Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

Stupid users gonna be stupid.

The most detailed error report I've ever had from a client. He couldn't login to his email, I asked him to send an email explaining what was going wrong, attach error messages, etc.
I got this from him:

"I can't login to my email, why"

Really?! 😑

Now where's the rest of your face octocat..

I love this error report... Fml

In the begining of time, when The Company was small and The Data could fit in some fucking excel sheets, Those Who Came Before implemented some java tool to issue invoices, notify customers and clear received payments.

Then came the Time Of The Great Expanse, when The Company grew to unthinkable levels. Headcount increased with each passing day, and The Data shows that everything was going great!

But when the future seemed bright, came The Stall-Out. The days when The Company could not expand as fast as it did before. And Those Who Came Before left, abandoning their Undocumented Java Tool to its own luck.

Those who came after knew nothing of the inner workings of the Undocumented Java Tool. They knew only that the magical Jar would take a couple fucking excel spreadsheets and spit out reports and send emails like magic.
And those were The Dark Days.

In the darkness, The Data grew to be a monster. Soon a fucking excel spreadsheet could not hold The Data contained any longer. Those Who Came After, fearing the wrath of The Undocumented Java Tool, dared not mess with its code. Instead, they fucking cut away the lowest volume transactions from the fucking input spreadsheet, and left the company to report the unbilled invoices as "surprise losses". Fucking script kiddies, were Those Who Came After.

Then, at The Darkest of Days (literally, Dec 21st), marched into the project The Six Witchers, who fear not the Demon of Refactoring.

This story is still unfolding. Will The Six Witchers manage to unravel the mysteries of The Undocumented Java Tool? Will they be able to reverse engineer the fucking black box, and scale it's magic into a modern application?
Will they decrease revenue forecasting error by at least 2% in a single strike?

Only the future will tell.

Hey Root, we have a high priority ticket for you! It's adding some columns to a report. Should be simple. Details are in the ticket.

First: reports are some of the most boring, drool-inducing drudgery i have ever worked on.

Second: Specs for these reports are a nightmare since everything is ... very indirectly tested, and the specs are everywhere but where you'd expect them to be, so it's a lot of spelunking and trial/error. It's also slow as beans.

Anyway. The ticket's details are in ... not the worst engrish i've ever seen, but it's bad enough that i have no idea what they're asking despite (thus far) five attempts at deciphering it. There's also a numbered list of "fields" to add, so you'd think it would be straightforward. It is not. Half the list is crossed out, and half of the remaining items are feature requests (in yet more engrish), not columns to add. Also, one of the actual fields is impossible as the data it's asking for is not recorded anywhere.

yeah...

I cringe every time I see this person's name as the reporter because it's always the same. and honestly, there are more of these engrish people every month, and believe me: it isn't just a language barrier...

SM = Scrum Master

SM: "Card #130, you added a comment saying you aren't going to do update the report?"
Me:"Yea, I explained why in the comment"
SM: "Product owner wants it."
Me: "Product owner isn't the manager using it. I talked with Steve, he said the data is accurate and they have to go to the database anyway to verify the error. That report has no way of knowing the message logged could be a false positive."
SM: "That's not our job to decide. If the Product Owner wants the feature, we add the feature."
Me: "It is absolutely is our job. Steve is the user of the report. I could really care less what the product owner said. The only reason he created the card was because Steve told him a specific error logged could be a false positive, and only happens, maybe, once a month. I'm not wasting my time, Steve's time, or this project's time on wild goose chases."
SM: "I'll schedule a meeting this afternoon to discuss the issue with the product owner. Don't worry, if you can't figure out how to filter out the false positives, I'll assign the ticket to me."

fracking fracking kiss ass. I swear, if he goes behind my back again ....I... deep breath....ahhh...OK..Thanks devrant. Work place incident diverted.

"I'm getting an error. It's just not working right."

Stupidest. Bug. Report. Ever.

Please stop wasting our time with tickets like this people, it only requires is to then spend more time just figuring out what the issue is.

🙄🔫

I am laughing and crying at the same time.

I did a high value transaction with Google Pay, and now I cannot see the transaction details in history for this specific transaction (The money was transferred correctly though). When I open the history entry, it says "Something went wrong, please try again".

So after waiting for a week, I went to report a bug with Google from within the app. And when I press submit, I get an error.

Wanna guess what's the error?

ITS FUCKING "SOMETHING WENT WRONG, PLEASE TRY AGAIN"!

Tell me the classics you never get tired of. I'll start.

User message / report: "there is an error". With absolutely nothing else written or attached.

Some fun facts :

☻ Programmers spend approximately 30% of the time surfing the source code 😁

☻ Progress in programming can be classified into 4 stages:
(a). Complex Programming
(b). Making Progress
(c). Slow Progress
(d). Stuck

☻ Programmers have a tendency to report their problems incompletely

☻ The main error messages, execution times and runtime compilation errors and the average time to solve them

☻ The software maintenance consumes more than 50% of the effort

☻ Ctrl C, Ctrl V, and Ctrl-Z have saved more lives than Batman tbh😇

Rant!!!!!!!
When you work hard on building frontend and suddenly, you realise whenever you restart your localhost, some URLs don't work. And it's random. Error logs also seem meaningless as the latest error report keeps changing the error location from file to file. Wasted hours to identify the abnormal behaviour.
I always had the mentality to keep its programmers fault in order to always consider all possible flaws.
But realised later that it was the OS setting issue. Did a stacktrace about 300 lines and found out the root cause(hopefully as no issues till now). The bug was related to total allowed open files at a time.

sometimes our application users can't login to our application and they report the problem to us. The fucking problem? Almost sure they forgot the password because we can login with their account.. Yeah we should not have access to their password, but we do xD. The worst is they send a Word file with only a print screen of the application error saying they can't login. Why not a .jpg??! The word takes 4 seconds to open

Super angry and thought I would let it out here, even though its not related to coding.
So we had an assignment at school "Make a 10 minutes long radio report about montreal".

I teamed up with a "friend" and two gals.

First of all everything was fine.
but then, the "friend", last sunday, told me to translate 22 pages until the monday after and invited himself to my house. Those 22 pages, he should have written in english, but because hes too bad he didnt and wanted me to translate em. Even worse: He fought me with bad arguments and by swearing me in order not to have to do it in english.

So he invited himself and his gf to my home to work on that. I didnt want that, so I told em we could mee up in the school.

But then, he continued to annoy me with making me to translate them as fast as possible, he told me how he didnt believe in the excuse I made for not being able to invite them.

SO I just scrapped the meeting, without telling them, I didnt answer on the phone.

Now, hes super salty and wants me to do everything. LITTERALLY!
I have about 40h of work in front of me because he made many bad desicions.

What do you think?
Is he correct with that? Should I have gone to that meeting?
Have I made an error?

If they followed my suggestion and went straight to debugging the server issues they would have been solved it from week 1 and everyone would have thought the migration had a minor performance hiccup. In fact, we have already done such at least twice before and nobody batted an eye.

Instead they self-labelled the migration a failure on first error, setting the stage for apologizing to the client, and put themselves on the spot for a whole staging / production signoff, replication / backup worfklow, almost a blue-green "seamless" deployment reminiscent of DigitalOcean.

Well they're not DigitalOcean, and anyone who has spent any time understanding users knows they will not participate in "new system" tests long enough to find or report issues.

So of course the migration stretched out to almost three months up until the whole reason for the migration - the rapidly escalating risk of the old provider disappearing - hit like a freight train and now they have to go through the problem of debugging the server like I told them to on week 1. Only this time they've set the client mindset against it, lost any chance of reverting, have had grave risk for data loss, and are under pressure to debug other people's code in real-time.

This is why I don't trust devs to do ops. A dev's first solution to any problem is to throw tech at it.

"During the middle of a song the game crashes for no apparent reason!!!PLEASE FIX!!!"

Actual bug report on github. Apparently pressing the "Report error" button is to complicated for some people...

Dear app developers
The purpose of toasts is to report a few words in response to a single and repeatable action. Don't put long error messages resulting from submitting an 8-page form in a toast.

"This application has stopped working. Oops, something went wrong." Proprietary software, no error message, only option is to accept your fate or submit a report to your system overlords

Fuck I can't even. Remember all those rants (mine included) about how users are quite retarded and only report "omg smth wrong, help" without any explanaition or screen shot, or even worse WITH A WORTHLESS CROPPED OUT SCREENSHOT?!

USERS I GET, BUT FUCKING SENIOR DESKTOP SUPPORT GUY DOING SAME RETARDED IT DOES NOT WORK CAN U HELP THING IS MADDENNNNIINNGG

LEARN TO FUCKING READ THE FUCKING INSTRUCTIONS IN THE FUCKING ERROR DESCRIPTION, YES?

*Ahhh* 😄

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

Some days it feels like visual studio is conspiring to break my sanity.

Compile.... 5 errors
Clean & recompile .... 12 errors

Open file that contains the errors

Error report clears all errors ...

Compile .... 12 errors .... But still bloody runs

Stop program .... No errors

Grrrr

Compile .... No errors

For god sake .... Which is it ... Do I have errors or not FFS

PHP code that didn't use sanitize, but manually checked if strings contained ' or ". Not even in a function, but manually implemented whenever the person writing that burning dumpsterfire thought it was a good idea to check for that.

Code also didn't report, it just exited without error code. Users would just get a white screen if that spaghetti code "security" system got tripped.

Complete bug reports for devs: Error name, stack trace, what did you do when it happened and all that stuff

Complete bug report for users: it crashed help

Argh fuck you Microsoft for blocking my precious mail server. I can't believe that you were the only one. Even google accepts my mails with every fucking test passed...

Oh and not to mention that in the no delivery report you are referring an error code which is not present on the linked troubleshoot page. Thank you once more, you piece of shit.

Should have listened to the articles about why I don't want an own mail server...

I don't know why I'm doing this but when I go to websites that aren't mine and found that there's a bug in their site or system, I kinda happily report these bugs and issues to their email with screenshots, findings and steps to reproduce the bug.

Just recently, I just went to a site and found a peculiar timeout error, eventhough it was less than a second to respond back. Only to find that there was an undefined JavaScript variable in their code.

Is there a bug bounty for fixing code?

During the company's Xmas event, we were off-site at a place that does events to do a team-building event followed by dinner party.

An error report came up, it wasn't a showstopper, but it was fairly serious, and the perfect excuse to sit out the BS improv team-building exercises that the powers that be thought would be a good idea to have.

Probably my favorite bug ever.

Build failed: "CL.exe has exited with exit code 5"

Thank you Visual Studio for the detailed error report about why the build fails! I can finally fix it!

(This is not fixable by running VS as administrator, also the output file is not running nor locked by some process)

"You need me to fix a report? Ok... Since I don't have access to that server, email me the report."

"Umm, it doesn't have connection info. Can you send me the username/pass for the DB?"

"Ok, so the DB isn't set to work normally on this report and has to be a UDL file... Can you send me that file?"

"All done, here you go!"

"WTF do you mean you're getting a database connection error and you're looking to me to fix it? You seriously don't remember that it's all shit you gave me?"

Magento Debugging Horror!
Changing lots of things in magento with no problem. Continuing development for quite sometime. Suddenly decide to clear cache to see affect of a change on a template in frontent. Suddenly magento crashes! There's no error message. No exception log. No log in any file anywhere on the disk. All that happens is that magento suddenly returns you to the home page!
Reverting all the changes to the template. Clear the cache. Nope! Still the same! Why? Because the problem has happened somewhere in your code. Magento just didn't face it, because it was using an older version of your code. How? Because magento 2 even caches code! Not the php opcache. Don't get me wrong. It has it's own cache for code, in a folder called generated. Now that you cleared all the caches including this folder, you just realized that, somewhere something is wrong. But there is no way for you to know where as there is absolutely no exception logged anywhere!
So you debug the code, from index.php, down to the deepest levels of hell. In a normal php code, once the exception happens, you should see the control jumps to an exception handler, there, you can see the exception object and its call stack in your debugger. But that's not the case with magento.
Your debugger suddenly jumps to a function named:
write_close();
That's all. No exception object. No call stack. No way to figure out why it failed. So you decide to debug into each and every step to figure out where it crashes. The way magento renders response to each request is that, it calls a plugin, which calls a plugin loop, which calls another plugin, which calls a list of plugins, which calls a plugin loop, which calls another plugin.....
And if in each step, just by accident, instead of step through, you use the step over command of your debugger, the crash happens suddenly and you end up with the same freaking write_close() function with no idea what went wrong and where the error happened! You spend a whole day, to figure out, that this is actually a bug in core of magento, they simply introduced after your recent update of magento core to the latest STABLE version!!! It was not your mistake. They ruined their own code for the thousandth of time. You just didn't notice it, because as I said, you didn't clear the `generated` folder, therefore using an older version of everything!
Now that after spending 7 hours figuring out what has failed with absolutely no standard way of debugging and within a spaghetti of GOTO commands (Magento calls them plugin), why not report it to github? So you report it with a pull request. This also takes 1 hour of your time. Just to next day get informed that your pull request is rejected because another person already fixed the bug and made the same pull request. It was just not on the latest stable version yet!
So you decide to avoid updating magento as much as possible. Because you know that the next Stable version will make your life and career unstable. But then the customer complains that the Admin Panel is warning him of using old Magento version which might pose SECURITY THREATS!

Dafuq is wrong with Android Studio, build error report is useless every time I have error in one of my files I need to run gradle assemble debug manually to know where the fuck is my error

Like now I changed type of a property and as usual build report showed error in Databinding auto generated class instead of pointing to my fragment where the error should be

Not a rant, just something that made me laugh way too much. We wanted to test this error logger we made to see if it could report where the error happened, so we wrote a function that just throws an exception. Not sure what to call it, we called it “shitTheBed”.

So it looked like:

service.shitTheBed()

I almost want to leave it there.

I am the technical lead in a project which uses a C# based framework. It's a lot of drag and drop, and C# scripts can be embedded for fancy stuff.

Scripts in general are not hard to do, it's harder to understand the business rules rather than the code itself.

I got hired as a junior to build this project from scratch as an MVP, and we need another junior to add enhancements and minor changes required from our end users. Since management wants me to move on working on more mid-senior development stuff, I'm supposed to be only supervising the juniors work (in the hopes that one day they'll be able to work on their own).

We've had bad luck filling this position. Our last hire is a guy like 17 years older than me, supposedly with experience in said framework but OH DEAR GOD.

Fucktard can't understand requirements and corrections, isn't able to deliver a 20 line script without fucking up. I give him a list with 3 mistakes to fix and only fixes two, crap like that.

Now, hear me out, the mistakes are stuff like:

- Unused variables
- Confusing error messages
- Error messages written in spanglish (mix between Spanish and English, we're located in Latin America)
- Untested features, this is the worst of all.

You may say "but he's a junior", sure. But as I said, he supposedly has experience, more years in IT than me, and fine, you're allowed to fuck up a few times on your first tasks but not make the same mistakes over and over, specially since we've already sat down and addressed these issues in presence of the CTO.

Fuck this guy. I genuinely dislike him as a person also, he is from another latin country and we have some serious cultural differences. For instance, he insists on sucking your ass constantly, being overly well manered (we already saluted with the whole team at the daily stand up, stop saying hello, good day, regards in each of your fucking chat messages or task submissions), and other mannerisms that are hard to translate, but whatever, all of these attitudes are frowned upon here. They're not necessary, we just want to keep it simple, cordial and casual and see you deliver the crap that you're being paid for with a decent level of quality.

On Monday the CTO comes back from vacation, I'm looking forward to that meeting, gonna report his ass, there is evidence everywhere on our issue tracker.

"Please provide steps to reproduce" seems to be the catch-22 when people try and kick up a fuss about a bug I'm certain doesn't exist.

It's funny because then they report the bug, they word it like I've ruined their life, that can simply cannot continue to function until this error is fixed, yet those simple magic words "Provide steps to reproduce" seems to put their prioritise back into perspective or at the least scares them back into the void from which they came.

!rant, more of an incredulous/cruelly amused "you had ONE job..."

so: biggest IT/PC/electronics store in my (and neighboring) country. their webpage, of course with the function to buy online, because of course.

the big green "Buy" button does nothing. doesn't work. doesn't react. I keep clicking it multiple times, shorter, longer, etc, because maybe their JS scripts are just shit so they slow.

nope.
okay. open devtools, JS console.
hover over the button: "Error: isMobile is not a function".
click the button: "Error: isMobile is not a function"

WAT.
search for isMobile in the script.
173 occurences.
fuck this.
console: isMobile = function(){return false;}
because I'm not on my phone.

click the "Buy" button.
works flawlessly.

...HOW?
THE WHOLE PAGE IS AN ESHOP YOU COMIC RELIEF INCOMPETENTS! =D

173 uses of non-existing function that blocks business-critical feature, THE ONLY CORE FEATURE FOR WHICH YOUR SITE EVEN EXISTS, and NOBODY, not the dev who fucked it up, NOT EVEN QA, noticed it??? =D =D

if I was the boss of the devs, or even boss of the whole company...
git blame
...and then i'd go the whole chain from the dev who caused the bug, through all of the QA people who "tested" that version before deploy, and I would personally, on the spot, fire each and every single one of them.

mainly because of who knows how much money this stupid not even a proper bug lost them.
but secondarily, because clearly none of those people give a single shit (n)or have an idea how to do their jobs.

=D =D

yeah but I was a good guy, filed a bug report in the "Complaints" section of their Contact form.
it goes to some call-center-like peon, so it starts with a sentence "forward this to your site's dev people outright to file as a bug, thank you".

but... HOW.... =D
HOW can you let something like this through? =D
the bottleneck of your whole user interaction, which forms first of the three steps OF THE MAIN AND MOST IMPORTANT FUNCTION of your whole business... =D
...I...
...does not compute =D

...BUT THEY USING ANGULAR, SO THEY ALL MODERN AND HIGH-TECH AND EVERYTHING'S FINE!!! =D =D

So the saga of broken fucking everything continues at work, and I'm managing it, effectively, and doing it correctly on the first go-round. It's a long process though, because the two retards who preceded me were equally inept for completely different, yet equally disruptive and destructive reasons. The first dude was just plain psychotic, probably still is. I'd post some of his code, but I don't want anyone's face to melt off like those Nazi dudes at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I can handle it because I'm constantly inebriated, which is not as fun as it sounds. If you have to ask yourself if you can handle it, you probably aren't, unless you've had to Uber to/from work due to still being fucking drunk. Anyway, enough about that, and it was only like twice. The rest of the times, I was more blazed than Jerry Garcia at a weed smoking contest. Moving along.

UPS shipping labels broke two weeks ago, I fixed it, but these fucking 10xers jointly decided to not only never implement anything resembling error handling, other than EMPTY GOD DAMN "try/catch"es (empty catch, wow so efficient), and instead of using COMMENTS, which I know are a new thing, they'd wrap blocks of code in something like: if 1 = 0 {} FUCK YOU DICKFACES. As I was saying before I got emotional again, they tied the success to all kinds of unrelated, irrelevant shit. I'm literally needle/haystacking my way through the entire 200GB codebase, ALONE, trying to find all the borked things. Helpfully, my phone is ringing all the time from customer service, complaining about things that are either nothing to do with the site, or due to user stupidity, 75% of the time.

A certain department at my company relies on some pretty specific documents to do their job, and these documents are/were generated from data in the database. So until I can find and fix all of the things, I've diverted my own attention as much as possible to the rapid implementation of a report generation microservice so that no one elses work is further disrupted while I continue my cursed easter egg hunt from fucking hell.

After a little more than two days, I'm about to lauch a standalone MS to handle the reports, and it's unfortunately more complicated than I'd like, because it requires a certain library that isn't available on Winblows, so I've dockerized the application. Anyway, just after lunch, I've finished my final round of tests, and I'm about ready to begin migrating it to the server and setting up (shitty fucking shit) IIS to serve it appropriately. At this point, this particular report has been unavailable by web for about 8 days.

A little after lunch, and with no forewarning of any kind, the manager of managers runs upstairs and screams at me to "work faster" and that "this needs to be back online RIGHT NOW", but I also know that this individual is going to throw a fit if things on this pdf aren't a pixel perfect match. So I just say "that's some amazing advice, I wish I'd had the foresight to just do it better and work faster". Silence for a good five seconds, then I follow up with "please leave and let me get back to my work". At that moment from around the corner, my "supervisor" suddenly, magically even, remembers that he has had the ability to print this crucial, amazingly super fucking important document all along, despite me directly asking him a week ago, and he prints it and takes it where it needs to go. In the time that it takes him to go to that other department and return, I deploy my service.

I spent the rest of the day browsing indeed and linkedin jobs, but damn this market is kinda weird right now, yeah?

Pardon the rant; some of it can probably attributed to me, but please indulge me of you could.

I'm tasked with creating a report that pulls data from some sql tables in c#and presents it using javascript. My manager was nice enough to lend me his old sql query, so I run with that using sql connections. Now I find out AFTER I get my sql query string working and retrieving data properly that my manager wanted it done using linq and entity framework, so now I have to start over, a process made only more "fun" by the confusing and unintuitive column names of our sql tables.

Moral of the story: don't take the easy way out.

After I spend some time fixing that up, I have to print out the data using javascript and html, which my manager was kind enough to lend me. Cue me shutting off my brain and thinking that I should have the program open and display this stuff itself. Let me tell you that converting a console application to a Windows form application is not a fun experience, especially when entity framework makes classes named "application" and "form" from your database tables. After finally getting the WebBrowser form to work, I'm hit with a javascript error from the library my manager referenced (he is a programmer himself). I tell him about the error and he just tells me to write the html code to a .html on disk like he did, but never explicitly said he did until just now.

Fixed moral of the story: don't take the easy way out, unless you should.

I should clarify I was given the whole raw sql query and html with some embedded javascript and a reference to chart.js.

So, do any of your poor fuckers have the opportunity - nay, PRIVILEGE of using the absolute clusterfuck piece of shit known as SQL Server Integration Services?

Why do I keep seeing articles about how "powerful" and "fast" it is? Why do people recommend it? Why do some think it's easy to use - or even useful?

It can't report an error to save its life. It's logging is fucked. It's not just that it swallows all exceptions and gives unhelpful error messages with no debugging information attached, its logging API is also fucked. For example, depending on where you want to log a message - it's a totally different API, with a billion parameters most of which you need to supply "-1" or "null" to just to get it do FUCKING DO SOMETHING. Also - you'll only see those messages if you run the job within the context of SQL FUCKING SERVER - good luck developing on your ACTUAL FUCKING MACHINE.

So apart from shitty logging, it has inherited Microsoft's insane need to make everything STATICALLY GODDAMN TYPED. For EVERY FUCKING COMPONENT you need to define the output fields, types and lengths - like this is 1994. Are you consuming a dynamic data structure, perhaps some EAV thing from a sales system? FUCK YOU. Oh - and you can't use any of the advances in .NET in the last 10 years - mainly, NuGet and modern C# language features.

Using a modern C# language feature REMOVES THE ABILITY TO FUCKING DEBUG ANYTHING. THE FUCKER WILL NOT STOP ON YOUR BREAKPOINTS. In addition - need a JSON parsing library? Want to import a SDK specific to what you're doing? Want to use a 3rd party date library? WELL FUCK YOU. YOU HAVE TO INDEPENDENTLY INSTALL THE ASSEMBLIES INTO THE GAC AND MAKE IT CONSISTENT ACROSS ALL YOUR ENVIRONMENTS.

While i'm at it - need to connect to anything? FUCK YOU, WE ONLY INCLUDE THE MOST BASIC DATABASE CONNECTORS. Need to transform anything? FUCK YOU, WRITE A SCRIPT TASK. Ok, i'd like to write a script task please. FUCK YOU IM GOING TO PAUSE FOR THE NEXT 10 MINUTES WHILE I FIRE UP A WHOLE FUCKING NEW INSTANCE OF VISUAL STUDIO JUST TO EDIT THE FUCKING SCRIPT. Heaven forbid you forget to click the "stop" button after running the package and open the script. Those changes you just made? HAHA FUCK YOU I DISCARDED THEM.

I honestly cant understand why anyone uses this shit. I guess I shouldn't really expect anything less from Microsoft - all of their products are average as fuck.

Why do I use this shit? I work for a bunch of fucks that are so far entrenched in Microsoft technologies that they literally cannot see outside of them (and indeed don't want to - because even a cursory look would force them to conclude that they fucked up, and if you're a manager thats something you can never do).

Ok, rant over. Also fuck you SSIS

Quick Plesk config question...

Been getting open_basedir() notices in the WordPress logs, and frankly it's flooding the log right now. Sample below:

[24-Feb-2019 07:05:19 UTC] PHP Warning: file_exists(): open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/var/www/vhosts/webspacedomain.com/SiteInstallDirectory/wp-content/db.php) is not within the allowed path(s): (/var/www/vhosts/webspacedomain.com/:/tmp/) in /var/www/vhosts/webspacedomain.com/SiteInstallDirectory/wp-includes/load.php on line 397

Checking the settings for open_basedir in the domain's PHP settings, it's currently set to the following default value:

{WEBSPACEROOT}{/}{:}{TMP}{/}

By my read, that **should** be granting permission to the directory. I just checked it against the setting on the dev server (which doesn't report this error), and it's configured in the same manner. Only difference between Dev environment and this one is that the one in Dev is in vhosts/webspacedomain.net/DEV instead of just vhosts/webspacedomain.net

Is there something I'm missing here?

Dear the devs at Danske Bank UK,
For the 4th time in 5 years I am going to send a error report to you and get my local branch to directly email you to complain about the lack of being able to see anything on my ISA on online banking, plus just fucking fix it,
sincerely Hidden

Had someone report a bug that we did not provide an error page for someone using IE8 trying to use our site. My suggestion was to create a page that simply said:
"Hi we noticed you are using IE8, you should immediately turn off your computer because it's obvious that you are too out of touch with reality to be using the internet. Please come back when you pull your head out of your arse."

The product owner did not find my suggestion as funny as I did.

Need some opinions, what error reporting tool do you guys use? I used bugsnag before. Now I found a bunch of them I can't seem to decide which one to go for. Thanks in advance 😣😣

Do reports actually make people dumber?

I write a lot of reports that output for our customers into excel. I'm starting to suspect that for many customers it doesn't actually help them, rather it might actually hurt them (also eat all my time).

If a user generates their own report via search options or etc to pull out some data, they usually SEEM to have put some thought into the actions required to find the data they want.

Accordingly:

1. They immediately know what information is there, and why some information might be excluded.

2. They can do a little trial and error to solve their own problems / better understand what is going on.

3. They're a hell of a lot less likely to insist that something is "MISSING!!!" without seeming to actually know what the thing(s) are that are missing.

With auto generated spreadsheet that shows up in the email there's just little no critical thinking outside of some stray thoughts in their head when the spreadsheet showed up ...

defect report: "After updating, I can't make a field turn red when an error occurs"

me: "You could do that before the update!?"

Client creates bug report for me (Android dev): "Customer 193796 gets a JSON parsing error when trying to access their order history."

...okay, what the hell am I expected to do about that?

Idk if It's my luck or something, but as much as I love Microsoft, EVERY fucking thing of it that I use, has bugs.
I report them, they get fixed (eventually)
but goddamn.
Visual Studio enterprise taking 2mins+ to report a simple error on debug
That error happens within one of Microsoft's Nuget Packages for OneDrive Enterprise for UWP
Oh and if that wasn't bad enough, my machine is a Surface Book 2 and the cursor still stutters through it all (and on idle half the time)

Am I cursed or something?

Had to fix a small program that wrote a report to a file and was supposed to uploaded to FTP but kept sending error notices. For a week I had the FTP part commented out and just manually used filezilla every morning till I realized the config had an old password... Not a proud moment

Darn xml config file for a dll wouldn't load.

1) Searching Stackoverflow which says that only configs for exe files are loaded. Problem found and time to send bug report? Nah, better check source code first.

2) Downloading and reading the source for the dll. Nope, dll should explicitly load config file and read settings. Time to send problem report to author? Nah, better to test in greater isolation first.

3) Setting up isolated test. About to copy the LibName.dll.config.xml and WHAT? Note to self: You half witted twat, the file contents is XML, the bloody file extension isn't!

Now apply this sort of typo error to program code, and you will see why I use statically typed languages.