On my former job we once bought a competing company that was failing.

Not for the code but for their customers.

But to make the transition easy we needed to understand their code and database to make a migration script.

And that was a real deep dive.

Their system was built on top of a home grown platform intended to let customers design their own business flows which meant it contained solutions for forms and workflow path design. But that never hit of so instead they used their own platform to design a new system for a more specific purpose.

This required some extra functionality and had it been for their customers to use that functionality would have been added to the platform.

But since they had given up on that they took an easy route and started adding direct references between the code and the configuration.

That is, in the configuration they added explicit class names and method names to be used as data store or for actions.

This was of cause never documented in any way.

And it also was a big contributing cause to their downfall as they hit a complexity they could not handle.

Even the slightest change required synchronizing between the config in the db and the compiled code, which meant you could not see mistakes in compilation but only by trying out every form and action that touched what you changed.

And without documentation or search tools that also meant that no one new could work the code, you had to know what used what to make any changes.

Luckily for us we mostly only needed to understand the storage in the database but even that took about a month to map out WITH the help of their developer ;)

It was not only the “inner platform” it was abusing and breaking the inner platform in more was I can count.

If you are going down the inner platform, at least make sure you go all the way and build it as if it was for the customers, then you at least keep it consistent and keep a clear border between platform and how it is used.

Can someone tell who the fuck lets morons with absolutely 0 knowledge of how the industry works go on and write articles concerning "what programming languages to learn" clickbait articles?

Look, I never looked into them. Not even when starting, I knew (out of spite) that the people that built Windows Vista were developers and then I went ahead to look what a software engineer was. I went down the rabbit hole from that and my next step at the time (I was on the local library) was to go ahead and look for programming books, C++ and Java caught my eye, so I got them two books and went down. Later on I found about JS and Python and similar shit like that and I just continued to learn. I seldom bothered to learn from internet articles because to my opinion if I needed to read documentation then I might as well fucking read it from the people that designed X technology.

some were good, some were shit, etc etc, but I never bothered to look for "what programming languages to learn" articles because I could give close to two shits about some other dickhead telling me what to learn, I have always been rather hesitant to take other people's opinion into consideration when it comes to my own learning.

BUT today I clicked on one of those articles out of curiosity.....

"Many DEVELOPER (notice the lack of proper grammar) choose to leave Visual Basic in favor of more modern frameworks like C#, Java or .NET"

Ok, so, for whatever the fuck reason Java is mentioned along C# and a fucking framework (.NET) rather than just C# for microsoft shit, is this moron talking about VB.NET at all? is he going about VB6? what? what is going on here?

Obj C is not relevant at all and should be immediately replaced by Swift since it is a modern, and stable language (never mind that each release has breaking changes on entire code bases, yeah, fuck it, just jump alltogether and ignore Obj C and the decades of stable code it has)

"Coffeescript has been replaced by the newer features of Java" <--- ok fam, you lost me here, give me your "ITPro" card please and then kick yourself repeatedly in the groin since I won't be bothered touching you, i might get some stOOpid on me.

Fuck, these articles are all over the place, from idiots like the one above, to the moron raving about pharo smalltalk shitting on every tech you use.

Just.....please bring back shit like byte magazine and shit.....please? or Linux Format, make Linux Format more popular across the board, where people who know their shit think twice before spewing their bullshit to the masses? Some fucking kid there might want to know where to start and these fucking idiots are out there just ruining shit for everything.

I'm sorry for not being updated on undocumented breaking changes. It is totally my fault.

The thing that I most hate is when you're approaching a new framework/tool, you follow the official documentation and the first example doesn't work.
I'm trying the official documentation of webpack, I tried the first example and guess! Error! It says that's probably a breaking change. Where the hell should I learn it? I don't have the crystal ball, should I guess how your fucking tool fucking works? Oh my god, it's ok if you introduced breaking changes, but just update all the references, is it so hard?

My employer should burn his DevOps system to the ground: esoteric configuration split on 1000 files, bugs and downtime almost daily, not communicated breaking changes which breaks pipelines, shitty documentation, few opportunities for customization and for everything you have to open a fucking ticket, I love programming but since I have to spend more time on a fucking ticketing system rather than on Vim my motivation is gradually falling to pieces.

Had to be appcelerators titanium (weirdly I think this app was built with it).

I used it in the early days, before they had the foresight to add a date-time picker for Android.

It was a horrible unforgiving place, bugs on top of bugs, horrible documentation, incorrect instructions, and hacky workarounds posted as official installation instructions.

I'm not sure if it's gotten any better now, but I did give it a go again 2 years to update an app for someone. They made so many breaking changes, which is fine, but the new outcome offered less features and required more boilerplate code. I then spent (literally) 3 hours trying to get the Android simulator to run the app. Titanium just kept timing out and throwing incomprehensible errors. I eventually gave up and told my friend I updated it, it compiles but I can't test it.

Will never touch it again, and will never be used in any team I work for. Just awful.

About 3 years ago, we had 4 different WordPress sites for various clients.

My colleagues thought it'd be a genius idea to keep them all in one repo. Even more genius, for local development, a single installation which implements a switcher for the wp-config.php files so we can switch between sites. Not bad in theory.

Fast-forward to present day. 1 client left; another site got converted to using Laravel because they always asked us to update their content so no point using a CMS; whereas the remaining 2 sites use differing versions of WordPress on their live sites, no less than 18 months out of date, have no dev sites, different collection of plugins and themes and both modified to the deepest darkest depths of fucking hell that's barely recognisable as WordPress anymore and next to no documentation or comments around the changes.

The functions.php file of one of these themes is over 4000 lines long!!!

We're keen to upgrade our servers to use Ubuntu 16.04 which defaults to PHP7, so all the already deprecated WordPress functions will then fail to work completely as will have been removed.

Both of these clients have agreed that they wish to convert Laravel as well so there's not really much point in going through the clean up process of their WordPress sites. Just copy the database nuke it all and start a fresh with Laravel FFS!

They also wish to completely redesign and discuss what features to keep/add/remove. With no date for these redesign meetings in sight, we won't be converting to Laravel any time soon, nor upgrading our servers in the foreseeable future either!

This is all because of one dev in the office and his history of failing to keep on top of breaking changes!

Fuck you! Seriously, fuck you!!!

If I was your superior, then you'd have been fired long ago!

can't take this sh1t anymore, will start updating my CV today.

I have to steer wheels on this shitty php-related task with testing suites with latest guides written in 2014, code base of that suite got a shitton of changes.

When referring to original documentation and example that is not working and gives me loads of errors, community pricks just saying something like: don't use 6 year old tutorials!!! well, that is the latest I could find, so yeah -> basically go fuck yourself situation!

went alive from 1st part as I managed to make some hacky clusterfuck that works. now i had to switch library that has no documentation at all, has shitton of options and lattest update is like from 3 years ago, library that is connected had some breaking changes lately so to no surprise I can't get this shit to work!

Is whole php ecosystem just made of folks who simply doesn't give a fuck and latest knowledge update they had is like 4 years ago?

ofc I am excluding laravel community in this!

#Suphle Rant 8: Strange star discovered

I was searching for a project I'd starred earlier, on my github feed, when I realised a user had starred suphle at some point but for some reason, it wasn't reflecting on the stargazers. I was half overjoyed and half confused. Overjoyed over unlocking the milestone.

User seemed legit –an Italian with projects in C that were not forked. Followers and commit graph are organic. Did he star in error, feel the project is a stinker, or encounter installation challenges? Luckily, I found his email address but all his repositories are in Italian so I wasn't too sure he'd understand English, or if the mail was being attended to. Yet, I took my chances

He surprisingly got back to me, affirming that the star-unstar was actually deliberate. He withdrew the star cuz project's documentation is not hosted online and still requires npm start.

I try to persuade him by reminding him it's just a one liner but that markdown files are equally rendered directly on github. Never heard from him again, sadly

I'm kind of bothered cos I find it funny I thought suphle's APIs are all cast in stone, but the more I work on the docs, the closer I am to spotting something that doesn't sit right with me, and diving in to modify it. This not only prolongs ETA, there's the risk of someone who may have stumbled upon it and is studying it, having the rug pulled from under their feet. Things like validator rules and route-collection service-coordinators have been converted from methods and classes to native decorators. I guess I'm safe since nobody has indicated any signal to the contrary. It'll be pedantic to start tagging versions for each change.

Another consideration is that these breaking changes would go to the first segment of the semver scheme, which is hilarious because the rate at which I push such changes is so alarming, we'd probably progress through 15 versions under a year