A client called me today saying their custom website I built for them is down. It just shows a 403 error now. They said they just wanted to update the prices. I asked what changes they made before it crashed. She said, "I couldn't figure out how to change the prices, so I just installed Wordpress, and now it doesn't work!" They completely deleted the entire website using cPanel and replaced it with a partially installed Wordpress.🤦

Hey, Root? How do you test your slow query ticket, again? I didn't bother reading the giant green "Testing notes:" box on the ticket. Yeah, could you explain it while I don't bother to listen and talk over you? Thanks.

And later:
Hey Root. I'm the DBA. Could you explain exactly what you're doing in this ticket, because i can't understand it. What are these new columns? Where is the new query? What are you doing? And why? Oh, the ticket? Yeah, I didn't bother to read it. There was too much text filled with things like implementation details, query optimization findings, overall benchmarking results, the purpose of the new columns, and i just couldn't care enough to read any of that. Yeah, I also don't know how to find the query it's running now. Yep, have complete access to the console and DB and query log. Still can't figure it out.

And later:

Hey Root. We pulled your urgent fix ticket from the release. You know, the one that SysOps and Data and even execs have been demanding? The one you finished three months ago? Yep, the problem is still taking down production every week or so, but we just can't verify that your fix is good enough. Even though the changes are pretty minimal, you've said it's 8x faster, and provided benchmark findings, we just ... don't know how to get the query it's running out of the code. or how check the query logs to find it. So. we just don't know if it's good enough.

Also, we goofed up when deploying and the testing database is gone, so now we can't test it since there are no records. Nevermind that you provided snippets to remedy exactly scenario in the ticket description you wrote three months ago.

And later:

Hey Root: Why did you take so long on this ticket? It has sat for so long now that someone else filed a ticket for it, with investigation findings. You know it's bringing down production, and it's kind of urgent. Maybe you should have prioritized it more, or written up better notes. You really need to communicate better. This is why we can't trust you to get things out.

*twitchy smile*

Just got this little stinker added to my board this morning….

Ticket Title: Weird shit going on in app

Ticket Description: (blank)

Attachment: <Screenshot of app logo>

Manager: Well what do you think is causing it?

Dev: Causing what?? This ticket doesn’t describe anything at all

Manager: Well it’s a bunch of different things! The ticket is just a high level summary. Now how long do you think it’ll take to fix?

Dev: …

"Hey, Root, someone screwed up and now all of our prod servers are running this useless query constantly. I know I already changed your priorities six times in the past three weeks, but: Go fix it! This is higher priority! We already took some guesses at how and supplied the necessary code changes in the ticket, so this shouldn't take you long. Remember, HIGH PRIORITY!"

1. I have no idea how to reproduce it.
2. They have no idea how to reproduce it.
3. The server log doesn't include queries.
4. The application log doesn't include queries.
5. The tooling intercepts and strips out some log entries the legendary devs considered useless. (Tangent: It also now requires a tool to read the logs because log entries are now long json blobs instead of plain text.)
6. The codebase uses different loggers like everywhere, uses a custom logger by default, and often overwrites that custom logger with the default logger some levels in. gg
7. The fixes shown in the ticket are pretty lame. (I've fixed these already, and added one they missed.)
8. I'm sick and tired and burned out and just can't bring myself to care. I'm only doing this so i don't get fired.
9. Why not have the person who screwed this up fix it? Did they quit? I mean, I wouldn't blame them.

Why must everything this company does be so infuriatingly complicated?

Buy it, use it, break it, fix it
Trash it, change it, mail - upgrade it
Charge it, point it, zoom it, press it
Snap it, work it, quick - erase it
Write it, cut it, paste it, save it
Load it, check it, quick - rewrite it
Plug it, play it, burn it, rip it
Drag and drop it, zip - unzip it
Lock it, fill it, call it, find it
View it, code it, jam - unlock it
Surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it
Cross it, crack it, switch - update it
Name it, rate it, tune it, print it
Scan it, send it, fax - rename it
Touch it, bring it, pay it, watch it
Turn it, leave it, start - format it

Manager: What’s taking so long on that PR?? It’s just some small styling adjustments

Dev: No it’s not you added an entire new calendar module that doesn’t work

Manager: Ok but besides that it’s just a small couple of css edits

Dev: You made styling changes in 50 files, half of which break our mobile responsiveness

Manager: Well then STOP talking to me and FIX IT if you’re so smart.

Dev: You also added a series of filters on a table in this same PR that cause th—

Manager: OK SO I GOT A BIT DISTRACTED THE FACT IS IT ALL NEEDS TO GET DONE SO IT DOESN’T MATTER IF IT’S ALL ON ONE PR SPLITTING THINGS UP INTO SMALL UPDATES IS JUST UNNECESSARY BUREAUCRACY AND IF YOU LIKE THAT THEN GO. WORK. FOR. THE GOVERNMENT!!!

Dev: …

I would absolutely love it if people would write their own stupid code instead of blindly mixing everyone else's mental diarrhea together and pouring the resulting mess into their bloody stupid IDE. At least then I could insult them properly. As it is, they're outsourcing their fucking stupidity to the lowest fucking bidder and then bragging about how quickly they get everything done. And management eats it up! No wonder everything is a slow, tangled, unmaintanable mess.

I can't fix much of anything because almost none of it is in my control. It's all autogenerated bullshit glued together with laziness and poor taste. "But Root, why is fixing this taking so long?" Gee, I wonder why. Maybe if someone had built it somewhere in realm of correctly the first time, it wouldn't have all fallen apart when someone looked at it the wrong way!

Seriously, there's no way this pile of stale fertilizer could have passed QA.

Them: Root, you take too long to get tickets out. You only have a few simple ones. You really need to rebuild your reputation.

Also them: Hey, could you revisit this ticket? Could you help ____ with this other ticket? Hey Root, how do you do this? Root, someone had a suggestion on one of your tickets; could you implement that by EoD? Hey Root, i didn't read your ticket notes; how do you test it? Hey, could you revisit this ticket for the fourth time and remove some whitespace? Hey Root, someone has non-blocking code review comments you need to address before we can release the ticket. Hey Root, we want to expand that ticket scope by 5-6 times; still labeled a trivial feature though.

Also them: Super easy ticket for you. Make sure you talk with teams A, B, C, D, E and get their input on the ticket, talk with ____ and ____ and ____ about it, find a solution that makes them all happy and solves the problem too, then be sure to demo it with everyone afterward. Super easy; shouldn't take you more than a couple days. Oh, and half of them are on vacation.

Also them: Hey, that high-priority ticket you finished months ago that we ignored? Yeah, you need to rewrite it by tomorrow. Also, you need to demo it with our guy in India, who's also on vacation. Yes, tomorrow is the last day. (The next day:) You rewrote it, but weren't able to schedule the demo? Now you've missed the release! It's even later! This reflects very poorly on you.

Also them: Perfect is the enemy of good; be more like the seniors who release partially-broken code quickly.

Also them: Here's an non-trivial extreme edgecase you might not have covered. Oh, it would have taken too much time and that's why you didn't do it? Jeez, how can you release such incomplete code?

Also them: Yeah, that ticket sat in code review for five months because we didn't know it was high-priority, despite you telling us. It's still kinda your fault, though.

Also them: You need to analyze traffic data to find patterns and figure out why this problem is happening. I know you pushed the fix for it 8 months ago, and I said it was really solid, but the code is too complex so I won't release it. Yeah I know it's just a debounce with status polling and retrying. Too complex for me to understand. Figure out what the problem is, see if another company has this same problem, and how they fixed it.

-------------

Yep. I'm so terrible for not getting these tickets out, like wow. Worst dev ever. Much shame.

LF work, PST.

Manager: How come the push to prod didn’t happen?

Dev: We told you at the scrum yesterday. To reiterate, our dev environment was crashing so it’s not safe to push to prod until that is fixed.

Manager: Ok well lets set a goal to fix that and push to prod happens today so that it guaranteed happens.

Dev: That was our goal yesterday and it definitely didn’t happen.

Manager: I AM AWARE OF THAT. The corrective action is that this time compliance with the goal is 100% ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY!!

Dev: We’ll do our best, can’t guarantee anything until we figure out what the nature of what is occurring on dev though.

Manager: NO. I AM THE BOSS. YOU WILL 100% ABSOLUTELY COMPLY WITH THIS. THAT IS AN ORDER. YOU WILL SUCCESSFULLY GET THIS UPDATE OUT TO PROD TODAY. ANYTHING LESS THAN THAT SHALL BE CONSIDERED INSUBORDINATION. I WANT STATUS UPDATES EVERY 15 MINUTES ON WHERE WE ARE AT WITH THIS.

Dev: …

Dev: Can I get you to send me that request in an email?

*Manager leaves the meeting*

// *****************************

Job search is ticking along. It’s tough going though because I currently make ~120k and the best offers I’ve received so far are all ~70k because “You only have 2 years experience so you couldn’t possibly have the skills to be worth 120k. You are are junior level developer and 70K is already overpaying for you. We can pay you more later™. No we will not give you that in writing”. Ah well, the hunt continues.

#2 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

Back before we utilized stored procedures (and had an official/credentialed DBA), we used embedded/in-line SQL to fetch data from the database.

var sql = @"Select
FieldsToSelect
From
dbo.Whatever
Where
Id = @ID"

In attempts to fix database performance issues, a developer, T, started putting all the SQL on one line of code (some sql was formatted on 10+ lines to make it readable and easily copy+paste-able with SSMS)
var sql = "Select ... From...Where...etc";

His justification was putting all the SQL on one line make the code run faster.
T: "Fewer lines of code runs faster, everyone knows that."

Mgmt bought it.

This process took him a few months to complete.

When none of the effort proved to increase performance, T blamed the in-house developed ORM we were using (I wrote it, it was a simple wrapper around ADO.Net with extension methods for creating/setting parameters)

T: "Adding extra layers causes performance problems, everyone knows that."

Mgmt bought it again.

Removing the ORM, again took several months to complete.

By this time, we hired a real DBA and his focus was removing all the in-line SQL to use stored procedures, creating optimization plans, etc (stuff a real DBA does).

In the planning meetings (I was not apart of), T was selected to lead because of his coding optimization skills.
DBA: "I've been reviewing the execution plans, are all the SQL code on one line? What a mess. That has to be worst thing I ever saw."
T: "Yes, the previous developer, PaperTrail, is incompetent. If the code was written correctly the first time using stored procedures, or even formatted so people could read it, we wouldn't have all these performance problems."

DBA didn't know me (yet) and I didn't know about T's shenanigans (aka = lies) until nearly all the database perf issues were resolved and T received a recognition award for all his hard work (which also equaled a nice raise).

Walked into the office in the afternoon, everyone was kinda panicking
Asked what was going on, well, the ticket system is not working anymore, can't put in any new tickets.
So I started to look for the issue as well, checked the system and... The last tickets' IDs were at ~32k. Ha. Looked into the source code and, sure enough, they used a data type with an upper limit of... 32k. So when trying to get a new ticket ID it just crashed and burned.
Quickly changed the data type and stopped the office panic in around half an hour.
Memorable not because of how tough the bug was, but because of the impact and the simplicity of the fix

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

So yesterday one of the "senior" python developers woke me up at 1 am (we work in different time zones, and he knows how many hours I'm ahead) asking why isn't his code working. The error message was:

[ERROR] Runtime.ImportModuleError: Unable to import module 'app': xxx is not installed, run `pip install xxx` Traceback (most recent call last)

I am at lose of words and patience. Not only idiots who can't google simple stuff are seniors, additionaly we went from "DevOps is a culture" straight to "hey I'm developer in my silo, if it doesn't work on my machine it's DevOps problem, plz fix".

> make a change
> PR gets rejected
> IHATEFORALIVING! YOUR CHANGE IS NOT WORKING! EVERYTHING BREAKS!
> 3 hours long debugging session
> We find out a whole bunch of bugs
> Suddenly, everything works
> None of the bugs had ANYTHING to do with my change. In the instances where the app broke, my code wasn't even being called at all.
> My change was literally the one and only working thing

I wish life was like in The Office, when you just stop what you're doing and you drop the Jim stare at some camera

Messaging me at 4:30pm on a Friday about a high priority issue currently in production.

My reply: a link to the code review from 2 months ago that literally explained the problem and what to do to fix it. That got implemented. Then removed. For some reason...

Feels good.

Up for a rollercoaster?

I had a super motivated day where i could focus and wanted to get my work done. My stupid work lappy instead kept throwing tantrums and totally prevented me from working. (Everything caused disk thrashing, took multiple minutes instead of seconds, etc.) Total shit day, but I felt great.

Next morning, I woke up all achy and cold. Ignored it and went to work. I was able to fix everything, and got my benchmarks running smoothly in all of fifteen minutes. Got good results, too! Left work and got married at the courthouse. :)

Went to a restaurant afterward, and two jolly fat guys (Off-duty Santa?!) bought us lunch.

Got home and… started feeling really awful. A little while later, I had a 102*f fever. Collapsed on the floor with an electric blanket and was absolutely miserable. Just kind of stared for hours, aching everywhere. Eventually went to bed, and my wife (!) made me all warm and comfy. And then I proceeded to be completely unable to sleep. Or move. Or think. Laid there for four hours unable to move, and shaking violently at any touch of cold air.

Now it’s 1am and I’m here at the freezing kitchen table writing this.

I am miserable.
Absolutely miserable.
But still happy, too!

🥶👰‍♀️💍👰🏻‍♀️

i got access to production of our internal website 😈😈😈

I'm finally gonna fix that shitty css

Manager: We will be building a new app. THIS TIME EVERYTHING MUST BE ABSOLUTELY PERFECT, ANYTHING LESS THAN TOP QUALITY WORK WILL BE REJECTED!!

*Not even 2 days into the new project*

Manager: Ok that’s good enough, we can fix it later. Can you go quicker on the next feature? Just sacrifice a bit of quality so we get these tickets closed as fast as possible. I said we can fix it later. Getting tickets closed asap is top priority.

Dev: …

Boy do I hate office politics...

A client asked our company to fix perf issues on their product. Our coleagues had been picked for the job [being led by another 3rd-party, as per client's request]. Aaand they dropped the ball. The deadline is in 2 weeks, nothing is working.

Mgmt engaged us to put out the fire, but strictly at the scope the other guys were working in.

On the first day of testing we've revealed an elephant-sized perf issue that's as easy to fix as brainlessly changing 4 values in config. And that elephant is masking all the other perf issues.

We got a firm NO for config changes as that is out of the defined scope. And we're asked to continue testing.

I mean, the elephant is THAT huge that any further testing is moot - all other bottlenecks are hidden behind it. And just changing those 4 values would reduce the resources required by a magnitude of ~10.

But that's out of scope...

Client is desperate, lost and honestly asking us, pros in the field, for help.. We know how to help.. It takes 10 seconds to apply the fix..

But our mgmt forbids us to step out of the scope :/

as a result we have to pretend to be dummies hardly knowing what to do and hide the truth from the customer they so desperately want.

This is frustrating. And wrong. And imo unprofessional

!rant

Let's take a moment to appreciate interested and enthousiastic non-developers who really want to learn a programming language.

I am studying Medical IT at my college and most of my classmates aren't coming from an IT background.
We're currently working with Java, PHP, JavaScript and some require Node for their semester projects.

Some of my classmates approach me when they're stuck while coding and I try to teach them as much as possible so they understand what they are doing wrong and how to fix it.
I also show them how they can optimise their code step by step and they love it!

As a classmate told me yesterday:
"It's always so much fun working with you. I come up with a small problem, but I end up learning so much more about programming when solving a problem with you. I appreciate that."

It's a mindset I've learned when I was doing my developer apprenticeship back in the day. One of my colleagues told me: "if they want your help because they need a quick fix, tell them to kiss your ass. If you know they've already tried everything they could and ask you specifically because they want to understand what they are doing wrong, they are future developers with great potential, so go teach them."

May the force be with you, my enthousiastic little non-devs ❤️

My graduation project partner was strange person

Favorite IDE is VIM

Forget how to use git

But somehow she could code most of the app

I asked what does she do when mistake happens, she answered "delete and write again"

I suggest github but she is "to embarrassed to show her code on internet"

She send .zip file of her code to me

Go to univ library to copy some code because she don't believe random code on internet

Of course verson of code on book in library is too old, but she prefer fix herself

But she is overall good person, so I can graduate next month

Once upon a time, there were a restaurant called "iEat.tech.com".
It was a small single-location place, where the sufficient number of patrons could be served by the cozy number of employees.
In fact, headcount was so lean that the cook was also the one who washed all the dishes.

But then came the suits and their "VC"(daddy) money and scaled shit up.
Soon, there were so many patrons that the dishes started to pile up the sink, never washed.
"We need someone to wash the dishes!" said the cook
"Fuck you, you wash the dishes!" said the s*its
Naturally, the cook left soon after.

The s*its had a problem now. They could not replace the cook fast enough - all other cooks were either young, inexperienced and mediocre (but did clean the dishes), or refused to waste their time on the sink.
So the suits did what $*its always do - they got a fucking consultant. Who told them to get a fucking dishwashing machine and billed them the GDP of Ireland.

The s*is, of course, did not want to buy a dishwashing machine. "Our fucking process is too fucking disruptive for us to use a fucking store-bought mass-produced metal servant!" (s*its don't know what "machines" are. For them, it's all in terms of "servants", employees and machines alike).

So the s*its hired an engineer to "solve the fucking dish problem, once and for all".
The engineer quickly started measuring and drawing and calculating. The engineer was about to prepare a budget when the s*its came screaming "What the fuck are you doing? There is a fucking pile of dishes in the sink!"
The engineer replied that "I'm designing the machine!", to what the s*its responded "don't bring me fucking problems, bring me solutions!" (or some other s*it blabber)

So the engineer quickly designed an efficient dishwashing assembly line to be done in half the time most people would. And then went back to designing the machine.
But the s*its were having none of it. They kept expanding and expanding and doing what they could so that the engineer never had a moment to work on the machine. They dit it so surreptitiously that no one barely even noticed, but one day they were paying a team of engineers to be fucking human dishwashers.

Now replace "dishes" with "Jira tickets" or "quick fixes" or "tiny changes" and fix other terms accordingly.
Fucking s*its.

Intern: Can I fix this?

Dev: sure whatever

(Intern makes breaking change.)

Dev:

I'm a tech lead for a digital agency.

Digital agencies are universally known for being shite. Why? Because they typically push through sub-optimal code with very little testing over tiny deadlines for maximum profit. Maybe I've just had bad experiences but this is the 5th digital agency that I've worked at that does this bollocks.

I am currently sitting on a Teams call at 8:39pm because the fuckwit project/account managers are unable to face up to the big scary client and ask them terrifying questions like "Is this bug a blocker for the deployment?" or "We don't have enough time to fix/change these things, can we delay another day?". They just assume that A - We will work into the evening, and B - that all the issues are P1 and that we should all 'pull together' as 'team players' to get this done in time.

No, Me and my team have to work into the evening for seemingly free because these pricks can't do their jobs properly.

The funniest thing of all? When I speak to the CTO about overtime payment he tries to make me feel bad about "we don't typically pay for overtime..."

Fuck Everyone.

Time to find a new contract.

Today I ran the Windows network troubleshooter because my laptop didn't have wifi.

The troubleshooter ACTUALLY FIXED THE ISSUE!!! This is the first time I see a Windows troubleshooter actually FIX THE ISSUE.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

Sorry. I don’t give out free tips.

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People who message “I’m getting a error” without any context or even better the actual error message, no one else can see your screen and we can’t magic a fix, and we’re not f***ing psychic, tell us what the f***ing error is. Or better yet, figure it f***ing out like the rest of us, you also have google - go nuts

I've become a night worker. To put it mildly, it's become mildly annoying. I start studying/writing code at night and before I know it, it's morning. I can't seem to stop. I then end up feeling weak and sleepy during the day when I need to be awake. If I'm lucky, I get a few hours of sleep during the day. And then at night, it happens all over again. I need to fix this.

Worst hack/attack I had to deal with?

Worst, or funniest. A partnership with a Canadian company got turned upside down and our company decided to 'part ways' by simply not returning his phone calls/emails, etc. A big 'jerk move' IMO, but all I was responsible for was a web portal into our system (submitting orders, inventory, etc).

After the separation, I removed the login permissions, but the ex-partner system was set up to 'ping' our site for various updates and we were logging the failed login attempts, maybe 5 a day or so. Our network admin got tired of seeing that error in his logs and reached out to the VP (responsible for the 'break up') and requested he tell the partner their system is still trying to login and stop it. Couple of days later, we were getting random 300, 500, 1000 failed login attempts (causing automated emails to notify that there was a problem). The partner knew that we were likely getting alerted, and kept up the barage. When alerts get high enough, they are sent to the IT-VP, which gets a whole bunch of people involved.
VP-Marketing: "Why are you allowing them into our system?! Cut them off, NOW!"
Me: "I'm not letting them in, I'm stopping them, hence the login error."
VP-Marketing: "That jackass said he will keep trying to get into our system unless we pay him $10,000. Just turn those machines off!"
VP-IT : "We can't. They serve our other international partners."
<slams hand on table>
VP-Marketing: "I don't fucking believe this! How the fuck did you let this happen!?"
VP-IT: "Yes, you shouldn't have allowed the partner into our system to begin with. What are you going to do to fix this situation?"
Me: "Um, we've been testing for months already went live some time ago. I didn't know you defaulted on the contract until last week. 'Jake' is likely running a script. He'll get bored of doing that and in a couple of weeks, he'll stop. I say lets ignore him. This really a network problem, not a coding problem."
IT-MGR: "Now..now...lets not make excuses and point fingers. It's time to fix your code."
IT-VP: "I agree. We're not going to let anyone blackmail us. Make it happen."

So I figure out the partner's IP address, and hard-code the value in my service so it doesn't log the login failure (if IP = '10.50.etc and so on' major hack job). That worked for a couple of days, then (I suspect) the ISP re-assigned a new IP and the errors started up again.

After a few angry emails from the 'powers-that-be', our network admin stops by my desk.
D: "Dude, I'm sorry, I've been so busy. I just heard and I wished they had told me what was going on. I'm going to block his entire domain and send a request to the ISP to shut him down. This was my problem to fix, you should have never been involved."

After 'D' worked his mojo, the errors stopped.

Month later, 'D' gave me an update. He was still logging the traffic from the partner's system (the ISP wanted extensive logs to prove the customer was abusing their service) and like magic one day, it all stopped. ~2 weeks after the 'break up'.

I get a call from a client at 7 PM:
- Client: We have a business partner that just visited the website you just made for us and he said it was absolutely terrible, things are not showing up, layout is all messed up... *sends photo*. This is a VERY important new business partner and this will affect our relationship and image. Fix it NOW!
- Me: ok? I will check ... *proceed to check on several browsers and versions*
- Me: I checked on all modern browsers, cleaned cache, tried from multiple devices, it seems to be fine. What browser is your partner visiting the site from?
- Client: Idk, let me ask ...
- Client: Internet Explorer
- Me: ... that browser is not even supported anymore wth?!
- Client: We need it fixed!
- Me: ... *proceeds and hacks for IE website until 6 AM*

Had 2 days of vacation. Theoretically (plus weekend, plus 2 days) 6 days.

Worked today… At Saturday.

Some administrators forgot to properly check bandwidth limitations....

*rolls eyes*

We had a major version upgrade of some server software at Monday.

Guess why I got called...

Of course it MUST be the software upgrade.

It couldn't be the new hardware that was setup 2 weeks ago and on which a lot of "important" VMs were migrated.

*eyes roll inside till only white is visible*

The even more annoying thing is that it wasn't that hard to figure out.

Looking at monitoring, we had spikes on 20 Gbit/s (roughly 2.x Gigabyte/sec - Ethernet) connection of some server at roughly 1.9 plus Gigabyte/sec.

IO latency spikes that made the graph look like a heartbeat EKG with severe tachycardia...

*additionally to white eyes starts cursing in reverse latin*

Incompetent admin answer: Booboo that can only be your fault - the developers must investigate.

Me (just a tad more polite): Meep Meep mother fucker, get your shit together. If the software would eat that much, the network would be a niece chunk of charcoal. Plus the time (sending instead of links to monitoring pictures… guess the lazy fucktard who's brain is a vacuum didn't even bother to check it)...

NOTICE SOMETHING?!

Incompetent admin: It starts at the same time. Always.

After wasting roughly another hour of time discussing with him, I just hanged up the video call.

Called someone I knew from the admin department and turns out that - drumrolls please - the incompetent admin was someone who got recruited 3 months ago…

*turning into antichrist*

I then had a not so polite discussion about how the only competent people could take days off (all except incompetent admin were on vacation) and the seemingly incompetent fresh recruit - who by the way NEVER mentioned this - was the only one left of the admin department. Which would be bad alone, but no - he even got the 24/7 emergency support role for the whole weekend.

Sometimes this company and HR especially notoriously drive me insane...

Guess next week there will be some HR barbecue.

But yeah. After a lot of raging around we nailed it down to the traffic of backups and could fix it.

Roughly 4 hours of analysis, communication, raging and hatred.

Just one hour implementing shit.

*goozfraba*

my boss: this fucking thing doesn't get done and everyone is coming after me about it

me, who doesn't have the access required to fix that for him:

Out of all the bugs, the most annoying are the ones that come out and make me say "WTF?!?!? WHY THE FUCK HAS IT BEEN WORKING FOR THE LAST 2 YEARS??!!?!!??? THERE"S NO WAY IT COULD HAVE!"

When the bug surfaces, you investigate and see that it indeed IS a bug and there's no way it would ever work w/o a fix. But then SOMEHOW it's been working just fine for years....

It's like server elves went on strike and said "no more, it's enough covering that bug - it's time you fix it, lazy-ass idiot!"

Managers: fullStackClown!!!! The image uploader on the dashboard at <insert 3rd party service here> isn't working!!!!!

fullStackClown: Yeah? What do you want me to do about it?

Managers: Well, fix it!

fullStackClown: ... * sigh * Well, in case you didn't realize, I don't work at <insert 3rd party service here>, so... unless you want me to go work for them instead of you absolute clowns (which I dream about daily), I cannot help you further in this matter.

Managers: ...

fullStackClown: ...

Kill me. 🤡

How in the fuck can people develop using Node.js?! What the absolute shit is happening here?! The simple upgrade from 14.16.0 to 16.13.0 (LTS) provides a list of error messages a mile long and no clear answer as how to fix these! And the time it took them go from 14.16.0 to 16.13.0 is only 9 months! What the fuck is this shit?! I'm supposed to use the LTS and have to rebuild my app every 9 months completely because you have no idea what backwards compatibility is?! There isn't even any guides on how to do major version upgrades for your applications so I assume these sons of bitches think we're gonna run unsecure node.js versions on our servers forever? What the fuck, seriously!

We've had a bunch of flaky tests in our repo for a while now that no one could be bothered to fix; we'd just re-run ci until it's green. Today I looked into it and I was inspired to make this meme, because I lived through it.

Adding logs to investigate just lowered the fail rate making investigation more difficult. I do have an idea of what it might be though so, we'll see tomorrow.

You know what, fuck microshit to fuck town and back again.

What part of disabling "allow the computer to turn of this device to save power"

DO YOU NOT FUCKIJG UNDERSTAND!

MY FUCKING USB'S ARE GOING FUCKING MENTAL SWITCHING ON AND OFF LIKE A DRUNKEN HOBO YOU COCK FUCKS.

my week is a complete and utter shit of a week as it is, I don't need this bullshit on top of it too.

#Microsoft, fix your fucking shit already!

Just spent 10+ hours refactoring a code, and at the end I've figure it out a one line fix to the problem... just wasted 10 hours of my life.. :)

Hey Root, remember that super high-priority ticket that we ignored for five months before demanding you rewrite it a specific way in one day?

Yeah, the new approach we made you use broke the expected usecases, and now the page is completely useless to the support team and they're freaking out. Drop everything you're doing and go fix it! Code-complete for this release is tonight! -- This right after "impacting our business flow" while being collapsed on the fucking floor.

Jesus FUCKING christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

If I dropped the ball on a high-priority ticket for two weeks, I'd get fired, let alone for five fucking months.

If I was a manager and demanded a one-day rewrite I can only imagine the amount of chewing out I'd receive, especially on something high-priority.

And let's not forget product ownership: imagine if I screwed up feature planning for someone so badly I made them break a support tool in production. I'd never hear the end of it.

Fucking double standards.

And while I'm at it. Some of the code I've seen in this codebase is awful. Uncommented spaghetti, or an unreadable mess with single-letter variables, super-tightly coupled modules so updates are nearly impossible, typos in freaking constants added across sixty+ files, obviously-incorrect comments, ... . I'll have to start posting snippets to show them off. But could I get away with any of it? ha. Hell no. My code must be absolutely perfect. I hear about any and every flaw, doesn't matter how minor, and nothing can go out until everything is just so.

Hell, I even hear about flaws in other peoples' code during my code reviews. Why? Because I should have fixed it, that's why. But if I do, I get yelled at for "muddying the waters."

Just. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

It's like playing a shell game where no matter which shell I pick (or point to their goddamn sleeve where they're clearly hiding it), I get insulted for being so consistently useless, and god damn, how can I never find the fucking pea or follow the damned rules? I'm so terrible and this is why "nobody trusts me." Fuck you.

I'll tell you why I can't find your damned pea: IT'S RATTLING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HEADS, you ASSHOLE FUCKING IMBECILES.

That's right: one pea among the lot of them.

goddamn I am fucking pissed off.

I've told the same story multiple times but the subject of "painfully incompetent co-worker" just comes up so often.

I have one coworker who never really grew out of the mindset of a college student who just took "Intro to Programming". If a problem couldn't be solved with a textbook solution, then he would waste several weeks struggling with it until eventually someone else would pick up the ticket and finish it in a couple days. And if he found a janky workaround for a problem, he'd consider that problem "solved" and never think about it again.

He lasted less than a year before he quit and went off to get a job somewhere else, leaving the rest of our team to comb through his messy code and fix it. Unfortunately, our team is mostly split across multiple projects and our processes were kind of a mess until recently, so his work was a black box of code that had never been reviewed.

I opened the box and found only despair and regret. He was using deprecated features from older versions of the language to work around language bugs that no longer existed. He overused constants to a ridiculous degree (hundreds of constants, all of which are used exactly once in the entire codebase, stored in a single mutable map variable named "values" because why not). He didn't really seem to understand DRY at all. His code threw warnings in the IDE and had weird errors that were difficult to reproduce because there was just a whole pile of race conditions.

I ended up having to take a figurative hacksaw to it, ripping out huge sections of unnecessary crap and modernizing it to use recent language features to get rid of the deprecation warnings and intermittent errors. And then I went through the same process again for every other project he'd touched.

Good riddance.

Sales: "There is a problem in complicated feature A, in a client system!
Dev: "What is the problem"
Sales: "I don't know exactly"
Dev: "which client system? What version is installed?"
Sales: crickets.
Dev: "Do you a Jira ticket, or an email with more details?"
Sales: "It is urgent that we fix the problem ASAP!"
Dev: "what problem"
Sales: "The problem! I talked to the VP RnD, So he can make sure you are on it!"
Dev: "What exactly do you me to fix"
Sales: "The Problem!"

A friend asking me to fix his bugs in the code.... But when I review his code .....

Omg

Fix my depression
Learn C++ properly
Fix my life's future
Try to pick up a relationship which I've dropped out of stupidity again.

We do infra as a code, and one of my coworker worked on the project alone. Few months down the road, when shit hits the fan, he just message me this is not working.

First of all, I did not write that shit, and also I was never part of the conversation during the decision making. So when shit hits the fan what do you expect me to do? Do some black magic and fix it magically???

4 hours! four fucking hours! f.o.u.r. h.o.u.r.s.!
It's the amount in the time domain this bug has cost me to fix. The cost in the sanity domain is immeasurable...
I swear, the god damn ass births of devs who coded this abomination should be slowly mutilated and then raped by their own severed limbs.
It took me 4 hours to figure out that their 12 year old binary CLI tool they used to generate PDFs from PHP could not handle neither HTML5 nor some linebreaks at specific places. Some part of it is due to them using REGEX to find and replace HTML tag.
Yes, I am indeed very pissed. And I need a 🥃 or 3

What we learned:
- Don't use REGEX to "parse" HTML
- Don't call random compiled CLI tools from PHP if there are PHP packages to do the same shit

My level of frustration with Microsoft is growing to a point that I'm unable to contain it.

They buy Github, it was a great tool for developers because is FUCKING WORKED! New features were never beta tested on users unless they requested it.

Why in the absolute fuck am I getting all these new experimental bullshit features that literally make it harder for me to do my god damned job?

They provide me NOTHING but grief and sleepless weekends while I fix the god damned pipeline that's worked perfectly fine for YEARS.

Your business model is bad and your products are SHIT.

Fuck you Microsoft, I cannot even stress it enough. If I had a time machine that could go back 5 years and my options were: Tell the world about Covid, make sure Trump never became president, or stop the Github purchse. I would hunt down and brutally attack the team of executives that decided to buy Microsoft.

Words cannot adequately describe how much I want Microsoft to fuck off. If the company was a person and they died in a house fire it wouldn't be enough.

I just want a VCS that does what it's supposed to do. I don't need pipelines, I don't need image repos, I don't need static code analysis.

I JUST NEED A FUCKING VCS THAT CONTROLS VERSIONS OF SOFTWARE YOU IGNORANT FUCKS.

No other language can do something as fucky as javascript.

"7 high severity vulnerabilities"
$> npm audit fix --force
"13 vulnerabilities (11 high, 2 critical)"

How is this fixed?!

It will be a great day when JS finally prolapses under the weight of its own hubris.

in my attempt to fix my sleeping schedule, i actually slept early... only to wake up at 3 am 🤡

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

Them: "What can we do to fix this?"

Me: Contact the vendor

Them: Ok, but from our side?

Me: Wait for the vendor to reply

Them: And what can we do to prevent this from happening again?

Me: get better vendors, include I.T on the process when the org decides to purchase shitty third party software.

Them: Ok but besides that?

Me: Drink?

Seriously tho, tf you expect me to do?

AAAAAAA!!!!!! fullstackchris!!! we've got an error!!!

***proceeds to send screenshot of monitor with no error on it***

bonus points if its a picture of their desktop from a mobile phone

Because DevOps in a lot of organizations is really “help desk for clueless developers”, conversations like this happen a lot:

Dev “hey the thing seems to be not working right”

Me “what does that even mean? I need you to be a good deal more specific. What thing. What isn’t working?”

Dev “I dunno”

Me “Are there error messages?”

Dev “yes”

Me “….would you like to share them with me?”

Dev *sends error*

Me “ok did you actually read this error message?”

Dev “yes”

Me “…so you’re good then? It says you’re trying to use a variable that hasn’t been declared yet. You should fix that. “

Dev “…”

Me “good luck”

You know when you try to fix a bug but you end up fixing a different bug you had no idea existed

It's the end times: I've received a JIRA ticket asking me to fix something in JIRA

Why do my colleagues insist on HOURLY messages like "any update on X?" or "did you fix Y yet?"

REST ASSURED, WHEN IT IS DONE AND READY TO BE DEMOED, I WILL MESSAGE YOU, AS I HAVE FOR ALL PAST FEATURES AND BUG FIXES.

sheesh talk about too much time on your hands...

Nightmare IRL:

Your colleague is in PTO for 2 weeks.

You are in charge of maintaining his project along with yours, CI, code, tests and everything.

Your colleague's code base is a real master piece of shit when you look at it closer. By shit, I mean hardcoded values everywhere, random sleeps now and then, 20 if branches that could be replaced by maps, variables named a b c d everywhere, try catch to silence errors that should not be silenced, etc.

Your colleague left the CI and code broken as shit. Takes forever to run on my goddamn computer.

PMs are spamming you: "What is going on? It's red everywhere. Help! Plz fix this! We are going to release tomorrow!"

FML

analysing a database problem and writing a 4-line fix: 5 minutes.

preparing a foolproof manual for the manager on how to apply the fix: 15 minutes

writing a manager-level explanation what the fix does: 30 minutes.

explaining it to the manager: 30 minutes.

writing a _detailled_ explanation why we need the fix: 60 minutes.

explaining it to the manager again: 30 minutes.

figuring out why our progress is slow:

_priceless_

I wish my classmates didn’t know that I’m good at programming.

Recently, more and more often I am being reached out to by my classmates (and especially by one individual) about the problems they’re having issues with. For example yesterday, a guy fucked up his Git commit and made a bunch of merge conflicts, so I helped him fix this, which then lead to WinForms having multiple declarations of same objects.

And I really don’t wanna be rude, and I always try to help, for the love of god - stop bothering me every 5 minutes while I code, or at 10 PM while I wanna chill out.

Most of the things they have problems with can be solved by 2 minute Googling and I strongly believe that at the university level, you should be able to find solutions for your problems yourself - especially when you’re a programmer.

I'm working with some too smart junior. He rarely listens, does his own magic.

In his last MR, he did an ugly fix, 100 lines big. I told him exactly, what to check first, but nope, he's likes being a magician.

Now, I took 5 min and fixed it with single line of code.

it is really frustrating not to be able to actually maintain and improve the code you're working with. i'd be happy to completely dig in and live in the code and get it all - not so much fucked up - , or, totally spitballing here, do some research on how we could improve the functionality and performance in general (which is not "nice to have", but rather ongoing customer pain points), but I'm not allowed to, because management hates having maintainable code or even an adequate number of devs. it rather has me doing hippity hoppity between different projects to make sure nothing gets my full attention. -.-

the only thing i can do is to clean it up a bit during bug fixes, but even heavy polishing won't fix this giant pile of garbage that is called our code base.

how often did this happen to you?

- fix a bug
- think, now that i'm here, let's smuggle in some refactoring, just this aspect, won't take too long
- spend more than half a day refactoring, finally finding yourself entangled in a spaghetti nightmare
- stash / shelve and revert all your refactoring changes
- continue on your other tasks and talk to noone about it ._.

People on devRant: "it took me 1/2/3 hours to fix that bug, omg, what a time waste!!"

Me: *wrestles some bugs for 1/2/3 DAYS*

I'm confused, how is fixing a bug within hours a ranting material...?

Monday morning: The last straw.

After talking about in a previous rant about how my client wants to fix bugs that keeps popping out after bug fix.

Today I discovered, that all C-levels, worked all Saturday to "fix my code" because it "didn't work" and we "needed bug fixes not pretty things".

The app version I was working on for the last week is gone. Without mentioning that their "CTO" wrote a fucking crappy code to disable features that I added, breaking the build step.

This shit is enough for me, I'm done!

Some years ago i attended to a summer school abroad. I instantly built a connecection with this one girl, we spend the whole week together, talking, sharing humor, deep conversations etc. We also won the prize for the best project together. I guess it looked like the beginning of a love story for the rest of the course. For me it didn't exactly, actually I didn't had much romantic feelings for her; she was the arrogant, manipulative type I thought I could handle a friend but never as girl friend. We shared some darkness so to say. But I really hoped for a new close friendship. Since she had a boyfriend back home i thought she most likely wanted just the same. Anyway I was a bit worried she might want more because she made me quite a lot of compliments and told me how she liked me.
And yes, she wanted more: Whenever we talked on the phone after the summer school or met (she lived in a city not far away from mine by coincidence) she begged me for help with coding. She had a well paid as extremely interesting PHD position with a topic between political science and computer science. Besides classical humanities methods her topic would require a lot of coding though. But she had zero, absolutely zero clue of programming, and, as it turned out, zero interesst. I told her from the beginning she would have to learn quite a lot or pay someone to code for her. It was far too much to do as a favour by a friends or such. And, since it was part of her fucking PHD it would have been cheating somehow of she didn't do it herself. But instead, she kept texting me if I could 'help to fix some bugs', sending me unrelated code fragments she copied from SO and not even tried to understand. So I told her to fuck off at one point. After all it was not that we have been friends for decades; we only knew each other for a couple of months an spent only one week together. So thats it.
But I still think of it from time to time and it makes me angry because it feels like she was only nice to me because she thought i am this nerd guy who falls instantly in love to a charming good looking girl and does everything for her. I did neither at all but indeed wanted to be friends with her, thats bad enough. It even makes me more more angry that she actually has this awesome PHD project about politics in the fucking digital world and think of programmers like this. And that she will succeed without understanding anything bacause in the end there would have been a dude who did all the work for her I bet.

TL;DR Pluralsight should be ashamed for taking 299 USD a year and writing some very low-quality quizzes.

I've always heard that Pluralsight is a great platform having some high quality courses, so I chose it as a benefit, as our company was giving us some budget for learning purposes. I've paid (or rather the company did it in the end) 299 USD for this year, which, I guess is not much for US standards, but it is a lot for Eastern European standards.

I didn't actually get to the point of watching any of the courses, but I started to use a feature called "Stack up", which is a long series of questions in a specific theme, like Java, Kotlin, C++, etc., accessible once a day. I must say, I'm amazed by the fact, that people pay quite a great amount of money and they get something so poorly made with a lot of errors and stupid questions.

Take the question from the included image for example. Not only that the 2 possible answers are repeated (and thus I failed to select the correct one from 2 equal answers), but the supposedly correct answer is also missing some type specifications. No Java compiler will compile it this way as far as I know. There would be at least 3 ways to fix it.

Then there is today's gem (should be included as first comment) as well, where the answer is wrong in both Chrome 96, Firefox 95 and Node v10. Heck, THIS IS one of the reasons why you should never use `var` in your JavaScript code, but always `let` and `const`!

So the courses on Pluralsight might be good, but I would be ashamed, if I were to release something like this. People might actually try to solidify their knowledge by solving these quizzes but instead of learning something useful, they will be left with some bullshit. I just don't get how could they release a feature with so much incorrect information and I am kind of disappointed, even if I didn't try the courses yet.

Yeah well fuck right off then. I'm just going to build a bot to auto signup for every possible username combination left in the latin alphabet. Then after the media bullshit dies down they'll be changing this policy.

👺

Fuck this completely abysmal CMS!!!!
Not even god damn Einstein would be smart enough to understand this stinky pile of legacy code!
No, it's not enough to write an HTML template in PHP with less than 500 lines of code, noooooo, every god damn template HAS TO BE AT LEAST 3000 FUCKING LINES OF CODE WITH RANDOM INCLUDES EVERYWHERE!!!
Every fucking thing I fix spawns at least 2 new bugs! I FUCKING CAN'T!!!
I swear, if I meet these fucking worms of developers... someone will eat fresh turds mixed with puke from a highway toilet!

that one legendary guy who cranks out code and builds insane features. PMs (product management) love him because he builds features in several months which 10 devs together couldn't have built in the same time (so they say), features that are loved by customers as well, become their new standard and that have saved our company's asses in the past.
features are really awesome, performant and have very few bugs (compared to the rest of the software シ).
but this guy seems to live for this job. he also works at weekends, at unholy times of day and night and even in his holidays (he doesn't care that this is actually illegal, in terms of employee's rights, and he wouldn't listen to his superiors, no matter what they tell him)
so far, so good - except that he will probably die of some stroke or something very soon due to this lifestyle.
but it must be an absolute pain in the ass to work with him, as long as you're a developer (or his superior).
he lives in his own world and within the software, his features are also his own world. since the different modules interact with each other, sometimes you would be assigned a bug that might have its cause in some interaction of your and his module. talk with him about it? forget it. he wouldn't answer most devs who contacted him for some reason. ever. fix it in his module yourself? might happen that he just reverts your changes to his module without comments. so some bugs would lie on your desk forever because theoretically you know what would need to be done but if you cannot reach out into HIS world, there's no way to fix it. also - his code might be good in terms of performance and low bug numbers. but it seems to be hard to work on that code for everybody else but him.
furthermore, he is said to be really rude. he is no team player, but works on a software that is worked on by a huge team.
PMs think he's a genius, just a great dev, but they don't understand that other devs need to clean up the mess behind or around him.
everyone who's been his superior so far recommends to get him fired, but the company wouldn't fire him because they don't want to lose his talent. he can just do what he wants. he can even refuse to work on certain things because he thinks they are boring and he is not interested in them. devs seem to hate him, but my boss said, they are probably also a bit jealous because of his talent. i think, he's not wrong. :)
i haven't actually met him so far or was actually "forced" to deal with him, but i've never heard so many contrastive things about one person, the reputation of his, let's say vibrant personality really hurries ahead. he must be a real genius, after all i've heard so far, like he lives in the code. i must say i'm a bit curious but also somewhat afraid of meeting him one day.
do you also have such a guy at your company?

I feel like resigning from a company that i joined 3 weeks back.

I don't like to code in PHP and the manager wants to stick on to that , no new developers joining the company and php is one of the reason. The code is a mess. Every now and then some other team come running for a change like one button to do some shit and then for a fix after 15mins of release.

So many database operations are happening manually. No innovation in the team. Developers are very boring , women being senior developers and team leads brings stability but there is no innovation , excitement or any enthusiasm. All my team members are very happy doing mediocre shit. Manager talks about agile development and they are following that at a level where every half a day some requirement changes.

I m tired of being a developer that fixes the same mediocre shit.

Its too boring.

I'd rather take a swim in a moist human massgrave than fix any more bugs of this cancer-inducing "selfmade" CMS developped by a "company" that shall not be named.
Sadly I am not aware of any such pit in the neighborhood, thus more bugfixing it is... yay ⚰️

Stress made me fall into old habits of instead of saying stop and letting my team now that I was falling apart (not realising it myself even) I just kept saying "Yes, I fix that." to every single request that was made in the project.

The closer we got to the deadline, the more I hyperfocused and ignored the signs. I just kept working. The last two days I didn't even sleep.

Of course the launch botched. I finally broke down and both my mind and my body have given up, since yesterday I'm in a mental feedback loop causing continuous anxiety attacks and migraines. I literally CAN'T do anything but trying to not go back into fight- or flight mode and remember to breathe.

I FINALLY made my project manager aware (something I should have done days ago) that I am incapacitated and now I am waiting for medication (Oxazepam) to be picked up at the pharmacy by my husband.

I almost literally worked myself into the ground.

I've been here before. Never again.

This is what happens if you don't listen to your mind and body and put up a white flag in time.

*me and my manager, during my appraisal meeting

me: *talks about work done in previous project, and the current one under him

manager: but your JIRA throughput is very less.

me: the tickets which I pick are more research oriented and almost always take more time than the other config- fix type ones, and due to me being shifted from another team, there has been an increasing learning curve, I realize that, but...

manager: look at Jack, his throughput has been consistently high.

*me, after realizing my appraisal has obviously gotten affected and this discussion will lead nowhere

me: I would like to have a chat with HR before I sign the form with the percentage increment you are offering.

*me, with hr the next day
hr: your manager tells me that your throughput has been less than satisfactory.

me: *goes on to explain about the type of tickets I have been working on, along with other enhancements done to make people's lives easier

hr: but the throughput...

me: where the f**k do I sign?

Boss: we can't accept your MR request until you fix the problems we highlighted, everything is blocked and the client is getting angry

My brother in Christ, I understand your concerns but I need you to understand: you decided to block a perfectly working and documented PR because you didn't like having "<!-- -->" in a couple of HTML files and menial bullshit like that.
It may not be the most elegant thing ever but don't put on me the responsibility of your blocks or I'll smash your face with the coffee mugs I've used to work until midnight so that you could deliver the product in time after someone else delayed the deadline twice already.
Thanks and get fucked ASAP.

fucking hate how some sites deliberately break their own scroll functionality if you haven't logged in/accepted gdpr nonsense/signed up for a newsletter.

It's such an easy fix (most of them just slap style="overflow:hidden;" to their <html> tag) but I still think it's very loathsome

Client says the styling of a particular component on their website is wrong. It looks fine to me. They can't give me an example of how it should look, or tell me what's wrong with the way it looks currently, but they want me to fix it.

Nothing is as boring and frustrating as cloning a ripo from GitHub
run it then you get 3, 4 syntax errors
you fix them
then boom a library throws a hug ass exception

at that point I just delete the damn thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

And and and and and...

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

Bad dev habit I'm trying to fix?

Code addiction.

I love tools such as IntelliSense or Copilot, don't get me wrong!

But i still have a deep rooted fear that one day, developers will become so dependent on those luxuries, that we will become practically unable to write code on our own, without our cloud overlords blessings.

Until, you know.. the server for such a service will crash and no one will know how to fix it without its own help. *see Palpatine meme reference*

Please deploy on Fridays I get paid overtime when I have to stay late to fix whatever untested microservice broke as a result.

Got to know the power of python in Linux today, when I accidently executed apt-get purge python* in Ubuntu and all the UI of Ubuntu got deleted and even the terminal couldn't run normally.
The good thing is I managed to fix it.

them: welcome new project members, this is our CI/CD pipeline which is completely different from the rest of the company, there won't be any great knowledge transfer, we just expect you to be able to know and use everything. but also, we expect you to work on your tasks and don't waste any time.
me: okay, so my tasks aren't going as fast as expected, because I need to invest some learning so i can set up my project correctly.
later: some help would be nice, i'm stuck right now
coworker: *helps me to fix my problems, which were partly due to misconfigured build servers* i know it's a lot, and unfortunately, for this topic sources on the web aren't so good. i can really recommend this book, this will give a deeper understanding of the topic.
me: okay, yeah i mean, tbh, i'll read the book if the project invests some time for me so i can learn everything that's required, but this won't happen. also, some initial workshop on the topic or anything would have been nice.
coworker: well, i mean, i am a software developer. for me, it is normal that i learn all that stuff in my free time. and i think that's what the PM expects from us.
me: okay, that's fine for you, i mean, if i'm interested in a topic, i will invest my private time. but in this case, PM would just expect me to do unpaid labor, to gain knowledge and skills that i can use in this specific project. i'm not willing to do that.
coworker: ...
me: ...

it's not that i don't want to learn. the thing is that there isn't any energy left by the end of the day. i'm actually trying to find some work life balance, because i don't feel balanced right now, haven't felt since i started this job.
also, this is only one of several projects i'm working on. it's like they expect me this project has top priority in my life. if it wasn't so annoying on different levels, maybe i'd have a more positive attitude towards it.

also, at the moment i find it fucking annoying that i have to invest so much time in this dev ops bullshit and this keeps me from doing my actual work.

if they are unhappy with my skills, either they can invest in my learning or kick me out. at this point, either is fine for me..

Today I got a chance to completely unironically say "it's not a bug, it's a feature".

It wasn't anything that would qualify as a bug. It was a new button for a new feature. But it broke automatic tests, so the tester called us and said it's a bug. He even added it to our backlog. Meanwhile our entire team was laughing our asses off. Can't wait to label it as won't fix, with a comment "it's a feature"

In my current company (200+ employees) we have 3 guys who deals with everything related to service desk (format computers, fix network issues, help non-tech people...)

The same team is responsible for the AWS accounts and permissions, Jenkins, self hosted Gitlab... anyway, DevOps stuff.

Thing is: only one of them have enough DevOps background to handle the requests from the engineering team (~15 people). Also, he usually do anything "by hand" clicking trough the AWS interface on each account, never using tools like Infrastructure as Code to help (that's why I started to refer to his role only as Ops, because there's no Dev being done there).

Anyway... I asked my manager why that team is responsible for both jobs, despite the engineering guys having far more experience with those tools. He answered with a shamed smile, as he probably questioned the same to his manager:

- Because they are responsible for everything related to our Infrastructure.

Does it make sense for anyone? Am I missing something here? In what universe this kind of organization is a healthy choice?

Bad dev habit I am trying to fix: copy-pasting code without understanding

Dear Managers,

Don't just have one person maintaining something forever. Don't ask that one person to also fix an issue in a module just because they merged in that code a few years ago. Don't ask them to fix issues introduced by others. Grant leave when requested especially when there is no formal leave policy and they are sick.

Fuck you.

Today another story in this stupid company:
A freelancer created a feature to pay orders online . It took him 3 months (!)
Problem: sometimes people pay, but orders are not stored. Every morning, it takes 1 hour to check in db if the orders are stored, and if not, create them manualy
Yes, orders are created after payment.
Manager wants to fix it by creating the order before the payment, in 3 days (!)
Turns out that the freelancer has written a lot of obsolete code, I now have to clean up. 3 fucking months vs 3 fucking days!
And on top, the shoppingcart was stored in localstorage! (Already fixed by now)
Fuck this, I'm getting another wodka

Habit I'm trying to fix?
Doing it all myself. I've been timeboxing my problems and forcing myself to ask instead of forcing myself to just figure it out myself. Communication isn't my strong point.

WHY DOES GOOGLE CHROME CACHE THIS SHIT AND WON'T LOAD IT AGAIN. I THOUGHT I DIDN'T FIX THE BUG BUT GOOGLE CHROME IS THE BUG. THIS FLYING FUCK

Devils Advocate moment: A proper PM can assist greatly on projects.

Don't get me wrong, you have all for the most part been faced with the incompetence of glorified quasi manager positions. But a proper PM can be a gift really.

I absolutely despise generalizations, I do get that percentages matter, but shitting on professions when the realm of possibilities have yet to be touched to the full extend of capabilities seems like child's play really.

remember, y'all think you are all God's gift to the world through coding experience, but a solid network engineer might have as much gripes about developers as y'all do about managers, project managers, sys admins etc, and the same shit can be applied vice versa.

Software engineering is magic, in the sense of the tv show "The Magicians" where you can make an incantation and suddenly your penis/tiddys explode: inexact science.

Be a tad bit open minded, learn enough about their shit to tell them that they are fucktards, and run from the ones that know but don't fix shit.

Peace pendejos

Who in the hell has time to upgrade JavaScript frameworks? Nobody! Take as an example, Strapi.js. I have a version running that I installed EXACTLY ONE YEAR AGO. Already it's gone up one major version, and there's three different migration guides between minor releases! And each migration between versions has three different portions that break into even smaller portions! DO YOU THINK I HAVE TIME TO FIX MY PROJECT EVERY 3 MONTHS BECAUSE YOU MORONS CAN'T BUILD A BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE PRODUCT?! AND IT'S RIDDLED WITH SECURITY ISSUES! FUCK YOU AND YOUR FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT "CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM"!!!1 THIS IS WHY I USE LIGHTWEIGHT FRAMEWORKS AND NOT FULL BLOWN SYSTEMS!

Good thing it's only for my personal website so I couldn't care less.

PM: I’m not asking what you were doing, I’m asking what was done
me: losers are asking, champions go and do it. This is what I did. The only thing I hear from you is questions. Meanwhile leaders are always a part of the answer. With that loser mentality, you’re never gonna be an MVP.

I’m a neural network powered parrot with a supercar brain. No matter the business guru speak BS you throw my way, I’m gonna wipe the floor with you in your own game. You have no chance. You’re that mediocre type of person who buys a rolex, the same one Gary V has, with the hope it would fix your self-confidence. The only thing I see in your eyes is your shattered ego.

Holy retarded internet company. The fiber cable that comes from the power pole lost its connection to the building I live in. So the fiber was laying on the ground in the parking lot. The upside is it is still working. The problem is people are going to run over the fiber and break it. So I sent an email to the ISP on Thursday. They didn't create a ticket all day on Friday. By the time I got home they were not open. I called their tech support number and pressed 0 until I got a real person. I explained they need to fix this soon or it will get broken. They said "I understand" and then proceeded to create a ticket for fucking wednesday next week! I told them it will damaged by then. They said "I understand". Then I get a text saying they will do this wednesday. No you stupid fuckers, you do not understand!

Queue the McGuiver music:
I got out some steel wire I use to fix stupid shit like this. I made a hook to connect the steel cable holding the fiber. This hook will go around some exposed electrical conduit. Then I got a board to lift it up high (no ladder and 5 inches thick of ice on ground). I cannot balance wire hook on board and get it to slip down. So I got a steel pole I have and attached another hook with electrical tape. As I passed the hook over the conduit I used other pole to grab bottom of hook and pull it down to keep a hold of the conduit. Now the fiber is up in the air again above the parking lot. I hope this stupid hack works until wednesday. My right arm hurts like hell cause the strain of holding the fiber taut while I pulled the hook down. It strained my right hand.

Worst customer service on the planet with Century Stink. They fucking make it harder than hell to get help and it seems they take almost a week to fix shit.

Longest I've worked without rest + why?

Over 24 hours. Why?

In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).

Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.

One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.

January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"

At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)

One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...

VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow."

I think managers should at least know what is CSS and what is not. But NOOOOOOO.

If your “solution” fixes the test case which is failing, it does NOT guarantee that it is the correct fix. You don’t just blindly change whatever piece of code you like to make just the test case pass. You actually also need to analyse the code and ensure that the rest of the intended functionality is still intact.

Yesterday, I was looking back at a project that isn't a focus right now, and unintentionally realised the cause of a frustrating bug. It's a one line fix and the smallest PR I've ever done, and it was such a good feeling!

I'm fucking tired of putting my efforts into bug fixes.

5 years of web. I never had a client that likes to keep it's crappy slow piece of shit product on the market in the exact same way it is.

If they didn't sell it to state employees (and good luck for them if they do not use it) their product would be dead.

That's the only way they get money: bids. And the minimum a state pays is 15 MILLION.

And they don't have 90K to pay another dev to help creating a new product.

Their CEO fucking REJECTS anything that's not a bug fix. Once he said to our PM:

"It's pretty and more fast, but wasn't this way that made me rich"

I'm thinking I'm getting another client, seriously. Everyday the same thing breaks and they already know the fucking answer:

WE NEED TO FUCKING REFACT

CREATE A NEW FUCKING PROJECT

This shit is making crazy. I can't sleep. I can't eat and I'm always fucking tired, no matter what I do.

I need to stop working for Brazilians.
I'll try US, Canada or somewhere in Europe.

Sometimes it takes too long to fix it :(

Am I the only one the sometimes just makes a PR that won't fix the issue but at least shuts everybody up so I can investigate in peace.

Very senior colleague: *hits a problem that is a minor inconvenience*
VSC: "I have to restart this task, the two weeks I put into it must be deleted!"
Me: "You forgot to do *this* here, add this 1 line and it's ok."
VSC: *An hour of rumbling about the codebase*
VSC: *adds my fix*
VSC: "Ok, it works now, you can review again"
Me: *cries inside*

Not really trying to, but probably should try to fix this bad, bad habit…

I keep wanting to fix and improve everything - and I keep taking notes, writing action plans et fucking cetera to the point the amount of work that should be done and I want to do is driving me insane. And they should all get done now!

In short, I should really either learn to focus on just one thing at a time for a meaningful period - or just cease to give a fuck. Either could work.

Intern - adds commit message like "added two files"

Me - Hey Intern, I've added commit lint, please don't disable precommit hooks.. so let's follow standard commit message format

Intern - commits like "feat(app): fix changes"

*later*

Me - Hey Intern, please commit with short meaningful messages like what actual changes were made

Intern - commits like feat(app): whole long story of what he couldn't do and some changes..

Me - 🤦

Golang code review be like

> oh no, you used prohibited `else` keyword

Context? Dosent matter. Its banned, mkay?

Fix? Oh you know its hell to read now

I'm a fullstack engineer, this period there is literally nothing to do, we are a 1000+ employees company.
I got so bored I toke over the database of our production server two times in a week, exploiting dumb vulnerabilities I discovered out of boredom, of course I reported everything.

The funny thing is that they just don't care, no one took action or is willing to fix it and they actually insulted me because I set a query in sleep for 8 minutes exploiting one of the vulnerabilities.

I work for a great company that hosts (in this very server) most italian citizens informations C: free to take for everyone c:

Sometimes I get bored and fix people's shitty code on stack overflow for fun

It's actually entertaining...

But as infuriating as you'd imagine

Me: *changes a long and complex calculation to fix old mistakes*

Program: *keeps outputting the same wrong result*

Me: *goes mad for a good hour trying to discover the problem by debugging it like a angry rat*

Also me after one hour of debugging: *discovers he never changed the output source of the function and it's still outputting the old result*

Last sprint is a mess.

Working on three products that are related one with another a little bit.

1. Bug reports are coming in;
2. We fix it and give for QA to test;
3. QA starts testing and it doesn’t work;
4. Because another team updated something in product A and product B depends on it.

Repeat for straight 14 days

I have been trying my best to fix a broken process and a product that never saw the day of the light.

Aligning all the teams, trying to bridge all the feature gaps, and at the same time learning this new product and company culture.

Now this lady comes to me with a requirement. I have zero clue what it is and instead of empathising with me that I am new and should dumb down her ask, she kept throwing heavy product specific terms as if I have been working in this team for previous 9 lives.

Anyway, I take her ask into my product roadmap and try to prioritise it.

Now I connect with them again for some discovery and she is passive aggressive towards me that it's been more than a year no one is considering their request and started whinning.

I have just joined the org 6 months ago and you start attacking me for someone else's mistake?

What the actual fuck! Go fucking die bitch. Never again I am taking her request.

If she has a problem then just speak it up and take it with leadership. Don't fucking be passive aggressive with me especially when I am not at fault and infact I am trying to help her.

And in interviews they ask people whether they are a team player or not.

So this will be my first rant/story sorry if it gets too long.

So finished work and I was like finally some days off, went to bed, woke up the next morning, went to near city to take care of some work, went back and I noticed they were digging the ground near my place, as I've found out from neighbors they were changing some pipes, well ok no problem arrived home, sat on my PC to study a bit and do a bit gaming, but guess what?? NO INTERNET well ok contacted the ISP, the idiots told me it will take them 2 days to arrive WTF? is this 2018 or 1918?? I was so pissed off but ok the next day they called me that they arrived, they checked and said that they will need to fix some wires they will return the same day.. so I've waited few hours but no internet, the asholes didn't came, so the next day they arrived and guess what?! the idiots that digged the holes cut the wires, instead of fucking contacting the ISP to ask for supervisor to tell them where they can dig they didn't know what was the fire for and they thought oh well lets cut the fucking wire, and instead of stopping and contacting the ISP about their mistake they continued with the digging and cut the wire at 3 places, so the ISP at the end called the police, the plumbers that did the digging where just laughing, why do you laugh you primitive ashole, even 10 year old would first ask if it can continue if it finds something that he didn't know about it (I call primitive the person not the job title), and the best part is that the idiots not only they cut the wire at 3 places they also took part of it out of the ground and then they filled the holes back! Now I won't have internet for 2 fucking weeks, yes in 2018 this is happening, at that moment I was so pissed, but kept my cool and contacted the ISP to give me LTE USB stick to use it for the next 2 weeks, sadly they couldn't do that wtf??? So I asked politely who will pay the damage for me not working for 2 weeks and they said that they will gladly pay the damage.. So I was confused because that literally meant that they will compassed me for the 2 weeks, so I re-asked are they sure about that and they said yes, so lets see what it will be done, in the meantime I solved the internet problem by using my phone to access internet on the PC.. But still its amazing how primitive people can be and how ISP don't have alternative solutions for such cases, just to point out this sam ISP bragged how they will be among the first to bring 5G when it arrives... LOL

Has someone an idea why KDE Neon has this buggy text rendering and how to fix it? Google is not my friend with this problem.. It's often the text which is buggy but sometimes everything else is buggy too..

Can anyone tell me how to become less resentful and less bitter? I am becoming a miserable fuck. Its true that I burned out in this job after doing 100hrs overtime during previous month, its also true that I am pissed off about having to wait 8-9 weeks for my raise to happen. I cared so much that I burned out and now Im trying to set some boundaries but damage was done and Im struggling dealing with it.

I took 6 days off to disconnect from work (still was responding to some major blockers and monitoring stuff). Today I got back at work and interacting with two incompetent devs immediately sets me off. Imagine taking 2-3 days and extra meetings to do a simple fix which shouldnt take longer than 30min. My mind was blown and still gets constantly blown about how ineffective some members of team are.

I am becaming a ranting fuck. I even noticed one person escaping my rants once he sees that they are taking longer than 5min.

Right now I started setting boundaries - I clock my 8 hours, disable slack/email notifications and get the fuck out from the office. I dont care if I will have to sit in traffic extra 30min during summer heat, Im done with putting in overtime and caring so much about being efficient. I will just start working on my side project and put my love/learnings in that. Hoping that by the end of year I will have couple projects to show in my portfolio so I could find a better paying job...

In the past I was the sole dev responsible for apps and I was communicating with ceos/ctos/product owners/designers directly. This is my first position where I work in a dev team and boy oh boy out of 8 devs barely 3 are competent enough but their output is how to say... Not the biggest. Anyways...

Transition to boundaries and 'normal life' is so hard. Nobody told me that I will have to learn to work with and tolerate such retarded and incompetent people. Im talking about illiterate monkeys who cant even read or write. Im amazed how they manage to code.

Today was a bad dev day working on a shitty React project. Not that React in itself is bad, but it can be hell to work with when the code is a big pile a crap full of anti pattern code. I spent the day refactoring to try to fix a bug, but to no avail. It would take days if not weeks to put some order in this mess and to prevent such bugs.

Was on call last night. I get a phone call at 3 am that all of our clients projects (including one that was launching at 5 am) was missing libraries (thus causing the sites to not work). I was able to fix all of the errors but one (missing jQuery). Couldn’t figure out how to fix for the life of me. Had to call my boss and wake her up because I forgot I could just download it from the site. Feeling like a failure for something so small.

Manager encounters problem, hacks a load of stuff together to "get around" the problem. Asks me to fix the issue. I spend a week tidying up what he'd hacked together, then change it so I encounter the problem.

A morning of probing later, the problem?

One of our servers is running 2 firewalls, so we were having network connection issues on just that server.

Had a bad dream one night that my bosses were going to run me through the ringer on some stuff that I needed to do better.

A day later, exactly that happened.

It would’ve been nice if my premonition could have had a few days gap between dream and reality so I’d have had some time to fix things first.

Life begins when you bring down production and don’t know how to fix it

Software runs fine on several in-house instances. First time customers hosting it themselves. Runs fine. Users start using. Server need absurdly high processing power and fucks up. I can not access customers Server to debug. Only hope, get copy of their images to reproduce their setup. And have *** one single fucking hour *** to go into it before having to tell in emergency meeting if we can fix it or they would blew the project.

I didn't expect, but found the cause, a single very badly written query. Written by myself years ago I have to admit.
They also gave me one hour to produce a patch. I did but but lost so many hair.

f it ain't broke, don't fix it!
I feared my Android phone's touchscreen suffered severe damage from using it in the rain, until I discovered that the 3-button navigation stopped working after an Android 12 security update (both in Nova launcher as well as in official Google Pixel launcher). Wasted time drying the unplugged phone and googling for repair options before finally wasting more time changing system settings back and forth, rebooting, changing system settings, rebooting, etc.
Remember those happy times before mobile phones have been invented, which of course I don't really want back either. I just want developers to stop breaking features that used to work. Regression testing outside the happy path, anyone? I mean, it's not a hacked maker project, it's a commercial phone that I bought and intend to use with the latest official software. Don't want to think about the next breaking changes that Android 13 might bring.

I took a job with a software company to manage their product, which was a SaaS property maintenance system for real estate, social housing, etc.

There was no charge to real estate agents to use it but maintenance contractors had to use credits to take a job, which they pre-purchased. They recharged their credit costs back to the real estate agent on their invoice).

Whether this pricing model is good or not, that's what it was. So, in I came, and one of the first things management wanted me to deal with was a long-standing problem where nobody in the company ever considered a contractor's credits could go into the negative. That is, they bought some credits once, then kept taking jobs (and getting the real estate agent to pay for the credits), and went into negative credits, never paying another cent to this software company.

So, I worked with product and sales and finance and the developers to create a series of stories to help get contractors' back into positive credits with some incentives, and most certainly preventing anyone getting negative again.

The code was all tested, all was good, and this was the whole sprint. We released it ...

... and then suddenly real estate agents were complaining reminders to inspect properties were being missed and all sorts of other date-related events were screwed up.

I couldn't understand how this happened. I spoke with the software manager and he said he added a couple of other pieces of code into the release.

In particular, the year prior someone complained a date on a report was too squished and suggested a two-digit year be used. Some atrocious software developer worked on it who, quite seriously, didn't simply change the formatting of that one report. No, he modified the code everywhere to literally store two-digit years in the database. This code sat unreleased for a year and then .... for no perceivable reason, the moron software manager decided he'd throw it into this sprint without telling me or anybody else, or without it being tested.

I told him to rollback but he said he'd already had developers fixing the problems as they came up. He seemed to be confident they'd sort it out soon.

Yet, as the day went on more and more issues arose. I spoke to him with the rest of the management team and said we need to revert the code but he said they couldn't because they hadn't been making pull requests that were exclusive to specific tickets but instead contained lots of work all in one. He didn't think they could detangle it and said the only way to fix was "play whack-a-mole" when issues came up.

I only stayed in that company for three months; there was simply way too much shit to fix and to this day I still have no idea the reasoning that went on in the head of anyone involved with that piece of code.

Probably everyone at least once had situation when they receive a meaningless screenshot with 500 page, a message "Application doesn't work fix it" and 0 info whatsoever.
Here is my tip that saved me a lot of trouble.
I display error id in the center of the screen, large enough so no matter how small and blurry the image is (yes users, send us photos of theirs displays) , It is always easy to ready it so we can start investigation without talking to those monkeys.

wish can do coding in fix hours :(

Learning react .. just took one cup of tea in morning.. and dang its 8pm :( No idea about the time.. react giving me hard time. maybe am newbie ..

Hope so I learn this Single Page application

Yesterday, my boss asked me to solve a certain problem the company has with my code.
I tried reproducing it for a very long time but still couldn't manage to do it.
Ultimately (after my boss has been no help at all), I changed some stuff and sent the revised version with this message:
"I couldn't reproduce the problem, so here is a revised version with some changes that **could potentially** solve the problem you're facing."
She immediately decided that the entire company was switching to this version and thanked me. There is no way she tested it that fast. She just saw this might be a fix and didn't bother with the details. I have no idea if the update fixes the problem or even if it won't break anything else. I tried to explain the situation to her but she asked, "Are you saying this works on your computer?" and I was like "Yes, but..." and she didn't care about anything after the Yes, and I just know that when the problem will occur the complaint will be directed at me, and I'm sick of it.

The moment you find a fix for something after days but you don't understand how it fixes at all.

Second week sick I see how my life slowed down and how meaningless everything around is, everyone is rushing about some bullshit, name it new amazing job opportunity, black Friday great deal, super duper product idea or some most important bug on production that we need to fix asap.

All that can’t wait a week when I’m healthy?
Seriously, people lost their minds in today’s world to some bullshit.

I’m to old and to depressed to care about such idiotic things. Living my life as I want and on my own peace, don’t care everyone is running, I’m slowly walking and I like it.

It’s better to walk straight than run around like an idiot.

How do you handle work colleague who is becomming too chummy? Got this one guy who is my age at work (we are in late 20's), we've been working for the past 5 months in the same team. At first I was in a bad place so kinda overshared my personal life with him so did he. Went out for drinks and etc.

Problem is that its becoming weird in the office now. I am trying to fix my habits like quitting drinking and quitting smoking and all I get from him is pressure about why Im not going out and etc. He doesnt even really know me, just assumes that if Im not hanging out with him I just sit in my home on a couch. And in the end what if I do? What kind of guilt tripping is this?

Also I feel that he as a senior is kinda undermining me. I am not a senior but definetly also not a junior anymore, and he treats me as a junior while he has at least half of knowledge gaps as me. He has been working remotely for some time now and I noticed even how dynamics in the office changed. I see other devs coming up to me for advice and I see that I am actually competent enough to help them. If my big ego senior was here, he would be sucking all of the attention out of the room and I would be in his shadow yet again. Its just weird.

I have fucking HATED Windows 10 from day one. Now I'm hearing there are new vacillations of this genius programming train wreck that I think is designed to force monetize Microsoft's business model.
After a short while I managed to get to a point where I can maintain W 7. In fact, I'm using my old computer right now. Because I could not get this rant to load onto Devrant website. If you are reading this we know that it is because 10 sucks consistently.
I save my files onto a backup hard drive so I can find 'paper file' type solution for whatever random crap might block me at the keyboard. In fact, I still use paper and file cabinets so "technology" doesn't bring me to a screeching halt every time something like "no record of that account" or "wrong password".
Why the hell does my PASSWORD work from W7 but not from W10?! And it's getting WORSE by the day! I'm about to take a fucking hammer to my new fucking computer. And to that guy who smarmy says something to the effect of 'don't be such a pussy... just fix it and you will be happy.' Well. Fuck you too!
Now. That being said. Anybody have a suggestion on what to try next? And don't say something like, 'take your computer to Micro Center or Geek Squad'. I've done those guys twice each. And for a small phenomenal fee they have each time made things slightly worse plus lost parts of my saved data each time.
Oh. And "reset to previous" doesn't work either.
Suggestions?
Probably better at this point to attempt to solve my own problems wrong for free at this point. Maybe I'll learn to program in Linux or some such thing.
Forrest
for suggestions please contact me at
res0naza@yahoo

Small chaotic startup that never grew up (15 years atm).
Hosts/maintains a number of apps/sites for various customers.

At some point, someone decides that a CMS would be usefull to maintain the content across all products. Forgoing all sense, reason and the very notion of "additional maintenance and dev" it is decided that one should be built in-house.

Fast forward a number of years.

Ops performs routine maintenance on prod-servers. A java-patch accidently knocks out one of the pillars a 3rd party lib the CMS uses for storing images. CMS basically burst in to flames causing a.... significant incident.

Enter yours truly to fix the mess.
Spend a few days replacing the affected 3rd party lib. Run tests on CMS in test and staging environments. Apply java-patch. All seems fine.

When speaking to frontenders and app-devs, a significant hurdle present itself:
All test/staging instances of all websites/apps/etc ALL USE PRODUCTION CMS. Hardcoded. No way around.

There is -no- way to properly test and verify the functionality of any changes made to the home-brewed CMS.
My patch did indeed work in the end.

But did the company learn anything? Did they listen to my reasoning, pleading or even anguished screams for sanity?

No.

I went down a rabbit hole of code changes to try and delete a stupid for loop with a break in it.

It was super stupid and I gave up and submitted to the fact that some battles are not worth the time and stress.

OK... But seriously, It was returning multiple entities from the database, but we only always want the first one. My logic is that we should just go in there and fix the LINQ so we are explicitly getting one entity out.

But fuck that logic. No I'll have to change fucking everything that's tied to that method and expects a list from it. Every fucking thing. That includes error handling, parsing, for loops..... Nevermind...

You can have your foreach and your break. I'm taking mine, now.

we're doing a massive database migration and trying to fix a lot of shit that was done for years in the db. problem is, i have to cater to a business major asshat that doesn't know the first thing about working with data and he's responsible for 99% of the shit we're trying to clean up.

his response to the problem i brought up in his stuff? "we can deal with it later, right now i need it like this". this is why you guys have a shit database, because we have to spoil this idiot. then they complain everything takes forever to run and the database is bloated and somehow it is our fault.

I'm really holding myself right now, because i already went off on him once and he basically called me hysterical, and our boss likes him too much to antagonize the bastard. but god i wish i could run over him

I don't know what's wrong with me..

Within one day I basically lost interest in everything I do. I just don't see the point of all this anymore.

And the bad thing is, that I don't even know where that comes from so suddenly, everything is going fine, but still.. Life just feels like pain at the moment.

Don't want do drag down someone else with me and I sincerely apologise if it's too late to mention it at this point, just hope that maybe someone here can understand what's going on or give me some advice on how to fix my situation.

a week into building my first WebApp in JavaScript.
Today, after SO MUCH ANGER AND FRUSTRATION I decided to pop Cargo and start over with WebAssembly through Rust and it's finished already.
(╯ò_ó) ╯︵ ┻━┻
SERIOUSLY, F*CK JavaSpaghettiScript, can't wait to pop the champagne once it DIES.
It's like JavaScript is a house poorly built on top of a cliff and every year it gets something new added to it just to help keep it from tumbling over. F*cking hate Netscape for wrecking a future where JavaScript would've been a concise, intuitive and Scheme-like language. Gladly, WebAssembly is here to fix things 🗣️

I fucking hate managers who go out spouting things have gone to shit and production is broken, when a single feature is missing from the application. It's your fault for not making sure the specifications were correct or not testing in QA before going to production! Just because one minor feature is missing does not mean production is broken you dimwit! It just means you suck at your job and we have to fix your fuck ups. It would also be really helpful if you morons accepted the fact that the teams want to do daily releases and continuous development, instead of having to deal with your insanity of pushing releases to a specific date so we have everything ready from marketing to Steve the janitor

Why am I always oiling hinges on doors..

Can't they make a hinge that doesn't need that !

And why are folk always painting over hinges !

Next up, why are my cold water pipes growing mould.. ( I think due to lack of insulation, right ? )

And my toilet fix is still working ! ( Dremel washer thinner, since they stopped making thinner ones.. )

Not a fan of modern toilet design..

You know they test them with artificial poo !

That's not a real test !

How come Rust is the most loved programming language? I wanted to give rust a try in my windows machine and when I run `cargo run` or `cargo build` is shows: linker `link.exe` not found
Okay, how to fix it?
you need to download 8GB+ of bullshitty visual studio C++ build tools just to run a simple rust programs! WTF!

Previously when I installed rust, it didn't need all these bullcrap. why now?

Client breaks website and i’m the one trying to fix things. For two unplanned hours i’ve been trying to help and instead of a thank you i get a thanks for nothing message. I’m not responding to this client next time. Fuckn bitch

manager: fix and prevent this bug that we can't reproduce and we don't have any logs for

Man all I ever do is fix bugs in a giant overgrown calculator, that has references to code before I was even born. It might be new job time

Can someone brag about using Arch when he spends more time using a live Ubuntu system to fix his Arch installation than actually using Arch?
Asking for a friend.

It's a Monday, I've been trying to fix a bug since the morning, I cannot read or write any code. I tried to review a PR, still cannot read the code. Getting frustrated by the slightest problem.

Worst dev experience of the year:
So, I went to my folks' for the holidays. My old man is a hospital practitian and is still resentful because I did not want to be a doctor too.

So he made me fix the whole fucking wiring at his place over this last couple days, because "well, you choose to be a glorified electrician!"

BTW, I have three kids and am still WFH during this time. I haven't slept in a week.

I just remembered I have a list of funny things I want to put in a tech movie. Just thought of new one today:

Programmer trying to do IT work and cannot locate the person they are trying to help:
I have a specialized set up skills. I will find you, and I will fix your printer.

The character would be a programmer and have a PHD. Printer Help Desk certificate.

> Work with Spring Boot
> Find a bug in an official Spring Boot Plugin
> Open a GitHub issue offering to fix it yourself
> Wait a month
> "status: waiting for triage"

I love Pivotal Labs professionalism

New AltRant update!

This update features a fix for instability issues in the Notifications tab. All users that are in the testing group - please update soon! I am giving you a 3-day update window.

Today I‘ve been investigating a freeze in our app. It took me many hours to narrow it down to the textfield validation regex. And it turned out to be a "catastrophic backtracking" issue.
I‘m a regex noob so I don‘t have a clue how it occurs exactly. But I‘m a bit perplexed about what a seemingly innocent regex can cause.

For me it became another argument against regex now.
I‘ve rewritten the regex into readable code and the freeze is gone.

I could try to fix the regex but… nah. The code is better anyway.

Meetings entire day. Management/PMs fucked things up and forgot an ENTIRE system. They just spend A YEAR for the requirements. A YEAR!!! Just unbelievable. Guess who has to shoot from the hip just fucking guessing things to fix it before everything should be in production? So sad. I just have to quit this incompetence. Just…incompetence. I know it is complex but to forget an entire eco-system of applications is just beyond idiotic. One whole year and God almighty know how many workshops and business travel expenses. I am fucking distancing myself from this organization. I have no hope. No hope.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it

The universe has taken a cactus.

It proceeded to gift the cactus with a toxin that greatly enhances the stimulus of pain.

After the universe watched it's miraculous creation it decided to shove it up so far my arse that my gag reflex turned on and I puked a lot of cactus.

Didn't sleep well, weekend hardware migration finish, today an old server got moved.

Some part, most likely the redundant PSU, had a short circuit - decided to take the switches out... Which are the only non redundant hardware...

There was only one critical system in the whole rack, that was one redundant firewall.

Guess what happened..... Naaaa?

*drum roll*

For whatever reason, the second firewall didn't kick in, so large part of internal network unreachable as VPN was on the firewall.

:thumbsup:

That's not cactus level yet.

Spontaneously a large part of the work at home crew decided to call, cause getting an email wasn't enough.

So while all the phones were ringing and we had the joyful fun to carefully take apart a whole rack to check for possible faulty wiring / electric burns / hardware damage and getting firewall up and running again...

Some dev decided to run a deployment (doable as one of the few working at the company at the moment -.-).

I work from home, but we had a conference phone call running the whole time so I could "deescalate" and keep others up-to-date. So me on headphone with conference call, regular phone for calls, while typing mails / sms for de-escalation.

Now we're reaching cactus level, cause being tortured by being annoyed out of hell by all telephone ringing, the beeping of UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), the screaming of admins from the server room and the roaring of air coolers…

Suddenly said dev must have stood in the midst of the chaos… and asked for help cause "the deployment broke, project XY is offline"...

I think it was the first time since years that I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Bad idea (health issues)… but oh boy was it a pleasure to hear my own voice echo through the conference speaker and creating an echoic sound effect.

It was definitely worth coughing out my loungs for the next hour and I think it was the best emotional outburst ever.

I feel a bit sorry for the dev, but only a tiny bit.

After the whole rack thing, the broken deployment fixing and the "my ears are bleeding and I think I will never be able to talk again" action...

We had to roll out several emergency deployments to fix CVEs (eg libexpat).

This day was a marvelous shit show.

I will now cry myself to sleep with some codein.

Hear me out. Ive been trying to fix this flutter bug for... I lost the count of how many days or weeks it was, maybe even months. I now got to the point of having borderline mental breakdown. I am crying because i cant solve this bug and there is no one to help me. I am on my own. All by myself. And im crying.

Listen dude I get it, you've been in more of a Systems Admin role for a long time, you haven't really worked on a devlike team.

I can be patient I can be understanding. But when you break the build you need to fix it.

Yes I know you didn't change any of the files that are now failing, but you the pipeline is no longer deploying and so we can't fix anything.

Okay dude we are being prevented from deploying because you broke the build, you need to fix it. It's stopping everyone else.

DUDE FIX THE FLIPPING BUILD EVERYONE IS WAITING FOR YOU TO FIX THAT!

Seriously I know we should be patient with people learning new things, but some days it is difficult.

Killing people is bad. But, there should be a law to allow killing people who don't write proper unit tests for their code. And also those "team leaders" who approve and merge code without unit tests.

Little backstory. Starts with a question.

What is the most critical part of a quoting tool (tool for resellers to set discounts and margins and create quotations)? The calculations, right?
If one formula is incorrect in one use case, people lose real money. This is the component which the user should be able to trust 100%. Right?

Okay. So this team was supposed to create a calculation engine to support all these calculations. The development was done, and the system was given to the QA team. For the last two months, the QA team finds bugs and assigns those to the development team and the development team fix those and assigns it back to the QA team. But then the QA team realizes that something else has been broken, a different calculation.

Upon investigation, today, I found out that the developers did not write a single unit test for the entire engine. There are at least 2000 different test cases involving the formulas and the QA team was doing all of that manually.

Now, Our continuous integration tool mandates coverage of 75%. What the developer did was to write a dummy test case, so that the entire code was covered.

I really really really really really think that developers should write unit tests, and proper unit tests, for each of the code lines (or, “logical blocks of code”) they write.

boss: someone fix these it's not working *3 problems highlighted on screenshot*

problem 1: something went wrong when updating the data, i fixed it in a minute
problem 2: not our problem, send an email
problem 3: wait isn't this the task *boss* handles?

First "computer" : Electronika BK. Had some fun with table software and some basic

first X86 : Intel 80286 with wooping 1MB of ram and 40 MB hard drive.

First fun experiance :

Me : "I'm gonna clean folders"
Me : "What are these files on the c: ? I'll move them into a folder"
(Youknow like io.sys, autoexec.bat)
Reboots :
Computer : "Please insert a boot drive"
Me : "The what now?"
Needed some help to fix it.
At least I learnt how boot loader works and wrote my own small thingy in asm

Huh? GitHub just added an empty column to my project with an empty item I can't remove, reloading doesn't fix it.

( ་ − ་ ) 'You can't see this item'

I will keep this short. I fucking hate Windows 11. There is nothing I like about it after over four weeks of having its fuckery drip down everything I do on my laptop like radioactive maple syrup. None of my apps from Windows 10 work. I google troubleshooting and I'm not going to go through 10 hacks to solve a problem created by Microsoft. The screen moves all over the place for no reason. I hate it. Not as much as I hated Mac, but I'm going to revert back to Windows 10 if I can. I don't wish to separate my laptop screen from my laptop keyboard again. The only person I know who can fix it tried to steal a hundred and twenty bucks from me. Thank you for reading this rant I'm living a charmed life otherwise, but snipping tool just fucked up and I'm fucking fed up. Peace out.

Is there a name for the phenomenon whereby you iteratively modify code to try to fix a bug, with no apparent result, and then realize it's an entirely different part of the code causing the issue, but the parts you were modifying actually did need modifying too?

Never trust organizations who claim to have adopted the agile mindset, saying they use SAFe or Scrum or w\e, unless the teams themselves say that they have full autonomy for the release process. Because the upper management is not agile. Especially in older organizations. Typically they are the ones who will have the final say if teams don't have autonomy.

As a consultant, I joined a team on an organization who says that they're using SAFe. "Scaled Agile Framework". There is absolutely nothing agile in that horrid process.

Agility only happens at the team level. That's where we seem to improve the ways of working. Levels above, nothing happens.

I've been on this team for a year and we haven't released ANYTHING to customers. So those "release trains" are sitting on their stations.

Upper management refuses to green light a product release to customers that doesn't contain everything they want in it. In their mind they have the "perfect product" in mind and it needs to be perfect before it can be delivered to anyone. Fighting them on that idea has proven pointless. They don't understand what an agile mindset it. At the moment we are providing zero value to customers.

The MVP release date has been pushed for over 6 months now because nobody can come to a conclusion as to what needs to be finished before the release. They can't accept that we'd just release it now and keep iterating it. Everyone from the team members to the organization leader to their grandmother has to green light a release. People argue about minor nuances. Semantics. Big manual regression tests are needed to make sure that everything works. When a minor bug appears, PO's lose their minds and start calling out developers to investigate and fix it, and to set up more gateway checks that these things don't happen.

Organizations don't adapt the agile mindset very easily. Frustration sets in. Waterfall is forever.

Betty: Opens slack chat with Bob, Tony and me to ask me to fix some data for a client who messed the setup. (Don’t worry just building a script that takes 3 hours to complete and that I must supervise)

Betty: Opens slack chat with Ron, Tim and me to ask me to force the system I made to ignore protocol because someone else’s fuck up made it so she didn’t get the output she expected.

Betty: proceeds to ask for status updates constantly on both chats. She also disguises them as her asking what she can do to “get it across faster” knowing there’s jack shit I or anyone can do to make it go “faster”.

Also Betty, vomits BS about my micro service being unstable in front of managers even though it is it’s correctness what brought to light a bug fucking up thousands of records silently.

Go fuck yourself Betty ☺️ and fuck the client

More and more, I am getting frustrated/depressed from the attitude of our customers who complain, moan and get angry about issues in their infrastructure, while at the same time, refusing to pay more so the issues could be mitigated.

Like, a client's angry with us today for having one of their non-production-critical databases inaccessible for... Hmm... About 8 hours now (So a whole workday).

Like... I get it, some of your employees couldn't work with it offline, but like... What the hell do we do? You keep data from as far back as several years ago in there, without partitioning, without exports, in a mix of innodb and myisam, so when the DB crashes, and its replication has to be reset from zero, reimporting all the data takes hours upon hours, and importing .sql files just takes time.

Or another client who got angry when their app fell out of the internet, cuz one of their myisam-based log tables crashed, and had to be repaired, with data spanning several years back, meaning it took hours to fix...

The more I work with these "basic" and "simple" infrastructure designs that is *not* redundant, or HA, the more I wonder -- How do the big names out there do it? How do you design systems with fault tolerance so a single DB table crash doesn't lead to the whole app getting inaccessible?

We have... One, exactly one, client, who uses MariaDB with Gallera, and that cluster is *amazing*, it just keeps chugging along, without a care in the world. But it cost them quite a lot, as they had to buy 3 DB servers, instead of 1...

That moment when you find a function called with faulty arguments or a referece mistaken and fix it and code actually works now aaaaand you wake up.. i started to dream about the same code cause i keep rewriting it for different reasons.. what a life

So I'm working on something and I get a message from the business owner saying that something is missing in production, we need to fix this quickly. Turns out it's some missing images. We have a placeholder in place, so no harm done, users just see a placeholder image there and it's a minor thing. (These images cannot be uploaded by the user, because no one had the time to complete a feature for it. So business people bother developers.)

Anyway, the business owner escalates this into a request to add those images quickly to the repo and push it to production asap. I said that it can be done, because it is very low risk, but as I've seen this kind of "going straight to the developer with my problems" behavior before, I wanted to bring the issue to a broader audience. Then the product owner (PO) steps in and asks why wasn't he involved in this. Then other PO's step into the conversation as well, because they manage the process to prioritize and handle bug reports. Then someone posts the bug and error prioritization assessment and what do you know, judging the issue from that scale, it ranks as being "low".

"But what do we tell the customers?!". Oh, fuck you! It's one customer! Not everything can be prioritized as critical! If we stop work to fix every single thing we get feedback on without doing a proper assessment and prioritization, that's all we will be doing.

This is why PO's exist. They will push the breaks and assess the situation, then prioritize the work accordingly.

New excuse for not doing work:
"taking data"

My dev system is tied up taking data for an hour to store data for a replay system I intend to build. I need raw data from the system. I need to know how much data I will collect in an hour as well. I also need to collect said data. For about an hour. This data will be fed back into the system sans the data collection. This will allow me to replay whole jobs that our field techs perform. If they get me data I can reprocess the data and fix my positioning algorithms. Kinda fun!

So the excuses are now up to 2:
"compiling"
and
"taking data"

Just finished a defect fix, and turns out there's another unrelated but harder bug in the codebase. We are in the last few days of the release.

I told my tech leads that it was an unrelated problem and showed them in detail. I told them I was starting work on it now, but there should probably be a new defect entered for it.

They actually said for me to piggyback the old defect and let this go under the radar. Actually laughed it off like it was no big deal. Like WTF! I don't think its very unreasonable for devs to want separate defects for separate bugs. They're worried about analytics and shit, but I'm the one left holding the rug, looking like I spent a week on a trivial defect.

My day couldn't start in a worse day.

We are having a demo this week and I worked yesterday after hours to get the product ready. Tested everything and we were all set for the demo content.

Today we installed the new version with my fixes and nothing worked. Today's version should be the golden version to prep the demo! Obviously everyone starts looking at me as to why nothing works both worried and eager to help. But I got so stressed I just wanted to dig a hole.
Luckily after going through the logs a colleague of mine pieced together something he heard about another colleague on another location we have submitted a fix (without telling our location) that f**ked up the whole system.

Luckily we reverted it since the system was better without it and got it stable again but after all of that I had to go rest because until we found the answer I was starting to think I couldn't get one thing right. I think it was the most stressful moment in 5+ years on this job