Since one of my colleagues had a difficult time saying/spelling the word SpamAssassin, it's now officially (in our office):

Spam Ass Ass In

😏

Was asked to help a team of interns in a remote country, finish an app. Not only were they terrible at literally every aspect of development, but were arrogant and argued their "new" ways were right.

Spent weeks on the project being nice, trying to help them, sending them links to standards and documents, pointing out unit tests shouldn't be failing, everyone needs to have the same versions of the tools etc. You know, basic shit.

Things got quite heated a few weeks in when they started completely ignoring me. Shit was breaking all over the place and crashing, as I thought we were going to build it one way, and they went and built it another.

Was practically begging the team architect and my manager for help dealing with them. Only reply I got was the usual "were aware of the problem and looking into it" bullshit.

Eventually after the app was done, a mutual agreement was reached that the 2 teams would split (I maintain they were kicked out). All the local devs were happy, managers had mentioned how difficult they were and it would be great for us to finally work on our own.

So I thought everything was fine ... until my end of year performance review came along.

Seems I'm quite poor at "working with others" and I "don't try hard enough with others", it was clear I was struggling with the remote team and "made no effort".

WELL FUCK RIGHT OFF

Not being cocky, but I've never had anything like that in a performance review for the past 7 years. I'm a hard worker, and never have trouble making friends with colleagues. Everyone in the country complained about these remote fuckers, even the manager, who I begged for help. And the end result is I need to work harder.

I came in early, stayed late to fit their timezone, took extra tasks, did research for them, wrote docs. And I was told to work harder.

Only reason I didn't quit, was my internal transfer request was approved lol. New team is looking at projects orders of magnitude more impressive, never been happier.

Just started my new job.

Poorly defined requirements ✅
Expecting things to be done yesterday ✅
Poorly managed teams ✅
Terrible legacy code ✅
Half the development team is offshore ✅

Maybe I’m just selfish, but I need to work in an environment that has the following

A good technology stack.
A competent manager/team leader.
Competent colleagues.
Clearly defined documentation.
A proper onboarding process.

Why is this so difficult to find in organisations?

What the F**K? Why Marketing department always think they know better than IT Department? They always tell us "What so difficult to do this thing? You guys must have templates and change a few things!"

Let me give you some insight here, that this guy is the guy who buy website templates from programmers, change things and upload the site to Bluehost or Wordpress, That's all he do.

Our Software Archictect, colleagues and I personally went from "What the f***?" to "Are you f**king Kidding Me? "

Sometimes I just want to tell him this "Hey you mother f**ker, based on your f**king statement , why would you need programmers then? You guys can just buy the templates and change things".....

F**k you Marketing Department!

In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:

- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.

- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it

- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.

- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.

- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.

- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages ​​and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages ​​in the job interview.

- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).

- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML

- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...

- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.

- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.

- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022

- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.

- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.

- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.

You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.

As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.

If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!

devRant is awesome, but Disney also manages to light-up my day.
This is how Wall-E became a beloved member of our team, and helped me put a smile on my face throughout a very frustrating project.

It all started in a company, not so far far away from here, where management decided to open up development to a wider audience in the organization. Instead of continuing the good-old ping-pong between Business and IT...

'not meeting my expectations' - 'not stated in project requirements'
'stuff's not working - 'business is constantly misusing'
'why are they so difficult' - 'why don't they know what they really want'
'Ping, pong, plok... (business loses point) ping, pong'

... the company aimed to increase collaboration between the 2 worlds, and make development more agile.

The close collaboration on development projects is a journey of falling and getting back up again. Which can be energy draining, but to be honest there is also a lot of positive exposure to our team now.
The relevant part for this story is that de incentive of business teams throughout these projects was mainly to deliver 'something' that 'worked'. Where our team was also very keen on delivering functionality that is stable, scalable, properly documented etc. etc.
We managed to get the fundamentals in place, but because the whole idea was to be more agile or less strict throughout the process, we could not safeguard all best-practices were adhered to during each phase of a project. The ratio Business/IT was simply out of balance to control everything, and the whole idea was to go for a shorter development lifecycle.
One thing for sure, we went a lot faster from design through development to deployment, high-fives followed and everybody was happy (for some time).
Well almost everybody, because we knew our responsibility would not end after the collection of credits at deployment, but that an ongoing cycle of maintenance would follow. As expected, after the celebrations also complaints, new requirements and support requests on bug fixes were incoming.
Not too enthusiastic about constantly patching these projects, I proposed to halt new development and to initiate a proper cleaning of all these projects. With the image in mind of a small enthusiastic fellow, dedicated to clean a garbage-strewn wasteland for humanity, I deemed "Wall-E" a very suited project name. With Wall-E on board, focus for the next period was on completely restructuring these projects to make sure all could be properly maintained for the future.
I knew I was in for some support, so I fetched some cool wall papers to kick-start each day with a fresh set of Wall-E's on my monitors. Subsequently I created a Project Wall-E status report, included Wall-E in team-meetings and before I knew it Wall-E was the most frequently mentioned member of the team. I could not stop to chuckle when mails started to fly on whether "Wall-E completed project A" or if we could discuss "Wall-E's status next report-out". I am really happy we put in the effort with the whole team to properly deploy all functionality. Not only the project became a success, also the idea of associating frustrating activities with a beloved digital buddy landed well in our company. A colleagues already kickstarted 'project Doraemon', which is triggering a lot of fun content. Hope it may give you some inspiration, or at least motivate you to watch Wall-E!

PS: I have been enjoying the posts, valuable learnings and fun experiences for some time now. Decided to also share a bit from my side, here goes my first rant!

Not sure if it was 2016 or late 2015, but it's a fun story anyway (and if it's not you'll at least learn something from it).

Back at the time I was quite new to unit testing (weird how it has become second nature in a years time). I was writing some software that was supposed to send out some SMS to customers. Of course this had to be tested. However, it was a bit difficult to test (or so I thought) without actually receiving an SMS to know if it was sent. So I decided to use the live API key to make sure the sending of SMS was actually working correctly. I tried it a few times but didn't receive an SMS. So I kept working on it and running tests.

The testing setup I had at the time was just a continues loop that went through all tests to make sure it all still worked (I've moved to only checking on file changes now, but that is besides the point). Keep in mind I was still running these tests, in a loop, with the _live_ API key.

So the end of the working day arrives and I go home and sit in the train. All of the sudden I receive some test SMS. I was thinking "hey nice, it did work". Then I started receiving more. It soon turned out to be an alarmingly big amount of SMS. It stopped around 100, but don't think that was the end of it. Oh no. I had changed the number to send the SMS to from my own number to a different number (+31612345678 to be exact, which I found out later isn't an actual phone number. I really hope I was right about that). I was beginning to become nervous, but there wasn't much I could do.

The next day I returned to work and checked the API for sent SMS. Turns out I had sent a couple of thousand (I think between two and three thousand) SMS in a couple of hours. Most of them to the test number I had supplied.

This probably cost the company a couple of hundred euros. Luckily my colleagues and team leader all thought it was pretty funny, but did tell me not to do it again. And I haven't of course.

Lesson learned: don't use live API keys during testing (among other things :)).

So yeah that was probably my worst dev experience.

I am beginning to hate the relationship between email and my clients. I never thought it would come to the point where email is the worst communication platform I've ever used because some of my clients simply don't know how to use it properly.

I have one client who never uses the subject header in his emails. This makes conversational threads very difficult to follow, and I can't just scan the inbox I have for him. I have to actually do searches on my emails just to find recent conversations.

For some reason nobody knows how to start a new email thread. I have multiple clients that will just take the last email that I sent them, regardless of what it's about, and start a new conversation completely unrelated to the other email by hitting"reply". I end up with email threads that are 60 to 100 emails long and contain many different subjects, which again makes it hard to find anything. Never mind that they've usually put two or three important attachments, or username password combinations, or other valuable information in there amongst all the noise.

Worst of all, I have a few clients and co-workers who insist on starting a new email thread whenever anything about a particular issue comes up. This means that just today I have five separate email threads about the same goddamn issue from the same damn person. Am I supposed to respond to each thread with the same damned information? One of these people is supposed to be both a media consultant and an SEO expert and really should know better. Also, if you do actually send me an email with a subject like "the robot.txt error", please don't give me one sentence about that and five paragraphs about what color you'd like the background to be. That's ridiculous. How the hell am I supposed to find that later? Especially since we already discussed this in the other email that sitting in my inbox.

I swear I am setting up a bug tracking system simply so that my clients can log in and leave me bug reports, and feature requests, and will stop filling up my poor email boxes with what amounts to piles and piles threads that I have to sort through.

For a person who suffers with a form of ADD this is extremely frustrating. Why is it so difficult for my colleagues and clients to write good emails with good subject lines, and reply to the right damn emails?

Am I just being too anal, or does this bother others as well?

First company:

- being sat at an office that didn't have chairs with proper back support. It would kill my back every day. Like sitting on a bar stool coding.
- not having access to basic resources (cafeteria, salary bonuses)
- being seriously underpaid ($200 under)
- not having an IT process pipeline (yeah, this is a huge one): no JIRA, no git, no VCS, no continuous integration, etc. I fucking spend 45% of the time fixing coding-unrelated shit.

Second company (very aggravating):

- dumb frontend bitch and privileged colleague who both kept telling me months on end to shut up and who wouldn't listen to my advice on anything, while my advice would actually help the company advance in productive ways. The key here is being told to shut up while stagnating. i.e. dead end job.
- people advancing in the company based on nepotism and favoritism, based on having tits and ass, rather than skills and independence.

- pointlessssssssss meetings where decisions are made solely based on the opinion of Mr. favorite senior dev. The rest just sits there like a bunch of sad saps and yay-nodders. Incompetent PO's who "would like to hear your input" but then when you give it, they completely dismiss you.

- pointlessssssssss monthly meetings with stakeholders, where the dev teams do nothing but clash and act like pussies in front of the PM just to get in his favor, but behind scenes continue to make the same mistakes and telling the CEO everything is fine. Goodness, how can it get more unproductive.

- completely antisocial and nepotistic 'colleagues' who won't even talk to you, let alone smile at you or be friendly. You saying good morning and them pretending you're vapor that doesn't exist. Go go company atmosphere! Especially during lunch, those are the worst times. Imagine sitting at lunch where everyone looks like you killed their dog and the rest is huddled up in little high school groups.
What else? The incessant and pointless smalltalk that makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Talking about dogs, kids, what show was on tv last night. The fuck man, do you have a brain?!

Third company:

- HR bitches who think they are the shit and developers are antisocial, helpless misfits, but they work with computers and they don't even fucking know what a status bar is! The irony!

- forced socializing and stigmatization for the opposite. Imagine coming into a company and you don't say good morning. Should that be a problem? No. Instead, everyone starts dogging on you and hating you just because you didn't smile in their faces and said: hiiiiiiiiiiii how did you sleep? Did you feed your dog? Fuck you.
Elliot (Mr. Robot): "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a mute button for life?" -boop, boop, boop, boop...- Ahh.. there.. that's much better."

- CEO's sucking up to you but when it comes to salary increase, they say shit like: "Ahhh ya know, it's kinda difficult." Yet another dead end job.

When there is no Grow potential at your position
Boss is not willing to give you a raise. And any other place earns 1.5x more at least with better benefits.

But you really like the position and colleagues.

That is a difficult decision to make.

I see a lot of rants on this platform complaining about their boss/management.

About how they don't understand how complicated the development can be of seemingly simple tasks or how they would prefer small estimations over realistic ones.

Is that really the standard in this field of work?
Am I just that lucky to find basically the ideal boss on my first try?

My boss really understands how difficult some tasks can be even if they don't initially seem like it. He listens to my ideas as if they are at least just as important as his own. He can almost think like a real developer and is prepared to give us all tools we could want to evolve.

It is a very small firm and I'm basically the only real developer on this project, but I would follow that man to the ends of the earth.

Can some people please clear my conscience and confirm there are still good managers in this field who really care about their project and their employees/colleagues?

If somebody creates rules around you, they're not your friend.

e.g.: you want to ask your colleague a question but they block you off and say that they have a set of bureaucratic rules you have to live by before you may even attempt to ask them a question.

Sigh.

For me it was not do much a choice.

I started out using basic and simple text display (graphics existed but was quite difficult).

For a long time I was the sole or part of a pair of devs so specializing was not possible and once we grew to such a size I already was quite proficient in all areas from hardware to customer support and education.

But from that time onto today I have gravitated towards a more backend role mainly because I lack a good sense or visual design.

I know it something looks good, but doing it my self results in more boring or plain designs where more thought goes into UX than nice looking design.

That said, if we do web applications I can still keep up since it usually is more ux heavy ;)

But when it comes to adding background images, nice color sets and such I gladly defer that to colleagues with a better design sense.

Is anyone here with ASD? How are you cope with communication with colleagues? At the moment I'm junior dev and need ask and discuss more, but it's difficult to explain what I mean and make correct questions

Time sheets. I'm not a fan of our task management system, you don't check out jobs or tasks like moving cards on a kanban board, it's more of a loose, calendar-based setup. We're also in a small, open office so it can be difficult to remember to log things in the software when you could tell the person opposite you that their task is finished. On top of that a lot of the time it takes me longer than the scheduled time to get a job finished as I'm learning a lot of new stuff, so digitally documenting things like that worry me a little. I don't want to look like I can't hack it just because a job takes me longer than my much-more-experienced colleagues.
I should note that I understand it's all incredibly useful data to the company, but I hate doing it and it's very easy to forget or ignore.

Just delivered most difficult project I had so far, despite all issues managed to deliver (on time). Had help from team but some colleagues only contributed with "I'll tell X and Y to do it".
Told my manager it was really hard for me and sometimes I had to work some hours in the weekends, once even entire weekend with no extra pay, just to meet deadlines.
My manager just told me in my performance review that I didn't deliver on time and compared me to the UX designer that delivers Figma designs on time for like 8 projects and never has to work overtime. I guess dev work is the same as Figma design around here.
Then manager proceeded to tell me that he wants what's best for me.
Safe to say no raise this year.

Change is truly a difficult thing. I've been trying to introduce my group colleagues to GitHub, I even gave them some tutorials that I used. I'm not saying I know everything about Git or GitHub but the pros of using it or any VCS outweigh using Google drive, zipping and email each other the code and many other creative ways of sharing work. Let's just say two months have passed there haven’t been any change ☹

I've been working for over a year now in this remote job as a sysadmin for a local client. I personally find this job quite intimidating at first with all of the infrastructure and all of its many microservices running in high availability set up. I enjoyed learning everything about them and why it's been set up this way, which gives me ideas if I were to build my own app (not competing with my current employer, of course).

But now I don't feel comfortable managing this beast in its many environments.

From time to time, I would hear from my old colleagues at my old sucky company for help in their work and that they know I'm an expert in. I help and it makes me feel good.

Now I'm at a career dilemma. I don't want to lose my current job because I feel "uncomfortable" with managing and administrating the tech holding the whole infrastructure. And I don't wanna go back to my old job with the sucky pay and the feel of being unchallenged. And if I try to find another job, I might be as lucky as I do now, especially good difficult it is for me to find a remote job to begin with.

Objectively, I just need to clear off my debts (at this rate, in 4 years), and have a side income to support my family. But I don't think I can follow through on that plan. Should I look for a new job or do better with the current job that I have now?

Suddenly, I find myself in a crossroad situation. I have been offered a position which would align perfectly with my career path aspirations (cloud solutions architect) with double the pay to my current salary. If only those were the only variables in this equation, taking the offer would be a no-brainer. Alas, it is never that simple (unless all you care about are pay and career path, of course)…

So, let’s break it down to pros and cons of jumping ship, shall we?

Pros:
- double pay compared to current salary
- aligns with my career aspiration
- part of a team of cloud solutions architects (mentorship opportunities)
- varying projects (position is at a consultancy firm)
- shares of the company come with the position ($$$ if it grows)
- possibility to influence strategic decisions
- no more 2h+ commutes

Cons:
- it’s a consultancy startup (emphasis on both consultancy and startup)
- 100% wfh
- would mean losing my current team where we are well and truly glued together and have such great vibes (and I value this, very very highly - this really is the main con)
- would mean losing my current work environment, where we have a gym and sauna at the office etc all kinds of stuff that support my athletic lifestyle
- would mean I don’t have as many opportunities to visit my parents anymore (since they live close to my current office but not close to me)
- at my current position I have super interesting projects both ongoing and in the horizon for a long time to come
- would mean eating my words (see previous point, and the fact I’ve said to my TM ”I can see myself staying as long as this job offers me opportunities to keep learning skills that are meaningful to me”), and I value my integrity
- would mean leaving my colleagues in quite a hairy spot, effectively betraying them in my mind (when our lead dev jumped ship a few years ago, he left us in quite a limbo and hands full of shit we didn’t know what to do about… I don’t wish that situation for anyone)

So, to sum it up, my reasons to stay are more those of moral integrity and convenience, well as the will to see the wheels I got rolling to the end, whereas my reasons to go are more personal finances and career oriented. A difficult decision. What to do?

I hate it when colleagues name their commits with a non descriptive name like "minor changes", "minor fixes", "small changes" and so on. I know that good naming is a difficult task in software development, but do I expect to much when I want them to explain shortly what exactly they changed since the last commit?
Good commit messages are always helpful if you want to do good PR reviews and furthermore if you want to go back to an older commit because someone fucked something up.
Don't get me wrong, my colleagues are great people and great developers, but some of them ignore the fact that good commit messages might be useful in the future for others and themselves

It seems that my barometer for whether I would stay long in a company is roughly 1.5 years. Because apparently that's how long it takes to gauge if:

(a) The work I'm doing is fulfilling or self-satisfying
(b) My colleagues make work a fun and challenging experience
(c) My bosses are people I can be proud to work for.

Right now, the tally thus far:

(a) The work is half crap, supporting old code (fuck Swig and Architect, by the way) or fixing bugs on old projects. New projects are always mismanaged, and I mean ALWAYS (let's do Agile and create tickets but hey the requirements are still in progress so do start anyway and we'll file everything as bug tickets until they're done)

(b) I'm sure it's an effect of going remote working for the last few months, but I'm feeling detached from my team. It's fine I guess.

(c) My manager is okay, he's a good guy who listens and is also technical so we get along. But his boss (who oversees several teams. including ours) is a total prick who loves to insult people at their expense as a joke. He knows nobody's gonna talk smack back so he just does it without repercussions.

I'll probably see if I can move around internally to a different division since the pandemic makes it difficult to find work externally. I'm grateful I have a job, but I shouldn't have to feel like I owe the company for that at the cost of my personal happiness.

Just gotta #survive2020 I suppose.

#Suphle Rant 2: Michael's obduration

For the uninitiated, Suphle is a PHP framework I built. This is the 2nd installment in my rants on here about it.

Some backstory: A friend and I go back ~5 years. Let's call him Michael. He was CTO of the company we worked at. After his emigration, they seem to have taught him some new stack and he needed somewhere to practise it on. That stack was Spring Boot and Angular. He and his pals convinced product owner at our workplace to rebuild the project (after 2+ years of active development) from scratch using these new techs. One thing led to the other, and I left the place after some months.

Fast forward a year later, dude hits me up to broach an incoming gig he wants us to collab on. Asks where I'm at now, and I reply I took the time off to build Suphle. Told him it's done already and it contains features from Spring, Rust, Nest and Rails; basically, I fixed everything they claimed makes PHP nonviable for enterprise software, added features from those frameworks that would attract a neutral party. Dude didn't even give me audience. I only asked him to look at the repo's readme to see what it does. That's faster than reading the tests (since the docs are still in progress). He stopped responding.

He's only the second person who has contacted me for a gig since I left. Both former colleagues. Both think lowly of PHP, ended up losing my best shot at earning a nickel while away from employed labour. It definitely feels like shooting myself in the foot.

I should take up his offer, get some extra money to stay afloat until Suphle's release. But he's adamant I use Spring. Even though Laravel is the ghetto, I would grudgingly return to it than spend another part of my life fighting to get the most basic functionality up and running without a migraine in Spring. This is a framework without an official documentation. You either have to rely on baeldung or mushroom blogs. Then I have to put up with mongodb (or nosql, in short).

I want to build a project I'm confident and proud about delivering, one certified by automated tests for it, something with an architecture I've studied extensively before arriving at. Somewhere to apply all the research that was brainstormed before this iteration of Suphle was built.
I want autonomy, not to argue over things I'm sure about. He denied me this when we worked together. I may not mind swallowing them for the money, but a return to amateur mode in Spring is something I hope I never get to experience soon

So, I'm wondering: if his reaction reflects the general impression PHP has among developers globally, it means I've built a castle on a sinking ship. If someone who can vouch for me as a professional would prefer not to have anything to do with PHP despite my reassurance it'll be difficult to convince others within and beyond that there could be a more equipped alternative to their staple tool. Reminds me of the time the orchestra played to their deaths while the titanic sank