My CEO: "So! You are the new guy we hired to design and manage the implementation of our new state of the art super-duper fancy ERP solution with badass Business Intelligence systems to grow our company which already spans over several localities across the county, that has to live for at least the next 12-15 years?

Please remember that the Windows Server in the rack in the basement needs replacement soon, and that our new fancy solution must not in any way utilize cloud-technology or SaSS! I don't like that! I think it's a scam! We store everything on premises, own our infrastructure and we buy our software...Because I think that is best!"

Me: "So... let me get this straight: You want me to build you a one-off, concept sports car that can outperform a Lamborghini using only plywood, duct-tape and a donkey cart?"

He walked off... I may need a new job next week!

I was at my uncle's village.
Where getting internet is big thing,very far from main city.
I was talking with one shopkeeper.
I told him ,I am software developer.

He ask me questions that
"How can I improve my business using software?"

To help me figure out situation.
He told me problems he is facing right now.
Accounting/inventory management/contact's with big retailers.

He was so genuinely explaining it.

He don't want next billion dollar startup.

He want to solved his problem.

I am really impressed after that conversation because person who don't know what is excel is talking about ERP software.

I am going to develop that software.

#respect

===rant

So I have been freelancing as web developer for 5 years. I was also playing basketball professionally so I was only working part-time, building websites here and there, small android apps to learn the job and I was also reading a lot to challenge my brain.

When I stopped playing basketball about a year ago, I thought I would really enjoy coding full time so I pursued a job.

With no formal education and just a basketball background on paper, in the collapsed Greek economy, as you may assume chances of landing a job are minimal.

After about 40 resumes sent I only got an internship. It was a 4 month, part-time, no pay deal, and then the company would decide if they would like to hire me later.

The company had 4 employees and they are one of the largest software distribution businesses in my area. They resell SaaS bought from a third company, bundled with installation support, initial configuration, hardware support, whatever a client may need.

I was the only one with any ability to code whatsoever. The other people were working mostly on customer support with the occasional hardware repair.

After the 4 month period they owner (small company, owner was also manager and other roles) told me that they are very happy with my work and would like to keep me part-time with minimum pay.

Just to give you and idea if the amounts of money involved, in Greece, after taxes, my salary was 240euros per month. And the average cost of surviving (rent, cheapest food possible, no expenses on anything but super basics) is about 600euros.

I told him I needed more to live and he told me ok, we will reevaluate a few months later, at the end of May 2017.

I just accepted it without having many options. The company after all was charging clients 30euros per hour for my projects so I kept thinking that if I worked a lot and delivered consistently I would get a full time job and decent money.

And I delivered. In the following months I made a Magento extension, some WordPress themes, a C# application to extract data from the client's ERP and import it to a third application, a click to call application to use Asterisk to originate calls from the client's ERP, a web application to manage a restaurant's menu and many more small projects. Whatever they asked, I delivered.

On time, version controlled, heavily documented solutions (my C# ones are not exactly masterpieces but it was my first time with the language and windows).

So when May ended I was pretty excited to hear they wanted to keep me full time. I worked hard for it, I was serious, professional, I tried a lot to learn things so I can deliver, and the company recognized that. YAY.

So the time comes to talk money. The offer was 480euros per month. Double my part-time pay, minimum wage. I asked for about 700. Manager said it's hard but I will see what I can do. So we agreed to keep the deal for June while they are working on a better offer.

During the first half of June I finished my last project, put all my work on a nice folder with a nice readme on every project's directory, with their version control and everything.

The offer never improved, so I said no deal, and as of today, I am jobless.

I am stressed as fuck and excited as fuck at the same time.

I will do my best to survive in the shitstorm that is called Greece.

Bring it on.

S = Some person I know
Me = Me

S: Hey, I heard you also do [software/web development].. I was hoping to get some advice from you about some advanced level HTML and CSS for my classes.
//or that if I could teach him something

Me: What do you study?

S: Oh, I teach.

Me: 😯 Really? What do you teach?

S: Oh, just some basic HTML and CSS with Notepad to about 50-60 students.

Me: (;﹏;) That's great.

/*this is a shortened version of a very long conversation*/

They teach some basic HTML and CSS like <table> and <marquee> and stuff. They also teach C++ and Tally ERP.

Also, he and some other person made their small intuitions' website but they don't know how to put it online. They made it in, as far as I understand, simple HTML and CSS USING NOTEPAD (Don't know if they used JS or something else). That's.. really courageous or something... ? I don't know, I couldn't have a look at it because they have it on their local computer and don't know what Git is.

I showed him some better alternatives and ways that they could use (editors, version control, db, etc.) to improve their curriculum and answered his questions, and I told him that I'll try to help in any way I can if they ever need me.

This also made me realize how much I've learned and grown since I first started learning C in school. Still, I've got so much more that I need and want to learn.
//Always keep learning
😊

PS. What would you've told him if you had been in my place?

Job Interview for a CTO role for a premium employer, a big law firm.

All is going well, I am telling them about my years of experience doing complex software integrations in business environments. Talking CRM/ERP, project management and development with external service providers. I tell them I want a salary of 100k and they nod in silence.

Then out of the blue one of the three stakeholders/managers leans over for a final question:
"Soo, we have this really big IT problem and if you would happen to know a solution to it, you would really prove your worth: I have these 10k+ E-Mails in my Outlook folder which doubles as an archive and Outlook keeps getting slower all the time. What can we do?"

!rant
tl;dr; quit my job last monday. going to grow my side hustle into full time freelancing.
I am so exited.

---
Story time:
I am working full time as a jack of all trades and also have a side business where I coach people on an ERP for doors/fenestration and also write custom software in c#.
I was able to manage both over ~4 years, with customer amount slowly growing (only doing B2B).

Last month I opened an account at a freelancer website just for the lulz and damn after a short amount of time the orders exploded. I had to shut it down again because I cannot manage the amount of work. But did manage to win a fair amount of customers that will keep me busy for the next year or two.

Spoke to my employer and told them about the situation (they know about my side business and it's all mentioned in the contracts). Said that I would need half the amount of hours with my business to reach the same amount of money and that working as an employee makes no sense for me in terms of money. I would however like to work 1 to 2 days in a week for them because working there is fun, even when its financially uninteresting.

they took one week to prepare a position and then invited me to a meeting. "we offer you 32 hours a week. if you want more, you have to make a descision. As a self employed person you have risk and we as an employer do not want to carry that risk for you and we do not want to finance your self employment" (etc.)

Thought I am in the wrong movie. I took that into the weekend and thought a lot about what has been said.

And last monday I invited to a follow up and told them

"sorry, I think I was not clear enough. Working for you is of no interest in terms of money. You do not finance me, it's the other way around. Sadly we do not come to an agreement, as 8 hours less does not fit the need. You said I need to make a descision. I do not want to do this but I'm quitting".

They responded with "Oh that is sad to hear. Is there anything that we can make so you do not leave?"

"Either pay me the same I would make as a self employed or follow my conditions"
Did not get a response on that.

I now have three months to prepare myself for self employment.
Currently working 40h + growing side business + getting the whole german bureaucracy shit together.

Tough time but hell this feels so damn good.

Just wanted to share this :)

Came across a gem today...part of a stored procedure that sits under our erp software. This explains a lot

So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.

Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….

My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.

After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …

So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???

Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...

Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.

First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?

The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.

The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.

The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!

Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.

IMHO technical dept is kind of like smoking cigarettes for some decades.

You were told that shit will hit the fan but you do not take proper action. And one day you'll realize that you fucked up (or not, also seen that).

Worked for a company in IT, where we maintained an ERP which was "in progress" for over a decade. The basic implementation was done by people with zero technical understanding. To clarify: not self coded. Software was bought. We are talking about integrating the system.

Therefore, the foundation was like a wet noodle. When I joined that company, I told them that they need to address that. I told them that things will get slower and slower and that shit will hit the fan if no proper actions taken.
Even made a list with flaws I found. With potential risk and actions to take, that could then be measured.

At that time, five people worked in said department (including me).

People did not want to listen. "Would be too expensive to rewrite stuff".

Nothing has changed about the wet noodle, but I tried to fix as many things in a working system as I could. Felt like heart surgery, because changes got implemented and "tested" in prod. No version control, no documentation, everyone implemented things like they felt (no guidelines for consistency).
A lot of small fuckups that summed up over the years.

I left the company after two years because I had the chance to land a job as a dev.

Been around two years now since I left. Now 9 people work in that department with around the same efficiency as us 5 people back then.

The new employees struggle to be productive, because things are just implemented poorly and not maintainable anymore.

Had some dialogs with them some time ago. Everything I told them would happen, actually happened. What a suprise :-|
I will not go into too much detail about all the shit that's going on there, as it would be just too much (and my morning coffe is almost finished).

I think that we all know the difference between "not beautiful, but does the job" and "oh, that will backfire - badly". And I wish that my communication skills increase so that people start listening in future.

You realize that the ERP software you use at your company is shit when:
- there is no service-side ERP backend handling requests
- the whole permission system is client-side (!)
- every client directly connects to the MSSQL database with a supervisor user (stored in plain text in a local config file)
- the MSSQL database contains tables with:
- typos
- names like "contract" but then also "contracts"
- mixed german and english words
- the multiple-business-unit implementation uses 4 columns named "Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 3, Layer 4" in EACH table
- you find out that the ERP software is created with a fucking "software creation tool"
- there is no API, so you have to program one yourself to use for services

Yet, they charge us shit ton of money for their broken ass software.

Probably had my worst half-week ever this week.

Customer's CRM system, the read and edit masks just...stopped existing on last week friday. CRM fell back on some default masks for the dataset. No way to create new masks directly without putting the whole system upside down.
We couldn't do anything anyway because they reported the issue literally as we all were about to leave for weekend and our boss was like "Ah nah, well do it next week."
Our brains were already fried anyway...
I mail the reporter that we've registered their issue, will investigate and report back ASAP once we've got news.

Monday rolls around, I'm whacking my head against their system trying to figure the fuck out, what went wrong and how to solve it, I come up empty; Not that terrible since the masks only stopped existing in the webclient version of the system and they can still use the windows client, so they can still work.

Tuesday rolls around, I'm at an on site training for an ERP system with my boss at a remote company. Get an email in midst of the training, I was doing protocol.
Guy from the afflicted company goes and tells me that the issue has somehow spread to his colleague and him...IN THE WINDOWS CLIENT.

I'm fucking flabbergasted, so to speak, since the masks for the windows client and the web client are totally isolated from one another.
After we're back at our company, I investigate, less efficiently this time because my brain got fried at the training. I come up empty again.

NOW TODAY: Discuss further proceedings with my boss, he's not pissed at me or anything, just to say, but we're both worried, obviously.

Then at 10:20, a guy from the afflicted company mails me in an annoyed tone that the masks are still broken.

11:00, we figure out a workaround so the windows client users can at least work again, albeit limited.

11:10, I mail the guy, telling him that although we're still not able to fully work everything out and are still investigating, we've made a workaround so they can at least work again.

11:20, the guy mails me in a pissed tone around the lines of "This is very very important and must be fixed ASAP or else we'll not be able to work at all [...]"
And I think like "Dude I literally just told you like 8 minutes ago that there's are workaround so you'll be able to at least work again..."

Forward the mail to boss, we meet up quickly to discuss how in God's name we can deescalate this mfer.

11:31, the guy mails me again, all apologetically this time "Stop! All is good, I just now fully read you mail, thanks for implementing the workaround, nothing will come to a standstill [...]"

BRUH CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ BEFORE ESCALATING SHIT

Fuck customers. Dumb fucking cretins unable to fucking read.

The issue is still unresolved. Support of the CRM software lets us sit on our collective asses and wait.

There is no such thing as stable software, it's a myth.

Every corporate software is like an ever-decaying semi-corpse of a brain dead patient slowly getting worse and worse but not fucking dying.

Rant over.

Have you ever had the moment when you were left speechless because a software system was so fucked up and you just sat there and didn't know how to grasp it? I've seen some pretty bad code, products and services but yesterday I got to the next level.

A little background: I live in Europe and we have GDPR so we are required by law to protect our customer data. We need quite a bit to fulfill our services and it is stored in our ERP system which is developed by another company.

My job is to develop services that interact with that system and they provided me with a REST service to achieve that. Since I know how sensitive that data is, I took extra good care of how I processed the data, stored secrets and so on.

Yesterday, when I was developing a new feature, my first WTF moment happened: I was able to see the passwords of every user - in CLEAR TEXT!!

I sat there and was just shocked: We trust you with our most valuable data and you can't even hash our fuckn passwords?

But that was not the end: After I grabbed a coffee and digested what I just saw, I continued to think: OK, I'm logged in with my user and I have pretty massive rights to the system. Since I now knew all the passwords of my colleagues, I could just try it with a different account and see if that works out too.

I found a nice user "test" (guess the password), logged on to the service and tried the same query again. With the same result. You can guess how mad I was - I immediately changed my password to a pretty hard.

And it didn't even end there because obviously user "test" also had full write access to the system and was probably very happy when I made him admin before deleting him on his own credentials.

It never happened to me - I just sat there and didn't know if I should laugh or cry, I even had a small existential crisis because why the fuck do I put any effort in it when the people who are supposed to put a lot of effort in it don't give a shit?

It took them half a day to fix the security issues but now I have 0 trust in the company and the people working for it.
So why - if it only takes you half a day to do the job you are supposed (and requires by law) to do - would you just not do it? Because I was already mildly annoyed of your 2+ months delay at the initial setup (and had to break my own promises to my boss)?

By sharing this story, I want to encourage everyone to have a little thought on the consequences that bad software can have on your company, your customers and your fellow devs who have to use your services.
I'm not a security guy but I guess every developer should have a basic understanding of security, especially in a GDPR area.

Sometimes life takes unexpected turns:

I studied mechanical engineering and did some "computer stuff" in my free time, you know, "programming" with Java, toyed around with HTML/CSS/PHP a few years ago, some local server stuff with a raspberry pi, nothing fancy.

Half a year ago i got hired as engineer first but they said they needed an "IT Guy" also.

What i did since then
*Researching, Testing and Planning the introduction of an ERP software
*Planning, coordinating and (partially) setting up a new server for the company (actually two cause redundancy (heavy lifting got done by our IT partner, its not like i suddenly know how to do the entire windows server administration)
*Writing 3 minor tools for some guys in the company in java
*Creating numereous excel vba scripts that make work a lot easier
*doing all the day to day business that comes up when absolutly noone know how to use a pc in the company
*consulting the boss about webshops and websites in general and finding a decent partner
*and some engineering

Did i mentioned that i studied mechanical engineering? I know nothing about all this, or rather, i know enough to know that i know not enough.

My current side project is creating a small intranet, so creating a new VM in Hyper V, setting up some OS (probably slim CentOS), getting a Webserver running and making it somewhat secure. Then i need to create some content, i am very close to just install a mediawiki and call it a day. If i write anything in PHP i fear that i make way to many erros or just reinvent the wheel, on the other hand, i couldnt find anything resembling what i need. I also had to create the front end side, i knew CSS around 2010, there is probably tons of stuff i dont know and i will make so many errors.

This is frustrating, everything i touch feels like i am venturing the beaten path but noone ever showed me the ropes so everything i do feels like childs play. I need an adult. Also the biggest Question remains: What i am?

Note to management:
Throwing more $$$ at the problem will not help the fact that you picked the wrong software. It will never do what you want it to and it will never smoothly integrate with our current ERP. Maybe next time you should spend the money upfront on a better system and not buy the cheap system that requires expensive customizations to bring it to the point where it sorta kinda works.
Thank you for listening.

Deciding whether to stick to being a web developer, or switch to something else

(thinking more like rocket software, or something with security (but maybe sticking with web), or some other cool sh#t

I don't know yet, what I do know is even when I'm creating an erp system, I find it very unsatisfying

"I helped create the software on that rocket"
Or
"that hospital uses the system I've helped to create"

Sounds a lot more satisfying than,
"that company uses my 'warehouse resources manager'/'webshop'/'planning system'

But then again I don't know, I now have a stable job, know what to do and know the language we use.

I have been a professional Dev for about a year for a cyber security startup. Unfortunately, startup died do to finance mismanagement. My lead Dev said that he wanted to start a co-op contract business and since we all work great together than we should stick around. So we tried to obtain contracts and it is going much slower than imagine. I am going on my second month of no work or contract work. I'm working on my own site to do some freelance work on the side for myself offering ever, marketing and ERP software services. That is the goal for side hustle. However, for the main hustle well I'm stressed now of being home and we'll meetings not turning into money. I actually want to call it quits and do my own thing and look for normal gig. It just feels rough as he has been my mentor and offered me my first software gig. I don't feel like I own anyone anything I'm regards money or time. However, I do feel bad of I take off it will hurt them from being able to handle larger contract if they do get one.

Note: I'm pulling from my savings

Thoughts??

¡rant|rant

Nice to do some refactoring of the whole data access layer of our core logistics software, let me tell an story.

The project is around 80k lines of code, with a lot of integrations with an ERP system and an sql database.

The ERP system is old, shitty api for it also, only static methods through an wrapper to an c++ library

imagine an order table.

To access an order, you would first need to open the database by calling Api.Open(...file paths) (yes, it's an fucking flat file type database)

Now the database is open, now you would open the orders table with method Api.Table(int tableId) and in return you would get an integer value, the pointer.

Now for the actual order. first you need to search for it by setting the search parameter to the column ID of the order number while checking all calls for some BS error code

Api.SetInt(int pointer, int column, int query Value)
Then call the find method.

Api.Find(int pointer)

Then to top this shitcake of an api of: if it doesn't find your shit it will use the "close enough" method of search.

And now to read a singe string 😑

First you will look in the outdated and incorrect documentation given to you from the devil himself and look for the column ID to find the length of the column.

Then you create a string variable with ALL FUCKING SPACES.

Now you call the Api.GetStr(int pointer, int column, ref string emptyString, int length)

Now you have passed your poor string to the api's demon orgy by reference.

Then some more BS error code checking.

Now you have read an string value 😀

Now keep in mind to repeat these steps for all 300+ columns in the order table.

News from the creators: SQL server? yes, sql is good so everything will be better?

Now imagine the poor developers that got tasked to convert this shitcake to use a MS SQL server, that they did.

Now I can honestly say that I found the best SQL server benchmark tool. This sucker creams out just above ~105K sql statements per second on peak and ~15K per second for 1.5 second to read an order. 1.5 second to read less than 4 fucking kilobytes!

Right at that moment I released that our software would grind to an fucking halt before even thinking about starting it. And that me & myself and I would be tasked to fix it.

4 months later and two weeks until functional beta, here I am. We created our own api with the SQL server 😀

And the outcome of all this...

Fixes bugs older than a year, Forces rewriting part of code base. Forces removal of dirty fixes. allows proper unit and integration testing and even database testing with snapshot feature.

The whole ERP system could be replaced with ~10 lines of code (provided same relational structure) on the application while adding it to our own API library.

Best part is probably the performance improvements 😀. Up to 4500 times faster and 60 times less memory usage also with only managed memory.

So, my job title is sql Developer, but recently I’ve been balls deep in A .Net application, not an issue, but there is a huge learning curve.

Anyway, earlier in the year I spent about 2-3 months manually entering price list and exchange rates into our ERP system. I proposed an app to help make this process easier, boss was happy so I knocked up a 20+ page software design document, covered everything, and laid out a road map I.e v1 would just be MVP, and additional nice to have features would be added incrementally.

Boss didn’t read the document, and didn’t mention it again.

5 months later I get an invite to a meeting to discuss my progress, which is this afternoon.

It was always going to be something I worked on in my spare time, so I currently have 5 models to show her.

Why not mention something for months and then ask for a progress update out of the blue?

My boss isn’t a dev so will just bury them in technical details which she doesn’t really need to know

Recently I've been working on an ERP in logistics, and I was doing it solo. Gotta say that it's a big mistake to take this up alone, and architected the whole system based on the flexibility of scale. It took me more than 7 months to bang enough walls to realize that tech work is not what it used to be.

As of now there are a slew of meetings that I need to go to. It pretty much felt like the client was trying to find faults in my work.

Software timeline estimation becomes irrelevant, and work still needs to continue on anyways. At this point, I really do feel like giving up and just be a product manager instead. What say you?

I had this amazing boss. He had 25 years of experience in the sector covered by our software, an ERP. He knew how to be a programmer, a boss, a sales manager, a support person.
I learned most of the best practices from him: do not shout in the office, it makes impossible to work. Don't hide something to your coworkers, nobody was trusting him. Be clear with your clients, his subtle mind tricks pissed off a lot of clients. Your client needs to see an economic advantage in your offers, trying to sell gold priced shit is not a good way to stay in the market. The list could go on and on and on.

I learned what happens when you do everything in the wrong way, and I will never forget.

the current ERP software i test has a function that, when you dont have the USB dongle plugged in, it will annoy the workflow with a popup where you have to solve simple math stuff. (Like 2041+949). I am kinda inclined to write a small programm that insta solves those pop ups.

I must note, this is a weird way of licence management.

Manager: make some AI for this project it is simple.
Me: what are we talking about?
Manager: I want to get a report about any topic in our ERP just by talking to the software.
Me: 😓

This is why we can never have enough software developers

It's true. No matter how many people learn to program, there will never be enough people who know how to program. They don't have to be very good at it either. It is now a required skill.

Minimum wage in first world countries is way above 5$ per hour. A Raspberry PI 3B costs 40$, or at most 1 day of work for the worst paid jobs. And it will run for years, and do routine tasks up to thousands of times faster than any employee. With that, the only excuse that people still do routine tasks, is the inaccessibility of coder time.

Solution: everybody should know how to write code, even at the simplest level.

Blue-collar jobs: they will be obsolete. Many of them already are. The rest are waiting for their turn.

Marketing people - marketing is online. They need to know how to set up proper tracking in JS, how to get atomic data in some form of SQL, how to script some automated adjustments via APIs for ad budgets, etc. Right now they're asking for developers to do that. If they learn to do that, they'll be an independent, valued asset. Employers WILL ask for this as a bonus.
Project Managers - to manage developers, they need to know what they do. They need to know code, they have to know their way around repositories.
QA staff - scripted tests are the best, most efficient tests.
Finance - dropping Excel in favor of R with Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks or whatever, is much more efficient. Customizing / integrating their ERP with external systems is also something they could do if they knew how to code.

Operations / Category Management - most of it would go obsolete with more companies adopting APIs as a way to exchange important information, rather than phone calls and e-mails.

Who would not be replaced or who wouldn't benefit from programming? Innovative artists.

A lot of it might not be now now, but the current generation will see it already in their career.

If we educate people today, without advanced computer skills and some coding, then we are educating future deadbeats.

With all this, all education should include CS. And not just as a mandatory field or something. Make it more accessible, more interesting, more superficial if needed. Go straight to use cases, show its effectiveness in the easiest way possible. Inquisitive minds will fill in the blanks, and everyone else will at least know how to automate a part of their work.

The most bizzarro thing I have seen my client do is, whip out his keyboard, open his ERP - DOS Software and remove his pajamas and walks me through every feature for some module he wants to add.

My question, why a DOS Software for ERP in 2018?!

I don't know how erp systems can be so expensive and yet so bad. Integrating our software with sap is turning out to be painful.

!Dev
TL Dr :- Debugging a software I barely know about was slow and ended up breaking in the shop it was used in and reverting the changes does not solve the problem

I asked my father a few days ago why he was buying a dedicated server for his ERP software and not using a client computer as his server which he is doing in his shop currently. He said that it was slow on other computers in the LAN which is an wired. The solutions given by the company that made it did not work. Big bills would sometimes also dissapear which took around 30 minutes to make. So when he bought the computer to home during lockdown I pulled up the debugging guide from the company which summed up to check latency,ram and add these files to exclusion list of your antivirus. Latency was kinda high at the first when pinging another computer on the LAN but I was testing on WiFi so it could be pretty inaccurate. The computer met the ram requirements so that was not a problem. I checked the data path by opening the software and accidentally typed something but I did not worry since the changes needed to be manually accepted. I added the files to the Windows defender exclusion list and shut it down.

Next day :- My father calls me up and says the software is working on the server but is broken on other computers. So I check if the changes were automatically accepted for some reason and yes that happened. So so pull up a guide to configure the software in multi user mode and I replace the mistyped setting with the correct one and it still does not work. My father asks me to undo everything by using anydesk. I remove all the exclusions I added to Windows defender and disable windows firewall. Still does not work. Restart the computer and software. Still does not work. Check permissions on data folder. They are correct.

WTF I reverted all the changes I made and the software does not work on other computers.

WHITEPAPERS.

Not exactly a programming problem, but one of my many task (as i am apparently a multi headed hydra) is it to find Software for tasks. I made the experience, as more marketing experts are on it, and as more SEO is poured in as more information about a topic degrade.

Two examples:
i wanted to find out if there is anything that speaks AGAINST "the cloud" as a concept for Data Procesessing and Storage. (Beside that the company internet connection is crap). There are tons of documents that in a semi "scientific" way show that having a data centre with a constant staff of experts is superios to everything. And it goes on, every company has a different version of basically the same document, and they all subtley show that THIS company is the best.

Example 2:
ERP Software, the most infested pool of filth i have entered yet, be it just a tiny CRM System or a full blown SAP clone, they all have those "Whitepapers" that first look somewhat scientific or informative. Like "the top8 common pitfalls when introducing an ERP system". 7 of them read logically and were what i expected, the 8th was "dont get your IT involved".
Yeah sure, IT doesnt understand economical processes, fair enough, but not getting it involved at all sounds like selfdefense. A further look showed me that this particular vendor has a web-based solution but doesnt provide any further informations (srsly, the website is starved of actual hard informations). The screenshots let the software look a bit oldschool but what really threw red flags for me was the sentence "we are ready for Win10, we did significant adjustment to perform excellent with Windows 10"
So, either they have some system interwoven stuff (so why bother with Webbase then?) or its just another marketing bullshit sentence.

Either way, i found it to be really hard to get ANY reliable information about this particular topic which adds to the overall world experience of missinformations and the all-being "fakenews". But for many things one can usually filter through a lot of different informations that can be pieced together, with this..its all outright propaganda camouflaged as "useful information", some even try to let it look scientific. In the end its all biased..

ultimativly, this rant is about all the people that write those missleading whitepapers, fill the world with biased informations and make the whole planet a worse place.

How do you diagnose speed issues?

I've been lumped with looking after a legacy app.

It connects to our ERP system to handle raising invoices etc. And in June is developed slowness, which we sort of fixed by making one section load later (the SQL was a horrible view in a view in a view).

We then upgraded our ERP software, and the SQL issues are resolved (had to upgrade SQL server etc at the same time) and now the legacy app is running really slowly.

I know that it is when it loops through a data set to set column values etc.

A particular project has 1900 time transactions and takes upto 2 minutes to load.

This part of the program hasn't been changed in over a year, and has only started running slowly since the upgrade.

Are there any good way I can investigate and diagnose exactly why it has suddenly started running slowly?

So in my last rant I mentioned an ERP. This is its story:
When I started, all paperwork (including invoices, delivery slips, orders to suppliers etc.) was done on Word and some Excel, no specialised software whatsoever.
At some point (I already worked there for 2 years then), it became too much even for our boss, so he decided to spend some cash on the real deal.
After some looking around, he found software that seemed right (same vendor as our external bookkeeper used, so it would work with him too, nice). In order to save some money, he purchased it in Germany, as they offered a smaller product costing way less (we were based in Switzerland).
Once installed, we realised that this product was only meant to be used within the EU, as it only supported € as a currency and German VAT rates. We needed Swiss Francs and local VAT to work as well.
His solution looked as follows: I had the task to edit all forms via built-in MS Report Builder (god does it suck) to display the string CHF instead of €, and alter the on-sheet excel-like functions to use our VAT rates. Internally, the application of course still thought it was using € etc. For that reason, all output was unusable for bookkeeping, so we (as before) would just hand it in on paper.
If he had purchased the version sold here, all of the above would not have been the case, meaning support for multiple currencies and VATs, as well as direct transfer to the bookkeeper. He hardly saved 15k, in exchange for a non-working solution.

Acumatica ERP... does anyone else understand my pain?

so, a new day, a new ERP software to rant about:

this one features an email feature (heh) but with a catch.

only pop3, no imap, if you want ssl the software suggest that you use a 3rd party program, also every user has to be logged in by the admin cause they assume the sysadmin knows all passwords cause he has "password lists"

i called them to ask why their software is what it is, they answer "there was never a need to develop an IMAP functionality, SSL would be so much work and it never became a problem that the sysadmin didnt know all passwords"

in unrelated news, does anyone know a nice sub 100K ERP software with CRM, Material Management and Offer/Order Management that runs on a local server and offers german support for a company in the 50 to 500 worker bracket?

Hey fellow devs,

i finally did it! i applied as a junior dev in a software company for inHouse projects. the job interview is today in one week.

little background story for those of you who are just procastinating at this time:

i have started coding when i was in school. just little stuff - nothing special. after i finished school i edjucated in the business field (did not found the english word. something like office person or in our words "user").
after that my company changed the ERP System and i wanted to do that so badly. and i got that job. i worked my ass of to get that baby running. from entering the orders to production to shipping and billing, i made that all happen by myself. as we had some very specific requirements i also wrote applications myself. after about three quarters of a year we switched to the new system and it ran smoothly (company is producing windows and doors). i was so proud when the first windows were finished.

BUT there was one problem. I was alone. no second it person i could talk to. no one i could learn from and no one who could learn from me. i then decided to change the company. same product, same job - but within a team. It was a whole other experience. i really enjoy the exchange with my colleagues. we learn from each other and we solve problems together. we can rely on each other. As i worked there i also wrote applications for inHouse usage and i even launched my own first app (not related to company - private commercial project)

BUT there is one problem. I am still the only dev. so i try to code the lease i can at my current job so that the team still works and the whole system stays maintainable for everyone. I do not feel good holding back the desire to code something. so after two years (and with a lot of talks with my cousin) i finally applied for a job as a "real" developer.

I have no bachelor, so the invitation for the job interview made me so damn happy. i really hope that i can transmit my passion for this job and if everything fits that they take me.

The next rant will then be about the result of my job interview :)

PS: even if i do not get the job. i am proud of myself that i applied!

Thanks for reading, potato potato

Every day is tempting to me..tempting to use some solutions i am not sure that i can handle it.

The Company i work for has an external IT Partner that does all the heavy lifting when it comes to our infrastructure, like installing servers, doing the installations and such. I mostly monitor it and do basic maintenance. Its all windows.

Recently i thought about adding a fifth Hyper V instance for an intranet webserver...based on some linux distro (probably ubuntu cause that is what i am familiar with). But i am not THAT familiar with ubuntu or any linux distro..buts its just the intranet and i already installed nginx and apache with success, what could go wrong?

today i sketched some intranet websoftware our production might find useful to collect data input from our workers (we are somewhat small so there is no big ERP software as of now). When thinking how to realize the data input i thought that maybe a basic raspberry and some cheap 1280x800 10.1 inch touch panels would be best..its very tempting, but on the other hand i am not sure i am ready for that, my experience is shallow and only based on my own RaPi that i 99,99% run headless. On the other hand it would be a very small and space safing concept..and cheap..compared to the use of Laptops (the go to company solution when computers are needed).

It also had the risk that i am the only one that could unfuck anything if things go south..it also has the advantage that i am the only one who could fix things when it goes south...

so much temptation

i am currently tasked with testing various small company ERP softwares.
for the current one i have a full 30 days evaluation copy based on MSSQL Server, i had some problems to integrate the local MS Jet Databse into the server so i call support, all is well and good..except it doesnt work. After a while it turns out, my 15 character password was too long for their software to handle. Furthermore, everytime i try to login i have to enter the password twice, after asking the support why that is they say "so you have additional validation if you entered the correct password"

i tried to explain three times that i know the password, i dont create a password, there is no need for validation, the server (hopefully) will report wether my password was right or wrong. Support guy just says "i think differently, this is a good function"

in a few weeks i will visit them personally for a meeting, i dont know yet if i can stop myself stranggling this buffon

Does anyone knows some open source crm/erp?

Who here works with SAP ? How different is learning like ABAP from mainstream languages like Java ? More specially, what really makes ERP softwares so different from the rest ?

I’m trying to download the SAP GUI on my Mac to practice and learn ABAP. But the download page redirects to something weird. Speaking of which, is it really hard to get help/resources for something less mainstream and highly specialized like ABAP as opposed to a language like Java, C#.