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I work in a company where I'm the only developer, with everyone being designers or marketing or sales. Typically like the scene from Silicon Valley.
Moto was to create a ticket selling website for their products, and make sure they worked as well. It was all fine, until deadlines were discussed. They wanted it done within 2 weeks, the entire backend dashboard, API and front end.
I told them it's almost impossible to do it, but they insisted on it. So, I made a minimal dashboard and told them, I haven't completed a few things, such as if you edit data in one place, it won't reflect in other tables. So, be careful while editing the data.
They nodded their head for everything, yesterday was site launch and 2 hours before that one bastard decided to changed the product names to something "catchy" but failed to change the same in other places.
I had used the name as foreign key, so querying other DBs became a fuck all issue, and eventually API stopped giving any response to front end calls.
I got extremely pissed, and shouted at that dude, for fucking everything up. He said, you're the tech guy and you should've taken all this into account.
I sat and hardcoded all the data into database again, made sure site is live. Once it was live, these guys call a company meeting and fire me saying I was incompetent in handling the stressful situation.
At that moment, I lost my shit and blasted each of those people. The designer started crying since her absurd designs(though great) couldn't be realised in CSS that too within 2 weeks time.
One of the worst experience for working for a company. I could've taken the website down, and told them to buzz off if they'd called, I couldn't get myself to do it, hence ranting here.
I seriously feel, all these tech noob HRs need to get a primer course on how to deal with problems of a programmer before they get to hire one, most of these guys don't know what we're trying to tell in itself.
I find devRant to be the only place where I can get someone to understand the issues that I face, hence ranted.
TL;DR: Coded ticket selling site in 2 weeks. 3 hours to launch, data entry dude fucks up. I clean all the mess, get the site online. Get fired as soon as that happens.
Live long and prosper. Peace.16 -
Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"
Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"
Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"
Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."
Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."
Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"
Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."
Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."
Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"
Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."
Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."
Cprn: - "Please do?"
Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"
Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."
Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."
Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."
Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."
Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."
Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."
Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"
Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."
Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."
Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."
Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"
Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."
Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"
Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."24 -
Why do people (Some devs too...) bloody hell think that devs have Hard time fixing the Semi Colon issue, we have a lot of other issues to figure out, like the Structure of Data, Code Fragmentation, API Creation, Invalid Data Handling, Injection Prevention. But no, since we are developers, we are having sleepless nights because of one fucking semicolon? FUCKING NO, it hardly takes 30 seconds to figure out that there is a missing semi-colon. Really People, stop the ; thing!10
-
3 years, part time, $0.
I used to volunteer my time to an old text based rpg, handling code changes, sysadmin maintenance and the likes - back when those were a thing in the mid 2000's and money wasn't my issue in life - free for them, experience for me - win win!
Was something to get my hands dirty back in the day and contribute to an active community, but since then that place has shut down and been disbanded.24 -
Dev checked in code (I suspect purposely not inviting me on the code review invite) saying he "fixed" the authentication bug in the web service.
Um no, like I told you last week, the authentication error is because the load balancer wasn't passing the user's authentication to IIS.
If I didn't overhear him telling a user "Still getting the error? I don't know, we might have to re-write that service", he might have gotten away with it.
Me: "Wait, that doesn't sound right. If I hit the server directly, authentication works. Its an issue with the load balancer, not the service"
Dev: "Admin said the load balancer is fine and it has to be the service."
Me: "I don't buy it. IIS is returning the authentication error, not the service."
Dev: "I added exception handling and nothing is being logged. Must be something in the service configuration."
Me: "No, IIS performs the authentication, not the service. I explained that last week, remember?"
Dev: "Oh yea. What changes do we need to make to the service?"
<my blood pressure starts to spike>
Me: "None. Give me a sec.."
<we have other apps on the same server farm that work just fine, so I re-configure the service pool settings to match theirs>
Me: "See, now going through the load balancer, the service works fine. For some reason, the admin had our service set up differently."
Dev: "OK, I'll let the users know the service is fixed."
Me: "Service was never broke and I'm not leaving it in its current state. In the morning I'll talk to the admin and see what he can do to fix."
6 -
tl;dr: Bossmang blaming my code for a database connection issue thrown from outside of my code. Bossmang doesn’t listen. Bossmang doesn’t want to believe it’s a connection issue.
———
Bossmang: The code you wrote is causing insane spec failures in the release branch! It’s hard to follow because it’s so insane, but the cause is your code not properly handling undefined settings! Look at this! <spec>
Me: Specs pass on my machine. I ran it with both a set and nil value. <screenshots>
Bossmang: It works when you set it to nil.
Me: But a setting that doesn’t exist returns nil? <screenshot>
Bossmang: Not seeming to.... So this is the spec failure from the release: “No connection pool with id primary found. <stacktrace that starts outside of my code>”
Me: ... That’s a DB connection error. It’s also being thrown outside of my code, and from a `super` call to Rails.
Bossmang: But <unrelated> and <unrelated> and <other spec> is failing, and if I set the version, it has <other failure> instead! That calls your code first.
Me: It’s a database error. Also: <explains probable, unrelated cause of other failures, like someone didn’t mock a fucking external api call>
Bossmang: But if I restore a DB backup, it fails again.
Me: Restoring uses a dB connection, which could be exhausting the pool depending on the daemons you have running.
Bossmang: perhaps.
...
Bossmang: I still think it’s related to spec ordering.
🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
This is tiring.12 -
This Part 3 and finale of the tale of Mr DDTW, or the worst coworker I've ever had to deal with. I suggest you start from the beginning if you don't have the context, it's been a trip.
Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605
Part 2: https://devrant.com/rants/4220715
The problem with this man threatening to snitch on me to the professor if I didn't revert my commit was that he backed me into a corner. Letting him go at his pace with his quality standards would have ruined the project for the rest of us, and I'm not going to let three other people's grades suffer because one was lazy. I'm the PM, team lead, the guy who will ultimately be held responsible for this project succeeding or failing and the mediator of problems.
So I snitched first.
The professor knew us. He had an idea of how we worked as a team, who was enthusiastic about this subject, who was diligent, and who wasn't. It'd been half a semester and he wasn't stupid. I'd also taken the not-so-minor task of testing our software and handling all the little integration problems between components and between the professor's server. This had resulted in several calls between me and him because he'd been flying by the seat of his pants with some of the upgrades he'd been doing to the server code and as the fastest group we were the ones running into all the bugs on his end. And he'd also noted our prior complaint and seen the discrepancy in commits, author tags and hours logged. Mr DDTW had been graded significantly worse than the rest of us. So when I sent him a goddamn novel about our team's internal problems, the bomb was set. And so we get to the conference call, with everybody panicking and with no clue what any of this is about. Except me.
Dear god. That call was pure catharsis. Never have I seen a man get demolished so hard. Mr DDTW got a 45 minute LECTURE, a goddamn SMACKDOWN, about how he needs to take some responsibility for this team effort and that in the real world he'd have been fired. And the professor was so incredibly serene throughout! He could've blasted him with the rage of a thousand suns but he said it in such a way that Mr DDTW's only real responses were "yes", "I understand" and "I'm sorry". An entire semester of this useless fucking bitch being nothing but a leech on our team in three separate projects and he was finally getting SCHOOLED. And then, it gets even better. The professor asked how we could solve this problem, as Mr DDTW needs to do work to be graded but he can't hold us back.
I dropped a suggestion: As I had implemented the module in a way that worked, we could carry on using my version while Mr DDTW could work on a separate branch. Everything else was working reasonably well for an MVP, we just needed to improve and test now, so if Mr DDTW got it working we could merge it back into the main branch. This solved the team's problem of not being able to progress, it solved Mr DDTWs problem of not wanting to fail the course, and it solved my problem of not having to work with this shit-for-brains for the forseeable future. A weight was lifted off my shoulders. No more Mr DDTW. No more bitching and no more shitcode. A grating arsehole that had been bugging everyone all sememster put in his place and out of my hair.
On the way home from uni that day, I rang a friend and told him the entire story as I needed to get it off my chest. Every time I brought up a problem, an issue, a setback, an argument, he made a remark.
"Damn, if only he just... did the work."
Every time he said it it was in a slightly different way, but every time it made me laugh harder as he just didn't stop interrupting me with the same comment. If only he did the work. But the funniest part of all was how right he was. Mr DDTW had so many opportunities to just sit down, shut up, and do the work like the rest of us, but instead he decided to do fuck-all until he got flak for it and proceeded to dig his own grave. What sort of delusional entitlement, sheer incompetence or other dumbfuckery was he suffering from to make such terrible decisions? It's his last year of university and he still hadn't learned to just do the goddamn work (I would later find out that his friend had covered his shortcomings a lot and was apparently the reason why he hadn't flunked out of uni yet).
And so ends the story of Mr Didn't Do The Work the worst person I have ever had the displeasure of working with. We never did merge his branch as we ran out of time during testing. The professor passed him, possibly out of pity or just so that he wouldn't have to resit the course and burden some other poor sods. We weren't the top scorers this time, partially because of my shortcomings as PM but mostly because of the huge delays and manpower deficit, but we did well enough to pass the course with some very high grades. With one exception of course.5 -
The solution for this one isn't nearly as amusing as the journey.
I was working for one of the largest retailers in NA as an architect. Said retailer had over a thousand big box stores, IT maintenance budget of $200M/year. The kind of place that just reeks of waste and mismanagement at every level.
They had installed a system to distribute training and instructional videos to every store, as well as recorded daily broadcasts to all store employees as a way of reducing management time spend with employees in the morning. This system had cost a cool 400M USD, not including labor and upgrades for round 1. Round 2 was another 100M to add a storage buffer to each store because they'd failed to account for the fact that their internet connections at the store and the outbound pipe from the DC wasn't capable of running the public facing e-commerce and streaming all the video data to every store in realtime. Typical massive enterprise clusterfuck.
Then security gets involved. Each device at stores had a different address on a private megawan. The stores didn't generally phone home, home phoned them as an access control measure; stores calling the DC was verboten. This presented an obvious problem for the video system because it needed to pull updates.
The brilliant Infosys resources had a bright idea to solve this problem:
- Treat each device IP as an access key for that device (avg 15 per store per store).
- Verify the request ip, then issue a redirect with ANOTHER ip unique to that device that the firewall would ingress only to the video subnet
- Do it all with the F5
A few months later, the networking team comes back and announces that after months of work and 10s of people years they can't implement the solution because iRules have a size limit and they would need more than 60,000 lines or 15,000 rules to implement it. Sad trombones all around.
Then, a wild DBA appears, steps up to the plate and says he can solve the problem with the power of ORACLE! Few months later he comes back with some absolutely batshit solution that stored the individual octets of an IPV4, multiple nested queries to the same table to emulate subnet masking through some temp table spanning voodoo. Time to complete: 2-4 minutes per request. He too eventually gives up the fight, sort of, in that backhanded way DBAs tend to do everything. I wish I would have paid more attention to that abortion because the rationale and its mechanics were just staggeringly rube goldberg and should have been documented for posterity.
So I catch wind of this sitting in a CAB meeting. I hear them talking about how there's "no way to solve this problem, it's too complex, we're going to need a lot more databases to handle this." I tune in and gather all it really needs to do, since the ingress firewall is handling the origin IP checks, is convert the request IP to video ingress IP, 302 and call it a day.
While they're all grandstanding and pontificating, I fire up visual studio and:
- write a method that encodes the incoming request IP into a single uint32
- write an http module that keeps an in-memory dictionary of uint32,string for the request, response, converts the request ip and 302s the call with blackhole support
- convert all the mappings in the spreadsheet attached to the meetings into a csv, dump to disk
- write a wpf application to allow for easily managing the IP database in the short term
- deploy the solution one of our stage boxes
- add a TODO to eventually move this to a database
All this took about 5 minutes. I interrupt their conversation to ask them to retarget their test to the port I exposed on the stage box. Then watch them stare in stunned silence as the crow grows cold.
According to a friend who still works there, that code is still running in production on a single node to this day. And still running on the same static file database.
#TheValueOfEngineers2 -
A colleague named Sam was really pissed off today at an out sourcing firm from India.
My Boss outsourced an application to India based firm. Sam was the one handling the project after the handover. Sam coded a feature 2 weeks ago and moved to staging server for approval. After the sign off from the lead developer of the outsourcing firm, he moved the feature to production. For the past 2 days the application was crashing over and over again so Sam went to check and found out that the feature he coded was causing the issue. When he pulled the feature to his computer and had a look at the code, it wasn’t his code. The code he wrote was commented out and the lead developer of the outsourcing firm wrote new code.
When Sam emailed to him regarding this he replied that he re-wrote his code to fix issues with the feature. Sam and outsourcing firm lead developer had heated argument about this. It’s turns out that the outsourcing developer re-wrote the code without anyone’s approval and on production server.
The lead developer of the outsourcing firm was fired.7 -
Please disregard. I just need to vent.
Being a manager is so fucking shit. This is not even about devs or tech specific only. Never become a manager.
Why? Because it’s about handling people and all the dumb shit they do. It’s all about knowing what people suck at and preventing that weakness from leaking into other areas. The amount of fucked up people on this earth means that you have to work with at least some of them, and that means putting up with their stupid ass list of super special requirements, that if they do not fulfill, will make them a shit worker. It’s not even an issue of technical skills.
You have the guys that are often late, because “they have depression”, but will complain that “companies don’t treat employees like adults”. Being on time for work is apparently very difficult. Which doesn’t generally matter in general for dev work, but it ends up affecting other things.
You have the completely socially inept idiots that make half the team hate them and try to avoid working with them, increasing problems and work for other people. Just because they’re socially stupid, have low or no empathy, or are incapable of not being insufferable to others.
You have the people that are so bad at estimating that they keep making up numbers instead of waiting to think for a few minutes and say “ not sure, I need to research and estimate that”.
You have the surprise absentee for dumb as fuck reasons like “my phone died lol sorry”. They never do anything to actually improve, it is just “sorry guys! Btw I will do jackshit about this”.
Or the ones whining about virtually everything, all the time. Wtf why do I have to be on scrum at 12 tomorrow?! Wtf why do I have to record the result of that customer call? Wtf why should I talk with XYZ?
And if you leave them alone, everything burns. They actually need someone to tell them “hey mate you need to improve that, shall we plan something to do so?”. I think managers are useless and unneeded when you have adults working, but it seems like most of the population is composed of children. It’s basically another form of daycare.
And you have to prepare shit around all of these constraints.
Then you have the one guy that reads the requirements, has common sense, and is inoffensive and can work like a normal adult human that needs no baby sitting. A ray of light on this shitshow.
I just want to go back to pure dev.22 -
Why is it that an issue is only critical-priority until the person who's raising the biggest fuss has to do something about it?
I was notified that a website hosted in AWS went down overnight and never came back up. I was then bombarded with email after email after email while I logged into our AWS account and poked around. I'm responsible for cloud infrastructure stuff, like VMs or virtual networking or security or whatever, not the actual applications running on said infrastructure. Once I confirmed their EC2 instance was reachable and I could login with SSH, I told them they'd have to fix their application.
They told me that they had no backend developer on their development team. I'm still getting a deluge of emails from multiple people on this team and their managers and managers' managers and so on.
"Perfectly understandable," I told them, though it was anything but. "You should probably look into obtaining one."
The emails stopped immediately. I assumed they were handling it and closed my ticket and moved on. But apparently I was wrong.
Six weeks later, the site is still down, they still have no backend dev, and I'm convinced that they were lying to me when they stressed the importance of this web app because now that it's no longer my problem, not a single person seems to care that it's still broken.3 -
I'm a student, so this isn't exactly the same.
I once created a Flask application for some coursework. It was basically an Instagram clone. Anyway, when it came to handling images and saving them, I used an import called ImageMagick. Now the issue is, it had to run in Levinux (which is shit). The problem was that ImageMagick was a Debian, and Levinux only used TCZ (Tiny Core Extension or something,) so I spent a literal three days trying to convert the library into a .tcz, only to find out that Flask's built in image manager worked perfectly and reduced my code by about 25%.4 -
Perhaps more of a wishlist than what I think will actually happen, but:
- Everyone realises that blockchain is nothing more than a tiny niche, and therefore everyone but a tiny niche shuts up about it.
- Starting a new JS framework every 2 seconds becomes a crime. Existing JS frameworks have a big war, until only one is left standing.
- Developing for "FaaS" (serverless, if I must use that name) type computing becomes a big thing.
- Relational database engines get to the point where special handling of "big data" isn't required anymore. Joins across billions of rows doesn't present an issue.
- Everyone wakes up one day and realises that Wordpress is a steaming pile of insecure cow dung. It's never used again, and burns in a fire.9 -
Dynamically typed languages suck. God I hate them
It's like one big clunky free for all. I don't understand how people can work in Python or even JavaScript and tell me that they're good languages with a straight face
Not having proper autocomplete or documentation (a somewhat seperate issue of Python) is a kick in the stomach for productivity.
I've seen people advocate for using EXTERNAL DOCUMENTATION VIEWERS. WHAT
I hate not being able to enforce types so I can reason about little parts of my program. I hate not having an IDE that can actually help me. I hate having to see stupid grep'ed code snippets instead of nicely formatted javadocs. I hate having to double and triple check everything when trying to code. I hate handling effectively opaque values where I don't know anything about the type without looking it up. And I especially hate not knowing what types function parameters need to be.
Dynamic typing doesn't remove types. That, although completely unfeasible, I could respect.
Oh no, the types are still there. Just not for you
It's like solving a jigsaw puzzle with a blindfold on56 -
Arguing with a co worker.... he is writing a serial data plotter, and wants me to send the data as text. I’m like ugh no I’m not wasting bandwidth for text data, you are getting it as binary, as my embedded system has a lot of other stuff todo than send debug info, so the quicker I get the data to you the better... plus his program is running on a pc there is no issue regarding resources handling binary data.
He tells me I’m am wrong, and is trying to defend his stance, then all the electrical engineers and other software engineers all stand up and said why in the hell would it be faster to send text than binary? He has no response.23 -
FUCKING FUCK ANGULAR!!!!
LIKE FUCK IT IN THE ARSE AND BURN THE MOTHERFUCKER WHILE LAUNCHING A MISSILE ON IT TO BE SURE!
(ﾉ≧∇≦)ﾉ ﾐ ┸━┸
So I am making something on angular and I got everything running in ng serve(development environment) , after handling all issues and showing it to my boss man he approves and asked to put it up on prod for a demo , doesn’t sound like an issue , I make the prod build on cli and BAM! 16 errors ? No issues right?, I’ll just google the issue. Googles.... there aren’t no clear solutions to it as the angular version keeps changing and nobody knows what broke it, I mean people have the issue,but like 100 reasons that can cause it,
HOLY LORD RELEASE A NEWER VERSION AFTER MENDING THE OLD ONE
But nooooooo!
Angular Dev:We fucked this one, lol what should we do boss man?
Angular boss man: lol just leave it, we need to build the new version with newer bugs,
P.S. I like angular, but it’s like a underdeveloped framework, too many issues and too many changes2 -
I don't get it.
I tried Kotlin on Android just for fun, and it doesn't support binary data handling, not even unsigned types until the newest version. Java suffers from the same disease.
How does one parse and process binary data streams on such a high end system? Not everything is highlevel XML or JSON today.
And it's not only an Android issue.
Python has some support for binary data, and it's powerful, but not comfortable.
I tried Ruby, Groovy, TCL, Perl and Lua, and only Lua let's you access data directly without unnecessary overhead.
C# is also akward when it comes to data types less than the processer register width.
How hard can it be to access and manipulate data in its natural and purest form?
Why do the so called modern programming language ignore this simple aspect that is needed on an everyday basis?11 -
So fuck this. Fucking fuckers fuck this.
We've been having massive performance issues with a nested drag and drop component. I built this abomination about a year ago and had to rush through it due to my colleague not thinking the change was necessary, even though the previous revision was even worse. It's been going strong for a while, but since a month ago it has started to perform badly. Makes sense, because it was hacked together, and wasn't made for the amount of data that it's handling now.
So the other day I presented the issue to my colleague, telling him exactly what the problem was, and that we'll have to rewrite quite a bunch of the code to get it working. Today when I bring it up again he is really negative towards the changes because they are so big, and don't really want me to do them. He is, however, super stressed about the performance issues and starts digging around in the code himself. Code that he's never touched, don't understand how it works, and has said he's not interested in learning about. He even says he sucks at frontend and Vue himself. So we sit there from morning to lunch, digging through the code together (I had to do it as well because he came nowhere). And what do you think the conclusion was? The same thing I told him a few days ago.
So what now then? He still don't want me to do the changes, but still wants it solved! How the fuck is that supposed to happen?!?
Worst part is that we're the only two developers in the company, and our boss has little IT experience. That puts me and my colleague at the same hierarchical level, so all decisions has to be cool with the both of us.
So fuck this. Fucking fuckers fuck this.8 -
How to fix issues the easy way:
1. Provide users a way to raise issues
2. Immediately respond to new issues saying you added them to the internal ticketing system
3. Wait till the affected product reaches EoL
4. Tell the customer you are sorry, but as the product is now after EoL, you cannot use any resources on fixing the issue
5. Close the issue -
SO MAD. Hands are shaking after dealing with this awful API for too long. I just sent this to a contact at JP Morgan Chase.
-------------------
Hello [X],
1. I'm having absolutely no luck logging in to this account to check the Order Abstraction service settings. I was able to log in once earlier this morning, but ever since I've received this frustratingly vague "We are currently unable to complete your request" error message (attached). I even switched IP's via a VPN, and was able to get as far as entering the below Identification Code until I got the same message. Has this account been blocked? Password incorrect? What's the issue?
2. I've been researching the Order Abstraction API for hours as well, attempting to defuddle this gem of an API call response:
error=1&message=Authentication+failure....processing+stopped
NOWHERE in the documentation (last updated 14 months ago) is there any reference to this^^ error or any sort of standardized error-handling description whatsoever - unless you count the detailed error codes outlined for the Hosted Payment responses, which this Order Abstraction service completely ignores. Finally, the HTTP response status code from the Abstraction API is "200 OK", signaling that everything is fine and dandy, which is incorrect. The error message indicates there should be a 400-level status code response, such as 401 Unauthorized, 403 Forbidden or at least 400 Bad Request.
Frankly, I am extremely frustrated and tired of working with poorly documented, poorly designed and poorly maintained developer services which fail to follow basic methodology standardized decades ago. Error messages should be clear and descriptive, including HTTP status codes and a parseable response - preferably JSON or XML.
-----
This whole piece of garbage is junk. If you're big enough to own a bank, you're big enough to provide useful error messages to the developers kind enough to attempt to work with you.
2 -
Sometimes lack of confidence in one area reveals oversight cockyness in stronger areas:
Set up a simple login system from Unity engine to php to mysql db, using android device ID as the login id. Set up database column to accept 32 length varchar for MD5 hashed strings, as I knew the method I was getting the android device ID was automatically being hashed that way and more or less was what I wanted anyway.
Spend 2 days wondering why it would insert the logins with 0 issue, but could never retrieve them. Due to lack of web development and PHP skills, I assumed I was screwing up the handling of mysqli_num_rows() (to check whether I was inserting or selecting in the query) or simply screwing up my SQL queries.
Rewrite the code a few times, even went back to a method I had used in the past.
Today it dawned on me that my testing machines deviceID had been getting trimmed to the 32 character limit. Turns out I didn't account for my workstations device ID to be automatically hashed like the android device id is.
For 2 days I was obtaining and sending a 40 character string to a 32 character limit varchar and blaming my lack of PHP skills........
Back to my niche I go!1 -
So after the team have been digging through to work out why the app is spitting out errors it turns out that turning off developer mode clears the issue up.
This thing has been spitting out errors since its release in 2012 but the engine was handling it internally 🤣2 -
Compilers should just work for raw C with only static memory allocation. This isn't the bad old days where a couple of dudes wrote a short book explaining how C might probably should possibly work. I hear supposedly we have standards now.
Well, last week I lost 2 days to our compiler randomly forgetting that it wasn't okay to put a globally allocated uint32 at an address ending in 9. What? It had been handling this case without issue for more a year, but now after changing completely unrelated code we have this problem.
I'm not sure how to even deal with this idiocy so no doubt I'll continue working on it this week, too.
Thanks a lot, GCC.1 -
Because of the amount of complaining I do at work concerning legacy php applications the HOD is trying to push for different technologies to use for backend services. We have met multiple times to discuss the proper way of handling the situation since there are a lot of very obvious things to consider regarding the push for a new tech stack. The typical names have come about, but my biggest issue will be training people for these stacks.
Testing environments with docker and so forth, push for CERTAIN applications to be more API centric and the use of better frontend frameworks that will remain standard for years to come(hard to bet on this one but I tend to orefer React) among other things are the topics of conversation.
Personally I would love to move the shop to something geared towards Golang, thing is, the lead dev is complaining about it saying that the training for a new language would just take time. After a couple of examples he is still not convinced.
I think its wrong of him to center himself on just PHP and JQUERY as the main development stack he uses and learning new things should be part of the job, I also have a case against the spaghetti code that results from just using vanilla php with no proper development practices(composer based systems, oop etc etc you get the gist)
In the end I am starting to think that it will become one of those "fuck off I am the boss" type of deal since I am going to be here after a long time and he has about 2 years before he medically retire.1 -
Customer: It doesn't do what we wanted it to do, we have this issue, this particular usecase doean't work because you didn't use the patch we sent you. Please use it!
Me: I used most of it, I just fixed few broken parts and dropped part handling the hardware you realized you don't have and I just retested this particular usecase and it works! -
How do you deal with code/project burnout?
I've been refactoring and bugfixing my script for a week now. The project seems simple on the surface but the edge cases and methods to handle certain subsets of data are breaking it because handling them is vague and takes time to figure out and every day something is fixed and something else ends up as the issue preventing completion.
On the surface the idea seems sound so I'm also under pressure to get something "this easy" done.
Starting to feel some burnout on this.1 -
(Question/0.5Rant)
So I am working on a mixed API (aka reachable from anywhere, but also only accessible by specific allowed devices) and I am struggling with the security of it, its not managing anything hardcore (this API is "is the coffe ready?" kind of level) or I would have just enforced per device registration for example already, but the app that goes with that API is deployed remotely and has to be "ready to go!!!" out of the box, so I can't add any registration, verifications of devices etc.
The main thing I am afraid of is, that one of those agent retards will get his spaghetti phone blasted from the inside, so all the https calls will be read out by some random attacker, which then will be able to "abuse" the API via read out api-key, is there any way for me to have a rescue plan if one of those retards does get hacked and the system then get spammed or something, like if I log all devices that use the API I could just deny access from that device (until resolved) and issue a new app update via new api key.
What's the best way of handling this and is my idea really the only way to handle this? this shitfest is really causing shit ton of ideas in my head, which then I deny literally 20 seconds later, because there's a way to bypass it or once you have the old api key to get a new one by just monitoring it etc.5 -
I was casually browsing some issues for a project on github, and I certainly across an issue where someone wanted support for for URI handling (there's a good reason for his request).
I was bored, and I just wrote a script to do exactly that. I'm gonna polish it on Sunday, and then upload it, (plus add a PR). -
So the company is launching this massive new project, I'm tasked with building a dashboard to track the performances of the whole thing in near real-time.
90% if the data comes from this one somewhat rubbish API (3rd-party).
I'm given plenty of time to build this, everything runs fine prior to the launch, manager happy.
Launch day, happening exactly at midnight.
I go and check my dashboard 5 min past the hour, all excited.
Errors, errors everywhere. "What is going on?" I exclaimed. #datHeartAttack
Took me a fair amount of time to figure out the issue.
Due to the time difference I was technically requesting the 3rd party servers for "tomorrow's data," and that instead of handling that in some sensible manner, the API just threw a "wrong fucking date error."
I mean, we're paying additional money, good money, for this API. -
I'm in a big fat fucking stinking rut, as in progress on this project has absolutely stagnanted.
Gonna rubber face your duck now **UNZIPS** excepts I don't have zippers, as joggers are the one true way; fake Adidas til I fucking drop.
Brain damage aside, I understand both how I've layed out the data and what I'm supposed to do with it. We have a virtual machine, an array of instructions and arguments for a given process within it, and we need to walk this array and map values to registers.
We also need to spill values inside registers to stack, IF they are required at a further point within that block. This also isn't terribly complex. We simply look forward in the array and see if the value is an argument to any instruction that *needs* this value to be loaded (ie, within a register).
So this implies multiple iterations; we need to better understand how one particular value is used throughout an F before we can make a final decision on how many registers and stack space are actually needed for the whole block.
Here's where it gets tricky. If there's a call, we need to be certain that the symbol being invoked has already been fully processed. Besides the obvious fact that recursion fucks me up, there's another matter: say a private method gets invoked by another private method. We can take advantage of this, by which I mean, sacrilege incoming so put on this toga.
Looking at the output for C compilers, it would seem this is not done in practice, I would assume because it's a pain in the ass. But when you have the guarantee that F will only be called internally, as that's what "private" means, there's two ways it can go:
0. It's well below the 13-20 cycle threshold, so you inline the fucker. No suprises there.
1. It's a more involved affaire, and invoked in more than one place, so you don't inline it. Codesize matters.
Recursion and [1] are the big deal things holding me back. Not because it's too hard, like I said this is kindergarten level abstraction. I'm just slow and fanatical, which is how I prefer to spell "constant obsessive paranoid delusions". I can see the potential optimization I can pull here, so I'm stuck trying to figure it out.
Idea would be, handling the register allocation and stack spill for an internal-internal (or deep internal; what we like to call a "guts" method) in synchronization with the *calling* processes. This is, fundamentally, violating all conventions -- but so under the hood no one will notice.
Let me give you an example. If we were to pass some value to a function, expecting to mutate it and get a different value back, in a lot of cases it'd be stupid to make an implicit copy by using two registers, one for input and another for the output. Dude, it's one cycle. Multiply it by a million, say sixty times per second, for every time you __needlessly__ make a copy of a value that we've already stated is mutable.
Clearly unacceptable. This is, in the strictest sense, everywhere in every single codebase. Premature micro optimization is the root of all goodness, God is great and praiseworthy. So how do we go about it?
Answer is I know and I don't know. By which I mean to say, this very thing I've done by hand. Assembly is fun. Now the issue is teaching a calculator how to do it. Not so fun.
There is a dependency chain between processes, as I believe I've kind of alluded to. I'm trying to make decisions on the side of the caller depending on the details of the callee, which is why recursion is rawdogging my soul. This is the same situation, it's inverting the direction of one or more links in the dependency chain, which makes no fucking sense.
And yet it does.
Brain, explain yourself.
How do *you* handle this without crashing?
Brain?
<<ME STEWPED; BEEP-BOOP>>
Alright then, that was a useless attempt at fuckery. Let's have a nap then, maybe it'll come to me in the morning. That's what I've been saying to myself for almost a month now.
Perhaps it is a hardcoded fuk.1
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