when you have no QA department
- via CodeHumor

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

Now, that's an edge case

I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.

My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).

Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.

I introduce to you, my team ...

Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.

UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."

Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.

Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.

Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.

Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.

Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.

Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.

The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.

There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.

All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.

I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.

Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?

And yeah, FML.

Had an interesting time these past few days. Had a customer who, when I left for vacay, was complaining that he couldn't get access to our private package registry. Get back, this issue is still active.

We'd granted access to his github enterprise, and for some reason he wasn't getting the activation email. We spent about 22 hours of customer support time on his failing to help himself before he finally escalated to the standard 40 person IT enterprise tantrum/come to jesus meeting.

Long story short, he had somehow ignored repeated attempts (35 email replies to the ticket chain, 4 phone calls) to get him to check his spam folder. In which, as it was revealed to all the hollywood squares in attendance, there were no less than 35 activation emails from github granting him access. Of course, none of this was his fault. And while screensharing his big brain to god and everyone he decides the problem is now actually Microsoft because their office 365 spam email filtered his emails incorrectly. We of course agreed with his big brain, smoothed over his bruised ego and went about our day.

I mean, fair enough, it's kind of dumb that Microsoft ever spam lists github, but still. I was just a fly on the wall, and he burned all his paid support tickets on the issue, so hopefully we won't be dealing with him again this year.

Also, this is an edge case with our new product line, most of our customers are painless.

We called it "Project Hindenburg".

A huge planning and logistics app with hundreds of screens and dozens of interwoven subfunctions, suddenly needed to be able to support multiple time zones. Our project was to retrofit every area that touched on dates or times, to allow the user to specify, and work in, any time zone.

At this point in the story I can tell whether you have had to work with time zones in code. People who haven't are butting in with something that begins, "that should be fairly simple, you just need to..." followed by some irrelevant noise that betrays their ignorance.

People who have worked with time zones are nodding in shared pain, like fellow attendees of a survivors meeting.

You see, programmers tend to think of time zones as arithmetic; in reality, they are confusing, ambiguous, chaotic, and individual. You can't translate everything into a central time zone (eg UTC) because you lose the user's intent. For example, if you schedule a meeting for 3pm and then move it to the next day, you want it at 3pm even if the clocks have changed.

Project Hindenburg ended up using the entire development staff of the company for well over a year. It smashed our release projections to rubble, made an already tangled code base completely unmaintainable, introduced mind-bending edge case bugs that reduced staff across the company to tears (literally), and led to most of the mid-level and senior developers eventually quitting (including me).

I am @fuckfuckityfuck, and that was the story of Project Hindenburg.

I have been gone a while. Sorry. Workplace no longer allows phones on the lab and I work exclusively in the lab. Anyway here is a thing that pissed me off:

Systems Engineer (SE) 1 : 😐 So we have this file from the customer.
Me: 😑 Neat.
SE1: 😐 It passes on our system.
Me: 😑 *see prior*
Inner Me (IM): 🙄 is it taught in systems engineer school to talk one sentence at a time? It sounds exhausting.
SE1: but when we test it on your system, it fails. And we share the same algorithms.
Me: 😮 neat.
IM: 😮neat, 😥 wait what the fuck?
Me: 😎 I will totally look into that . . .
IM: 😨 . . . Thing that is absolutely not supposed to happen.

*Le me tracking down the thing and fixing it. Total work time 30 hours*

Me: 😃 So I found the problem and fixed it. All that needs to happen is for review board to approve the issue ticket.
SE1: 😀 cool. What was the problem?
Me: 😌 simple. See, if the user kicked off a rerun of the algorithm, we took your inputs, processed them, and put them in the algorithm. However, we erroneously subtracted 1 twice, where you only subtract 1 once.
SE1: 🙂 makes sense to me, since an erroneous minus 1 only effects 0.0001% of cases.

*le into review board*

Me: 😐 . . . so in conclusion this only happens in 0.0001% of cases. It has never affected a field test and if this user had followed the user training this would never have been revealed.
SE2: 🤨 So you're saying this has been in the software for how long?
Me: 😐 6 years. Literally the lifespan of this product.
SE2: 🤨 How do you know it's not fielded?
Me: 😐 It is fielded.
SE2: 🤨 how do you know that this problem hasn't been seen in the field?
Me: 😐 it hasn't been seen in 6 years?
IM: 😡 see literally all of the goddamn words I have said this entire fucking meeting!!!
SE2: 😐 I would like to see an analysis of this to see if it is getting sent to the final files.
Me: 🙄 it is if they rerun the algorithm from our product. It's a total rerun, output included. It's just never been a problem til this one super edge case that should have been thrown out anyway.
SE2: 🤨 I would still like to have SE3 run an analysis.
Me: 🙄 k.
IM: 😡 FUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOU

*SE3 run analysis*

SE3: 😐 getting the same results that Me is seeing.
Me: 😒 see? I do my due diligence.
SE2: 😐 Can you run that analysis on this file again that is somehow different, plus these 5 unrelated files?
SE3: 😎 sure. What's your program's account so I can bill it?
IM: 😍 did you ever knooooow that your my heeeerooooooo.

*SE3 runs analysis*

SE3: 😐 only the case that was broken is breaking.
SE2: 😐 Good.
IM: 🤬🤬🤬🤐 . . . 🤯WHY!?!?
Me: 😠 Why?
SE2: 😑 Because it confirms my thoughts. Me, I am inviting you to this algorithm meeting we have.
Me/IM: 😑/😡 what . . . the fuck?

*in algorithm meeting*

Me: 😑 *recaps all of the above* we subtract 1 one too many times from a number that spans from 10000 to -10000.
Software people/my boss/SE1/SE3: 🤔 makes sense.
SE2:🤨 I have slides that have an analysis of what Me just said. They will only take an hour to get through.
Me: 😑 that's cool but you need to give me your program's account number, because this has been fixed in our baseline for a week and at this point you're the only program that still cares. Actually I need the account to charge for the last couple times you interrupted me for some bullshit.

*we are let go.*

And this is how I spent 40+ useless hours against a program that is currently overrunning for no reason 🤣🤣🤣

Moral: never involve math guys in arithmetic situations. And if you ever feel like you're wasting your time, at least waste someone else's money.

Ah very good, it seems Windows has taken the liberty of putting a link to Edge on my desktop again. Just in case I had accidentally removed it or something.

Manager: Here's the design for the next feature, we're ready to hand it over to the consultant

FullStackClown: Uh... okay... is it spec'd out with requirements?

Manager: Huh?

FullStackClown: Well, already look at this design and user flow, did you consider what happens when <insert edge case X here>, <insert edge case Y here>, or <insert edge case Z here>? How is the consultant going to know what to put in for business logic if you don't even know or define it yourself?

Manager: Huh?

FullStackClown: Sigh... yeah, I'm too busy right now to be a kindergarten teacher, come back in a few days once you understand how your own feature is supposed to work

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

Based on a true story:

Me: Woah, I can't believe you wrote a test for such an edge case, you really take TDD seriously

... 1 minute later

Me: Woah, I can't believe this is the only test for the whole project

So here is my week 72 as a reviewer. But first, let me ask y'all. Am I weird to think that you should finish coding the thing and testing the thing before kicking it out to review? Cuz that's how I do it. And that is the process at my work place.

So anyway, I was doing this review. And it was very wrong. Like really, really wrong. We give a thorough intro to our product (perhaps too thorough) so this guy should have known every test case he had to cover. Or at least, if he was unsure, asked. It was all documented.

Anyway, he kicks out this peer review. First thing I notice, it is not following the standard. Fair enough, we didn't give him the coding standard. BUT HE DIDN'T EVEN MAINTAIN THE FORMAT OF THE ORIGINAL FILE. HE JUST DID HIS OWN THING!!! So I email him the coding standard and make a comment in the review. He denies the finding. No reason. Just turns it down. Strike 1.

Then, I'm going through and he didn't even cover all of the core cases. I found several core cases that he missed. And every edge case. Make a not of it. He fixes only the couple of examples I gave him. Strike 2.

Guy decided to redesign a major chunk of our interfaces. Our interfaces are not just used by us (hence interfaces). We designed them the way they were for a reason. It was not a fun design process. Myself, the architect, one of our customers, and the guy that did the implementation all told him to roll back his change. Especially since it wasn't in the scope of what he was doing. He wouldn't. Strike 3.

I go to the lead and bring him in. He has a talk with him. All of the sudden he is putting out multiple builds per finding. Like most times I will put out like 2 to 4 for the whole peer review. No he kicks out minimum one per finding and chokes the review queue. Strike 4.

Strike 5: he tells me, a former DBA, that I didn't know what I was talking about when I told him to move something into a new table, even after I told him that "while in database terms it doesn't make sense, this is for product robustness".

Strike 6: he was just a condescending asshole. Bragging about how he did this job and that job over his career. His longest position held was about 18 months. Bragged about working at my company and being some hotshot at the company: only worked here for 8 months and that was 5 years ago.

You know. I have never really wanted to fight someone after about undergrad. But he came close.

Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.

I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.

I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.

That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.

Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).

I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.

Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.

I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.

Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.

To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?

Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?

There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...

Every single fucking time I run into problems, the problems are very specific edge cases of common problems.

The search results however, are created by an army of retards, they're a sea of answers to the common problem. They drown out my super specific edge case.

And then someone dares to half-read my stackoverflow question, and immediately mark it as duplicate.

Ugh.

Backstory: A few months ago, I wrote an inventory management web app for internal use by the sales team, logistics, and whoever else might need to use it.

Earlier this week: A few minutes before I usually leave, my phone rings. It's some dude I've never heard of. No idea what his function at the company is, still don't, probably never will, don't care. He's never used the app before, and says he's having problems. His cube's on my way out, so I swing by.

I'm not making this next part up. This dude is probably 60 years old, and he's using a very old looking gateway desktop (with the cow print logo thing on the chassis), running Windows XP (not a typo), using IE7.

I don't know what to say, so I just stare at the desktop, look at dude, laugh, and eventually explain that he's never going to be able to use the system via the web app until his rig is replaced.

What the fucking fuck is this. How could this have happened. How do our it people still fucking have jobs. Better question, how did this thing survive the y2k bug?

Hey remember that edge case we told you about months ago and you said ya "don't worry, it's an edge case" ya, we just found the edge and sailed right off it

I recently found a ridiculous edge case that no test case caught and is very hard to debug and fix.
Then, I was assigned to find and fix it.
FML

Might have hit some random edge case of apt

Valid from, valid until.

Who else has this irrational feeling that in some edge case, it might be not long enough?

What the fuck! Just witnesed this at university. The guy in question is in the same cs course as me. Using edge, okay. But searching for a picture on google (a icon in that case), copy it to memory, open powerpoint, paste it, manipulate the color aellsettings to make it gray and then save it from powerpoint? That's not how you fucking do it! Fucker!

Fuck a edge case

There really ought to be a special word to describe a non-technical user who keeps finding weird, edge case bugs that we can't reproduce.

Any ideas?

Anyone else have that kind of manager who you ask a simple, single sentence question of, and get a ten volume essay of a response back from?

How do you deal? I'm usually a very capable, independent and initiative driven person but holy fuck.

All we need here is a:

"Hey manager, you assigned me this thing. I'm wondering what we should do about this particular edge case I've seen a few times in past roles?"

and a

"I'm not sure. Check with Steve, he should know, as his team worked on it and did x, y and z. If he doesn't know, come back to me"

and we're done.

Instead I get the entire Lord of the Rings saga written in zalgo.

Well... I can think of several bugs that I found on a previous project, but one of the worst (if not the worst, because the damage scope) it's one bug that only appears for a couple of days at the end of every month.

What happens is the following: this bug occurs in a submodule designed (heh) to control the monthly production according the client requirements (client says "I want 1000 thoot picks", that submodule calculates the daily production requirements in order to full fill the order).

Ideally, that programming need to be done once a week (for the current month), because the quantities are updated by client on the same schedule, and one of the edge cases is that when the current date is >= 16th of the month, the user can start programming the production of the following month.

So, according to this specific case, there's an unidentified, elusive, and nasty bug that only shows up on the two last days of every month, when it doesn't allow to modify/create anything for the following month. I mean, normally, whenever you try to edit/create new data, the application shows either an estimated of the quantities to produce, or the previous saved data. But on those specific days it doesn't show any information at all, disregarding of there's something saved or not.

The worst thing is that such process involves both a very overcomplicated stored procedure, and an overcomplicated functionality on the client side (did I mentioned that it dynamically generates a pseudo-spreadsheet with the procedure dataset? Cell by cell), that absolutely no one really fully understands, and the dude that made those artifacts is no longer available (and by now, I'm not so sure that he even remember what he done there).

One of the worst thing is that at this point, it's easier to handle with that error rather to redesign all of that (not because technical limitations, but for bureaucratic and management issues).

The another worst thing (the most important none) is that this specific bug can create a HUGE mess as it prevents the programming of the production to be done the next day (you know, people tends to procrastinate and start doing things at the very end of the day/week/month)... And considering that the company could lose a huge amount of money by every minute without production, you can guess the damage scope of this single bug.

Anyway, this bug has existed since, I don't know, 2015 (Q4?) and we have tried so many things trying to solve it, but that spaghettis refuse to be understood (specially the stored procedure, as it has dynamically generated queries). During my tenure (that ended last year) I spent a good amount of time (considering what I mentioned on the last rant, about the toxic environment) trying to solve that, just giving up after the first couple of weeks.

Anyway... I'm guessing that this particular bug will survive another 4-ish years, or even outlive the current full development team... But, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

I am a Technical Lead in the department in my company that writes code for our clients that have money but doesn't have the technical expertise to handle the complexities of our own software.

Part of my tasks involve taking care of a few projects written by employees that have left after using third-party tools rather than using our own software. No one else in this department knows these third-party tools, they only know our own, and my *still limited* web development experience means I get dumped these things in my lap.

And I'm SO pissed at these projects and their authors and the manager that let these ex-employees write these things. There is this one project that was managed by two different "developers" (I don't know they deserve this title) at two different times, and it is so riddled with different technologies it makes me want to throw up almost daily.

Don't believe me? Here is a complete list of the dependencies listed in the package.json of this project: babel-polyfill, body-parser, cookie-parser, debug, edge, edge-sql, excel-to-json, exceljs, express, html-inline, jade, morgan, mssql, mysql, pug, ramda, request, rotating-file-stream, serve-favicon, webpack, xlsx, xml2js

What this doesn't even show, is that one part of this project (literally one page) is made using react, react-dom, react-redux, and jade. The other part (again literally one page) is made using Angular and Pug. In case you missed it while picking up your jaw, there's also mssql, mysql, edge and edge-sql. excel-to-json, exceljs, xlsx.

Oh you want *more* juicy details? This project takes the entire data object used by the front-end, stringifies it into JSON, and shoves it into the database *as a single field*. And instead of doing WHERE clauses in the SQL queries, it grabs the entire table, loops, parses the json, and does a condition on it. If even one of those JSON entries gets corrupted, the entire solution breaks because these "developers" don't know what try/catch is.

The client asked for a very simple change in their app, which was to add a button that queries the back-end for a URL, shows it in a modal dialog, after which a button is clicked to verify the link by doing a second query to the back-end before modifying a couple of fields in the page.

This. Took. Me. Two. Months*. Save me. Please, save me.

*between constant context switches between this and other projects that were continuously failing because of their mistakes.

Our PM just send a mail to our team, that after testing the latest extension we made to the project, he could not find a single issue or bug (usually there are some minor UI problems or some edge case bugs we did not think about or know existed)
and what a incredibly great job we did, and he also forwarded the mail to all our managers up the hierarchy right under the CEO.
The appreciation is a nice change to the self-hatred I feel while coding

I really resent people who reduce the occupation to tickets. Our world is just tickets, tickets all the way down.

"well the ticket just says this, but that's vague, so what should I do?"

You either ask for clarification, or you get creative with the blank canvas you were handed.

"well that edge case wasn't called out in the ticket's specs"

this is _why_ we do TDD - to design our code to be able to function as expected for ALL cases

"is there a ticket to refactor that?"

what?! no, it's your job to always leave code better than when you found it (within scope/reason of course)

FFS we are not hired to be code monkeys or glorified typists. There should be joy that comes from getting to be more clever than the average bear and to solve problems and improve things with your code and logic.

shit bums me out.

So I work at a startup working on “cutting edge” technology with two other devs. Our lead engineer is an interesting fellow. The guy never ever writes a single line of code, just looks for similar projects online and receives a lot of credit for it, I have to hand it to him though, he has an ability to scheme through information and pick the gist of what’s going on but when it comes to detail, he’s seriously lacking. We recently started a projects a couple of weeks back and it was supposed to be an easy two days of hacking and we would be done but instead the guy looks for code online copies it I change the necessary variables to match the use case then it doesn’t work. So we’ve spent weeks debugging this code because someone is afraid to get their hands dirty. I can’t complain to the bosses because they’re not techies and the trust him more since I’m still new to the company.
I love their attitude though, they honestly believe they have a chance against some giants in tech and from the actual talent I’ve witnessed they’ll only get there through sheer luck.
I have to sit there and listen to them shit on more successful tech companies and that they have better ideas.
Maybe someone can change my mind on this issue as I’m still young and new to this industry.

* Gets handed additions to current software platform (web)

* Gives back estimte of time after meeting with everyone and making them understand that once the testing phase of the project is reached there will be no changes, tests should be exhaustive and focus on SAID FUNCTIONALITY of the new additions. NO CHANGES OR ADDITIONS AT THIS POINT IN TIME

* All directives, stakeholders, users etc agreed on my request and spend an additional hour thinking of different corner and edge cases as provided by me in case they can't think of them (they can't, because they are fucking stupid, but I provided everything)

* Boss looks irritated at their lack of understanding of the scope and the time needed, nods in approval after he sees my entire specification, testing cases, possible additions to the system etc

* All members of the committee decide on the requirements being correct, concrete and proper.

* Finish the additions in a couple of weeks due to the increased demand for other projects, this directly affects the user base, so my VP and Director make it a top priority, I agree with their sentiment, since my Director knows what he is doing (real OG)

* I make the changes, test inside of my department and then stage for the testing environment. Everything is ready, all migrations are in order, the functionality is working as proper and the pipeline for the project, albeit somewhat lacking in elegance is good to go.

* Testing days arrive

* First couple of hours of test: Oh, you know what, we should add these two additional fields, and it would be good if the reporting generated by the system would contain this OTHER FORMAT rather than this one.

* ME: We stated that no additions would be done during the testing environment, testing is for functionality, not to see if you can all think of something else, even then, on June 10 I provided a initial demo and no one bothered to check on it on say something.

Them: Well, we are doing it now, this is what testing is for.

Me: Out of this room, the software engineer is me, and I can assure you, testing is not for that. I repeatedly stated that previously, I set the requirements, added corner cases, tables charts everything and not one single one of you decided to pay attention or add something, actually, said functionality you are requesting was part of one of my detailed list of corner cases, why did you not add it there and then before everything went up?

Them: Well I didn't read it at the time (think of the I in plural form since all of these dumb fucks stated the same)

Then my boss went on a rampage on their dumbasses.

I fucking hate software development sometimes.

Oh well. Bunch of fucking retards.

Repeat/repost:

Unfortunately I do not own a drop of what is conventionally known as confidence or ego. It applies to everything; work, skills, relationships, friendships, you name it. I can estimate my chances of succeeding, and sometimes be pretend-delulu for a purpose (you gotta admit, sometimes showmanship is the biggest asset) but I don't understand confidence. In my opinion, it's just a gross overestimation of one's chances.

So this project/paper thing, I feel like I'm blind and running in the forest. I am not counting on my boss, nor am I counting on anyone in the dept to give me clarity or decent feedback. ("Cutting edge" research issues. Not anybody's fault.)

And I guess, in the worst case scenario the paper will be rejected, which would be a setback but not a full failure.

... Actually, that's not the worst case. The worst case would be someone running a peer review and finding that I made a tiny mistake and all my results are bullshit. 🤦

... Anxiety is eating me alive rn. 🤢

When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.

Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.

When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.

Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!

Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?

When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:

1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.

Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).

Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.

When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:

(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".

Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.

There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".

It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?

I recently started a new job where I’m working with someone who is vegan. This is great and I have no problems with it at all. My diet also leans heavily towards vegan and I understand and sympathize with the reasons that can lead to this choice.

However, I seem to keep ending up in inadvertent conflict with my colleague in ways that surprise and baffle me. For example:

* After buying and showing him a vegan product I had just purchased (and commenting that I had done so in the hope of avoiding a more animal-product based health solution), I found myself harangued at length about how healthy non-vegan foods weren’t actually healthy, and “Would you eat a human? Have they done trials on the benefits of eating humans? No? Exactly!”

* I sent an all-office IM asking if anyone wanted a cheese sandwich I had accidentally bought (accidentally in that I thought I had bought a different filling). I received an email back from him demanding that I don’t include him on any further “offensive” emails. This was followed up by an office update telling all staff to use work communications appropriately.

I enjoy my job and I did enjoy working with this person, but now I feel quite thrown and unsure of how to react to him. I’m pretty annoyed at being accused of being offensive for my use of the words “cheese sandwich” and don’t want to bring it up as I can’t see a way of that conversation going well (I’m not planning to apologize; I don’t think I need to?!). I realize the obvious solution is just to never ever mention food (or nutrition or words that aren’t vegan) again, but I need help with how to get back to a place where I feel like I am comfortable in my work environment rather than slightly on edge in case he kicks off at me again for some insane reason.

manually writing multiselector widget with jquery and javascript, because you need to be able hackily pass in metadata for some stupid fucking edge case that the previous generation didn't want to deal with

please euthanize me, i fucking hate frontend and im sure it hates me back

Everytime i buy any electronics , my brother would suggest me to buy latest ones with the newest configuration . His logic was " If you buy a not-so new tech now.. It will outdate fast and you will end up with an outdated one soon.. So the extra 10K is worth considering that " .

Considering the development trend i personally think it is useless to invest in electronics unless necessary . Everytime i buy an electronic product , within 2 or 3 months i find the same good at almost 75% of the price.. So with tech prices falling like this.. i think it is worth saving that money instead of the cutting edge tech which i wont need for another 2 years .

Thoughts ?

(The cousin brother i mentioned does this everytime he buys a phone and ends up changing the phone 4 times faster than me.. and the use case is similar to mine if not worse..)

I am still confused why people treat testing as secondary position? Tester are paid less and they hire lower quality engineers. I think testing is as important as any other phase of development, like design or implementation. . . and yeah we do testing of our own code. The only thing I can do in my case is to see that people who change my code may not break basic functionalities. And again about edge cases, try to handle some other left to be seen in production( those which I could not think of due to lack of time) I take care not to leave edge case but sometime cannot do it. I just hope people realise the worth of testing.

I often dream that I discovered a rare edge case in reality that can lead to a crash if corrupted people create any object together. Corrupted state is infectious but due to caching and lazy copying strategies you mainly spread it to previous owners of items you infect. Also I can't edit the code to fix the issue because I'd have to recompile and our world is an in-memory artifact of the current execution.

Microsoft is always at it.

Hello, I recently discovered this eye candy of a looking website and how good the CSS looks (Kudos to whoever made this) , and I decided to post a rant of my own. And its about MS Edge and other applications.

So I built my own ATX tower a while back (Loving it) , and I found that it was WONDERFUL to have a computer that was brand new, that didnt have candy crush preinstalled on it when I got it.

Windows 10 users, do this:

Press WIN+I to open the settings menu.
Go to "Apps"
Scroll down the list....

How many applications do you see there that are actually useful , or that you have downloaded?

I never downloaded a Realtek Driver... and I never need it for anything to work. This is the case for 90% of the things you may see in the applications.

Why is HULU installed?
Why is NETFLIX installed?
Why is MINECRAFT BETA INSTALLED? THE BETA HASNT BEEN OUT IN YEARS?

But I digress, this is the case when I work on a computer such as my grandmothers who, bless her soul, isnt very adept at basic file management. Heck , she uses free Norton Antivirus against my recommendation to use the PAID active firewall application on her computer (VIPRE)

So needless to say she needs help. All the time.

So here comes microsoft recently, reinstalling like 15 different programs on her computer , including MS edge. Who else is tired of bloating? I know I am.

I recently found this program on Git!
Its the Sycnex Windows 10 DeBloater
But guess what? DONT USE IT.

Wanna know why?

Because if you do, it works, and if it works, it disables:

- Cortana (basic search engine for your OS, good luck finding candy crush).
- Microsoft Store (That means no XBOX games pass either)
- It breaks part of the file explorer

Wanna know why? BeCaUsE it geTs riD oF Ms EdGe

And believe it or not, apparently MS edges source code is Mandatory for certain functions on your computer. So even If you try to uninstall the browser, it stays behind in some form.

So there you have it. They hard coded it into windows.
Enjoy!

So its not even the author of the GITHUB programs fault, its just a real techincal limitation of the platform.

I hate that stuff man. I really do. There should be 20 things installed on my computer and thats it. Everything else is just, space for games on a solid state. Or Eclipse Photon, etc.

I would post links to show you guys a few things but. Unfortunately I cant post URLs yet!

However, thats my first rant. Hope you liked it.

How do you test unreachable code or part that is considered an edge case?

For example I catch exceptions in case IO failed and data was not written on database, but that only happens if hardware failure, or no disk space left, how do I mimic that?

I also have unreachable code for example, in one layer I fetch data (lets call it function x) and always return success result unless item not found I throw KeyNotFound exception. But in the calling function I handle the case of Status == Failed
Just in-case in the future I change function x and start returning failed status, so my logic already written but never reachable

So, I have a major deadline coming up and was writing some edge case tests when the gf calls.
I'm already in the "dog house" for beeing an obsesive twat lost in my thoughts and not listening to her so I decide to answer.
She called to vent about some coworker of hers and how she got screwed out of an advertising project.
The moment I heard "let me tell you what she said.." I instantly tuned her out, went into aha, yeah, aha mode and back to my tests (the irony is not lost on me).
Her: blablabla blablabla
Me: aha
Her: and then blablalba blabla bla
Me: wow, aha
This goes on for about 4-5 min up until I heard a change in the blabla pattern.
To self: Oh crap, that was a question!
To self: Wtf did she ask? Quick, say something!
Me: Uhm, yeah, of course!
Her: Yaaaaay, I love you! I'll get the tickets!
To self: aaaaaaaaw crap, what the fuck did I just agree to?!
Me: Sure thing! I'll see you tonight.

Hey everybody, guess who's going to London next week to spend four whole days with her old colledge artsy-fartsy-stoner friends?
I hate those assholes!

You ever sit down to code, all pumped up and ready to conquer the digital world, only to have your computer decide it's the perfect time to install updates? "Sorry, can't work right now, I'm busy optimizing your experience," it says, while you sit there twiddling your thumbs and wondering who asked for this update in the first place.

And let's talk about variable names. Who thought naming things would be the hardest part of programming? You start with `count` and `index`, but by the end of the project, you're using variables like `reallyLongVariableNameThatDescribesExactlyWhatThisThingDoes`. It's like playing a game of how many characters can you type before your fingers revolt.

Then there's the joy of debugging. You sprinkle `console.log()` like breadcrumbs through your code, trying to find where things went off the rails. Half the time, you realize you've been chasing the wrong rabbit down the wrong hole, and the other half, you discover the bug is some obscure edge case that you couldn't have predicted in a million years.

But hey, it's not all doom and gloom. There's a weird satisfaction in solving those coding puzzles, like when you finally get that algorithm to work or refactor your code into something so elegant, it feels like you've sculpted a masterpiece out of digital clay.

So here's to all the coders out there, navigating the ups and downs of curly braces and semicolons with a mix of determination and exasperation. May your code compile, your bugs be minor inconveniences, and your computer never decide to update right when you're on a coding roll!!

Who actually started the reign of mixed character passwords? because seriously it sucks to have an unnecessarily complex password! Like websites and apps requesting passwords to contain Upper/Lower case letter, numeric characters and symbols without considering the average user with low memory threshold (i.e; Me).

Let's push the complaint aside and return back to the actual reason a complex password is required.

Like we already know; Passwords are made complex so it can't be easily guessed by password crackers used by hackers and the primary reason behind adding symbols and numbers in a password is simply to create a stretch for possible outcome of guesses.

Now let's take a look into the logic behind a password cracker.

To hack a password,
1) The Password Cracker will usually lookup a dictionary of passwords (This point is very necessary for any possible outcome).
2) Attempts to login multiple times with list of passwords found (In most cases successful entries are found for passwords less than 8 chars).
3) If none was successful after the end of the dictionary, the cracker formulates each password on the dictionary to match popular standards of most website (i.e; First letter uppercase, a number at the end followed by a symbol. Thanks to those websites!)
4) If any password was successful, the cracker adds them to a new dictionary called a "pattern builder list" (This gives the cracker an upper edge on that specific platform because most websites forces a specific password pattern anyway)

In comparison:
>> Mygirlfriend98##
would be cracked faster compared to
>> iloveburberryihatepeanuts

Why?
Because the former is short and follows a popular pattern.

In reality, password crackers don't specifically care about Upper-Lowercase-Number-Symbol bullshit! They care more about the length of the password, the pattern of the password and formerly used entries (either from keyloggers or from previously hacked passwords).

So the need for requesting a humanly complex password is totally unnecessary because it's a bot that is being dealt with not another human.

My devrant password is a short story of *how I met first girlfriend* Goodluck to a password cracker!

Let me just test what happens on edge case wk nunbers

I love it when a safety feature meets an edge case.

I was driving along the highway, with adaptive cruise control on. There were cars in front of me and also behind me.
The car ahead of me set his turn indicator to the right and was decelerating for the exit ramp.
All good, heart rate 60bpm, there was plenty of space to get passed...
Suddenly, my car was like "PANIC, PANIC, EMERGENCY, BRAKE BRAKE BRAKE!!" And some automagic emergency brake triggered.
And I was like, "WHAAATT THEE FUUU...."

You cannot make these random emergency stops when a car is trailing your ass at high speed.

Yeah, it was something with the radar and the car fluctuating in front but anyway, nice feature.

In what programming language, you love to code the most?
edge case: if you don't love to code, then skip the question

I thought my project would break on an edge case and I would have to spend 2-3 hours rewriting some code to fix it. Turns out I had already thought about that edge case when implementing that functionality (which was like 6 months ago), so nothing breaks and I don't have to fix anything. What a pleasant surprise!

Why does Europe have to format their currency with commas where decimals should go and decimals where commas should go? I suspect it causes our currency formatter to drop the commas so values like 87,56 turn into 8756; amounts 100 times the intended amount. Somehow I can’t reproduce the bug but business users keep complaining about it happening. Not even my code and yet I’m stuck sifting through it to track down this one weird edge case. 😖

Maybe I'm just being (overly) stupid with my vacation-brain in full effect, but when I console.log() an object in Edge, most of the properties are showing up as (...), which I then have to click to reveal the actual value. I don't recall this being the case before (I'm like 99.999999% sure it never was like this before)... is anyone aware of a recent change that causes this and maybe a setting or something that makes it show the value automatically? Thanks!

Ok bois it's IDE / Text Editor time again.

I have had my fair share of usage with VSCode and i have been using VIM for over a year now.

With Vim i miss intellisense, class lookups etc.

VSCode doesn't provide the macro abilities i like in VIM and also doesn't support every edge case of file (giant files for instance).

Now i am at a certain dilemma. Do i use VSCode? Vim?

I am seriously considering trying emacs, but i don't know much about it.

What is your take on this?
Please respect each others choice, i don't want another fucking IDE religion war

Sometimes knowing how to program has this weird effect where you pick apart all tech that has some cross over into your field. I rarely visit a website without seeing something that makes me think, “who the hell thought that was a good idea”.

Lately though, as I learn more about the management side of things, I can see many more reasons that stupid things end up in good products. Lack of time and trying to over-engineering to cater for some odd edge case being the 2 biggest killers.

In 2018 I’m going to be a bit nicer about silly technical mistakes.

I build a project for internal team around a year ago. QA did sanity and we released. Product wasn’t used and suddenly they decided they want to use project. They forgot almost everything about project feature. I had product doc and ask them to follow. Still they kept making mistake. And finally they found an edge case bug. Now these idiots making noise that product is buggy we are blocked. We are not able to use.
After I fixed it is working but these idiots are asking why there was bug and made us blocked to use product. They couldn’t follow doc to use their own product. They are just trying to pin blame on me and wash their hands. I was really pissed . I told there was bug but why the fuck it took a year to know ? And yes there is bug but it’s edge case and it happens when you guys make mistakes from your side then only it happens. Even if it is bug. What the fuck you want. Have you never made any mistake in your life? Go fuck yourself. There was bug but I don’t care. Bugs are part of release.

Just askin:
If you have a method which returns a value from an array. What do you prefer in a case when the item is not found?
A)Throw an exception
B)return null
C)return a special value like a null object or some primitive type edge value like Integer.MIN_VALUE

PO writes a story. We groom it. Point it. Do the work. Finish the work. Dev test it. Push it to test. Tester find a weird edge case. Talks to me. I agree it’s weird. I talk to PO and the PM in the standup. PO realizes the whole business flow doesn’t make any sense. Changes the AC. Asks us to change/redo shit. 2 days until the end of the sprint.
I guess I’m working this weekend. Not that I have to go anywhere 🤷🏽‍♂️

This *is* a question you silly wrong tagging mother fucker, how dare you doubt me?

Alright, no more disclaimer: I like dungeons and dragons, but it's too fucking much in terms of rules and systems and shit, as in just *making* a character can take a long ass while.

And if that's the highest level of all your ANAL preferences then OK, but I'm not you and things only come OUT of my ass, not inwards, I swear.

Anyhoo, I got fed up with it and wrote my own ruleset and setting as a last fuck you to everyone. It's very simple: if you want to be some kinky magical alien hermaphrodite royal prostitute half sewer dragon princess and three quarters bearded female incest child of demons and fairies then FINE, but you get no bonuses for that shit.

Get it? No complex racial level scaling bullshit, FUCK YOU, race and background is just for vibes, end of story.

You get no attribute or skills or shit to distribute on level one. All you get is a prompt: pick three actions, that's it. You wanna be sexy? Pick "seduce". You wanna set turds on fire? Pick "ignite". Are you an edge lord? Pick "summon". Would you be my wife? Pick "heal", "buff" and "smite".

The game is turn based, and each action you can take is effectively a spell. Everyone can cast a basic spell like walk, attack, talk, crouch, etcetera -- that costs no mana. Special crap like flying and firing fucking electricity costs mana, and you can only do those if you either picked the spell on level one or learnt it later from a book/tutor/demonic bargain/whatever.

Which spells are valid for taking at level one is up to the game master; I just tell people to pick three verbs or short sentences, and if they choose something that's too broken like "split the Red Sea" I'm like nah you're not Moses, try again.

Still with me? Good. You get eight points of health, four points of mana, and one point of stamina. They're all energy, and you can use it to power your magery, but spending all your health means you fucking die.

Stamina recharges fully every turn, and is used for the aforementioned basic actions. All of these cost one point of stamina each. If you run out of stamina, you can use mana. Or your BLOOD.

Level one spells cost one mana, level two cost two and so on. You get back one point of mana each turn, and you can fire all the spells you want during it, long as you have mana. Or BLOOD.

That's good and all, but if you spend anywhere over eleven combined points of energy in one go, you spontaneously combust and die, erasing all signs of life in a twenty-meter radius. This is called incineration, and it *will* leave behind a blackened crater from which the dark servants of the Horror Immemorial may or may not crawl out of.

In case you didn't guess by now, your blood doesn't fucking come back unless you eat, sleep or see a healer.

But anyway, the more points you spend into casting a spell -- and remember, basic attack counts as a spell -- the more powerful it is, so the bigger your diceroll can get. My rule is I add one dice for every fourth point of energy spent, so (1d4), (1d4 + 1d6), (1d4 + 1d6 + 1d8), incineration.

Additionally, for every three points of energy spent, your spell can hit one more target. That's right, you like AoE? Then spend more mana, bitch. Oh, and if you're using shit like poison it lasts one more turn for every two points of energy spent.

How do we calculate damage? Diceroll over two and fuck your mother. Armor class? Resistances? Out of my face with that shit. Damage reduction is called "tyranny" and is for dungeon bosses only.

If you live long enough to get to level two, you *do* get attributes. Pick:
- Grit: +2 health, +1 to fighter shit type rolls.
- Cunning: +2 mana, +1 to rogue shit type rolls.
- Allure: +1 stamina, +2 to wizard shit type rolls.
- Spirit: +1 to elemental shit type spells.
- Faith: +1 to benefactor paragon asshole shit type spells.
- Hatred: +1 to demonic murder hobo destructive shit type spells.

On second level, you can pick one of the spells you know to get +1 to it, specifically. Eh, "+1" just means you get a bonus to some diceroll, no time to explain I'm running out of characters what the fuck.

On level three, the cycle repeats. Pick attr, pick spell. DONE.

Oh right, and weapons. Mostly just vibes, pick your fancy and fuck off. Normally, you can hit things one tile away; if you have a BIG melee weapon you can hit from *two* tiles away, and if you have a ranged weapon you can shoot anyone in sight, but you need to spend one point of energy to reload.

And there, all bases covered in less that 5000 characters with some flair to spare, now suck my fucking cock Hasbro.

What was the question? Oh yeah right, I'm gonna GPL this shit and put it in browsers. I think I'm going to write it in Kotlin but I'm open to suggestions. Would you guys like to play it/contribute to it's development for shits and giggles?

This morning I found out that the code I wrote to convert json data to a new format in our DB was giving errors and a bunch of questions got saved with the wrong property. It was assumed when it was triaged with my boss that we would only see one key property so the code written by me so the code was aimed at that. Well some questions have multiple keys for no reason. They are mostly floating data that hasn't been wiped clean because the develop who wrote this use json data in psql with no validation or data cleaning. This edge case was also never caught on PR reviews and we got a pretty heavy review process. I'm not being blamed for it. Most of it I think all the devs feel bad we didn't catch this because it affected us greatly. I've been working all morning trying to resolve it with my boss and just now in the evening we stopped. I just feel like I'm not a good dev at all and just want advice on how to deal with situations like this. I'm a new dev and this is my first job I have held for almost a year

sorry, search engines were not helpful. does anyone know of a lightweight browser that doesn't need installing but stores everything in the os user directory?

i have no it-permissions but want to provide my department with a suitable browser. we have ie and edge, but the latter deletes everything on closing which makes it unusable for my usecase and the it is not willing to set this up different.

ff portable can not be run from a read-only-folder and any other scenario either needs installing on every terminal or does not handle different profiles which is essential. i read that this is the case for any portable browser.

i'd like to set it up properly with neccessary start page, favourites, adblocker and so on but just in one network directory for maintainance reasons.

we run a web based application strictly local but each windows-user-account must have their own setting in this app (cookies or preferably webstorage).

am i asking too much for?

man if i could figure out how to do stuff and had the money to do stuff i'd be dangerous as fuck, but as of now i can only posit questions... it sucks.

Examples:
- What do modern browsers/crawlers do when hit with, say, an "HTTP 450 Blocked by Windows Parental Controls" or an "HTTP 374" status code?
- What happens if I do <xyz minor edge case thing> on <system?> (just use your imagination, this happens for every edge case i can think of for every system and the list wouldn't fit in a few megs' worth of half-byte ASCII, much less *here*)
- What if I made like a board to fuck with busses while systems were on? Press a button and for like five bus clock cycles pins like 6 and 7 are shorted? That sort of thing. As for system/bus types, *literally any* (old consoles with expansion ports, PCI/-e/-X/whatever, southbridge, etc.)
- What if I did <filetype> shenanigans by doing <something indescribably horrible> to this file? How do things react?

sometimes I have random curiosities while I'm out and unable to test things. this is one of them (will comment with answer if I ever test it):

obviously writing aliases to make things you do frequently easy is a win. but what about typo aliases? stuff like sl, dc, she, etc. these aren't typo'ed often (hopefully) but are defined every single time you create a new terminal.

has this probably miniscule overhead actually been meaningfully measured?

question: how many aliases must be defined to cause a significant (say, 3sec?) slowdown when opening a new terminal?

I wanted to resetup my gitea on a newnserver and now? I can't connect with the postgres db and i have literally no idea why. it fucking worked when it ran on my old debian and now it won't even connect.

😭

worst mistake was probably introducing an infinite loop in the category tree for e-commerce site...

in the vein of true agile and considering MVPs and what not we had not yet automated everything. the client would send category updates as a spreadsheet and i had a script to generate the sql and jam it into the site. having run the script several times in the past I thought I'd just throw the update into production and call it a weekend...

it wasn't long before I started fielding calls that the site was unstable. no page would load and the server kept crashing under trivial load. well an entire frantic weekend later I discovered the category load hit an edge case I hadn't considered and I had introduced an infinite loop in the navigation of the site.

i'd like to say I learned my lesson and never just threw changes into production again, but what can I say - I like living on the edge. I did however learn that loop detection can be a valuable thibg

Fucking American tech lead rejecting PR because he wanted me to change disallow_some_feature to prohibit_some_feature 😡
FYI English was never your fist language either. It was because (from what I have read on the internet)

You did not have a first language just that you adopted it. And “called it your own”.

And you go on and and about Indian accent !!!

F*c*k accent. I’ll rant about your f*c*k*n* attitude. Guess time to change jobs.

BTW American based projects would do much better (in your f’ing opinion without this naming convention)

(This is not targeted at all Americans, I have had some good technical feed back as well. With some really good edge case catches which I over looked, this is meant for one f*c*i*n* project manager/Dev)

Double standards 😡😡

How do I deal with this;

Edge case hiccup on production, no errors in the available logs(very shallow logging), no access to the production server, issue unreproducable on staging and a manager that want me to fix it AFTER I already said that im kind of sailing blind and can't do much without logs or access, and already looked at it with another dev who also has no idea what is going on

So we're supposed to test even the most imporbable edge cases to make sure that our software is reliable. But there is a limit. We let a marketing intern go bug hunting. We use the same component in two tabs of our SPA, but we distinguish them through some parameters. The intern found that if you switch back and forth between those two tabs super fast a couple of times, the program for some reason confuses those two tabs and swaps them. Now management has listed it as a priority. When are the customers _ever_ going to do that?!

What should I do, I have a central function that is not documentated and no test-cases are written for it. I have no clue what the method should really do, I know that it works in 99.9% of all cases otherwise we had much more bugs. Now there is one Unit-Test that reports an issue. I tracked it down to this method, no one touched the method nor the unit-test.
My logical thinking says that there is one statement missing, but it could also fuck up another part of the code... (This project has a bad testing coverage :'( )

What would you do?

- copy paste the method for this special case (I would hate me so much for breaking DRY)
- inheritance?! (Would make it more complex and then it would be still untested / undocumented)
- YOLO changing oO?! (hope for luck, just joking)

P.s it's an edge case unit test, the client / customer probably wouldn't realised it if it happens

Calling dibs on this edge case!

fucking hate implementing a chat feature in the apps! a couple of moving parts and edge case handling!

Msal.js. I give it 3/10..

The docs are duplicated, and in various states of out of date. Half the library seems to be undocumented based on how many edge case bugs I've hit, it offers a popup login but you have to have a set specified white list of urls you can launch the popup from which makes a popup login pointless...

Ontop of that my colleagues shat the bed on it and fucked the whole implementation including the azure b2c setup... We do not even have a backend app listed in the azure b2c apps. The redirect also won't work if you don't instantiate an object in a hidden iframe of your own website that fetches a token... This does not make life easy when you use a SPA framework and you have already implemented a whole pipeline abstracting the creation of this object behind layers dependency injection.. Nice.

After sifting through endless shit I finally have a solution. What a week.

What's the minimal feature set that can make a language as ornamented as JS into a comfortable REPL?
Should I write a full parser or should I try to patch my way around with regex?
It will have to interface a lot with JS so it has to be able to manage JS datastructures in some fashion, which means that I can't just make a whole new command line with its own programs.

My current plan:
Some delimiter (probably a semicolon) will take the output of a command and inject it in the next in case you decide halfway through a line to do some more processing, It also awaits promises and does some other nice stuff to make controlling such pipelines easy. I have an elaborate system in mind to decide where a value must be injected to make the line valid so in most cases you don't even have to indicate it. JS has beautifully simple syntax rules so I have a lot of technical balance to burn before I start building technical debt.

I have some ideas for automatic parentheses and commas in function calls. I realize while using a command line you do not want to tap shift often. My main idea here is that two names or values in js are always joined by an operator so the first missing operator is a call and following missing operators are commas until the end of line. This has lots of nasty edge cases though, like that no argument expression can begin with a unary operator or a bracket of any shape. You can always prepend a comma but it's cognitive load.

Anyway, do you have any suggestion or warning besides "js bad" which I know but it's the most popular sandboxable language and has a massive existing set of libraries which I kinda need.

Persisterising derived values. Often a necessary evil for optimisation or privacy while conflicting with concerns such as auditing.

Password hashing is the common example of a case considered necessary to cover security concerns.

Also often a mistake to store derived values. Some times it can be annoying. Sometimes it can be data loss. Derived values often require careful maintenance otherwise the actual comments in your database for a page is 10 but the stored value for the page record is 9. This becomes very important when dealing with money where eventual consistency might not be enough.

Annoying is when given a and b then c = a + b only b and c are stored so you often have to run things backwards.

Given any processing pipeline such as A -> B -> C with A being original and C final then you technically only need C. This applies to anything.

However, not all steps stay or deflate. Sum of values is an example of deflate. Mapping values is an example of stay. Combining all possible value pairs is inflate, IE, N * N and tends to represent the true termination point for a pipeline as to what can be persisted.

I've quite often seen people exclude original. Some amount of lossy can be alright if it's genuine noise and one way if serving some purpose.

If A is O(N) and C reduces to O(1) then it can seem to make sense to store only C until someone also wants B -> D as well. Technically speaking A is all you ever need to persist to cater to all dependencies.

I've seen every kind of mess with processing chains. People persisting the inflations while still being lossy. Giant chains linear chains where instead items should rely on a common ancestor. Things being applied to only be unapplied. Yes ABCBDBEBCF etc then truncating A happens.

Extreme care needs to be taken with data and future proofing. Excess data you can remove. Missing code can be added. Data however once its gone its gone and your bug is forever.

This doesn't seem to enter the minds of many developers who don't reconcile their execution or processing graphs with entry points, exist points, edge direction, size, persistence, etc.

I'm troubled by the stuff I made back when I did not know how I should use Unity's Animator. I have these animators that open and close a dialog with transition effects, but I used Triggers to accomplish it. With Triggers, no matter how I construct it, it seems that there is always this weird edge case that can only happen if Triggers are spammed.

Why I did not use Bools for open/close state is beyond me. And I have tons of those Animators to fix. FML.

at any point in time, have you had over 200 tabs open? why the fuck is such a low number such an edge case, that neither firefuck nor chrome can handle these without leaking RAM (5MB/sec and 100MB/sec respectively).

Don't you hate it when you think you have the situation under control, you had tested and checked every edge case which you can think of, then you added and double tested some fresh undetected cases from colleagues, QA, project managers and even some of the higher ups, and then when you... [read more]