Storytime!

Manager: Hey fullstackchris, the maps widget on our app stopped working recently...

Dev: (Skeptical, little did he know) Sigh... probably didn't raise quota or something stupid... Logs on to google cloud console to check it out...

Google Dashboard: Your bill.... $5,197 (!!!!!!) Payment method declined (you think?!)

Dev: 😱 WTF!?!?!! (Calls managers) Uh, we have HUGE problem, charges for $5000+ in our google account, did you guys remove the quota limits or not see any limit reached warnings!?

Managers: Uh, we didn't even know that an API could cost money, besides, we never check that email account!

Dev: 🤦‍♂️ yeah obviously you get charged, especially when there have literally been millions of requests. Anyway, the bigger question is where or how our key got leaked. Somewhat started hammering one of the google APIs with one of our keys (Proceeds to hunt for usages of said API key in the codebase)

Dev: (sweating 😰) did I expose an API key somewhere? Man, I hope it's not my fault...

Terminal: grep results in, CMS codebase!

Dev: ah, what do we have here, app.config, seems fine.... wait, why did they expose it to a PUBLIC endpoint?!

Long story short:

The previous consulting goons put our Angular CMS JSON config on a publicly accessible endpoint.

WITH A GOOGLE MAPS API KEY.

JUST CHILLING IN PLAINTEXT.

Though I'm relieved it wasn't my fault, my faith in humanity is still somewhat diminished. 🤷‍♂️

Oh, and it's only Monday. 😎

Cheers!

An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..

She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.

The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.

AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...

A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me

Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"

She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.

And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...

Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.

He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.

Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!

Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.

all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.

the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:

Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.

Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.

Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?

Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends

Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.

After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.

colleague in a planning meeting: so now it's Easter, which in Germany is public holidays on friday and monday
PM: i as a manager would find it great if there weren't any public holidays

yeah not surprised, but thank fuck you're not the one to decide that... some people are trying to have a life^^

Have a great weekend!
I hope your code behaves the same on Monday as it did on Friday.

so am 23 , with a work experience of 1.5 years (1 year at b2c cumpany, 6 months at current b2b company) and am kinda uncomfortable with the comfort in my job.

tldr : my company has a work heaven and a very boring product , the nature of tasks makes me feel like a glorified QA and i am kinda feeling like wasting my 20s. should i quit?

my last company used to keep me on toes. they had this massive multi module fast evolving android app on which i used to work. it was made with latest techs from 2021/+ and combined with a lot of modules/architecture, it was very overwhelming at first.
i used to work 12+ hours everyday , not because of any pressure ( the pressure to execute fast was there, but the team was very helpful and understanding) , but because i liked to learn and explore.
at the end of my journey with them, i left with a lot of good memories with helpful seniors, a great knowledge of android dev and an unsatisfactory amount of bank balance.

my current company is... i guess ok. the work here is awkward. the product is made of either legacy techs(large verbose java project in which even concurrency or image downloading classses are written in project and not any 3rd party library) or techs that i don't find interesting ( unity , react native , flutter, etc projects that are just wrapper over native sdks)

its heen 6 months here and the growth for me here seems weird.

- i mean i can say i got to work on different techs but 1) am not becoming a master or anything useful in those techs . and 2) i already know a frontend framework i.e native android which i like and was growing in it.

- most tickets are client side tasks : client is unable to use some feature/product > i ask for their logs / app and weather they followed the docs/sample > they say we did> i check the logs which indicates that they didn't > i inform them the step and they are back to being happy. but most of the times i am also clueless and get to the conclusions after discussing with my seniors

- the non client tasks that i got were also not very interesting : one ticket was included testing out all sdks and 3rd party integrations and make a csv of what features are available in each . another was about creating a cicd pipeline that was kinda okay. but now its done so am guessing am back to making it useful by adding more unit tests :/

- however the work environment is very good i guess? daily scrum happens on MWF only, i get literally 0 meetings if not urgent on TT . apart from sat/sun and general festivals, the 3rd monday of every month is off . plus i get 2 additional paid leaves every month that gets can be carry forwarded for 11 months. in a nutshell, i feel like being the son of a school principal in school.

- pay is good , i switched here for an almost 100% hike

i have tried to utilise my time in learning different tech stacks (working on android all the time feels like unworthy) but i am not getting a kick. the satisfaction that i got in writing code that is immediately being used by 5 million people gave me the kicker to learn more and more.. but now am just feeling like being on a extended vacation where i have to sometimes wash utensils.

should i start interviewing with other companies? it's not like my current company is some well established corporate to always keep less worthy resources like me around. i am definitely worth getting the axe on the next possible layoffs