Boss: I need you to start on this new project, how long will it take?

Me: well, hard to say with no specs whatsoever...

Boss: just your best guess

Me: 4 to 6 month I guess?

Boss: so 3 months it is. When can you start?

Me: no specs, sir...and I said 4 to 6

Boss: the specs are almost ready, I know you can simplify it

Me: ...

Boss: just start with the basic infrastructure already

(4 months later)

Boss: here you are the specs, they might change a little in behaviour and design, but all the main stuff is here

(Hands me a A3 with a total of 21 pictures in InDesign)

Me: o....Kay. what happens when I click here?

Boss: oh, we should still talk about the app workflow, I'll get you updated

(2 weeks and 16 total rewrites of the "specs" later)

Boss: you told me it was a 2 months job, why aren't you finished yet? We must deploy in 3 weeks!

Me: ...

Angry customer (😤): Your software is still too slow!!!
Me (🙄): It's running good all in all. Let's divide this into smaller aspects. Which steps do you need to perform faster?
😤: Every step needs to be as fast as google!
🙄: But our software ain't google, not even to mention your infrastructure
😤: Everything needs to run in 2 seconds!!!
🙄: You aren't helping in any way. We need something to grasp...
😤: It's all your fault.

📴

"Let's go for the low hanging fruit first" 🤢

"I think we should do some market research" 🤢

"Yeah that is also on my radar" 🤢

OKAY YOU FUCKING CUNT, STOP WITH YOUR PATRONIZING SHIT.

FIRST OF ALL, ARE YOU REALLY SO SMALL MINDED THAT YOU CAN'T REACH ANY HIGHER? THIS TREE IS FUCKING RAW AMD BARE ON THE BOTTOM, WITH YOUR FILTHY CLAWS GRASPING FOR ALL THOSE EASY NARROW FIXES.

SECONDLY, A FUCKING EMAIL SURVEY WITH BIASED QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY 3 HOBOS IS NOT BLOODY MARKET RESEARCH.

THIRDLY, IF THIS NUCLEAR ICBM OF AN INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEM IS ON YOUR RADAR, MAYBE STOP FONDLING YOUR SWEATY BALLS FOR A MINUTE AND TAKE ACTION.

"Okay lets peel this onion, so we hit the ground running" 😩🤢😞

NO, LET'S NOT "HIT THE GROUND RUNNING", YOU'RE GOING TO FUCKING TRIP AND MESS UP YOUR FACE EVEN MORE. HOW ABOUT GET YOUR PILE OF SHIT IN ORDER FOR ONCE, PREPARE FOR A MEETING? HOW ABOUT THOUGHTFUL ACTION, SOME FEATURE DESIGN?

"No, just implement it quick and dirty" 🤢😡👿

OH YOU WANT IT QUICK AND DIRTY? IS THAT HOW YOU FUCK YOUR DAD AS WELL?

"Let's evaluate the fix in a few weeks. We really had good synergy here team" 🤢😫

YEAH SURE, LET'S EVALUATE THIS.... BUT LET'S EVALUATE IT RIGHT NOW: 😡

"Ahem....

1. You're always late for meetings.
2. After 6 months, you still barely know what we do as a company, you still don't know the teams, and you still don't know the product.
3. You do not listen to engineers flooding you with red flags, requiring time for a redesign to fix serious scaling issues.
4. Everything must be a quickfix, nothing is allowed to require thought, because you CAN ABSOLUTELY NOT think ahead for more than 30 seconds.

OH AND IF YOU EVER AGAIN COVER UP ONE OF YOUR MANY SHORTCOMINGS WITH THAT FUCKING SLIMEY DOUCHEBAG MANAGER VOCABULARY OF YOURS, LET'S SEE HOW MUCH SYNERGY YOU FEEL WHEN YOU'RE DEEPTHROATHING A CACTUS."

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

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

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

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

Me: "I'm a programmer"

Others: talks about linux
Others: search algorithms!
Others: service infrastructure
Others: memory optimization
Others: encryption

Me: "I'm a front end web developer"

Others: complex services
Others: strong user form validation
Others: lazy loading
Others: SEO

Me: "fucking, I make shit look pretty alright"

We build a backup infrastructure at work to make sure that clients can restore their files and databases themselves when something gets fucked up.

We also have step by step tutorial on how to do this.

Every fucking day we get requests to restore backups.

Mostly used reason is "I'm a technical so I won't understand it".
With all due respect, if you don't understand this and keep asking without even trying, please don't host with us.
Because, if you did as I asked and actually read through the entire article, you would.
In case you're wondering, anytime one of us asks what part they don't understand, that question is simply ignored and they pushing for us restoring it anyways continues.

Sometimes they get angry and want to talk to someone higher up or start complaining that they're paying loads of money already and that it would just take us a second anyways.

If you would read the fucking tutorial/manual instead of trying to eat out your mother's badly shaved pussy and hopefully choke on it while you're at it, you wouldn't come asking us for it.
If you genuinely don't understand this article, feel free to ask but also provide us with cocksucking feedback.

Why do you think you have the right anyways to ask us to do it for free? We maintain the backup infrastructure which definitely isn't cheap but we do it so that you, pubic sniffing weazel, can do this shit on your fucking own.

You're entitled to ask us for help but not for asking us to restore your bullshit for free every freaking time.

Tip: give your parents some condoms. Because that way they hopefully won't reproduce again, we don't need more of you in this universe.

Biggest scaling challenge I've faced?

Around 2006~2007 the business was in double-digit growth thanks to the eCommerce boom and we were struggling to keep up with the demand.

Upper IT management being more hardware focused and always threw more hardware at the problem. At its worst, we had over 25 web servers (back then, those physical tall-rectangle boxes..no rack system yet) and corresponding SQL server for each (replicated from our main sql server)

Then business boomed again and projected the need for 40 servers (20 web servers, 20 sql servers) over the next 5 years. Hardware+software costs (they were going to have to tear down a wall in order to expand the server room) were going to be in the $$ millions.

Even though we were making money, the folks spending it didn't seem to care, but I knew this trajectory was not sustainable, so I started utilizing (this was 2007) WCF services and Microsoft's caching framework Velocity. Started out small, product lookup data (description, price, the simple stuff) and within a month, I was able to demonstrate the web site could scale with less than half of our current hardware infrastructure.

After many political battles (I've ranted about a few of those), the $$ won and even with the current load, we were able to scale back to 5 web servers and 2 sql servers. When the business increased in the double-digits again, and again...we were still the same hardware for almost 5 years. We only had to add another service server when the international side of the business started taking off.

Challenge wasn't the scaling issue, the challenge was dealing with individuals who resisted change.

Inspired by @h3ll, this is a combination of current and former coworkers:

Awkward Wizard:
This guy has the social skills of a microwaved dog turd. He is a genius, but working with him is about as uncomfortable as sticking a grill skewer in your eye and twisting it repeatedly until close of business. He laughs at inappropriate times, and every time he does, an unborn child tears its own ears off. He explains things in a way that only himself and Satan understand, then talks to you like you're a child when you don't follow his logic. He is the guy you hide when the CEO is around. His code is immaculate.

Backstab McGillacutty:
This bowl of bile is the son of a bitch that takes credit for everybody else's work. When you do something good, he was miraculously involved, but when you mess up, this twat is the dicknose that brings it up in retrospective and calls you out by name to the boss. You can usually find these guys talking shit about the CTO, until the boss quits. Then they buddy up with the CTO and become a Joel Osteen-esque evangelist for everything the CTO wants in a shitty, underhanded attempt to climb the ladder. Fuck this guy.

Professor Fuckwaffle:
This coworker used to teach Computer Science classes. Their resume is amazing, and they can speak to the most complex of design principles. This is the shitstain that you hire because of their skill and knowledge only to find out that ol' fuckwaffle can't apply the shit they spout to save their wretched lives. You'll spend more time listening to fuckwaffle lecture than you will reviewing their code (because they cant fucking write any!) You know the saying, those who can, do, and those who can't, teach? Yeah, that shit was written for Fuckwaffle.

Last but not least:
Scrumdumb:
This guy isn't even a coder. This guy is worse than the the scum you pour out of the bottom of a slow-cooker that you forgot to wash last time you made chicken. He's a non-technical PM. You know the type, right? He usually says "cloud infrastructure," "paradigm," "algorithm," "SDLC," etc but has no grasp of any of them. He often opens his dumpster to spout off something like "You can just create a new class for that" while talking about HTML. I won't waste any more breath on Scrumdumb, he already creates enough work for me.

We are transferring our infrastructure to Google cloud and Docker. Last week one of our frontend developers tell me:
But it works without Docker!

My team handles infrastructure deployment and automation in the cloud for our company, so we don't exactly develop applications ourselves, but we're responsible for building deployment pipelines, provisioning cloud resources, automating their deployments, etc.

I've ranted about this before, but it fits the weekly rant so I'll do it again.

Someone deployed an autoscaling application into our production AWS account, but they set the maximum instance count to 300. The account limit was less than that. So, of course, their application gets stuck and starts scaling out infinitely. Two hundred new servers spun up in an hour before hitting the limit and then throwing errors all over the place. They send me a ticket and I login to AWS to investigate. Not only have they broken their own application, but they've also made it impossible to deploy anything else into prod. Every other autoscaling group is now unable to scale out at all. We had to submit an emergency limit increase request to AWS, spent thousands of dollars on those stupidly-large instances, and yelled at the dev team responsible. Two weeks later, THEY INCREASED THE MAX COUNT TO 500 AND IT HAPPENED AGAIN!

And the whole thing happened because a database filled up the hard drive, so it would spin up a new server, whose hard drive would be full already and thus spin up a new server, and so on into infinity.

Thats probably the only WTF moment that resulted in me actually saying "WTF?!" out loud to the person responsible, but I've had others. One dev team had their code logging to a location they couldn't access, so we got daily requests for two weeks to download and email log files to them. Another dev team refused to believe their server was crashing due to their bad code even after we showed them the logs that demonstrated their application had a massive memory leak. Another team arbitrarily decided that they were going to deploy their code at 4 AM on a Saturday and they wanted a member of my team to be available in case something went wrong. We aren't 24/7 support. We aren't even weekend support. Or any support, technically. Another team told us we had one day to do three weeks' worth of work to deploy their application because they had set a hard deadline and then didn't tell us about it until the day before. We gave them a flat "No" for that request.

I could probably keep going, but you get the gist of it.

This is a really helpful diagram of how the Linux infrastructure is laid out :)

Yeees! Got my contract for the time after my apprenticeship. 4 days/week and a shitload of 💰, from my point of view. 36k € per year.

Additionally I got the position I wanted, I'm responsible for the whole infrastructure and the conversion of our app from Winforms to WPF.

I'M HAPPY AS F*** xD

I live in the terminal. I write lots of scripts (Shell, Python, node js) to automate tasks that would take hours to do by my teammates. Recently, I started automating everything that I put my hands on using Ansile: from pointing DNS server to continuons deployment, provisionning a fully customized infrastructure on the cloud using just a single command!

This is because automation gives you super power, the feeling that what you do help tl increase the productivity, reduce bugs etc.. Simply, once mastered, automation is ausome!

We've got a team of around 20 developers and the most junior of them all is a interesting specimen.

The kind of person who thinks they a 'expert' in anything and everything and is constantly trying to school our senior developers who have 20+ years experience behind them.

The sort of person that spends 15 seconds googling something he has never heard of before, but now that he has skimmed 1 page on Google would classify himself as a 'expert' in said topic.

He comes into my office yesterday and proclaims that it has been decided by himself that he no longer wants to be a developer anymore and wants to do Ops/Infrastructure, then starts rambling on about how he is a Kubernetes expert.

I asked what experience he had with Kubernetes and his response was "I watched a webinar they did last night" to which I asked if he had ever actually used anything to do with Kubernetes in his life.

"No, but I'll watch a few YouTube videos and will then be more than qualified" he says

Followed by him telling me that we'll be moving all of our current Docker Swarm clusters into Kubernetes.

This was news to me (I'm head of infrastructure and operations)

I needed a good giggle, so I asked why we would get rid of our exisiting Docker infrastructure that's got a 100% uptime over the past 2 years and has worked without failure. It's truely been a dream.

He says "Because it's shiny and cool and better"

The nest afternoon he comes to me and says "When I move everything into Kubernetes I am going to convert everything into micro services"

He says that he watched a YouTube video the night before on microservices and has decided that it's what we need to use for a particular project.

(It's a simple php website that gets 100 hits per day)

Hopefully his boss will notice that he is producing no output soon. Don't want to tell the manager that the guy he hired delivers no work and lives in a fantasy land.

"your not touching the infrastructure. Ever"

Fuck my life...

Okay, so I’m working on a web app with a small group... the app is basically a lead generator for new business in another country. We just need contact details cause they’re a fucker to buy.

Step 1: prototype to the investors, working with the ceo to make this thing look shiny AF.

Goes well as fuck.

CEO: “when can we get this out?”

Me: “it’s basically done mate, get your guys to look at it and we can talk about marketing”

Que a shower of 10 or so bellends with senior in their title going into a room and coming out with:

Bellends: “so on this page we want the user to confirm and accept the contract”

Me: “cool, makes some sense, that’s what it’s already doing.”

Bellends: “afterwards we want to show them the price and have them put in their banking details.”

Me: “Wait, you what when?”

Bellends: “Yeah, well Jenny says we should have as few clicks as possible to get to the final stage and have the customer accept.”

Me: “Jenny’s on fucking crack, moving the contract formation phase to after the contract acceptance stage is not an option”

Bellends: “Oh it’s okay, Andy in legal said that would be okay”

Me: “Andy’s a fucking moron, tell him that online contract formation laws were updated 2014/2015 and you can’t do that anymore”

Bellends: “No, andy’s legal, surely he knows”

Bellends: “We want all of this above the fold”

Me: “OH FUCKING SUCK A DICK YOU ABSOLUTE BAND OF FUCKWADS... which one of you, which one hasn’t looked at a website this millennia!?”

Needless to say I ignored all their shit, got the lead generator out and told the CEO those ten people are certifiably fucking useless.

Bonus round; recent, but “it has to be on internal infrastructure”

“Why? It’s a mobile app sending rest calls to a third party saas.”

“It just has to, we have this thing called the private cloud and w”

“Wait... you what son, priv 🤦🏼‍♂️ private what mate?”

“Private cloud”

“You... you mean a server rack?”

“Nah we spent £2mn on it, it’s brilliant”

“Hahahaha you fucking dick, you blew £2mn on server infra with fuckall to put on it!?”

“No, no it’s the private cloud”

“Fucking idiot, aye son, where’s the fucking bean stalk you prick!?”

“It has to go on internal infr”

“Shut up, that won’t work”

Scheduled devRant maintenance - I'm going to be upgrading some infrastructure later and there will be some downtime, probably about 15 minutes, around 9pm EDT. Apologies for the inconvenience and devRant disruption :) It will help with working towards an even more stable service in the future.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions!

Oh boy, my fellow devRanters, I just signed an 4 digit monthly salary (that's a lot in Lithuania) job contract, I'm a future Unix infrastructure engineer :o

As per original concept of ranting, it's been almost two months since I wrote for the stickers and didn't get a reply >:(

Never gonna happen:

* Port our API to graphql. Or even make it just vaguely rest-compliant. Or even just vaguely consistent.
* Migrate from mysql to postgres. Or any sane database.
* Switch codebase from PHP to... well, anything else.
* Teach coworkers to not commit passwords, API keys, etc.
* Teach coworkers to write serious commit messages instead of emoji spam
* Get a silent work environment.
* Get my office to serve better snacks than fermented quinoa spinach bars and raw goat milk kale smoothies
* Find an open source IDE with good framework magic support. Jetbrains, I'll give you my left testicle if you join the light side of the force.
* Buy 2x3 equally sized displays. I'm using 6, but they're various sizes/resolutions.
* Master Rust.
* Finish building my house. I completely replaced the roof, but still have to dig out a cellar (to hide my dead coworkers).
* Repair/replace the foundation of my house (I think Rust is easier)
* Get slim and muscular.

Realistically:

* Get a comfortable salary increase, focus more on platform infrastructure, data design, coaching
* Get fat(ter). Eating, sitting, gaming, coding and sleeping are my hobbies after all.
* Save up for the inevitable mental breakdown-induced retirement.

Writing more infrastructure than product.

Look, my application requests and transforms data from a single external API endpoint, it's just one GET request...

But I made an intelligent response caching middleware to prevent downtime when the parent API goes down, I made mocks and tests for everything, the documentation is directly generated from the code and automatically hosted for every git branch using hooks, responses are translated into JSONschema notation which automatically generate integration tests on commit, and the transformations are set up as a modular collection of composable higher order lenses!

Boss: Please use less amphetamine.

C'mon people! Spread the word! "The cloud" is not "just someone elses computer", it's a completely different way to compute!

I'm so tired of the oversimplifications done trying to explain the consept. The massive amount of work, sweat and tears put into the orchestration, automation and abstraction layers to deliver truly elastic, scalable and self healing infrastructure, applications and services deserves a fuckload more respect than "just someone elses computer"!

Hosting and time-sharing have been with us almost as long as we have had computers (mainframes etc), but dismissing the effort of thousands upon thousands of devs and ops people to make systems robust and automated enough to literally being able to throw a wrench in the engine any time during production and not have the systems suffer is fucking insane!

The whole reason the term "cloud" is so fitting is not just because it was coined from the cloud-shape used in technical and non-technical drawings and illustrations symbolising the internet, but also because of the illusion of magic it gives the end-user not being able to see "whats inside the music box".

So the Microsoft rage continues as I tell a story about my father, the company that he works for and that companies whole IT structure.

So my father is forced to use Windows because, get this (he hates W10 with a burning passion, like me).... Office and other crap. Cool cool
Seems like Libreoffice isn't enough for you.... YES IT FUCKING IS. MY DAD GAVE ME EXAMPLE DOCUMENTS FROM HIS WORK AND GUESS WHAT, THEY ALL OPEN WITHOUT A FUCKING PROBLEM. But OK, maybe not all employees are familiar with Libreoffice/Openoffice, JUST KIDDING THEY ARE SOME FUCKTARDS WHO WORK FOR THEIR COMPANY THAT DON'T KNOW HOW TO FILL OUT A FORM IN EXCEL (aka. PROBABLY NEVER USED AN COMPUTER IN THEIR LIFE/OFFICE SPACE AMNISH). Okay, some employees might be incapable, but their infrastructure might be alright.

IT RUNS ON MICROSOFT SQL AND DIVX (YES, FUCKING DIVX, CAUSE THAT MAKES SENSE) FROM..........2008.
At this point I just feel bad for them. Because there were no IT guys at the company (they didn't understand shit that I said half of the time). I've warned them that their infrastructure might have more holes than fucking swiss cheese. I see they value their data since the front door is a 60 kg one (that's 132 lb in retard units). And there's a 1.8 m fence around the building.

And they've told me that the parent company, which hosts the server also hosts for 100+ other companies around the world.

100+, you say. I'm legit scared for them right now.

So naturally, I've asked them if they have backups... they do, thank god.

But still they use 2008 shit in 2018 and expect it to be secure. Fun fact, logging into their server (which is an HTTP running on Windows Server...... 2008 (that hurts to say)) with a browser other than.... not Edge.... but IE, *drum roll* breaks it, since... it runs authetication dll's (YES FUCKING DLLS) on the host system. THOSE POOR MOTHERFUCKERS COULDN'T EVEN SETUP SERVER SIDE AUTHENTICATION. EVEN CHANGING THE PASSWORD REQUIRES A FUCKING SYSADMIN TO BE CONTACTED, OH YEA YOU CAN'T SINCE THERE ARE NONE.

GOOD DAY TO YOU <INSERT COMPANY>, SORRY BUT YOU'LL GET FUCKING OBLIRIATED IF SOMEBODY DECIDES TO HACK YOU.

In an alternate universe, devs live in their own country.

They make their own rules and dictate how much they are paid. They maintain the entire world’s infrastructure.

They don’t go to work, since their entire country is the workplace and guess what? Cold beers are free(a thank you from the beer company guys for coming up with all their inventory management systems)

Pizza is free too.

There is no government (laws are passed depending on upvotes on devRant )

No racism, sexism or any other ism ending words . Devs just code.

Oh, and the state police, preferably known as keyboard warriors patrol the streets and offenders are punished by limited internet speeds. 😂. It is said some actually commit suicide because of this unbearable punishment.

Fuck yeah they have coffee farms. That’s the only thing they don’t accept as *gratitude from other nations because those sons of bitches might fuck that up too.

And everyone drives teslas 😂

Okay I have to get back to work now. That multi universe travel machine won’t buy itself.

Hours spent on application development: 8
Hours spent on tackling shitty infrastructure: 48

A beautiful collage....

It's vacation for me for two weeks of which one week will be a vacation outside the country and one will be home-time.

Will work on redesigning my entire server 'infrastructure' and an automated website/openvpn/whateverthefuckiwanttodeployorwhatever system solely written in bash/shell scripting.

Partly because it's awesome to learn new Linux-related stuff and partly because I really want to have this functionality and would love to write it myself.

Also working on three side projects of which two will become a service and one will be released into the open :)

But, tomorrow will be dancing my ass off to quite some of my favourite producers :D

beginner coder: figures out how to write a feature

average coder: knows a few different ways to write a feature. but not quite sure on which one to use.

master coder: meditates before starting a project. closes his eyes to map out the entire infrastructure of the project.

god coder: gets paid ALOT of money to guide people on the right to do it.

Can someone please tell my boss / team that I am still in APPRENTICESHIP!!!

In the last few months I have been the only one who works for our second biggest client! On the paper an other guy is responsible but he does not know the project or the tech we use. But that's not all.

I also interviewed an external contractor (5x more salary),
introduced 8 more of them (technical and standards) [one of them in english, not my native language as you can see]
and I answered their question.
(Needless to say I get interrupted all the time)
Because of our unreliable infrastructure I get screamed at by the client and get calls after school from some coworker to talk him through fixing a bug.

Sorry for the long rant and all the english mistakes I made.
This had to get out!

PS Yes I have talked to my boss about it more than once, nothing changed

This happened a while back but thought it would be an interesting story.

So there is this guy, I'll call him Jack. Jack was a weirdo. He just graduated high school but thought of himself as very hot in terms of dev skills. He boasted lots of good programs, that are the best in industry, except they don't work (like the best proven file compressor, that just can't decompress anything because of some "bugs"). He also entered language holy wars quite actively, saying that Delphi is the best platform ever.

Aaanyway, a couple of years pass. Jack is now a student. Jack tries to make some money, so he talks to some guy, that offers him a "job" at the tax office, where he has to modernize the data infrastructure of the tax authorities. If you think this sounds very wrong, then you're 100% correct. But it gets better. After 2 months of work, the guy manages to do that. It's a simple CRUD application after all.

So everything works, but the guy who gave him this job refused to pay. He stalled and then just stopped answering the phone. Jack is now furious. So what he does, is publish the databases online, so everyone could see the income of every citizen. Authorities are in panic. They send the police to his door. They seize his computer and lock him up for a few days.

To sum it all up: Jack took up a job, without any contract, without any NDA, which is completely illegal in of itself, but he did that with the tax authority. And delivered the product before getting paid. And when he understood that he was owned, he published all online. He got bit back. The guy who gave him this job had no consequences for illegally hiring someone and not paying for their work.

Lesson: Don't be Jack

It's so annoying! One of the developers just started explaining to me some of the recent changes in the infrastructure. I made these changes! I know about them and can explain them better than he did. I tried telling him that I already know but he just wouldn't stop. It felt like he was mansplaining. I don't usually get that at work so it was weird and frustrating.

A colleague approached me today and said - "Why are we using Linux? Windows server is clearly better. We need to migrate our infrastructure"

I'm generally not someone who gets too caught up in opinion - but shut the fuck up. There is no way we're going to adopt Windows server because it has a GUI and you're too shit to learn how to use a console.

So today was the worst day of my whole (just started) career.

We have a huge client like 700k users. Two weeks ago we migrated all their services to our aws infrastructure. I basically did most of the work because I'm the most skilled in it (not sure anymore).

Today I discovered:
- Mail cron was configured the wrong way so 3000 emails where waiting to be sent.
- The elastic search service wasn't yet whitelisted so didn't work for two weeks.
- The cron which syncs data between production db en testing db only partly worked.

Just fucking end me. Makes me wonder what other things are broken. I still have a lot to learn... And I might have fucked their trust in me for a bit.

When your team has no time to address technical debt/infrastructure improvements but we need to make that square checkbox round immediately.

!dev
I am about to move into my own house. Yay. But every ISP I called is very insistent that there is no house there.
"Are you sure you entered the right building number? The entered house does not exist." Yes it does! And it has existed since 1912...
Stupid Germany with its stupidly bad internet infrastructure. I guess that's what you get for privatizing the network.

The face of confusion my boss made when I suggested the development of a simple "api" (one end point) to solve a particular issue we faced after improving our infrastructure made me realize I need to abandon this ship...

He really can't wrap his head around calling a URL and doing something on a server although that's what we do every fucking day...

~RANT
I started two months ago a new role in a new company.
Together with 3 colleagues I manage a HUGE OpenStack platform (I’m talking about more than 300 customers, many petabytes of data, dozens of compute nodes 😍).

On Friday night a well-known multinational had the GREAT idea to update the software of one of the core components of the platform (Neutron).
Obviously it all went wrong and customers started to call and open tickets, so even if it was already past midnight we’ve been all called to arms.
As a workaround we had to rebuild ALL the networks, detach all the ports and reattach them to the VMs, with all the errors that came with this kind of operations, such as failing to get an internal/external IP, fail to boot etcetera.

What amuses me is the fact that the above-mentioned multinational just asked for logs with no solution (except for the above workaround) until Monday morning.

It has been a good weekend, i talked with professionals from all over the world, in various languages, and worked multi-tasking with two different computers, with a third that was used just to share my screen and VPN for the management network.

During this weekend I virtually met all the possible colleagues that I will meet in this new role, and it was pretty funny to see how they handle stress. (Badly if you ask)

I’ve been woken up at 7:30 after falling asleep at 6:45, I’ve slept 17 hours in 5 days, haven’t taken a shower in 5 days (I know, it happens, I worked from home) but it was worth it.
Not only and merely for the money (overtime work), but mainly for the job itself.
I love to handle this HUGE infrastructures for now, even if I think they have many limitations and many components could have been written better.

The best thing about this weekend was to meet a group of people from all over the country and the world that worked non-stop from Friday night until Wednesday night to solve the situation.

All of them understood me when I asked them questions, and didn’t treat me like the [insert random]science nerd that I am.

I felt like in the movies, in front of three monitors, working from the comfort of my chair, in my underwear, eating as fast as I could because I was constantly in call with someone.

Apart from that, WHAT THE FUCK WENT THROUGH YOUR HEAD TO DEPLOY AN UPDATE ON FRIDAY NIGHT, YOU FUCKING PIECE OF adorable man???

WHY COULDN’T YOU WAIT UNTIL MONDAY??? NOBODY USES THOSE SERVICES AT NIGHT APART FROM THE SCHEDULED JOBS!!!!!

I HOPE YOU’LL HAVE A LONG AND PROSPER LIFE, FULL OF JOY AND HAPPINESS

Yesterday a colleague of mine told me that another colleague has done this in his web application for a subject:

For checking user and password, he did not query a database, but instead he checked information in a HIDDEN DIV in the html page.

Reason: "this way I don't lose my precious time".

I think of that and I'd like to punch him. People like him are the reason websites in Italy suck and my University web infrastructure sucks (he worked as intern on that).

My. God.

When you learn your project will be launched Monday in an email sent to the whole company, just before the weekend...

I'm not even kidding. No one on our team was consulted if the app was ready or not.

There was no infrastructure in place to even deploy the app. Everything had to be done in a hurry over the weekend to deploy something half baked, thanks to that idiot project manager who told his boss everything was ready.

Two colleagues ended up doing this work over the weekend, but looking back, if I was the one having to get something deployed over the weekend, I would have just refused and come back to work as usual on Monday and watch that idiot explain why it's not live.

The joys of being the sole developer and sysadmin of a service with hundreds of thousands of users.

Just spent a couple hours with my family. In that time half the infrastructure died and the service became unstable.

Best of all is that I seem to be the only one getting this so called "java.net.UnknownHostException: System error" exception.

Every year, my company organizes an internal seminar week for its engineers and developers. I helped plan it this year and, since I also ran a few sessions, was absolutely exhausted by the end of the week.

On Friday of that conference week (after I'd spent four hours in our engineering building), I come back to my desk to discover that a coworker managed to, single handedly, get our boss to agree to shortening our release cycle to one that, without dramatic infrastructure changes, would require about 8x the developer overhead than today's. ...The test cycle I am supposed to pick up in a month.

When asked about it, he said he was so full of energy, why wait for automaton? What better way to inspire us to improve than to switch right now? The worst that can happen is just a few bugs.

I love my job, but I can't stand this guy. 😒

Hello devRant, a question for you.

I'm looking to redisign/setup my server 'infrastructure'.

It'll exist out of:
7 vps's (6+gb ram/500gb+/100mbs up/down per vps)
2 dedicated servers running as virtualization servers. (16gb/4tb/1gbit up/down and another one but let's leave that one out for now because it's gonna take a shit ton of time to solve that clusterfuck)

One server will function as an entry point for all websites I run, multiple database servers and multiple backup ones.

Any advices/tips/ideas?

Just a very serious hobby thing :)

*looks for jobs in system administration*

For our client in $location we're looking for a Network and System Administrator ... to manage our local IT infrastructure (so far so good) ... that's Microsoft-based.

Fuck that company.

*looks further*

Requirements: deployment and maintenance of servers, backups and storage, updates, yada yada.. fine with me.
yOU wiLl mAiNtAiN WanBLowS sUrVaR sYsTeMs

Fuck that company too.

Does anyone here in Belgium even work with fucking Linux servers?! Or should I really relocate to the Netherlands to get something decent?!!

Has anyone ever donated a website and its maintenance/hosting to a charity?
There's a pet rescue/homing RSPCA centre near me and their website is terrible. I keep thinking about doing this for them.
Thoughts?

An important message:
PrOpErLy managing servers is HARD.

I get pissed off at customers with ZERO server knowledge who think they can manage their VPS. “Just get a control panel and a VPS” from some flashy provider that makes server management look way too easy.. Clicking around in their fancy control panel, until:

- they need help with their *self-managed* VPS;
- their email ends up in spam;
- they suffer from performance issues;
- they need to restore a backup;
- something breaks, because YES, things break

Way too little people are able to answer:

- when and how do you make backups?
- how do you monitor your servers and which services?
- how do you keep track of trend analysis?

Then I come by with necessary software. SNMP for trend analysis, Graphite for infrastructure health, Sensu for monitoring, Kibana, Ansible for configuration management..

Things that servers need but that customers have never even heard of.. because they can do everything in their control panel..

Until they come crying to me because it broke and they don’t even know how to get into SSH.

I think the ones to blame are VPS providers that tell the tale of how easy it is to install a control panel and never look at your server again.

Customers become responsible for something *business-critical*! Yet they don’t know how it works.

I've been fired today and somehow it was an relief :)
As I know that I am pretty much the only one who knows how the infrastructure works and I am the only one who actively tried to get the company to a better level of coding (tests, code reviews, proper deployment / continuous integration,...) It somehow feels like that gif.

interviewer: name something basic
me: your crappy ass bootstrap php5.4 website you call a “cloud data infrastructure”
interviewer: oh that’s very basic indeed

YOU FUCKING COCKSUCKERS!

Are you fucking serious? How it is possible that you, being a fucking teacher in a PRIVATE UNI, AREN'T ABLE TO FUCKING DEPLOY A .NET CORE WEB PAGE EVEN THOUGH I FUCKING WROTE YOU A PDF, LINKED TO MS DOCUMENTATION AND EVEN WENT TO TELL YOU HOW TO DO IT?

You fucking prick, and now you argue to your superiors that we aren't doing our job as expected... seriously? ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID SERIOUS?

I hope you choke on the turkey this christmas, you ignorant incompetent cheap slut... ha, you're not even cheap, because parents are paying THE SCHOOL to provide them with "supposed" better infrastructure, education than a public one, BUT YOU COME TO TELL ME I MUST CODE YOUR ANCIENT PAGE IN FUCKING ASPX WITH DOCUMENTATION DATED 4 YEARS AGO?

Yeez... seriously dude, level up or GTFO.

MAINTENANCE OF STACKOVERFLOW PLANNED
SHARE TO YOUR NEAREST DEV FRIENDS

Stackoverflow and its relative partners will be closed for two days due to maintenance, new design, and moving server infrastructure from United States to 1km below the Switzerland Alps for extra layers of security. This decision was made by the recent CloudFlare data leak.
Now our servers will be able to handle data leaks because even though the data was leaked, it will fill the empty places in the rocks resulting inaccessible from attackers.
Stackoverflow and its relative partners' maintenance estimated time is February 29 - 30. We will try to finish as fast as possible and bring you guys the best experience. If the maintenance delayes, we will tweet via @StackStatus or post details in our status blog.
Thank you for your support and have a happy day.
Best regards,
Stack Exchange team

So this is a rant about my country and especially my city: Berlin (Germany).
Germany is like a third world country when it comes to IT infrastructure. We have one of the slowest internet speeds in the whole EU. People are still afraid to pay with their card or phone. My people love their coins. While most of the other countries see the importance of the new technologies we still use mainly copper wire for internet. So why am I especially mad about Berlin? Google was planning to bring an innovation campus to our city. They wanted to establish a place for startups and technology. But the people from Berlin demonstrated against it extremely. They didn't want to have a company like Google in their city. I also am not a big fan of Google, but this would be such an important step to a better future for Germany. In a few years Germany will have a huge problem because we are so far behind the other countries. And it is so sad to see that seemingly no one cares about this.

This rant was brought to you by the worst internet in the whole EU

So apparently this guy has the infrastructure for the Linux kernel mailinglist archive sitting under his desk.

And then there was a power outage.
While he's on vacation.
Now, someone has to physically go there to enter a LUKS passphrase to let the system boot again... 🤔😂😂😂

Sometimes I don't understand people.

How to comply with GDPR on any website and web application:
- download the law and store it in some folder
- if you have money, pay a lawyer and a security consultant to write something about GDPR. Download reports and papers and store it in some folder
- Don't touch your code, nor your database nor your infrastructure. If you don't have anything encrypted, leave it like that.
- Write somewhere a popup that says: "we are fully compliant with GDPR". If you have still money left you can also buy such a popup.
- DONE.

I just blocked some of the top management from connecting to our WLAN because I was testing a verifing feature for said WiFi that kicks all devices not listed in the DB.
It happened while my boss/senior/guidance was trying to show them the advantages of a centrally managed infrastructure.
He covered my ass well and tried to sell it to them as proof of a secure solution, that unknown devices couldn't log in.
I feel like human trash right now, but that's what you get for testing in production.

My company is providing cloud infrastructure to our customers. For research purposes we are running a little openstack cloud in our laboratory datacenter were we can test stuff before implementing it in the productive environment.

Last week the manager asked me to shut down the cluster over night and only power on the servers when we need it. (about twice a week)

The reason: it produces too much heat.

My answer was: No.
First off thats not how cloud infrastructure works, and how about a proper climate control?

Sometimes i ask myself in which parallel universum our managers live 😑

We are a small size product based company. There was a change in management a year back and the new management decided to fire the entire engineering team one by one. I was hired as full time back-end developer (C++). Just after I joined they removed the last 2 engineers from the previous regime and handed over devops and Python API development to me as well.
There was no documentation for the main product which was a sophisticated piece of software. There were no comments in the code as well. I had to go through line by line (roughly 100,000 lines of code).
Then they decide to hire more devs.Turned out to be false hope. They hired interns who had no programming knowledge.
Now they got two clients who are interested in using the service. They lured them using empty promises. The product is not stable. The cloud infrastructure is not at all ready. The APIs are a mess. I don't know which one to work on.
Worst part is that there is no other technical person in the office.

I'm thinking about quitting now. I don't know why I haven't already.😖😖

US House Intelligence Committee: we can't trust equipment made by Huawei and ZTE since they may collaborate with the Chinese government

A black hat hacker: If you pay me a hundred bucks a month, you can use my infrastructure to monitor all communications and web traffic from any specific handset registered to a US Telecom. They discovered the breach nearly a year ago and haven't cut my access or sought to patch any of the vulnerabilities I utilized

US House Intelligence Committee: The only way to ensure the operational security of our government and safety of our citizens is to continue relying on American hardware and critical communications infrastructure and also let the FCC further deregulate it

I was noticing some slow network and it was dropping some connections. So I booted up my old XP install with Java 6 so connect to the ASA 5505, I see it’s logging max connections of 10000 has been reached.

Fine, I recon it’s my colleague backing up his entire machine to Google Drive.
Because when he shut it off, n connections dropped.

I check back in the log, and I see there’s 4-500 connections happening per second, I think WTF and check the source IP. Lots of random IPs from Vietnam, all going to a Windows2008 Server using rdp.

(I didn’t setup our servers, so I didn’t know which server it was accessing)

Ask my other colleague, he told me it’s a windows server from an earlier project that’s not used anymore.
I rdp into it, see there’s users logged in from around the world, and I immediately do a shutdown.

Would you look at that, connections per second dropped to about 50.
I guess that server isn’t going back online ever.
And I now need to ask management for a budget to update our network infrastructure, because the old ASA 5505 is begging me to die.

TL;DR gg previous employees didn’t shut down old servers and left them open to the world to enjoy

New router, 2x the speed 🤟

New router, 500 less on bank account 👎

Some time ago a salesman tried to sell me a super revolutionary solution. He introduced it with "today everyone will tell you that in order to save money you must move your servers and IT infrastructure on the CLOUD (big emphasis on the word) but we offer you a different approach: 'the on premise cloud'"
😶"so, you're basically telling me to replace my local machines with other local machines?"
😎"you don't see the whole picture: It's the cloud but INSIDE your company"

Am I dumb and I didn't see the obvious technology leap he was offering me?

Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.

I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.

I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.

That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.

Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).

I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.

Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.

I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.

Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.

To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?

Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?

There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...

<just got out of this meeting>
Mgr: “Can we log the messages coming from the services?”
Me: “Absolutely, but it could be a lot of network traffic and create a lot of noise. I’m not sure if our current logging infrastructure is the right fit for this.”
Senior Dev: “We could use Log4Net. That will take care of the logging.”
Mgr: “Log4Net?…Yea…I’ve heard of it…Great, make it happen.”
Me: “Um…Log4Net is just the client library, I’m talking about the back-end, where the data is logged. For this issue, we want to make sure the data we’re logging is as concise as possible. We don’t want to cause a bottleneck inside the service logging informational messages.”
Mgr: “Oh, no, absolutely not, but I don’t know the right answer, which is why I’ll let you two figure it out.”
Senior Dev: “Log4Net will take care of any threading issues we have with logging. It’ll work.”
Me: “Um..I’m sure…but we need to figure out what we need to log before we decide how we’re logging it.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, but if we log to SQL database, it will scale just fine.”
Mgr: “A SQL database? For logging? That seems excessive.”
Senior Dev: “No, not really. Log4Net takes care of all the details.”
Me: “That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to set up an entire sql database infrastructure to log data.”
Senior Dev: “Yea…probably right. We could use ElasticSearch or even Redis. Those are lightweight.”
Mgr: “Oh..yea…I’ve heard good things about Redis.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, and it runs on Linux and Linux is free.”
Mgr: “I like free, but I’m late for another meeting…you guys figure it out and let me know.”
<mgr leaves>
Me: “So..Linux…um…know anything about administrating Redis on Linux?”
Senior Dev: ”Oh no…not a clue.”

It was all I could do from doing physical harm to another human being.
I really hate people playing buzzword bingo with projects I’m responsible for.

Only good piece is he’s not changing any of the code.

Oh my God...
A colleague of mine got an email. The email was badly translated into our language (probably Google translate was used) it said 'please open invoice attached'.
The anti-virus software successfully marked it as a virus, and did not allow my colleague to open attached 'invoice.exe' file.
Now by this point you would think that the person would just delete the email, but no. The colleague looked at me, and with the bitchiest voice said 'I got an invoice and can't open it after your anti-virus installation. Fix it!'
Needless to say, I had to explain, what a virus is and teach all the colleagues not to get hooked on scam mail... Took about 4 hours to explain this seemingly simple concept.
Fuck knows, how they did not nuke their IT infrastructure before I came here :/

Theoretically I can build multicloud, geo reudant, load balanced, auto scaling infrastructure. But most of my workday I spent in outlook writing E-mails and arranging up meetings.

So I work as a "Web Development Lead"
Which means I lead (frontend,backend and infrastructure teams)
Also I am in charge of infrastructure or devops or whatever you call it, which means I handle production issues, dev and staging environments,...etc

and I am a team of one, and today I asked for a day off because it's my wife's birthday

and suddenly everyone is blocked, everything is on fire, and the phone is not stopping ringing, I had to go out of the cinema theater to answer the non-stopping calls

I AM ASKING FOR A SINGLE DAY, A FUCKING DAY, EVEN IF SOMEONE IS BLOCKED SO WHAT IT'S NOT EVEN A DAY I ONLY NEED 6 HOURS

IS TO TOO MUCH FUCKING TO ASK

So, the company I’m working for is finally merging with its sister company. That means budget for upgrading our infrastructure. And guess who volunteered to be in charge of it, and future sysops. That’s me.

Previously we haven’t had anything close to a sysops, and our servers has been neglected and never updated nor upgraded since 2012. We even had a Windows Server 2012 running with rdp wide open...

I was super excited when sirca 2009, I first made my own video streaming website.
It even had a live chat. I was streaming movies from an academic cloud infrastructure intended for research with an account I made using fake credentials.

They found out and I got banned, of course. Also they got my real ID and sent me a super angry letter, but no police was involved.

Ten years later I'm MSc in CI with access to CERN's grid network, but I cannot use any resources on their infrastructure. :P

Client wanted a website to offer rentals for her collection of student rental properties. She was adamant and stipulated that it had to be the Rightmove of student lets. I asked her if she had a £million plus budget for the marketing and then some for the infrastructure and mobile app development. She disapeared. Months later I checked the URL she had purchased and it had been done as a free site on wix.com and was a dreadful piece of shit. You just know instinctively that a client is going to be worthless.

When your home's infrastructure runs better and is more stable than some of the shit that's actually running enterprises because you actually do care about industry best practices and product quality.. it's a weird feeling. A very disappointing one, if anything.

Post-meritocracy, it very much seems to be a thing. And when you call people out for it because yes I do want to *be* the change that I want to see, they get all defensive and shun you. Yeah, let's make the world burn in inefficient, dysfunctional bullshit. That's a much better idea.

Are we humans really that far apart from the chimps that we descended from?

Worst part of it all, those incompetent bastards that can't possibly admit and work to improve their mistakes are the ones that are behind the companies' steering wheel. That too is such an excellent idea. I bet that half of them got employed only because they took the lowest wage and could (barely) turn on a computer. Fucking morons...

Okay, so I have a question...

Although unethical, I’m considering disabling a clients services without warning. They’re 6 months behind on paying me and I have complete access over their network infrastructure. Upon reading our contract, I’ve made the mistake of incorporating services will be discontinued due to lack of payment... But, I know if I disable things they’re not smart enough to figure out why they aren’t working and call me... That’s when I’ll tell them that I can’t preform work until past bills are paid in full.

I’m located somewhere in the US. Is this too unethical, too illegal? I just want my fucking money... Thanks!

EDIT: Yes I have invoiced then monthly. They’ve received them because I had deliver al invoices to avoid the “oh I never received it” claims.

so I had a very important video conference for some rather large cloud infrastructure that Im engineering. I decide to look "smart" so i decided to wear a jersey during the video call. I aced the meeting, happy people all round. I walk to my room and my wife says "you do know your jersey is inside out...and back to front..and the label is sticking out from under your chin....How did the meeting go?" me:"..fine until you pointed out a look like a 2 year old dressed me !" ... well thats one way to kill the happy feels!

Fucking shit, this university's website is so damn slow! Basically Every Semester, every student need to enroll to certain classes in University Website.

But the Infrastructure is not enough to handle such a big amount of students, we have approx. 7000 students enrolling at the same fucking time.

And here i am can't enroll to any class at all this semester. Fuck such a waste of time. This always been a thing since they digitalize enrolling system.

I don't want this to happen again. The student always be a victim since they cannot handle the request. Now, as a dev, i want to propose something better to optimize the server, i have some connection to pass some bureaucracy. I am going to do some brainstorming and I will need some solution.

Here some data i gather when i am mad from my univ infrastructure division :
1. The Server is a simple Local Server Forwarded to the Internet.
2. The Server use Windows Server 2007.
4. Web Server Using Microsoft IIS
3. The Website built using ASP.NET
4. The connection is not SSL encrypted (yes its fucking use the http)
5. Hardware Spec (not confirmed officialy, i got this information from my professor) :
- Core i5 4460
- 4 GB Ram
- 1 Gbit NIC

I will summon some expert here and i hope want to help me(us all) out.

Fuck that shit once again. Spent an entire day releasing micro-patches because nobody listened to me, because "I am a developer but I don't do that full time".
Because you might think that I didn't fuck my ass with a giant bottle-shaped dildo studying development to get this fucking place maybe?
And what, I was right, once again. Because maybe I know the fucking project I work in, linked to the fucking product I'm certified for, you dumb cumfilled assface.

For those that doesn't know it, i do manage, maintain, develop stuff on our ECM infrastructure for our clients. I do basically everything as we have few clients and are a small company we can do this that way.

Anyway, had to release "urgently" 3 fucking features to a custom module to export stuff from the ECM to a client's ERP system. Tests? No time for this, don't lose time on this. I smell the "why didn't you test?" in two days. I fucking smell it.

Plus, the client is a fucking retarded mess. The kind of guy that is unable to check his previous e-mails and asks again the same thing, four times. Should I do a fucking tutorial on how to fucking use a fucking search bar? And you want to be informed on the technical details about the features? Come on, I have to explain you how to do your fucking CFO job.

And if it wasn't enough, My boss replied to the client while I was on holiday to explicitely tell the client that I'm the only one that can take care of that. That gives us a very professional image, doesn't it? And when I asked to train someone to at least do the administration job when I'm away, it's always a "we'll check that, we need that" but then nothing.

Anyway fuck it. if I resign I will laugh. 2 months to train someone else and get them on the export modules (which are commented and documented) in a company where in the office I'm possibly the only developer (we have one in the second office but he's a web developer).

Hopefully I'm at a bar drinking a fucking beer while continuing my golang "getting started" project. That's the only thing that makes me happy of coming back from holiday

p.s.: I want the fucking raven, make me dream.

Code fuckup day or what?! After two weeks where I wasn't on my project and a co-worker handled it, I came back to my project and reviewed what he had done so far.
Me: "I don't understand how this new code part here can work?"
Him: "Uhm, actually, it doesn't, somehow."
Me: "..."
Then he had checked in his stuff with spaces while the whole project is with tabs. And variables that were used in a different way, but still under the old name, now completely misleading. Bypassing existing infrastructure and defines with "just for this case" hacks. But the best was tracking higher level state by peeking into lower level data buffers, even pulling out their data definitions into global header files - instead of using proper states in the higher layer itself.
NOT! IN! MY! FUCKING! PROJECT!!!
So I spent the day cleaning up the shit to fight off software rot right in the beginning.

On call at 2100. Call at 2101. Co-worker off at 2100, call at 2059. Neither were problems with our infrastructure. They were with the callers' teams fucking up.

Full stack programmer on the recruitment post vs reality

Requirements written on the recruitment post: Frontend Development, Backend Development.

Reality: Frontend Development, Backend Development, Devopts, Infrastructure, UI/UX Design, Video Editing, Design, Customer Service...

Me: Full Stack means everything

My boss is letting a really strong bus factor grow around me.
I try to show them how to do things but they really can't wrap their heads around it and I keep improving our stack/infrastructure ...

You just knew the DDOS attack that impacted Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Netflix, Reddit, Disqus, PayPal... Would not have a chance to slow down devRant! Guaranty @dfox has a world class resilient infrastructure built to circumvent and to scale.

0: Monitors and Graphic's Cards become affordable for us poor graduates

1: Node bloat becomes a thing of the past with WA or has auto-minimize functionality to keep only essential code

2: North American internet companies all go out of business due to free super high speed infrastructure maintained by a trust of communities and elected delegates

not all "dev" related per se, but my current day to day gripes answered

A client is like: Help! We got a 500 in our wordpress administration panel and there is no error in the log, it must be your infrastructure at fault!

So I calmly replied to them that wordpress handles its errors on its own, and without the appropriate debug flags enabled, doesn't log it anywhere. Even mentioned that a PHP app can change the error handler no problem, and linked them to both, PHP and Word press docummentation.

Didn't hear from them since.

There’s no better feeling then doing a full server rebuild, modifying several projects heavily to be portable and keep working under new infrastructure and loosing access to dependent systems.

Migrating everything across, firing up Apache.... and BAM the fucker just works and ssl labs gives it an A (it was a giant F with multiple vulnerabilities yesterday on the old server)

!dev

What kind of a motherfucking city is this! (Mumbai) Every fucking road has a shit ton of traffic and no one gives a shit about people walking nearby. An asshole drove over my foot while I was crossing the road, motherfucker. Traffic signals not working, no traffic constables to see anything. And people talk and keep telling this is the spirit of Mumbai. Shitty infrastructure is the spirit of Mumbai. Fuck everyone!

Inherited a simple marketplace website that matches job seekers and hospitals in healthcare. Typically, all you need for this sort of thing is a web server, a database with search

But the precious devs decided to go micro-services in a container and db per service fashion. They ended up with over 50 docker containers with 50ish databases. It was a nightmare to scale or maintain!

With 50 database for for a simple web application that clearly needs to share data, integration testing was impossible, data loss became common, very hard to pin down, debugging was a nightmare, and also dangerous to change a service’s schema as dependencies were all tangled up.

The obvious thing was to scale down the infrastructure, so we could scale up properly, in a resource driven manner, rather than following the trend.

We made plans, but the CTO seemed worried about yet another architectural changes, so he invested in more infrastructure services, kubernetes, zipkin, prometheus etc without any idea what problems those infra services would solve.

Damn hackers! Within the course of a week, the internet of my country has been DDOS-attacked three times! Last week the attacks came from Russia or China". Yesterday they came from Russia and Ukraina. Is this a part of the Russian military exercises Zapad 17? Well, when an important part of the infrastructure is down and thousands of civilians are affected, it's for real and not an exercise.

Go DevOps :)

Got fucking graduated, a whole day wasted, fucking ass hole literally trapped us cannot even got to release some water.

To get a fucking degree you have to bear with fucking teacher who don't shit about privacy, security.

And answering fucking theroy questions which has fucking string Match with the fucking textbook paragraph.

Do a fucking report which will be fucking 100 pages and take fucking 2 copy (10 rough copies)

The register to fucking leaky placement centre. Who leak you data to all hiring companies as well as your co-students.

Then fucking attend the fucking ass hole ceremony where some old guy lectures for fucking long time about some civil infrastructure , road and other stuff.

And I have not mentioned other fucking ass hole slutty stuff.i don't know fucking until what time I can hold on.

This Fucked the fuck out of me

Full stack developer.

I know what it's supposed to mean, but I feel like it gives discredit to the devs who perfect their area (frontend, backend, db, infrastructure). It's, to me, like calling myself a chef because I can cook dinner..

The depth, analysis and customization of the domain to shape an api to a website is never appreciated. The finicle tweaks on the frontend to make those final touches. Then comes a brat who say they are full stack, and can do all those things. Bullshit. 99.9% of them have never done anything but move data through layers and present it.

Throw these wannabes an enterprise system with monoliths and microservices willy nelly, orchestrate that shit with a vertical slice nginx ssi with disaster recovery, horizontal scaling, domain modeling, version management, a busy little bus and events flowing all decimal points of 2pi. Then, if you fully master everything going on there, I believe you are full stack.

Otherwise you just scraped the surface of what complexities software development is about. Everyone who can read a tutorial can scrape together an "in-out" website. But if your db is looking the same as your api, your highest complexity is the alignment of an infobox, I will laugh loud at your full stack.

And if you told me in an interview that you are full stack, you'd better have 10+ years experience and a good list of failed and successful projects before I'd let you stay the next two minutes..

The kitchen at my office is pretty small, it fits a max of two people. Today morning while making a sandwich, an infrastructure dev walks in and proceeds to say... "I hope you don't mind me standing behind you, it's really not a Christian thing to do"... what?

Deploying to production 8pm Saturday evening.

Because I have confidence in our test suite, QA procedures, infrastructure and my team members are not morons.

One night, after one very stressful week of production code fixes (I was working on a game with some friends and I created the network infrastructure for P2P and database communication from scratch), I was at my gf's house. After we fell asleep, I stood up and screamed right at her something like "I fucking already told you how X works and how to communicate with Y. Learn to write code properly and after double checking yours then you shall ask me for a non-existing 'bug' fix. Learn how to properly write event based code and use polling you moron!". After that I turned to the other side and fell asleep immediately.
When I saw her the next morning sleeping in the couch, I could not understand why... Only after she described to me the whole incident I started laughing.
After that I just took two weeks off the project and after that period I never actually worked the same way (so hard) in my free time with them.

My current dream project is sailing a 21st Century Message in a Bottle across the Atlantic Ocean from US to Europe, satellite tracking it in apps and desktop environment and more importantly inspiring school children everywhere that anything you can imagine is possible. Fortunately, the project is rapidly becoming a reality - here's how:
- teamed with a few amazing devs virtually
- team created an effective infrastructure for communication and knowledge sharing
- researched oceanic patterns, satellite communications, sensors, material design, recovery logistics...
- developed budget and received funding sign off
- created realistic, yet aggressive project plan with deliverable dates
- built relationships with two Universities for Oceanic knowledge assistance
- developed a partnership with NOAA and will share info

Oh yeah, we did all that and are having fun in only 25 days so far! More challenges to come but we embrace the challenges!

Client: There is currently no way for us to save forms to “the cloud” (yes they actually put the cloud in quotes)

Me: That would be because this software is installed on your onsite server infrastructure and is not cloud hosted in any way.

rant & question

Last year I had to collaborate to a project written by an old man; let's call him Bob. Bob started working in the punch cards era, he worked as a sysadmin for ages and now he is being "recycled" as a web developer. He will retire in 2 years.

The boss (that is not a programmer) loves Bob and trusts him on everything he says.

Here my problems with Bob and his code:
- he refuses learning git (or any other kind of version control system);
- he knows only procedural PHP (not OO);
- he mixes the presentation layer with business logic;
- he writes layout using tables;
- he uses deprecated HTML tags;
- he uses a random indentation;
- most of the code is vulnerable to SQL injection;
- and, of course, there are no tests.
- Ah, yes, he develops directly on the server, through a SSH connection, using vi without syntax highlighting.

In the beginning I tried to be nice, pointing out just the vulnerabilities and insisting on using git, but he ignored all my suggestions.

So, since I would have managed the production server, I decided to cheat: I completely rewrote the whole application, keeping the same UI, and I said the boss that I created a little fork in order to adapt the code to our infrastructure. He doesn't imagine that the 95% of the code is completely different from the original.

Now it's time to do some changes and another colleague is helping. She noticed what I did and said that I've been disrespectful in throwing away the old man clusterfuck, because in any case the code was working. Moreover he will retire in 2 years and I shouldn't force him to learn new things [tbh, he missed at least last 15 years of web development].

What would you have done in my place?

Don't question my infrastructure setup. I ssh into server A because it's the only one available from the outside. From there i ssh into server B to ssh into server C. C functions as a router and allows me to ssh into D, E, F and G. I could go from A to C directly, but OCD.

// My First Rant

We have a developer that almost everyone adjust to what he want to avoid talking or working with him.

I have office mates that doesn't want to give tasks to him just to avoid working with him.

Even our devOps guy just did what he want so he would stop talking.

One bad experience of our devOps guy with him is that his infrastructure or other AWS stuff was blame why his APIs is not working. It turns our that his url for the database has FUCKING SPACES.

Not sure if a good practice but he wants the base url of our Endpoint to be set in environment variables instead of having DEV/PROD/TESTING and base the endpoint from there.

He said that he was given permission to study a language but he doesn't even ask for permission.

2017 has ended and I want to throw this fucking rock of anger with it out of the Window.

I will tell you how my last 3 to 4 years as private IT Guy (IT Dumpster) for everything was.

My Gaming Community:
It was so fucking retarded that I would like to punch everyone there in the face over a thousand times.

Seriously there are over 60 People in that Community and they take every shit for granted and only cry about everything.

I'm Paying since 4 Years over 60 € for our Server every month. Some people donated some small bucks over the time and in the end it was around 150 € Donations over 4 years.

Im thankful for the Donations, but these people really think that they can demand for this Donations private Gameservers for over years for free or think that they now own the Servers. WTF?? FUCK YOU!!

Im managing 2 Linux Server with Web, MySQL, Voice and Gameserver. What did 1 guy donate? 10 € for 4 years, thats around 15% for just a month. You would get our Teamspeak for 7 Days for that price idiots!!

I did all the damn Webdev and am now writing a App in Kotlin for Android man!!

Since last everybody in the Community gets on my nerves, because they are so ignorant and dont appreciate the work of others 😡.

My Association where I support the hole IT with a friend:

We decided in the commitee that we would take on major changes in our infrastructure.

We need to finish the barebone concept in the end of January 18.
Early December 17 I wrote my friend, that we need to have a meeting and plan everything.

Well, now I mostly designed the roadmap by myself and didnt receive any reply from my friend 💀.

I really dont understand why the shit always sticks at me and I need to finish it.

I really love to code something, install or repair PC's with joy or manage Server but the people around me are in my free time like poison and they take out my fun for it.

The only fun and enjoyable IT Part for me is at my fulltime job. Thats the only good place left for me as Safe Heaven and the people there really appreciate my knowledge and work I do.

First thing, give the schools enough money to buy proper IT equipment and hire at least one person who does IT full-time per school so that the CS teachers or whoever runs the school's IT infrastructure doesn't have to worry about it at all times.
(Hopefully, the ban on cooperation here in Germany will be lifted and the federal government will be able to subsidy all schools at least financially in that aspect.)

Then, educate all the teachers, for fuck's sake.
It is sad to see an otherwise good teacher in a technical subject at a technical college struggle with the basics. Teachers should have continuing education in computer science and also should be comfortable working with technology.
There are some good CS teachers and some who're also nerds but they can't fix everything nor educate every colleague. Unpaid and in their free time, mind you.

Then, update the learning materials for CS. I've seen/worked with some of what is used in schools today and it's definitively not worth the money but it has to be bought anyway. At best, education materials should be open-source so knowledge can grow and be updated more quickly.

Also, don't rely too much on big cooperations just but cause they offer you shiny materials and discounts.

Just had my first insomnia night, I simply could not fall asleep! While laying in my bed I had great ideas for work and for my home projects, like new features, infrastructure and even implementation details. Now that I'm up I can't remember most of it, of course!

Worst part about it is that when I got to bed I had about 5hrs to get some quality sleep, now I got non it feels like. Fuck.

Can anyone relate? :/

Overheard: "I'll need to get in touch with my Infrastructure Architecture Innovation Team"

😂🤣😅😂🤣😅

Why not just call them team buzzwords. Omg.

Rant considering the latest Cyber attack and the news around it.

(A recap: a lot of Windows computers were infected with ransomware (due to security hole on Windows), which demanded 300$ in bitcoins to unlock data. After 3 days the price would double, and after 7 days the data was to be deleted)
1) In our country, one of the biggest companies was attacked (car factory). The production stopped and they got for around 1 000 000€ damage in less than 24h (1300 people without work). The news said that they were attacked because they are such a big company and were charged more, as the hackers "knew who they were dealing with" - another reason being the fact that the text was in croatian (which is our neighbor country), but noone realized that it is just a simple google translate of english text - which is obviously not true. The hackers neither know nor care who is hacked, and will charge everyone the same. They only care about the payment.
2) In UK whole (or large part) of medical infrastructure went down. The main thing everyone was saying was: "Nobody's data is stolen". Which, again, is obvious. But noone said anything about data being deleted after a week, which includes pretty much whole electronic medical record of everyone and is pretty serious.
And by the way, the base of the ransomware is code which was stolen from NSA.
All that millions and millions of dollars of damage could be avoided by simply paying the small fee.
The only thing that is good is that (hopefully) the people will learn the importance of backups. And opening weird emails.
P.S. I fucking hate all that 'hacky thingys' they have all over the news.

Yesterday one of our clients gave us the OK to launch their annual financial reports, 4 minutes before stock market closed and most of us was heading home.
Problem was we didn't have the proper access to their servers, so I and a senior consultant just spent a few hours calling our client and their IT infrastructure provider.

6 hours later, a large bill from the IT provider for after hours work, the job was done. A job that would take 5 minutes of uploading and 5 minutes of database transfer.

It was probably Microsoft Excel as part of backend infrastructure inside financial institution.

As far as I remember there was some spreads configuration and price feeder inside excel.

Figured I'd post for some advice here and see if anybody has had previous experience or success with a situation like this.

My team is generally comprised of full-stack developers completing front-end custom work on sites, writing back-end tools, and fixing broken sites. We are a rapid-response DEV team, and we typically turn around any custom requests in less than 5 days and fix any broken sites on the same day as they were reported. We manage almost 15,000 sites across multiple countries, and deal with very large corporations that many of you interact with every day (I'm trying to be cryptic here hahaha.) There are 16 of us on our team, and we are the only DEV team within our department of 500+ people. We are also the only DEV team taking requests from these 500+ people. The way the department works, we are the final say on whether a specific piece of custom work will get completed or not, and we are the go-to people when anybody has a question about our system infrastructure or if our system can accommodate a request, along with how to fix any broken pieces of our platform. We typically get about 150 requests per day. Lately, the entire team has become unhappy with our compensation for the work we do. We're quite underpaid, and they keep giving us more responsibilities without any sort of extra compensation. We've discovered that there are a large amount of non-developers below us that are getting paid more than we are. We've found that we get paid about $15,000 less than a comparable DEV team in a different department (let's call that team DEV_2,) just because of which department our team exists within, and how our department defined our job back when this position was created a few years ago. Ever since the position was created, our team's responsibilities have exponentially increased. We believe that there is absolutely no reason that an entry-level position below us should get paid just as much, or even more in some cases, than a developer. Of course, we're not asking to pay them less. Instead, we've decided that we're going to bring this up with our manager and schedule a meeting with him, our Department Director, and Human Resources, and voice that we believe that we should be on the same payscale as the comparable DEV_2 in the other department.

To be a good developer on our team, you need to not only have coding expertise, but also an encyclopedic knowledge of what you can do within our platform without any coding. You need this knowledge so you can pass it along to any people in positions below you, in case they didn't know that something could be done without custom code.

We're going to argue that if it weren't for our team, the company would be losing millions of dollars in clients, because people wouldn't have anybody to go to for platform infrastructure questions, broken websites, or custom work. Instead, they would need to send these requests to the DEV_2 team, which currently take about 6 months to turnaround requests. Like I said, we are a rapid-response DEV team, and these particular clients think that a 5 day turnaround time is ridiculous. If they had to wait 6 months for their request to be completed, they would cancel their contracts.

Not to mention the general loss of knowledge if the members of our team went to a different department, which would be catastrophic for our current department. Believe me, this department could not function without this DEV team. If we all went on vacation for a week, the place would be on fire by the time we got back, and many clients would be lost.

Do any of you have any experience with a situation like this, and if so, how did it turn out? Thank you!

Why is it that you guys are not seeing the big picture and reading between the fucken lines... why is it that people always have to run to legislation to fix their problems .... THIS IS WHY.. the other generation accomplished so much more because when there’s a problem they came up with a solution many times better than the status quo.
Those people are few and far between now.. those folks are the innovators. You know whom I’m referring to... those people didn’t whine to create laws to fix or protect their industry from competitors.
We need to stop looking toward our government to fix our issues... especially regarding this issue.. WHY because the people in government ARE NOT TECH PEOPLE!!! THEY DONT EVEN KNOW HOW COMPUTERS WORK! for Pete’s sake folks we had a lady in there who thought the term whip the server ment to literally clean it with a rag... come-on guys, do what they did years ago you don’t like something FIX IT.. by creating something new!
There’s a reason our grandparents generation made it to the fucken moon with less technology than a calculator, BECAUSE THEY PROBLEM SOLVED!
What have we achieved in the last 5 years that is really “big”... fucken apps

Unite together build the next internet learning from the issues we’ve seen with the internet over the last 30 years.. No it won’t be quick no it won’t be easy but nothing revolutionary is easy.
It took 6 years to land a man on the moon, I think we can rebuild the network infrastructure in that time OR FAR LESS if we unite together! Without the government interference we can eliminate the ISPs from the equation and screw them over for screwing us for so long

My group is has the solution, the vision and need, to get this done be we can’t do it alone I will make the official public statement within 24 hours of the vote results...
explaining everything, the plan, the work, EVERYTHING.
We need more people.
For reference the plan can be summarized like this.. nonprofit CoOp Tier 1 ISP.. members being the end users from both sides of the equation ...

TILL THEN
Contact me here,
Or SnapChat: theqsolution
Until I release all the contact info.

I once single-handedly developed an entire drag-and-drop ui for creation, provisioning and control of virtual datacenters and all its infrastructure. Other people developed backend and database and the whole project took about 10 months, but about three weeks before we had a working, stable release the company decided to cancel an entire project.
We thoroughly researched the market, and at that time there was no better such solution. We would have made something extraordinary.
Especially because it worked with VMWare.

Dev: Hey infra guys, our backend time to first byte takes 8 seconds! Can you guys investigate?

Network team: Oh yeah that's normal, we don't investigate anything below 30s, that's our SLA 😎

😵

They said a "t2.medium DB Instance" was enough for three production systems...

We love to freak out about critical infrastructure that's still running MS DOS in 2018, but tbh the scarier thing is that trying to upgrade all of it might be just as catastrophic as any exploits. Lots of this shit is so old that you'd have to rewrite any programs from scratch since they weren't even intended for modern x64 systems and the original documentation got lost in a rolodex from a dude who's probably dead. While we're totally unequipped to handle an advanced attack on our air traffic control systems or telecoms grid, it's a guarantee that any attempt to update the hardware SWIFT uses would cause a financial crisis.

When you ask your infrastructure admins for a firewall rule and you are very specific. They say that you don't need it... you troubleshoot for 2 hours then argue with them for 5 hours. Then they add the rule and it works. I want to punch someone right now and have a beer. FML!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How to write bug free code:

while True:
try:
_loop() # all logic here
except:
print_excv()

This will not cause any difficulties ever. Remember to pipe output to /dev/null, make this script a critical but undocumented part of your infrastructure and tell no one about it.

the kind of issues our it department have

When a marketing / sales person says in a meeting with executives that our current infrastructure can handle 300.000 new customers easily. (We're at 90 ATM).

Mfw I'm the techie in the room and aware of our non-scaling mysql DB.

Sometimes In wonder if the support at my hosting company are a team of highly untrained monkeys.

I know jack shit about the finer details of server management, thats what I pay you guys for.

But you guys could at least try to be a bit more usefull.

If I ask you guys about the backup functions you could try to answer my questions instead of telling me what I can see on my screen myself. Because I can read pretty damm well.

After 3 days of getting no answers and not being able to backup to server with the tools you build and are telling us to use. The server died and now you are telling you can't recover the data?

How about fuck you! So we got no backup because of your fault you now tell us all our data is lost?

We got our own backups but rebuilding the entire server and infrastructure is going to take days.

Going to be a fun couple of days telling clients why shit isn't working.

I no longer work for a startup company. On Monday I’ll start work for a real company, one that values project managers and their infrastructure. As a DevOps engineer, I value the IT resources that power my old companies SaaS platform. My old position is not being back filled and they’re hiring a full time dev instead of and Ops engineer. They have chosen to proceed with zero employees who know Azure or the platform their own software runs on.

Word to the wise when choosing to work for a startup. Ask these questions:

- Do they have a dedicated product manager/owner , who isn’t also the CFO?

- Do they value infrastructure and their IT resources ?

- Do they have decent powered laptops to work with?

- Do they have too much technical debt because they’re always building new features ?

- Do they work 18 hour days because they set poor work/life boundaries ?

- Who handles Support tickets , and what’s a typical support issue like?

- Do they have a branching and merging strategy? Don’t accept “we’re too small” as an answer! It’s a trap that they don’t want one.

Does anyone work on a team with multiple stacks?

For example we have batch jobs in Java but also have a JS front-end and APIs.

How do you divide the developers and the work across these projects?

Currently everyone does everything but I feel like this is inefficient and hard to develop expertise. And different people or even the same person will make the same mistakes over and over again because they don't know how to do X or they forget or overlook some quirk. When I switched Beck to JS took me like a week to get a Promises nailed down again. And this morning someone else had a production bug and couldn't figure it out. But when I looked at the code I could pretty much see where an issue could be (uncaught exception in a promise)

Also the testing frameworks are very different and there's a lot of infrastructure technical debt, things that really should've been done a long time or fixed but no one had the time or expertise to do it or notice it (until it causes a production issue and then everyone is like WTF is happening??!!!!).

I'm not the manager but I always feel that the team needs to be split along the language lines and specific people need to own these projects to review and code changes for all these common newbie errors. And also developer enough expertise to foresee problems before it becomes a production issue.

Best team experience?

Well, first I'd like to mention that after some more experience in the field since, I realize that this company had some pretty terrible management infrastructure...

Nonetheless, I think my best team experience had to have been during my first programming job because my project manager... WAS A FREAKING DEVELOPER! It wasn't his job to be a developer obviously, but we were a small team essentially developing waterfall style, and he had to pick up the slack now and then for certain issues. The man was a genius and everyone appreciated him because you could talk to him about anything dev related and he would get it. The rest of my team was also very chill too, so it was all in all just a fun experience, stressful as it may have been at times.

I have not since had such a diversified project manager 😟 but then again, not the PM's job to touch code...

I love it when asshats, that wear testicles for sunglasses, like to ask me a question about my past experience with a given technology. Let's call it "X". After I've said my piece about the desired effect "X" was supposed to achieve, and describe the environment/scope where "X" was used, and describe the pain points I've encountered with it or the headaches "X" has caused in those environments, these camel spunk garglers then try to immediately rebut me by saying that every one of the times they've set "X" technology up it's worked just fine.

So, I kindly remind them that my past experience was in large enterprises where "X" technology just doesn't scale well so I've seen some issues with it.

Spunk Gargler: "Hmmm, must've just not been setup correctly."

I lose my shit (internally of course because I can't afford to be without a job right now.) and say, "I'm not so sure that it wasn't setup correctly, I just don't think that 'X' works properly at the scale of 500+ employee environments well. You've only ever set it up in small offices of like - what, 20 users?"

Shitlord McHerp-a-Derp who's Drunk on Spunk: "Maybe, but it just sounds like a bad configuration was causing those issues to me."

He shuffled back into his office shortly after I basically told him he's a fucking chump playing small team tactics and I've seen shit at scale so I've seen first hand what does and does not work well.

I'm writing this because this is the same fucking imbecile that has only ever encountered a /23 network once before from a client they inherited from a previous MSP team and they didn't know how to "safely change it" to a /24 so they just left it in place.

(BTW, just for the non-networking guys/gals out there, I'm sure you've already guessed it, but a /23 network is NOT a fucking problem!)

These puffy cancerous taint boils that call themselves IT engineers are the fucking problem!

I'm not a dev by trade or training, but trying to learn DevOps, and I can totally see why Dev teams can/sometimes get pissed with infrastructure teams... infrastructure/helpdesk side of IT is full of these fucking meat heads.

Long time ago i ranted here, but i have to write this off my chest.

I'm , as some of you know, a "DevOps" guy, but mainly system infrastructure. I'm responsible for deploying a shitload of applications in regular intervals (2 weeks) manually through the pipeline. No CI/CD yet for the vast majority of applications (only 2 applications actually have CI/CD directly into production)

Today, was such a deployment day. We must ensure things like dns and load balancer configurations and tomcat setups and many many things that have to be "standard". And that last word (standard) is where it goes horribly wrong

Every webapp "should" have a decent health , info and status page according to an agreed format.. NOPE, some dev's just do their thing. When bringing the issue up to said dev the (surprisingly standard) answer is "it's always been like that, i'm not going to change". This is a problem for YEARS and nobody, especially "managers" don't take action whatsoever. This makes verification really troublesome.

But that is not the worst part, no no no.

the worst is THIS:

"git push -a origin master"

Oh yes, this is EVERYWHERE, up to the point that, when i said "enough" and protected the master branch of hieradata (puppet CfgMgmt, is a ENC) people lots their shits... Proper gitflow however is apparently something otherworldly.

After reading this back myself there is in fact a LOT more to tell but i already had enough. I'm gonna close down this rant and see what next week comes in.

There is a positive thing though. After next week, the new quarter starts, and i have the authority to change certain aspects... And then, heads WILL roll on the floor.

While this isn’t about one specific time this happened, I just got fired up about it.

“You’re an IT guy, right?”

Those immortal words echo in my head. Yes, if it has to do with a computer and I don’t know it, whether I know anything at all should be called into question. As a programmer, I should know the infrastructure and desktop teams’ jobs too. Because the fucking HR rep calling this into question can do accounting and run a marketing campaign, right? Oh, and the issue is you’re using the wrong password; we haven’t had SSO for that application ever and we won’t until next week. Read your email, asshole.

Eat a dick.

Webapp that organise it-infrastructure-data with visual representation

So I've been working as an operator in IBM for a year now. Two months after my onboard our team got an onboarding freeze. Since then more than a half of the team left and more are supposed to go, soo there is a problem covering all the workload. I volunteered to take 4th customers workload (out of 4 customers our team supports) because I already knew most of the work that is done there.
At a one-to-one meeting with my manager I asked for a little raise, because I have the 4th customer, I take other peoples shift anytime they need to take a free day, I update the documentation regularly, I write scripts for coworkers for installing software/automating what can be automated (and I'm the youngest here...) bla bla, telling him that I think I do a lot for the team and I deserve it. He told me that he would rather take away one of the customers workload. I rolled my eyes and went with it.
Two days later this asshole gave a raise to a guy, who was onboarding with me, because he wanted to motivate him. That very same day he told us that it seems like two customers are going to merge into one workload.
I'm so pissed because of this. I do my best all the time so I can get promoted to 2nd level linux team (I'm kinda one foot there) but the freeze is still preventing me to go. I'm already so tired of dealing with the bullshit of customer not knowing their own infrastructure, shitstorms of tickets during changes after level 2 didn't set maintenance mode again, repairing coworkers linux boxes because they don't know better and I'm so pissed at this un-initiative dickhead of a manager that gives a raise to lazy people.

!coding

I used to be a sysadmin, which meant I was in charge of quarterly server patching. My team managed about 2500 servers, running various flavors of linux and legacy unix. The vast majority(95% or more) ran Linux(SLES). Our maintenance window was always in the overnight-- 10pm to 6am --so the stroke of 10pm would be a massive cascade of patching commands sent to hundreds of servers.

Before I was brought into the process, it made use of the automation product we were tasked by mgmt to use: Bigfix. It's a real piece of shit. Though we had 2500 or so servers, this environment was dominated by windows. All our vcenter servers ran it, and more importantly, our bigfix nodes were all windows machines. That meant that while we're trying to patch, the bigfix servers would get patched by the windows team. This would cause lots of failed and timed out patching, because the windows admins never quite understood that taking down the automation infrastructure would cause problems.

As such, I got tired of depending on a bunch of button-pushing checkbox-clickers who didn't know shit about shit, so I started writing an ssh-wrapped patching system. By the time I left for my current job, patching had been reduced to a single command to initiate each group's patching and reboots, and an easy check to see when servers come back up. So usually, the way it worked out was that I would send patching orders to 750 machines or so, and within about 5 minutes, they would all be done patching, and within another 20 minutes all the ones that required rebooting but about 5 would be done rebooting.

The "all-nighter" which happened every time was waiting for oracle servers to run timed fscks against a dozen or so large filesystems per server, because they were all on ext3/4, which eats complete shit. Then, several hours later, as they finished, I would have to call the DBAs to tell them to validate their shitty servers.

So today I found a file share containing some super super sensitive information accessible to what I think was our entire user base (6,500 users) if you knew the server name and had an interest in nosing around.

I reported it to our head of IT and heard nothing after, although 5 mins after reporting I could no longer access...

I suspect the infrastructure lead is going to be a dick (because his one of them awkward non team player kind of guys) and not thank me for preventing our company from being in national news papers... but try to spin it on why am I nosing around his servers in the first place..

I actually feel 50/50 about if I should of told or not.. but on flip side, I guess the access logs of me listing the files as I flick through to confirm my suspicions would of caused s bigger headache.

Fucking useless infrastructure engineers!

I’ve been out of steady work for almost 2 whole months now but things are starting to look up...

I’m super stoked for some potential client projects!!! I have one client that wants me to completely rebuild their businesses infrastructure, PC refresh, server upgrade, network overhaul for 3 sites, and more. This new client has a business partner with another side business and wants to discuss potential work/projects. And I’m going to be discussing a potential contract deal on Thursday to develop a custom software for another client.

Guys! My startup is starting woot!!!

About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.

When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.

My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"

Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.

Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.

The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.

Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now.

I've noticed looking at the card exit of a building that most people a) just carry their laptop without putting it in the backpack because the carpark is a jump away anyway, b) that stickers on said laptops can leak your infrastructure

No idea what made me interested in that, but if you take the average of people's laptop stickers (sadly not everybody had their laptop or maybe even a laptop at all, so I've got just 20) - you could probably tell what tools and what services the company is running.

Could be a funny coincidence and I was able to verify later by googling their company, but it's an interesting non trackable way to know what services and tools need to be exploited/emulated to possibly gain access to some high security network.

I feel like somebody had to have a talk/presentation about this, so I wonder, had anybody else seen something like that? or how far could this actually go?

Have to present a school project I've been working in for three weeks with my team.

My part of the presentation is done, my part of the project is done.
The fucking sysadmin doesn't have his fucking part ready...

ALL HE HAD TO DO WAS SET UP A FUCKING WEBSERVER, IMPORT A DATABASE, EDIT THE HOST FILE AND WRITE A SMALL 2 PAGE DOCUMENT ON THE INFRASTRUCTURE.

Each of the 4 "roles" within the project need to present their own part, guess whose part of the presentation isn't there...

I am so fucking done with this guy and 2 others in the team...

I just don't get how you can spend 1000's of € per year on uni and then not take it seriously.

So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.

I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".

But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.

The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".

Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.

It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.

It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.

But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.

THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!

So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.

Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...

TL;DR: my boss is a dick and I don't know what to do.

Been working at the company for a month now, I enjoy the atmosphere and the culture (startup btw) but I really cannot stand my superior - there's only two of us in the team. Any screw up he blames it on me without a second thought. First week in he assigned their new website project to me and honestly they have quite unrealistic deadlines. I mean they didn't even have the infrastructure for it nor the manpower to build one yet it needs to be finished by the end of this month. On top of that the spec keeps changing literally every 2-3 hours.

Also since I've forgotten to mention the guy I'm working under is one of the founders so I can't really go and talk to someone about it. I feel pretty screwed over, anyone has any advice or been in a situation like this? Is it too early to quit?

A coworker created several WinForms-Tools because it was "more comfy" than learning XAML which we usually use for all our sw clients.

Now that these tools are relevant for our infrastructure and some even for the product itself they have to be maintained by others as well.
Note: he tried to use OOP but the result is more like a complete new style of programing . Processes, objects and external scripts in the mix.

Mainreason why noone could know about it: the product manager used him as kind of private dev for some hours a week. No reviews, barely documentation... Now we decided that developing the tools from the scratch is more time and cost efficient.
What a mess...

I think ive given up on caring about the code base I work on. Everyone just wants to take the easy solution, even if it couples everything together, and makes life hard in the long term.
We're introducing two new products in our system soon. Each product being added by a different team. But both teams think its a good idea to reuse same existing event in the system, rather than introducing two new events.
So this event, originally designed to represent the creation of a certain type of personal loan, will now also refer to two other kinds of loans that are totally unrelated to each other.
Yes. This will make the system nice and intuitive. The business will never ask for seperate reports for each product. Ill never be asked to work out what event means what. This wont break any existing infrastructure. This will be fine.

I used to be in an infrastructure maintenance team, and I worked with an old guy. We had a jump box we all used. This guy would work weekend maintenance windows and still be trying to get changes done at 7am, three hours after the end of the window. He was glacially slow. I remember watching him login to a prod weblogic server. He would open the Windows start menu, move his fucking mouse through two or three submenus, and finally click putty. Then, he would type out the FQDN of the jump server, and move his mouse to the connect/ok button. Then it would prompt him for his username and password, both of which took him about 90 seconds to single-finger type. Then, once loved into the jump box, he would then type ssh user@server.fqdn, rather than copying and pasting the server name.

It took him fully five minutes to get logged into the weblogic server. I could not take it. It would have taken me about ten seconds.

In these dark times, it's inspiring to see that a country as insignificant as Australia can demonstrate to us how things can always get worse.

By passing a law mandating that encryption must be broken, in secret (like the US's National Security Letters), at the demand of the Government, the two biggest parties have colluded to destroy Australia's tech sector.

This is the same government that has been whining endlessly about using Huawei LTE equipment in Australian infrastructure "because it might be secretly compromised". Now the same is true of Australian equipment, by law.

My favourite part of all this is how there will be firmware updates for devices sold in Australia, in order to comply with the new law. How well do you think those backdoors will be secured? How thoroughly do you expect them to be tested, given Australia's population of only 25 million?

How can any Australian company expect customers to trust them now?

# Honestly, no intention of starting a holy war;

Been a Linux guy for over 9 years spanning school, college and my previous job years;

Now I have to use Windows at my new job. I know very little abt this os and it has never been among my strong skills (only used it for gaming);

What's more intriguing is that my current company's entire infrastructure is Windows based - which I had no idea that it could be possible at such a large scale;

I don't know about what I feel about this whole thing. But what I know is that I don't wanna shy away from it. I love the job and the role (only just if it was Linux, it'd be perfect).

Just need this for a future reflection:
Can anyone confirm if it's the same with other investment banks/financial services institutions etc. infrastructure?

PouchDB.

It promised full-blown CRDT functionality. So I decided to adopt it.

Disappointment number one: you have to use CouchDB, so your data model is under strict regulations now. Okay.

Disappointment number two: absolutely messed up hack required to restrict users from accessing other users’ data, otherwise you have to store all the user data in single collection. Not the most performant solution.

Disappointment number three: pagination is utter mess. Server-side timestamps are utter mess. ANY server-side logic is utter mess.

Just to set it to work, you need PouchDB itself, websocket adapter (otherwise only three simultaneous syncs), auth adapter (doesn’t work via sockets), which came out fucking large pile of bullshit at the frontend.

Disappointment number four, the final one: auth somehow works but it doesn’t set cookie. I don’t know how to get access.

GitHub user named Wohali, number one CouchDB specialist over there, doesn’t know that either.

It also doesn’t work at Incognito mode, doesn’t work at Firefox at all.

So, if you want to use PouchDB, bear that in mind:
1. CouchDB only
2. No server-side logic
3. Authorization is a mess
4. Error logs are mess too: “ERROR 83929629 broken pipe” means “out of disk space” in Erlang, the CouchDB language.
5. No hosting solutions. No backup solutions, no infrastructure around that at all. You are tied to bare metal VPS and Ansible.
6. Huge pile of bullshit at frontend. Doesn’t work at Incognito mode, doesn’t work at Firefox.

My university has "Economics and Technic" on its name and it straight up fails on the technical side.

We don't have proper wifi because nobody from the management wants to be responsible for whatever the fuck students do, so they borrow the public (not secure/shitty) wifi from the state for us. Great. We could also use Eduroam, except it only works OUTSIDE of the university for some fujing reason.

Also, our classrooms don't have plugs to charge our notebooks so that's not an option, I guess they just think: "well if they can't use their notebooks they might as well not use any internet at all".

With the heatwave in Europe the servers almost fried bcs management was not sure if they should turn it off or not. We got no server a day.

To top it off, for some reason, every time I access the Intranet from the university it won't login and it literally blocks my dns requests. FANTASTICAL. I even tried restoring my computer and it does the same shit, so I just gave up on it entirely.

TL;DR: My university has shitty IT-Infrastructure and I need to rant about it.

Thank you for sharing ze pain™

I'm starting to feel super frustrated with my job.
Sometimes I feel like people who work for large tech companies must have it easy. My company is trying to do this digital transformation thing. Modern development practices Scrum, agile, CI/CD etc. So I was put on a team to work on a project with this new methodology. The idea was we would build the front end and interface with the core systems via service calls. Of course it didn't work out that simple and we had to add our own server side stuff but whatever. It's really hard without a point of reference for any of this stuff. We don't have established coding standards, the data we are working with is a mess, incompetent vendors, the infrastructure team supporting the environments can be such arrogant fucks when we need their help to get shit done. The team also doesn't have any members who really know the core systems well. I am the only developer on the team who is an employee of the company the rest are contractors who are in and out. Last week it was literally just me. This is my first job out of school btw I've been here a year now. I guess I just feel frustrated that I have to figure out so much on my own I don't really have many senior devs at the company I can look to. And on the team I've sorta ended up in an unofficial leadership position. Feels like a lot on my shoulders. I feel like if i could have worked for a bigger company I could learn to do a lot of things better. I feel like there's too much on me for the amount of experience I have or am I wrong ?

I work on a team project for a test and maintenance course in University. We agreed as a team to adopt a git infrastructure that would prioritize the stability of the master branch at all cost by only updating commits up to the next stable point and tagging every single release. We have a long polling development branch to prepare our releases and we create feature branches for the tickets we need to resolve. I even wrote documentation to make sure that we don't forget and protected the master branch on gitlab from direct modifications.

Can someone fucking tell me how one of my teammates managed to fuck over all of this and work on an unfinished feature straight on master?

N.b. I know that he probably edited straight from gitlab's online text editor because they have a big where they don't restrict modifications on protected branches.

Massive cyber attack hits Europe. Hopefully everyone is patched and secure. Critical infrastructure, banks... impacted.

More rants coming up.

1st

Working with a guy who I am not sure has the necessary experience to begin with.

The person who hired him told me to teach the guy for him to catch up to our project and its pace. He has some experience with Java. Which our project is being developed in java in a linux dev environment in a full stack way. So we handle front to infrastructure.

First day working with him and I saw this guy is trouble.

1st - doesn’t know effing git commands. Who doesn’t know git nowadays. Ok i can forgive him for that. But damn this guy’s learning curve is so slow. After s month of joining, he still has to look up the commands in his photo cheatsheet.
2nd - doesn’t know linux basic cli commands like cd, ls, rm. not an ounce of knowledge. He told me he is used to developing in Windows. Now this. I can’t forgive him for not knowing this shit. cd (change dir) even exists in windows command line. He even has guts to say to everyone he wants to try working in our servers. The HORROR!
3rd - not sure if knowing junit and matchers of hamcrest, if you are working with Java is a must. But this guy doesn’t understand Matchers of Junit. How the fuck did he ensure effing quality in his prev work.

All in all, seems like this guy doesn’t understand the basics of current development tools.

Please don't tell me the mobile app is a priority when the whole IT infrastructure has been handled by fuckface interns who had not a single fuck to give about documentation or commenting their shitty code that strangely reminds me of a drunken Jenga game.

Got a Student job during July. When I arrived the first day they gave me the project they need me to work on.

They want me to create an intranet for the department based on a SharePoint infrastructure.
After 3 days of working on it, I'm starting to realize how hard it'll be since I don't have any admin access (would have been too easy). It's a multinational company so I have limited access to everything. No access to Sharepoint designer, neither to Sharepoint Admin Center and on top of everything, I don't even have the right to embed scripts to the pages.

Oh, and did I mention that I'm learning Sharepoint from scratch ?

It's fun to learn and to try to overcome problems and limitations but I'm really starting to stress about the final result ...

/Rant

Fucking hell it is so hard to find an internship these days.

Now, I am just an normal student from a small college in India. The companies who are even slightly big/established won't even consider your resume unless you are from one the best colleges or know someone extremely high up in the management. The smaller startups are so disorganised that they just want free labour for a website or an app. Now ok I admit I slacked on my entrance exams and couldn't get a good college, but at least give me a chance. Take an interview, a test something. My mates from even slightly better colleges get internship offers from bigwigs just because their college is better and companies hire from them regularly. They come to campus and also takes interns with them. Meanwhile, here we are. Sitting empty on our assess waiting for a service recruiter to pick us all up.

I feel like it's worthless to slog through this shitty college now. Shitty colleges in India are lost causes. Shitty infrastructure, shitty faculties and the number one thing they care about is ATTENDANCE. Fuck them and fuck the education system.

Oh and did I tell you that the college administration won't let you intern at a no name startup and you need a No Objection Certificate from the Department Head to be able to pursue your internship otherwise it won't count towards your curriculum.

I am sorry if this bothered any of you and sorry if I came out to be a really arrogant person but I needed someplace to vent.

Almost..

I am a web developer and assigned in a project as Infrastructure Engineer AND Penetration Tester because no one is available. I survived that hellish experience, i learned clustering and other advance stuff on my own, studying even late at night, no training..just youtube videos. PM (who is currently has little to no involvement in this stage) has very little appreciation in what im doing(research, server estimates, diagramming, documentation, planning)

AAAARRRGH!!! I wanted to rant! I wrote a huge text! I got really furious about it! Then drove through some area without Internet, looked something up in the browser, returned to devrant app - and THE FUCKING FUCK TEXT WAS GONE!!!

That makes me even MORE ANGRY!!

Been working on AWS for about 8 months. Always looked at Cloudformation like an Alien thing. Never thought I'd be the one diving into this Rabbit hole.

But now here I am, 3rd day, trying to Automate the whole infrastructure of my App via Cloudformation.

PSA: Don't chase shiny.

Serverless stacks are fast, easy, and cheap... until they're not. 75% of the way through an implementation when the company started to realize that we would be done by now if we continued to use our own infrastructure.

Oh god where do I start!?

In my current role I've had horrific experiences with management and higher ups.

The first time I knew it would be a problem: I was on a Java project that was due to go live within the month. The devs and PM on the project were all due to move on at the end. I was sitting next to the PM, and overheard him saying "we'll implement [important key feature] in hypercare"... I blew my top at him, then had my managers come and see if I was OK.

That particular project overran with me and the permanent devs having to implement the core features of the app for 6mo after everyone else had left.

I've had to be the bearer of bad news a lot.

I work now and then with the CTO, my worst with her:
We had implemented a prototype for the CEO of a sister company, he was chuffed with it. She said something like "why is it not on brand" - there was no brand, so I winged it and used a common design pattern that the CEO had suggested he would like with the sister company's colours and logo. The CTO said something like "the problem is we have wilful amateurs designing..." wilful amateurs. Having worked in web design since I was 12 I'm better than a wilful amateur, that one cut deep.

I've had loads with PMs recently, they basically go:

PM: we need this obscure set up.
Me & team: why not use common sense set up.
PM: I don't care, just do obscure set up.

The most recent was they wanted £250k infrastructure for something that was being done on an AWS TC2.small.

Also recently, and in another direction:

PM: we want this mobile app deploying to our internal MDM.
Us: we don't know what the hell it is, what is it!?
PM: it's [megacorp]'s survey filler app that adds survey results into their core cloud platform
Us: fair enough, we don't like writing form fillers, let us have a look at it.

*queue MITM plain text login, private company data being stored in plain text at /sdcard/ on android.

Us: really sorry guys, this is in no way secure.
Pm: *in a huff now because I took a dump on his doorstep*

I'll think of more when I can.

The IT at my current work designed infra as such :
One repo for ALL the configs for every project and one config file per project that defines the version of the language (ex node 6) for all environment of a project. I don't even want to talk about deploying previous version or what happen when you update the version and AWS spawns new instances.
Jump into chatops hype approach and use one single script to deploy every app. Talk about a single point of failure but hey we use slack now it's great no?

Since I always think we are one character away from bad deployment and I'm into one click deployment then I've made a web app just to generate command and copy it or send it to slack.

I guess this is what happens when IT work for themselves only..

Technical meeting

We were at technical meeting a while ago, they discussed our infrastructure implementation, all was good.

Then some motherfucker of our technicians, suggested that we should move to bitbucket, I fought fiercely to don't even think about leaving bitbucket.

Suddenly the cock swallowers bosses agreed to bitbucket, they submit their changes.

10 min after the meeting i broke into the biggest boss room, gave him my resignation letter, I just told him, signing your acceptance to move to bitbucket, you should sign this too.

Boom, assholes.
I'm free now.

I was thinking about the problems one of our clients faced with the launch of their project the other day, because things were rushed, stuff was omitted and in the end they could not meet the launch date, and I started making a list of hard lessons I learned over the years that would have helped them avoid this situation.

Feel free to add yours in the comments.

- Never deploy on Friday
- Never make infrastructure changes right before a launch
- Always have backups. Always!
- Version control is never optional
- A missed deadline is better than a failed launch
- If everything is urgent, nothing is important
- Fast and cheap, cheap and quality, quality and fast. Only one pair at a time can be achieved
- Never rush the start or the end of a project
- Stability is always better that speed
- Make technical decisions based on the needs of the project two years from now
- Code like you will be the only maintainor of the project two years from now. You probably will...
- Always test before you deploy
- You can never have too many backups (see above)
- Code without documentation is a tool without instructions
- Free or famous does not necessarily mean useful or good
- If you need multiple sentences to explain a method, you should probably refactor
- If your logic is checked beforehand, writing the code becomes way easier
- Never assume you understand a request the first time around. Always follow up and confirm

There are many more that should be on this list, but this is what came to mind now.

Project leader did no work on our project (mainly due to not knowing how to do it), so he dealt with the problem by asking me to explain the entire infrastructure and setup to him five minutes before our call with the Director where he attempted to state all the things that "we" had done.

After his spiel of detail-less crap I explained exactly what was going on, and how I had done it, and the Director seemed far more interested to speak to me.

I'm an intern and the PL has been there full-time for over a year.

I said "I think that meeting went pretty well! He seems happy" after the call and was totally ignored 😂

Intern 1 - 0 Lazy, patronising, rude full-time employee.

TL;DR: If you do fuck all, let the person speak who knows the project inside-out; don't try and get in there first or the hard worker will then go into way more detail than you under to prove their worthiness!

Best:
Huge update and refactoring on my private infrastructure (gigabit lan, ipv6, new vpn architecture, new dns, new mailserver and much more). And there is no more microsoft in my little kingdom :)

Also i stumbled over devrant ;)

Worst:
Still a lot of unfinished projects, more and more problems at work because of lack of concentration. Been diagnosed with adhd this year, so at least i know the source of my problems, but it still hurts to fail :(

Best wishes for 2017++ to the devrant community!

Week end prayer for Infrastructure folks...

Not much of a SQL Dev, still an apprentice and had a basic run throughs. Client needed a migration script to run, which I was assigned. Took me a good 6/7 days to make, transfer over a secure (and VERY slow) network took 2 hours. Infrastructure 3rd party took 2 days to clear and run. After all that process. I then realise, I left the fucking rollback in

Am I Data Engineer or Software Development Engineer ?

I design the infrastructure for analytics data, and I build the infra entirely including an development. Except making reports out of the data.

What I'm supposed to be called ?
Data Engineer ?
Software Development Engineer ?

Definitely not an Data Scientist. Official designation given by company is Data Engineer II. But what I'm ?

Confused, someone help me please.

Company after years finally moves away from the ages old and buggy chat infrastructure to use HipChat, which gets adopted quickly and is loved by everyone...
Now Atlassian announces to discontinue HipChat. ;( *sadpanda*

At least we might be able to move to Slack now. :)

If you could remember that I'm not your staff anymore and stop assigning me to projects. That'd be fucking swell.

I'm meant to be infrastructure now so fuck off. Oh a devs leaving let's hand the project to the infrastructure guy who's fucking leaving also!!

Fucking genius. I'm so close to just to saying fucking swivel and walking out. Fuck the notice period.

Please share C++ advice for devs new to the language. What do you guys think is the fastest route to self learning C++ development for infrastructure systems and please suggest resources.

I love when a project puts a dependency on infrastructure that has not been implemented internally and have no idea if it will work. *sarcastic voice*