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1 week ago my boss forced me to ship a new feature on friday afternoon. The feature broke our application for about 2 hours. After this I bought him this cup.
9 -
[Thursday afternoon on a call...]
Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?
Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.
[Two hours later...]
Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?
Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.
Client: So when are you going to get it done?
Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.
Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.
Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.
By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.
If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.
I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.
Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.
I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.
[Next morning...]
Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.
-----
Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.7 -
I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.
Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.
It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...
I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.
Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.
Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.
He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.
I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.
I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.
If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.8 -
🎉 As of today, I can proudly count myself among the members of the "Killed Prod on A Friday Afternoon" club. 🎉16
-
Had a meeting with my boss earlier. Got yelled at for:
a) Working on a high-priority, externally-committed ticket (digit separators) that i was 85% done with on the Friday afternoon before my vacation instead of jumping to a lower-priority screwdriver ticket that just came in. Even though my boss agreed with me that what I did was exactly what I should have done, it's still bad because I was apparently rude to product by not doing as they asked?
b) Taking too long on that digit separator ticket that amounts to following a gigantic mess of convoluted spaghetti and making a few small changes, and making sure it doesn't break the world because it's all so fucking convoluted and fragile as hell. Let's not even mention my 4-10 hours of mandatory useless meetings every week.
c) Missing something that wasn't even listed in that same ticket -- somehow my fault? -- so I very obviously didn't test my work. Even though specs all passed and QA also tested and signed off on it as working and complete. Clearly half-assed and untested. Product keeps promising/planning UATs and then skipping them, and then has the audacity to complain about it.
d) Not recovering fast enough from burnout and daily mental breakdowns. I can still barely get out of bed and you want me to be super productive? Got it. Guess what? I'm being amazingly productive for my mental health. But my boss, Mr. Happy-go-lucky, thinks depression is dropping your icecream cone on your clean kitchen table, and this three-ton pile of spaghetti is "maybe a little messy, I guess."
So I need to somehow "regain the confidence" of both him and product because I'm taking awhile on difficult tickets (surprise), while having these ridiculous breakdowns (surprise), and because I don't fix things that aren't even listed in the fucking tickets (fucking surprise) -- and worse, that the lack of information is somehow entirely. my. fault. (surprise fucking surprise)
GOD I HATE THESE PEOPLE.15 -
Today was bad day.
- only had 3 hours of sleep
- 1.5h exam in the morning
- work in the afternoon until 8pm
- 1 drive crashed in a RAID5 array
- wasted hours of data copying
- my hands and arms got really dirty from all that nasty trump-face-colored dust in the server room
- nothing new in the west
- I have to get up in 4 hours again to start a new copying task
- I only knew it was friday today because the devRant meme game was reaching the weekly peak
- lists can save lives
- good night 😴2 -
We just deployed a new version of our app on a friday afternoon and all developers are taking the next week off. Wish us luck! 😂6
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I'm a bad influence.
It's been a tradition for me to keep a bottle of 'desk whiskey' buried in a drawer at work. A couple weeks ago, I started inviting cube mates over for a drink on Fridays as five pm rolled around.
Soon one of them brought in a bottle of scotch. Then another.
Started observing the afternoon drink on days other than Friday, more folks got involved...
Now the CTO talks about "Whiskey O' Clock" daily.
🍺5 -
Ok, some @#$#!!@ at my company set the WordPress cache directory to "/" on a Linux server, some other plugin triggered the cache clear and the Apache user was the owner of almost all the WordPress directories of several MU installations, this all happened on a Friday afternoon.2
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"Why do you think we should delay launching the new site?"
Because it's late afternoon on a Friday.
"So? What does it matter?"
Here's a bunch of good reasons.
"Nah let's do it today anyways."3 -
I recently joined this big MNC after shutting down my own startup. I was trying to automate their build process properly. They were currently using grunt and I favor gulp, so I offered to replace the build process with gulp and manage it properly.
I was almost done with it in development environment and QA was being done for production.
In the meantime I was trying to fix some random bug in a chrome extension backend. I pushed some minor changes to production which was not going to affect the main site. That was in the afternoon.
This Friday my senior rushed to me. It was like he ran six floors to reach me. He asked, did you push the new build system to production, I refused. He then went to the computer nearby and opened the code.
It was Friday and I was about to leave. But being a good developer, I asked what's the problem. He told me that one complete module is down and the developers responsible for them left for the day already and are unreachable.
I worked on that module multiple times last month, so I offered my help. He agreed and we get to work.
The problem was in the Angular front end. So we immediately knew that the build process is screwed. I accidentally kept the gulp process open for anyone, so I immediately rebuilt using grunt and deployed again, but to no success.
Then I carefully analyzed all the commits to the module to find out that I was the one who pushed the change last. That was the chrome extention. I quickly reverted the changes and deployed and the module was live again. The senior asked, how did you do that? I told the truth.
He was surprised that how come that change affect the complete site too. We identified it after an hour. It was the grunt task which includes all the files from that particular module, including chrome extension in the build process.
He mailed the QA team to put Gulp in increased priority and approved the more structural changes, including more scrutiny before deployment and backup builds.
The module was down for more than 5 hours and we got to know only after the client used it for their own process. I was supposed to be fired for this. But instead everyone appreciated my efforts to fix things.
I guess I am in a good company 😉4 -
End of second week at a new job. Found what I thought was a bug and wanting to impress I fixed it. The dev reviewing my code had just started a week before me so he also had no idea what was going on. It went live Friday afternoon.
Come back Monday morning and turns out I completely broke everything and nobody could use the site all weekend. I thought I was done for sure. Was shitting myself all day waiting for the call.
TURNS OUT NOBODY EVEN NOTICED4 -
Some dude in upper management: We hear you. We have too many meetings, it's not healthy. From now on we'll have meeting free Friday morning!!!
And then all meetings on Friday morning are re-scheduled on Friday afternoon, or Thursday afternoon.
Yeah this really works, genius! -
Trying to exit a bash script with 'halt'
on a friday afternoon
ran w/ root
on a internal prod-vm
which I did not had the permissions to turn on again4 -
So we're hiring for a new junior dev and for the most part it's been going great! We have some promising candidates and I am so glad to finally have a new dev on the team!
However, I would like to take a moment and offer a few suggestions to the people who wish to work for this great and illustrious company:
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE APPLY FOR THE JOB USING THE METHOD INDICATED IN THE AD. Please use our fancy, top-of-the-line, whiz-bang, cloud-based "talent acquisition" system that we paid way too much money for. I promise you, it's easy! Please don't send in your application by email, mail, telephone, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, telegram or carrier pigeon. But most importantly...
FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS BEAUTIFUL IN THIS WORLD DO NOT SHOW UP AT OUR OFFICE UNANNOUNCED RESUME-IN-HAND. Believe it or not I do have an actual job that I spend my day doing! If I'm not in a meeting or at lunch or working from home, the best possible scenario is that you'll get 30 seconds of awkward small talk and be pointed to our whiz-bang, top-of-the-line "talent acquisition" system which you should have used in the first place (you did read the ad, right?). And at this point whatever you do...
DO NOT DEMAND AN ON-THE-SPOT INTERVIEW WHEN YOU SHOW UP UNANNOUNCED TO OUR OFFICE! Like, really? Do you think that you've wowed me so with your 30 seconds of awkward small talk that clearly I cannot wait to see what you will do with an entire hour? Look, I prepare for my interviews. I research you, your previous employers, your school and the hobbies you list on your resume. I check out your GitHub and LinkedIn. I may even Google your name! If that is all in order, I try to hassle some people into sitting in with me, find a time that works for everyone, and hope that there is a meeting room available. I'm not going to interview you at reception at 4pm on a Friday afternoon.
Please submit your application through our whiz-bang, top-of-the-line online "talent acquisition" system. Once I figure out how to log in, I promise I will spend an evening and read through all your cover letters with the utmost care. If you seem OK, you'll get an interview. There aren't that many developers in this town.7 -
Thank you sooooo much for giving me a list of six tutorial videos you expect me to record by tomorrow, before I leave the company. It shouldn't be too hard, you say, having never ever gone through any of the processes before. Oh, and this is in addition to the big video tutorial which you asked for this afternoon that you expect by Friday morning. Not to mention the eight separate projects I still need to write documentation for. Oh, and this all would have been much smoother if this company would have given me time to work out all this documentation earlier instead of waiting until after I turned in my two weeks to take documentation seriously.
I guess I'll be lucky if I only have to deal with these things tomorrow. But given your penchant for pulling me off my main projects to deal with bullshit tangents, I bet that ain't going to happen. And I bet you're still going to flood me with calls on Monday morning, as I start my brand new job.2 -
What kind of polite answer should I give to a client who visited us on Friday afternoon (29 Dec) and expected us to present him the finished website on Monday (1 Jan)?
// 1st Jan is public holiday and we made ourselves clear to every client that our office is closed on both Saturday and Sunday8 -
So Friday afternoon is always deployment time at my company. No sure why, but it always fucks us.
Anyways, last Friday, we had this lovely deployment that was missing a key piece. On Wednesday I had tested it, sent out an email(with screenshots) saying "yo, whoever wrote this, this feature is all fucked up." Management said they would handle it.
The response email. 1(out of 20) defects I sent in were not a defect but my error. No further response, so I assume the rest were being looked into.
In a call with bossman, my manager states that the feature is fixed, so I go to check it quickly before the deployment(on Friday).
THERE IS NO FUCKING CODE CHECK-IN. THE DEV BASTARD JUST SAID THAT MY USECASE WAS WRONG, SO MY ENTIRE EMAIL WAS INVALID.
I am currently working on Saturday, as the other guy refuses to see the problem! It is blatant, and I got 3 other people to reproduce to prove I am not crazy!
On top of that, the code makes me want to vomit! I write bad code. This is like a 3rd grader who doesn't know code copy-pasted from stack overflow! There is literally if(A) then B else if(!A) then B! And a for loop which does some shit, and the line after it closes has a second for loop that iterates over the same unaltered set! Why?! On top of that, the second for loop loops until "i" is equal to length-1, then does something! Why loop???
The smartest part of him ran down his Mama's leg when it saw the DNA dad was contributing!
Don't know who is the culprit, and if you happen to see this, I am pissed. I am working on Saturday because you can't check your code or you lied on your resume to get this job, as you are not qualified! Fuck you!15 -
This one is more...puzzling than anything else.
We had a consultant come in, a young guy recently out of school. He completed his basic onboarding stuff, got along okay with everyone, etc., but was quiet and kept to himself.
At the end of his first week, we were heading out the door on Friday afternoon, and someone offhandedly said to him “see you next week” or something benign like that. He responded with “yeah we’ll see,” which was...odd.
And then he completely disappeared – we never saw him again.
Okay, so he just decided the job wasn’t for him and quit, right? What’s so strange about that?
Well, for one, the company technically owed him a paycheck for the week, but they couldn’t reach him despite multiple attempts. They eventually left a message and said if you want to get paid, come in and pick up your check. He never did.
But not only that, he *abandoned his car* at the office! On the Friday that he left, he apparently got a ride or a taxi home, and then he just never came back in to get his car. The company eventually had to tow it.
I just would love to know the backstory here. Why would someone go through the trouble to apply for a job, interview, accept the position, work for a week – and then quit without getting paid and leave their car behind??5 -
May i ask for help dear fellow devRanters?
@aureliagbrl suffered a deep depression and pressure from her family, the cause is exceptionally simple yet very crucial; so here's the story :
Every week, in friday after the last class she have to go home to fulfill her family wish to gather around and will come back to her dorm in Sunday. her home is more than 1.5 hour from University. recently one class in Wednesday moved out to Saturday Noon for some reason this cause her to go home in Saturday afternoon, yet her family doesn't care if it means she have to wake up 3am in Monday, to get back alone to catch up with class. her family just want to gather around longer, that's it, no exception. According to her this is so frustrating and exhausting. so the condition now is Tomorrow Morning (Monday) there will be a Live Coding Exam. she isn't prepared, her only wish was to get back on Sunday instead of Monday to Study. her family discard her wish entirely. this make her so deeply depressed and i can't even talk to her, she starting to mumbling about quitting college, and etc, etc.
We all know how bad it is to burnt out right ? and we want our fellow developers get out from it and a good shape. My wish is simple from you guys, i wish you can mention her in comment and cheer her up.
Thank You
here is her cheerful photo.
35 -
A support request came in at 4:30 this afternoon, I logged onto the server somewhat pissed off that there was a support request at this time on a Friday.
I checked the logs and noticed 500 errors coming from our integration parter after a little log checking and with glee I declared "not my fucking problem!" I replied to the customer and ccd our partner. Have fun bitches, next time deploy your new version when we fucking agreed!
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Fuck our new project manager.
Literally all she does in her time is schedule meetings for others and send us emails stating that X needs to be done by date or why are we delayed with Y. Then she even manages to completely screw us with the meetings she schedules.
Today I woke up to seeing a beautiful gapless column of colorful rectangles in my dairy.... for today. And last time I saw this Monday it only had 2.5 hours of meetings!!
Now a lot of us from our team had the Friday afternoon off so it may be that she did this beautiful piece of artwork during that time, in which case she could somewhat rightfully say that we should have taken a look at it. But we actually have a convention to only schedule planning meetings for Mondays which these fucking aren't and even if she hadn't known this, who the fuck schedules a ton of meetings to Monday?! from a Friday afternoon?!?!
By the way the new pretty pink and orange meetings I have today are about actually important topics in between which I would normally appreciate to grab a tea or at least use the fucking restroom. Officially I only have a 45 minute lunch break all day.
Oh and naturally she sets up the meetings as organiser so that we can only suggest her new times and can't change it on our own.
But naturally PM lady never actually attends the meetings because she wouldn't understand shit. So when my fav female colleague, Sammy and I joined our 11am meeting, the first thing Sammy said - well after I greeted her by "wtf" - is to just leave the call on while we grab brunch.
So here I am sitting in the close by park with my brunch and thought I could use the now extended lunch break time efficiently by ranting my ass of and asking you guys why the fuck such people like our PM get paid.5 -
Going live on Friday afternoon.
- no way, too many critical bugs! - I said
- we will - the Key account manager said.
Friday is here, still many critical bugs, I was right, it's impossible.
The Key account manager just dropped all functionalities with critical bugs and tricked the customer into thinking it's ok.
So we go live.
He was right, we can.
Oh yeah.6 -
When I was a graduate I often had to do proof of concepts and one had to be done by the weekend, I'd only been given it on the Wednesday. After a few sleepless nights I had it working or so I thought. On the Friday afternoon the CTO had a look at it and spotted a bug, he told me about it and I stayed in the office until about 10 when I finally managed to get some kind of fix in place. I emailed him told him I thought but was working and shouldn't happen again.
A few hours later no response I get a phone call from him screaming, shouting and swearing calling me useless and a waste of space etc. Etc. To the point I logged in desperately trying to fix the issue in a very hastily written integration and ended up having quite a major panic attack woke up on the floor and immediately went back to work. On the Saturday morning one of the senior Devs logged in and managed to fix it in the database and everything went fine in the end.
I went into work on Monday fully expecting to be fired from the way the CTO was speaking to me, I went to my line manager at the time and he just said don't worry. I left it in his
hands and things went back to normal. That call put a pretty serious dent in my confidence for years, but I learned a few valuable lessons which I stick to today.
Never work on serious shit after 6, use a second mobile for work which is turned off at 5 o'clock, properly test all fixes and always ALWAYS have someone in between graduates and senior management because honestly they can't handle the shit that's flung from above.1 -
Never update prod stuff on a Friday afternoon.
After the team lunch.
With cheese fondue and white wine.1 -
Well i was between jobs at the time, looking for something, anything to fill in the black hole being created in my wallet.
I applied online though this company’s website and within 20 minutes was on a phone interview setting up a face to face, this was Monday afternoon.
I went in on the Wednesday morning with the manager, no cv, no resume, no examples of work, we talked, did a couple of brain teaser questions and Friday morning I had the job 😂
I have never put so little effort into getting a job before but it was all a sham, the workload and requirements this job constantly sets out to kill me with are godly.
3 years later I’m still alive ( somehow ), and no blood has been shed.... yet. -
You thought real fear is deploying to production friday afternoon?
Hah nope.
Real fear is forgetting to flock(); a public toilet door while doing a dump();1 -
Not myself but friend of mine. Early 2000s working at a large university. Top notch office PCs for the time, best internet connection in the country.
He discovers this "Bittorrent" program. Meh, just another file sharing thing... but who cares, it's 2003-ish so everyone downloads shit from the internet.
Installs it on his office PC, because its university so no one cares.
Friday afternoon, he starts download of his favourite music album (some hard to get live version or something), then goes off into the weekend, computer is left running as always.
Download is finished after an hour or so, then his Bittorrent client starts seeding. Lots of people want this album. Bittorrent adapts to bandwith and when your connection is good you get upvoted in the network and everyone is connecting to you.
Monday comes, my friend arrives back at his desk, bit late because he slept in and its university so no one cares.
Suddenly realises many missed calls on his desk phone. Calls back, it's from the IT department.
Friend: "You have called me? What can I do for you?"
IT Guy (screaming): "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING??? YOUR PC IS CAUSING 50% OF THE UNIVERSITY'S INTERNET TRAFFIC.!!!!"
Friend: "Whops."
IT Guy (hysterical): "WHATEVER YOU ARE RUNNING STOP IT NOW!!!!"
Friend: *stops Bittorrend client, enjoys his favourite album*
Lucky him, it's a university, so in the end no one cared.4 -
Colleague while reviewing my latest commit.
Him: Hey, RemusWasTaken, why did you leave this debug log in here?
Me: That function won't work unless I leave that line exactly there.
Him: It can't stay, come here so we can fix it.
Three hours of debugging later, this Friday afternoon.
Him: Okay, I give up. Let's leave it there for now.
Me: I did the same thing yesterday. Time well spent.
Nodejs is weird sometimes, or we are incompetent devs.5 -
--Typical Wednesday Afternoon--
Me: "Have you finished the homework?"
Her: "Nah, I'm close! I'll be done before the test on Friday."
Teacher: "Here's three more assignments I need done before your test to prove understanding."
Her:
1 -
DONT do production stuff on friday afternoon. This friday evening we had an issue on production and just wanted to do a quick fix. The fix resulted in a ddos attack that we accidentally started on our servers in an IoT project. We contacted all customers' devices and asked them for response at the same time. Funny thing is that the devices are programmed to retry if a request fails until it is successful. We ended up with 4 hours downtime on production, servers were running again at 11pm.4
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So it's a damn sunny Friday afternoon, perfect for a motherfucking picnic or whatever..
And I'm at the fucking office trying to solve a facebook share api related bug while some motherfuckers are having a roof party less than a block away!!
Fuck this shit, fuck you mark and fuck your devs.2 -
Is it weird that I avoid forced socializing in my office? On mondays in the mornings we have a breakfast where essentially people gather (its a small gathering with 3 founders 1 cto and 3 employees), they have some pastries and juice.
And then they are talking about some bullshit for one hour.
For me personally monday mornings are for coffee and contemplation. I dont want to listen how boring their weekend was and try to impress them with my boring weekend. All that interaction feels so fake shallow and politically correct.
Dont get me wrong I care about my colleagues and what goes on in their life, but this forced monday morning and forced friday afternoon 1 hour gatherings are sooo draining and useless for me. I feel that only couple people are actually open during them and others are never sharing about their life, so esentially that gathering becomes an interrogation of 2-3ppl and topic revolves about them.
Gosh its draining. Gonna “be late” tomorrow again bcs I dont care. I would rather come in and go straight to work.
Having a beer after working means 100 times for me than that shallow and pretentious forced socializing that these guys are pushing so hard. Almost feels like micromanagement on personal level.5 -
So last week I really fucked up
I had this new implementation that was supposedly to be integrating smoothly into the rest of the service. It depended on a serialized model made by a data scientist. I test it in local, in QA environment: no problem.
So, Friday, 4pm, I decide to deploy to production. I check once from the app: the service throw an error. Panic attack, my chief is at my desk, we triy to understand what went wrong. I make calls with cUrls: no problem. Everything seems fine. I recheck from the app again: no problem.
We dedice to let it in prod, as the feature work. I go get some beers with the guys, to celebrate the deploy.
Fast-forward the next morning, 11am, my phone ring: it's a colleague of my chief. "Please check Slack, a client is trying to use the feature, it's broken"
FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!
Panic attack again. I go to the computer, check the errors: two types of errors. One I can fix, the other from a missing package on the machine that the data guy used.
Needless to say, I had a fairly good weekend.
Lessons learned:
- make sure Dev, QA and Prod are exactly the same (use Ansible or Container)
- never deploy on a Friday afternoon if you don't have a quick way to revert1 -
TLDR: Just had a "I am god" moment because something worked on the first try.
Been working on hooking into and modifying a plugin's central function and related output for almost two weeks now. The documentation is garbage and the source code is ... fine, I guess.
I had been working on getting the filter & display working on a form with sample data I'd put together. I finally got the desired result before I left on Friday, but had the sample selectors hardcoded in.
Within a couple of hours this morning, after fiddling around with pulling the needed data dynamically, I navigated to and checked out the function on the intended page for the very first time since starting the project and IT FUCKING WORKED RIGHT AWAY.
I let out a forceful "yussss" under my breath and stood up with my fists in the air. Nobody noticed. But at least I get to show my manager the fully functioning thing this afternoon instead of the hard-coded sample-only I had when he checked in with me this morning.1 -
*Assigns coworker as reviewer for a PR*
*Reviewer comments on something he thinks should be changed*
*Reviewer realizes I went home as it is Friday afternoon*
*Reviewer is super impatient, and chooses to push the change himself. He then accepts the PR (his own code) , merges, and makes a release*
*Team lead starts yelling since an obvious bug made it to prod - Literally white frontpage*
*Reviewer blames me, since the bug comes from my PR*
... Thanks, former employee. F*cking thanks. I know you got fired for being a d*ck, but I hope karma kicks you in the butt for the rest of your life..
And ps. to you: Don't blame coworkers when you can check the history.
F*ck some people..4 -
I just found a vulnerability in my companies software.
Anyone who can edit a specific config file could implant some SQL there, which would later be executed by another (unknowing) user from within the software.
The software in question is B2B and has a server-client model, but with the client directly connecting to the database for most operations - but what you can do should be regulated by the software. With this cute little exploit I managed to drop a table from my test environment - or worse: I could manipulate data, so when you realize it it's too late to simply restore a DB backup because there might have been small changes for who knows how long. If someone was to use this maliciously the damages could be easily several million Euros for some of our customers (think about a few hundred thousand orders per day being deleted/changed).
It could also potentially be used for data exfiltration by changing protection flags, though if we're talking industry espionage they would probably find other ways and exploit the OS or DB directly, given that this attack requires specific knowledge of the software. Also we don't promise to safely store your crabby patty recipe (or other super secret secrets).
The good thing is that an attack would only possible for someone with both write access to that file and insider knowledge (though that can be gained by user of the software fairly easily with some knowledge of SQL).
Well, so much for logging off early on Friday.5 -
In today's episode of kidding on SystemD, we have a surprise guest star appearance - Apache Foundation HTTPD server, or as we in the Debian ecosystem call it, the Apache webserver!
So, imagine a situation like this - Its friday afternoon, you have just migrated a bunch of web domains under a new, up to date, system. Everything works just fine, until... You try to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.
Such a mundane task, done more than a thousand times already... Yet... No matter what you do, nothing works. Apache just returns a HTTP status code 403 - Forbidden.
Of course, what many folk would think of first when it came to a 403 error is - Ooooh, a permission issue somewhere in the directory structure!
So you check it... And re-check it to make sure... And even switch over to the user the webserver runs under, yet... You can access the challenge just fine, what the hell!
So you go deeper... And enable the most verbose level of logging apache is capable of - Trace8. That tells you... Not a whole lot more... Apparently, the webserver was unable to find file specified? But... Its right there, you can see it!
So you go another step deeper and start tracing the process' system calls to see exactly where it calls stat/lstat on the file, and you see that it... Calls lstat and... It... Returns -1? What the hell#2!
So, you compile a custom binary that calls lstat on the first argument given and prints out everything it returns... And... It works fine!
Until now, I chose to omit one important detail that might have given away the issue to the more knowledgeable right away. Our webservers have the URL /.well-known/acme-challenge/, used for ACME challenges, aliased somewhere else on the filesystem - To /tmp/challenges.
See the issue already?
Some *bleep* over at the Debian Package Maintainer group decided that Apache could save very sensitive data into /tmp, so, it would be for the best if they changed something that worked for decades, and enabled a SystemD service unit option "PrivateTmp" for the webserver, by default.
What it does is that, anytime a process started with this option enabled writes to /tmp/*, the call gets hijacked or something, and actually makes the write to a private /tmp/something/tmp/ directory, where something... Appeared as a completely random name, with the "apache2.service" glued at the end.
That was also the only reason why I managed fix this issue - On the umpteenth time of checking the directory structure, I noticed a "systemd-private-foobarbas-apache2.service-cookie42" directory there... That contained nothing but a "tmp" directory with 777 as its permission, owned by the process' user and group.
Overriding that unit file option finally fixed the issue completely.
I have just one question - Why? Why change something that worked for decades? I understand that, in case you save something into /tmp, it may be read by 3rd parties or programs, but I am of the opinion that, if you did that, its only and only your fault if you wrote sensitive data into the temporary directory.
And as far as I am aware, by default, Apache does not actually write anything even remotely sensitive into /tmp, so...
Why. WHY!
I wasted 4 hours of my life debugging this! Only to find out its just another SystemD-enabled "feature" now!
And as much as I love kidding on SystemD, this time, I see it more as a fault of the package maintainers, because... I found no default apache2/httpd service file in the apache repo mirror... So...8 -
Friday afternoon, the week's work is finished, and I'm ahead of schedule.
An email arrives for another project.. "URGENT yaddayadda". The dickheads where it came from have taken weeks to react, and now it's urgent. Yeah, fuck you assholes, ideally with a smoothing iron.
On the upside, I'm not addressed directly, and that project isn't my task. But boss could make it mine in no time, and I think he would.
I don't even open the email, nobody has seen it anyway yet, AND I GO HOME! :-)3 -
Lets fix this bug in production on a Friday afternoon. (did that three times on the same project). Never went wrong :)3
-
Somebody made a mistake
Nobody reviewed that shitty shit
And thus
Things are now broken
Which is great for a friday afternoon, off course 😂1 -
Monday
pm: anon we need this by Friday I will get send you the requirements.
Tuesday
Pm no show.
Wednesday afternoon
Pm: here are the requirements anon(literally only one sentence) wtf
Thrusday
Pm: can I test it anon.1 -
I hate my company more and more everyday. 1. Release on Friday afternoon. 2. I should be home but that bitch decided that she wants to change something now, because she forgot to do that before. Of course, this shit cannot wait until Monday.4
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CSS is magic.
CSS is a katana blade.
CSS is a tiny bristle scratching Gorilla Glass Victus. It shouldn't exist, yet it does.
CSS is a plastic-based sticker that you peel off, and it leaves no residue behind.
CSS is a summer breeze of 2004 that you felt while riding longboards with your girlfriend.
CSS is plugging a '86 Les Paul into a Marshall JCM800 and switching to a dirty channel.
CSS is diving into a freshly made bed after an evening shower.
CSS is getting your winter coat and finding a hundred dollar bill in the pocket.
CSS is the front right burner.
CSS is stomping onto a Big Muff pedal before you do solo.
CSS is David Gilmour inviting you for lunch.
CSS is cracking open a cold bottle of Perrier.
CSS is falling asleep in the attic hugging your loved one and watching the stars.
CSS is a glass of just below the room temperature cold pressed orange juice after you run 5k.
CSS is stepping on a scale and seeing yet another pound of body weight gone.
CSS is a supportive, beautiful person saying they love you just after you escaped an abusive relationship.
CSS is putting on your cold white gold Rolex in the Friday afternoon before meeting with friends at the bar.
CSS is discovering your old Sansa Clip+ and booting RockBox.
CSS is giving cunnilingus to Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
CSS is finally feeling empathy to another person after two years of therapy and realizing you're alive.
CSS saying "unleaded" after you pull up to the gas station in your vintage 911.
CSS is your ex-boss apologizing to you after they hit the rock bottom.
CSS is smelling her hair in the back seat of a Maybach taxi.
CSS is giving presents to your grandparents.
CSS is hitting bong while watching Home Alone with your friends after New Year's Eve.
CSS is getting a new job that pays 3x your old one and removing your old job's Jira bookmark from a bookmarks bar.5 -
Working on this bug for a day. Frustrated Friday afternoon. Decided to explain to my manager and senior why I can't find a fix and while explaining it to them, I eventually figured out the problem and fixed it.
I just realized I used my manager and senior as rubber ducks. -
So we called out our project manager and tech leader, who sent out an email last Friday to our bosses and stakeholders a project schedule - which we never knew about until we saw it in our inboxes - that showed we had already completed development and would go on to UAT testing by next week.
Except if you look at our agile board we have 3 weeks of dev tasks left and a couple more for testing and QA. Then our dev environment is shit because the deployment steps in TeamCity were not properly done by Dev Ops. And we still don't have a UAT environment created, much less tested out. And the project manager is about to go on a one-month vacation. Great!
So we replied back with all the aforementioned information (less the swearing and name-calling) and sent it out to the same recipients, including our bosses and stakeholders.
That was such a fun Friday afternoon. -
PM: Heyy team x, could we have a suuper quick 90 sec tops call?
B*tch, if the call is actually 1.5m there is no way we need that call. We can actually respond to your question in text quicker.
But I know you. You can't fool me that it would actually be 90 seconds.
It's also fucking Friday afternoon.
fml2 -
So it's Friday afternoon just before a bank holiday weekend here I'm the UK, perfect time for our production database to go TITSUP (total inability to support usual performance), life sucks then you die folks....2
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When it’s Friday afternoon and you don’t want to work anymore after a loooong week in your web agency...
Caption : your communication is dickhead ? We have a team of cocks !
3 -
Thursday afternoon. Client gives us the go to deploy the latest release to production.
Friday late afternoon; my colleague - "wait, did we ever deploy"? Me - "uh, nope".
"Alright have a good weekend" -
How to impress PM:
1. Prepare a critical bug, that makes the frontend crash
2. Prepare a hotfix, that fixes the bug
3. Deploy bug on Friday afternoon
4. Wait until PM starts panicking
5. Deploy hotfix after 5 min
6. Get praise from PM5 -
Do you know how to spoil my weekend? Interview me on Friday afternoon for my dream position and tell me that "you'll let me know Monday latest".
Guess who couldn't mentally switch off over the weekend?4 -
Head of department is building a bitcoin rig with my manager friday afternoon in his office using tools from the IT one month after degrading me publicly and giving me an official warning in writing to respect working hours so cutting me off from my bonuses and promotions.1
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when the release date is may 31 and the client thought it's a good idea to request a bunch of new features and changes in friday afternoon :)
Tomorrow is gonna be a fun birthday... -
There is nothing better to code on a cool midsummer afternoon on a Friday with sour favorite music. It's just makes me happy!
1 -
>Friday afternoon
>Have to seperate list of json
>Two hours. Can't do it
>Clock off for weekend
>15 minutes later, realise what a complete fuckwit I am3 -
I'd been with the company for maybe two weeks, pushed some changes and updates to a client's site on a Friday afternoon as instructed by my boss, checked everything over and it's all fine.
Come Monday morning and this client is seriously miffed, not all of the changes had applied and the site was a mess all weekend. Turns out a bug with the caching plugin meant what we were getting in the office was different to outside.
Meetings were held and a new QA procedure was put in place. -
I once found a bug that I couldn't figure out from the code, so I started putting log statements that would print out the variables on screen (yes I have xDebug, but old habits die hard). Then the entire website didn't load anymore and eventually the entire container crashed.
It took me an hour to realize I was trying to var_dump an object from the ORM, resulting in a memory overload since there were like 20 related objects that recursively tried to load all the data in the database.
In my defense, it was friday afternoon... -
Client: Thank you for this and all your hard work we will review and get back to you EOP Friday before final submit.
Us: We have been working to a deadline and have actually finished early which meant that we would be able to submit on Friday, at the very least by the afternoon. One question...is this your time EOP Friday?
Client: Yes
Us: That'll be 2 in the morning here and a Saturday.2 -
!dev
Fucking hell, my phone (Nexus 5X) just died: I was browsing the web in Chrome, it suddenly hung, after a few seconds it turned off, and will not turn on at all now, it's just completely dead. FUCK!
I was going to pick up a used printer this afternoon, now I may not be able to because I can't contact the person to get their address. And if I could, I don't have Maps to find the way. FUCK!
On top of that, yesterday I got a call from the bank that my credit card was used in a fraudulent transaction so they had to cancel it, and send out a new one, which I will not have until Friday or Monday next. FUCK!6 -
Today, IT director blocked off a part of Friday afternoon on everyone's calendar as "focus time." WTF.6
-
Friday afternoon 5:00pm: everything works wonderfully fine, let's go home!!
Monday morning 9:30am: Let's do some more test on the latest code I have wr.... KABOOOOM!!! -
PM: we have plenty of time to develop this app. The client is so slow in providing designs and specifications that it took them 2 months just to give me this lousy mockup where they copy/pasted UI element directly from Photoshop. Btw, i have a meeting this afternoon with them :)
ME: ok. since it's Friday, monday you will update me :)
[Fast forward the weekend]
PM: where the hell is the App ? the client told me we have less than one month to deliver it. why didn't you provide a fully functional pixel perfect prototype yet ? Why don't you communicate with me ?
ME: :|1 -
Thursday: Made an appointment with doctor for (painful because no anesthesia) outpatient procedure. Sent message to team slack saying appointment would interrupt part of my day.
Friday: Boss decides to launch website. Launched.
Saturday: Fixed many broken things.
Sunday: Fixed more broken things.
Monday morning: Texted team about fixing more broken things WHILE BEING OPERATED ON!!!!!!!!!
Monday afternoon and evening: STILL WORKING ON MORE BUG FIXES!!!!!!!5 -
It’s always fun when you are asked to push to production on a friday afternoon...Because the project managers and owners won’t have be the ones who have to fix something on a friday night or weekend 🤷♂️
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Always test your code, especially if you did a commit to master on Friday afternoon. Otherwise, you will end up deleting thousands of vms.
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Drinking beer. Yes, seriously. I especially remember one Friday afternoon in the late 90s when I was still a trainee at a major Swedish telecom company. I had been working on a test application which gave visual output in the shape of dots teeming around on the screen, each one of which represented a network node. Then my colleagues and I had an afterwork at a nearby bar. After a few pints, when the others went home, I returned to the office and, in an inspired mood, made a few modifications to the test app so that you from each client could control one of the dots with the keyboard, basically turning the app into a multiplayer game. Over time I improved it further with some sprites and the possibility to shoot at each other. We had great fun while performing tests :D
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Friday: I have done a lot of work this week... Should take rest in the weekend
Saturday: Who needs rest? Let's learn new hobbies, watch movies, play games and have fun🤩
Sunday: I think I will take some rest today...But that series is so cool...
Monday Morning: Why did not I take sufficient rest the whole weekend 🥱🤦🏽♂️
Monday Afternoon: Slept for two hours in the office time😑2 -
It was in May and I had a recruiter call be up about an interview for a dev position. I went to the interview, thought it went all right and awaited feedback.
Nothing came... I called the agency a few days later and he said he'd get me something back by end of the week.
Still nothing. I called again and he was all "oh sorry, I forgot, and I'll get it tomorrow".
You can probably guess; nothing. A couple weeks pass so by now I'm pretty confident I don't have the job, so I continue looking.
Then early afternoon on a Friday in November that agency calls back:
Agency: "Hi, how are you?"
Me: "Hey, I'm fine"
Agency: "Excellent, remember that interview in May for that company?"
Me: "Yeah, why have they go another position available?"
Agency: "Better, you start work with them on Monday"
It took the guy 6 months to get back, nothing from him or the company. Then he calls up out of the blue. No idea what he would be done had I already got a job.
I actually did accept, still work there now 4 years later, for now. -
Managers that somehow leave projects until the last minute, and then get shitty when you're too busy to do them on the day they're due... Best of all, when it's 4:45pm on a Friday afternoon.
Every. Friday. Afternoon.1 -
When I was 12 i had a Friday afternoon course, as they called it, in QBasic. Nothing fancy but I learned that 'I wanted to work with computers'.
10 years later I got my first programming job. It was with the old Cognos Powerhouse language on OpenVMS. Does anyone remember that?
I had that job for 4 years and it took me another 10 (and several other IT jobs) before I started to learn Java, which I do now for 2 years.
That's my career story in a tiny nutshell 😎 -
PM comes into my office: "Hey, if <client> asks about his edits, just tell him they're scheduled for this week."
me: "I thought they were scheduled for this week, I thought that you were currently in a meeting to get final specs so you could tell me what needed changed."
PM: "Yeah, he wants to take the plugin from 5 steps down to 3, we told him it wouldn't be a problem and we would have it done this week."
me: "Ok, there are limitations as far as what I can cut out of the process, his tag line when he started as a client was '5 easy steps' and I built something that did what he wanted in 5 steps. Changing things this late in the game is not simple, I'm talking a minimum 6 hours of work."
PM: "Well I tried to make sure that what he wanted was possible but I didn't have a developer in the meeting. It shouldn't change anything that much."
He ended up scheduling a meeting with me and the designer to go over the edits Thursday afternoon. So I will have the new specifications which I said would be a minimum 6 hours of work and I will be given ~10 hours in which to do it. I sure hope nothing unexpected pops up while I'm working on this.
I'm also the only developer this week (and technically speaking I'm junior) since our senior dev wrecked his car over the weekend and isn't planning on being in all week. I'm the only computer literate person in the office of 50 or so, which means that if there is any kind of tech issue I'm ripped away from my desk for 'emergency help'. I have two other sites to get ready for client approval meetings by Friday afternoon and if the clients approve I will be launching their sites that afternoon as well.
The sign on my door currently says "Error 500: unable to handle your request" I need something to throw at these people.4 -
Today I released the next versions two of my company's Android projects. Today was a good day.
Also, releasing on a Friday afternoon FTW! (they are beta releases, so I'm good).1 -
Once I was working on a project that had a few complex implementations that needed to be done. So I got a colleague to get me a few Coronas from the staff bar on a Friday afternoon and did a little overtime. For some reason I was extremely focused, my mind was rushing, and I managed to do some pretty good implementations as well. I guess beer can make you smarter.
-
Story time!
I spend few hours last Friday debugging piece of code I wrote. It was based on working code, also authored by me. It was stuff for sending some data to transmitter, all in Python, nothing horrible or tough.
I wasn't able to understand, why older piece of code works (e.g. data are transmitted) and newer don't even when function bodies were same (I was desperate, so I copied-pasted my own working function there). Both function were in same file, bot syntactically correct, newer one was definitely running but still no transmigration from there.
And then it came, enlightenment at Friday afternoon. I forgot to actually push my prepared packet to radio. Older one was encapsulated in transmitter function and newer one wasn't. I was so focused on possible error in packet creation I forgot to send it?! Seriously?! Unfortunately yes.
Moral of the story? When debugging something, try step back (or up in my case) for a while. -
Monday AM. Instead of building images in the backend i'll just make them in HTML and use a headless browser to screenshot them ! Sweet. Doable in a day and saves the rest of my week !
Friday afternoon. Crashes, browser failure, zombie processes, intermittent failure, docker failure with headless browser. Still not working well.
Why am I such a dumb fuck ? -
Damn I left work on Friday afternoon with an unsolved problem. I actually solved it on my way home but forgot to make a note so this is now the only thing I can think of. What a beautiful weekend.
-
max - min != center.
(min + max) * 0.5 does though...
I astound myself sometimes on Friday afternoons...2 -
Have you ever considered switching to IT support/help desk?
I mean, sometimes I try to analyze my own situation from a 3rd person perspective and I realize I could have a pretty much stressless job with still enough money to live a normal life.
I have a BSc and MSc(soon to have) in CS, with focus on AI/ML. I've always been a geek with a problem solving attitude, that's why I got into computers in the first place. And now I'm pondering if I should just try an IT Support position, it's the kind of things I used to do as a teenager when a classmate had a network/computer problem, it doesn't even feel like a job to me. I could call it a day, get home at 5/6pm, and spend time on my personal projects (software, infosec) with a fresh mind, going to bed (and sleep) knowing that the next day would be a nice one. No clients wanting a new feature that you gotta implement and push on a production server friday afternoon because your ceo(who is also a pseudo proj manager) just said:"Yes, we can", while you watch the technical debt rising like amazon's stocks.
Maybe this is just the burnout talking, I don't know. Maybe I should just try being a software engineer outside of Uni in the first place, and only then start pondering.
Maybe a sysadmin position...
Have a nice day12 -
Well it's Friday afternoon so nothing quite like writing up some data definition & handover docs to help wind down for the weekend.
-
Friday afternoon and inbox zero. Time to kick back and enjoy the weekend!
Forward Email to Trello is a life saver when it comes to managing my task list. Once a week my manager and I resort my personal Trello backlog. -
Remove a property from an array to spend an hour trying to work out why something isn't running to notice that there was a count later on the array that required a specific number of elements so the bit I was expecting to execute never executed.
Was looking for ages as to why.
Friday afternoon code brain. -
Made commit changes on a Friday afternoon. Coworker makes changes over labor day weekend and things aren't in place. I'm just annoyed by the need to chase these bugs down, not so much my coworker. Fuckin hell.
-
Friday afternoon, customer sends in "your system hasn't worked since this morning, why aren't you fixing it!". To my personal email, and I've been *busy*! How dumb do you need to be to not:
- ...send emails to our support email instead of my personal email?
- ...describe WHAT is not working?
- ...be courteous to the only people with the ability to fix your problem? -
Two architectures to support, on one everything went smoothly, other one I spend since Monday till yesterday 2am to make it work. Now time for half-day meeting and if it compiles in the meantime, I can release today before leaving work. Sounds like a solid plan, Friday afternoon release. What could go wrong? And I hoped it will work nicelly on Monday, latest Tuesday.
-
So, I broke the lab environment friday afternoon. My boss said no to worry about it until this morning. Today he sends out an email saying we need the lab for a demo today. It is a good thing i only broke one of the labs...the lab only I am using. So now im sitting here waiting fir the lab to be fixed because I cant work without it.
-
Be me:
Said on Friday the API was looking unstable.
Get a text on Sunday afternoon that SHTF.
Guess what got made a priority on Tuesday? -
I don't think there's a better feeling than completing the rest of your assigned issues on a Friday afternoon and being able to take a relaxing weekend!1
-
You know it's Friday afternoon when your interface is broken because you tried to set the type to the string 'string' instead of the keyword string.
Interface IEnvironment {
name: 'string',
...
} -
need units to test new release built, says they'll be ready by Thursday afternoon. it's Friday they'll be ready Monday. yeah cause it's not like we have a deadline or anything.
-
Friday afternoon.
Close to finish a Task that took quite some time and research.
Loose connection to Server.Try some stuff.. Eh, okay restart.
Can't login. Windows account is banned. WTF?
Now I have to spend the whole weekend with this close to be solved problem in my head.. -
Pushing ahead with a Friday arvo release; what could go wrong?
(Arvo = afternoon for the non-Australians here)
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