So... This company was in trouble. They hire me to help fix things and build this nice new stack to get rid of their old legacy monster application.

I'm there for three weeks when one of their top investors storms in. Apparently they are turning less profit than they told me during my interview. (Yeah, it is one of the things I always ask, even thought I don't always get an answer).

So this investor/shareholder guy starts on this motivation speech which is basically a veiled threat that "we" need to do better.

Obviously he doesn't know anyone in the room other than the boss. And it was apparent, at least to me, he also has 0% knowledge of anything related to software development. The boss doesn't look to happy about having to let this happen.

Then the guy turns to me. He points his finger at me and demands to know how failing so badly makes me feel...

So I answered truthfully... "I've only been here for three weeks, so I don't think I've been failing too much, yet. Now, how long did you say you've been throwing money at this failure without getting the return you wanted?" Emphasizing the "you" by pointing right back at him.

That doesn't shut the guy up, but he does bring his "motivational" speech to a rapid close.

He doesn't bother saying goodbye when he stormed out again, not even to the boss, who looks a lot happier at this point.

Apparently the guy pulled this stunt every couple of months (or weeks, if he was bored enough). After this encounter, he apparently had enough of trying to "motivate" us developers. We I didn't see him again in the 2 years I worked with the company after that.

I got a pay raise the month after. Apparently that was totally unrelated to this incident... 😙🎵

After our Head Of Software has terminated.

I started to take control over our development crew. And in this year I did more then the old head in the last 6 years.
- Swapped from plain old SVN to Gitlab.
- Build a complete autonomous deployment with Gitlab.
- Introduced code reviews.
- Started to refactor the legacy product with 500.000 lines of code...
- learned how to use confluent apache kafka and kubernetes to split the legacy project in many small and maintainable one.(not done yet)
- Last 3 weeks I learned how to use elasticstack with kibana and co. That we aren't blind anymore. Big dashboards are now shown in the middle of the room :) and maybe convinced my coworker that we use unity3d for our business application cause of support for all devices and same design on them. And offline capabilities. (Don't know if this was my best idea)
When I look back, I'm proud to did that much in one year alone. And my coworkers are happy too that they have less work with deployments and everything.
But I can't decide what's the title for this. System or Software Architect cause I litterallity did both :/

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.

Sometime in mid 2013 or 2014 as a junior dev I woke up to a call from my company's CEO. He informed me that the legacy system they use for order processing is down nationwide that nobody can add new orders until it's fixed and that I needed to fix it. I had been working there 6 months and was hired along with a senior dev to begin developing a web app to replace this legacy system. The senior dev had left the company two weeks earlier for a better offer so it was put on me to figure it out. I was very frank with the CEO and told him I didn't know if I could fix it and suggested he try to call the company they hired to create it. I didn't even know where the source code was let alone what the design paradigm was or whether or not there was any documentation. He said he would try figuring out who created it and give them a call and asked "As a developer you shouldn't you be able to fix this?" I just told him it wasn't that simple and left it at that.

I get to work and the CEO has discovered that the company who created the software no longer exists and I tell him he may need to find a company to consult on this if I can find the source code and if I can't find the code he might be screwed.
I found the source code in a random IT shared folder there is no source control, no documentation, no unit tests, no test environment, and it looks like nobody had touched it since 2005 or about 8 years.

Despite being completely unfamiliar with the code and the design paradigm I was able to figure out that they were validating customer addresses against an old Google geocoding API that was shutdown the day before and the lack of response was killing the application. I fixed the issue and warned the CEO before deployment that I wasn't able to test but he said to go ahead and thankfully all went well.

University logic - Provide outdated curriculum. Drop current relevant stuff from the course. Use a legacy software that has no applications anymore. Expect the student to be a master at a technology without documentation.

So I once had a job as a C# developer at a company that rewrote its legacy software in .Net after years of running VB3 code - the project had originally started in 1994 and ran on Windows 3.11.

As one of the only two guys in the team that actually knew VB I was eventually put in charge of bug for bug compatibility. Since our software did some financial estimations that were impossible to do without it (because they were not well defined), our clients didn't much care if the results were slightly wrong, as long as they were exactly compatible with the previous version - compatibility proved the results were correct.

This job mostly consisted of finding rounding errors caused by the old VB3 code, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

One day, after dealing with many smaller functions, I felt I was ready to finally tackle the most complicated function in our code. This was a beast of a function, called Calc, which was called from everywhere in the code, did a whole bunch of calculations, and returned a single number. It consisted of 500 or so lines of spaghetti.

This function had a very peculiar structure:

Function Calc(...)
...
If SomeVariable Then
...
If Not SomeVariable Then
...
(the most important bit of calculation happened here)
...
End If
...
End If
...
End Function

But for some reason it actually worked. For days I tried to find out what's going on, where the SomeVariable was being changed or how the nesting indentation was actually wrong and didn't match the source, but to no avail. Eventually, though, after many days, I did find the answer.

SomeVariable = 1

Somehow, the makers of VB3 though it would be a good idea for Not X to be calculated as (-1 - X). So if a variable was not a boolean (-1 for True, 0 for False), both X and Not X could be truthy, non-zero values.

And kids these days complain about JavaScript's handling of ==...

Around 45 days ago after years of burnout and abuse I finally quit my job when I finally realised that all the promises of greener pastures and reinforcements were nothing but tales of sugar candy mountain.

I had no idea where or what I wanted to work on or even have any leads for work but I knew if I kept recursively burning out soon there wouldn't be anything left of me to give.

Flashforward 45 days and I am the proud owner of Sane software solutions which I am currently the only full time employee of.
My old company has become my customer since no one else knows the legacy system, 11 days after quitting their invoice exceeded my previous salary with a quarter of the work and I just landed an awesome contract with some engineers I feel privileged to listen to working on some neat IOT stuff, I've quadrupled my income and now work an 8 hour day.

Don't be despondent, there are better things in life to bleed for than another mother fuckers ambitions ✌

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

A lot of engineering fads go in circle.

Architecture in the 80s: Mainframe and clients.

Architecture in the 90s: Software systems connected by an ESB.

Architecture in the 2000s: Big central service and everyone connects to it for everything

Architecture in the 2010s: Decentralized microservices that communicate with queues.

Current: RabbitMQ and Kafka.

... Can't we just go back to the 90s?

I hate fads.
I hate when I have to get some data, and it's scattered on 20 different servers, and to load a fucking account page, a convoluted network of 40 apps have to be activated, some in PHP, others in JS, others on Java, that are developed by different teams, connected to different tiny ass DBs, all on huge clusters of tiny ass virtual machines that get 30% load at peak hours, 90% of which comes from serializing and parsing messages. 40 people maintaining this nightmare, that could've been just 7 people making a small monolithic system that easily handles this workload on a 4-core server with 32GB of RAM.
Tripple it, put it behind a load balancer, proper DB replication (use fucking CockroachDB if you really want survivability), and you've got zero downtime at a fraction of the cost.

Just because something's cool now, doesn't mean that everybody has to blindly follow it for fucks sake!

Same rant goes for functional vs OOP and all that crap. Going blindly with any of these is just a stupid fad, and the main reason why companies need refactoring of legacy code.

The situation right now:

Our client: full of legacy desktop solutions that always ran inside a VPN, but wanting to modernize the system and migrate to be hosted in the cloud.

Our first project with them: Frontend built with Angular, backend in a serverless model, all with GraphQL and heavily tested to assure quality. The system is mostly an internal software for management, but the backed may receive data from an App.

The problem: all management users have weak passwords (like "12345", "password", or their first name).

The solution: restrict our system to be accessible only inside the VPN

The new problem: how the mobile app will send data to our backend?

The new solution: Let's duplicate the backend, one public and the other private. The public one will accept only a few GraphQL operations.

------

This could be avoided if the passwords weren't so easily deductible

I left uni in 2005 clutching my shiny new .NET based degree, and was instantly hired by a local software firm... to maintain their legacy Turbo Pascal systems.

How much legacy code do I need to understand and fix before I add Software Archeologist to my LinkedIn?

*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!!!

Oh boy some mutex deadlocks inside the 16 year old, unmaintained, company application framework.

Time to look at the stack traces of 24 different threads and try and guess which one fucks it up

(Send help)

I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.

Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.

I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.

This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.

One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.

Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation

There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.

Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.

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.

Everytime I'm digging into some random legacy code where no one knows its original intention I'm seeing "Software Archeologist" as a well-paid job sooner or later...
Fucking undocumented legacy code...

My client's using some legacy server side software. I set it all up nice and isolated with proxmox, tunneled it through cloudflare, got the folks to do their install on a windows vm, passthrough their licensing usb. Hosted GLPI on it too (system inventory) and so on.

Wait for it. Windows Server refuses to accept local or domain passwords. WTF. Even went ahead and did a Utilman reset on it which lets you use an admin cmd prompt to the login screen where you could reset the password. Insane that it was even possible, but no good.

Client blamed linux for it, I switched over to Windows Server on baremetal. I setup Hyper-V thinking it should be just as capable as KVM.

Nope.

Guess what, you can't pass through usb for licensing (the legacy software). MOFOS DECIDED TO install it baremetal. I couldn't even get hyper-v to create a decent virtual network. It keeps changing all my network adapter settings. I COULDN'T EVEN PASSTHROUGH PCIE NETWORK CARDS.

This feels like an eternally stagnated, mossy soup of abandonware.

FUCK YOU WINDOWS. You've been sore pain the ass for EVERYONE.

Both apps I'm working on have legacy code:

iOS app has 100's and 1000's of lines of code with no documentation, no proper naming conventions and cut and pasted code off the net.

Android app has skeleton code from a Spanish taxi app + remnants of a funeral webcasting app, there's also the same no documentation, bad naming conventions and cut and paste code off the net.

The server is also as bad, it had methods that we're never used, I for one don't fully understand the server but from what I can see it's a mess.

I had a hard time understanding both apps and gladly majority of the modifications I made we're not including existing stuff, so I guess I just basically pilled my code onto of the already existing software.

I would have gladly started from scratch given the chance.

The first two stories on slashdot's homepage are:
1. Google releases Angular 2, breaks backwards compatibility
2. Apple releases Swift 3, breaks backwards compatibility

If you use either of those tools, why do you put up with this? When did software engineering stop being about building useful or enjoyable things for our customers, and start being about doing thankless make-work for Silicon Valley billionaire companies? Is this the legacy we want to leave to the world?

I'm convinced this is going to be wildly unpopular, but hey...

Please stop writing stuff in C! Aside from a few niche areas (performance-critical, embedded, legacy etc. workloads) there's really no reason to other than some fumbled reason about "having full control over the hardware" and "not trusting these modern frameworks." I get it, it's what we all grew up with being the de-facto standard, but times have moved on, and the number of massive memory leaks & security holes that keep coming to light in *popular*, well-tested software is a great reason why you shouldn't think you're smart enough to avoid all those issues by taking full control yourself.

Especially, if like most C developers I've come across, you also shun things like unit tests as "something the QA department should worry about" 😬

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.

AI is the future, and it's a future I want to be part of.

This week was very stressful, beside my usual depression and personal issues, I've received a lot of difficult tasks at work, to do in a very short amount of time.
Things I never did, tecnologies I've never used, and for a potential client that is critical for the company at this period in time, and if we won't be able to satisfy their requests we could go bankrupt really soon.
A lot of responsibility, almost no time and a person not competent enough to do it (me), especially on a hurry.

I couldn't sleep in these days, I couldn't think peacefully, concentrate to find the best solutions. I had really bad thoughts.

I couldn't find any useful solution online, on stackoverflow, forums, etc. and I spent hours searching them.

For who knows me here on devRant, probably knows also that I tend to work with old legacy code and dead languages as VB6 and VB.NET.
So integrate "new fancy stuff" isn't that easy and there are no documentation and examples to relay on.
I had fear to even try to understand the documentation (for other languages) and try to write code for it… I was panicking.

With no more ideas, I've decided to try to ask ChatGPT for help.

In maybe 3 or 5 seconds it was able to generate the solution, in VB.NET, with comments and all the explanation needed to understand it and integrate it correctly in my software.
With a few other requests it was able to change it to make it fit better my scenarios.

It's truely unbelivable how the tecnology advanced in the last years, how a computer on the other side is able to reply to my questions with answers that I couldn't find anywhere, because they probably never existed for my case, in VB.NET especially.

ChatGPT made my day, and allowed me to end this stressful moment and give me time to relax and focus on more important personal stuff this weekend.

I think I’m going to lose my mind. This stupid website I’m working on keeps going down and at the worst times possible. Nothing we do seems to help. I’m again awakened in the middle of the night to attend to it and still have no good answers why. My anxiety is through the roof because I can’t get back to sleep after tonight’s outage. The client is beyond pissed even though a ton of problems would be solved if they would just get off of some legacy software and onto something more modern. But they insisted it be this way and the budget is already blown and then some even if they changed their minds. If it’s going to be that I continue losing so much sleep and sanity, I may just have to quit this job. I hate the thought of that because I always want to see things through to a happy conclusion. And I like my teammates and don’t want to let them down. But I’m too old for that kind of no-sleep development lifestyle now. Nobody’s shitty website is worth my physical and mental health.

I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.

First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.

That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.

This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.

We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.

TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.

Don't you just love it when an official Docker image suddenly switches from one base image to another, and they automatically update all existing tags? Oh you've had it locked to v1.2.3, guess what, v1.2.3 now behaves slightly differently because it's been compiled with OpenSSL 3. Yeah, we updated a legacy version of the software just to recompile it with the latest version of OpenSSL, even though the previous version of OpenSSL is still receiving security fixes.

I don't think it's the image maintainers or Docker's fault though. Docker images are expected to be self-contained, and updating the base image is necessary to get the latest security fixes. They had two options: to keep the old base image which has many outdated and vulnerable libraries, or to update the base image and recompile it with OpenSSL 3.

What really bothers me about the whole thing is that this is the exact fucking problem containers were supposed to solve. But even with all the work that goes into developing and maintaining container images, it still isn't possible to do anything about the fact that the entire Linux ecosystem gives exactly zero fucks about backwards compatibility or the ability to run legacy software.

The worst part of being a senior software engineer for a team is that the legacy code of the company is not clear, and there's no documentation.

Anyone else burned out? I'm fucking burned out. Definitely taking a week off soon. That sort of makes it harder to get motivated though. I was humming along nicely with my new project, but got sidetracked fixing stupid shit in the legacy code and dealing with a moron in customer service, and I guess that kicked me off into a small depression. I feel like I should have worked harder in school, so that I could have gone into sales or something high paying, instead of "software engineering". With all the ass I've been kicking over the last year, I sure hope I get a raise soon.

NODE 18 MOVES INTO MAINTENENCE TOMORROW

...do you know where your legacy software is?

This was a free public service announcement brought to you by your favorite 🎪🤡🤹‍♂️

Hey this is the first time i post here.

I just started working part-time for this company last week. What i have to do is to change some windows from Win32 to WPF. As i was reading the legacy code i just had to sigh man. They have like 100 projects in a single solution, from C++ to C#, everything acctached to each other, with almost NO comments or docs. Wtf man? I don't know how it actually works in the industry (this is my first dev job) but when you write fucking 20 classes with each one contains bunch of attributes, methods, properties, you can't just leave all the code's semantics in their names. And by the way the app is so fucking ugly i bet they have appointed part-time developers as UX engineers... Even i have little knowledge about UX/UI, i just can't bear with this kind of ugly and confusing and unintuitive production with a cost of a good photo editting software.

Ok there may be much more to rant in the future but let me try through this and tell you more. Have a good day. :)

At a previous job, boss & owner of company would waste hours of my time to show me, at his own desk, every small detail of some random feature he had fallen in love with on some random webpage he found, while saying "I don't want to disrupt your plans or anything, this is just something to keep in the back of your minds, as this would be a really nice thing to have, even tho none of the clients have asked for this and I have asked no one else for a second opinion, and I will most likely ask you to remove this feature in the future because I will finally have realized it wasn't that good an idea anyway."

Ok dipshit, what the fuck are we supposed to do with this information? Every week from this moment on you will ask whether we have found the time to implement this feature, even though you are fully aware that our schedule has no room for random, unplanned features and that we are already not able to meet the unreasonable deadline you pulled out of your ass two weeks into a development process that would end up taking 8+ months.

We are already overworked, we already work hours upon hours of unpaid overtime, and yet you still think it reasonable to pull us away from our work every other fucking day to talk about random extra features you want added, but don't want added to the roadmap because you want no delays... Fuck you, fuck your toxic attitude, fuck your meetings where you spend half an hour complaining about features we are still in the process of developing the backend functionality for (on test servers) not having the right font colour for the text, and fuck your legacy desktop software originally written in COBOL that you now want moved to "the cloud".

I would rather be unemployed and live as a hobo on the streets with a "will code for food" sign than work for you ever again.

var _self = Object.create(Rant);

Hello devs I'm back

A few months ago I joined a software development company and I was pretty specific that I wasn't going to do support or maintenance only feature development, well, this past 3 months I've been doing dev helping stablish good practices and a better architecture for the app, but guess who is joining a support team tomorrow, they sold me the idea of a refactor team, I was trilled and accepted, now they tell me it's a legacy bug fixing team, damn I hate this crap, hope y'all doing better

> grep -c -e '// BAD HACK:' importantproject/src/main.cc
4287

our most important piece of legacy c++ software with about 44 thousand lines of code and next to no doc aside from inline comments.

So client wants an android app that implements some legacy Epson printer SDK, works on a chinese Windows device with an android Emulator on it, connects to local Webservice that had to be configurated and ran (local Network) , sends and tracks data, if Server down then handle it on the Client and reconnect as soon as Server up, running own TCP Server on Android device that listens for specific http requests, which make the android connect to an Epson printer to start printing. The stuff that is being printed? A png file that has to be converted to a Bitmap, a QR Code that has to be generated by the bugged base64 encrypted stuff coming via http in (webserver-> Android TCP server)
Dont forget the Software Design (MVP), documentation, research etc.. Im about to finish the app , its my 5th day on this Project, the 6th day was planned to be full testing. Client Calls me and ask me how far I am, I reply, he says ok. 30 minutes later he tells me he wont pay me next time that much because this work should take 3 days, or even 2. "A senior Android developer could do this in 2 days"... When i sent him my notices he called me a liar, his webdev has alot of experience and told him it should take 2-3 days...ffs

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.

For the love of GOD, if you're an architect or someone in the position where you can make drastic changes to the overarching design of a software system, if you're so keen on enforcing something "cool" just because you've read about it in a blog post/seen it on a youtube video, READ ABOUT IT THOROUGHLY, as in, pick up a fucking book or do actual research. An architect overseas just informed us that a whole legacy PHP application (a fucking monolith with a dysfunctional database, yes, I think someone demented designed it) should be rewritten to a microservice architecture (without a messaging broker, just plain API interaction through HTTP) AND WE'RE KEEPING THE DATABASE WHICH BEGS TO BE PUT DOWN FOR GOOD. So now we're gonna have a clusterfuck of tons of PHP microservices (Q_Q) which interact through plain HTTP APIs (swagger's gonna be put to a test) and all have a single broken database in the center. Talk about a microlithic design. Jesus Christ.

- Favourite pastime while waiting for your code to compile
- Most heroic/ingenuous bug fix
- Hardest to track down bug
- Worst legacy code you wrote and left behind leaving a job
- Weirdest project
- Last side project you actually finished
- Explain your job like I'm five/the way you do it for non-tech people
- That time your past self (almost) got you in trouble
- Software pet peeves
- Story about how you freaked someone out
- Feature that most certainly was a bug once
- Post something for your favourite previous weekly tag!

fuck oracle. fuck my company.

Using Oracle VM Manager/Servers to host Oracle Phone transfer solution without support coverage from Oracle.

Requiring Unix sysadmins to update to latest release and not telling that we do not have coverage from Oracle if anything goes wrong.

Gues what.. We've updated to Oracle VM Manager/Server 3.4.5 which was released this year and it uses fucking XEN hypervisor version 4.4.4 which has been deprecated and dead since who knows when. Latest release of XEN is 4.11. But that is not an issue, whatever, enterprise, legacy software, etc.

This fucking update introduced memory leak on the hypervisor which has been reported as per xen 4.4.4 history. Furthermore, we have no support from Oracle which means that I have to dig through mailing lists and limited information on the net since oracle has freakin support wall on nearly each of the major bugs found on that shitty software.

I have no idea whether any newer version of xen will work with that old Oracle Linux kernel or not.

Furthermore, Oracle provided great documentation on how to rollback the fcking update. Reinstall the hypervisor. Riiiight. XEN does not have export/import feature.

eh

I swear I didn’t hit delete and then confirm delete... Then why do we have 3 different software analytics that show all the mouse clicks leading up to and including the mouse click of you deleting the customer... thank goodness I set up soft deletes instead of hard deletes like the legacy system use to be.

The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.

That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.

A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.

One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).

The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.

Enter "situated environments."

In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.

We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.

I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.

No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.

In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.

It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."

This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.

One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.

Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.

What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.

Let's face it: I am and will always be a tinkerer. Yes, I know my ways around, I can sneak into legacy code bases easily and throw new stuff in there, I've seen software stacks. But scarcely sound design, really modular. Even from the cleverer, experienced ones. They can master more complexity, so they can handle more spaghetti. Some essay from the 80's had this grand idea to organically 'grow' software. That's how it looks like most of the times: cancerous, parasitic super fungi (armillaria). Yeah, we all know have to fight bit-rot and entropy, but it was all lost before already. We'll never get rid of legacy protocols, legacy code.
And even when we go green field, start a fresh. Yeah, take a great design, make everything new, after some months of throwing features and outer constraints at the thing, it's the same old mud again.
But we can still dream on: some day I will design great APIs, I will have great test coverage, documentation, UML design, autometed tests, fuzzing, memchecking, I'll work professionally, clean coder style.
Pfft forget it. Maybe change for consulting, because we'll continue to dream of the 'clean' code, so you can sell the next 'recipe', development method. It's like diets. As effective. For the one selling.

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.

By Thor (not the god, the dragon), Belial and Thor (the god, this time)...

Just got the sources for the software that runs on the SDR for my project. I think I just found the mother of all legacy code:
The whole behaviour is described in a single, 4000 lines C file. Most of the code is in a giant switch with cases selected from an enumeration with names that don't match their function. All varnames are overly long, yet hopelessly unhelpful. And why three fuck would you use pointer[0].data instead of (*pointer).data or pointer->data like a sane person would !? pointer isn't even an array, so why would you use []?

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

I started fully exploring different aspects of tech in a middle school technology class where the teacher gave me a good grade as long as I did something that could be useful or interesting. I learned how to design webpages by playing with inspect element, and then decided to make my own with Notepad. One of my friends showed me how to use Sublime Text, and I found that I loved programming. Other things I did in there included using two desktops with NIC's wired directly to each other with an old version of Synergy and a VNC server, and at one point, I built a server node out of old dell Optiplex desktops the school had piled in a storage room.

Last year in high school, I took a class on VB.net and made some money afterwards by freelance refreshing legacy spaghetti, and got burned pretty badly by a person offering $25,000 for a major POS to backend CMS integration rewrite. The person told me that I had finished second, and that another dev had gotten the reward, but that he liked my code. A few days later, I was notified through a *cough*very convoluted*cough* system of mine by a trigger that ran once during startup in a production environment and reported the version number as well as a few other bits, and I was able to see that *cough*someone*cough* had been using my code. I stopped programming for at least six months straight because I didn't want to go back.

This year in high school, I'm taking the engineering class I didn't get into last year, and I realized that Autodesk Inventor supports VBA. I got back into programming with a lot of copy-paste and click-once "installers" to get my modelling assignments done faster than my classmates. Last week, one of my friends asked me to help him fix his VB program, which I did, and now I'm hooked again.

I've always been an engineer at heart, but now I'm conflicted with going into I.T., mechanical or robotical engineering, or being a software developer.

A little long, but that's how I got to where I am now. (I still detest those who take advantage of defenseless programmers. There's a special place for them.)

ColdFusion and all ColdFusion devs should be executed. Its a god-awful software from the 90's and if you still use it you're either braindead or ignorant.

Shut up about legacy CF code too! No one cares whether or not your embeddable calendar would be hard to make in JS; fucking figure it out.

I realise that CF may make things easier in the short run, but in the long run you'll have introduced so much technical debt that you'll run crying back to JS anyways; CF is so hard to refactor and even to make flexible that you would spend less total time over an application lifecycle learning JS.

Ubuntu 17.10...

WORST UBUNTU RELEASE TO DATE!

Why oh why did they go with /swapfile by default? I was legacy booting with UEFI enabled and it still didn't work! And don't get me started on nouveau (Nvidia OSS).

When I click "use proprietary software" I want the OS to do everything in its power to just work. Disable 3D acceleration if you must - at least boot to a console.

I'm scared to try it on my main desktop now!

I switched to Linux Mint and I'm happy now, I just needed an instant OS that works. 😊

We use at our company one of the largest Python ORM and dont code ourselfs on it, event tough I can code. Its some special contract which our General Manager made, before we as Devs where in the Project and everything is provided from the external Company as Service. The Servers are in our own Datacenter, but we dont have access.

We have our Consultants (Project Manager) as payd hires and they got their own Devs.

Im in lead of Code Reviews and Interfaces. Also Im in the "Run" Team, which observes, debuggs and keeps the System alive as 3rd-Level (Application Managers).

What Im trying to achieve is going away from legacy .csv/sftp connections to RestAPI and on large Datasets GraphQL. Before I was on the Project, they build really crappy Interfaces.

Before I joined the Project in my Company, I was a Dev for a couple of Finance Applications and Webservices, where I also did coding on Business critical Applications with high demand Scaling.

So forth, I was moved by my Boss over to the Project because it wasn't doing so well and they needed our own Devs on it.

Alot of Issues/Mistakes I identified in the Software:
- Lots of Code Bugs
- Missing Process Logic
- No Lifecycle
- Very fast growing Database
- A lot of Bad Practices

Since my switch I fixed alot of bugs, was the man of the hour for fixing major Incidents and so on so forth. A lot of improvements have been made. Also the Team Spirit of 15+ People inside the Project became better, because they could consult me for solutions/problems.

But damn I hate our Consultants. We pay them and I need to sketch the concepts, they are to dumb for it. They dont understand Rest or APIs in general, I need to teach them alot about Best Practices and how to Code an API. Then they question everything and bring out a crooked flawed prototype back to me.

WE F* PAY THEM FOR BULLCRAP! THEY DONT EVEN WRITE DOCUMENTATION, THEY ARE SO LAZY!

I even had a Meeting with the main Consultant about Performance Problems and how we should approach it from a technical side and Process side. The Software is Core Business relevant and its running over 3 Years. He just argumented around the Problem and didnt provide solutions.

I confronted our General Manager a couple of times with this, but since 3 Years its going on and on.

Im happy with my Team and Boss, they have my back and I love my Job, but dealing with these Nutjobs of Consultants is draining my nerves/energy.

Im really am at my wits end how to deal with this anymore? Been pulling trough since 1 year. I wanna stay at my company because everything else besides the Nutjob Consultants is great.

I told my Boss about it a couple of times and she agrees with me, but the General Manager doesnt let go of these Consultants.

Even when they fuck up hard and crash production, they fucking Bill us... It's their fault :(

So I made an update to my React Native app. I changed UI of a couple of screen, added a few animations here and there, refactored how my graphQL resolvers work in the backend(no breaking changes), changed how data gets loaded into the database etc.

It worked in dev so I figured hey let's deploy it. Today is(was because it's now 3am but more on that later) a national holiday so no one goes to work so no one will use my app so I have an entire day to deploy.

I started at 15:00(because i woke up at 13:00 lol). I tested the update once again in dev and proceeded to deploy it to prod. I merged backend to master, built docker images, did migrations on the db, restarted docker-compose with new images. And now for the app. I run ./gradlew assembleRelease and it starts complaining that react-native-gesture-handler is not installed. Ugh, rm -rf node_modules && yarn install. It worked. But now gradlew crashes and logs don't tell me anything. Google tells me to change a bunch of gradle settings but none of them work. Fast forward 5h, it's around 20:00 and I isolated the issue to, again, react-native-gesture-handler. They updated from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 which didn't fucking compile. 2 more hours passed (now 22:00) and I got v2.3.1 working which fixed the problem in 2.3.0 but made my app crash on startup. YOUR FUCKING LIBRARY GETS 250K WEEKLY DOWNLOADS AND YOU DONT EVEN BOTHER CHECKING IF IT COMPILES IN PROD ON ANDROID?! WHAT THE FUCK software-mansion?

After I solved that, my app didn't crash. Now it threw an error "Type errors: Network Request Failed" every time I fetch my legacy REST API(older parts use rest and newer use graphql. I'll refactor that in the next update). I'll spare you the debugging hell i went through but another 5h passed. Its 3am. My config had misspelled url to prod but good for dev... I hate myself and even more so react-native-gesture-handler.

Windows containers with Kubernetes on AWS and Azure are thing now.

What does that mean? Is it now possible to containerize system critical windows 3.1 legacy software from the 90ties (like the ticketing software at Airport Paris Orly) and orchestrate it in the cloud?

Do you know any use cases for Microsoft Windows in the cloud?

Client: "I've started as a software developer too" *chuckling* "so I understand EXACTLY what you say... But could you just explain me what do you mean with 'legacy code' ?"
Me: :|

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.

Oh the joy of enterprise software development in a legacy system. I just wanted to add a new checkbox with a small feature and now I'm balls deep in age old half decent documentation and just have to pray it works. Implementation time: about 2 days or so

I understand the reasoning behind switching to a new, maybe better, technology, but for fuck sake, it’s against typical Microsoft strategy to “kill and shoot to the dead corpse” something instead of maintaining backward compatibility. Why they’ve changed?
I still can develop VB6 software for Windows 11 that just works. But you removing newer tools for no reason.

In short: Xamarin is dead, and that’s alright, but they are even deciding to “remove” development tools from future updates of VS 2022. Why?? Keep it optional, allow me to write legacy code (just 4 years old actually) a bit longer. 🙃

And also, .NET MAUI doesn’t seem “great”, at least at the first sight.
Why you’re forcing me to switch to it if there are 0 benefit for my product?
It’s so bad the only way to bring developers is this one?!

What is incredible to me is that the “industry field”, which is HUGE is so often ignored because of the “customers field”. Keep them separated. If you don’t want to support old tools, just don’t, but leave them there.
They killed Windows Mobile 6.5 which was old but still alive and fine in the industries, you had the biggest market share in PDAs and decided to give it to fucking Google.
The manufacturers kept selling WM devices even in 2020… and they stopped just because you stopped selling licenses.
You acquired Xamarin, gave everyone for free the tools to keep writing .NET for Android and move the industry apps, and now you are saying “actually fuck you, do it again, even though nothing really changes, but convert your entire project to this bs we’ve created”. Why???

Microsoft response: it’s just a few clicks and everything works fine.
My response: No, it’s not… the entire UI is rendered in a different way, I have to rewrite the whole UI of my app and a lot of modules stopped working because of nuget packages I can’t install anymore…
I have to spend additional time to make it work THE SAME as before, not better. So what’s the fucking point?

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

We work with multiple platforms, a legacy language and c#. This dev uses underscore between variables in c# and camel case in the legacy platform. The thing is the legacy system has used underscores since 1981 and I've never seen a readable example of c# using them between words.

I also told him I was working on learning to use patterns and how the process of software development should work by training. His response... Why would you want to do that?

He also copies and pastes code everywhere and pays no attention to scope.

And worst of all I'm his coverage when he is gone. If I have to debug one more sloppy bug I am going to face desk.

A former team lead decided the team should review any open PR before proceeding with their own tasks after their breaks. Any open PR also meant reviewing refinements in an ongoing discussion. Several times, we wasted time for review, coding, and discussing when the second reviewer asked to revert the changes introduced according to the requests of the first reviewer.

Now as a freelancer, in smaller projects, I sometimes have no coworkers to review my code. So, apart from testing, I try to pay more attention to linters, static code analysis and automated coding assistance. I have stylelint, eslint, SonarLint, and possibly some more IDE inspections. For the infamous popular blogging software, I also have a so-called PHP code sniffer that checks all PHP and JavaScript code for compliance with the WordPress coding styles, so finally, I got the team experience back: SonarLint suggests removing unnecessary spaces and reformating my code, which in turn makes PHPCS complain that the code violates the legacy code style.

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)

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?

"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.

I have a small NUC-like machine in my home with an old external hdd connected to it. I use it to run my local gitlab, nextcloud and to test a few websites I build for the lolz.
If you too have a homelab, whether it's a single raspberry or an entire room full or racks, you know damn well that everything you have running locally as a web service keeps going until it doesn't, for whatever fucking reason. This time, it was the turn of my nextcloud.
The machine has arch linux running, I chose it since I already use it on my coding laptop and being a rolling release means I don't have to manually upgrade to a newer version, risking various fuck-ups and consequent screaming of profanity.
The downside is that arch is a bleeding-edge distro, so, despite being pretty good for what concerns security, as updates are pushed out some packages may still require legacy software to work as intended, since obviously not all developers for all packages can release simultaneously.
The problem was that php reached 8.2.x but nextcloud couldn't use anything beyond 8.1, so the highlighted solution was to download php-legacy, a package with a set of utilities which the cloud could use instead of mainline php.

Pretty easy, right? fuck my life, here we go.

I edited apache-httpd's configurations to link the new libraries, updated every reference in every virtual host that could possibly screw up the web server.

Done.

Then I went on and disabled the php-fpm mainline, creating a new systemd unit that would instead run the legacy executable and afterwards I edited nextcloud's additional configs so they use that instead.

Done, getting a bit dizzy, but I reboot everything and breathe.

At this point the migration should be complete, but wait, the server returns an error saying that the application is still trying to use php 8.2+...wait, what in the sysadmin Christ?

Back to nextcloud config, everything is set, everything else in every other fucking php-legacy and web server is fine, the old fpm service is disabled, I am confused, and why in the FUCKING FUCK is the new php-fpm unit failing to start at boot with "error 78/config - directory not found"? Hello? Am I being trolled by a shitty dual-core amazon fake NUC?
Maybe yes, cause it turns out that the unit was referencing a directory in the external hdd, which gets mounted at boot time after the unit itself starts, so nothing much, just a matter of tinkering with cron jobs, a reboot and at least this one is off my balls.

But why still isn't the server responding correctly? why? WHY?

After slamming my cock on the keyboard here and there scrolling back through all the config files I think to myself, hmmm, my gitlab is working flawlessly, well yeah, I didn't need to install the whole web stack, everything was nice and easy wrapped in a docker container...so why am I even here, why the fuck am I bothering with all this layered web-app bullshit, why don't I just run the up-to-date docker image that someone else has already set up for me, back up all the data and reupload them on the application?

Oh joy, you can't imagine, after 3...almost 4 hours of pure computer-touching the relief I had from seeing the blue web page with the "welcome to nextcloud" title.

Right now it's copying back all the files, and the external hdd is now linked to include the data folder.
Like really, everything was solved in two lines of bash.

I am still fuming, but at least I learned a valuable lesson, if you want a service up for yourself, implement it and deploy it as fucking easy straight-forward as you can, giving MAXIMUM priority to already fully-working options that are out there just waiting to be downloaded and used. I swing my scrotal sack on web-apps elegance as long as it's MY homelab in MY place.

Eat a fat dick php.

sudo pacman -Rns nextcloud
sudo systemctl disable --now php-fpm-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns php-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns $(sudo pacman -Qdtq)

How do you diagnose speed issues?

I've been lumped with looking after a legacy app.

It connects to our ERP system to handle raising invoices etc. And in June is developed slowness, which we sort of fixed by making one section load later (the SQL was a horrible view in a view in a view).

We then upgraded our ERP software, and the SQL issues are resolved (had to upgrade SQL server etc at the same time) and now the legacy app is running really slowly.

I know that it is when it loops through a data set to set column values etc.

A particular project has 1900 time transactions and takes upto 2 minutes to load.

This part of the program hasn't been changed in over a year, and has only started running slowly since the upgrade.

Are there any good way I can investigate and diagnose exactly why it has suddenly started running slowly?

At the moment? There are a bunch of classes that someone wrotes back in 2017 to make a connection to a legacy software in the company and every single integration since then strongly depends on that hard to read code. I live with the constant fear of that code suddenly stop working, I don't think I will be skilled enough to fix it.

Of lifetime? Taking decisions on colors in the front end.

Entropy wins. More useless accumulated historical nonsense in each programming language. Complex software stacks impossible to reach the bottom. However C and C++ still there possibly even some Cobol and Fortran zombies. And we devs still writing our ifs and loops for that kind of legacy stuff.

Just updated one of our age old legacy projects. Customer wanted to discontinue the software for two years...
Codebase was quite solid but I am so sick of it - I keep bolting on bugfixes until it crashes and burns - and I will be happy.

I pride myself on not being a nerd. I can communicate with customers and I don't dismiss aesthetics, marketing, delivery dates, and legal considerations as completely inconsistent and arbitrary.

But still, when clients complain about my predecessors, I start to feel for them and imagine when past developers
- preferred to rewrite the legacy system
- were reluctant to use Microsoft software
- needed much more time than estimated
- and failed to understand implicit requirements.

I know that there are a lot of developers in the world, but you need a decent or good one who is available and willing to work on your project.

As (web) developers, we should behave more like craftspeople, stay calm, and ignore entitled clients' and managers' moods and micro-management attempts unless there's really a critical issue.

My first dev job was as an intern. Hired for my skills in Java and C++, had to maintain a big legacy software in VB.NET. I felt kinda lost and disappointed ...

Do you ever feel your job is too demanding compared to other software engineering jobs?

I've worked in two companies for now.
First company, Kotlin microservices and we had QAs, didn't have to write a lot of tech specs and no post mortem or on call at all (not yet atleast), it was just talk to PO, he tells the business requirement, we work together to make tickets, no legacy code so was easy to know what to do for tech, no monolith to handle or anything, much easier, just code and meetings.

Current job is meetings with PO telling you what he wants, have to write a full on tech spec and also know business requirements and product knowledge as the current PO doesn't know anything about how the products work, writing huge tech specs, communicating on requests sent my clients on slack, pretty much always firefighting, the system is so fragile and legacy, coding is actually less its mostly spending hours finding out how this shittt legacy flows work (no docs) , PO pretty much does fuck all, just wants meetings and wants us to do very very stupid tedious low impacts projects. This bundled with oncall and onpoint and the absolute sheer amount of incidents our team is involved in (on average we have 4 a week LOL, varying size but they're all very annoying) and the overtime oncall benefit is so bad too, if you do get paged out of hours, you just get that hour back during work hours. In other companies like friends, you get paid for the whole time you're oncall, whether you get paged or not. I can't go out anywhere on weekends or anywhere at all during on call in case I get paged, which happens a lot. Its a cluster of a mess. This bundled with manager stoll not wanting to promote me to IC3 despite all I've done so far.

My question is, is this more normal than I think it is? Is this just how crap our career can be? Mind you I'm in the UK so not getting those mind boggling US wages sadly either. Have US colleagues in same team doing same job but obviously getting more

Working on an enhancement for a legacy product that's been in the industry for about fifteen years... The situation is that I fix one defect and give more pop up. I'm frustrated so much that I give up twenty times a day.
Please tell me that's how you work on legacy software 😔

Im amazed by people ranting on CoC, whining that is end of the meritocracy but at the same time have nothing against kicking out Hans Reisers legacy. After all ReiserFS is a fine piece of software. It's just that his aspie took over as he killed his wife. Where were those wankers when Reiser was going to prison? They could do great job on forking, renaming and supporting reiserfs. But no, it's easier to cry about sjw and stuff, than saving neat code.

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.

The project I'm currently working on: developing a new rootless container deployment to host some legacy Python applications (zope/plone). The initial plan was to just host those on VMs with all the legacy software, I at least convinced everybody to develop a new container deployment for it, which could be re-used for other things. However, it's a lot more work, and working with Puppet goes at a meandering pace.

Software or hardware design solutions that are retrofitted for Legacy systems. I understand the value of backwards compatibility, but Gah damn!