Yesterday, in a meeting with project stakeholders and a dev was demoing his software when an un-handled exception occurred, causing the app to crash.

Dev: “Oh..that’s weird. Doesn’t do that on my machine. Better look at the log”
- Dev looks at the log and sees the exception was a divide by zero error.
Dev: “Ohhh…yea…the average price calculation, it’s a bug in the database.”
<I burst out laughing>
Me: “That’s funny.”
<Dev manager was not laughing>
DevMgr: “What’s funny about bugs in the database?”
Me: “Divide by zero exceptions are not an indication of a data error, it’s a bug in the code.”
Dev: “Uhh…how so? The price factor is zero, which comes from a table, so that’s a bug in the database”
Me: “Jim, will you have sales with a price factor of zero?”
StakeholderJim: “Yea, for add-on items that we’re not putting on sale. Hats, gloves, things like that.”
Dev: “Steve, did anyone tell you the factor could be zero?”
DBA-Steve: “Uh...no…just that the value couldn’t be null. You guys can put whatever you want.”
DevMgr: “So, how will you fix this bug?”
DBA-Steve: “Bug? …oh…um…I guess I could default the value to 1.”
Dev: “What if the user types in a zero? Can you switch it to a 1?”
Me: “Or you check the factor value before you try to divide. That will fix the exception and Steve won’t have to do anything.”
<awkward couple of seconds of silence>
DevMgr: “Lets wrap this up. Steve, go ahead and make the necessary database changes to make sure the factor is never zero.”
StakeholderJim: “That doesn’t sound right. Add-on items should never have a factor. A value of 1 could screw up the average.”
Dev: “Don’t worry, we’ll know the difference.”
<everyone seems happy and leaves the meeting>

I completely lost any sort of brain power to say anything after Dev said that. All the little voices kept saying were ‘WTF? WTF just happened? No really…W T F just happened!?’ over and over. I still have no idea on how to articulate to anyone with any sort of sense about what happened. Thanks DevRant for letting me rant.

Frack he did it again.
In a meeting with the department mgr and going over a request feature *we already discussed ad nauseam* that wasn’t technically feasible (do-able, just not worth the effort)

DeptMgr: “I want to see the contents of web site A embedded in web site B”
Me: “I researched that and it’s not possible. I added links to the target APM dashboard instead.”
Dev: “Yes, it’s possible. Just use an IFrame.”
DeptMgr: “I thought so. Next sprint item …what’s wrong?…you look frustrated”
Me: “Um..no…well, I said it’s not possible. I tried it and it doesn’t work”
Dev: “It’s just an IFrame. They are made to display content from another site.”
Me: “Well, yes, from a standard HTML tag, but what you are seeing is rendered HTML from the content manager’s XML. It implemented its own IFrame under the hood. We already talked about it, remember?”
Dev: “Oh, that’s right.”
DeptMgr: “So it’s possible?”
Dev: “Yea, we’ll figure it out.”
Me: “No…wait…figure what out? It doesn’t work.”
Dev: “We can use a powershell script to extract the data from A and port it to B.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell, good…Next sprint item…”
Me: “Powershell what? We discussed not using powershell, remember?”
Dev: “It’s just a script. Not a big deal.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell sounds like a right solution. Can we move on? Next sprint item….are you OK? You look upset”
Me: “No, I don’t particularly care, we already discussed executing a powershell script that would have to cross two network DMZs. Bill from networking already raised his concern about opening another port and didn’t understand why we couldn’t click a link. Then Mike from infrastructure griped about another random powershell script running on his servers just for reporting. He too raised his concern about all this work to save one person one click. Am I the only one who remembers this meeting? I mean, I don’t care, I’ll do whatever you want, but we’ll have to open up the same conversations with Networking again.”
Dev: “That meeting was a long time ago, they might be OK with running powershell scripts”
Me: “A long time ago? It was only two weeks.”
Dev: “Oh yea. Anyway, lets update the board. You’ll implement the powershell script and I’ll …”
Me: “Whoa..no…I’m not implementing anything. We haven’t discussed what this mysterious powershell script is supposed to do and we have to get Mike and Bill involved. Their whole team is involved in the migration project right now, so we won’t see them come out into the daylight until next week.”
DevMgr: “What if you talk to Eric? He knows powershell. OK…next sprint item..”
Me: “Eric is the one who organized the meeting two weeks ago, remember? He didn’t want powershell scripts hitting his APM servers. Am I the only one who remembers any of this?”
Dev: “I’m pretty good with powershell, I’ll figure it out.”
DevMgr: “Good…now can we move on?”

GAAAHH! I WANT A FLAMETHROWER!!!

Ok…feel better, thanks DevRant.

[Client]
We've noticed we gave you the wrong product prices for our new online shop.

[Dev]
Yeah, just login to the backend and fix them.

[Client]
But we don't want to use your fancy backend, we'll be using anyway soon - we want EXCEL!
Could you send us an EXCEL, so we can fix that?
How much will this cost?

[Dev]
Sure... here you are.
Not that much, takes about an hour.

[Client]
Great, you'll hear from us in a few days.

(a few months later...)

[Client]
We've finally managed to update the EXCEL. And btw, we've also added a bunch of columns with product pictures and new properties, highlighted products to delete red, inserted some comments with manual instructions and basically destroyed the entire data structure of this table.

Before I forget... also make sure to get this finished today, we have to go live ASAP. Our marketing campaign is already live.

[Dev]
Well, I'm sorry to say this, but this is not possible.
I'm currently working on another project and it will take me hours to clean up the data you sent me, before even starting to build an import tool for the new data you provided. Better stop the campaign and I'll do my best to get this done by the end of the week. Also it may be a bit costly.

(angry client calls immediately...)

(dev transfers to manager...)

(client transfers to client's boss...)

[Manager]
Ok Dev, I think I was able to explain it to them. However, it would be great if you spend day and night to get this thing out ASAP.

[Dev]
No problem...
I'll just do it by hand to get this out immediately.

(few days later; nearly done, exhausted)

[Client]
Hey Dev, here's another EXCEL.
We've just noticed there were a bunch of errors in the previous one. Please use this instead...

Benefits of being a dev:
Wife: "I just wish I had a program that could organize all my shit for my [work-from-home outside sales] job. My old company had much better software."
One week later:
Me: "Here honey: I built a program that will organize your business leads, allow you to search them by city, street, phone number, it detects when you have multiple businesses with one owner, warns you of duplicate information before you add it, and you can now launch phone calls with the click of a button. I've also put an app on your phone that can send and receive data from the main program."
One hour later:
Giggity giggity.

“Fullstack dev continues to unleash his terror.”

We were in a meeting the other day discussing how we can integrate our React component with other existing systems easily — other React apps, Ionic, Angular, Vue and vanilla HTML.

All of a sudden, he opens his mouth.

Fullstack dev: So the thing is... it’s like...ummm... (he always starts after with these words. Always) since Ionic and Vue are both “angular-based”. It shouldn’t be a problem.

Me: excuse me! What do you mean vue is “angular-based”? What’s vue gotta do with angular?

Fullstack dev: You need angular installed to run vue apps and you have data binding in vue and in angular.

Me: (fuck me dead) I don’t know what that means, but I know what the Rock is cookin’. (My exact words in the meeting)

They flew him in from India and they keep extending his stay. He’s been working on the project for 2+ years now.

More to come!

Manager: Why did you clear the data from the database? The client is now specifically requesting it and we don’t have it anymore!

Dev: You told me to.

Manager: Well why did you listen? It’s obvious now that that data was very important and should have been kept!

Dev: Last time you told me to do something that wasn’t a good idea I tried to explain why and told me not to question you ever again and that doing so was “disrespectful” and then threatened to have me fired. So now I just go along with what you say and let you suffer the consequences of not listening.

Manager: Well don’t do that then! It’s obviously not working very well! It’s ok to disagree with me you just have to make sure that what you think is something I agree with!

Dev: …

User: *Clicks on staging environment*

Giant Warning Dialog: YOU ARE CURRENTLY ENTERING THE STAGING ENVIRONMENT

Users: Ok

App: *Completely different colour, I’m talking bright unsightly yellow*

User: Ok

Giant Yellow and Red Flashing Banner at the Top of the Screen: WARNING YOU ARE CURRENTLY USING STAGING, THIS AREA IS FOR TESTING ONLY

User: The production environment sure is acting strange today. It’s a weird colour and I don’t recognize any of the data, it’s all just dummy filler data. I better create a ticket for the dev team to check o—….. no wait I’ll send an email CC everyone including the CEO and sound the alarm production is currently down and filled with giant warning messages.

Manager: OH MY GOD PRODUCTION IS DOWN DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THIS??? WHAT THE FUCK COULD THESE WARNING MESSAGES BE THAT’S ONLY SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN ON STAGING! THE CEO IS BREATHING DOWN MY NECK YOU NEED TO GET THIS FIXED IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!

Dev: …

!dev

const children = {
length: 1,
data: [{
name: "noah",
gender: "male"}]
};

children.length++;
children.data.push({
name: "mina",
gender: "female"
});

const happy = true;

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

Interviewer: So are you familiar with our company and what we do?

Dev: I looked at your website, looks like you build tools for managing restaurants.

Interviewer: No. That’s not even close.

Dev: ?

Interviewer: What we do is create an ecosystem of integrated data centres all orchestrated for immediate stakeholder utilization.

Dev: But the product itself…. it’s a user interface for tracking inventory. Of like…. burgers…. and bottles of wine.

Interviewer: It’s not a product! It’s a data……habitat!!

Dev: …

Dev: So does that make your users animals?

Interviewer: 😡. Unfortunately it looks like you do not see our vision and would not be a good fit for this role.

Dev: Agreed.

So I was hired about 4 months or so in this companty, we will name it 'Derp & Co.'

The first task they want me to do was to 'clean' an android app that, for what they told me:

- Previous dev fired. said that tasks have been done but totally a lie.
- Took a fully week of 2 fellows coworkers to 'undo' the mess.
- And for the last but not least, zero documentation, like ZERO.

So, I clone the repo, install android studio, blah blah blah, get hands to the pile of code and jesus...

- The whole app was working with a gargantuan json, there was no use of POJOs at all. Objects are for normies.
- A masive copy/paste code, like 'I will need this here, crtl-c... ctrl-v, DONE!'
- Threads are free, isn't it? let's just put a thread whenever I desire to make an HTTP request and not reuse code at all.

So... with this on mind, my first task is to make proper objects:
- Coworker: 'Sorry dev, we don't have documentation for this, you must debug the code to se what the server will send to you'.
- Me: 'Real?'

Shit... ok. So I first try to figure out how the hell is made my gargantuan json. A month was entirely lost to unravel this data and implement Objects, improve their code, reuse code, etc. but at the very end:

- coworker: 'Good job dev, when the POJOs are done, we can focus on the next task, whe have to define a new DATA MODEL because the one we are using now is not good at all'.

*note: the app is on production and working with all the previous 'features' and today it still on use on some enviroments.

- Me: 'Wait... this is a joke, now you want to define new data models? This should have been done in first place!' <WTF face>
- Coworker: 'I don't think so dev, Mr. boss have this list with things to improve on the app an this is the order of do the tasks'.

Mr. boss is on vacations, two days after he came back:

- Mr boss: 'Coworker said that you have been working with POJOs, is that right?'
- Me: 'Yes'
- Mr boss: 'Why? Did not see the need of a new data model?'
- Me: 'I told that to him, but he insist on "the order" of the list.
- Mr. boss <facepalm>

This is one of the few tales i have from 'Derp & Co.'

PS: Sorry if i made a mistake on writing, english is not my first language and maybe I have done some mistakes.

Newspaper: This CEO is one of the top entrepreneurs in the country, a true tech visionary shaping the future.

--- 3 months previous ---

Lead dev: O2 have said they are will pre-install the app on all their Androids but they need documentation from us.

CEO: documentation? on what?

Lead dev: Our unit test coverage, bugs found / fixed, security scan results, performance assessment, if and where its storing any data etc.

CEO: Ah were not doing any of that crap, bloody unit tests, its not necessary, tell them no.

lead dev: ..... eh ok

O2: *approved*

... true visionary, well done to everyone involved.

A customer did send a 3GB+ .txt file to the database guy in my office. He (senior dev) starts ranting about how he should handle this since his tools failed to do whatever he had to with this data.
After seeing him struggle some time I did a short search (I'm apprentice since 4 months) and then told him to use "split -l".

Best: the tool that works for the job.
Worst: the tool that doesn’t.

Example: Ruby is great for scripts and web dev, but simply doesn’t work for graphics engines.

Example: SQL is great for fetching data (etc.), but it is absolutely terrible for business logic.

Example: XSLT is great for lowering your faith and your will to live, but it is absolutely awful for literally every other purpose.

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

I'm convinced code addiction is a real problem and can lead to mental illness.

Dev: "Thanks for helping me with the splunk API. Already spent two weeks and was spinning my wheels."
Me: "I sent you the example over a month ago, I guess you could have used it to save time."
Dev: "I didn't understand it. I tried getting help from NetworkAdmin-Dan, SystemAdmin-Jake, they didn't understand what you sent me either."
Me: "I thought it was pretty simple. Pass it a query, get results back. That's it"
Dev: "The results were not in a standard JSON format. I was so confused."
Me: "Yea, it's sort-of JSON. Splunk streams the result as individual JSON records. You only have to deserialize each record into your object. I sent you the code sample."
Dev: "Your code didn't work. Dan and Jake were confused too. The data I have to process uses a very different result set. I guess I could have used it if you wrote the class more generically and had unit tests."
<oh frack...he's been going behind my back and telling people smack about my code again>
Me: "My code wouldn't have worked for you, because I'm serializing the objects I need and I do have unit tests, but they are only for the internal logic."
Dev:"I don't know, it confused me. Once I figured out the JSON problem and wrote unit tests, I really started to make progress. I used a tuple for this ... functional parameters for that...added a custom event for ... Took me a few weeks, but it's all covered by unit tests."
Me: "Wow. The way you explained the project was; get data from splunk and populate data in SQLServer. With the code I sent you, sounded like a 15 minute project."
Dev: "Oooh nooo...its waaay more complicated than that. I have this very complex splunk query, which I don't understand, and then I have to perform all this parsing, update a database...which I have no idea how it works. Its really...really complicated."
Me: "The splunk query returns what..4 fields...and DBA-Joe provided the upsert stored procedure..sounds like a 15 minute project."
Dev: "Maybe for you...we're all not super geniuses that crank out code. I hope to be at your level some day."
<frack you ... condescending a-hole ...you've got the same seniority here as I do>
Me: "No seriously, the code I sent would have got you 90% done. Write your deserializer for those 4 fields, execute the stored procedure, and call it a day. I don't think the effort justifies the outcome. Isn't the data for a report they'll only run every few months?"
Dev: "Yea, but Mgr-Nick wanted unit tests and I have to follow orders. I tried to explain the situation, but you know how he is."
<fracking liar..Nick doesn't know the difference between a unit test and breathalyzer test. I know exactly what you told Nick>
Dev: "Thanks again for your help. Gotta get back to it. I put a due date of April for this project and time's running out."

APRIL?!! Good Lord he's going to drag this intern-level project for another month!

After he left, I dug around and found the splunk query, the upsert stored proc, and yep, in about 15 minutes I was done.

You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.

I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.

I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.

Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.

I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.

But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.

He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.

Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.

The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.

Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.

I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.

Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it.

Semi-colon:- c'mon babes!
PYTHON:- I don't give a fuck to you!;)

A billion dollar company just sent me a nice email template.

Probably the dev missed a tutorial.

DEV 101

NEVER USE PRODUCTION DATA FOR DEVELOPMENT

> 3 hour long mandatory online cybersecurity training
> Preaches that the company is very secure and the only risk of being “hacked” is if employees post company data on social media
> oksure.tar.gz
> Bored out of my mine
> Open dev console
> JSON continually getting sent to backend
> Simple structure and human readable fields including {complete: false}
> Open postman
> {complete: true}
> Send
> 200 response
> Refresh page
> Course complete
> :’ )

Muppets.

Back in the day when I was a junior developer, I somehow got hired by this guy who asked me to code his entire platform from scratch. I was being paid a junior dev salary, being asked to do senior dev work, and unfortunately I needed the money, so I didn't want to turn the job down. So I did what any junior dev would do in the situation... I decided to experiment and ended up with an insanely inefficient codebase.

For some stupid reason I thought that a good DB model would be to pull one record from the DB at a time, and then just repeat the method in a loop as needed. Keep in mind I was a self-taught junior dev. The backend worked great during development, and after 3 months of developing we decided to add a lot of data in the DB for further testing, and... you guessed it... the platform slowed down like shit!

Moral of the story... u get what you pay for, so hire great talent and pay them well! And also that self-taught junior devs don't know that the f@*k they are doing sometimes.

“Your time zone is not my concern” - manager of the backend team

I asked if there’s another way for us to get test data into QA. That doesn’t involve us staying on until 9pm to get a backend dev to modify the db manually, everyday.

The worst thing I’ve seen a dev do is create a social sharing platform that sells its user data to the highest bidder and then asks for forgiveness after the privacy horse is out of the barn.

Dear backend dev:
No data is not an error for fuck sake. Don't want 404, or messages if the search criteria filters out all values. Give me a empty array.
Is this hard to understand that we need a team meeting to discuss?
Godamit

Dev: Hey, I need you to see something.
Client: ok
Dev: this is the models of those reports you need
Client: ok, wait, what is that number? This is wrong, we can't...
Dev: hey, calm down, this is not the production, it's just fake database!
Client: ah, ok.
(5 minutes of explantion)
Dev: so, what do you think?
Client: just one point, that data is very very wrong, we need to change this ASAP!

For a week+ I've been listening to a senior dev ("Bob") continually make fun of another not-quite-a-senior dev ("Tom") over a performance bug in his code. "If he did it right the first time...", "Tom refuses to write tests...that's his problem", "I would have wrote the code correctly ..." all kinds of passive-aggressive put downs. Bob then brags how without him helping Tom, the application would have been a failure (really building himself up).
Bob is out of town and Tom asked me a question about logging performance data in his code. I look and see Bob has done nothing..nothing at all to help Tom. Tom wrote his own JSON and XML parser (data is coming from two different sources) and all kinds of IO stream plumbing code.
I use Visual Studio's feature create classes from JSON/XML, used the XML Serialzier and Newtonsoft.Json to handling the conversion plumbing.
With several hundred of lines gone (down to one line each for the XML/JSON-> object), I wrote unit tests around the business transaction, integration test for the service and database access. Maybe couple of hours worth of work.
I'm 100% sure Bob knew Tom was going in a bad direction (maybe even pushing him that direction), just to swoop in and "save the day" in front of Tom's manager at some future point in time.

This morning's standup ..
Boss: "You're helping Tom since Bob is on vacation? What are you helping with?"
Me: "I refactored the JSON and XML data access, wrote initial unit and integration tests. Tom will have to verify, but I believe any performance problem will now be isolated to the database integration. The problem Bob was talking about on Monday is gone. I thought spending time helping Tom was better than making fun of him."
<couple seconds of silence>
Boss:"Yea...want to let you know, I really, really appreciate that."

Bob, put people first, everyone wins.

Dev: We need a better name than “Data” for this class. It’s used for displaying a set of tiles with certain coordinates so maybe TileMap would be a bit more declarative?

Manager: No I don’t like that. Data is perfectly fine, this class is for managing data so it’s perfectly declarative you just need to get better at reading code. If you have to change it then DataObject or DataObjectClass might be a bit more specific.

Dev: …

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 😊

a dude just DROPPED the whole Fu**ing mongodb cluster. like Right Now.

multiple databases, expanding multiple projects.

fortunately in dev. but dunno how much data is recoverable.

Client: We are tired of having to go only to specific users to get things actioned, we need everyone to be given admin access so that we can get work done efficiently

Dev: Highly do not recommend that *outlines the likely consequences*.

Client: We don’t care, we DEMAND you do this. We’ll make sure everyone is careful.

Dev: Ok but I warned you. Please submit this request in writing.

Client: Ok, not sure why you would need that. I told you everything would be fine.

*Not even two days later*

Client: HELP!!! OUR DATA IS NOW COMPLETELY MESSED UP. WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WOULD HAVE CAUSED THIS IT’S AS IF EVERYONE IS RANDOMLY DOING WHATEVER THEY WANT HOWEVER THEY WANT IN ORDER TO SUITE THEIR OWN NEEDS. IT MAKES NO SENSE HOW THIS HAS OCCURRED. I TOLD EVERYONE SPECIFICALLY TO NOT CAUSE ISSUES!!! WE NEED THIS FIXED A.S.A.P!!!!!!

Dev: …

The nightmare continues.

Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.

It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.

More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”

Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)

Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.

Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.

On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!

Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Me: Are you writing data to the disk?
Them: No
Me: Are you sure?
Them: Maybe a little
Me: The disk on that machine is full
Them: Actually I'm writing gigabytes of duplicated data to a random location, use some of it and delete none of it
Me:
Them:

Makes you wanna punch a dev.

That moment you realise why you enjoy the dev life again.

It's been a long time since I've had a solid day of coding, just coding..., no meetings, no wild requests, no crazy issues, no data fixing because someone can't type a number correctly, just me, myself and that keyboard going on a field trip of quality coding time again.

Ah, it's a good day to end the week on!

Developer came to our area to rant a bit about a problem he was having with Xamarin. A particular android device was receiving a java runtime error trying to de-serialize data from a WCF contract. What he found was not to use WCF and use WebAPI (or a simple REST service that sent back/forth JSON).

When he proposed changing the service (since the data transport didn’t really matter, he could plug the assembly into a WebAPI project in less than an hour), the dev manager shot down the idea pointing him to our service standard that explicitly stated no WebAPI (it’s in bold letters).

I showed him the date on the “standard”, which was 5 years ago. We have versioning on our sharepoint server, so I also him my proposal notes on the change request document (almost two years before that) stating we should stop using WCF in favor of REST based web standards. Dev manager at the time had wrote in his comment “Will never use REST. Enterprise developers prefer RPC.”
He just about fell over laughing when I showed him this gif.

Unaware that this had been occurring for while, DBA manager walks into our cube area:

DBAMgr-Scott: "DBA-Kelly told me you still having problems connecting to the new staging servers?"
Dev-Carl: "Yea, still getting access denied. Same problem we've been having for a couple of weeks"
DBAMgr-Scott: "Damn it, I hate you. I got to have Kelly working with data warehouse project. I guess I've got to start working on fixing this problem."
Dev-Carl: "Ha ha..sorry. I've checked everything. Its definitely something on the sql server side."
DBAMgr-Scott: "I guess my day is shot. I've got to talk to the network admin, when I get back, lets put our heads together and figure this out."
<Scott leaves>
Me: "A permissions issue on staging? All my stuff is working fine and been working fine for a long while."
Dev-Carl: "Yea, there is nothing different about any of the other environments."
Me: "That doesn't sound right. What's the error?"
Dev-Carl: "Permissions"
Me: "No, the actual exception, never mind, I'll look it up in Splunk."
<in about 30 seconds, I find the actual exception, Win32Exception: Access is denied in OpenSqlFileStream, a little google-fu and .. >
Me: "Is the service using Windows authentication or SQL authentication?"
Dev-Carl: "SQL authentication."
Me: "Switch it to windows authentication"
<Dev-Carl changes authentication...service works like a charm>
Dev-Carl: "OMG, it worked! We've been working on this problem for almost two weeks and it only took you 30 seconds."
Me: "Now that it works, and the service had been working, what changed?"
Dev-Carl: "Oh..look at that, Dev-Jake changed the connection string two weeks ago. Weird. Thanks for your help."
<My brain is screaming "YOU NEVER THOUGHT TO LOOK FOR WHAT CHANGED!!!"
Me: "I'm happy I could help."

At the company I worked for earlier, they'd blocked two USB ports citing security policies. The third USB, was unblocked because the system admin didn't know a laptop can have more than 2 USBs .
Gigabit LAN was open.
They just wanted you to copy stuff at higher speed, I think.
If you think blocking a couple of USB ports is going to stop a dev from copying data, well either you're unbearably stupid, or think too less of your devs. It is just gonna hinder their productivity, nothing else.

Alternative job if I weren‘t a dev?

Politician creating new dev jobs by passing annoying new data privacy laws each year.

I attended a data science meetup recently. There were many suits walking around the corridors because of some startup night taking place at the same time.

After some time a guy appeared infront of me, telling me he was afraid at first that this was a meetup for suits only. Until he saw all the dev and rock stickers on my notebook. He was reliefed that there was some nerd at least.

He asked what I was doing so I told him about my startup about optimization of heat generation plants jada jada. I asked him back.

He replied, "Well, I'm also part of some small startup. Among the things we develop processors and stuff. It's called Intel."

Well dude, that was nicely played. I had a lot of fun that evening.

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

Me as Junior Dev doing mysql first time, specifically INSERT test data to test db, sucess on first try.

My Senior co-worker says: WOW, Baby's first INSERT...... that sounds so wrong out of context xD

Yep. So the dev teams boss says it's fine to run a production environment on a single Windows instance with the db on that same instance, which they already totally lost once from a reboot after an auto update before I came along tasked with fixing the cluster fuck they created.

This from a man who somehow runs a dev team while using gmail via the web because he can't use an email client, uses email to track tasks but can't because they get lost amongst his 3000+ unread emails, has a screen dirtier than a hookers vag on half priced Tuesday, and got a new laptop but had to get his daughter to set it up and transfer his data because he couldn't.

But ok... you have a degree, You must know what you're doing.
It's ok though, I'll keep covering your incompetent ass while you keep raping the company because no one listens.
Peoples ignorance and arrogance astounds me.

Dev: Can you please tell me why you changed this?
Me: Because we need to handle permissions in the app. The quickest way of doing it, according to the docs, is [insert change log here]
Dev: But we can just check for the user's token.
Me: That's not exactly a permission, because...
Dev: I was only showing the information related to the user according to their token.
Me: I understand. But that means you're filtering data, not authorising users to access it. If a user is logged in, but changes query parameters, they can still access data they shouldn't be able to.
Dev: Whatevs.

Le me then proceeds to try to push my changes (that took the whole day to implement), gets a "you need to pull first" message from git, doesn't understand why, logs onto GitHub and realises dev has implemented their "permissions".

I was the one responsible for making those changes. Le dev was meant to be doing other things.

How do I even begin to explain?

Been looking for a part time game dev job to pass the time during summer break, got a reply from a guy.

This part came up some time in the middle of our conversation:

Me: So, do you have a version control system in place?

Him: Excuse me, a what?

Me: A Version control system, like Git.

Him: Ow, what's that?

Me: It is a way to host projects in a more productive way for two or more people. It allows us to share our work more easily and work on the same file without overwriting and losing data.

Him: Ow, like Dropbox?

He was developing the game solo thus far and no idea such thing existed.
:/

ChartsProblem

My PM once inserted test data directly into the dev database [ We do have an admin panel ].

Took screenshots of what was not working properly with the imagined data.

Posted them on the WhatsApp group.

Greets me in the fucking morning with "I WROTE TEST CASES YESTERDAY".

FTW

A dev team has been spending the past couple of weeks working on a 'generic rule engine' to validate a marketing process. The “Buy 5, get 10% off” kind of promotions.

The UI has all the great bits, drop-downs, various data lookups, etc etc..

What the dev is storing the database is the actual string representation FieldA=“Buy 5, get 10% off” that is “built” from the UI.

Might be OK, but now they want to apply that string to an actual order. Extract ‘5’, the word ‘Buy’ to apply to the purchase quantity rule, ‘10%’ and the word ‘off’ to subtract from the total.

Dev asked me:

Dev: “How can I use reflection to parse the string and determine what are integers, decimals, and percents?”
Me: “That sounds complicated. Why would you do that?”
Dev: “It’s only a string. Parsing it was easy. First we need to know how to extract numbers and be able to compare them.”
Me: “I’ve seen the data structures, wouldn’t it be easier to serialize the objects to JSON and store the string in the database? When you deserialize, you won’t have to parse or do any kind of reflection. You should try to keep the rule behavior as simple as possible. Developing your own tokenizer that relies on reflection and hoping the UI doesn’t change isn’t going to be reliable.”
Dev: “Tokens!...yea…tokens…that’s what we want. I’ll come up with a tokenizing algorithm that can utilize recursion and reflection to extract all the comparable data structures.”
Me: “Wow…uh…no, don’t do that. The UI already has to map the data, just make it easy on yourself and serialize that object. It’s like one line of code to serialize and deserialize.”
Dev: “I don’t know…sounds like magic. Using tokens seems like the more straightforward O-O approach. Thanks anyway.”

I probably getting too old to keep up with these kids, I have no idea what the frack he was talking about. Not sure if they are too smart or I’m too stupid/lazy. Either way, I keeping my name as far away from that project as possible.

MAINTENANCE OF STACKOVERFLOW PLANNED
SHARE TO YOUR NEAREST DEV FRIENDS

Stackoverflow and its relative partners will be closed for two days due to maintenance, new design, and moving server infrastructure from United States to 1km below the Switzerland Alps for extra layers of security. This decision was made by the recent CloudFlare data leak.
Now our servers will be able to handle data leaks because even though the data was leaked, it will fill the empty places in the rocks resulting inaccessible from attackers.
Stackoverflow and its relative partners' maintenance estimated time is February 29 - 30. We will try to finish as fast as possible and bring you guys the best experience. If the maintenance delayes, we will tweet via @StackStatus or post details in our status blog.
Thank you for your support and have a happy day.
Best regards,
Stack Exchange team

Client: i'd like to develop for this particular device named the hololens. And i want 2 of those to communicate over LAN as well (holo lense specific data)
Dev team: If you can provide us with 2 holo lenses to try some stuff out, we can do that.
Client: Well i only got one but i need that for my presentations to my clients. Can't you just research something and make it happen without the hardware?

And that is the story of how we now have to do something for hardware we do not have any of. FML.

Me:
Totally riffing to my new playlist....
the ideas are just flowing.....
Code flying...
changing in my brain....
I think I've got I might have it.....
...... RING RING ITS THE MOTHERFUCKING BOSS,
Boss:
Why is the whole website down?

Me: WTF, looks fine here, all logs are clear.

Boss: I just got an email saying the whole thing is fucked. Stop everything and fix it now.

Me: but we just agreed dev is taking priority over any support issues within sla and I've checked from everywhere there are no issues, just data issues probably from user error.

Boss: Just get it back and figure it out!!!!! Why are you being difficult?

Me: okay whatever, let's patch each of these shits.

COULDVE SENT THIS ANYWHERE BUT NOW MY IDEA IS GOOOONEEE!!!!!! NULL FUCKING DATA FIELD ON A SINGLE FUCKING EMAIL....FRAAAAACKKK THIS

Any bikers around here?

I recently bought my first motor bike ( super cheap ) and I'm excited to add some enhancements to it like GPS logging and collect relevant data about my bike.

Have you don't anything similar to your ride? I would like to put my Dev skills and improve my bike as a hobby.

The first time i made my own electron app, and saw it working and displaying live data the exact way i wanted it to be doing it.

At the same time, it was the first time i felt like been a real dev in all meanings.

Manager: We have a new equity survey from HR that is ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY. Anyone who doesn’t fill it out will be severely reprimanded for being against diversity in the workplace. We need this data in order to ensure we have the ABSOLUTELY EXACT ratio of EVERY minority so that we can show the people that we do not discriminate against ANYBODY for ANYTHING. One of the problems with hiring new people is that most people we want to hire turn out to be white and we are absolutely not allowed to hire any more white people because we are over the quota for white people. Now there’s a loophole to this, if that white person belongs to some sub-minority like they are muslim or gay or something like that it’s totally cool and we can show people we don’t discriminate on these things when making employment decisions!

Dev: That’s…not wh—

Mandatory Survey: Please select your sexual preferences and/or religion from the dropdown below.

Dev: jesus christ.

How do I know when I’m ready for a junior dev job? Currently I’m very familiar with syntax rules, data structure, I even created my first p2p app and I’m feeling more comfortable with server side programming and handling dependencies.

But I can’t like code blindfolded and I’m very slow and have to think very deeply and concentrate very hard before doing any minor thing.

How do I know??

My car stopped working.
I thought of having a look. Opened the bonnet.

"GDPR"

!dev - cybersecurity related.

This is a semi hypothetical situation. I walked into this ad today and I know I'd have a conversation like this about this ad but I didn't this time, I had convo's like this, though.

*le me walking through the city centre with a friend*
*advertisement about a hearing aid which can be updated through remote connection (satellite according to the ad) pops up on screen*

Friend: Ohh that looks usefu.....
Me: Oh damn, what protocol would that use?
Does it use an encrypted connection?
How'd the receiving end parse the incoming data?
What kinda authentication might the receiving end use?
Friend: wha..........
Me: What system would the hearing aid have?
Would it be easy to gain RCE (Remote Code Execution) to that system through the satellite connection and is this managed centrally?
Could you do mitm's maybe?
What data encoding would the transmissions/applications use?
Friend: nevermind.... ._________.

Cybersecurity mindset much...!

I hired a coder to write a WordPress plugin on my dev server. He no longer works for me and is unreachable. The plugin does most of what it needs to do. But when I dig into the code and the database to find what should be obvious bits of code that do obvious things? None of that code is found. Not even with a recursive directory keyword search for that should be easy to find like CSS class names and IDs. Even the data that comes from the database and that I see on the screen is not actually present in the database!!! Yet it all works. I'm pretty sure at this point the code and data reside in a parallel dimension only the coder can get to. How do I debug code that doesn't actually exist?!

Last week I was erasing a 2Gb USB thumb while copying some really important shit to my backup disk. I look at the terminal and see it's taking a lot of time to did zeroes on dev/sdb.
Then I realized that dev/sdb is the backups drive and I just erased the firsts sectors of my only fucking backup.
It's ok, I said, let's see what can TestDisk do for me. And it only could find an empty sad partition that had useless shit on it. Whdd couldn't even find the drive. Cat and dd vomited 160Gb of nothing to a file that couldn't be read. I was lost, because I failed doing something I'm really good at. And I did it because I was to stupid to check fstab...
It's the very first time I couldn't recover data, so I'm thinking about delete "Data recovery" from my resume skills and put "Data cleaning. Really effective. I can send you 160Gb of pure horse shit to prove it" instead.

Dev: I think I just deleted data I shouldn't have. Can you do a rollback?
Me: No, I'm a DBA, I don't touch data. Did you commit?
Dev: Yes, I committed.
Me: Your data is gone.
Dev: But don't you guys do backups?
Me: We backup the Prod servers. We only back up Dev on request. Did you request a backup in Dev?
Dev: No.
Me: ...
Dev: The Testers are going to be pissed.

<just got out of this meeting>
Mgr: “Can we log the messages coming from the services?”
Me: “Absolutely, but it could be a lot of network traffic and create a lot of noise. I’m not sure if our current logging infrastructure is the right fit for this.”
Senior Dev: “We could use Log4Net. That will take care of the logging.”
Mgr: “Log4Net?…Yea…I’ve heard of it…Great, make it happen.”
Me: “Um…Log4Net is just the client library, I’m talking about the back-end, where the data is logged. For this issue, we want to make sure the data we’re logging is as concise as possible. We don’t want to cause a bottleneck inside the service logging informational messages.”
Mgr: “Oh, no, absolutely not, but I don’t know the right answer, which is why I’ll let you two figure it out.”
Senior Dev: “Log4Net will take care of any threading issues we have with logging. It’ll work.”
Me: “Um..I’m sure…but we need to figure out what we need to log before we decide how we’re logging it.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, but if we log to SQL database, it will scale just fine.”
Mgr: “A SQL database? For logging? That seems excessive.”
Senior Dev: “No, not really. Log4Net takes care of all the details.”
Me: “That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to set up an entire sql database infrastructure to log data.”
Senior Dev: “Yea…probably right. We could use ElasticSearch or even Redis. Those are lightweight.”
Mgr: “Oh..yea…I’ve heard good things about Redis.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, and it runs on Linux and Linux is free.”
Mgr: “I like free, but I’m late for another meeting…you guys figure it out and let me know.”
<mgr leaves>
Me: “So..Linux…um…know anything about administrating Redis on Linux?”
Senior Dev: ”Oh no…not a clue.”

It was all I could do from doing physical harm to another human being.
I really hate people playing buzzword bingo with projects I’m responsible for.

Only good piece is he’s not changing any of the code.

One thing I've noticed about devRant is the ratio of web dev/mobile dev posts to database/architecture/big data dev posts. There's A LOT of you web peeps out there, and not enough data dudes, which I guess justifies my constant demand, salary and lack of competition. Just an observation.

A popular social media website in my country (which my friends and I were working on it's new design) was hacked and everyone on the dev side of the website was invited to the ministry of communications, believing we were going to discuss security of user data. The other guys (working on the back-end) were friends with the CEO (if you want to call it that) and naturally came to the meeting. They started to talk about the girls of their city. Meanwhile about 1.2 million user data encrypted with MD5 was out there.

I'm a software developer. Last week I spent half a day teaching a "Senior Data Scientist" how to use git branches. I spent the other half a day teaching him how to use Jira. Now I'm being told that the dev team isn't raising enough Pull Requests. FML

Just discovered a major bug in a frontend app of ours that might have been collecting wrong data in a form for months already :)

That is what happens when you put a back end Dev to do front end and back end while demanding rework every fucking 2 days for 9 months straight.

Should I actually look into getting a dev job..?

*I have a high school diploma (graduated three years early)
*College dropout (3-4 months, Computer Science - Personal Reasons)
*No prior work experience.
*Good textural communication skills, poor verbal communication skills.
*Currentally unemployed. (NEET :P)

*I have extensive personal experience with Java, and Python. Some Lua. Knowledge of data generation, parsing, Linux, Windows, Terminal(cmd & bash), & Encryption(Ciphers).
*Math, but very little algebra/geometry (though, could easily improve these).
*Work best under preasure.

Remote only.

Think anyone would hire me..?

Didn't had to fix anything (so far). But took my dev laptop to show all the projects I've been working on to the dad of my girlfriend and he showed me his projects.
He's not mainly a dev, but an electrical ingenieur. He designs his own pcb boards (with 8bit processors on them, as "that's more than enough power to do almost anything!") and then programs that stuff with basic (he writes his own firmware for it).
He also creates desktop application to get data off the devices using Delphi.

Love that guy and have a shittln of respect for him!

When the department’s large plotter printer broke down, the users demanded they still be able to execute their large reports. The area manager understood reality, if we are waiting on parts, not a lot we can do, but one developer decided to re-write the report/application as a web/.asp application. Mind you, he wasn’t a web developer, mostly VB experience, so the ‘report’ executed the same queries and filled up simple html tables. Did it work? Sort of. The output had none of the specialized formatting like headers, grouping, summary calculations, etc. Since the users could see the data in the web browser and scroll left/right, they were OK with the temporary fix. When I heard this:
Me: “You do know the application could output the report in HTML exactly the way it prints to the printer. All we would have to do enable that feature in the application.”
Dev: “Yea, but I thought it would be cool to do it as a web app.”
Me: “OK, but we should just update the app.”
Dev: “Um...that is going to be difficult, the boss liked my idea so much, he wanted the report replaced with my asp application. I deleted the application from source control and from the network. Sorry.”
Me: “OMFG!…tell me you make a backup!”
Dev: “Ha!...no…boss said you would fight innovation. Web is the future.”
Me: ”What is going to happen when the printer is fixed!? Users are going to flip”
Dev: “Oh, we didn’t think of that. Oh well, that’s your problem now.”
Me: “WTF? My problem?”
Dev: “Yea, you are moving to the team responsible for those legacy applications, since innovation really isn’t your thing. I just got promoted to senior developer.”

mangodb's rant reminded me of smth.. Folks from my country might remember this story.

So we have a national e-health system. Millions have been invested, half of the money have never reached the project [disappeared smwhr in between] and its quality is not shiny. It works, sometimes even fast enough. But boy does it have bugs... Let's not get into that. It's politics.

So some time ago one IT guy spotted a bug that allowed him to get sensitive info of other patients. He informed e-health folks and waited for a fix. He waited for a few weeks but the fix had never been released. So he published his findings in soc media [yepp.. Stupid move]. That caused a national scandal. Not to mention he had been pressed with charges.

That guy and our health minister were invited in one of the tv debates. The guy was asked to explained how he found all this sensitive data. And he explained that he hit f12 in his browser, opened a network tab, issued a network request by clicking smth in the webpage analysed received data in the dev tools.

The minister looked somewhat happy, maybe a lil proud of himself - a person who has a "gotcha!" moment has that very glow he had. And he said: "what you did there was obvious hacking. I reckon you should know that true developers do not do those things you have just explained to us" [he was talking about dev tools].

I died inside a little bit.

Thank God the week 233 rants are over - was getting sick of elitist internet losers.

The worst security bug I saw was when I first started work as a dev in Angular almost year ago. Despite the code being a couple of years old, the links to the data on firebase had 0 rules concerning user access, all data basically publicly available, the API keys were uploaded on GitHub, and even the auth guard didn't work. A proper mess that still gives me the night spooks to this day.

Long but hilarious:
I was deeply concerned about how we have a single, non-paginated call to a backend service, returning hundreds of entries, which has to be enriched with constant data fetched from our db for each entry. FOR EACH ENTRY. AND FOR EACH REQUEST.
I voiced my concerns to my PM, who called me a "rage prophet" for it.

As expected, the call took 20-something seconds to complete.
Ten minutes before the CEO comes over to have a look, another dev changes his loosely-related service, and the entire super-heavy, sprawling abyss of enrichment pipeline returns in sub-second timing!!!

CEO: guys, this is too fast. You have to slow it down a bit. It doesn't seem reliable that we're able to get all this data immediately.
PM: you see, rage prophet, it all worked out in the end
Me: #$@%$&!!!!!

A little back story:
A dev who left already implemented a system and modeled the data like he doesn't even care because he was going away in one month anyway.

This sucker here inherited the responsibility to remodel this fucking clusterfuck of data.

I was trying to do a good work here until today but some things came to my mind :
I don't care.
They don't care.
Fuck it.
I'm gonna do the same shit and the next person can suck ma'dick.
I have better things to do.

Look, I'm gonna do a lazy job that is gonna be a million light years better than what this sucker did anyway.

I work in a fintech company and our product is a point of sale app. Two senior indian dev contractors just spent 3.5 months on a feature where all they had to do was map two tables by using a third mapper table and display 2 lists to the user so he could update the data in those two tables.

After hearing same excuses (that they are working in it) for the past few weeks, I took it upon myself and made a proof of concept for them.

Yeah our codebase is kinda shit but even me, a fcking junior with 3 years of experience managed to do it in 1 week.

Meanwhile these fuckers spent 14 weeks beating around the bush and couldnt even save data to a fucking database. They just added UI and thats it. When asked how investigation is going fuckers couldnt even come up with any findings. For weeks. Seniors my fucking ass.

If not for me, I guess they would have taken till the end of the year. No, fuck you, here is an example now pickup your slack.

Im tired of picking after you. God damn incompetent leeches

Java dev here. I rewrote an app and replaced a system call to ssh with a modern jaxrs post for uploading a file and (new) some additional data.
I even used a stream.

1 hour in production, first client doesn't get his file. Log says OutOfMemoryError: heap.

Me: wtf? I already use streams.
Looking at the Jersey library. Docs say nothing. An issue from 2013 says: oh if you silly don't use the Apache httpclient addon, we disable chunking and buffer the whole body, because our tests fail with the jdk included http client otherwise.

Me: meh.

No warning in the logs. Thank you soooooo much! Who could have known?

Fuck Microsoft and the windows dev team! Fuck the person who thinks it's a bright idea to force users to download updates on their fucking insecure OS.
I live in a shitty substandard country where the cheapest mobile data plan is roughly $7.5 for 7.2gb for a month.
After several weeks of Windows auto downloading updates I don't need, I disabled the updates on several fronts using tutorials found online until yesterday, the fucking thing still found a way to download updates over 6gb, I didn't suspect a thing until I got notification that my data plan is exhausted and I immediately checked windows update and saw a fucking download meter of 76% downloaded. The data was suppose to last for 4-5 days, all gone within 3 hours span.

Fuck whoever thought it is a nice idea to force users to download shitty updates, leave me with the fucking old unstable version, if I get a malware I know how to find my way out you fucking goofs at microfuckingsoft!!

I once ran a batch import job to stress test with much more data than usual in staging... so I thought.
I sshd into prod by accident. History search can be a bastard at times...

The moment I realized what I was doing was crazy. I was shivering and thought I get fired if anything went wrong.

fortunately I just duplicated the original data for the test, and the system was built to ignore unnecessary updates... so the data was correct and nothing went wrong.

Not an active stupid dev choice but still something I will remember for a while.

Conversation with coworker at a staff function...

girl: ...we can't wait to see what you can do!
Me: Great! I can't wait to get stuck in, but you know, those exports you wanted from it, that doesn't have to wait. If you need that straight away, come to my desk and I'll make some queries for you and pull out the data you want...

Girl: o_0
Girl: ... Omg, you can do that?! You're awesome!!

Me later: o_0 - the Dev before me could never at least do that?!

Today in horror stories: setting up the local dev environment for a project I'm taking over creates changes and notifications in prod.

Oh and my local dev env is somehow receiving data from actual patients. I don't know how.

We developed an application and deployed on production (but not launched)
And business team already created lot of garbage or dummy data. Reporting systems are huge pile of bars, stats and shit.

Now, has to destroy and clean production.

Already advise them to do experiments or testing dev or staging.

Damn. First time in my career experienced this. Has to delete production.

Overheard a dev bragging about how our site is fully PCI compliant. So much so even the invoice data is secure. My BS meter went off, so I decided to look at what 'secure' code looked like.

Dev team: This part of the app has a shitty ux. We want to fix it after we finish this feature.
Business: hey guys we think we lack data so we got some users to check our page with shitty ux and see if they think it is shit
User: yeah it’s shit

Great use of resources you chucklefucks

Still dealing with the web department and their finger pointing after several thousand errors logged.

SeniorWebDev: “Looks like there were 250 database timeout errors at 11:02AM. DBAs might want to take a look.”

I look at the actual exceptions being logged (bulk of the over 1,600 logged errors)..

“Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”

Then I looked the email timestamp…11:00AM. We received the email notification *before* the database timeout errors occurred.

I gather some facts…when the exceptions started, when they ended, and used the stack trace to find the code not checking for null (maybe 10 minutes of junior dev detective work). Send the data to the ‘powers that be’ and carried on with my daily tasks.
I attached what I found (not the actual code, it was changed to protect the innocent)
Couple of hours later another WebDev replied…

WebDev: “These errors look like a database connectivity issue between the web site and the saleitem data service. Appears the logging framework doesn’t allow us to log any information about the database connection.”

FRACK!!...that Fracking lying piece of frack! Our team is responsible for the logging framework. I was typing up my response (having to calm down) then about a minute later the head DBA replies …

DBA: “Do you have any evidence of this? Our logs show no connectivity issues. The logging framework does have the ability to log an extensive amount of data regarding the database transaction. Database name, server, login, command text, and parameter values. Everything we need to troubleshoot. This is the link to the documentation …. If you implement the one line of code to gather the data, it will go a long way in helping us debug performance and connectivity issue. Thank you.”

DBA sends me a skype message “You’re welcome :)”

Ahh..nice to see someone else fed up with their lying bull...stuff.

At this point, I just feel bad for my coworker.

No, I am not frustrated or angry, just feeling terribly bad for her as how difficult life must be for someone so dumb.

We are introducing a new method to track some data in our product, like total number of sign-ups, DAU, etc.

Now the implementation is already WIP and this is known to all.

The dev has documented the approach where he has mapped the screen name, a screenshot, and a snippet of the schema that tracks that particular screen.

I kid you not guys, this coworker somehow landed on that document and started some scientific study to try and extract data.

Yes, she looked at the schema screenshot and spent like few hours trying to decode it to figure out the sign-ups and DAU.

Data via a screenshot in a document. I can't even express it.

And then texts me in panic mode that she isn't able to access the data because the file is . jpeg within a document.

I asked where is she executing the schema, because I thought she is joking initially. She said she doesn't know and asked me where she should execute it.

My mind is numb. Life must be real hard when you are so fucking dumb.

ah yes, i'm a VERY kinky Java dev

my favorite NSFW act is naming my java variables shorter than their data types

I dont know what to feel anymore.

Got hired directly without an interview into 'Data-analytics' department in fortune 500 company. This is my first job. Got hired because this company want start a website that cost millions.

Even though I am junior, I can see that this company has no idea about software development at all. No git server, no code review, no quality assurance and no proper workflow. No senior developer to guide us (junior dev) too.

There is one 'senior' consultant that work on automation project here but he just focus on his work and don't help us directly too.

The contract is about 1 year. Still got 11 months to go :/

Sorta dev related.
I work at a service desk for an automotive supplier.
We've once hab out entire mobile phone system crash and for whatever reason, it won't let the phones connect, if there are more than 50 phones trying to connect at the same time. Kind of a problem if there are 400+ phones trying to connect.
My colleagues showed me what to do in order to get one phone to connect to our system.
It was basically: enter some invalid data on out webinterface, save, enter the correct data again and safe again.

It was too stupid for me. So i hacked an AutoIt script together in about 15 minutes, and let it run for the next half an hour. Showed it to my colleagues, they were excited and I went and got a coffee.

It's a job description for an entry level Software Developer role at Apple.

Basically they want
- A Front end dev
- A back end dev
- An iOS expert
- A Gimp/photoshop designer
- A streaming data expert
- An Oracle/Teradata expert
- A Kafka expert ( Not shown in the picture)

And on top of that the guy should be able to learn new tech faster.

Do they want a developer or a fucking terminator?

Idiots. Just... Fucking Idiots.

Junior Frontend dev got a feature to implement. Decided to add a field to a set of mongo collections. I'm the responsible adult for those collections. Talked to the junior - told it, "don't do that, you will lose the data you are adding later". Junior says "will not happen", and goes on to try and prove It is "Right". Problem? Junior is an Idiot. did not trigger the data loss scenario. So... Junior got his TL to talk to the RND manager. And those Idiots Decided that the implementation will go forward as is.

Data loss will happen. QA will not find it. Only the client will experience the data loss, and complain....

I was debugging a new version of a calendar web app I've created, and was puzzled when the code for rendering calendar events was never hit...Till I realized, there are no calendar events this week in the dev environment. Silly me! *LOL*

//rant

So I'm a BI consultant, been doing this for about 6 years now, and I'm pretty good at the data stuffs. Now I had to complete a project for a client where we call a web service and it had to be done in .NET. I wrote a console app in C# that called the WS, dumped the data then a stored proc processed the staging tables into final tables that our visualization tool can consume.

It works, it's done.

Mind you I'm not a pure .NET developer.

And now that it's completed and working this fucking .NET dude that works for my client is basically giving me an attitude talking about "why wasn't it done as a Windows service? Blah, blah" Like WTF!!??? I get that he's the C# BSD but like chill bruh!!

It's annoying as fuck having to work on projects that are not your area of EXPERTISE and then be ridiculed by other elitist assholes about it.

Doesn't happen much, but fuck it's something I hate about dev. FYI, if it was the opposite I would just be asking questions for understanding, not being a sarcastic prick.

//rant done

"Non-devs never call Steven Spielberg to have their TVs fixed."
But sure they MUST call a dev to update their Android, iPhone, Windows, installation of Anti-virus, data recovery, malware removal, to shortlist 20 laptops from market, ask for what printer to buy, why is there a weird animation in Android sometimes, come borrow my WiFi, have their phones and computers fixed, RIP old audio CDs (yes!), fix Bluray, fix anything electronic, repair their bike, teach them science, politics...
This While True loop never escape.

so I left uni after my PhD and joined a start up where the boss is a Cambridge grad who does coding and is like 50 years old (he never told us the true value), the CTO is very talented and another dev who quickly became my best friend and me doing data science. the 4 of us worked together like friends and the efficiency was fantastic, there's no bureaucracy bullshit or shit boss talks. We built the whole thing from scratch (okay I admit they did most of the building) and to this day, we work just has we have been.

Dev. policy: The use of SELECT * is forbidden.

Open Data Access Layer > first statement: SELECT * FROM bullshit_table

Why the fuck does every operations app do popouts now? I don't want a simple view of the data, I want all the data so I can compare it together.

It's not like you're saving any bandwidth! All the data is there, I can fucking see it 👀 in the dev tools!

I hate how every product now desperately tries to be like their competitor and everyone fails at it because everyone is copying everyone else.

I'm a web dev who decided to take a shot at mobile development (My first mobile app mind you). I'm writing a mobile app and one of it's features is communicating to my server via websockets.

So I write the code, click to send the data and my server doesn't receive it. Fuck. I check why. I log everything. Nothing.
I spend several of hours and I'm exhausted by this point so i call one of our mobile developers to help me. Turns out my emulator didn't have a WiFi module. FUCK.

Alright so I compile it to an apk and install it on my phone. I popped open a terminal and started my local node server.

I click on the mobile app...

NOTHING LOGS. FUUUUUUCK.

And this is the best part.
Apparently I deleted the console.dir call from my server that executed when it received some data from an emitter.

I only thought of this last night at 2am so I got up and checked. Yep. Kill me.

I really felt like a badass one time when I managed to recover all projects on our dev server after a full meltdown of the HDD.

We had no recent backups, because our backup server was down for a few months, and our (at the time small) company was in a tight spot on finances, and couldn't get a replacement.

The problem was that the HDD on the backup server failed, but we were storing all projects also on the dev server, along with our local git repos (no GitHub at the time for us), but then the dev server HDD also broke, and I used every piece of data recovery software I found trying to recover the data, until one actually managed to read the raw data from the HDD and store it as a virtual drive, that I then used to try and build another partition index and it actually worked!

Lost about 10% of the data, but that was enough, as i managed to recover all the git repos and databases...

I don't even remember the tools that got the job done in the end, but that was one hell of a week, and at the end I felt like a true IT God!

True story!

PS: 2 weeks later we had a new backup server, another offsite backup solution and a GitHub account for the company. Was delayed on salary in order to manage it (me and the CEO both agreed to give our pay for one month to get them), but worth it!

> be me
> i'm a junior dev
> i use C# at work
> frontend guy left
> now i use C# and Angular
> boss hired a data analyst
> data analyst created R script for his work
> implement this script to our services
> script doesn't work
> i have no idea of R
> i need to fix it
> pleashelp.png

Android dev job question:

"Describe the activity lifecycle and write an application that does x,y,z in accordance with it"

Fullstack dev job question:

"Write some code that interacts with our API and does x,y,z, put the data into our database and build a web interface"

Java backend dev interview :
"BUILD AN ELEVATOR ALGORITHM WITH LESS THAN o(nlog(n)), FIND NEIGHBORS IN A BINARY TREE, WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN INTERFACE AND ABSTRACT CLASS?"

Why?

Was writing a functional test in AdonisJS that queries an API endpoint with data and my test stays red with a dainty `expected 500 to equal 200` assertion failure.

In frustration, I yelled "What must I fuchen do to get my 500 to become a 200". Then my dev friend, an absolute fuchen genius tells me, "Subtract 300." I hope the prat stays debugging his code for a week!!

Today at 'Derp & Co' a fellow co-worker decided that had duplicated data on Relational DB is good!

- Dev: 'but what if we have 2 companies in diferents groups?''

- co-worker: 'Just call it company A and Company B'

- Dev: 'but... this is not what...'

- co-worker: 'Trust me Dev, is the easy way'

I want the professional way, not the easy (and damn wrong) way :(, I can't improve myself like this.

Also, dead line is here too... TT^TT
Last sprint and still with doubts about the DB structure.

I am doing some freelance work for a client who is thankfully mindful about security. I found out that they are so strict with their access because they had a huge data breach last year.

Today I was given access to their repo for connecting to their AS400. In the docker file the username and password were included and were the same for dev and prod. They also are performing no sql injection prevention. They are just joining strings together.

Comment a 1 if you’re a web dev.
Comment a 2 if you’re a game dev.
Comment a 3 if you’re a data scientist.
Comment a 4 if you’re in cyber security.
Comment a 5 if you’re in IT.
Comment a 6 if you don’t fit any of the above categories and you code only in PHP and refuse to learn any other language because you think PHP is the future.

management logic.

dev : calling api on every product scroll is a stupid idea. we shouldn't do it. what if user has 100s of products bought?
mgmt : it isn't a practical scenario. in prod, we checked the data and we rarely have customers with more than 20 products
dev : 😮🤷‍♂️

dev : this is a rare issue that only happens for very old devices from this specific manufacturer. even manufacturers have acknowledged this.
mgmt : we don't care. fix it, as per data this error has been logged for more than 12 times (from 1 user only)
dev : 😮😢

Few years ago as a junior android dev with couple years of self taught experience of working in startups I submitted a simple android app assignment for a junior android dev role. Assignment had only like 8 requirements so I followed them to the letter. That didn't end well.

App was simple just 3 screens. Login screen with username and password input fields, login button.

Had to call a login endpoint after login button was clicked, redirecting to home screen, calling items endpoint, displaying a list of items and when an item was clicked passing item data and redirect to item details screen.

Needless to say big swinging dick senior was not impressed. UI was not perfect, I forgot to display a loading animation when fetching data, didnt handle back button properly.

I agreed with some points but other comments were clearly just nitpicking: his preferred variable naming conventions, his opinions on architecture that was not up to his standard (official google arch at the time was not up to his standard).

He also was mad that app wasn't prepared for release to googleplay (another out of the ass requirement). Like I would prepare a 3 screen app for prod release that he will forget ever existed after 20min of his review.

Lots more of nitpicking, encapsulation this encapsulation that, omg now hes shocked that there are a few warnings after the project is built.

Regardless my self confidence was destroyed at that point and after few more negative experiences I dropped android dev alltogether for a couple years and switched to game dev.

After game dev ran its course I went back to android dev and found a supportive place where I could grow.

Looking back, they were actually hiring atleast a mid level for a junior position but I was grilled as a senior. The guy literally didnt wrote any single positive thing in that review about my code even tho my senior peers said my project was decent back then, its just that I didnt handle a few edge cases and that's all.

I looked up the guy in linkedin, turns out hes a uni dropout who posts all books that he red about software dev in his education section of his linkedin profile. Found a bunch of other narcissistic stuff on his profile. Guy was a fucking idiot. Even if I worked under him it would have probably sucked.

Learned some important lessons I guess. Always get a second, 3rd and 4th opinion and dont take criticism too seriously. Always check what kind of person is providing feedback.

Reviewing some code the other day, seeing a lot classes like:

SimpleThis
CoreThat
BaseSomething

I get the idea..Microsoft is doing it...disguising complexity with clever adjectives.

I think in my next project I'm going to start naming things like

SpaghettiMonster
GodClass
Repository (cause, every framework needs one)

Then in a year and a half-dozen other devs adding their bits, someone asks "SpaghettiMonster...WTF?...why is this data access called..<dev looks at code> Oh good Lord ...oh well...at least the class name is accurate"

Dev: We have a data quality problem. Combined with data silos, we can't trust the numbers. We need to agree on metric definitions as a company.

CTO: (Points a PM)Help him on the metrics he has defined. We'll discard any other alternate definitions inside the company.

PM: You can start with these. (Throws a bunch of metrics without their definitions. Doesn't respond to questions regarding definitions.)

After a week of generating aggregates,

PM: The numbers seem wrong.

Fuck I know the numbers will be wrong. Because you didn't give me the definitions and I'll have to deduce them myself.

Seriously guys, how do you deal with PMs who don't cooperate in the requirement analysis?

Hiring a third party to help us with something...
Third party: yeah okay, we know what we need. Can we get access to your git repo
Me: sure, I'll make sure you'll get it
(To the admins): hey can you get them access to our git server?
Admins: did they sign the personal data processing contract?
Me: oh they won't work with any personal data. It's a dev server and they only need access to the source code. And the usual contracts and NDAs are already done
Admins: well we still need the other one.

... Sure. Why not. Just delays the start of the process for... Like a week and a half until that useless bit of paper has passed through all the necessary departments. Not like time's an issue. Right?

Good morning to everyone, except that one Twitter dev who one day woke up and was like "YOU KNOW WHAT, MY APPLICATION WILL FEATURE BOTH OAUTH1 AND OAUTH2 ENDPOINTS, BUT SOME FEATURES WILL BE EXCLUSIVE TO EITHER OF THE TWO -NOT NECESSARILY THE MOST RECENT, JUST A RANDOM ONE-, AND ALSO THE OFFICIAL TWITTER LIBRARY WON'T COVER ALL THE ENDPOINTS SO PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO RESORT TO RAW HTTP REQUESTS INSTEAD OF USING MY SDK AND ALSO I'MMA MAKE DEVELOPERS FILL 2 VERY DETAILED FORMS, REQUIRING PERSONAL DATA AND ACTUAL REAL PHONE CALLS, JUST TO START DEVELOPMENT WITH 7 DIFFERENT AUTHENTICATION TOKENS, BECAUSE SOME REQUESTS WILL REQUIRE A DIFFERENT AUTHENTICATION METHOD THAN THE OTHER REQUESTS DESPITE ALL OF THEM PERTAINING TO THE SAME FUCKING ENTITY"

So we just had our GitLab moment... Some dev ran a script that is nuking our db as I speak...

At least it was uat but... fck all that data has to be restored from somewhere..... By someone....

I kinda hate to admit it but they were right. Data structures and algorithms are kinda the shit and you should try to learn and appreciate them. Not just so you’ll use them. But in that learning them helps you become a better problem solver.

There’s a self taught dev that my company works with for really bespoke applications. A senior dev that works with him and helps manage the development process told me that the dev in question doesn’t really know how to implement the finer details. Very telling indeed.

Follow-up on yesterday's rant.

Boss hired dev-ops team to restore data from the broken server image. They said it may be completely impossible. Which will probably make clients want to kill us considering it's an government agency.

I wonder how large the contractual penalties will be considering they are almost completely incapable of working without the system and it's going to be few days until anything will be fixed.

Oh well, since no one bothers me it seems it's currently not my problem and I'm free to code ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hi. I'm new here and liking it.
My rant today: Lofty business guy tells my small dev team that he knows exactly how everything should look and work because he knows exactly what users want out of the webapp experience.... goes on to tell us to make an editable, side-scrolling table that is also mobile-friendly, for users to manually input a ton of data....

Ladies and gents, it was a 🍺 day, today.

I spent more hours than I care to say today tracking down an issue in our web workflow, even looping in our only web dev to help me debug it from his side. There ended up being multiple bugs found, but the most annoying of them was that the json data being pulled back was truncated because a certain someone, in their migration script, set their varchar variable to a size of 1000 and then proceeded to store a json string that was 2800+ characters in length.

C'mon man!

I got nothing productive done today. Hate, hate, hate days like this!

Beer me.

Database is being slow AF again. Team lead is investigating. This is happening more often lately and affects both production and dev because everything is just in one gigantic database. So clients are calling support being angry about the speed they get and us devs get to twiddle our thumbs while waiting for our own data to load.

> Moment you thought you did a good job, but ended up failing
> Times the bug wasn't actually your fault
> Times you took the blame for a junior or other dev
> Times someone took the blame for you
> Times you got away with something you shouldn't have.
> Most valuable data loss
> The bug you never fixed
> Most satisfying bug to fix
> Times where a "simple" task turned out to be not so simple
> Debug code left in production?
> Moments you wish you could undo
> Most satisfying optimization
> Have you ever been ranted about?

fuck..fuck..FUCK..FUCK YOU MANTIS!!!
fuck you and your fucking invalid security token... fucking cunt...
yeah i love extracting my notes from POST data via the browser dev console cause you fucking delete it when hitting the back button...
THANKS FOR NOTHING

It's my yearly cleanup day, when I fully nuke down my windows installation, to clean out all the installed trash and residue.

Have moved all important data and I will be ready to fully refresh my computer as soon as it syncs, heres the question though.

I decided this time I'll create a dev vm, so I can just each time reset to point 0 and also because I miss having local development.

What new linux distros or flavours are out there that would be worth looking at? (I saw things like ubuntu budgie being mentioned)

If you use it and it doesnt break if I sneeze, mention it, I am open to getting to know other environments, even if its not my usual debian homeplace.

This post is kinda late. For those who haven't read my previous rants, a marketing coworker bragged about a feature that we hadn't yet finished. (I'm thinking that they perhaps did it to put extra pressure on the dev team 🤔.) Of course it backfired pretty bad, because this feature was a plug-in for another service, and even though the dev team was on time with the feature, the other service we were writing a plug-in for took _sooo_ long to approve of our code, and it made this marketing guy look so bad in front of these clients because the feature was a few weeks late.

A part of the new feature was that some of their data would be synced with this service. These customers were so important that we couldn't afford to disappoint them, and the solution was... *drumroll please* ... that this marketing guy would have to manually copy the customer's data from the service into our platform to make the customer think this feature is ready. Row by row. I'm hearing it takes about one hour of their day 🤣

I mean I'm good friends with the guy but... they kinda deserved it

I just officially graduated from a web dev program and it feels...

Very underwhelming.

Learned ES6, React, Webpack, service workers, offline databases, accessibility, (...bla bla bla)

And my knowledge with data structures and algorithms isn't even that great yet.

I look at the stuff I still don't know and wonder if I'll ever be comfortable with my level of expertise.

It works locally, it works in Dev, it works in Test, but fails to deploy in UAT. Is it a data issue? I don't know, I don't have permissions to see the UAT database. Literally all I know is that this API is returning 500 instead of what it's supposed to return, but only sometimes.

Guess I'll sit here all day and try to solve the problem telepathically as there is literally no way of troubleshooting other than scrolling through the code and hoping that a cartoon lightbulb appears above my head.

I had rough week last week. Accidentally deployed dev code to production, soon found out there was no production version of code to do a redeploy. Deployed another app to production, it was working fine then another Dev changed a data type in the database from bool to nullable Boolean which broke some Linq queries. Looked like I deployed crap code. 3rd week with company.

Wanna be dev data scientist tried out vim... Took 2h for him to exit vim.

Am I crazy ?

Right now we have an API which returns a full planning for a week for 300 employees with indicators (Like "late", "may be postponed" etc) in 4 seconds.

I have a pressure, people telling me it's not fast enough.

I honestly think it is fast.

In order of data it'a around 100 MB of JSON. AND you can do actions on the whole set if needed.

Long story short, I think 4 seconds to get all that data is pretty great. Customers think they should have it instantly.

(Never mind the whole filtering system at thier disposal, they literall only lod the full set and then MANUALLY scroll (Yes there is a quick search box)).

What can I do more ????? cache that ? I can. But they also expect that any changed value is reflected.

And we fucking do it. While you are on the page there is a SignalR conenxion created and notified when any of data is changed and updates it on front. Takes around 500 ms.

Apprently "too slow".

I honestly don't see what we can do more with our small 4 dev team.

Give me 56 developpers I can do something, but right now I'm proud of result.

Holly shit, they will never understand....

If you come to dev, minding his buissness, writing some code, beeing focused, with headphones on, etc. You absolutely destroy his cache of things in mind, you stay next to him gazing at his screen and throwing away madly words that you need some data extracted from database NOW and you will stay standing next to him gazing when he quickly types few lines of ultra-wide screen of SQL querry with all the fucking joins and shit you wanted with exac aliases you understand and makes one typo but query executes and spits out some data. He didn't notice that something is wrong with it becouse he didn't memorize database's data, and he sends it to you.

Now you are coming back to him pissed and in general fighting mood becouse he did one fucking typo when you was actively pressurizing him to make fucking query faster while you absolutely destroyed his flow of work (in meaning he now needs to dive back into code, figure out why he was editing given file and what was idea for further structure)

Now you are standing again next to him and absolutely pissing him off that he fucked up and made one fucking typpo that unfortnately database didn't say "nope" but it instead spit out wrong data.

If you can relate to "you" stated above, sincerly fuck you.
If you can relate to "he" stated above, I feel ya man, its fucking annoying, isn't it?

i'm curious... to anyone on here who does hiring, why do companies always expect someone to already have experience with high volume systems. i've been a php dev for 10+ years but am having the hardest time finding a job and i have been turned down so many times because they expect me to have worked on a system with millions of users and terabytes worth of data already. it's beyond frustrating

So I am a Junior Dev in this small company. We have different tasks for the current sprint so I don't care what my teammates are doing. Then came the integration of our works, where a Mid Dev was assigned to create a Carting/Basket service. As we are integrating, I noticed that we are passing data to his service as is. We are passing the price, item name, etc. on his API. I asked him why the fuck are we not passing the IDs of the items instead. He didn't understand what I'm saying and instead defended his work. I showed him how I was able to manipulate the total amount of items I added to cart. He wasted almost 6 days of developing. Ughh.

I was a c# - sql server dev in every other project I was in.. now in this new project I'm doing only sql server, checking on procedures and data, to calculate risk indicators for financial instruments. I'm away from home 5/7 days a week 😭 I miss C# . I'm so sad 😭 😭

What the best database solution for web and smartphones dev?
Is mysql the good choice?
I’m an “old” dev with old usage, php-mysql-JavaScript.
Is it a 2018 solution or am i a dinosaur?
All data will be stored on server side. Web and smartphone app as client.
Thanks for your experience sharing.

You all know that these AI dev tools are reading your code right?

It is sending it back to a data center and doing evaluations on the code. This is like handing your code to an unknown entity with no guarantees for privacy or copyright protection.

This concept bothers me and I would have to consult with my employer to even determine if we wanted to take that risk. I think it is just a matter of time before a bad actor takes advantage of this and rips off a company somewhere.

!dev
Unpopular opinion.

Mage or shaman is no different than data scientist or insurance agent.

Product Management thought of automating an entire legacy product so they funded undisclosed amount to program management who in turn hired >20 contract devs managed by architects and dev managers with zero functional or technical knowledge of product and who in turn went ahead automating the product in selenium, end result of which was an useless automation framework with lot of browser specific dependencies and whuch could run only on one setup environment and migrating test cases to another environment and running is almost impossible and tyrannical to configure. The automation test cases are highly disorganized with all generic setup, DB configurations and business case test data mixed up in same config files and which need to be rewriten every time ported from one environment to other.To add misery to my woes as a dev working in that product I was told to utilize that framework and enhance the quality of my code by writing inline automation Cases for the same. I am left speechless thoughtless and emotionless after that decision.

[story of your first dev project] - i really think there should be a headline like that for wk rants

Anyways, it was a while back, le college teacher approached my friend and me asking if we wanted to do a project. We said sure, it was a medium sized data analysis project. We got the specs with a lot of formulas, basically implement them all and make a web frontend, thats it. Took like a year but we did it. Few months later teacher is furious because the calculations didnt give him data that he expected (by expect i mean he thought that a distribution formula would accurately yield 200+ data fields from around 4) and blamed it on us. Not the retard other professor who fucked up half of the formulas. Ok.

So in the project I’m working on we were about to do a push to live, no major functionality just minor adjustments and nice to have stuff. One of the things I did was a reminder, nothing special just sends an email out if something hasn’t been done for 3 days and then sends an email every day following. Push to live and every thing goes fine with no issues. Day 1 there are no issues. Day 2 there are no issues. Day 3 and I’m inundated with people telling me that the emails are getting sent to practically everyone, shit. What have I done? What have I missed?
So I start looking at the live database hoping for a data problem, no such luck. I look at my code looking for something blatantly obvious but nothing. I start replicating the data but I can’t reproduce this bug and it’s annoying the hell out of me. I checked one of the emails that the client sent to us more thoroughly and seen that it was sent at 07:01. This is odd as our webjob runs at 1am so I start looking at environmental factors and started looking at release management, more out of hope than expectation. I check the staging environment and see that the webjob ran at 7:00. Coincidence I thought, the webjob gets packaged on the release pipeline and everything in the database was dummy data anyway but I’d better check anyway. The database was an exact copy of the live database, turns out a “senior developer” wanted to sanity check everything by running live data through the code so he copied the database over. It was fine for the first couple of days but the data was now 3 days out of date triggering my email code and I get hit with the shit storm. I’ve never met such an incompetent developer in my fucking life, functions 700 lines long, classes that are over 20000 lines, repetition every where and the only design patterns he’s used is when he picks up a child’s colouring book. I can live with the fact that he writes code like someone on their first day of University But copying a database because he wants to “visualise” the fucking data is absolutely farcical. No wonder the project is fucked with a “developer” (in the loosest possible use of the word) is at the helm.

Can you help me to come up with a company name?

I want to provide dev services (mainly mobile apps) but I also want to have couple projects of my own, so I can't go with a name which indicates only mobile apps. This is the keyword list that I have at the moment:

dev
optimal
baltic
digital
digital
app
cyber
data

vision
systems
projects
solutions
apps
systems
tech
development
software
strategy
byte
builder
services
industries
house
Factory
incubator
media
dev
projects
net
tools
system
center
tech
pro
loft
devs

and these are my current ideas:

appswat.com
appdevhouse.com
balticdevs.com
devbaltic.com
balticincubator.com
appdecision.com
balticstrategy.com
appmobservice.com
appmobservices.com
appmobileservice.com
appbaltic.com
devbaltic.com
mobilebaltic.com
databaltic.com
balticcyber.com
solutionmob.com
mobiledevmedia.com
balticmobilevision.com
balticmobilesoftware.com
mobilemediasystem.com
probaltictech.com

But none of them seem good enough :/

What do you think about appbaltic.com or devbaltic.com ? Does this name makes sense for you native speakers?

Baltic because it will be an eastern european company located next to Baltic sea. We will provide dev services and have couple projects of our own.

-----------Jr Dev Fucked by Sr Dev RANT------

Huge data set (300X) that looks like this :
( Primary_key, group_id,100more columns) .

Dataset to be split in records of X sized files such that all primary_key(s) of same group_id has to go in same file.

Sde2 with MS from Australia, 12 years of 'experience' generates an 'algo'. 70% Test case FAILED.

I write a bin packing algo with 100% test case pass, raises pull request to MASTER in < 1 day. Same sde2 does not approve, blocking same day release.

|-_-| What the fuck |-_-| Incompetent people getting 2x my salary with <.5x my work

~dev, not in front of computer stuff

Playing with the controller and power management using the torque sensor, managed to get this flatland cook-off going today on the fat tire ebike with only 50watts of assistance. Efficiency gains over stock of 28%! 30mph on a bike feels ridiculously unsafe, but the looks you get from cars are even better.

Love being able to gather all this telemetry (GPS, elevation, pulse, durations), gives me stuff to fish through and data to play with.

Thanks, AfterShip.com, for working flawlessly while the system I was building was in dev/test mode and for the first few days in live mode, then completely crapping the bed the first day I needed you to work with real tracking data with the live system. You were the ONE thing that was working consistently well, and you had to go and ruin it.

So, we (I'm the backend guy and work with a UI dev) are building this product portfolio management tool for our client and they have a set of 250 users. The team has two point of contacts for the 250 users who maintain the master data, help users with data quality, tool guidance, reporting and other stuff. So one day one of these two support users come to me and say : Hey I'm not able to add new transactions coz a customer is missing.

We have the provision to create / maintain customers.

I check the production DB, application code, try creating the customer and then the transaction, everything works perfectly fine.

I ask the user for a screen sharing session, the user starts reproducing the error like this :

We have a 3 system landscape - Dev / Test and Prod

U : Logs into the test system url, creates the customer.

U : Points out the toast saying customer creation is successful.

U : opens a new tab, opens the production system, tries creating the transaction, searches for the customer and says " see !! cant find the customer here ! the master data management apps never work !! "

FML?.

I hate doing front-end development...
I was hired along with another dev to build a webapp to manage the personnel of this big (2000+) company.
I made the backend and some of the frontend (mainly handling the data movement between the two), but my partner was let go after we delivered a first version because "there was not enough work for both of us".
The backlog is months of work for me and now I have to do everything and it's wearing me down...
I want to quit but it's paying well and I don't want to search for something new.
What do?

The worst part of being a dev? Working in teams.

And I don't mean that in the "I'm the best ninja code wizard in the whole world and you're all holding me back" kinda way. I'm thinking more in the lines of someone who has to deal with that kind of attitude on a daily basis. As someone who recently was put in a leading position in a dev team, this is by far one of the worst experiences that came with it.

Some examples?
- One dev completely changed the naming scheme for variables in a class he worked on for one. single. bug fix. His reason? He just didn't like it!
- Another one noticed that data he was supplied with was not in the specified format. Instead of flagging this with the project leads, he just rewrote his parser to fit the data. A couple of weeks later the supplier noticed the error, fixed the format and suddenly everyone wondered why the software failed processing the data.
- Or that one senior dev, that just refuses to accept changes because "it was always done like this and it worked" No, it didn't. That's why it was changed!

Once a dev team reaches a certain size, people need to realize that stuff like coding rules and process guidelines are not there to annoy them but to help the whole team work as efficient as possible. I don't care how good a programmer you are, if you can't check your ego you don't belong in any kind of team-oriented development project!

Not entirely dev related, but definitely shameless. In high-school we had to study CS, but it was more about knowing to use Office. We had class tests, which mean that we all had the same task and we had to finish it until the end of the class. Obviously no one wanted to do it, so whoever finished first would email it to everyone. Most people, however, were stupid enough to leave the meta data untouched, so it was obvious who was the original author. To not appear suspicious, I removed the original metadata and put my own in, and deliberately made errors in the sheet and corrected others that I noticed. I never got caught, because my work would always have "unique" mistakes.

Im a junior android dev working in a startup. Wasted whole week on trying to parse some retarded json data generated by junior backend guy.

Im talking about objects with other objects as their elements, no use of arrays.

In the end had to redo his data in proper order so I could parse properly. Fkin waste of time.

At least now I know how to do his work, and won't be afraid to confront him with detailed criticism.

I started iOS app dev thinking there’s good scope in the future,now I hear people saying app dev is gonna die switch to data science. Tf

Working for 5 months as a junior dev. I receive a request to check out a data issue at client, no one knows what is happening. I quickly find a data import issue and let everybody know. Few days later apparently issue is still not solved. A senior data consultant approaches me asking for help.
senior: 'So, any idea what's wrong with the data?'
me: 'Yeah, someone messed up the import. Just delete it and import it again.'
senior: 'How do you know?'
me: 'Because <insert valid arguments>'
senior: Wow, very clever. Amazing work. I wouldn't have thought about that. Great job'

A few moments later I receive an email from the senior with all the stakeholders in the cc: 'I found the problem and I have a solution <copy/paste my words>'

// Stupid JSON
// Tale of back-end ember api from hell
// Background: I'm an android dev attempting to integrate // with an emberjs / rails back-end

slack conversation:
me 3:51pm: @backend-dev: Is there something of in the documentation for the update call on model x? I formed the payload per the docs like so
{
"valueA": true,
"valueB": false
}
and the call returns success 200 but the data isn't being updated when fetching again.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:00pm: the model doesn't look updated for the user are you sure you made the call?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:01pm: Pretty sure here's my payload and a screen grab of the successful request in postman <screenshot attached>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:05pm: well i just created a new user on the website and it worked perfectly your code must be wrong
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:07pm: i can test some more to see if i get any different responses
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:15pm: ahhhhhh... I think it's expecting the string "true", not true
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:16: but the fetch call returns the json value as a boolean true/false
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:18pm: thats a feature, the flexible type system allows us to handle all sorts of data transformations. android must be limited and wonky.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:19pm: java is a statically typed language....
// crickets for ten minutes
me 4:30pm: i'll just write a transform on the model when i send an update call to perform toString() on the boolean values
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:35: great! told you it wasn't my documentation!

// face palm forever

This Christmas I transitioned into a new job. At the old job I was the only kubernetes-guy, so since they no longer have any developers who are confident working with that, they decided to go with LAMP-stack.

The data from dev-kubernetes-server was backed up by some guy and moved to an offsite-server, or so they told me. Turns out, he had backed up the kubectl-config-file, and not the databases. Now everything is wiped. Sure glad we still have that config-file!

Of course, since that was only our dev-server, there was nothing too important there, except for all the documentation. The only other backup? On my laptop, which I turned in to them, and is now wiped and used by one of the sales-guys.

Now I’m being called in at least twice a day, since I was their goto-guy for almost anything backend-related. Feels great, after they spent a couple of months attempting to rewrite everything in pure PHP (with a strict no-dependency policy for some reason). Fml.

- why did you enter test data text value with this <script> html? Don't do that. Use normal text

this is something I've never expected to hear from a php/react dev.... I'm truly disappointed. I really am.

On top of that he refused to follow my recommendations to google: "xss". Another teammate had to google for him and drop a link.

Just when I was about to like working with this guy.... :(

Wow fuck today. I took the day off to watch the eclipse yesterday so coming in today was like Monday squared. Right off the bat I have somebody from last week that I had spend around 8 hours working to get their system right call in and tell me they were cancelling even though everything just got working right.
Also got tasked with documenting the servers which wouldn’t be rant worthy if the dev that set them up didn’t get cranky whenever I ask for credentials or even a rough overview of how the server stack is configured. Then I get a ticket about how a customer is going to get his data from his ‘web guy’ but this customer has been keeping his data in our system for the better part of a decade. Wtf you getting bro? And who is this web guy? What data does he have? Nobody seems to know. And just to smear shit on top it turns out I swapped the addresses on the car parts I sold on eBay and now I have to do 2 returns and cross ship and almost definitely get negative feed back. Fuck everything.

All this before lunch. After lunch I still have the same problems but at least I got chicken!

So I've been working a project while now. last week we got a lot of changes from the client and the boss suggest we pull one of the senior devs from another project to help out. All good...until I checked the code...WTF!
For ex we have a method that checks and update weather info, if required, and returns a view(100 lines of code). so the client wants the weather to display differently in certain areas. exactly same data and everything just the view to look different. easy right..? Mr "senior" dev duplicates the method each time and just change the return statement to a different view...Fuck me right? Oh and 90% of CSS statements ends with !important. senior my fucking ass!

Packt.com (dev education books) is doing a survey of their readers. I don't fit into any of their boxes, closest one is data scientist.

I think I might really be a mathematician rather than a dev...

I hated maths at high-school.

Last night was dreadful- at 11 pm Dev on my team makes a change to a form with 2 million plus records without informing me and leaves to go out without confirming the change was successful. I get call from the data center at midnight because the app is down. Didn't get done till midnight and now data center boss is blaming me.

No data no cry ~ Dev Marley

I hate filling out status reports, so I build a generator which collected all the data from the dev and ticket systems and formatted it so all I had to do was copy the output and then provide “management friendly” notes.

Working for one of our oldest customer, in some serious old, ugly and outdated code(web service).
The dev db doesn't contain any relevant data.
The QA service points to production, so can't use it for any tests.
My contact, at the customer, is going on vacation tomorrow.
Their pm is going on vacation next Friday.
No time for refactoring, db data updates or otherwise do important and much needed updates.
They want it to be done yesterday.

FML.

We take over development of a live customer facing system and PM agrees date for our first code deployment with client CIO
Me: The dev and staging environments don't have any test data currently as the old agency screwed it up
PM: Well you better load some
Me: There isn't any... It'll take 10 days to copy prod db due to hosting provider SLAs, leaving 1 week for SIT, UAT and performance testing (assuming they don't screw up)
PM: Well the date is set, 1 week will be enough for testing

I need some time off. Just had this convo with a dev-manager about an 'issue' with our system change mgmt calendar (Blazor) app.

K: "In the system drop-down, it's not filtering when I type."
Me: "Let me check <I attempt to reproduce>, yep, not working. Do you get the same error? Looks like duplicate data from the database is causing a problem."
<this is over MS Teams, about 5 minutes go by with no response, then>
K: "No error, its not working."
<I find the bad data, delete it, TADA, the filtering is working again>
Me: "The filtering is working again, at least for me. You sure you didn't see an error?"
<wait 5 minutes again>
K: "No, no error."
Me: "You didn't see a little red banner at the bottom and in all caps..ERROR"
<send him a screen-shot of the error I still had in another tab>
K: "Yes, I saw that one, but no other errors. Filtering is working again. Thanks"

One of dev I was working with once stored users' payment data in plain text. Luckily enough that thing never got to production.

My biggest data loss and also contributed in me getting into computer stuff was when dad formatted the computer before I was able to take a backup, felt so bad at that time it had all my photos from school with friends.

So instead of crying in the corner and me not knowing they can be brought back, at least half of them, I started learning how computers work, how software work, what type of software is out there ...etc. Though that brought more work for dad having to format my mess every month of so XD

But I ended up learning a lot of new things. Then one programming class at school sent me into the dev world

So in my current workplace we have an IT department of... 7-8 people, with 3 developers (or 2.5, but that's debatable)

The oldest dev is old school, over 65 now came from Visual Basic, of course, and is a father of department's director - this is a story in of itself, but besides the point of this rant

Anywho, this dev is of course in this workplace way longer than me, and historically is in charge of finance and Microsoft CRM systems.

Guess the reason why Microsoft CRM was chosen at all in the company?

Because dev said he is not good with creating web forms from scratch, and apparently with MSCRM you can craft them without much trouble.

Yes, that's it, our MSCRM is used as a web application with custom forms that store data into custom DB tables that dev creates... nothing to do with actual CRM use cases.

Hello,

I have gone through all the options that your public API has for syncing data, and i can now officially say that stripping an iFrame of a Google Drive page would be better than the piece of shit mutation methods you have come up with.

Most sincerely,
A fucking annoyed dev that just wasted about 4 hrs on your shit.

Background: I am currently working with a DB that has websocket functionality ("notify a client on insert/etc."). However, you do have to whitelist tables in order to use them with sockets.

I wanted to optimize my code and didn't want to mess with my coworkers dev-data, therefore I duplicated the table. After improving some small things I noticed that the interface does not change with new socket data. I have spent the last hour or so trying to figure out where I broke it.

I just realized that I forgot to whitelist that duplicated table 😐 Most relieving moment today 😅

Bonus side effect: The code is much cleaner now since I refactored a lot of the realtime-logic in order to understand it/fix the bug.

When backend is slow to add fields of data, and product manager is after you, the frontend dev to add the new feature.

How must it feel to build pagination for the partner list in a cookie consent popup? Did the dev realize that they and their company are the primary reason for the GDPR? That they are the ultimate bad guys of online privacy, even worse than accumulators like Google who process their data in-house?

So, My usual dual boot setup is Linux(Dev stuff) and Windows(For gaming) and for Linux I always create different partition just to make sure I don't fuck up while removing Linux(mostly switching). So at one time I wanted to switch to CentOS and I accidentally deleted windows partition of C drive which had like 90+GB just for Steam....it was not Big loss but still it was pain downloading data for steam games.

My boss is being a stupid cunt. To give you a background we were facing issues with our Collections system. First week December 2019, I and a colleague of mine came up with a new efficient collections architecture. My colleague and I started to Code and create automation scripts mid December and completed it in First week of Jan 2020. This PoC version was supposed to be just between the Dev team(App Dev and Back end, also one from the Ops side to verify the data). I did not receive any feedback on the actual collections system and the data integrity but during this time all they’ve done is take meetings with no real outcome. I raised this and the only email I got is data is looking fine when I know it is not.Now in First week of Feb, he is stressing us to go ahead and deploy the architecture in Production and we have not done any Code Review, Static Code analysis, any real tests on Code and deployment scripts. Have not discussed any metrics for our dashboard and alerting. I have no idea how to handle this cunt. I have even asked for resources to atleast productionalize the code and move ahead the deployment and still no out come. I’ll go in a meeting with him in an hour, I will be very blunt and tell him that whatever he is doing is a foolish way and maybe resign in couple of weeks

I am forced to work with a client's notoriously slow SOAP api. Slow in this case is 1.5-2s per request.
The api is structured rather... creatively... at the same time. So we have to bombard it with thousands of requests to build our data base with historical SOAP data. Also the data sometimes is a couple of hours late, giving a flat line (all values at 0) until retroactively fixing the output for the same requests.
So to fill one dev data base with a year's worth of historical data (nice to have when testing a dashboard application) we hammer the api with ~20k requests (~1 million if we want to be thorough).
Best thing about that: There is no staging/test api and the prod api seems not to handle lots of requests at the same time very well...
Latest thought: Maybe we could put a varnish cache in front of the SOAP for testing. Better have wrong data, than nothing at all and we don't kill the prod clients every time we ramp up a new instance.
Also that would dramatically decrease the 4.2 hours of data pumping to about 7 minutes after the first run.

From a dev and eCommerce management perspective, Groupon is THE WORST. They just launched a brand new marketplace site but STILL don’t have an API I can connect with to do fulfillment. Their CSV format is useless for our shipping company. Their data inputs are not sanitized and standardized enough to be predictable for purposes of transformation via scripting. The exceptions and edge cases are infinite. So I’m STILL stuck having to take time out of my day to manually copy and paste and correct order data into the proper format to FTP to the fulfillment company. Oh, and I don’t yet know if the new marketplace does this, but the old one used to suspend vendor accounts for...get this...selling TOO MUCH! How is Groupon still in business?

Designing with "real" data

In Interaction Design Uni i've got this assignment to design a prototype for an "Ebay for used books". A requirement is that we have use "real" Data and not lorem ipsum for our design prototype tools. Which is a fair point but....

It's about 50 book categories (crime, history, romance) we have to cover, and for every category the prof wants at least 2 Books.

I've don't have the time to type in the (meta)data for 100 books at 30 JSON properties by hand. What would be your advice?

Do you maybe know a easy to use online bookshop API? (remember I'm a tech savy designer not a dev)

Or do you know someone in a low income country who does data entry? Or any experience with hiring someone on fiverr?

Thank you for your help. :)

I upgraded a Linux server one time and data that was serialized in yaml stopped being parsed properly.

It turns out the libyaml people decided to change how hashes were handled, which made any previous hashes come back as blank.

A whole database of valid data in dev was coming back invalid in prod. It was maddening.

It took a day to figure out the problem and how to update the data to the new format in rails.

I now serialize in json.