Consultant: "you should deploy a website. Use wordpress and have a draft ready in a few days. It's easy."

Me: "It's a static website, a one-pager even. I think we would be better served with something light-weight without a database."

Consultant: "99% of the websites in the entire internet are powered by wordpress. It's state of the art, you should use it"

Me: 😢 "Nooo, it needs mainentance and stuff. Look, XY is much simpler. You can even version the static site with git"

Consultant: 😤

We ended up with wordpress for our static website now. I am so proud. I absolutely love wordpress. It is amazing. Now my static one-pager can have plugins, multiple users, security issues and all that. The future is now!

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

Other people : she said yes :') :')

Me: the client accepted the first draft without asking for changes :') :')

He gave me task, and I estimated it will take 2 (120 minutes) hours...
He came after 20 minutes to check the progress... Then he came after 40 minutes... Then he call me after 70 minutes... Then he came again after 90 minutes... Then I delivered the task in the time with my resignation letter draft.

Today, I was telling a team member who joined recently to refer a GitHub repo, fork it and start working.

That person asks me, "Why GitHub, why should I access it etc". I blanked out after hearing the first question, so whatever said after that wasn't registered in my mind.

I asked that person "how did you do it in your previous org ?"

The response was, "we zip the code at end of everyday and store it as draft in our mailbox"

I stormed out of the workplace, even though it was just around mid of the day...

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

+++ Thank you for 1000+'s! +++

So guys we did it! We've reached our first big milestone!
This account was created about a month ago, and we are already this far!

Thanks to all authors (@DLMousey, @filthyranter, @baewulff) who are putting a lot of work and time into their articles and help this account to further grow in size!

To make this article at least a bit informative, here's how we publish our posts:
When I started this account, I hadn't thought of how articles were going to be published. Should I give the password to all writers? Should I post the articles manually?
Well, after I've started the devNews Discord Server, @olback suggested making a Discord Bot, that helps us to publish our stuff.
After surprisingly few hours, @olback already got a prototype working.
We have a special channel and whoever writes stuff in it, updates the current article. Later, I took on the work, @olback has done and switched to LowDB, to be able to let multiple users have their own articles they are working on and much more. (Like special signatures)
And that's how it is now.
We have a channel for draft, where we write our stuff and a channel for publishing, where the bot listens to what we write and then publishes the articles with a command.
That's all of it.

Thank you for reading!

Once, I overheard a conversation between my former PM and a client during a phone call.

Client: I will send the final draft of the project by Thursday.

PM: That's great to hear!

Client: When can I expect the updates to review the changes after the draft is sent? I need to present it at a meeting this weekend.

PM: It should be ready by Friday without fail!

Client: Excellent! Thank you. I will be expecting it.

PM: Sure, goodbye.

(After the call, PM joined the team.)

PM: So, team, the client for Project-A will be sending us a new draft for review and updates. They are putting a lot of pressure on us and need it to be ready by Friday at the latest. We need to treat this with a sense of urgency.

(After hearing this, we felt compelled to respond.)

Me: There's no way they would expect us to deliver an unseen draft within a day. Both the backend and Figma team members were forced to work last weekend, on Saturday, because you mentioned that Project B was behind schedule and the client needed an update by Monday. We simply can't continue working like this.

Backend guy 2: I also worked last Sunday on Project B.

Me: We overheard you telling the client that they should expect an update by Friday. It seems like you're the one directly putting the team under pressure, even though we still have three ongoing projects with tight deadlines.

(The office fell into an uncomfortable silence.)
(PM left the office without saying a word.)

Later on, I heard that he contacted the client to reschedule the expected time of arrival (ETA) after receiving the draft.

PO: Here's a small cool feature I thought of, should be easy enough *shows very basic draft spec*
Me: Cool, how does it work for logged out users? What about customers in Spain? Does it work with US sales tax? Do we need to update the privacy policy? Do we have translations? What's the fallback if it breaks? Who will be maintaining the content?
PO: ...
PO: I'll get back to you

*never hears about feature again*

So the CEO tells me our new release needs to be compliant with new guidelines. I say sure, I draft up a few small changes and send them to my PM. He calls an impromptu meeting with the UI team and I explain my changes. They don't like them. They then proceed to draft and redesign a new UI based on these new requirements, I tell them that they are overthinking everything and remind them of the rules of KISS. 45 minutes of me silently waiting and an entire 4x8 whiteboard of designs, I tell them this is an entire redesign and that we will never make our end of the year deadline. PM goes silent for a minute, then responds "yeah I guess your right, let's just implement your original changes"

!rant ~dev
Just got my first job in software. Over the moon.

Do you ever spend an hour editing an email reply to a client before you send it? Trying something akin to alchemy when you attempt to convert snark, veiled contempt, and shock at how stupid the client is into something professional and polite? It’s like trying to bottle farts as fancy perfume.

Like the first draft is:

“Dear idiot,

Please disconnect your computer from the wall and return it to where you bought it from and then never use a computer again you dopey fuck.”

To

“Dear Client,

Yes sir. I’ll have it done for you by tomorrow.”

God it hurts.

Coworker on slack: "Hey, is my wallet on my desk?"
Me: "Hey it is"
C: "Alright thanks. I'll arrive a bit later to work today"
Me: *about to write* "Because it took too long to find your wallet? 🤣"
C (before I hit enter): I'm going to a funeral
Me: *deletes message draft* "ok, see you later"

Close one

I hate Skype for Business with a passion. It's the most garbage useless chat program imaginable. It can barely send basic text chats without throwing an error, and it can almost never send an image without the upload failing. The fact that it can't even save conversation history for each of your chats within Skype is ridiculous -- it fucking saves the conversation as an email draft in Outlook. Come on Microsoft, why do I have to open a completely separate program to view conversation history?! Skype conversation history should be saved IN SKYPE! Fucking AIM was able to save conversation history. I've tried multiple times to get the company to move to Slack or Teams, and for some reason they think that Skype is a good program and they ignore the fact that it's completely useless. It's 2019, why are we using a program that's built like it's 2009? I swear they haven't updated Skype at all in the last decade

One of the guys in my uni group project accused me of bullying, shutting him out of the group, ignoring him and taking over his work. He complained to head of year, I had to have a "discussion" with head of year, welfare tutor and my personal tutor.

For supporting evidence, I brought the message he'd posted in our team Facebook group where he told me to do the thing I was doing. The discussion didn't last long, but it seemed he was unhappy with me asking questions, mean things like "I need a draft api to do my work, why don't we sit down and design it instead of the UI you're working on?"

Conclusion? He "worked on a separate project". Got to the end of the year, the whole class went for pub drinks, someone else came up to me, had been through the exact same thing, exact same person, different group project.

Group projects teach you to hate people.

Me : so here is your quote for the app

Client : oh yer and it needs to work in both android and iOS, that's not a big deal right?

Me : of course not, however I am going to have to add a little something to your quote!

I don't get how when I ask a client if I got everything right so I can draft up a quote, they don't think to mention stuff like other features they had an idea for or cross platforms they wanted but didn't say in the original proposal -_-

Not directly a dev related rant but needed to write it somewhere. (Also, long long rant, be aware).

I am currently working on a project for a client who is going to launch a new product. He wants us to create the brand and choose the logo, colours, communication... BUT before everything we have to deliver the website design.

We told him several times that the design has to be created AFTER the brand is created, however, he insisted. Then, we offered him to develop the UX/UI patterns but the colors and a few more things would be delivered after, so his 3rd party dev could make the job.

After working on the first draft, we sent it to him and he refused it, calling it "poor designed". We insisted that it was a draft for the UI which he ignored.

He asked for another design by taking as example a website from another (unrelated) company. We worked for another 2 days and delivered a more finished design, which he automatically refused again.

He called us to his office in order to provide us exactly what he wanted in every part of the site. He only gave us the home page and the product page, and ordered us to work through the weekend (Which we didn't as he is being quite petty about everything and bullying us).

We delivered this third draft and he made changes, sometimes going back to things that he refused before.

Now his 3rd party dev has things to work, but he called yesterday today telling us that the rest of the site must be before friday, date in which we will be showing him how the brand will be and what we have created. He didn't care about and demanded the designs.

I helped the designer to develop the designs of the website as I can work in Photoshop (I am mostly front web developer but can design UI) but he is now busy working on the brand and I had to make ALL the remaining designs, knowing that the client will reject them as soon as they are sent to him, since he hasn't given us any indication on how and what he wants.

We developers sometimes make futile work which will be used a few days or months or in order to provide demos, however, the time I wasted today made me get behind other deadlines, which makes me feel bad for not being able to accomplish them.

One day after the release of the website of a medium sized travel company, I made a big mistake by accidentally taking it offline for 1 hour during peak usage (~150 simultaneous visitors).
Turns out deleting the wrong image transformation cache folder in production can hang up the PHP process for taking too much load on regenerating image transformations.

The designer of PHP probably took a big load too while creating the first draft.

After 6 months of work in this startup I gave in my notice yesterday.

- Me: I decided to leave this position as well as this country because: 1. My side business is expanding and Im making the same salary like here, 2. My army drafting got postponed for this year and next year they cannot draft me anymore(because of the age gap), so basically I'm a free man and can go back to my own country, 3. I have some freelance gigs on the side as well, so having them plus fulltime job plus my own side businesses it's not sustainable.

- My project lead: What if we would increase your salary ?

-Me : No, as I said this is purely due to personal reasons

My project lead: What If we would hire another dev so that you wouldn't have to work alone on frontend?

-Me: ......

Seriously do they ever listen??? I'm telling you that I'm making nearly twice the salary that you are paying me, do you really think an extra couple hundred of EUR a month will make a difference?

Excerpts from "Bastard devops from hell" checklist:

- Insistently pronounce git with a soft "G" and refuse to understand people not using that pronunciation, the same goes for jithub, jitlab, jit lfs, jitkraken etc.

- Reject all pull requests not in haiku format, suggest the author needs to be more culturally open minded when offending.

- increment version numbers ONLY based on percentage code changed: Less than 1% patch increment, less than 5% minor increment, more than that major version increment.

- Cycle ALL access keys, personal tokens, connection strings etc. every month "for security reasons"

- invent and only allow usage of your own CI/CD language, for maximum reuse of course. Resist any changes to it after first draft release

First draft of motivation letter done.

... Now, I'm gonna go cry in a corner and eat cake. In no particular order.

military compound while dodging my mandatory draft order.

devrant needs DRAFT.

I left so many rants unposted because I felt stupid or cringy AF after writing it.

I never thought clean architecture concepts and low complicity, maintainable, readable, robust style of software was going to be such a difficult concept to get across seasoned engineers on my team... You’d think they would understand how their current style isn’t portable, nor reusable, and a pain in the ass to maintain. Compared to what I was proposing.

I even walked them thru one of projects I rewrote.. and the biggest complaint was too many files to maintain.. coming from the guy who literally puts everything in main.c and almost the entire application in the main function....

Arguing with me telling me “main is the application... it’s where all the application code goes... if you don’t put your entire application in main.. then you are doing it wrong.. wtf else would main be for then..”....

Dude ... main is just the default entry point from the linker/startup assembly file... fucken name it bananas it will still work.. it’s just a god damn entry point.

Trying to reiterate to him to stop arrow head programming / enormous nested ifs is unacceptable...

Also trying to explain to him, his code is a good “get it working” first draft system.... but for production it should be refactored for maintainability.

Uggghhhh these “veteran” engineers think because nobody has challenged their ways their style is they proper style.... and don’t understand how their code doesn’t meet certain audit-able standards .

You’d also think the resent software audit would have shed some light..... noooo to them the auditor “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” ... BULLSHIT!

Am I the only one who draws drafts for a better comphrehension? :D

When the poet in me fuses with the geek in me:

Will you be the css to my html?

When I encountered you,
My system threw a fatal error
My RAM was overloaded,
And my CPU went haywire

Will you be the css to my html?

I would show you my source code,
And let you merge your branch into mine
I will help you fix your memory leaks
And I will try filling all your nullpointers

Will you be the css to my html?

Your frontend would perfectly plug into my backend
I can compile all your heavy code,
Just in time

Baby just promise me,
You'll provide the JSON
To my API calls

Will you be the css to my html?

This is my first draft... Constructive criticism is welcome!

Me showing boss a draft document

Me: Ok so this is a placeholder list of statuses, I have to call the client to find out what statuses should go here.

Boss: Hold on lemme read it. *Reads*. But this list of statuses is incomplete, you should call the client to find out what statuses we should add.

Me: ಠ_ಠ

Got a ticket saying we need our website's record creation wizard to have better validation. No worries, just some regex, right?

Sure, regex for name entry (with the usual white person assumptions about names), and fixing the fact that it's in-page popup doesn't close on save. Or save draft. Or delete.

And also you need to apply the name regex for the fields on this page to all the previous names that the user lists.

And there's that one issue where the address history message always shows no matter what.

Oh and make sure that if they choose to ignore those validation issues then the validation message is in the notes for the record.

And fix the thing where it saves as draft instead of as a normal record.

And and and and and...

Can we just talk about making it 1 problem per ticket? This sort of shit makes me look bad when it takes me a week to fix 1 ticket, when I'm usually a few-a-day kinda person

Fuck-a-doodle-do Fuck Fuck Fuck what a fucking dipshit. Scared the god damn shit out of me.

So I am deep in code, listening to my music pounding out some code and Drupal configurations and I feel a shadowy draft over my right side like someone is watching me.

I work with a guy that will not for the fucking life of me use Slack to send me a message when I have my headphones on or at all for that matter.

He gets up and walks to my cubicle and just stares with a goofy fucking grin on his face. You know the one. LIke a retarded fucking dog eating shit out of a wire brush. Yeah that's the grin. Silently derping with his fucking derp ass Derp McDerpington face waiting on you to turn around an notice him there instead of knocking on the cubicle wall or waving to get your attention.

The FUCK dude? CreepyPasta

C and C++ want people to use them, but make people pay for the standards. Sure, you can download a draft, but it's not guaranteed that's what's in the standard.

What is the point of a standard if you disable people from conforming to it?

client looks on my awsome logo draft and hates it. wants it to look like a 90s logo with a jpg instead of vektor art.
and he is absolute impressed by bullshit cms content-slider landing pages.

sometimes you are forced to do bullshit work that you cant put on your portfolio.

YEARS of practice. I had my ups and downs. I learned myself, left it myself early on, came back to it half a year later, continued since. Figured out that web development is not the hell I wanted and quickly fell in love with iOS development in Swift. Been riding on the wind ever since, learning something new every single day.

Today I made something that some time ago took me about 3 weeks in less than an hour. If that’s not an improvement, I don’t know what that is.

Practice makes perfect, don’t forget that. Although it sounds ridiculously cheesy and shit, this is how it goes.

I’m getting drafted tomorrow. Well, this is not exactly a full on draft and joining the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) right NAO, it’s what we call a rough draft: I am having a psychotechnical examination so the military can understand how much I need to go to a cybersecurity unit instead of going to Gaza LMAO.

I recently tried to apply the same data analytics rationale that I use at work to my personal life. This is not a rant, it is more like an data storytelling of an actual use case I would like some input on.

I set a goal - gotta thin up a bit and calm down my ticker - and got a (almost unreasonably expensive) field expert consultant to yell at me about it for a couple hours.

I unravel the metrics - there is like a million weight-related KPIs and most say nothing at all. I have never seen an non-infrastructure measurable subject that could not be resumed to 2-5 performance metrics. I got overall weight, how well my nine-years-old business suit fits me, heart rate, and day-after relative muscle pain (it will make sense soon).

Then its data-pipeline time. I bought a cheap weight scale and smartwatch, and every morning I input the data in an app. Yes, I try to put on the suit every morning. It still does not fit.

After establishing a baseline, I tried to fit different approaches. Doing equipment-free exercises, going to the gym, dieting. None was actually feasible in the long run, but trying different approaches does highlight the impacts and the handling profile of each method.

Looking at the now-gathered data, one thing was obvious - can't do dieting because it is not doable to have a shopping list and meals for me and another for the family.
Gym is also off the table - too much overhead. I spend more time on the trip there and back than actually there.
And home exercise equipment is either super crappy or very expensive. But it is also the most reasonable approach.

So it is solutions time. I got a nice exercise bycicle (not a peloton), an yoga mat (the wife already had that one) and an exercise program that uses only those two resources. Not as efficient without dieting, not as measurable and broad as the gym, but it fits my workflow. Deploy to production!

A few months pass and the dataset grows. The signal is subtle but has support - it works! The handling, however, needs improvement, since I cannot often enough get with the exercise program. Some mornings are just after some hard days.

I start thinking about what else I can improve in the program, but it is already pretty lean and full of compromises.
So I pull an engineer and start thinking about the support systems and draft profile. What else could be draining my willpower and morning time?

Chores. Getting the kids ready for school, firing up the moka pot, setting the off-brand roomba, folding the overnight-dried clothes, cooking breakfast, doing the dishes, cleaning the toilets. All part of my morning routine. It might benefit from some automation.

Last month I got that machine our elders call "wasteful" and "useless crap lazy entitled Americans invented because they feel oh-so-insulted for simply doing something by hand like everyone always did" - a "dish-washer".
Heh, I remember how hard was to convince my mother-in-law that an remote-controled electric garage door would not make she look like an spoiled brat.
Still to early to call, but I think that the dishwasher just saved me about 25 mins every morning. It might be enough to save willpower for me to do more exercise.

This is all so reflective of all data analytics cases really are out in the wild - the analytics phase seems so small compared to the gathering and practical problem-solving all around. And yet d.a. is what tells you that you are doing the wrong thing all along. Or on what you should work next.

Send the dev a request for a design before they do a delicate process. They send back some mess done in MSPaint and a ton of select statements, with no context or explanation.

Send back an example of what they need to work through. Get back a response saying that the previous spec was just a draft, and once they complete development they’ll complete the design.

Why would I want a design once it was too late? What would be the point?

I'm an hobby web designer. Every time I create a website for someone they want me to draw a draft. Needless to say, I'm very very untalented at drawing.

So a problem end client of mine made my life hell for 3 months.

She hired a design agency to design her a bespoke site, she signs off on it and then once I've made it she decides that it's just a draft.

She then spend the next 3 months emailing me multiple times a day, calling the office and calling my personal phone. I'm still not sure how she got my number.

after 3 months on a two week project, many conference calls and changing every single template so that the site is unrecognisable it is finally live.

This woman literally went around her whole office, building and street asking them what they thought should be changed.

Not only that but half way through she suddenly told me she wanted it live in 2 days with a list of changes as long as my arm. I managed it and she wanted more changes anyway so it didnt go live...

The moral of the story is, never go the extra mile for a client more than twice, make sure you charge them for your extra time, try not think about how someone so retarded is the head of marketing at a huge company and that a true rant has no structure.

PS she also complained to me often that the changes had not been made less than 24 hours after requesting them, showed a half built site to her board of directors and then moaned at me that it didn't look right.

Devrant making responding to someone impossible by removing draft content if you accidentally click outside the editor is almost more frustrating than half the shit I actually rant about.

I will have just about finished a long response when something happens and it's all fucking gone.

When the customer is complaining that not what she meant but then you show her the emails and then she said I (the developer) should have known better from the first meeting draft and shouldn't followed the email. It is a lose lose situation.

I picture a large, ice cold, crystal pint filled with bubbling ruby red ale straight from the draft... Its majesty overflows as I stare some human shape walk that marvel at my table...
I take a sip. Fuck it, it's not enough and I'm not feeling like manners... I straight up bottom down that bitter odd amount of beer while my hand feels the cold liquid handshake of this heavenly brewed product... It was a shit day at the office, but right now I'm at the top...

!dev_related

Finally hit chapter 6 of my book's rough draft!

Feels good to be making good progress, had to do a bit of an info dump on the readers but still need to expand everything.

Might even think about publishing in the future :-D

Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.

Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).

Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.

Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:

1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.

2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.

3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.

Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.

My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.

How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.

In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.

No matter how many times, or whichever way I explain, he still doesn't get it. Are people so fucking blinkered they do not want to listen, or even read what you write. Back story, produced some web design visuals for a client, and fortunately he had the good sense to listen and employ a copywriter. She had the first draft done when i was putting together the styling, so i placed actual copy on the visuals. 2 weeks pass, still no answer. I send the same email to him, every 4 days and cc his PA for good measure. Finally, he says he wants to make some tweaks to the copy. I explain that any copy changes can be done via the CMS once the site is built, and can I proceed and build the site? He replies I need to make changes to the copy first. I explained again about the difference between the visual and the actual website, same response. You Fucking Infuriate me! Cunt!

Geekiest non Dev Activity.
Easily playing Magic The Gathering every Monday, Wednesday and Friday evening.
EDH, Standard and Draft.

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 😉)

My oversea job journey continues on.

I am relocating from Taiwan to Germany. I got my work contract draft from the company. I don't think there are any big issues. But I still would like to consult dev friends here about the contract.

Especially for German companies, are there any tricky things that should be noted in the contract but sometimes ignored (intentionally or unintentionally)?

Any other advices about work/life in Germany are sure welcomed.

I am also happy to share my job seeking experiences, just put your questions on the comment.

Cheers.

More and more getting myself caught thinking about the code more than writing it. I mean I draft it, it is usually very shitty at the first moment, and insted of refinifng and adding spaces to moments I just sit think, write some ideas in my notebook, search on Stack overflow, listen to the music, and wait until the code talks to me.

I know it sounds like some hippie shit, but it actually happens and really solves the problem.

Anyone has the same thing?

Just finished making an ER diagram for the 5th time now.
It was less painful this time. (Thanks draw.io)

(About the 4th ER diagram - le professor says "It looks like a flow chart, that's not right", but it's clearly not?)

I'll have to submit the draft tomorrow to the professor, I just hope that he green lights it so I could finalize the project report.

I hate making ER diagrams now.

Story time;

Major project, multi million budget, huge business and IT coordination, board level status updates, meeting started back in March 2018 for a Go Live of Aug 2019.

Based on draft requirements (and experience) I request the test environment be built for half of the work. Turns out that no one told Server Eng and they are out of space in both dev and prod until Q2 of 2019. We went from Green to Red because a Service Request.

I give a draft version of my report to my colleagues so they can review it with things to add or correct while I eat. One of them:

"This report is really well structured. I think there's nothing more to add. Good job!"

I think the finishing touch consisting of "[...]" here and there had him fall in love with it.

Here's some nice UI logic in Android Play Console.

There's more than 50 apps in this account, so I click on Filter to find the app I was working on. Options are "Unpublished apps" and "Draft apps". The app I want is in "Draft" so I click "Draft". Nothing changes, so I figure it's broken. Then I try to find my app and it's missing.

Why?

Because some shithole thinks that a filter dropdown should hide what I'm looking for. Thanks for that!

Caution: only half RANT
I AM FUCKING ANGRY RIGHT NOW BECAUSE OF THE FUCKING MEDIOCORE THINKING OF MY COWORKER WHO WILL BE SOON MY EX COWORKER. AND WHEM HE WILL BE , I WILL DRAFT MY CURRENT ANGER IN SOME SOPHASTICATED WORDS NOT ONLY FOR DEVRANT BUT ALSO FOR MEDIUM AND TUMBLR
FUCK HIM AND FUCK HIS SHORTSIGHTEDNESS

I hate devrant''s 2 hours limitation for posting :( atleast give option save as draft or set publish time (even it after two hours just disable the timer for two hour)

Welp, it is panic attack time. Can't sleep because of work stress, which stresses me out even more. Can't get my work done because of bullshit meetings I can't skip. Coworkers are possibly being purposefully idiotic. Can't take vacation because we are in the middle of shit. I am not even coding, just writing documentation about the same crap everyday because of perviously mentioned idiotic developers. They have the same info as me, but refuse to work on even a draft version until I paint a screen WITHOUT the button they need to remove. I want to code so I can point at it and feel good, but no. And people keep talking to me. FUCK! AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!

Goals builder that follows SMART method for goals. What was originally intended as "rough draft" became a full blown SPA in less than 2 weeks. It's the ones you don't expect to go far that usually go the furthest. First "draft" took less two hours to build from scratch.. 😃

I have fucking useless market in facebook apps but cannot find the fucking draft panel ... Omg

new manager: draft a runbook consisting of like ~3 lines for marking a jira ticket as duplicate and closing it

.....like.....i can do this because it's what you want and you're my boss but something about this just doesn't sit right with me /shrug

So one day i see someone in my office walking around with devrant sticker on their laptop.
Now most of my actual work related rants don't see the darkness of the feed because they had personally identifiable information. I write in draft, read and delete😶

draft article in atlassian confluence

oops it lost your image when publishing

fuck u atlassian

When the client complains that there is no way to save a draft eForm to "the cloud". yes they actually put quotes around "the cloud". Our service is not cloud hosted in any shape or form, its installed directly to the clients onsite server. what cloud are they expecting us to save it to??!!

I'm helping my teammates with the problems that they face in debugging an issue or fixing a Dev environment.

Sometimes ppl go too flexible and ask for my Dev VM. The help I have to offer is tell them cause of an issue and tell them the fix that they have to give. What the fu*k they do? What did they gain as experience all these years.

Ppl don't know how to make draft commits. They can't fix but failures. They don't know anything.
They just sit at office and age as it is their only job.
Seniors take so much salary. Why don't they feel bad that they are not doing justice to their work.

Today I read a book and it talks about giving feedback on others; as a developer we tend to give feedback and review others code almost everyday. When I write the code I always put a lot of effort on making it look at prefect but I found I am having trouble on receiving others criticising and comments being judgemental. Instead if we make it as a "draft" rather than "final", that will make you becoming more open towards others opinion. I find this is quite true and I hope this could benefit developers who have similar attitude :)

Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a problem — after his army service, he got so used to cold that he could only sleep on a raw, cold metal grill. Usually, normal people put mattress on top, but Erdogan didn’t feel right this way. So, in one of his personal prisons, he established a social project for making a full metal bed for himself.

For starters, to calculate the shape, he took the smallest man ever (3 inches high) with his fingers and sunk him into molten plastic. “What are you doing?! It hurts!” — man screamed. “Shut up. You’re on an important mission. Your motherland won’t forget you.”
After three months, the bed was ready. It was more of the same — metal bars, but this time with some kind of structure built of metal hinges, rebar and strong springs. This was the day — this was the big reveal event. It took place in the same prison — three prisoners were ready to lay on their new full metal beds, while news crews congratulated Erdogan and celebrated his greatness. “Well, it is time!” — he said.
Prisoners laid flat. An awful screeching sound. Prisoner number two is bleeding out. The spring mechanism broke out and impaled his chest onto a large metal bar. He’s not breathing.
“Shut it down. Shut it all down. No more cameras, no more news”, — said Erdogan.
“Yes, our master”, — said news crews.

They wanted to draft me to Afghanistan.
“No!”, — a young officer shouted, misgendering me — “He doesn’t know the stages of pain. Useless.”
“Are you perhaps arguing pain with a bipolar patient?” — I replied.
“You are a rave. Nothing but a rave.”

Raves spawned near your doors at night. Sometimes, they even spawned on the inside. I can’t say you were in danger, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant thing to happen to anyone. They looked ugly. They dressed weird. They spoke in riddles.
“How do I move to Europe?”, — a rave asked.
“I…”
“Shut up!”
Rave took a door, suspiciously painted over and over multiple times, and started to slam my door with it, using it as a ram.
My door started giving in.

Alarm system.
On a separate note, to disable the alarm system, you have to speedrun Stanley Parable. It’s the hardest speedrun ever, specifically its hidden ending. It disables all alarm systems in three-mile radius IRL. No one knows how it works, but it does. Back to the danger zone!

“The better quality time you spend sitting on your toilet, the more you’ll live.”, — an officer said.
“I once had a girl blow me while I was shitting,” — Matthias replied — “You have nothing on me.”
“Fair enough!”

It is a little known fact, but the liquid that Northern cities use to clean up snow isn’t quite what it seems like. It’s not salt — in reality, there are bases on Mars, and they store pink goo that… “iMpRoVeS” dead bodies. The liquid is biological in nature, and it expires. Expired liquid is recycled as snow melter. You learn that in high school, but now, living on a train, you should know that there are special learning rooms here, in every. single. carriage. The small gym ball with two handles on its sides is called Gandhi ball. Fun fact: if you wear headless Segways on top of your shoes, and then lay flat holding a Gandhi ball, you can reach the speed of 270 kph!

Today’s news: a Reddit moderator and a legless woman gave birth to a living sex toy for their domestic boar.

I started asking to get draft templates in German language. So at least we'll know what the site will look like what when text is very long and customers are called "Sebastian Wiedenmann" instead of "John Doe".

Remember English is a very concise language and you always get bad CSS surprises when applying translations.

Am I the only one who hates that Slack has added a new `Drafts` section?
Like WHY TF? On one hand, I'm having some important work talk, and then I realize that I cannot see my boss's chat anymore and then I have to always look up and see the horrible Drafts section.
Although it is becoming second nature after a million times, I just don't like this feature at all.

IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF THE END?

Devrant needs a simple draft system - 20 mins gone on a rant after the app closed while multi tasking 😞

Draft Pull Requests : With draft pull requests, you can clearly tag when you’re coding a work in progress. Next to the “Create pull request” button. Toggle the dropdown arrow whenever you want to create a draft instead.

Once in school, a teammate couldn't contribute real work, and is wiring the report. I asked him to write about how ABC should be like DEF, and those exact words appeared on the report draft.

Carpel Tunnel has actually made me a far better programmer.

While I've had to cut down on how much I program, I have instead started writing the first draft of any program on the whiteboard and manually debugging it.

Also got my dream internship because it made me far better at coding interviews!

Yeasterday I was making some changes in my database in sqldbm and I guess I forgot to change something, so when I logged in it was I an unsaved draft and if I would like to load it. Obviously I said yes!

Now I see every change I made yesterday is gone! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK

I use this app from Laptop and It does not have draft facility :(

Could you just make this popup close by clicking on close button only not from outside area of popup

:(

When you try to delete a empty draft but instead have sent it to the person instead...

#Suphle Rant 9: a tsunami on authenticators

I was approaching the finish line, slowly but surely. I had a rare ecstatic day after finding a long forgotten netlify app where I'd linked docs deployment to the repository. I didn't realise it was weighing down on me, the thought of how to do that. I just corrected some deprecated settings and saw the 93% finished work online. Everything suddenly made me happier that day

With half an appendix chapter to go, I decided to review an important class I stole from my old company for clues when I need to illustrate something involved using a semblance of a real world example (in the appendix, not abstract foo-bar passable for the docs)

It turns out, I hadn't implemented a functionality for restricting access to resources to only verified accounts. It just hasn't been required in the scheme of things. No matter, should be a piece of cake. I create a new middleware and it's done before I get to 50 lines. Then I try to update the documentation but to my surprise, user verification status turns out to be a subset of authentication locking. Instead of duplicating bindings for both authentication and verification, dev might as well use one middleware that checks for both and throws exceptions where appropriate.

BUT!

These aspects of the framework aren't middleware, at all. Call it poor design but I didn't envisage a situation where the indicators (authentication, path based authorisation and a 3rd one I don't recall), would perform behaviour deviating from the default. They were directly connected to their handlers and executed after within the final middleware. So there's no way to replace that default authentication scheme with one that additionally checks for verification status.

Whew

You aren't going to believe this. It may seem like I'm not serious and will never finish. I shut my system down for that day, even unsure how those indicators now have to refactored to work as middleware, their binding and detachment, considering route collections are composed down a trie

I'm mysteriously stronger the following day, draw up designs, draft a bunch of notes, roll my sleeves, and the tsunami began. Was surprisingly able to get most of previous middleware tests passing again before bed, with the exception of reshuffled classes. So I guess we can be optimistic that those other indicators won't cause more suffering or take us additional days off course

Client complains not enough documentation. Wants an arbitrary number of pages in a document on our modules. Wants more uml diagrams. They are going to get so many uml diagrams!
So complex they must be right, because nobody can read them. Sick of doing this draft after draft after draft...

Not really a rant, but maybe someone can help me on this one.
Me and my brother are thinking about creating our first app. We know what features we want and also how the workflow of our app should be (we even sketched the workflow with an online mockup tool). The programming of the app itself is no problem, but we are both struggling when it comes to create a nice looking, smooth design from our draft. As we both believe that a nice looking UI is important we are not afraid to invest a little bit to get a nicely designed UI - "Make it right, or don't do it at all" ;-)

We searched a little bit in our hometown and found a company that would design us something for at least 15-20k Euros. As we do already have a pretty detailed sketch and also would need to pay that from our own pocket (we do not know if it gets more than a hobby project) its definitely too much for us. So my question is: Are their any app design companies out there that takes a sketch and creates a smooth design from it?

If I'm not ready with my article I'm currently writing for my wordpress website, I never save it as a draft. I always schedule it, because only then I care about finishing my article! ;)

So this lockdown gave me time to think and strategize on how to run my software business more efficiently
Launch the model
3 days later remodel the structure
Launch it
3 days later review
Rectify
Redesign draft a new strategy
Review launch it

So my government is proposing a new National ID scheme. This will be used to identify s citizen as well as keep track of property, taxes etc.

Parliament just started the debate on how it would work today. It’s set to be implemented by December 2019. My government tends not think things through so as to prevent s disaster like what’s happening in the Netherlands as per @linuxxx musings, I’m trying to gather insight from the industry to compose a document of considerations then getting a law firm to draft the laws it would need to compliment it

Do you 'draft' your code?

I'm just really curious, as I'm not a developer; but I've been doing dev work for the last 8 months...

I just realised today, that 'drafting' my code on paper makes my workflow 10^10 times better and intuitive.
Like, just writing a rough code block with what function I'm going to use and how I'm going to form an equation, etc...

Or do you guys just jump straight ahead and start pushing out code?