering joins a small company.
— Okay guys, I’m planning for the long run. I need an AWS cluster running Kubernetes deploying microservices built with Docker. We might need autoscaling. Frontend should be Next.js + TypeScript — everyone does that now, plus we can develop a React Native app more easily if need be. We need a future-proof solution.
— Wow! That’s what I call a good manager. You really know what you’re talking about. You’re promoted!

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.

The MS Teams SDK is bullshit. It's so half baked and comes with instructions like "you'll probably want a better implementation for production, good luck cause you'll have to write it yourself."

Oh and don't forget to cache your installations in a file called "notifications.json"

Deploying will create 2 app registrations (OIDC) and about 6 resources in Azure... But "you'll probably want to log to app insights in production"... So I hope you're very familiar with Bicep cause you'll have to figure out how to add that to your template properly and there are about 7 Bicep files to decipher and it doesn't create an app insights out of the box.

Probably written by an intern.

So I wrote a code for a discord bot a few months back. It worked perfectly alright. Suddenly one day, the bot starts sending random shit to me!

Then I realised that my bot had been hacked because I didn't use the bot token as an environment variable while deploying!

Instead I added it to the code, which I uploaded on GitHub! 😐

brace yourselves!!! we are deploying this weekend... (expect more rants to follow as the deployment continues (or fucks up) )

So we are deploying our hip new react-native app on the playstore and all is fine and happy, being in the playstore gives you a warm fuzzy feeling that your app finally has been set out in the world....

Then comes the iOS store... you monster, you have let your app into a minefield, there is no warm caring environment, there are only white sterile walls around him and at the slightest misstep your app gets marked and send to a correctional facility, tortured and interrogated until it falls in line..waiting for the next misstep hoping the overseers will not notice his untied shoelaces....

That feeling when you finally use @ before a few functions in PHP to suppress warnings, since the whole application is a hack which miraculously works anyways.
The feeling of finally getting close to deploying it.

You thought real fear is deploying to production friday afternoon?

Hah nope.
Real fear is forgetting to flock(); a public toilet door while doing a dump();

My boss just called me and asked to write a email informing our clients to not to download the update we pushed this very evening because Application is crashing when you will open that particular page.

What went wrong? One of our senior Developer, let's call him Mr. X, is totally against of testing the app before deploying it to clients. He believes that as i have created the application, i know exactly what to change to accomplish a requested feature or bug in application.

When a ticket assigned to him about a bug in the application, he simply make some changes in code, create the package and send it to test department. How do I know? He even boast it in front of us.

Most of the time it works but not every time like today. And I am pretty sure my boss is not going to ask a explanation about this to him.

I have great respect for him. It's okay to have confidence but testing before sending it to anybody will not make you junior. Will it? Being a senior You are making others to be careless about his job.

That's what happen today. Mr. X failed so does the testing department. So am I. I am the head of testing department as well.

I am not blaming him. I just cant. It was our job to test app thoroughly. I am feeling pretty bad now. His confidence made me vulnerable. Say his confidence made me clearly a fool. Lesson has been learned though.

I hate Python.

Deploying it is annoying, and the fact that I basically need to create another Python instance via 'virtualenv' only so that projects can co-exist without dependency-issues is maddening.

I would be greatfull for Python 3.6+ at least, but NO we're stuck on Python 2.7

Deploying to production 8pm Saturday evening.

Because I have confidence in our test suite, QA procedures, infrastructure and my team members are not morons.

I once agreed to maintain and develop an application used in a different section of the school to keep inventory and make sure everything is where it is supposed to be.

At first there was enthusiasm, together with 2 of my classmates we agreed and git clone-d the .NET application that now graduated students built and maintained for the past few years. What could go wrong right?!

It became clear that the original students that worked on it followed an older curriculum, meaning they still got taught .NET instead of the core variant that we get now, not only that but it also seemed that they either did not fully grasp the Clean/Onion architecture or didn't get it in class since there were infrastructure components in the 'Domain' project of the solution. Think of 2 DBContexts in the domain model, yep.

One of us bailed in the first week, the other one and I felt bad for the people using the app so we went on and tried to work on the first bugs that were described in a document. One of these bugs was 'whenever I filter on something in the list, everybody gets to see that filter on their screen instead of only me'. Woah that's weird! Let's see how they put that together!

Oh god, they are using a _static_ variable to store filters, no wonder that it doesn't work properly. Ever heard of sessions?!

Second bug: Sometimes people can't create an account when we sign them up from the admin panel. Alright that is weird, let's figure that one out! Wait a second it seems to work in development? What's this about.

Oh wait I can't create an account on production either? Oh that's weird, wait a second... Why do I have to put my e-mail in a form that was sent to me through e-mail? Why is my address not filled in already? OOH, if someone types in the wrong e-mail address (which is easy since our school has 4 variants of the same f*cking e-mail address) it won't work since it can't recognize the user! Brilliant! Remove e-mail input box and make a token/queryparam determine the user account.

Ah that seems good, it's a mess but it seems a tiny bit better now, great! We're making progress and some sweet buck.

Next bug, trillions of 50x errors on random pages, that's a weird one.

Hm everything works in development, that's odd. Is the production data corrupted?

DID I MENTION that in order to get into the system in development we have to load in a f*cking production database backup ON OUR DEVELOPMENT MACHINE and then ask one of the users' password to login to it and create an account for ourselves? Seeding? What's that, right?!

Anyway, back to bug fixing. I e-mail the the people responsible for the app and get a production admin account, oh I also can't ssh into it because of policies so I have to do everything over e-mail and figure out what's causing the errors. I somehow also wonder if they have any kind of virtualization in place, giving students a VM to do that stuff in doesn't seem so weird does it ? Even with school policies?

Oh btw, 'deploying' means sending a .zip file to a guy in another building and telling him how to configure it, apparently this resulted in a missing folder that the application needed to work and couldn't make on its own. This after 2 weeks of e-mailing back and forth.

After 3 months i quit out of despair and sadness, and due to the fact that I just couldn't do it anymore. I separated everything into logical subprojects and let the last guy handle it, he was OK with that and understood why I left.

Luckily, around that time I already had an actual job at a software development company :)

!rant

I am a Windows user and have been using Mac for last 3 years. I knew SSH for a while, but used it just to connect servers when no other options were available.

Today I just found that I can connect to my Mac from my Android phone using SSH and can run any command I want. I am now running builds and deploying code from my phone since then.

I don't know why I am feeling this happy 😁

Progress. The backend is deployed and works on my server. Tomorrow, deploying my fronted code to work with the backend.

Rant r = new Rant(Rant.TEAM_PROBLEM);

Three months ago, a senior, one year older than me, decided to join me in doing startups. He said he's good at finance stuff (his parents are fund managers), and he is interested in startups just like I am. He treated me very nicely, so I gladly accepted him.

I'm currently working on many projects, and some of them won me quite a few awards, most notably on the national competition. I also got invited into startup incubator programs, met some awesome people and offered free scholarships at universities in my country.

He frankly said he joined because he wanted to learn about startups and have those "privileges" too, and I'm cool with that.

Anyway, the problem is that I'm the one doing all the work. He's really nice, doesn't claim anything whatsoever, but the thing is he doesn't have any skills whatsoever except soft skills like communicating. So, I'm horribly tired from working alone.

My tasks mostly involves full-stack development, such as planning the specs, designing and developing frontend for mobile apps and progressive webapps, developing microservices for the backend, up to deploying and maintaining the servers. It's a lot of work for a single person to handle in such a short timeframe.

Not only that, but I'm also the one handling the business/marketing part, albeit I'm still learning. From doing paperworks, pitches, business models, up to creating advertising materials for the product.

I'm obviously not the smart ones like the people out there, but I keep focusing on improving my skills.

So, he said he could help me, and I let him try. What did you think he did?

He made pitch decks using default fucking PowerPoint themes, shooted a demo video with his phone cam in 320p potato resolution and expect me to "add some effects", gives me loads of requirements when all we needed was a simple feature, copying and pasting prior documents in my paperworks which doesn't make any fucking sense at all, and quite a lot more.

Also, he said I should stay in the developer zone only while he maintains the business, whilist he obviously can't do much in the business part either. Seriously...?

I'm okay with his lack of experience, considering he's nice and all, unlike the other business guys I've met in the previous rants. However, I keep questioning myself why he is here in the first place when I'm the one doing everything anyway.

What should I do? Maybe just keep him and recruit more experienced people to join us, as he's not that much of a burden? What do you devRanters think?

Thanks for reading, fellow devRanters! 😀

developer: *deploying spaghetti code to production*
hacker: *alters the code with an injection*
developer:

Who the HELLFUCK deploys on a Friday?!

CI came up with 265 errors. (deploying to an old server to bring it back).

I make some very clever fixes and run it again.

Now we have 269 errors.

-_-

The loop of having an idea, building a prototype over 3 months, deploying it and realizing there has been a better alternative in the market on day 1.

Today: deploying at 23:00 because the boss told me he wanted to show something to a client.

Was talking about how I implemented CI/CD in one of our projects as a starting point to others and how it worked by running tests and deploying to the server and one of my colleagues laughed about having to have tests at all, I explained and asked him what was he gonna do that morning, his answer:

"Well, I'm gonna test the system X and fix some bugs"

To what I replied:

"If you have automated tests you could have those tests automatic(?!) and they also help you finding bugs early"

Wtf do ppl have in mind that they prefer remediation over prevention and they end up wasting their time with shit that could be fully automated?

deploying success

I am about to do the unthinkable.
I am going to a place no dev wants to go.
I am about to take an unhinged decision everyone would warn me against.
I am about to cause a change to my future, whether good or bad I guess I'll find out.

But what I do know, is YOLO.

I'm deploying to production on Friday just half an hour before I log off for the day and come back on Monday.

Wish me luck. I'm gonna need it.

And the time has come, my gf and I are just a month away from deploying yet we still call the project "project".

Usually solutions jump in my head when programming at least once a day but I can't name the damn thing for the love of God! It's the first night since we started development I have felt clueless.

Plus I don't want to be "that guy" that just gives it a generic name, like there's already a "ratemyprofessors", professor this, teacher that, fuck that shit!

I'm brain dead.

Deploying on friday...

My first freelance project - happened to be with the worst client. They didnt wanna pay more than $500 and also had no clue what they want, so each time i present something they request additional features or changing the ones implemented. In the end i kept the half downpayment for my time and bailed without deploying or anything. I introduced them to another freelancer to take the project and never went near them again.

To clarify, it was not my first project/ just my first time dealing with clients for projects instead of doing them at work. Ever since then i have a strict no dealing with clients directly policy.

FUCKING MICROSOFT IIS SHIT.
I'm a .NET dev since 13 years and EVERY FUCKING TIME STUPID IIS MOTHERFUCKER AND STUPID WINDOWS SERVER have a different problem setting up because of some permission.
You can't never get a site up in IIS without loosing time and patience having weird 400/500.x errors because every fucking machine have to set up some tweaky and hidden permissions.
I have 2 identical fucking win servers and deploying a .NET core applications and on one works (test server) and obviously, on the production server it gives troubles.

FUCK YOU MICROSOFT FUCK YOU I would take the IIS devs personally here and whip them to death until they don't resolve the fucking thing

Before I realized what a Vagrant Box was, I thought everyone was talking about cardboard boxes for homeless people.

So there I am thinking everyone was talking about homeless people and I finally understand that it's a service for quickly deploying VMs for local development when I get invited to a party after a convention with my hosting company and I look over the rail and see a vagrant man asleep on a cardboard box.

The person who claims we should be "in control" of our stack and not use any of this pre-made, one size fits all, BaaS bullshit.

Even though none of our projects are even remotely close to needing scaling and whatnot.

Then proceeds to argue all we need is a step by step guide on how to deploy things very easily using Cloud Formation.

Spends the next two weeks trying to figure out why config files and scripts don't work.

And now that we have that "recipe", we're fully capable of deploying our own pre-made, one size fits all backend.

Just found a job listing that requires experience in deploying apps to Google Play and Apple App Store T_T

Proudest bug squash? Probably the time I fixed a few bugs by accident when I was just trying to clean up an ex-coworker's messy code.

So I used to work with a guy who was not a very good programmer. It's hard to explain exactly why other than to say that he never really grew out of the college mindset. He never really learned the importance of critical thinking and problem-solving. He did everything "by the book" to a point where if he ran into an issue that had no textbook solution, he would spin his wheels for weeks while constantly lying to us about his progress until one of us would finally notice and take the problem off his plate. His code was technically functional, but still very bad.

Quick Background: Our team is responsible for deploying and maintaining cloud resources in AWS and Azure. We do this with Terraform, a domain-specific language that lets us define all our infrastructure as code and automate everything.

After he left, I took on the work to modify some of the Terraform code he'd written. In the process, I discovered what I like to call "The Übervariable", a map of at least 80 items, many of them completely unrelated to each other, which were all referenced exactly once in his code and never modified. Basically it was a dynamic collection variable holding 80+ constants. Some of these constants were only used in mathematical expressions with multiple other constants from the same data structure, resulting in a new value that would also be a constant. Some of the constants were identical values that could never possibly differ, but were still stored as separate values in the map.

After I made the modification I was supposed to make, I decided I was so bothered by his shitty code that I would spend some extra time fixing and optimizing it. The end result: one week of work, 800 lines of code deleted, 30 lines added, and a massive increase in efficiency. I deleted the Übervariable and hardcoded most of the values it contained since there was no possible reason for any of them to change in the future. In the process, I accidentally fixed three bugs that had been printing ominous-sounding warnings to the console whenever the code was run.

I have a lot of stories about this guy. I should post some more of them eventually.

Long time ago i ranted here, but i have to write this off my chest.

I'm , as some of you know, a "DevOps" guy, but mainly system infrastructure. I'm responsible for deploying a shitload of applications in regular intervals (2 weeks) manually through the pipeline. No CI/CD yet for the vast majority of applications (only 2 applications actually have CI/CD directly into production)

Today, was such a deployment day. We must ensure things like dns and load balancer configurations and tomcat setups and many many things that have to be "standard". And that last word (standard) is where it goes horribly wrong

Every webapp "should" have a decent health , info and status page according to an agreed format.. NOPE, some dev's just do their thing. When bringing the issue up to said dev the (surprisingly standard) answer is "it's always been like that, i'm not going to change". This is a problem for YEARS and nobody, especially "managers" don't take action whatsoever. This makes verification really troublesome.

But that is not the worst part, no no no.

the worst is THIS:

"git push -a origin master"

Oh yes, this is EVERYWHERE, up to the point that, when i said "enough" and protected the master branch of hieradata (puppet CfgMgmt, is a ENC) people lots their shits... Proper gitflow however is apparently something otherworldly.

After reading this back myself there is in fact a LOT more to tell but i already had enough. I'm gonna close down this rant and see what next week comes in.

There is a positive thing though. After next week, the new quarter starts, and i have the authority to change certain aspects... And then, heads WILL roll on the floor.

Deploying on stage.
Testing on stage.

Why does the issue persist on stage?

Testing on local. It is fixed!

Wtf?
Wtf!?
WTF???

Oh.

I did not merge my branch and deployed a new version on stage without any changes 🤦

It's Friday. I should go home.

Developing in your local environment? A few bugs here and there. Deploying it to production in a completely different environment? The whole app is a bug...

*deploys another few Telegram userbots for my other Telegram accounts*
*finds a warning in a module it depends on, dev is a friend of mine so report it I guess, low priority as it doesn't affect anything*
*both of us agree that it still works and might very well be a clusterfuck in the bot*
*proceeds with deploying the bot*
Bot> Your API ID cannot be empty, refer to READ THE FUCKING DOCS.io for more information.

Well fuck you too bot!

My project manager one time called me while I was waiting in the bank. He told me that the latest changes in the project I was working on were not deployed to production and they were having a meeting to demo those changes to the client later that day.

I had my laptop with me but it wasn't charged. I asked the security guys if I could use the socket used to power up the cleaning/sweeping machines and they didn't mind.

So it was me sitting on the floor in the bank hall using a side socket to power up my laptop holding my cellphone so I can use the hotspot and get internet connection deploying yesterday's changes to a production server.

Eventually, the client didn't attend the meeting that day!

A Heroku-compatible PaaS for deploying tools and services for the Wikimedia Foundation

So, my company pays thousands and thousands of euros just to show map and enable geocoding, a bug in google maps prevent Google Maps to work in Cordova and it's blocking us from deploying. After days and days of research I understand I can't solve it and I open an issue on google platform. Result: Severity -> S4, Priority -> P4

So a guy made us develop a website, an Android app and an iOS app prototype under contract for a really low amount. We had initially agreed as it would be a learning experience.

3 months later we are still doing bug fixes for end-to-end deployment. For some reason we are responsible for publishing and deploying the whole system. He hasn't paid us anything yet and has given a shitty LOR which has been taken off the net.

Im deploying a Machine Learning Model to production. We dont have an automated deployment pipeline for the models, so we do it manually exposing the models through a rest api.

I asked for the model artifact to the DS, they didn't have permissions to download files from Databricks.

I asked their manager for the artifact. He told me that he has the permissions, then bullshitted me with something about the formal process, some shit about proper permissions handling, and that they do no have a standard process for sharing files right now so i should wait.

I was like "bro, share the artifact with me to unblock my work, then stablish your process, i dont care". He said no, and just after that he started a thread involving half of the middle management and data engineers asking for feedback on how to stablish a process for sharing databricks files. Just Wtf.

I got pissed, i reach out to his superior (good friend of mine), that was on vacation btw, and i told him the situation. He opened slack and humiliated him so bad, that i almost felt bad for the manager jajajajaja.

I grabbed my model artifact and got out of there instantly.

PM schedules deployment on a Friday... I address my concern about deploying on Fridays, I am assured it won't happen again since it is a special occasion. Next week's Friday... "Guys we need the remaining tasks on jira by today, client wants the app on production by today". smh

Developing and deploying in Xcode is some Requiem for a Dream level bullshit.

I literally just de selected everything for managing automatic signing, and re-selected the EXACT SAME GODDAMN THING. And it worked. It’s literally some fucking shit you do when you are first learning how to code or learning a language and you keep flipping something but you don’t get exactly how it works.

But this is YOUR FUCKING FLAGSHIP development product. I shouldn’t have to check my goddamn inception totem to see if I’m dreaming or not because this kind of bullshit can’t be real life.

That being fucking said your bullshit forced shutdown also FUCKED MY ANDROID STUDIO INSTALLATION AND FUCKED MY $PATH. Thanks. Now NOTHING WORKS. Fuck you Apple. Between slowing my phone and the cluster or problems your shit is causing that are just random as hell and are plenty common because thank god people smarter than me have fixed them in SO by now, I am SO READY TO LEAVE THE APPLE ECO SYSTEM. If I didn’t have to use one of the boxes to push iPhone app updates I doubt I would touch one again.

Apple stuff looks good but at this point that’s about it.

I am usually lurking in here since I never really worked as a Software Developer, but until I start going to the University, I thought I might also find myself a job in Software Development.

Well... I don't know where to start.

Someone in here heard of JBoss? Me neither... we're using it... It is a Framework to deploy fortified Java Web Applications. My first day was very chaotic and was dedicated to get this fucking shit to work. I got JBoss 7.5 from my colleagues and started deploying the hello world program...

So. Many. Things. Gone. Wrong...

After like 5 hours of troubleshooting, I had to install/setup a new wrapper with my own batch scripts, install SPECIFICALLY jdk 1.7_17 (anything else won't work) and downgrade JBoss to 7.2.

Yeah that's the first thing. Let's continue about JBoss. Version 7.2 uh? What's the newest one though? Oh it's now known as WildFly... huh... FUCKING HELL, THE NEWEST ONE IS VERSION 10.1??? AND EVEN 10.1 IS 1 YEAR OLD? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKK AAAAAAHH...

So yeah, after that, without any expectation, I had a look at our codebase. Unit tests huh? I couldn't find a single self written one to test the applications functions... I asked my fellow devs and they told me that "it is too time consuming and we have to focus on new features, the QM Team will just manually test the application". Ever heard this bullshit? A big fat ass codebase with shittons of customers and not a single unit test...

So last but not least, since it is a web application, it also got a site. Y'know RichFaces? The deprecated front end library for Java Webpages? Where you got like 150 Tables per page everyone with a random id everytime you reload? Yeah I don't think I have to explain that to you guys...

So now YOU tell me? Is this a place to be 😂😂😂

I think the worst thing about android programming and deploying directly to a device, is that you can procrastinate in both the pc and the mobile...

I got a contract with this schools to build a student portal,

I do all the needful and the project whatever guy insists that I use their current shared hosting to host this MERN stack application.

first of all, cPanel is my least favorite place when it comes to deploying, I actually dont do deploying I just hand it over to whoever is the IT guy there.

I discovered there's no provision for nodejs in their current plan, I go through all the stress of contacting the shitty customer support and the process of squeezing out useful information from them.

I'm only doing this because the project whatever has refused to pay me until their site is deployed. throughout the process of creating this project I had setup continous deployment on heroku and netlify and I had to beg this guy to look at the changes and review them.

well, today I asked the former guy that built the current site for the login details to the schools dashboard on the hosting providers site and he says he used his personal details for it, according to him projects from other organizations are there too.

I swear I'm going to loose my shit, freelancing sucks

The IT at my current work designed infra as such :
One repo for ALL the configs for every project and one config file per project that defines the version of the language (ex node 6) for all environment of a project. I don't even want to talk about deploying previous version or what happen when you update the version and AWS spawns new instances.
Jump into chatops hype approach and use one single script to deploy every app. Talk about a single point of failure but hey we use slack now it's great no?

Since I always think we are one character away from bad deployment and I'm into one click deployment then I've made a web app just to generate command and copy it or send it to slack.

I guess this is what happens when IT work for themselves only..

A loooong time ago...

I've started my first serious job as a developer. I was young yet enthusiastic as well as a kind of a greenhorn. First time working in a business, working with a team full of experienced full-lowered ultra-seniors which were waiting to teach me the everything about software engineering.

Kind of.

Beside one senior which was the team lead as well there were two other devs. One of them was very experienced and a pretty nice guy, I could ask him anytime and he would sit down with me a give me advice. I've learned a lot of him.

Fast forward three months (yes, three months).

I was not that full kind of greenhorn anymore and people started to give me serious tasks. I had some experience in doing deployments and stuff from my other job as a sysadmin before so I was soon known as the "deployment guy", setting up deployments for our projects the right way and monitoring as well as executing them. But as it should be in every good team we had to share our knowledge so one can be on vacation or something and another colleague was able to do the task as well.

So now we come to the other teammate. The one I was not talking about till now. And that for a reason.

He was very nice too and had a couple of years as a dev on his CV, but...yeah...like...

When I switched some production systems to Linux he had to learn something about Linux. Everytime he encountered an error message he turned around and asked me how to fix it. Even. For. The. Simplest. Error. He. Could. Google. Up.

I mean okay, when one's new to a system it's not that easy, but when you have an error message which prints out THE SOLUTION FOR THE ERROR and he asks me how to fix it...excuse me?

This happened over 30 times.
A. Week.

Later on I had to introduce him to the deployment workflow for a project, so he could eventually deploy the staging environment and the production environment by hisself.

I introduced him. Not for 10 minutes. I explained him the whole workflow and the very main techniques and tools used for like two hours. Every then and when I stopped and asked him if he had any questions. He had'nt! Wonderful!

Haha. Oh no.

So he had to do his first production deployment. I sat by his side to monitor everything. He did well. One or two questions but he did well.

The same when he did his second prod deploy. Everythings fine.

And then. It. Frikkin. Begins.

I was working on the project, did some changes to the code. Okay, deploy it to dev, time for testing.

Hm.

Error checking out git. Okay, awkward. Got to investigate...

On the dev server were some files changed. Strange. The repo was all up to date. But these changes seemed newer because they were fixing at least one bug I was working on.

This doubles the strangeness.

I want over to my colleague's desk.

I asked him about any recent changes to the codebase.

"Yeah, there was a bug you were working on right? But the ticket was open like two days so I thought I'll fix it"

What the Heck dude, this bug was not critical at all and I had other tasks which were more important. Okay, but what about the changed files?

"Oh yeah, I could not remember the exact deployment steps (hint from the author: I wrote them down into our internal Wiki, he wrote them done by hisself when introducing him and after all it's two frikkin commands), so I uploaded them via FTP"

"Uhm... that's not how we do it buddy. We have to follow the procedure to avoid..."

"The boss said it was fine so I uploaded the changes directly to the production servers. It's so much easier via FTP and not this deployment crap, sorry to say that"

You. Did. What?

I could not resist and asked the boss about this. But this had not Effect at all, was the long-time best-buddy-schmuddy-friend of the boss colleague's father.

So in the end I sat there reverting, committing and deploying.

Yep

It's soooo much harder this deployment crap.

Years later, a long time after I quit the job and moved to another company, I get to know that the colleague now is responsible for technical project management.

Hm.

Project Management.

Karma's a bitch, right?

So I actually got an update for my PC at work, proposing me to postpone it or to do it later. I postpone it to one hour later, since I'll be buying food for lunch, it can update and reboot.

When I came back from lunch, laptop is asking me to postpone or do the update right now. So I sigh because the laptop just stayed locked without doing anything, and ask it to do the update in 4 hours, when I'll be leaving.

2 minutes later, it forces me to update with the "30 min left before rebooting", so I sigh again, closes everything and reboot.

Since it's a Windows, it's slow on booting by definition. Plus launching Slack, Eclipse, Firefox, VLC. Takes time. Plus launching the server. +1000 files to compile then deploying.

I lost 20 minutes because of that edgy bitch called "update".

So, i use this bulk messaging service and they decided to make logins OTP only ("for security reasons", they say), sent to your email.
So instead of entering a password quickly,
- enter the password for your email account,
- click about 10 times on Resend OTP
- wait for OTP
- copy OTP and paste in the box.

So basically relying on the person's email provider's security than deploying their own.

Deploying your stuff and watch people use it.
Now i know why i like this work again.

Old story, happened some way back. I worked part-time for a small web development company that did between other things something called SharePoint development, basically .net webforms with shit glitter on top of it.

The most weird part of it, was the fact that we were working on vms that hosted the app, it was our dev, test and staging environment, as well as were we showed the client the polished turd.

Did I say that it was on a vm? Well it was on a remote vm, that each of use had access to it, through our domain accounts, and they couldn't configure the windows server to accept more than two or three users at once to be connected.

That was our test enviroment and dev enviroment, sooo showing the app to the client meant for the rest of us to not write any code because it might crash or get stuck.

The app was accessible and discoverable by url and through google search from outside, I dont think that should have been allowed.

The most disastrous part was that we had NO source versioning whatsoever, just plain old copy and paste in different folders.
Deploying to client meant remoting to the clients host or whatever it was, and manually copying the source files

If someone wanted to debug the application you had to shout, and you also could hear it, in the office: "I'm debugging!" or "I'm deploying!". Because we were on the same machine, there was only one process with the server and it meant that if you debug or deployed it would block it for the others.

Should I talk about code quality? Maybe not.

It drives me Insane that AWS still doesn't support Swift 3 for iOS. We're almost to the point where Apple is going to drop Swift 2 support in XCode and Amazon STILL has not gotten it.

I've started deploying Gateway APIs in Objective-C and linking them to the bridging header just so we can finally move foreword in our company and quit relying on legacy Swift support. Which is something I was really trying to avoid because we don't like mixing languages unless absolutely necessary. It's not a problem, but it's incredibly annoying to me. What IS a problem is having to start new projects already using legacy code from the very beginning.

What is amazon going to do when the next release of XCode comes out? Tell all new customers to downgrade?

Why even offer native Swift APIs if you're going to go this long and still not migrate, Amazon?!

Oh god where do I start!?

In my current role I've had horrific experiences with management and higher ups.

The first time I knew it would be a problem: I was on a Java project that was due to go live within the month. The devs and PM on the project were all due to move on at the end. I was sitting next to the PM, and overheard him saying "we'll implement [important key feature] in hypercare"... I blew my top at him, then had my managers come and see if I was OK.

That particular project overran with me and the permanent devs having to implement the core features of the app for 6mo after everyone else had left.

I've had to be the bearer of bad news a lot.

I work now and then with the CTO, my worst with her:
We had implemented a prototype for the CEO of a sister company, he was chuffed with it. She said something like "why is it not on brand" - there was no brand, so I winged it and used a common design pattern that the CEO had suggested he would like with the sister company's colours and logo. The CTO said something like "the problem is we have wilful amateurs designing..." wilful amateurs. Having worked in web design since I was 12 I'm better than a wilful amateur, that one cut deep.

I've had loads with PMs recently, they basically go:

PM: we need this obscure set up.
Me & team: why not use common sense set up.
PM: I don't care, just do obscure set up.

The most recent was they wanted £250k infrastructure for something that was being done on an AWS TC2.small.

Also recently, and in another direction:

PM: we want this mobile app deploying to our internal MDM.
Us: we don't know what the hell it is, what is it!?
PM: it's [megacorp]'s survey filler app that adds survey results into their core cloud platform
Us: fair enough, we don't like writing form fillers, let us have a look at it.

*queue MITM plain text login, private company data being stored in plain text at /sdcard/ on android.

Us: really sorry guys, this is in no way secure.
Pm: *in a huff now because I took a dump on his doorstep*

I'll think of more when I can.

The story of how I knew I did the right thing leaving the start up I was an employee of.

It was a great place to work when I started, we had a plan and we were are working hard to make it. But pretty soon I realised that things weren't 100%. We kept altering the product and focusing on the wrong things. Our backlog grew faster than it was completed.

Pretty soon a launch planned in April was pushed back over and over again, until we finally released in November, and instead of being first on the market we were last.

We pivoted hard and I didn't believe in the new product so I quit.

The last week on the job I was finishing up some stuff and when our PO (who also was a programmer)was deploying the things I had done to production something went wrong. Now I had just integrated *his* new authorization service and I had a hunch it wasn't deployed. But he sent a message over slack with a bunch of code alterations that was the "problem". Along with some passive aggressive words about how I wasn't professional and didn't take ownership of the product.

I only added an error log that asked if the authorization service was deployed, and 10 minutes later he came up and said good job, no mention of what was fixed between now and then.

I have no regrets leaving that place.

I spent 2 years working on a streaming platform and it finally went live but i got sick of using angular so I rewrote the entire thing in 3 months. With a better frontend (sveltekit) and backend (cloudflare workers).

Adding new features takes hours, rather than days. And it's incredibly fun.

Deploying to digital ocean and AWS was fun and all but just a waste of time using K8s and docker.

Cloudflare pages, is the future.

Got in trouble yesterday for deploying to a QA environment and NOT sudo vimming a file to change the hardcoded email recipient... Maybe, the dev who wrote that file should use our configuration files instead of hardcoding it!

Deployments, a limerick:

there once was an ops guy from New York,
who was working on deploying a fork.
the docs were weak
the code memory leaked
in a half hour all of production was borked.

Until today, I had assumed deploying stuff to prod would NOT be one of my responsabilities in this company. Apparently that's not the case.

Had to deploy my code and pray it didn't break anything. Why is this a big deal at all?

Well you see, there is no repository. At all. No git, no svn, not even duplicate folders. No tests, no pipeline. Just a bunch of CPanels.

Had to manually copy files and folders from the development site to the production site and partially copy a database. "Just drag and drop" were the instructions I was given.

As if using CakePHP2, PHP5 and having to parse fucking Excel files wasn't bad enough, now I have to deal with one of the worst ways to deploy code.

Fuck it, I'm switching on the looking-for-job flag on linkedin.

Deploying at 2am to "minimize impact" because that's our time of lowest traffic

Me and the dba are slowly migrating parts of our JVM stack into .NET AND even tho I love and will always love Java and its ecosystem....I am glad.

IIS as a server is something that I actually look forward to since deploying shit to it is always a breeze

Installing ssl certs is a breeze

Everything is a fucking breeze

Before any of you cocksuckers say anything: this is my opinion only

My first job was adding features to a django app and deploying to Heroku. Learnt a lot from that startup in my home town Kakinada.

I HATE that deploying every change takes like 5-10 minutes. I get so distracted and have such issues working efficiently. GAAH

So... I take over this one ticket to test... the ticket mentions some visual component popping up when a button is clicked. It says there is a success and a failure message. The title of the story also mentions another functionality.

I start testing and some fellow QA asks me why I'm testing in this environment. Turns out, three people are sharing one environment and three different things are deployed...

I ask the dev whats going on because I heard there are multiple people deploying stuff...
He just tells me "oh, my changes are deployed I just checked".
I tell him that it's not about that but about communication and testing one thing at the time. Then I tell him, that I wouldn't test until his stuff is the only stuff there.

Some time later he hits me up again, now with the env to himself.

I test and quickly I see, that there is only the positive message even when I make sure that the backend is not reachable. I tell the dev what I found and he tells me "oh no, it's just the implementation of the popup thing, it's just frontend for now"...
I tell him, that the ticket should say so.
No answer for like 1-2 hours. Then I get an "ok".
End of the day.

Next day I come in and the fellow QA tells me, that the dev asked him to test the ticket.
I ask him if he changed anything about the scope of the ticket, he says no...
I'm like "ok... know what... begin testing and then tell him what I already told him".
So he's testing and then tells him again to update the scope.

Later in the daily the the dev's update is besically "they won't test my ticket..."

It would have taken him like 1 fucking minute to update the ticket...

The whole QA team was always trying to being helpful and even when the tickets where sometimes not 100% clear we always made it work... but now we are more and more going towards "MR does not meet ticketdescription, fix it" and "I don't care if its just a small thing... fix it and then come back to me"...

Seriously frustrating some times...

Deploying django in windows server 2019 using IIS. Why? Because client is a microsoft fanboy. Nothing is working till now.

Let's focus/master computer architectures, coding paradigms, datastructures. Everything comes after that...the problem with todays academics is that they are more focused on immediately deploying students to industry; theyre more focused on teaching specific frameworks and specific language instead of teaching how things work...i bet most students (at least in my country) are having troubles with endianess or encoding or even byte manipulation or what a thread is....If im going to be the teacher for example of an oop subject, ill let the student choose the language they want as long as the oop paradigm is intact ,it will be fine.. i dont friggin care whether you know vue or angular or swing if you dont even know what a callback is..

The datepicker saga

Part one

So I begin work on a page where user add their details, project is late, taking ages on this page

Nearly done, just need a component to allow users to put in some date of births. Look for react components.

Avoiding that one because fuck Bootstrap.

Ah-ha, that looks good, let's give it a go.

CSS doesn't exist, oh need copy it over from npm dist. Great it applied but...

... WTF it's tiny. Thought it was a problem with my zoom. Nope found the issue in github.com and it's something to do with using REM rather than EM or something, okay someone provided a solution, rather I saw a couple of solutions, after some hacking around I got it working and pasted it in the right location and yes, it's a reasonable size now.

Only it's a bit crap because it only allows scrolling 1 month at a time. No good. Hunting through the docs reveals several options to add year and month drop downs and allow them to be scrolled. Still a bit shit as it only shows certain years, figure I'd set the start date position somewhere at the average.

Wait. The up button on the scroll doesn't even show, it's just a blank 5px button. Mouse scroll doesn't work

Fucking...

... Bailing on that.

Part 2

Okay sod it I'll just make my own three drop down select boxes, day, month and year. Easy.

At this point I take full responsibility and cannot blame any third party. And kids, take this as a lesson to plan out your code fully and make no assumptions on the simplicity of the problem.

For some reason (of which I regretted much) I decided to abstract things so much I made an array of three objects for each drop down. Containing the information to pretty much abstract away the field it was dealing with. This sort of meta programming really screwed with my head, I have lines like the following:

[...].map(optionGroup =>
optionGroup.options[
parseInt(
newState[optionGroup.momentId]
, 10)
]
)...

But I was in too deep and had to weave my way through this kind of abstract process like an intrepid explorer chopping through a rain forest with a butter knife.

So I am using React and Redux, decided it was overkill to use Redux to control each field. Only trouble is of course when the user clicks one of the fields, it doesn't make sense in redux to have one of the three fields selected. And I wanted to show the field title as the first option. So I went against good practice and used state to keep track of the fields before they are handed off to the parent/redux. What a nightmare that was.

Possibly the most challenging part was matching my indices with moment.js to get the UI working right, it was such a meta mess when it just shouldn't have taken so stupidly long.

But, I begin to see the light at the end of this tunnel, it's slowly coming together. And when it all clicks into place I sit back and actually quite enjoy my abysmal attempt at clean and easy to read code.

Part 3

Ran the generated timestamp through a converter and I get the day before, oh yeah that's great

Seems like it's dependant on the timezone??!

Nope. Deploying. Bye. I no longer care if daylight savings makes you a day younger.

Lessions I learned so far from my first big node/npm project with tons of users:
1) If you didn't build something for a while, expect 3 hours of resolving version conflicts for every two weeks since the last build.
2) Even if the tests pass, run the containers on your own machine and make sure that the app doesn't randomly crash before deploying
3) Even if the app seemed to work on your own machine, run the tests again in an environment mimicking prod at most 15 minutes before replacing the running containers.
4) Even if all else indicates that the app will work, only ever deploy if you expect to be available within the 4 hours following a deployment.
5) Don't use shrinkwrap for anything other than locking every version down completely. A partial shrinkwrap will produce bugs that are dependent on the exact hour you built the app _and_ the shrinkwrap file, and therefore no one will ever have seen them other than you.
6) Avoid gyp, and generally try not to interface too much with anything that doesn't run on node. If parts of your solution use very different toolchains, your problems will be approximately proportional to the amount of code. And you'd be surprised just how much code you're running. (otherwise it's more logarithmic because the more code the less likely a new assumption is unique)
7) Do not update webpack or its plugins or anything they might call unless you absolutely need to
8) Containers are cool but the alpine ones are pretty much useless if you have even just one gyp module.
9) There's always another cache. To save yourself a lot of pain, include the build time in every file or its name that the browser can download, and compare these to a fresh build while debugging to assert that the bug is still present in the code you're reading
+1) Although it may look like it, SQLite is far from a simple solution because the code and the bindings aren't maintained. In fact, it'll probably be more time consuming than using a proper database.

Marketing team built out some changes in the staging environment using the CMS, didn't test it, submitted a ticket for cloning with the note that they only changed the content of one page. I check and it works fine, complete the clone. Two weeks go by and I get a ticket saying one of the pages isn't working, I check and it doesn't work because it only exist in staging. Turns out they were hoping to sneak one by me and deploy something that they were trying to get printed for shipping that day in their original request. So now I have to spend the next hour running test, getting approvals, and deploying that page. I need to finish my CI/CD for this site.

So I made a car configurator for a big car manufacturer.

it's working awesome on all devices except motherfucking chrome on ios.

The canvas does not resize completely after device rotation . and I can't even remote debug the shit.

So right now at 12 AM, alone in the office and deploying vorlonjs on Azure to remote debug the shit out of it.

Let's hope I can fix it.

It's 1:15 AM and I just got gome from work after 16 hours working on some really difficult mission critical things and deploying.
I think it's 16 hrs, my mind doesn't really work anymore. Good thing I drove home safe...

I was deploying a fix for a bug (for a hotly-anticipated feature) with a really strict time limit (there was literally a countdown clock). Our senior dev couldn't do it, and threw it out for the masses. I fixed it with about 1m30s left on the clock.

That felt pretty great.

Me: So we're deploying this today on prod.

Junior: Can you record the deployment steps for us so that we can deploy whenever you're unavailable?

Me: Seriously?

I liked their enthusiasm though.

Maybe it's just too early as these chaps don't even know the basic commands right now.

What y'all have on this?

What is the proper VLAN to use when deploying Raspberry Pi monitoring stations?

VLAN 314 of course.

"We have a rockstar react dev on our side"

*Me, after deploying my first react based app using CRA to bootstrap*

<_<

>_>

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
'I guess this is my life now'

Listen dude I get it, you've been in more of a Systems Admin role for a long time, you haven't really worked on a devlike team.

I can be patient I can be understanding. But when you break the build you need to fix it.

Yes I know you didn't change any of the files that are now failing, but you the pipeline is no longer deploying and so we can't fix anything.

Okay dude we are being prevented from deploying because you broke the build, you need to fix it. It's stopping everyone else.

DUDE FIX THE FLIPPING BUILD EVERYONE IS WAITING FOR YOU TO FIX THAT!

Seriously I know we should be patient with people learning new things, but some days it is difficult.

I've fallen in love with (unit) testing, it just saved my ass from deploying a broken version of my library because of a missing '!'

I got a bunch of newbies deploying to production this week. Should be fun watching everything BURN!

(I am on standby)

I have a confession: I produced a shit ton of wacky code...

The business guy in my team is super fucking bitchy about deploying to prod, while my codebase is a total mess. I could refactor it to use a much cleaner module, but I had to do it because we're running out of time. I spent half a day trying to refactor while failing miserably.

//FIXME: I will come back... or not.

Took over an open source project today. There's something quite scary deploying a fix to NuGet which has 18,000 downloads 😰

Deploying web apps is a bitch and a half. I need to learn how to dockerize my shit - spent all day trying to deploy a laravel app on a digital ocean instance and it didn’t even work. Wish my work ended after pushing to github.

I write code and deal with clients reporting bugs that are actually just misconfiguration or that are fixed in the latest release version, but they managed to forget deploying it for one particular separate service.

I just realized that I may be hard to fire because I create a lot of apps. All other devs on my team work on the same big projects and maybe share code more.

But I tend to be the only dev for a lot of my work. In addition to building and deploying a few standalone projects.... That no one else has used. I write usage and design docs but nobody reads those.

And one application is very complex, has many parts. It even took me a while to pick it up at first and I've been the only dev on it for years... So built a lot of things on top.

Today I was actually talking to the business team that uses it and they were like when is feature A, B, C going to be done. And I finally said, has to be one at a time bc I'm the only dev...

Though last week I did ask for some help to look into one of them while I worked on another more complex one but I gotta train them. And well their part involves only a small part of the entire app.

Ok so today marks one week of harrassing our client to deploy.
Finally she calls in today after agreeing to deploying tonight, and says "oh no! We tested it today, it's not ready, and we'll need this functionality on the backend tomorrow, thanks!"
So, because we don't really have a choice, we must dev a new functionality + API + interface for tomorrow.morning (it's 9PM right now)

what the fuck are "covariant" return types...
I've been using java since java exists through all different versions. Mostly for web development.

Today I discovered "covariant" return type. What a shitty name.
I think I used the concept even without being aware of it...maybe just -oh- because Eclipse is allowing or even suggesting it.

I honestly cannot develop without Eclipse suggestions.

But here I am, survived 30 here in the business, developing end-to-end web applications for thousand of customers and deploying them.

And failing stupid questions in moronic interviews. Fuck.

PS also I don't use Streams. sorry.

Any recommended reading material for someone deploying a go web application for the first time?

I am trying to see if I can deploy a go app into one of my institution's test linux servers. I would have one of the technicians create the server, so It doesn't really matter what it is, but lets say for argument's sake that the servers in question are either an ubuntu server or a red hat/centos server. Any recommendations before I dive in?

Deploying into linux containers (lxc) as of 2013 before docker even was da hype.

(Experience was a bit problematic tho, as it was in a highly virtualized environment whose backup would really badly kill the whole container every now and then: you could still ssh to the machine but with every access to the file system you'd lose your shell. and only the "echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq" would help to restart the box.)

Attempting to deploy my web application using Heroku. It throws me error code H14 so I add scale web=1 to the web dyno per their documentation. I get this console log thrown at me after attempting to deploy.

I'm starting to get pissed. I may end up just dumping this and deploying my node.js/java application straight to my Linux server.

Edit: Or better yet start learning to use this Docker thing I keep hearing about.