Everyone here ranting about a fucking missing semicolon. I can't remember the last time a missing semicolon was the issue...

You wanna know what's REALLY BALL-BUSTING????

WHEN THE FUCKING 10 y/o LEGACY CODEBASE, CODED BY FUCKING PHP WORDPRESS SCRIPTERS WHO THOUGHT THEY COULD BUILD AN ENTERPRISE SHIT CAUSE ZF2 "LOOKS EASY" AND THEN FILL IT UP WITH SPAGHETTI, IS SO BAD WRITTEN THAT IN ORDER FOR THE PAGE TO RENDER YOU ACTUALLY ****HAVE**** TO DISABLE ERROR REPORTING SO WHENEVER A FUCKING ERROR HAPPENS ON THE TEMPLATE RENDER COMPONENT OF ZEND FRAMESHIT 2, YOU'RE LEFT WITH A FUCKING BLANK PAGE AND NOTHING IS LOGGED TO THE LOG FILE, SO YOUR ONLY OPTION IS DIE() DEBUGGING LINE BY LINE ON THE 1300 LINES PHTML FUCKFEST OF A VIEW THEY HAVE.

MISSING SEMICOLON? YES PLEASE, GIVE ME MORE OF THAT SHIT

After opening the legacy code and finding out that the entire shit has 15000+ LOC and without proper comments

Me after changing code of an old project

Manager: 'Please remove this checkbox from that page.'

Me: 'Sure thing, it was stupid anyway. Just gimme a couple of minutes.'

Legacy code: 'LOL the checkbox is wired to everything else and if you simply remove it the backend will shit itself. There is several hundred lines of inline Javascript in the HTML template with some Thymeleaf stuff managing the form data or just are there to make the code less readable. The controller for the page is a bit more than a thousand lines of spaghetti, no easy way to find where is that specific data necessary and where can be easily removed. Class variables declared between methods, dozens of nested if statements checking shit in every method and the data is passed through like half a dozen other classes. Good luck with that!'

Me: '💩.'

Ranting time;

Yeah so OK this ancient legacy clusterfuck we've been maintaining and keeping alive finally broke. And even though I'm very pleased with both being right, and the well deserved right to say I TOLD YOU SO, SO MANY MANY FUCKING TIMES to all in management, it's the definition of hate to work 18 hours a day to fix the shit someone else built, that they refused us to refactor. Ah, but wait; there's more! Everyone thinks it's our fault (R&D), because historically it was our department that built the system. Ten years ago. So sales and support are now all over us, those responsible for us being in this mess are either gone or so high up in management that they refuse to take part.

Taking the fall and blame and workload, for something we warned repeatedly about, but were refused to do something with, because shiny features and new apps is what is important!

I'd understand it if the numbers were red, but they arent!! We are growing so fast it was inevitable!

I fucking hate companies who dont listen to their devs..... also companies who places ops on dev shoulders.

Yaaaargh! Also; two developers means twice as fast? No? Fuuuuuck!!!

Business: How long will it take to add that feature to the legacy system?
Programmer: When will the new system be implemented?
Business: 6 months
Programmer: The new feature will take 7 months

So I finally got my head out of my ass and decided to install some OS on that 500MB RAM legacy craptop from earlier.

*installs Tiny Core Linux*

Hmm.. how do I install extra packages into this thing again? *Googles how to install packages*
Aha, extensions it's called.. and you install them through their little package manager GUI, and then you also have to dick around with some TCE directory, and boot options for that. Well I ain't gonna do that. Why the fuck would I need to dick around with that? Just install the fucking files in /bin, /var, /etc and whatever the fuck you need to like a decent distro. I'll fucking load them whenever I need them, BY EXECUTING THE FUCKING BINARY. But no, apparently that's not how TCL works.

Also, why the fuck is this keyboard still set to US? I'm using a Belgian keyboard for fuck's sake.. "loadkeys be-latin1"
> Command not found.

Okay... (fucking piece of shit) how do I change the fucking keyboard layout for this shit?!
*does the jazz hand routine required for that*
So apparently I need to install a package for that as well. Oh wait, an EXTENSION!! My bad. And then you can use "loadkmap < /usr/share/kmap/something/something" to load the keyboard layout. Except that it doesn't change the fucking keymap at all! ONE FUCKING JOB, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!

That's fucking it. No more dicking around in TCL. If I wanted to fuck around with the system this much, I'd have compiled my own custom Linux system. Maybe I can settle with Arch Linux, that's a familiar distro to me.. I can easily install openbox in that and call it a day. But this is an i686 machine.. Arch doesn't support that anymore, does it?

*does another jazz hand routine on Arch Linux 32 and sees that there's a community-maintained project just for that*

Oh God bless you fine Arch Linux users for making a community fork!! I fucking love you.. thank you so much!! Arch it'll be then <3

long rant = this;

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

The task: get Windows 7 on my mom's new Lenovo running win 10.

First idea: dual boot. Go into disk utility and shrink win 10 partition leaving empty partition. Easy!

Unfortunately it all went downhill from there.

Restart, can't get into boot menu. Google says you have to do that from Windows. Ok.

Laptop says BOOTING FROM CD IS NOT SUPPORTED. WTF??

Go into BIOS, enable legacy boot, prioritize legacy. Restart. Ok, it boots from disk.

Go to install 7 on the empty partition and it can't because its an unsupported partition format or some shit. Whatever, wipe everything. Ok, installing windows.

Windows installed, need drivers. Go download them with another computer and go to copy them over with USB disk. Windows doesn't detect it. THIS POS DOESN'T HAVE STANDARD USB DRIVERS?!?!?

Of course, the laptop didn't come with any driver software. I end up burning a fucking CD like its fucking 2001 so that I can get the goddamn wifi driver on it.

Ok, I have wifi. Go to Lenovo site, find driver page. Select all the drivers I want for the model/OS and click download. Lenovo site says "hey, use this driver update software." I'm like, hey asshole, why don't you just give me the drivers i asked for. But fine.

Driver update software downloads, I install it, nothing happens. I run it, it says it's already running. Still nothing. What the goddamn flipping fuck?

I go download the drivers individually. I try to install USB driver. It says my system is not supported. .............Try to install chipset driver, not supported. ............ I can install maybe half of the drivers and I still can't even use a fucking USB mouse. Gonna have to wait for windows update to find it sometime two days from now.

I hope everyone in charge of Lenovos fucking ass backwards pointless piece of useless fucking shit drivers gets raped to death with a serrated knife.

Horrors of Supporting Legacy Systems

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

They made a full fucking application in MICROSOFT EXCEL!!!!!!!
who the fuck makes an app in Excel? Though it's used internally, it has over 100 users and Everytime there's an update a new file is sent to all of them by mail. They use different excel files as DBs and tables as sheets. It's even got a fucking UI with check boxes and drop-downs and shit

Now guess what my task is?
Understand that entire application from the Excel files and make a webapp to cater to those requirements.

Fuck documentation, there are bugs in the Excel file and I need to fix the bugs in my app

Some good soul please tell me how must one start analyzing an Excel sheet to understand the logic behind it. Or a tool that magically converts "excel applications" to webapps

Why the fuck would you assign two new values to the same variable in consecutive lines like that ? I swear this project is driving me nuts. Fuck the dev who wrote this.

Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.

Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)

Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.

So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.

And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.

Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...

People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.

Summary

PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.

That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.

Enjoy.

I don't know why my position has to be labeled "developer", when in reality I ain't develop shit, all I do day after day is fixing legacy code

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

Developers who use JavaScript "eval(...)" deserve a normal place in hell.
Developers who use JavaScript eval() within eval() deserve the most special place in hell. 🔥

Fuck all this legacy shit. I'm buying a strip club on the bahamas, seeya!

When I joined my team in august as a junior/trainee, we were 6 developers.

Now we are 4 left in the team.

By the end of june, we are 1.. I mean its me, myself and I.

Wtf did I do!? My code isnt that spaghetti. I think...

But its np, just me with a 20 years old database, 7 legacy systems and a new one planned.

Atleast my boss believes in me keeping this shit floating.

Me at QA, talking about a nasty bug I found in legacy code.
QA: what was the root cause?
Me: pos code.
QA: pos?!
Me: piece o' shit.
QA: ...

"Holy shit that was fucking traumatic to look at" you whisper under your breath

That moment you get the satisfaction of deleting 2468 lines of legacy code.

So I had a fun week.

It started off with my boss replying to a co-workers email where he sent his new bank account, saying he doesn't need it untill we close off some baddly planned projects, meaning no paycheck.

Needless to say we were working night and days including weekends on it and put our best into it.

For the next part I need to explain a little background. We have this old legacy system I'm working with for the past 3 years. I keet raising the red flag we need a new one. Nothing happened. So every time I worked with it I kept thinking how to improve the parts. Almost two years went into thinking and planning the new system untill I got a green light. It was most satisfying - the day I got to build something good and awesome. I drew all the data structures, laid out the foundations and started building ontop of it. It was amazing and I was really proud of it. Then suddendly client wanted to see something and the decision was made we threw it together quickly with the old legacy system. It was on hold 'till then due to work overload.

Boss wrote me this week if I can put the project from git on a server, where he out sourced the completition into India where they will finish it. On thr question if they can't work on git, he replied: "should they?" -.-

To top it all up, I got a notice at the end of the week if I don't fill his shit time tracking system (that takes me one hour/day to insert all entries) by monday he'll deduct a sizable portion of my paycheck.

I AM WORKING FOR YOU ALL THE FUCKING TIME BECAUSE YOU LACK RESOURCES AND I THOUGHT A TEAM STICKS TOGETHER AND SAVES EACH OTHERS ASS! I DONT HAVE TIME TO ENTER YOUR FUCKING STUPID TIME ENTRIES IN YOUR FUCKING BUGGED SYSTEM EACH DAY ON TASKS THAT DON'T EVEN EXIST BITCH! MAKE IT BETTER FIRST!! OH! AND NO ONE IS MORE QUALIFIED TO FINISH THAT PROJECT THAN ME, I POURED MY FUCKING HEART INTO IT YOU PRICK!

woah.

Here is my list of horrible techs which are common in my current and previous workplace which should be extinct ASAP:

SAP
SharePoint
Java applets
Java Swing desktop apps
C# Windows Forms desktop apps
ASP/JSP
VB
RemoteApp
Shitty insecure php web apps
Micorsoft Access DB
Windows XP
Windows Servers
Closed Linux-based appliances which lack many basic GNU software and are forbidden to tamper with
Every single Symantec product

Post yours below

Today the CEO asked us to create KPIs to follow a junior tasks, daily.
The problem it's he wants KPIs to foretell problems or delays in his tasks.

The junior is analyzing 14 years old C++ code, made by an electrical engineer who had all worsts practices possible when coding.

We explained that we couldn't make real, true KPI that would foretell the advancement due to complexity of the legacy and the fact that the junior had NEVER USED C++.

SO.... He asked to know how many code lines he made daily and an estimate of how many lines he'll have to do to complete the task.... So he could foretell advancement.

....
....

It was the 5th time in less than 60 days, that the CEO bypass totally the CTO to ask some stupid useless shit. So now all developpers have resign, complaining about the CEO actions/stupidity.

Oh boy, my riskiest coding decision was certainly that one time when I refactored some 50k lines of critical legacy shit code in 3 days, straight up merged everything into master and then deployed to prod.
Luckily there was only one minor bug I had to fix after that... phew...
(To my defense: I was solo-working on it - the infamous CMS Of Doom™)

I love how the Keybase Linux client installs itself straight into /keybase. Unix directory structure guidelines? Oh no, those don't apply to us. And after uninstalling the application they don't even remove the directory. Leaving dirt and not even having the courtesy to clean it up. Their engineers sure are one of a kind.

Also, remember that EFAIL case? I received an email from them at the time, stating some stuff that was about as consistent as their respect for Unix directory structure guidelines. Overtyping straight from said email here:

[…] and our filesystem all do not use PGP.
> whatever that means.

The only time you'll ever use PGP encryption in Keybase is when you're sitting there thinking "Oh, I really want to use legacy PGP encryption."
> Legacy encryption.. yeah right. Just as legacy as Vim is, isn't it?

You have PGP as part of your cryptographic identity.
> OH REALLY?! NO SHIT!!! I ACTIVELY USED 3 OS'S AND FAILED ON 2 BECAUSE OF YOUR SHITTY CLIENT, JUST TO UPLOAD MY FUCKING PUBLIC KEY!!!

You'll want to remove your PGP key from your Keybase identity.
> Hmm, yeah you might want to do so. Not because EFAIL or anything, just because Keybase clearly is a total failure on all levels.

Written quickly,
the Keybase team
> Well that's fucking clear. Could've taken some time to think before hitting "Send" though.

Don't get me wrong, I love the initiatives like this with all my heart, and greatly encourage secure messaging that leverages PGP. But when the implementation sucks this much, I start to ask myself questions about whether I should really trust this thing with my private conversations. Luckily I refrained from uploading my private key to their servers, otherwise I would've been really fucked.

Another non programming related rant although kinda tech related.
So I work in a distribution center and today I learned box packing.

1. THEIR LEGACY ASS SYSTEM ONLY RUNS ON IE (FUCK ME IN THE ASS SIDEWAYS PLEASE).
2. SYSTEM CONSTANTLY FREEZES.
3. THE HAND SCANNERS RUN ON AN OLD FUCKING LEGACY WINDOWS (PRE 2000 I THINK) SYSTEM AND IS SLOW AS MOTHERFUCKING HELL.

Yes, it is VERY frustrating to have to work with this FUCKING SHIT THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING DAY.

Plus side today, the locations I had to pick from today included 200, 403 and 404. Had loads of inside jokes about not being able to find locations and not having permission etc 😆

When you're trying to support a legacy product and you come across this goldmine. Stupid shit like this is the reason I want to murder people

(Read the order of the parameters)

I'm not sure whether to cry or to burn everything to the ground.
I'm stuck in a rotten, over aged corporate that will one day choke on all the documents and formalism they require. Which is something I'm generally fine with. Each to their own.
But ever since I handed in my resignation they have been fucking me like I have never been gang raped before.
(A little context: I work for a midsize financial institute. Which at least in Germany are full of legacy projects and are regulated as all hell.)
So some fuckwits decided that since the regulator slapped us hard 2 years ago that we need to make up a new standard of documentation that has to be used for all IT-documentation there ever was and ever will be.
So the upper management (the before mention dumb-dumbs) choose some consultant company and locked them up together with the brightest stars (read biggest slime balls) of the IT department in an ivory tower and told them to pull some out the ass.
And one year later (early November last year) they got the shit they ordered. Gilden shit, only the most sparkly and non-sensical bullcrap you could imagine.
But they only looked at it and deemed it good. Now the guys actually in charge of the the applications got served the dish. And guess what they found out when started to dig into? Nothing but contradictions, non-final thoughts and all of that held together by web of retarded, unusable guidelines. But they ate it, they cursed but they swallowed forced by disciplinary punishments waiting should they misbehave.
The only one emerging fact was: All previous documentation was completely invalidated.
But now the mighty lords in the ivory tower guided by the never failing hand of the higher management had the greatest idea of them all. They needed someone to check all the documentation till the end of this year but since they blew all of their budget on useless wankers ( oh, ofc I meant "highly qualified external help") they now preyed on the lowest in the food chain. Which is where this story goes full circle and comes back to me.
I was the lowest rank on the food chain, a student that just handed in his resignation.
I was the first to be locked up in the basement, my co-student followed shortly after.
And now I'm going to spend my last 2 months looking at checklists that we had to pull out of the slime's ass and validating hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation. We get grinded up in the endless hate coming from the guys that we need to tease and are held in position by a wall of sheer idiocy on the side of the rule makers.
Today I cried when I had to tell someone that his magnificent documentation was not standard conform and had thus no longer any meaning or right to exist.
Thanks you for those that made it this far down. I hope you never have to feel my pain.

Before starting a job at company CUNT, we had an interview at which I told them I do not want to work on legacy monolithic codebases. We had a nice agreement and they offered me to work as a back-end with one of their projects. I was super excited to start. CUNT was very culty, always talks about how carrying for employees they are and always keep promises on their end of the table.

A week has passed, the codebase is superb legacy shit hole, no fucking standards, monolithic as fuck (BE and FE projects live in one project folder with tons of depreciated tools - there are no docs for them. That’s how old they are). They even have secret folder in their project with YOU GUESSED IT - secret keys.

Told CTO today, that I want to switch projects, because this was not the thing I signed up for and remember THEY ALWAYS CARE ABOUT THEIR EMPLOYEES AND PROMISES MADE. He basically told me, that project owners (other company) will not understand this culturally and I can either wait it out and possibly get my hands on a better project or fuck off right now.

Also, I was told, that my judgment was garbage worth and I should work longer with project “shit hole” to fully understand it.

Such a fucking salesman.

Anyways, I told that this situation is not culturally appropriate for me either as they gave me a sort of promise and I wont leave the company as I just switched jobs and cannot afford to do that again. I’ll hopefully get another position in another project soon.

WTF IS WORNG WITH PEOPLE

Oh man. Mine are the REASON why people dislike PHP.

Biggest Concern: Intranet application for 3 staff members that allows them to set the admin data for an application that our userbase utilizes. Everything was fucking horrible, 300+ php files of spaghetti that did not escape user input, did not handle proper redirects, bad algo big O shit and then some. My pain point? I was testing some functionality when upon clicking 3 random check boxes you would get an error message that reads something like this "hi <SENSITIVE USERNAME DATA> you are attempting to use <SERVER IP ADDRESS> using <PASSWORD> but something went wrong! Call <OLD DEVELOPER's PHONE NUMBER> to provide him this <ERROR CODE>"

I panicked, closed that shit and rewrote it in an afternoon, that fucking retard had a tendency to use over 400 files of php for the simplest of fucking things.

Another one, that still baffles me and the other dev (an employee that has been there since the dawn of time) we have this massive application that we just can't rewrite due to time constraints. there is one file with (shit you not) a php include function that when you reach the file it is including it is just......a php closing tag. Removing it breaks down the application. This one is over 6000 files (I know) and we cannot understand what in the love of Lerdorf and baby Torvalds is happening.

From a previous job we had this massive in-house Javascript "framework" for ajax shit that for whatever reason unknown to me had a bunch of function and object names prefixed with "hotDog<rest of the function name>", this was used by two applications. One still in classic ASP and the other in php version 4.something

Legacy apps written in Apache Velocity, which in itself is not that bad, but I, even as a PHP developer, do not EVER mix views with logic. I like my shit separated AF thank you very much.

A large mobile application that interfaced with fucking everything via webviews. Shit was absolutley fucking disgusting, and I felt we were cheating our users.

A rails app with 1000 controller methods.

An express app with 1000 router methods with callbacks instead of async await even though async await was already a thing.

ultraFuckingLarge Delphi project with really no consideration for best practices. I, to this day enjoy Object Pascal, but the way in which people do delphi can scare me.

ASP.NET Application in wich there seemed to be a large portion of bolted in self made ioc framework from the lead dev, absolute shitfest, homie refused to use an actual ioc framework for it, they did pay the price after I left.

My own projects when I have to maintain them.

Using 10% React with the rest in Jquery. Importing a giant legacy CSS blob in a newly made SCSS file. Two thirds of the API documentation in docblocks, the rest in Markdown files. Half of the repositories in Github, the other half in Bitbucket. The root of every project littered with ymls and jsons and readmes of stupidly named tools no one has ever heard of.

Fuck your partial refactoring, fuck your little experiments, fuck all this half work. I'm so done with this shit. 😡

IT'S ALMOST 2021 AND I STILL HAVE TO FUCK WITH WSCRIPT OBJECTS FOR AN INTERNET EXPLORER WEB APP WHY? 😡

I'm investigating PRs for a super legacy codebase. Someone else already approved the PRs -- somebody who has never even run the code or had the project set up before.

The codebase hasn't been touched in two years, and it hasn't been updated in four. It's using CoffeeScript, Node v0, Electron v0.30, and Angular 1.x. I obviously don't have a dev environment anymore, either, and my previous dev env was on Windows, so I'll have to translate my custom build utilities from batch to bash (or much more likely: node).

To make matters worse: the PRs break both the initial project setup and the project itself (NPM can no longer find some installed packages, among other problems). And. someone already merged them into master. So: fuck.

I'm going to yell at the author and tell him to fix his shit. Why? Because when I check out my last commit prior to his PRs, everything works perfectly. Surprise!

I was so done with this project two and a half years ago. I'm still so done with it. I just don't want to maintain this anymore, or honestly even look at it. I would happily rebuild the project from scratch, but updating it from the days of IE8? No way.

*removes Paint 3D as well as a bunch of other apps that I never use*
*Windows shits the bed every now and then again, BSOD here and there like the usual piece of shit it is*
After a few of those occurences..

Windows: Oh look, you want to open this PNG image? Well I guess that I'll open it in my newly (re)installed Paint 3D!!!

Me: For real, Microshit. Just how pushy can you fucking be. If I want to edit images, I'll just use the "legacy" fucking Paint for that, thanks!!! No need to convince me anymore, and get this 3D shit out of my fucking system already!!!

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-AppxPackage *paint* | Remove-AppxPackage

AND NOW JUST FUCK OFF, FUCKING PAINT 3D!!!

Currently, I am going through a legacy application built in microsoft access back in 90s.

* No Comments
* No Relationships between tables
* Random code that does nothing
* Weird form layouts
* Weird naming conventions

I need to copy this functionality into modern version using SQL Server Management studio and asp.net core, I also need to kill myself because none of this fucking shit fucking fuck makes sense.

I do my best to write clean and concise code along with comments but after this ordeal I am going to up my game because nobody should need to suffer through spaghetti code and stupid logic that is uncommented.

😶

Today I found out when a user logs in in this piece of crap: 59 calls to the api just to get user permissions 😤

I'm done...

*edits file on remote server*
WanBLowS: naah you can't 😈
*le wild BSOD appears for the over 9000-th time*

... Yeah. Windows, great job. Who needs system integrity when they're working on remote servers anyway, right?!

And to top it all off, le reboot mentions that they're working on fucking "features" again. That's what you needed to BSOD for?! For a goddamn motherfucking feature?!! Fucking piece of shit.

At least when I opened vim on that server again, it's saved everything neatly in the .swp files, ready for recovery. Now that's neat, isn't it? Microsoft, the Linux community has already moved on to nvim in terms of development, but maybe, just maybe, you can learn a thing or two from our "legacy software", vim.

As for me, maybe it's time to take out my Arch laptop again. At least that won't crap out on me because the sun and the stars are in a position that the OS doesn't like, or something stupid like that. FUCK YOU MICROSHIT!!!

OMFG! Who’s bright fucking horrible stupid ass idea was it to mix Ajax with php (php deciding the ajax paths) with random js outputting HTML inside random fucking static divs found no where near the logical route of content.

Trying to add a simple fucking status to a gigantic cluster fuck of a legacy project is just FUCK.

If I could I would burn this bitch to the ground and start again I would, But no, it’s needed.

Someone kill me before I break the shit out of this thing, I would take a wordpress project right now instead.

Having pets is a good way to prepare yourself for working in a brown-field environment.

When your cat or dog shits on the floor, you get the same feeling as when you need to dive into a legacy code base.

You know you can't just leave it there, and yet you still want to find anything else to do except for touch the pile of shit in the middle of the room.

Meanwhile you know your users are going to end up trampling over it and mashing it into your carpet.

Just read an article that really grinds my gears. Its about coding in other languages. Not programming languages, but literally other languages.

Btw I learned to code in Spanish and I'm not against coding in programming languages using variable names in other languages.

That's fine.

What pissed me off was that the author claimed that we should be able to code Fucking JavaScript in SWAHILI or other languages available. What kind of PC bullshit is that!

Coding is barely fucking readable and now we have to make standards for Multilanguage support. Just learn the less than 60 reserved words you lazy fuck and code with them! I leaned to code with shitty tutorials in Spanish and theres no 1000x resources out there and this author claims you can't code unless you know english.

Granted. It's easier but wtf not just learn it. When I coded in Java in Spanish, I didn't know wtf a Class was or ags meant. So what. I memorized that shit. How? By coding!

Why bring this PC shit to programming? The author thinks there are few programmers bc we don't support fucking SWAHILI in JavaScript. Fuck no!

Now if you want to support this initiative. Think of this,

...legacy code

...in 32+ languages.

Have fun debugging this thing.

Folks...

I think I need to get away from web development...

Honestly, no grudge held against web/mobile development itsef... But the projects, the teams, the workflows... It's always shitty af.

I'm fed up with the bad architecture, poor management decisions, unmaintained legacy code, broken windows, arrogant juniors, arrogant seniors, code smells left to rot, the freaking red door... Hell! The fucking "we don't have time for that" answer to testing... Damn!

Been there done that.

Feels like it's always the same crap and unfortunately, it's rare to start a professional project from scratch.

Fucking angular, broken piece of shit.
Fucking react (& RN) community modules, broken pieces of shit.
Fucking lazy-ass node developers.
Fucking ES and fucking garbage proposals submitted to the TC39.

I wish I could do Haskell / Rust / Clojure professionally... I could even enjoy Go with a good team... Anything but that huge pile of dogshit JS and its community of brainfucked so-called developers.

Fuck me in the ass, but do it harder then this api just so I can feel some love 😖

it's one of those days where you have to migrate from soap to rest, only the rest api doesn't have the same structure or search parameters as the soap api, so there's this entire fucking application sending requests at a brick wall, and expecting a purple throbbing 12 inch cock of xml to be pushed into an multi dimensional array and pushed through to the views to derange the mess, only you have to create that fucking 12 inch cock from several 2 inch dipsticks that have a different hierarchy, different field names, and merge the shit together with a glue gun...

good thing it's only an unexpected prod problem... right? 🤷‍♂️

Ah, the woes of a Monday on the legacy app adventures.

Yknow, I want to make an android app that I have in my mind for about half a year now and I already tried twice, both with Kotlin and with Java but everytime I try it's just pain and suffering and frustration...

No it's not because of the language, I like Java and I like Kotlin too and I'd say I'm at least decent at Kotlin and really good in Java...

No no.. the issue is the fucking Android SDK and the mix-and-match documentation available online!!!

Every fucking time I want to implement some sort of UI element, user action or a background service and I start googling how to do it It comes with with at least 3 different stack overflow solutions, all of them saying "that way of doing it is deprecated, instead you should X" and looking up the OFFICIAL FUCKING DOCS it will just make me roll up in the corner and cry because of how fucking inconsistent it is and the retarded domain language it uses... fucking transactions for fucking fragments inside fucking activities... because I guess the word "screen"/"view"/"template" or something similar natural just was too mainstream for the all knowing alphabet soup that google is...

And then you start looking up what the fucking difference even is and how to code it up only to find out there's at least 12 other opinions on how fragments should be used and what should be an activity and what should be a damn fragment...

But that's not all, that's just the base... I get a headache even thinking about how the fucking inflating of templates and the entire R. notation works. You want to open a fucking tiny corner menu with the settings options? WELL THEN YOU FUCKING BETTER REMEMBER TO IMPLEMENT IT THROUGH SOME SORT OF EVENT AND INFLATE THE MENU YOURSELF EVEN THOUGH ITS THE SAME FUCKING THING WITH STATIC STRINGS...

AND WHY THE FUCK DO I NEED LIKE 4 NEW FILES TO IMPLEMENT A FUCKING LISTVIEW...
also talking about ListViews... what was wrong with "ListView"... Why do we need a "RecyclerView"... oh right... because the fucks fucked the fuck up and all the legacy components were designed by a monkey and are next to useless! SO WE NEEDED A NEW NAME FOR THE FIXED VERSION, CANT NAME IT LISTVIEW AGAIN... FUCK YOU...

honestly... if I got a dolar for every "what the fuck android" I said during trying to understand that mess I'd be richer by a few hundred...

oh oh oh, but you know what? You don't like the android SDK? that's fine, you can use fucking React or Flutter or something... yeah.. because instead of torturing myself with the android SDK I want to torture myself with an abstraction of the same SDK and JavaScript as the fucking cherry on top... HAVE YOU FUCKING SEEN THE CODE FLUTTER SHOWS ON THEIR WEBSITE AS THE "Introduction" ?!!!

Look at this piece of shit:

[code in attached image, we could really use a proper Markdown support at least for rants]

THAT'S NOT EVEN THE ENTIRE THING, THAT'S JUST THE *REALLY* UGLY PART...

The fucking nesting... What is it with JS and all the fucking nesting everytime?! It looks like shit.... It reads like shit as well...

WHY, in the name OF FUCK, IS THERE MORE THAN 5 ANDROID FRAMEWORKS and ALL of them... used this FUCKING NOVEL idea of programming using A FUCKING BRACKET WALL

It always looks like:
(code(code[code{code(code{code()})}]));

If I wanted to make a fucking app or a website using fucking Haskell I'd do that.... at this point reading assembly code feels like heaven compared to this retardation... Why is this so popular?! WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE SEE IN IT?! Clearly it's not the aesthetics... it looks like a fucking frog vomit running down an emus leg, fuck that.... I don't even hate classic JavaScript, it's a good enough language and it does what I tell it to... but these ugly fucking frameworks like react, angular and whatever else uses this fucking format can go fuck right off. This is not the way JS is gonna get a better name for itself...

So:
Fuck Google

Fuck the marionette that designed the Android SDK

Fuck the Hellspawn the came up with the "functional-like" way of using JavaScript

Fuck everyone that thinks "JavaScript everywhere" is a good thing

And deeply future-fuck everyone that makes a new framework following any of these standards, stucks a .js at the end of the name and releases his hairball.js of an invention into the fucking world....

It's a mess... fuck everything android related...

Worst technology I've ever worked with?

Microsoft-FUCKING-Access

The error riddled, varchar frenzy, disgusting ui, os and architecture dependent pieces of shit, powered by the cherry on top: fucking VBA, that are applications developed with this monstrosity have kept me awake trying to understand why on earth would anyone that is not dying of cancer already would use such thing to try to build anything.

I had to deal with load of Access applications when I first started at my current company. Whats left now are mainly legacy systems, I killed them one by one and whatever's left will suffer the same punishment.

If you develop in Access you're my enemy and I will destroy you.

My manager thinks I am Superman! and he is so confident that can do any shit he wants me to do.

Yesterday he asked me to merge an ancient code hotfix (literally ancient) with latest branch of changes.

1. Hotfix is really old, most of the things are hardcoded, very specific to a stone age client.

2. Code documentation does not exist.

3. Developers of that code are probably dead.

4. Many Libraries which code uses are deprecated.

5. It's a legacy code, so no one has fucking idea what a particular clumsy block of code do, or what will happen if you remove it.

'if it runs don't touch it' policy by management.

Despite all this shit I successfully merged the the hotfix, refactored outdated code so as to run the application.

Showed this to my manager in full swag!

He was surprised at first, and asked me to show the code changes.

'Code review' was done by comparing files 😅

Manager: Dude, you have changed these lines, why? Explain.😧

Me: those lines won't work with new build, with new libs.☺️

Manager: then why can't you do old build with new changes?🙄

Me: umm.. wait... what???🤔

Manager: the code was working previously, it must be working even today without these changes.😡

Me: it was not working hence I made changes and now it's working fine see! ☺️

Manager: you have removed this, this and this!!! 😡

Me: but I also added that, that and that!😔

Manager: "don't touch it' if it works!"😡

Me: ... Idk what to say!
(In the back of my mind: "Don't touch it even it doesn't works!")😌

I just signed up to get this off my chest.
Dear Windows, you god damn moronic, ugly, unuseable abomination of an excuse for an OS. I wonder how we could end up here in this situation. You suck, in every way imaginable. I didnt choose Linux or Mac, you made me do it.
I know no other OS that can screw you up this bad when setting up. My friend is an experienced windows user and the last install took him 2 days. I just spend the last day trying to get this uncompatible sucker installed. I manage to set up an hackintosh quicker than I was able to install Windows the last three times I checked, you scumbag.
Your error messages suck ass, there is nothing I cant figure out given enough time, except your useless hints and pathetic attemps to get anything done on your own.
And you are fucking slow. Just why, do you keep installing stuff I didnt ask you to. Now I got this ugly ass Bing-Toolbar because I missed a damn checkbox in an .exe, which could have also been an exploit, you never know.
You are cluttered with useless stuff. I dont care about you lame ass app store, idc about your cortana annoying spy assistant and I certainly dont care about your forced updates.
Just sit back and feel your PC getting slower every day by background processes. Watch your productivity decline while dealing with their brain dead privilege and file system.
You ugly malformed mutation of software. When I look at your UI I feel disgust while wondering how you can fail with the most basic principles of UX.
How pathetic, badly supported, bug ridden and dangerously unsecure can an OS be you ask while trying to navigate through the settings, a pile of legacy software debt this garbage pile was build on. And your shell... what a sick joke.
I hate you Windows. For screwing other OS with your asshole boot manager, hardware driver requirements and making people send me .zip and .docx. You should be embarrassed to charge money for this unfunctional junk, but you do, a lot.
I really try to see the positive here. You got all the software, but thats not on you, thats because all those poor suckers are trapped with you and the effort to change is too big.
This OS is the most disappointing thing technology could come up with today. I would rather set myself on fire than work with this pain in the ass software professionally. I mean if you are a serious developer at some point you have to admit that you just cant develop on windows. You will get fucked 5 times as often as any Mac or Linux user. Fuck you, Windows.
Hey Microsoft, thanks for Typescript and VSCode and all the other good things you have done. But burn in hell for what you have done to all of us with this piece of shit OS.

Fun drinking game: work on a legacy system for a few hours. Every time you say "what the fuck?" equals 1 shot.

Coming back here after years to rant about... myself.
TLDR: I fucked up and now have to call a thousand people as a dev, I'm not even getting paid for it and they all get crazy about a random ID that got assigned to them, so now I want to throw away all my electronics and become a skilift operator.

Stupid me deployed a project shortly before we have the largest amount of orders in the year. (Like 90% of yearly orders in a couple minutes cause they are sold out fast and people wait to order first)

I got this horrible legacy "plain self written framework php" project which I tried to upgrade state of the art.
There was one piece missing to upgrade everything and nicely deploy it to some fresh new servers which can handle the high load which peaks at the time orders open.

So I did it the day before orders open and... everything worked well! Nothing crashed.
I wrote my client to wait a little before he confirms the orders, since after confirmation each of the people who ordered will receive an email where they can choose a unique number which they'll receive as a sticker with the order.

Since it's an event my client is promoting, people will meet each other wearing those unique stickers and being able to identify each other online and in person with this number.

Suddenly my clients call me that "customers are complaining about that there is something wrong"
Turned out he confirmed all orders straight away and that part of the application which makes the number unique was broken on the update.
So everyone could chose any number (also taken ones) as his "unique" number.

In my panic, I told my client "It's my mistake, I'll deal with it of course and call the affected people in my free time, since it's my mistake you don't have to pay for it". (it's my largest client by far, am a freelancer)
Realizing when people can chose any number it'll not be a few ones who have the same, it's like almost everyone did chose "69", "1", "420", "88 (a scary amount of people)",... (with 69 being the number being chosen by most people btw, even more then "1")

So now I have to call about a thousand people telling them a new random ID will be assigned to them. I thought of course about mailing them, wrote a script that deals with the issue automatically, and FUCKED IT UP TOO so everyone is confused and the only way to deal with it is by a call basically.
And while I'm sitting here now for 2 days straight calling people in my free time about their random ID will have to change, I realized that some people are quite crazy about random ID's.
I'm talking about yelling and threatening because "is it too much to ask for a working website when ordering this expensive product".

I hate my life right now and am getting quite serious about throwing all my electronic devices away and become a skilift operator instead. Fuck the higher pay, it's not worth the shit, I wanna have only responsibility about one button to press while watching people fall on their face.

Most of our university courses are stuck in the early 2000. Feels like it's mostly due to lazy professors who just use the same material year after year.

What do you think?

It feels like I'm not learning anything useful anymore. Should get out of here ASAP.

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

Okay, first rant here.
Spend most of my morning searching for a js file that was supposed to build some graphs in a report page in this legacy system (still in active development) just to find it embedded inside a random .php file being included inside a wall of if-elses (that shit has around 100 lines) on the index.php (that somehow manages to route all the nonsense that's going on there).. was it really that difficult to make it a proper .js file? and actually import it on the page that is using it? c'mon...

After 10 years maintaining the same codebase, I sometimes find features in the system that I wrote years ago and I forgot they existed, like "Cool, I didn't know the system was able to do that, I completely forgot, I wonder how it works, and God knows how I wrote this shit, let's see..".
I've even found myself starting to implement features that already exist, and then having to revert the changes.

Yay, I have to rewrite + design a 15-20 year old website 🎉

Originally written in, God knows what version of php, HTML and JS by a Java dev, and patched every other year when something broke or a new feature was needed, every time by someone new...
Some years ago the system was moved from a Windows host to Ubuntu and that was a nightmare in its own, because of all the hard-coded paths...

Welp, at least some fucker found another fucker who is willing to create a new design for the site, so that's off my plate...

Had a blast from the past the other day. Testing an issue with an AngularJS app in IE11 on a project managers Surface.

Nothing works. Just a blank screen. I open the JavaScript console to hundreds, maybe thousands of errors. They all seem eerily familiar, but I can't place them. It's like something from a past life.

Then I see one that brings the issue into sharp focus.

"{{variable_name}} is a reserved word"

No it isn't, I think. That hasn't been a reserved word in JavaScript since...

Me: "Is your browser in Compatibility Mode?"

PM: "Yeah, it's for one of our legacy programs"

Me: "You need to turn that off to test this app. It thinks you're using IE6, so it's having a 2 decade old shit-fit. I haven't seen those errors since I was a teenager making crap on Geocities"

I never thought an error message could make me feel so old 😩

It's 5 AM and I don't want to shit on anybody's party but trust me when I say most of you here complaining about legacy code don't know the meaning of the word.

As someone who maintained a PHP4 codebase with an average file length of 3000+ lines for almost 4 years, I feel you, I feel your pain and your helplessness. But I've seen it all and I've done it all and unless you've witnessed your IDE struggle to highlight the syntax, unless you had to make regular changes in a test-less SVN's working copy that **is** the production and unless you are the reason that working copy exists because you've had enough of `new_2_old_final_newest.php` naming scheme, you do not know legacy. If you still don't believe me bare in mind I said "is" as in: "this system is still in production".

But also bare hope. Because as much grief as it cost me and countless before me, today of all days, without a warning, it got green lit for userbase migration to a newer platform. And if this 20 years of generous custom features and per client implemented services can be shut down even though it brings more profit than all the other products combined, so can happen to any of your projects. 🙏

Unfortunately, I do mean *any*.

Meeting with a co-worker who is supposed to do a code analysis on a large legacy project. Actually, HER project - she inherited it already years ago, and the original devs aren't in the company anymore.

Her: customer is asking this and that analysis.
Me: easily two weeks.
Her: but who will do that?
Me: you of course.
Her: but I don't know most of the code.
Me: me neither.
Her: and I don't know the protocols.
Me: google them. I'd have to do the same.

Really, I told her to google shit, which I consider as quite a slap for a co-worker. Basically, she tried to offload a complex analysis because she just wants the low effort parts of the job.

Won't happen. DO YOUR FUCKING JOB!

What you see:
"we gonna build a new application to replace our legacy one"

How to read:
"we gonna make you put more shit in the legacy app whenever we want and still keep asking about the new app you don't have the time to make"

I've started programming when I was 12. Right now I'm 25. I can clearly say that I'm passionate, I've touched I think almost every "type" of programming ever. From game development, through IoT and finished at eCommerce. I never stop learning.

My workmates are pissing me off. For code review sometimes I'm waiting even 3 days when I've changed like 5-6 files. They don't want to introduce "new" technologies (by new I mean who are existing at least 2-3 years, got stable community). They don't want to refactor some core of the application because it's working - they don't care about it as they can later say "legacy system so this basic feature took me a week".

Code quality means for them "use shorthand syntax, this code is ugly" - the basic shit which can do any linter

When I'm doing code review, I'm checking out to this branch, test it, check if the solution is scalable. Then I make my comments. I just hear "stop bitching about it just approve".

Thank God I've made through interview and I'm going to switch job in next week.

Stupid piece of legacy shit needing to silent print without the dialogs in IE on windows 10.

this is proving to be a thing of nightmares.

this has worked for years but no windows need to block this “for security”

windows and security - i would laugh but this is going to keep me awake at night.

It grinds my gears to no end as to how insanely BAD most Electrical engineering software is. Lets start with Tina. A circuit simulator. A few versions ago it was rather good but now it feel like its built upon more legacy crap than fucking Windows! This causes it to have memory access violations and crashes even when you look at it from an odd angle.
On topic of circuit simulation. LT-Spice! It has less errors than Tina but is impossible to use without being lobotomized first. Who the FUCK decided it was a good idea to reinvent keyboard shortcuts by movin all of them to the F-row at the top of the keyboard. Also there is no option to delete a component. YOU NEED TO USE CUT IN ORDER TO REMOVE IT!
And at last Altium Designer for Layouting and Schematics. Whose license costs 9 grand. No one outside of some companies will buy this because of the price. Altium realized this and made two watered down versions of it. Which dont really get updates anymore. (last one was in 2018) So they essentially made a cash grab from people who cant afford their actual product. There also exist other (and a lot cheaper) products than what Altium offers. The problem is that they dont work well with interoperability. Schematics drawn in one program will look distorted in another or not import at all. And since Altium is the industry standard you got yourself this nice steaming soup of impossible collaboration. Its kinda like Adobe being absolute shit at progressing their software just because they got no competition. Or rather they do but the industry wont switch cause adobe is so engraved into it.

The ability to look at uncommented legacy code and read the thoughts of the developer when he wrote it
(seriously, comment your shit!)

Some people are really getting high on this Agile shit. Probably because they learned some new bullshit bingo phrases - and it suits them: lots of vapory talk and expensive meetings and others will have to do the work anyway, while they can circlejerk on how to have shorter iterations to improve the time to market, increase the business value, inspect and adapt to faster deliver a minimal viable product - yeah, do the agile transformation, update to the digital age, you noobs. Throwing around some catchy phrases will let you compete with Google? Maybe need some blockchain or machine learning?
While you are clustering your post its, the coders who keep the ship afloat, sit in their legacy code base that's so bitrot they are mainly doing bugfix releases without a single feature for three fucking years. Consider this.

Web development:
I'm honestly happy that my toxic "senior" colleague is gone.
- Didnt learn a single thing in the last 10 years. Used godamn serverside rendering with Jquery / plain JS for a highly interactive business Web Application. Yeah boii, save that UI state in the relational database, good job.
- Every error in his shit was the error of someone else.
- Manipulative as hell. Type of guy that is your best buddy to gather information.
- Blocked entire technical progress in the Web department by manipulating people. Understandable. I mean if your legacy shit is gone...
- Kept backend developers from doing their job with unjustified complaints about structures... etc to justify that he needed an insane amount of time to implement simple things.
- Cried for every shit to be documented to the last bits. Did never do any documentation himself.

Fuck these people, honestly.

I just found a 980 line long method in one of our legacy code bases.... And I need to add to it. There are no unit tests and I desperately want to refactor that shit....

working on a crappy legacy site written by an invalid. The job was to replicate an existing site for a school with the original's permission. I fix a shit ton of bugs and update the original.

For the first time ever I got a phone call from the original's owner to complain that I had fixed their site -.-

leave things broken from now on!

!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.

!rant

I love the first weeks after a job change. It's just like falling in love, everything seems to be perfect until you take off the pink glasses.

Have to wait until I'm assigned a burning project to have a full picture.

Actually I am in a burning project. Deadline in 2 weeks. Doing Bugfixes which do not require in-depth project knowledge, and... It's fine. All a matter of perspective. I also think that project based work suits me more than usual 15y old legacy enterprise shit. And I'm able to switch. From embedded C++ over hardware dev to fullstack .NET (I consider myself as a full-fullstack dev, able to do everything from hardware to frontend).

Topics such as IOT, medical, device engineering, machine learning. Wow.

It's my first company having >50 employees and multiple offices in multiple countries. I used to jump every 2 years from one shitty garage company to another.

Wish me good luck ✌️

Oh great...
I am slowly beginning to realize that my boss/manager doesn't care about refactoring at all. He cares about features and resolved tickets and thats why the code is a pile of spaghetti filled with hacks to fit every clients desires.
Also all of my coworkers work for themselves, ticket by ticket, either because they just don't care or because they are so frustrated that they don't care anymore. And here I am, an intern, and they expect me to cope with this deformed clutter of legacy designs, buried under hacks and workarounds, while implementing some new feature which in the end I have to put on top of everything else because nothing of that codebase can be reused. Fucking shit, fucking irresponsible managers who dont think about the quality of their product.

FUCK EVERY PERSON IN THIS SHIT BANK!! FFS THE IDIOTS CREATED A NEW DATABASE USING SQL SERVER 2008! Yes, 2008 and its a new database if it was some type of legacy I could try to understand, but this shit is a completely new database. I have to use sequelize and guess what? It can't paginate results because shit server 2008 does not accept OFFSET FETCH syntax

GWT.
Let me explain:
Tl;dr : someone fucked up, I took shit, it was a gwt project. In a sense I don't hate GWT because of the framework itself but because how I was introduced and forced to "work" with it.

Context:
Was working as a paid intern at a small company there were 3 devs 2 interns and one senior employee that only worked from home handling the shit ton of legacy VB6 code he wrote over several year and a boss with no technical knowledge. (Other unimportant people as well)
I was working with their DBA (cool dude) because I was writing statistic and report generating software.

Story:
The other intern was tasked of doing a gwt app that was supposed to use a input file.
Rather than asking the user to upload it with a file picker (I guess they exist in gwt I didn't got to dig in the framework) he was trying to load the file with a http request directed at the same host the app was running on.
It did not work.
Then his contract was other and the app was left in an unfinished state.
The boss then tried to have the app deployed, the remaining dev dodged the bullet invoking some bullshit because he was clearly incapable of doing it.
So it fell on me, couldn't deploy the app because it was not even close to working.
Tried to fix things and make it work.
Turns out he thought it would take me 3h to deploy when I clearly explained that the other guy didn't finish the app.
Boss got mad, threatened to ruin my studies and my future career.
Couldn't because my uni had my back.
Didn't want to see me anymore.
Couldn't break my contract.
Told me to work from home for the end of my internship.
I got 3 weeks early vacation and got paid, fuck him, fuck GWT, fuck his company.
Still got well marked for the internship as my supervisor was the DBA who was happy with my work.

Morality:
Don't let your intern unsupervised, don't let your main dev work from home when you don't know shit, don't piss me off and send me work from home.

I swear to god, if I read another medium post on how you managed to be focused and productive I will fucking... well... roll my eyes, make a facepalm and rant about it on devRant!

Who gives a shit if I'm unproductive and unfocused?!

Well, look at me now, I'm fucking productive while I write about you, you fucking peace off shit! And guess what? I'm not even using any of your 40 todo apps or time trackers. There is no pomodoro timer next to me or framed quotes from Steve Jobs hanging on the wall. Oh, I must be a fucking genius!

But what if YOU became unproductive?
What will happen when YOU start to procrastinate?

Do you really think the world would care?

Oh, but you are not really a writer are you? you're a developer building your app!?
Well fuck, I guess you're going to change the world than?
It's your big project. Your life's work, your legacy.

Let me remind you...

All apps will be abandoned!
All blog post will be forgotten!
Productive people will die!
Focused people will die!
Enthusiastic bloggers writing about productivity will die!
All CEOs and CTOs will die!
All developers will die!
Steve Jobs is dead!
In x years, you and I will also be dead!

Whatever you do, it's not really that important!
It's really not.

You're not going to change the world.
The world doesn't need another app.
The world doesn't need your advice on how to be productive.
You are not special.

Deal with it!

My worst legacy code experience:

>10k lines of switch case statement with "some" fall through.
Even fall through for 4 or 5 cases.

This monster was copy pasted and modified over years (Order of the case statements and another fall throughs).

So you can't diff this piece of shit for refactorings.

Luckily I leave that company.

One thing that really bothers me is that people use use megabyte to mean mebibyte. What makes it even worse is that Windows does it too. It says it shows gigabyte but actually shows gibibyte.

Now imagined my frustration when I saw this D:

My sanity... there is only so much legacy shit one can endure until it's gonesky...

I am really stressed rn. I have terrible Imposter's Syndrome coupled with this being my 2nd year as a professional (bootcamp grad) and an extreme lack of insight and support from my company. WFH has only exacerbated it. Im on a 2-ish person team handling some ancient legacy code with no one ever willing to just throw me a fucking bone. My supe is actually on my team and makes up the "ish" part and has always told me to ask questions but when I do he gets pissed and reminds me of all the people who are working and super busy and dont have time to stop what they're doing and help me. Its my first job in tech and I just need to know if this is a consistent thing across the board bc im ready to fucking jump ship. My anxiety levels are through the roof and when I go over our backlog I look at every card and ask myself how tf Im going to grt it done bc Ive never seen any of it before. Initially I thought i landed a great workplace with complete autonomy but now I just dont know. My other teammate has a habit of being condescending, whether he realizes it or not and therefore I just feel like im out here alone trying to figure all this shit out. This sprung from a card ive been working on for 2+ months but cant resolve, finally I just came to the conclusion it was above what im currently capable of and he told me he's "disappointed Im just throwing in the towel" even though ive asked for help from senior devs. Idk what to do, he even told me there'd be cards I may hit a wall on when I first started but this just feels shitty. Ive had other things going on to including surviving a fucking hurricane, having a friend murdered, and having my dad die all within a few weeks time. I am absolutely stretched to my emotional limit, but I dont know if Im overreacting. Anyway, I just needed to vent to people who could understand, thanks for reading.

The problem method calls into the...back-end framework!

The back-end framework was built on top of...the older framework!

The older framework was built around...the legacy framework!

The legacy framework was a...piece of shit!

And that's why the site just hangs!

5000 scss file with the name global.scss styling.

How fucking dumb can you be to fucking mess up a clean component based architecture like Foundation or Bootstrap and fill it with shit in a single file.

No wonder WP gets shit. The legacy code is usually shit.

And to put the shit cherry on top. This motherfucker had a settings.scss file with all general components and he never used it.

Fucker put different font size in px everywhere! Fucking asshole!!!

My mentor always told me to tackle 1 problem at a time. “Go get the basic scenarios first then we can decide/derive what happens on complex scenarios.”

This shit helped me through my 4+ years in the company. Now that I’m a mentor myself I’ll make sure the legacy continues.

Omfg... Fixed 3 LifeRay 6.1.1 ce security bugs in less than a day. I should be proud, but I am actualy fucking worried I've been with this project for too long if I can already make liferay fixes THAT fast...

Am I becoming a legacy...? Shit

I love working on legacy products. You just need a good shower and possibly a therapist after.

- Sensitive data sent over the internet encrypted with DES (not even 3DES). Guess it doesn't matter that the key (singular, for the last decade) is basically 0123456789ABCDEF.

- Client databases with open default port, admin/admin superuser.

- Critical applications (potential for substantial property damage, maybe loss of life) with a single point of failure and without backup.

Suggestions, to slow down a bit with sales, so we have time to rewrite this steaming pile of crap are met with the excuse: be more pragmatist, this is standard industry practice.

Some of this shit can be fixed on my own time if my conscience nags too much, but others would require significant investment of time from multiple developers, which would slow down new business.

Guess the pay is ok, so that's something...

Why!!!
Why must some devs make life complicated!!!!!!

So, here I am enjoying my day (well enjoying the meetings that are taking me away from working) when I get a bug report that script X isn't sending out emails anymore.

Ok that's weird, this as far as I know uses the same email class as every other email being sent out from this project, and they all work.

Let's go have a quick dig...

function sendEmail(){
/*do a bunch of stuff*/
}
Is being used, well that's odd, it should be $emailService->send()
But what ever, it's probably an old wrapper for legacy sake since this script was written years ago. But nope, I almost cried, it's a wrapper for mail() isolated into this script.

Like for fucks sake, why in the hell would this be used when there's an entire fucking class that's tried and tested and only looses 1 email every few months, coz shit happens.

Errrrr.... sometimes i really wonder why people can't just do what they need to do the first time round.

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.

sensible naming stuff for readability? nah.. it's not like someone will read my code after i'm done here right?

Sometimes I do wonder why can’t I just be content at getting best I can get at what I’m already good at - and what brings in the €€€? Why do I go ”oooh look shiny intetesting language, let’s try do shit with it” or ”hey, let’s try this thing called kernel dev/pld/program verification which are all so far outside my core expertise they might as well be in a different universe!”

Dude I mean writing a kernel in V and doing proof oriented programming in F* are fun and all, but what good’s that gonna do me when I’m in all likelihood still maintaining legacy web apps in PHP ten to twenty years from now?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m torn inside with my current workplace offering me everything I value and stuff that’s rare to find - but at the same time I’d love to be challenged more and don’t really have enough of those opportunities in my current environment. Or some shit like that.

Well fuck that, back to writing my own embedded DSL into F* in F#….

God, the dude who "assisted" me today can go and fuck himself with a cactus.

I need to configurate and integrate some cms into a project. But since the documentation is utter horse shit and superficial, it's fucking torture to do so!

So after creating an issue on their helpdesk, i get an answer from some employee there. Instead of actually posting something useful, he decide that he could instead quote the fucking documentation.

Of course, he also quotes the very page i mentioned in my issue for being COMPLETELY USELESS. This goes back and forth. And he keeps just quoting the fucking documentation.

So i decompiled their product and painstakingly worked out how the feature worked that i needed.

Fuck you support asshole. I hope you get to maintain a legacy VBA project!

Ugggh. Has anyone else on here worked with MFC?

I've been updating some legacy software and it's been like wading through a swap that was caused by a malfunctioning trailer park septic system: no map, and mostly shit with the occasional nasty surprise.

Long story ahead

Background:
I recently started a job in a smallish startup doing web development in a mostly js stack as an entry-junior engineer/dev. I’m the only person actively working on our internal tools as my Lead Engineer (the only other in house dev) is working on other stuff.

Now I was given a two week sprint to rebuild a portion of our legacy internal app from angular 1.2 with material-ui looking components with no psd’s or cut-outs of any kind to a React and bootstrap ui for the front end and convert our .net API routes into Node.js ones. I had to build the API routes, SQL queries (as there were plenty of changes and reiterations that I had to go through to get the exact data I needed to display), and front end. I worked from 9am until 11pm every day for those two weeks including weekends as our company has a huge show this upcoming week.

I finish up this past sunday and push to our staging environment. The UI is 5.5/10 as we’re changing all of our styling to bootstrap and I’m no ui expert. The api has tests and works flawlessly (tm).

So we go into code review and everything is working as expected until one tab that I made erred out and was written down as a “Needs to be fixed.”

This fix was just a null value handler that took three minutes and a push back to staging, but that wasnt before a stupendous amount of shit being flung my way for the ui not looking great and that one bug was a huge deal and that he couldnt believe it slipped through my fingers.

Honestly, I’m feeling really unmotivated to do anything else. I overworked myself for that only to be shit on for one mistake and my ui being lack-luster with no guides.

Am I being a baby about this or is this something to learn from?

When your up against a session issue and can't fucking work out why the session is lost, not one instance of the logout functionality is called and yet... the fucking thing decides to log you out anyway.

Now this was working all fine and dandy last week, and NOTHING has changed, as in not 1 fucking line of code for this process has been touched in 4 years.

It's like all of a sudden, Satan crawled out of this piece of shit site and decided I was to be toyed with.

As you can imagine, I'm a little pissed at this one, there's something hiding in the shadows fucking me in the ass.

I used to love my job, the guy that looked forward to mondays, there was always something new to learn, I was passionate about clean code and learning new languages like Elixir. As a software engineer I thought my occupation had a special significance in this world, I saw possibility and potential of creating something so impactful on the world that it would become my legacy.

Now after 5 years I’m realising that none of this stuff really matters to the world, software engineers aren’t special and it’s evident from our salaries how valuable we are compared to other professions in sales, medicine or law. My friend who works as in customer success management makes more than me.

While some of us will be in the lucky few whose work will change the world, most of us will just be another cog in the wheel, all that matters is how many product/features you ship out, nobody gives a shit about code quality, concurrency and architecture design other than us

Writing unit tests on a weekend and catching up on work that needs to be done because I m too busy on weekdays to have time to think about this...

The sad thing is test coverage is shit in the entire code base as boss just decided to start enforcing requirements now... And I have this huge migrating from legacy system project that needs to be merged. And we'll the legacy system is even shittier

So I have to write unit tests for shit code that was never written with testing in mind...

On the other hand I reworked some testing utilities to make it easier... For everyone... I want a huge bonus.... That I probably won't get...

Learning institutions move so slow. Kotlin and Swift are nowhere to be found in this mobile applications course.

The shit code I wrote before my cs degree is marginally better than the shit code I write now. The lack of of improvement is related to the shit job I got after my degree. Cs degree did teach me a lot of good oo concepts and design.... That I rarely use due to shit legacy code I maintain.

At last, after a year and a half working with legacy codebase, I got the greenlight from the seniors to refactor my team's app to modern front end technologies. You know, webpack, unit tests, component based architecture and shit.. I really love it!

My PM doesn't look as enthusiastic though...

Hey, uh, fuck reviving legacy projects. Intern here looking at the shit I have to do and pretty much everything's deprecated by now so yeah fuck that I guess.

Crawling around in a legacy project. Need to rewrite 500 lines of SCSS, to regular CSS. Fuck it. Runs compiler, beautifier and copy paste that shit.

Spent all morning debugging legacy code that I need to migrate.

Most of the time is just waiting for it to load --pieces of data-- entire tables from the database and then filter out the records it doesn't want using some app logic.

WHAT SORT OF MONKEY WRITES CODE LIKE THIS? HOW WAS THIS EVEN ALLOWED INTO PRODUCTION...

I have to open Notepad to write down my chain of thoughts, steps, and things to check once the next breakpoints are hit so that I don't forget them.

So in theory I'm being paid all morning to sit around and do nothing.

That sounds great but I'm falling asleep... Shoulda worked from home...

What was I saying again...yea...

DON'T HIRE MONKEYS!!! THEY WRITE SHIT CODE THAT WASTES EVERYONE'S TIME EVEN AFTER THEY LEAVE...

I'm going to lunch now... Hopefully Notepad has enough into for me to remember what I was doing...

Just started a new job as a software developer, even though I basically applied as an embedded software developer. I knew from the interview there was gonna be alot of legacy / high level stuff and they were pushing me away from embedded with the promise I could do it 'later on'.

Finally started and it turns out there's a shit tonne of legacy Python code for their non-existent test framework that's basically tied directly into a Qt GUI app and I'm doing shit that nobody else wants to do. Can't see myself wanting to do this for anywhere more than 2-3 months. Should I just bail now? Seems a bit dodgy if I leave having only worked there for a week? Job actually pays really well though.

Plan was to take an extended vacation around July/August, so quitting this early and then telling another employer later on that I need to bail for summer seems wrong also, not to mention COVID sucks and is making everything hell now.

It’s so crazy to me how my bosses sometimes wake up and it’s like they get in a groupthink that we are stuck on technology from five years ago. The company has grown our paths have simplified, our tools have gotten more powerful.

Everybody forgets that a new feature has come out occasionally, but sometimes for weeks at a time they will go about explaining things the old way, or saying it can’t be done. Then they’ll come back around. This has been on and off for all of this year basically.

Since the issue is within the legacy backend data, this brings us the great opportunity to solve and sanitize the data on the frontend and therefore killing the performance of the application! Sincerely, a manager that doesn't give a shit

Whoever the fuck at my university thought that a distributed systems project using Java Web services was a good idea? The server we're supposed to use (Glassfish) is so out-of-date, half the time spent on this project is just spent fixing fucking broken dependencies and otherwise getting it to play nice. Please just tell me this shit isn't used in industry outside of legacy applications.

From such a healthy environment this job turned into an extremely toxic one. Now i finally understand how a toxic environment looks like. It's extremely disgusting. Putting 5 tasks on my name to work in parallel and as i work they put 2 more. All High priority tasks. It is physically impossible. The scrum master whore told me to just check the code how to do something to users and understand this for monday so i can help QA guy to test it. I went over the code with a colleague and understood it. Today she screamed at me angry i didnt do the task. What the fuck are you talking about? I checked the code and im ready to do help the QA guy test it whenever necessary. Then she talked shit changing the task that i was supposed to not only understand the code but also do the task on Monday and now its the end of tuesday and its not done. Fuck you. That was not what she said initially. Its very Fucking confusing. Then she said to QA guy i give up i cant handle it with this guy sorry but ill have to report this to product owner. So be it. I dont give a fuck. I am ALONE working on a GIANT, unmaintainable, spaghetti, caveman technology codebase with broken outdated or nonexistent docs, nobody to help me, the colleague whos supposed to guide me is a good guy but overloaded with tasks himself so he doesnt have time, i him and many of us requested another person to join to work with me on same role but they dont have the budget which is a Fucking lie, a client worth trillions of dollars does not have a budget, yeah get fucked retards. This suffering and downfall of your project is mostly their fault. Theyre too arrogant and proud to understand or admit that it's not possible physically for 1 person to manage and keep knowledge and code on 7 tasks per day. All that for Fucking $8 an hour?????????? I hope cancer eats all of u. Every single one to the very fucking bones till ur bones break. This is fucking disgusting and sickening. Right when i was supposed to get paid $17 an hour (and thats gross income not even net.....) I am now fucking forced to quit this shithole toxic job. Because i realized no amount of fucking money, not even before-tax-$17-an-hour money is worth the weight of stress that i get punched with every fucking day. No fucking job is worth more than health. This is saddening and depressing extremely. All of my fucking plans are ruined. The car to buy on leasing--ruined by a whore. The 2 day vacation this week--ruined by a whore. Going out with my hot blonde gf during this miserable 2 day vacation--ruined by a whore. Meeting with 2 american clients I've been in touch with for several years to work on a side project--ruined by a whore, meeting canceled and delayed due to my overtime work. I am literally fucking treated like the Moscow Crocus Hall terrorist. They have no fucking sympathy or understanding for how fucking HARD this fucking DevOps job is where i work on a 30 year old legacy codebase with no fucking help. It is simply not possible. Now its a race between who's gonna fuck who: either i quit first or they fire me first. At this point its not a matter of if but when. Surely soon enough. Cant wait to get the FUCK away from these pieces of shitheads. I either have option to cry and go mentally insane by giving it my all until i fix the task on time but the stress i would get for that would need them to pay me at least 9 mill $ a year. Fuck with someone else you fucking retards. You're using slave labor to work for basically free just so u can profit a lot. Literally on the meeting one of their bosses said they get 50% of margin which is a lot in biz world for tech field. This is absolutely sickening and saddening that im treated like a fucking terrorist. Fucking Disgusting. Cant wait to not Ever fucking work in this toxic fucking place. Quitting by max 1st of april.

There is nothing more beautiful than having to embed legacy shit into an new website because the customer is a cheap arse and doesn't want to budget the whole pissing redesign package of his website.
I hope you choke on the next meal your stinky gullet has to swallow!

Fuck AngularJS' scope fuckery. Yes it's legacy shit in an old project.
A minor change fucked up the model scope shitfuck thus leading to improper input model fuckvalues.
Go rot in pieces and perish.

Meh. FFS. Thats how this shit starts.

Get a call to say 2018 Bank Holidays not showing on legacy web calendar.

/me looks for bank holiday code in PHP file ..... no dice.

/me finds a dBase table that holds all Bank Holiday info. Not ideal, but I can work with that.

Enter all Bank Holidaya into dBase. Sit back, relax, wait for page to reload to show me Banks .... no dice.

Huh??

Read code more closely ......

Included file (inline, half way through PROCEDURAL FILE FFS) and notice that the linked file has all Banks hand formatted into Calendar events, and minified.

If I ever meet the old dev in the street, so help me god. 🤬

tfw you have matured enough as a developer to look at old legacy code (some of which you contributed to) from a hacked together UI Frankenstein kludge and immediately you notice all the security flaws.

How fortunate there is strong query param validation going on...otherwise this would be a veritable shit storm.

Does anyone watch the movie The Mack (1973)?

Today I am working with some legacy code written by a shitty developer who isn't with us anymore. Every time I make a change the code screams at me with problems.

Every error makes me feel like saying this quote from Goldie the pimp...

"List to me and listen good. I don't give a shit what happened to you!.......get back out there and get me my money!"

Hell of a Docker

One application in c++. 4 in c# targeting Linux. Several logging places, Several configuration files , dozens of different folders to access (read/write). Many applications being called from just one that orchestrates everything.

OS is Linux. Installation is to be made inside a docker image and later placed in a container by means of several bash files and python scripts. All these are part of a legacy set of applications.

They’ve asked me to just comment out one line which took 3 days to find out because they didn’t remember where it was and in which application it was and what was in that line.

After changing it, I was asked to create a test environment which must have resemblance to the current server in production. 12 days later And many errors, headaches, problems with docker, I got it done.

Test starts and then, problems with docker volumes, network, images, docker-composer, config files and applications, started to appear.

1 month later, I still have problems and can’t run all applications at least once completely using the whole set.

Just one simple task of deploying locally some applications, which would take one or two days, is becoming a nightmare.

Conclusion: While still trying to figure out why an infinite loop was caused by some DB connection attempt in an application, I am collecting a great amount of hate for docker. It might be good for something, that’s for sure, but in my experience so far, it is far worse than any expectations I had before using it.

Lesson learned: Must run away from tasks involving that shit!

The company who "hired" me for 6.25$ an hour I'll have to work on a legacy old ass caveman java 8 code for a bank system. And I'll have to do the devops part. Main role as devops engineer

I lied having 3+ years of cloud devops experience

I started diving deep into cloud devops since january this year

Turns out I'll be the only devops engineer working on this bank software building devops pipeline and devops shit!

So now they expect me that im so experienced I don't need help for shit and i could do it on my own!

Am i fucked?

This is kind of a loaded question because it's so broad. So I'll just throw my thoughts down on the idea anyways.

Honestly with all the way that game dev has come it's so sad to see just the increase of people that are so ungrateful and dont appreciate what went into making it. Complaining about small not a big deal bugs that occur, blaming the devs for stuff that's completely not up to them but the "idea man", etc. Although good things are coming out of it. Like children wanting to get into it more which is awesome and indie developers basically holding up the industry while majority of the AAA companies get their shit together. So I see all of that increasing. Also I'm expecting to see the Rust language start to be used in AAA titles replacing C++

Web dev I believe will just get more JavaScript improvement with new libraries, frameworks. I really hope the companies that had PHP5 legacy code get back on their feet quickly. But I hope we can become more accepting of JavaScript doing more than just webdev like Electron, WebGL, etc. Because I think it's great that it can do all that stuff. Is there better options hell yeah but let's let people do crazy shit.

Software dev well I see python making a bigger uprising and I'm hoping people become more accepting of python as well.

These are all just random thoughts so please take that into consideration

"Delete all code!" That should be the mantra!

Was watching some stuff from destroyallsoftware.com. Not entirely convinced. So I should cook up my own shit.

So here is how the argument goes:
There's quite some negativity in the term "legacy" software. Partly it may be the envy to software that runs on actual machines and is not that phantasm, that perfect first lines on a greenfield project until it gets messed up as it has to put up with all the real world messiness. But the negativity it deserves is actually for the code that we cannot get rid of. This ugly class or function that soaked all the complexity and functionality so it defies any positive change. And always when it appears on your screen, it irks you, enrages you, makes you punch the screen, because you can almost feel the distaste physically. - *That* is the definition of "legacy" in its true negativity. No software should be like that. On the contrary. Every line should be replaceable, dispensable, disposable. At the verge to deletable. Because you know: the best code is no code.

This is where my hatred of code could get productive: Delete all the wretched, loathsome stuff and replace it, with something that just sucks less and can be thrown away any time. Don't expect beauty or perfect design. It'll never finish.

Project Lead in the morning: This one story needs to be finished till 2pm for the QA department.

Me: No problem, everything is finished and there is only one test case open. It should be finished in no time.

Also me: Spends 7 hours of intensive lagacy code debugging to find out why this shit isn't working sometimes. Try to fix it, broke some other things. Retested all cases and found 3 other minor bugs. End of the day, story is still not finished.

Now: Project Lead is mad, QA guy is mad, I am mad.

Conclusion: I hate debugging legacy code and I never again trust the last open test case!!

I just thought. The next generation of coders are going to curse the software we praise. Well be using JavaScript to drive cars and ATMs (if we aren't already). We're gonna talk shit to dev youngsters about compilers, shims and fucking cross browser compatibility and how good they have it. Some of us will be stuck in the past keeping bullshit legacy code alive. Besides that, the world is gonna be a fucking awesome place (rip Mahammad Ali)

I dont understand how am i not fired. I literally dont know how to do shit in this legacy 30 year old junkyard code. I am literally alone working on this project on a giant codebase and have no one for help. The project is burning on fire and scrum master is talking shit for breaking deadlines and i cant do anything about it. Why dont they just fucking fire me that would be such a huge relief bro

Liferay is a fucking malediction inflicted on the human race, bubonic plague has nothing on Liferay. A staunch advocate of legacy tech, bad documentation, bad APIs and poor UX, Liferay has it all. Scriptlets all day every day. Fuck your hot reloads, a deployment cycle is the shit. Why be productive when you can wait for a deployment? Scientists are still deciphering the enigma of Liferay APIs. Over fifteen arguments per method, some optional, some not, littered with value specific functionality. Happy debugging motherfucker. API design is for hacks and pussies, real developers want to know implementation details. JSP the flagship of frontend tech, scriptlets, the pinnacle of evolution. Liferay has PLENTY of that. Did I mention scriptlets? How about obscure Liferay grown frameworks? MetalJS? A bigger mistake than smoking a pound of meth. Liferay UX, heh, heh, design, user experience hehe, hoho. Best joke I've heard. Liferay and UX, choose one.

I'm out, fuck my life.

Shitty legacy codebase made by shovelling pile of different shit by some 'cool dude' who left the company 3 years ago. Fixing bugs on this pile of shit all the time, but also I have to document everything as documentation wasn't there at all and fix the whole damn project in the meantime. No linters, no types, ancient libraries that have shitton of issues, hacky behaviours wherever you look, no tests whatsoever.

Except when we want to refactor/rewrite we don't get time for fixing the whole shit as it is worthless - there's no value for customers in that.

the other one was shitty HR talk which consisted of bashing on my technical competencies by computer illiterate troglodyte after which I left the company. They asked me could I stay for 2 more months.

That was that one single NO that felt so great that I will remember it for the rest of my life.

Why hasn't Google told us 5 years ago that we should use fragments whenever possible so it won't be a pain in the arse to add a navigation drawer?! 😥

While Indian govt. talks about digitizing the country and is pushing ahead with it, their Employee's Provident Fund Org (EPFO) infra is absolutely shit and it's killing small time business that want to help their employees.

You need to add Digital Certs to do just about anything (great security wise) BUT,
The digital sign interface is written in Java Flash, that was dropped by all modern browsers 4 years ago.
The only stable working latest browser for it is Firefox 52 released 3 years ago.

The USB tokens used/supported are all Chinese that don't respect OSS drivers and fork built their own (read Watchdata) with no/shitty and cumbersome linux support (couldn't get it working after 2 nights of trying different versions of drivers).
You still have to run Windows to sign the docs or to interact with EPFO using legacy browsers from 2016

Non Tech problems: EPFO charges 500 Rs/month minimum admin charges, and I pay 1200 Rs PF for my driver. That kind of commission is plain stupid and will make small employers run away from paying PF for their employees.

Any interaction with EPFO is like having to eat thorns. painful, unnecessary bullshit. How useless can someone be building such a system released in 2019?
I just hope they fix it. A simple google search shows there is Web Crypto API for modern browsers. Someone wake these people up. SMH

FOR FUCKING FUCK SAKE
I have a shit ton work to do. Just finished (hopefully) all of my exams, came back to work and got tasked with simultaneously developing a new app (Android), adjusting some of my own code to work with client's specific requirements in completely different project (C#) and also I have to fix a legacy app (Android) because UE comitee will be visiting us on wendesday.
I've never seen this code earlier. I've never seen this WHOLE SHITTY PROJECT. Guy that was developing this left few years back.
It's a complete spaghetti. 550 FUCKING LINES OF CODE for a one class, most of the methods are deprecated and won't even try to work on Android > 4.0. No documentation. Nothing works. Whole code is ridden with bugs, warnings and looks like it's glued together with duct tape. I even had to migrate from fucking Maven to Gradle it's that old.

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.

fuck VBA, fuck retard business users, who think it's proper to use it in 2019....
fuck them all, with their "save money" shit, then expect old shit to work "like at google".... let's STOP USING SHITTY LEGACY TECH, JUST BECAUSE THE LEADERS ARE TOO INCOMPETENT AND NEVER INVOLVE TECHNICAL PEOPLE FOR SELECTING SOFTWARES / SOLUTIONS....
Go back to the 80s and give'em a terminal to work... I'd like to see those fuckasses in pain....

Fellow coworkers working with 20 years old legacy Delphi codebase.

Whenever I'm stuck on smth all I need to do is open a delphi source file and I instantly feel better for not having to deal with that shit.

Finally dropped our old useless in-house legacy content editor (built by another team) today. Going through the database and ripping out all the shit that we had to keep for legacy support is the most liberating feeling I've had in weeks!

Joined a new team at work hoping to learn something new. Was told by the team lead that they will be starting development on a new project that I was interested in.

Guess what it was all a fucking lie. I'm assigned a task to create documentation for some legacy java shitcode without any fucking comments.

Fine I get it, they say it's required going down the road of the new project as it will work alongside the old application. But the code is so fucking bad. For starters

-The db host and credentials are hard-coded in a million places
-it stores user credentials in plain text
-its creating files in the fucking filesystem to store things instead of storing it in the db
-each functions ranges from 100 to 8000 lines of code

Who even codes like this 🤯

And I can't fix these issues. All I need to do is document every function and class and package. Fine. Fuck this shit

Facing some down - simultaneously somehow as dev and privately.

The dev part partly triggered by another burning project. Our team deep in shit up to the chin... And this unanswerable question: who is to blame? Everyone is working up their arses, but the result is still some sparkling firework ship wreck, that only held together for the demo to the board. It's not that we are stupid or lazy, yet we push some unmaintainable spaghetti, because this shit just gotta work.

Dunno, somehow this object orientation / pattern ideologies were also kind of depressing to me: partly because they smell like attempt to enlighten the inept by stupid receipts - and of course then deep down there's this nagging question if I'm not one of this inept not knowing the newest fashion template from the catalogue..

Then this Clean Code - Craftsmanship shit is bugging me similarly. Liked Robert C. Martin's book, but now I picked up some "Clean C++" and.. I kinda feel dumbed down if they try to sell the KISS principle to a 36 year-old physicist/engineer. Good for them that all our legacy shit und own fuck ups nourish this whole industry of well-meaning advisers. Argh, just fuck it, you priests, sell your obvious calendar mottos elsewhere, they are are just as useful as telling a griever that "rain follows sunshine". - As if they would not some time use the raw pointer that their coworker gave 'em, to ship shit tomorrow?

So I've had a few rants now about this dumbass legacy Apache Wicket project I'm on.... Latest was that the guy who kind of knew what was going on but was impossible to communicate with is was leaving which meant I'd be inheriting this shit show. I was on leave his last week and he had the task of onboard the new senior.

I get here this morning and meet this guy. Seems a nice enough champ, well spoken (praise be.) First thing the man says to me is that this code is a mess and he doesn't really understand the IP... Yea me too, buddy, me too

Big ass company paying me fat stacks to remake their 3 important legacy projects (hospitals, gov, big companies) into another stack.
Will require me to no-life.

Or chill local medium sized company which creates apps to help museums, education and other wholesome shit.

Feels like i need to choose the big one because "carreer" but i am haunted by all the burn-out horror stories online.

Currently on my way to the latter for my last interview with them.

Reworking old java apps. Holy shit im gratefull i can use spring boot.
But this code is handsdown awfull. Every file contains more ifs than other words. upto 6 layers deep. Thank god its at least properly commented.
But seriously how did this shit ever pass any QA. All legacy apps around here are a massive pile of if statements.

SWIFT 3 sucks! SUCKS I TELL YOU! swift 3 changes the NSError class to its own Error class, now the categories (i.e the extensions) that I have added to the NSError class (like convenience inits and NSDictionary map to my own variables) are ALL LOST !!! MORE THAN 100 LINES OF CODE LOST!! because of this piece of shit mutation of the DATA TYPE ITSELF!!! when objective C code is used in Swift (using the mix-match technique) DONT UPGRADE TO swift 3.0 GUYS DONT DO IT!!! especially if you have legacy code in your project !!

In my first job another junior dev and I (junior at the time) were assigned the task of designing and implementing a user management and propagation system for a biometric access control system. None of the seniors at the time wanted to be involved because hardware interfacing in the main software was seen as a general shit show because of legacy reasons. We spent weeks designing the system, arguing, walking out in anger, then coming back and going through it again.

After all that, we thought we would end up using each other, but we actually became really good friends for the rest of my time there. The final system was so robust that support never heard back from the client about it until around 2 years later when a power outage took down the server and blew the PSU.

Good times.

I have been working on a long time, low progress project of mine that keeps on giving and giving.

Let's begin like two years ago where I dipped my toes into "more then gigabit" networking thanks to a Linus Techtips video about infiniband.
I had the dream of booting my Workstation from my NAS, a so called diskless setup.

Well, since I run FreeNAS on my Nas , a very nice Freebsd based Nas OS, everything's gonna be good.

In the beginning, there was no infiniband support.
Turns out, you don't need it, since the mellanox CX2 nics can do ETH too.
Yay.
Just took me a few weeks of anger.

So, to be able to boot something over the network, you need firmware that finds the bookable stuff and loads it.
That protocol and firmware is called PXE.
PXE needs a DHCP telling it what to do, and what is where and etc.

Freenas here I come! Installing dnsmasq on the actual freenas install turned out to be not that great of an idea because freenas thinks of itself as being an "appliance" that you don't fiddle with. So things work, until you update/ upgrade when everything will basically be wiped, except what you have done through the ui.
Ok. So I gona use a jail, a container like thing for that.
Everything is great, jail has internet, everything Installs fine, what could go wrong?
Dnsmasq can launch and work, but not as dhcp server. Some thing about permissions.
Turns out, jails have permission like things.
A few days of head scratching later, it has ALL the permissions.
Dnsmasq still can't work as DHCP server though, why you ask?
Because it needs a specific kernelmodule that isn't contained in the jail. Since jails are kind of like a docker container, they run on the same OS kernel, who does not have this module, I'd need to patch the freenas, which is an appliance, so fuck that.

Like a year later, freenas has finally added good VM support, so why not make a VM for the dhcpserver?

Well, about a year ago, I didn't know that the virtual Intel nic is a fucken unstable piece of garbage, crashing nearly any OS at some point.

So that was it for a while again.

Now to the last few weeks.
Finally dnsmasq is running in a freebsd VM with a good and working configuration which is rather simple, if those tutorial fuckers out there would explain shit instead of just telling you to copy, paste and replace X.

Now back to the PXE side.
I'm using iPXE because I have no clue how to boot anything over tftp so iSCSi it is, since that is what I can relate too.
The idea behind iscsi is to fake a SCSI disk over the network. Attached devices appear as if they are actually directly connected to the machine instead of over the network.

iPXE gets a lease from the server, can connect to it, everything is fucken great. Finally.
Except that if it "sanBoots" the iscsi drive, it can't find anything to boot.
Well fuck.
If I attach a Linux live USB over iscsi, it boots, finds grub, and crashes because the live iso isn't configured for network-boot.
But it boots.
So what's so different?

Well iPXE is booted in legacy mode, where as the content of the target is windows 10 in efi mode.
Ffff.

Ok. Can I get iPXE to boot in EFI mode?

Well yes, after like 3 days fiddling with it.
But it only finds the onboard Intel nic instead of the new Mellanox CX3 cards, and can't even connect to the target....

Sooo, I guess my options are as follows.
Either, get PXE efi to work on the network cards directly, its called flexboot and might be able to since I just found some firmware options for that.

Or give up on efi and install windows in legacy mode.
Which isn't that easy when it has to end up on a drive on my nas.

I know AFS is shit, but honestly its been a breeze to learn and use... Legacy systems arent so bad with AFS