Maintaining software built by interns who have all quit by now and made zero documentation

The react documentation can be taken wildly out of context!

Me: So, I've been looking through the code and there's barely any comments and documentation. What's up with that?

Him: Yeah, it's really complex and low level, so it's difficult to actually describe what it does.

Me: But that's exactly why you should document it! 🤦🤦🤦

Him: ...

And the award for the best API documentation goes to...

Microsoft!

So this is going to be one hell of a FUCKING rant.
Just heard from a friend (doing the same exams I passed, it was going to happen in two groups and he was in the second) that he failed the first out of three phases. And why?
I NEARLY FUCKING FAILED THE FIRST FUCKING PHASE. I GOT A FAIR CHANCE TO MAKE IT RIGHT AND I TOOK THAT CHANCE.
BUT.
MY FRIEND MADE THE SAME MISTAKE. HE MISSED A FUCKING DOCUMENT AND ASKED FOR OVERTIME, WHICH HE GOT AND THEN HE ASKED THE EXAMINOR VERY NICELY IF HE COULD TELL HIM WHAT DOCUMENT HE MISSED (for the record, it was bad documentation and it was not clear that it had to be a seperate document) AND WHAT DID THAT FATHERFUCKING COCKSUCKER SAY?
Hmm hmm hmmm.... nope, that's your responsibillity

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? HE HELPED ME BUT NOT HIM? I KNOW YOU LIKE ME MORE THAN HIM BUT IS THAT A MOTHERFUCKING REASON TO LET HIM FUCKING FAIL?!?!?!?

I AM MOTHERFUCKING FUCKITY FUCKING FURIOUS.

Jesus Christ. Dagger2's documentation has got to be the most convoluted shit I have ever laid my eyes on.

The sheer mental gymnastics I had to do to get through this one line at 2:30 am...

Documentation 🤷‍♂️

!rant

Today I bring happy news. First company I interviewed at clicked so well, both personally and technically, and they expressed an eagerness to hire me on the spot. I figured we might as well talk salary to compare them against other interviews. The offer they made me was so good I decided to sign there and then. They said they participate in a fair wage program but for me this is absolutely the dream. I get lots of nice perks to boot. And they've already mailed me some tech documentation to go over so I can prepare, as I'll be working with the latest front end stuff and of course my trusty .NET (and yes I asked it'll be C#, haha).

I can't even begin to express how great this is. The last decade I've been unemployed for several years in total, and vastly underpayed when I was employed. I've worked in some toxic environments, been falling behind on tech and wrote a lot of rubbish code as a result of that. But it seems that somehow all the hard work I did put in paid off by taking a chance when it presented itself and go in accepting I might fail horribly. And I did bomb the tech questions actually. But they let me explain myself and come to answers together and saw beyond the black and white.

In short I feel like I've won the work lottery and will start 2018 in style. Part of me is still scared though, that there will be a mistake or a catch or even somehow I'll ruin everything. But that is the risk in life and I'm just going to have to deal. What I can control and will do is my very best, because I want to keep succeeding and have a great future career. And I hope I can inspire others in the same boat with my actions too.

Happens all too often

Found in JavaFX documentation.
Biggest range I've ever seen...

Android really gets on my goat. They are moving things so far that they are actually doing more damage than good.

Upgrade my build tools to v25? sure! Now all my BLE code is borked, thanks for nothing.

Go to the documentation? Lol, that's deprecated fool!

At least now it can all fail to function in Kotlin, a wrapper for Java 6. Instead of keeping your tools up to date you just create another layer of obfuscation. Well done, so proud.

Team lead wants me to document a 7000 line code in 2 days. Tell me about it

When I was at university in my last semester of my bachelor's, I was doing a game programming paper and our last assignment was to group up and make a game. So I go with one of the guys I know and this other dude since his previous game was really neat. Then two randoms joined that from my first impressions of their games wasn't much at all (one guy made four buttons click and called it a game in Java when we had to make games in c++ and the other guy used an example game and semi modded it.

Anyways we get to brain storming, totally waste too much time getting organised because the guy that volunteered (4 buttons guy) was slow to getting things sorted. Eventually we get to making the game and 4 buttons guy hasn't learnt how to use git, I then end up spending 3 hours over Skype explaining to him how to do this. He eventually learns how to do things and then volunteers to do the AI for the game, after about a week (this assignment is only 5 weeks long) he hasn't shown any progress, we eventually get to our 3rd week milestone no progress from him and the modder, with only three classes left we ask them both to get stuff done before a set deadline (modder wanted to do monsters and help 4 buttons with AI) both agreed and deadline rolls up and no work is shown at all, modest shows up extremely late and shows little work.

4 buttons guy leaves us a Skype message the day of our 2nd to last class,, saying he dropped the paper...

Modder did do some work but he failed to read all the documentation I left him (the game was a 2d multiplayer crafting game, I worked so hard to make a 2d map system with a world camera) he failed to read everything and his monsters used local coordinates and were stuck on screen!

With about a week left and not too many group meetings left we meet up to try and get stuff done, modder does nothing to help, the multiplayer is working my friend has done the crafting and weapon system and the map stuff is working out well. We're missing AI and combat, with our last few hours left we push to get as much stuff done, I somehow get stuck doing monster art, AI is done by the other two and I try to getting some of the combat and building done.

In the end we completely commented all of modders work because well it made us look bad lol. He later went to complain to my free claiming I did it and was a douchebag for doing so. We had to submit our developer logs and the three of us wrote about how shitty it was to deal with these two.

We tried out best not to isolate ourselves from them and definitely tried to help but we were swamped with our other assignments and what we had to work on.

In the end leaving and not helping right when the deadline is close was what I call the most shittiest thing team mates can do, I think sticking together even if we were to fail was at least a lot better.

Fukken School project

I spent days writing good documentation with step-by-step tutorials. I broke the project down into small, simple tasks.
Trying so hard to make everyone’s job easy.

And they still fail.

Give me a cookie

You know what is disappointing?
When you struggle with something and then you discover that the solution was clearly stated in the documentation.
In short, I'm an idiot. But I still got one upvote on my question on stackoverflow so apparently I'm not the only idiot out there. Arigato, idiot-tachi, we need to stand together so we can fail together.

Email chains, screenshots shared in google docs, two comments per 1k lines of code, and sticky notes are sufficient documentation, right? RIGHT?

Running a fucking conda environment on windows (an update environment from the previous one that I normally use) gets to be a fucking pain in the fucking ass for no fucking reason.

First: Generate a new conda environment, for FUCKING SHITS AND GIGGLES, DO NOT SPECIFY THE PYTHON VERSION, just to see compatibility, this was an experiment, expected to fail.

Install tensorflow on said environment: It does not fucking work, not detecting cuda, the only requirement? To have the cuda dependencies installed, modified, and inside of the system path, check done, it works on 4 other fucking environments, so why not this one.

Still doesn't work, google around and found some thread on github (the errors) that has a way to fix it, do it that way, fucking magic, shit is fixed.

Very well, tensorflow is installed and detecting cuda, no biggie. HAD TO SWITCH TO PYHTHON 3,8 BECAUSE 3.9 WAS GIVING ISSUES FOR SOME UNKNOWN FUCKING REASON

Ok no problem, done.

Install jupyter lab, for which the first in all other 4 environments it works. Guess what a fuckload of errors upon executing the import of tensorflow. They go on a loop that does not fucking end.

The error: imPoRT eRrOr thE Dll waS noT loAdeD

Ok, fucking which one? who fucking knows.

I FUCKING HATE that the main language for this fucking bullshit is python. I guess the benefits of the repl, I do, but the python repl is fucking HORSESHIT compared to the one you get on: Lisp, Ruby and fucking even NODE in which error messages are still more fucking intelligent than those of fucking bullshit ass Python.

Personally? I am betting on Julia devising a smarter environment, it is a better language already, on a second note: If you are worried about A.I taking your job, don't, it requires a team of fucktards working around common basic system administration tasks to get this bullshit running in the first place.

My dream? Julia or Scala (fuck you) for a primary language in machine learning and AI, in which entire environments, with aaaaaaaaaall of the required dlls and dependencies can be downloaded and installed upon can just fucking run. A single directory structure in which shit just fucking works (reason why I like live environments like Smalltalk, but fuck you on that too) and just run your projects from there, without setting a bunch of bullshit from environment variables, cuda dlls installation phases and what not. Something that JUST FUCKING WORKS.

I.....fucking.....HATE the level of system administration required to run fucking anything nowadays, the reason why we had to create shit like devops jobs, for the sad fuckers that have to figure out environment configurations on a box just to run software.

Fuck me man development turned to shit, this is why go mod, node npm, php composer strict folder structure pipelines were created. Bitch all you want about npm, but if I can create a node_modules setting with all of the required dlls to run a project, even if this bitch weights 2.5GB for a project structure you bet your fucking ass that I would.

"YOU JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING" YES I FUCKING DO and I will get this bullshit fixed, I will get it running just like I did the other 4 environments that I fucking use, for different versions of cuda and python and the dependency circle jerk BULLSHIT that I have to manage. But this "follow the guide and it will work, except when it does not and you are looking into obscure github errors" bullshit just takes away from valuable project time when you have a small dedicated group of developers and no sys admin or devops mastermind to resort to.

I have successfully deployed:
Java
Golang
Clojure
Python
Node
PHP
VB/C# .NET
C++
Rails
Django

Projects, and every single fucking time (save for .net, that shit just fucking works on a dedicated windows IIS server) the shit will not work with x..nT reasons. It fucking obliterates me how fucking annoying this bullshit is. And the reason why the ENTIRE FUCKING FIELD of computer science and software engineering is so fucking flawed.

But we can't all just run to simple windows bs in which we have documentation for everything. We have to spend countless hours on fucking Linux figuring shit out (fuck you also, I have been using Linux since I was 18, I am 30 now) for which graphical drivers for machine learning, cuda and whatTheFuckNot require all sorts of sys admin gymnasts to be used.

Y'all fucked up a long time ago. Smalltalk provided an all in one, easily rollable back to previous images, easily administered interfaces for this fileFuckery bullshit, and even though the JVM and the .NET environments did their best to hold shit down, and even though we had npm packages pulling the universe inside, or gomod compiling shit into one place NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO we had to do whatever the fuck we wanted to feel l337 and wanted.

Fuck all of you, fuck this field, fuck setting boxes for ML/AI and fuck every single OS in existence

My boss asked me two days ago to fix some errors in an application. From the errors I saw it would be a 5 minute fix. I fixed the problems just now because there was no documentation on how to set it up.
After setting it up it was just changing a value from true to false...

I ruined two days just because there was no documentation. Please everyone, I know writing documentation is boring but at least write some documentation on how to setup a project.

Companies that create APIs and then update them but fail to update the documentation, to a point where the syntax doesn't even remotely resemble how it originally was, or even give the location of where the new endpoint is.
WHY MUST YOU MAKE MY LIFE HELL

I spent the entire freaking day on one spec — one! — and I still haven’t gotten it to pass. Or fail. It’s still just breaking. Even the simple crap is breaking, so getting the actual complicated things I need it to do working? Bloody pipe dream (whatever that means).

Just. Goddamn this system is complicated and poorly designed.

And no, before you ask, of course there is no documentation.

I want my day back. 😡

Dear providers of SDKs, when you claim to have a full documentation for your SDK, please at least provide the info about what unit (radians or degrees) the Angle properties are. Especially important when the iOS SDK is taking radians and the Android SDK is taking degrees, as I found out by experimenting. I don't even care so much about float on Android and double on iOS. Just make use of the fucking documentation and provide some actually useful info there. "Sets or gets the angle" is fucking NOT useful.

TeamViewer documentation
wanted to find out some command line args and they show me this..

I FUCKING HATE IT WHEN I HAVE TO BUILD SOMETHING FROM SOURCE!!!!

So I wanted to install a package with pip. Shouldn't be that difficult, right? RIGHT? Lmao
Things I encountered on this adventure in no particular order:
- multiple undocumented dependencies, only explained on stackoverflow or some github issues
- inconsistent and outdated documentation spread over multiple pages on multiple websites
- Python version can't be too old or too new
- other external software version incompatibilities
- Build process that takes several minutes just to fail, then try again and fail with exactly the same outcome after a few minutes
- fucking SVN is needed?!?!?!
- VS Code is needed for completely manual build ????
- cmd/powershell incompatibilites
- required reboots

At some point I just gave up... Now I don't even remember what I crap I installed that I don't need anymore.
Please for the love of god provide prebuild packages or at least a very SIMPLE build process -_-

PM: "Can you take a look at this app and see if you can find why it's producing errors and fix it"
Me: "Yea sure, can I see the documentation so I might be able to understand the system and why it's doing that?"
PM: "There's no documentation" ... "Also it was cowboy coded by an intern"

Got into the job a week ago, was asked to do a documentation of a project. It started 4 years ago.

Me: "Need help with build config problems, please help almighty documentation page!"

Docs Page: "Nah fam, I got 4 headers about problems with no text, a blank code example, and 2 error 404 pages."

And that's why I don't like build pipelines.

Here’s my step-by-step guide for the idiot:

1) take <cutting-egde tech> (Tech)
2) read documentation for Tech
3) figure out what you want to do with Tech
4) if you are being ambitious, simplify the idea appropriately
5) Go do the thing with the Tech
6 When you fail at something, RTFM
7) Rinse and repeat

SO MAD. Hands are shaking after dealing with this awful API for too long. I just sent this to a contact at JP Morgan Chase.

-------------------
Hello [X],
1. I'm having absolutely no luck logging in to this account to check the Order Abstraction service settings. I was able to log in once earlier this morning, but ever since I've received this frustratingly vague "We are currently unable to complete your request" error message (attached). I even switched IP's via a VPN, and was able to get as far as entering the below Identification Code until I got the same message. Has this account been blocked? Password incorrect? What's the issue?

2. I've been researching the Order Abstraction API for hours as well, attempting to defuddle this gem of an API call response:

error=1&message=Authentication+failure....processing+stopped

NOWHERE in the documentation (last updated 14 months ago) is there any reference to this^^ error or any sort of standardized error-handling description whatsoever - unless you count the detailed error codes outlined for the Hosted Payment responses, which this Order Abstraction service completely ignores. Finally, the HTTP response status code from the Abstraction API is "200 OK", signaling that everything is fine and dandy, which is incorrect. The error message indicates there should be a 400-level status code response, such as 401 Unauthorized, 403 Forbidden or at least 400 Bad Request.

Frankly, I am extremely frustrated and tired of working with poorly documented, poorly designed and poorly maintained developer services which fail to follow basic methodology standardized decades ago. Error messages should be clear and descriptive, including HTTP status codes and a parseable response - preferably JSON or XML.
-----

This whole piece of garbage is junk. If you're big enough to own a bank, you're big enough to provide useful error messages to the developers kind enough to attempt to work with you.

Today after longer vacation I came back to work.

Edit: wrote this rant long time ago, but never finished. Was too pissed.

Some easy meetings, then wanted to start on an easy job.

Just migrating some things from bash regex voodoo to proper tools like JQ.

Finished in roughly 1 h. Lovely.
Made some tea, ate some cookies.

Set up dev environment, found no documentation what so ever, got it running after half an hour.

Annoying, but ok.

Then I tried my scripts...

They worked... Except they didn't.
Console log empty, response code 200 with state: GENERATE_NO_FILES.

Eh. Fuck you. Just fuck you.

Fixed the logging configuration, which was broken since uhm... 2 years plus?

Well... Another half another hour gone...
Kinda pissed now.

Still script return failed...
Poking and trying to sprinkle debug all over that shit cause everything seems ... An incohesive, inconsistent diarrhea.

3 hours later...

Made the ticket to rewrite it.

I did nothing wrong at all.

The API just has no workflow at all. The
*seperate* API calls have to be in an **specific** order - as otherwise the generation will fail, as the prerequisites for the generation are not fulfilled.

Yeah. Completely logical. Especially not to give out any kind of warning or an error message like requirements not met, blablabla.

I drank that evening 2 six packs of beer. I was raging mad....

Then gave that shit to another manager, as I never want to touch that nuclear waste again....

How can someone be so brain damaged -.-

Apparently my learning style is more rote memorization than learn-by-doing and I've been trying to learn by doing for years as a hobbyist.

It took a fucking *national quarantine* to get me to try something different and I'm blown away.

What would have taken me many months to learn I've all but grasped in detail in a matter of 20 hours of study over the course of a week.

Fuck you javascript. I WIN THIS ROUND. No more looking at the documentation for stupid shit like how to write a regex, or why everything is wrapped in fucking parenthesis (IIFE), or why
I keep getting a uncaught reference exception.

The important thing to realize about learning is NEVER be obstinate about it. Try many things, and don't get stuck in one way of learning unless you know thats what works for you.

This is why having study partners and mentors are important.

I think experience/practice and rote learning work in tandem. Rote learning lets you skip the much longer step of grasping the fundamentals, bootstrapping the process of learning the abstractions that are composed of those fundamentals.

I'm still adding cards to my anki flash card deck, but if anyone wants it I'm willing to share. It's mostly just 1. practice questions, 2. detail questions (what are the types? What does this regex do?, etc), 3. implication questions (heres this bit of code. It's XYZ, why did it fail? Correct it.), combining core details to memorize, and the application of the facts learned.

It helped me to learn and I'm apparently retarded, so if you're new to programming and want to learn JS, it can probably help you too. Unless you're more of a tard than me lol.

Are you asking me?

!rant!
I have replaced a dev in a company where the project already started and it is shit! The project is directed already to fail, no requirements documentation, no proper communications, and a stubborn dev teammate.

aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

All the documents that we have right now is I am the one who created it. Like c'mmon! this project is already going for 1 year and I recently just joined the team!

Googling for Angular (>=2) documentation and finding AngularJS instead feels like cancer.

If Google was going to "update" to what is functionally a new framework, they should've named it differently instead of trying to piggyback on the popularity of AngularJS. Sure, there's similarities, but let's be realistic here.

That feeling when you open link that's supposed to lead to the index of documentation and you find this...

The rest was.. unfinished..

#fml

Started a new contract:
Dev: "here, take this draft document containing a rough explanation of the requirements and write this service that exchange messages with these two subsystems"
Me 😐"ok"

-- couple weeks later --

Dev: "oh btw, you should go through ALL the fields in those messages described in the 'documentation' and double check them because we use millimeters and they use meters, we measure milliseconds and they use seconds. You should handle conversions when you deal with those messages"

Me (in my mind): "fucking son of a bitch! Why didn't you tell me this little piece of information at the beginning so I could have accounted for that instead of bloating the code now with your spaghetti style, full of horrible hacks, ifs and workarounds?
Me 😐: "sure, I will"

(don't worry, in the end I managed to find a clean solution for that 😉)

Client: I'm not able to see the mount storage
Me: share your configuration
Client: 📃

Me: (frustrated but still kind and polite) I see the ports are swapped between hosts which is the culprit behind the issue.
Me: can I ask the reason behind doing this?

Client: I thought red color goes left and aqua goes right.
Me: 🦍 🤐🤐

Very useful!
It's not just about code but the whole package.
Watching great programmers fail miserably at project management, research, documentation, team leading and acting professional is just embarrassing, especially when they slate those who went out to educate themselves.

🎙️ Mic drop, I'm out!

FUCK you "WP iThemes Security Pro".

First of all, your FUCKing services isn't really secure, more like security by obscurity.
Don't get me started on how you probably don't have a dedicated team of security experts.
But oh well, the customer insisted I must install you, despite my advise.

Second of all, Don't FUCKing send me emails regarding "Scheduled malware scan failed" without it containing the FUCKing error message, not some generic "http_request_failed" error, why did it FUCKing fail?

Last but not least: Don't FUCKing clutter is with with your giant ass logo that takes up half my screen or FUCKing spam such as your upcoming events, newly published books/articles, incorrect "documentation"

When some gotchas aren’t documented so you need to trial and error the api

Need to use new module or pattern:

1. Read the online documentation
2. Have no fu*kin clue what I just read
3. Try for 2 hours and fail.
4. Go home and sleep
5. Wake up at 3am from a fever dream with the solution to the problem
6. Go to work and implement it in 10 min

I guess I learn when I sleep

Just spent the last hour working out how something worked because I didn't write any documentation and it was a hack in the first place. Damn You Past Me!

How the fuck does a community write an open source library/package that works wonders, but fail to write a proper documentation.

So many times I have to look into the core of frameworks, libraries and packages so form my own documentation in my head.

I guess I should be contributing too.

We are all to blame.

Losing faith in Netflix and their awesome open source projects.

Had a hard time trying to install Security Monkey : poor quality quickstart Ubuntu-only, almost no documentation, same instructions for latest (aka dev) and stable (aka prod) version, no depencies list ... oh and the UI display well only on Chrome ..

Then you surrender and just want to check the dockerized version they provide : it doesn't work neither (build fail or back end process just shut down) !!

I'm done ...

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!

Java docs are unreadable.

TLDR: I didn't & still not sure if it is..

I love bug hunting & fixing & figuring out how stuff works, but many will argue this is not even real programming..

Long version how I ended up programming:
Back in highschool, I was deciding between english and mathematics & computer science.. I filled in the form for the latter. Got a change of hearts but I already gave the extra/backup empty form to schoolmate..

Figured it's for the better because it's a hell to get a job as an english teacher/prof anyways + I dislike comunications with people + documentation (if any) is in english etc..

At the end of first year, I didn't even apply for all the exams because you had to have both programming 1&2 to pass or even be eligible to take the year again.. I figured I'd fail them, so once I actually passed both (& actually not with bad grades), I was fucked.. had to retake the year, which means I lost time + still had to pay the rent etc.. decided to drop out and return home and do the IT engineer course instead to at least have some formal education to help me find a job. Finished that without problems, I 'specialised' in network administration.
I got a job straight out of school as a web developer.. the irony.. got some conflicts with the boss and was terminated (material for another rant).

Later I sought out admin jobs, but got declined because I was overqualified and had programming experince. FML, right?

Ended up sending out mandatory job applications for IT administration & programming to not lose the bonuses & got called up to a meeting in the company I work for since then.

No qualifications for .net & MS technologies, but they liked my CV so the ended up setting up the interview anyway. I didn't know half of the technologies and concepts by proper name, but they figured I understand enough of the content to give me a try. A few years later, I got the most fucked up project they have because of my love for new thigs and trying to understand everything. It's aaaalmost bearable now.. still needs a lot of work, but I'm happy where I am. Saddly, I'm still second guessing if I'm doing a proper job as a dev, but they seem to be very ok with my work. (:

1) Browse high level documentation on the matter.
2) Find a semi-guided source of in-depth material (usually a book).
3) Start working with the technology.
4) Supplement with YouTube tutorials if necessary.
5) Fail initially.
6) Eventually succeed after much persistence.

nothing new, just another rant about php...
php, PHP, Php, whatever is written, wherever is piled, I hate this thing, in every stack.

stuff that works only according how php itself is compiled, globals superglobals and turbo-globals everywhere, == is not transitive, comparisons are non-deterministic, ?: is freaking left associative, utility functions that returns sometimes -1, sometimes null, sometimes are void, each with different style of usage and naming, lowercase/under_score/camelCase/PascalCase, numbers are 32bit on 32bit cpus and 64bit on 64bit cpus, a ton of silent failing stuff that doesn't warn you, references are actually aliases, nothing has a determined type except references, abuse of mega-global static vars and funcs, you can cast to int in a language where int doesn't even exists, 25236 ways to import/require/include for every different subcase, @ operator, :: parsed to T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM for no reason in stack traces, you don't know who can throw stuff, fatal errors are sometimes catchable according to nobody knows, closed-over vars are passed as functions unless you use &, functions calls that don't match args signature don't fail, classes are not object and you can refer them only by string name, builtin underlying types cannot be wrapped, subclasses can't override parents' private methods, no overload for equality or ordering, -1 is a valid index for array and doesn't fail, funcs are not data nor objects when clojures instead are objects, there's no way to distinguish between a random string and a function 'reference', php.ini, documentation with comments and flame wars on the side, becomes case sensitive/insensitive according to the filesystem when line break instead is determined according to php.ini, it's freaking sloooooow...

enough. i'm tired of this crap.
it's almost weekend! 🍻

So I needed to go through a documentation of a program that was obviously developed by Chinese people, and went through some kind of Google translate to be in English.
This is an utter disaster: sentences that barely make sense, code blocks without a matching ending that cause the rest of the paragraph to be in the code block as well, code outside code blocks and without formatting, sentences unrelated to the section they're in, etc.
The program itself is great, but the shitty documentation makes me wanna kill whoever wrote it

When the documentation suggests you use composer to install swiftmailer so I can use sendgrid.

Even though I can install composer as an extension and sendgrid is integrated within the portal it's down to me to work out the azure cli or is it a powershell cli or is it bash?

Echo gives kudu error, oh well if there's kudu why am I using composer?

Grrr azure you don't make it easy.

Just finished setting up immich on my server. Using the prepared docker compose file. But I renamed the docker image of the database. It was called postgres. I renamed it to immich_postgres. After all, I want to know that this container belongs to immich.

Half an hour troubleshooting later, I figured out why I get a login failed error message. Login did not fail, connection did. Why? Because, they rely on the postgres name as an alias. They could have put an explicit alias for dns, they could have used the configuration name, after all they used it in the depends_on section. But they decided to refer to it via the automatically assigned name. Really? Container name? That one thing in the configuration that is supposed to be unique?

Did you really think that was the only postgres database on the server? Maybe I should centralize it into a single database, but I like when my applications can run without outside dependencies. Proper documentation would have been nice. I am sure they mention it somewhere.

Learning a piece of software from an external supplier. The manual is thick like the bible. The examples fail without explanation. Trying to contact support just leads you down an endless trail of support articles. Damn right I get frustrated and bored. Can you blaim me for rather hanging around on devRant than desperately trying to work around problems in someone else's system/documentation? Yeah, I have to pull my shit together, but they have to pull theirs first.

Very reassuring when your payment gateways XML examples have invalid markup.
I asked for XSD's and even they are invalid (containing missing type references)

When the documentation mentiones 2 "easy" steps, but you already know it's gonna be at least 12 ...

Yo what the actual hell is up with the lack of Azure AD B2C documentation, the error codes are pretty ass too! Had a similar problem many users faced & on stackoverflow everyone had different solutions. My solution wasn't the accepted one and it has 2 upvotes ....2 UPVOTES!!

#Suphle Rant 6: Deptrac, phparkitect

This entry isn't necessarily a rant but a tale of victory. I'm no more as sad as I used to be. I don't work as hard as I used to, so lesser challenges to frustrate my life. On top of that, I'm not bitter about the pace of progress. I'm at a state of contentment regarding Suphle's release

An opportunity to gain publicity presented itself last month when cfp for a php event was announced last month. I submitted and reviewed a post introducing suphle to the community. In the post, I assured readers that I won't be changing anything soon ie the apis are cast in stone. Then php 7.4 officially "went out of circulation". It hit me that even though the code supports php 8 on paper, it's kind of a red herring that decorators don't use php 8 attributes. So I doubled down, suspending documentation.

The container won't support union and intersection types cuz I dislike the ambiguity. Enums can't be hydrated. So I refactored implementation and usages of decorators from interfaces to native attributes. Tried automating typing for all class properties but psalm is using docblocks instead of native typing. So I disabled it and am doing it by hand whenever something takes me to an unfixed class (difficulty: 1). But the good news is, we are php 8 compliant as anybody can ask for!

I decided to ride that wave and implement other things that have been bothering me:
1) 2 commands for automating project setup for collaborators and user facing developers (CHECK)
2) transferring some operations from runtime to compile/build TIME (CHECK)
3) re-attempt implementing container scopes

I tried automating Deptrac usage ie adding the newly created module to the list of regulated architectural layers but their config is in yaml, so I moved to phparkitect which uses php to set the rules. I still can't find a library for programmatically updating php filed/classes but this is more dynamic for me than yaml. I set out to implement their library, turns out the entire logic is dumped into the command class, so I can neither control it without the cli or automate tests to it. I take the command apart, connect it to suphle and run. Guess what, it detects class parents as violations to the rule. Wtflyingfuck?!

As if that's not bad enough, roadrunner (that old biatch!) server setup doesn't fail if an initialization script fails. If initialization script is moved to the application code itself, server setup crumbles and takes the your initialization stuff down with it. I ping the maintainer, rustacian (god bless his soul), who informs me point blank that what I'm trying to do is not possible. Fuck it. I have to write a wrapper command for sequentially starting the server (or not starting if initialization operations don't all succeed).

Legitimate case to reinvent the wheel. I restored my deleted decorators that did dependency sanitation for me at runtime. The remaining piece of the puzzle was a recursive film iterator to feed the decorators. I checked my file system reader for clues on how to implement one and boom! The one I'd written for two other features was compatible. All I had to do was refactor decorators into dependency rules, give them fancy interfaces for customising and filtering what classes each rule should actually evaluate. In a night's work (if you're discrediting how long writing the original sanitization decorators and directory iterator), I coupled the Deptrac/phparkitect library of my dreams. This is one of the those few times I feel like a supreme deity

Hope I can eat better and get some sleep. This meme is me after getting bounced by those three library rejections