I hate ZenHub. For those who haven't heard of it, it's an agile project management solution that is hacked (and by hacked I mean really hacked) on top of Github.

It's touted as being convenient because you can have all your issues in Github and then look at them in epics and board format. Sounds awesome. Except it's not. For everything "convenient" it does, it severely lacks the most basic ticket management features that make any ticket management solution usable. Ex., you can't copy tickets. That's right - if you're creating 20 similar tickets, which I've needed to do in the past, you must create each one individually. New ticket -> add labels -> add assignee -> add title -> add description and then submit. 20 times.

ZenHub is so bad and so poorly conceived that many of those who use it have lost sight of project management reality and are blind to the 300 other PM products out there that are better.

True story: a couple of weeks ago people were celebrating because ZenHub added functionality to allow you to define what epic an issue belonged in while you were creating it. For those who aren't familiar with what that means, let me explain: before two weeks ago, when creating an issue in ZenHub, to fill out this "epic" field, you needed to first create the issue and then edit it to fill in the epic.

Let me break that down in devRant terms: it's the equivalent of not being able to add tags to a rant until you create it and then go back and edit it. Complete lunacy is the only way to describe it. And when they added the functionality two weeks ago allowing you to do it all in one step, people praised them!!!

Yeah, ZenHub sucks.

Story, !rant.

This memory came up as I was commenting on another rant, and thought it was worthy of a better retelling.

So about a year or two ago, I had just gotten a Software Defined Radio, and was tinkering with it and looking around for cool stuff I could do with it. After stalking planes for a while (caught a 747 over my area 😎) I saw this program that decoded satellite images of earth, coming from the NOAA satellites. I thought this was amazing.

So I waited until one was over my area and let the software do its magic. The image was not great, since I had this set up on the first floor and there was a lot of material between me and the satellite.

So I came to the brilliant conclusion that I'd leave the program on automatic more (it will start sampling when the satellite is near) on my terrace, which should yield better results, right?

Perhaps. Who knows. Anyways, couple hours pass and we are running late to a family dinner. So we book it. Family dinner was great, good food and all, and was having fun, so never thought about my poor laptop, sitting alone in the night.

But then, when I was walking home in the rain... It hit me. I started running. I couldn't believe what I had done. Fast forward five minutes, and I'm out of breath, but home. I run upstairs, and see the laptop just sitting there, lid open, no lights on, and of course soaked right through.

I couldn't believe it. My only piece of tech at the time, and my only avenue for programming, gone. And I was 15, so I wasn't getting another one any time soon. Took it inside and drained the water out of it, and just left it there lying on its side.

Next day it worked just fine 🤣 the battery on my laptop only lasted max one hour, so by sheer luck it had lost power before the rain came. That is the one time I have to thank that battery for being such utter trash.

Pet peeve: When people use "Jira" to mean story / task / sprint / epic.

*Real* pet peeve: When people use it with more than one of the above meanings in the same sentence.

"Will we finish this Jira (story) by the time we close the Jira (sprint) on Monday?"

Dude, wtf. I actually have to decode your sentences to figure out what you're on about. Just learn the right terminology. It's not hard.

You know, the whole AWS outage being caused by a typo while debugging got me thinking... whoever did that is most probably a developer who had a REALLY bad day. Could that person be on DevRant? Because the story of what the rest of that day and week was like for him or her has the chance to be the most epic rant on here ever. Poor guy/gal.

!!inspiration to rant

To all people who feel lonely at smoochentinesday: 😘
Get your most EPIC, FUCKED UP or IMPRESSIVE dev-related story out and rant it on here!

The comments will help you to get over it, you poor, lonely, grievy flower. 😉

Happy valentines-slay!

Three word story:

I saw the infinity rant @linuxer4fun created and got inspired--it's about time we write one of those somewhat nasty, utterly random, amazingly sophisticated three word stories (spanning unto eternity!)

This means I start by writing three words, somebody else responds to that with three words, keeping within the context of the previous one, with the ultimate goal of writing an epic tale together (of dragons and stuff!)

You're not allowed to write a comment if the previous comment is yours:

if (comment.previous ().owner == you)
return false;

I consider just strangling somebody because iOS14 fucked all legacy Google Cardboard SDK apps overnight.

8 months already, still can't get all my old apps to work, for a thousand reasons.

If I didn't know better, I'd sue somebody. But it's apple, and I'm not Epic, so fuck me.

"Ohh dude why dontya just rewrite your apps to support Unity XR? hurr durr easy peasy lol so cheesy"
I'm tryin, but it's so underdeveloped and featureless, that I need to rewrite and create everything, and in some cases I can't because old apps had many dependencies. I am porting all my prefabs for hundreds of unpaid hours over the last 3 quarters already, and keep getting stuck.

Today I just extended an 8th deadline set by my clients. Each of those are exponentially more explosive and demotivating. It's not just the question of losing money for them - some of their careers depend on these apps I had made. (Long story, but it's exactly like that)

WHAT HAPPENED TO MAINTAINING LEGACY SUPPORT?!?! Nobody asked anyone to deprecate perfectly well working gyro/accel api on all <5 year old iPhones overnight TIM.

Fuck agile,fuck scrum masters now I really hate the word story and epic.

*Me explaining how the modules were planed out*
Me: Did you all understand how we are going to proceed?
Coworker 1: yes!
Coworker 2: easy!
Narrator: An epic story about a group of software developers, that build walls instead of modules, is about to unfold.

Embarrassing screenshare story? Yeah, I've got couple of those.

- Showing one client a VSCode workspace of another client's. I was lucky they didn't escalate or anything.

- YouTube open in PIP mode and accidentally showing that to the higher-ups in company. What made it more embarrassing is that they informed me about it, I thought I was sharing a window not Entire screen.

- WhatsApp open in one window and I accidentally shared it on screen, thinking I wasn't sharing my screen, but I was, and everyone saw my texts with a girl I was "dating" at the time.

- Presenting my entire screen to a client and out of nowhere Epic Games pop up with a notification saying ""Your buddy sent you a message - Ready to start playing?". But that was 11pm so I got off easy.

- Opening sentry to show one thing to the client but they notice many new bugs and I got slammed by my boss for it.

Almost everyone here has shared a story about their boss whether bad or good at some point in their time on devRant. Here's mine.

I started out in my current company around mid third year in college. I have been doing freelance for about six years which is why I think my boss hired me.

I couldn't be more thankful for these last 10 months in this company, every experience has been epic. Since my boss knows my future plans and how I hope to build my own company some day, my boss has been mentoring me ever since I've knew him.

Last week he even offered to take me along with him and certain other members of our team to the US to meet with a client of ours. (I have nothing to do with the client, he just offered the trip for the heck of it.)

I can't wait to see where my time with this company will lead me.

I got assigned to work on a new project a couple of weeks ago. We got the POC code handed off from senior management, since he came up with the idea over the weekend. The project concept is hella exciting, but the dev manager and PO I have to deal with make life unbearable to say the least.

We have only 2 devs (including me) and 1 QA on this supposedly very important project. Of course, management announced the project to the clients already, so now we have to deliver ASAP cause it adds “sizzle”.

The MVP deadline is... no one knows when, either July 30th or September 1st. The MVP requirements are... unknown. I swear if someone saw the list of tasks and issues attached to “MVP” Epic, they would call us nuts trying to fit it all in.

To make things better, each PR requires 2 reviewers, so we end up adding manager as a reviewer just cause we need him to hit that “approve” button. So in attempt to make life easier, we requested to have a third developer. We are getting another developer, but that guy doesn’t know how to unit test a pure function...

Current priorities are... unit testing with coverage of 95% and if we want to refactor code, we have to add area to the list in a Google Doc. As a result, we are not tackling big things like risk of SQL injections not to mention big features like i18n (5-6 languages to support by the way and yes, it’s part of MVP as well as SSR no one knows why). Currently, I spend 2-3 hours a week in calls with the team just to figure out what the hell MVP is, what we have to do and why we have to do it. Last time we spent an hour refining 1 spike and breaking down one story into 3.

Oh, we also don’t have a deployment plan, not even to test environments since DevOps team was not aware of this project at all. Thus, QA cannot create any test suites and have to test everything manually which eats a lot of their time.

This whole project is a big hot mess and I’m considering leaving it all together especially since I’m working on two squads at the same time. I love the project, I love the idea, but management makes it unbearable, so I’m not even motivated to work on that.

Once upon a time, there was a cup of coffee aimlessly walking around the open fields of Alabama. He then realized he was not from Alabama and joined with his father the Sun.

That, my friends, is the story of the epic adventures of a sheep named Bob.

Basically, Stephen said unto me: "let there not be sheep", yet there still was.

The wonders of the modern world--the wonders!

I really do like chocolate.

just a little pool here, do you, yes, you, do you think an inexperienced intern should take an epic story?
(not that there we work with agile, that would be great, but it's a task equivalent to an epic.)

Questions more then a rant...

I've moved from being a lead on imploring DevOps and Agile practices in a large Telco to now working for a security consultancy... The team I'm with are s*** hot when it comes to SecOps (which is why I changed jobs) and I've been hired to he the automation and working practice expert on the team. Already got some of them learning Ansible which is a great start!

I've got delivery now being pushed to Git and all client work being tracked in Jira and properly documented and collaborated through HipChat and other CI tools on the way....

My question is this... Does anyone have some awesome resources to teach people Git, Jira, Jenkins, etc. quickly without forking or branching out on expensive training? Focus on being a technical but consultative team. Ideally just wanna pull some awesome guides and make. My own commits on them for the team... Please fire a story or epic away!