Hey everyone!

devRant will be going down on Friday, July 7th around 10:30pm EDT so we can do some database maintenance and restructuring of our cluster. It hopefully won't be down for more than about 30 minutes or so, and during that time you should see our "down for maintenance" message.

If you usually use devRant while you're on the toilet (we know many do!), we apologize and suggest you try to schedule around this!

Please let me know if you have any questions and apologies for the inconvenience.

Everything has gotta have a maintenance break every once in a while!

Boss throwing up a huge source code that I didn't see before.

Boss: Hey, this is an app from a contractor to do XYZ.

Me: Oh, okay.. so?

Boss: You will continue the code and the maintenance now. How much time do you need to implement X feature?

Me: I need to see the code first, can't say nothing now.

Boss: ok I need estimation now.

Me: *getting nervous* I need to see the fuckening code first. if you want estimation now I would say one year..

Boss: what?

Me: what?

Hey everyone,

This coming Sunday (Feb 4), at about 12AM EST, devRant will be going down for scheduled maintenance (database server maintenance). The maintenance shouldn’t take more than about 15 minutes.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions and apologies for the inconvenience!

Hey everyone,

We’ll be doing maintenance on our web server on Sunday, April 29 at around 3pm EDT. The app will probably be unreachable for about 10-15 minutes over that time. We apologize for the inconvenience and we’ll be sure to get it back up as quickly as possible.

Feel free to let me know if you have questions.

At the beginning of an interview...

HR girl: You know, that position you applied is already taken but I found some similar in our company.
Me: Uhm, ok?
HRG: What about this one? It's some programming... *pointing at some IT position regarding db maintenance* Do you want to try that?
Me: Sure, why not.

I was applying to student position at embedded firmware development at the time. I did some school project with MySQL but it was few years back and I happily forgot most about it.
Anyway, story continues.

IT manager: Hi, I heard you want to join our lines.
Me: That is what I heard as well.
IT: Eh?
Me: I came for completely different position actually.
IT: Uhm, ok. We have standardised test, let's see what you can do.

It was some basic stuff for db guys but I was totally lost. I was done after 3 minutes returning nearly blank paper.
We shaked hands, both agreed this is not well fit for me and I went away.

After this botched attempt HR girl remembered that there is another team looking for embedded developer students. I was accepted.

Corporates are marvelous.

How not to give support..

Me: Creates ticket on support site, letting them know their webservice returns "maintenance" page.
Support: "It works on our end."
Support: *closes ticket*

Euhm.. excuse me?

Me: Creates another ticket with a screenshot and the curl response information..
Support: Sends screenshot back that it works on their end. "Maybe check your firewall"
Support: *closes ticket*

I ain't playing these games..

Me: Creates new ticket with more curl responses from 4 different servers to prove it's not "firewall" related.
Support: ..

2 days later

Me: Sends *friendly* reminder.
Support: ..

6 days later

Me: Creates ticket again saying I'm still having issues.
Support: "I'm forwarding this to our technical support"
Support: *closes ticket*

10 minutes later.

Technical Support: "Here's the manual for our integration .pdf."

Excuse me, you say what now? I KNOW HOW IT WORKS, I'VE WRITTEN THE INTEGRATION ALREADY. THE SERVICE JUST SEEMS TO BE DOWN FFS.. pls..

Me: Sends mail to their project manager who manages the clients dossier with support history and such.
Him: "I'll check it out and let you know."

1 day later.

Support: "We had some issues this and that, wasn't publically availble, works now, .."

What a nice way to waste your time..

Heard the plumber yelling because of the work someone before him did on my heating system...

As a programmer:

Do you want a class to never EVER be deleted?

Just add in the comments that it's "temporary".

Holy fucking hell!
Who the fuck sets up a local network with an 255.255.0.0 subnet mask and then lets the dhcp-server distribute clients onto the 192.249.x.x., 192.2.x.x and the 192.22.x.x networks AT FUCKING RANDOM???
I need to SSH onto 40 routers distributed across the entire campus and have a WORKING internet connection while doing so and you make me spin the connect-disconnect-wheel. Fucking hell dude, don't give me that "Uh, it wasn't intended for this size"-bullshit. You have about 200 active devices. And in one subnet you have space for more than 60 000. Fuck you, dumbass! OH, YOUR FUCKING LIST IS FUCKING WRONG AND YOU DON'T REMEMBER THE IP OF THE ROUTERS? OH FUCK YOU EVEN HARDER!!!
Goddamn people why does legacy maintenance always suck so much?😭😭😭

Observed my bf spending at least a half hour browsing devRant in bed, so asked him what he'd do if devRant didn't exist anymore.

His simple reply?

"Cry"

May God help him tomorrow for the scheduled downtime... ;)

Tonight I was getting ready to pay my monthly apartment maintenance bill so I Googled my property management company's name because I always forget the url. It's always the first result, but I noticed Google placed a little "This site may be hacked." line of text on their listing.

Seeing that before and knowing what it means, I went into the source for their index page, and to my suspicion, their WordPress installation was hacked with the standard invisible spam links.

I realize this happens to a lot of WordPress blogs, but this is an NYC property management company that is responsible for a lot of buildings and has millions of dollars in contracts. Normally I would inform them, but having dealt with them in the past I don't like them very much, but more importantly, I don't think they'd understand what I was saying because they are so technically inept. They might even think that because I found this, that I had something to do with it.

So devRant, it is up to you. What should I do?

"Arch Linux is actually not that difficult".

I ssh'ed into my home server yesterday.

I was greeted by a message from an ext3 disk about needing fsck. Fine, "I haven't been in here for a while, might as well do some maintenance". fsck /dev/sda6, let's go!

This nicely "repaired" the sshd service (i.e. cleared the sectors), I cursed at myself for pressing enter at "repair (y)" right before the connection broke.

So I connected a display and keyboard... ok so let's just pacman -Sy sshd or whatever. We can do this! Just check the wiki, shouldn't be that hard!

Wait... pacman has not run since 2010? WAIT IT'S ACTUAL UPTIME IS 9 YEARS??? I guess we know why I'm a DB admin and not devops...

Hmm all the mirrors give timeouts? Oh. The i686 processor architecture isn't even supported anymore...?

4 hours, 11 glasses of cognac, 73 Arch32 wiki/forum pages, 2 attempts at compiling glibc, and 4 kernel panics later: "I think I'll buy a new server".

Worst disturbance while working?

Some of my faves:
- Mgr flying his new $400 drone around the office (hitting walls, ceiling, etc). I mentioned the price because he crashed it a week later (un-repairable kind of crash), so I didn't feel too sorry for his loss.
- Mgr trying out his new blowgun and blowing darts at a cardboard box down/bewtween the cube hallway (where anyone could walk out of at any time). We would hear the "pfffft" and a loud 'Yea!'.
- Mgr would walk by a cube entry-way, fart, and walk away laughing.
- Mgr called me into area and his desk+the floor area around his desk was covered in peanut shells.
Me: "Wow, you got a mess here."
Mgr: "Yea, got tired of trying to hit the trash can. Maintenance will vacuum the office this weekend."
The mess was one thing, but what disturbed me the most was this asshole thinks Maintenance-Jim has nothing better to do than clean up after this so-called adult.

Karma kicked in and an hour later the owner's wife (we're still a family owned company, so he+his wife are on friendly basis with everyone) stopped by to say hi and walked in on the mess.
June: "What do we have here!?"
Mgr: "Oh...um...uh..I was eating a few peanuts and putting the shells in the trash can and accidentally knocked it over. I was on my way to get the vacuum cleaner."
June: "Hmmm...this looks like more than a few. *You* clean it up right now and *never* let me see this again!"
Mgr: "Yes..yes ma'am...right now.."

Whole office heard the exchange and it was frickin' awesome.

devRant, the only place developers get excited witnessing a maintenance, downtime.

When management measure the performance of maintenance team by the amount of bug they fixed

We got married and started our relationship at 1.0. After our first argument, we managed to patch things up, so it wouldn't all break down: 1.0.1
Same night, I suggested a sexy new feature, and we worked up a good sweat implementing it together.
I got too excited and released prematurely: 1.1.0
After that, she was a bit cross, but then I suggested a hotfix. She agreed and got right on top of it. After a few minutes she finished and managed a release as well: 1.1.1 😏

I woke up nicely, made my coffee and breakfast, got into coding mood, really motivated.

"Huh, how am I supposed to do this... Let's Google. Ah, StackOverflow has the perfect solution to my problem."
*clicks link*
*irritated internal scream*
Noooooooo!

Because Moment.js is too mainstream,

Oh man I really need to punch person who wrote this shitty file,
1k LOC , whole thing is a mess, this is just a gist of this crap

"We have another major incident spinning up. QueenMorgana, are you free?" NO, I'M FINISHING UP THE NOTES FROM MY LAST TWO CALLS THAT JUST ENDED, WHY DON'T YOU CALL IN, LAZY FUCKWAD.

Why is it so damn difficult for my boss to cover a call when we're all busy DOING ALL THE LITTLE POINTLESS SHIT HE GIVES UP. He had me follow up from my coworker's call yesterday, not seeing the logic in, IF IT WERE STILL A FUCKING ISSUE, THEY WOULD HAVE CALLED US BACK THIS MORNING.

So now, I have to sit on the line AGAIN and take notes for shit that's not even a major issue BECAUSE IT'S BEEN DOWN FOR A WEEK. IF IT'S DOWN THAT LONG AND YOU DON'T SUBMIT A TICKET TO ME OR CALL OUR MAJOR INCIDENT LINE, I DON'T GET PAID ENOUGH TO RESPOND LIKE IT'S AN EMERGENCY.

Also, fucking lazy asswipe of a "teammate" bitching about being on a call for over 8 hours, while the rest of us are on back to back calls. He's never been on a long call and has been here a year longer than I have. I've been on a 14 hour and a 16 hour, and my other teammate has handled a 26 hour call. 8 HOURS IS FUCKING NOTHING AND YOU WORK FROM HOME SO DON'T EVEN HAVE TO WEAR PANTS.

**spilled 3 cups of coffee this morning, and have an expensive maintenance on my car today, likely to explode on just about everyone**

A repo on GitHub I'm maintaining has grown with 200k downloads / month since I started working on it a year ago. My recipe? I added an npm badge in the readme showing downloads / month and I responded to every issue and reviewed every PR. Now there's so much issues and PRs coming in that we had to add an extra maintainer, feels great! Teamwork, fuck yeah!

Not every PR got merged of course, but every single one of them got reviewed. Just being a good and friendly developer, giving back to the community that has given me so much. Some tips for you maintainers out there. If you have a popular project and no time there's always someone else who's willing to spend time on it, ask around and you will surely find someone else.

IF LIVES DEPEND ON A SYSTEM

1. Code review, collaboration, and knowledge sharing (each hour of code review saves 33 hours of maintenance)

2. TDD (40% — 80% reduction in production bug density)

3. Daily continuous integration (large code merges are a major source of bugs)

4. Minimize developer interruptions (an interrupted task takes twice as long and contains twice as many defects)

5. Linting (catches many typo and undefined variable bugs that static types could catch, as well as a host of stylistic issues that correlate with bug creation, such as accidentally assigning when you meant to compare)

6. Reduce complexity & improve modularity  -- complex code is harder to understand, test, and maintain

-Eric Elliott

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

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

3 years, part time, $0.

I used to volunteer my time to an old text based rpg, handling code changes, sysadmin maintenance and the likes - back when those were a thing in the mid 2000's and money wasn't my issue in life - free for them, experience for me - win win!

Was something to get my hands dirty back in the day and contribute to an active community, but since then that place has shut down and been disbanded.

- AI/ML will be creeping into absolutely everything in some way, shape or form

- Developers of every shape, size, background and skillset will continue to be the most in-demand talent on the planet, likely leading to a huge bubble that's gonna fuck us eventually.

- JS will continue to dominate everything, NPM will probably encounter some form of MAJOR major outage that halts most of the globe's development + deployment processes, sparking the creation of another registry which will lead to the holy wars of the registries

- Web devs will continue to be stuck supporting IE8.

- Java will probably die out, maintenance halting completely unless you pay Oracle extortionate amounts of money, like single handedly paying every Oracle employee's salary extortionate.

- There'll probably be another big hype on the scale of Docker/k8s that you have to learn because you'll be unemployable without it

- The year is 2078 and WordPress still supports PHP 5.2, that fucking cockroach will outlive us all I swear

- Haters gonna hate

- React gonna react

- Angular gonna... Math?

I just love going through the code review gauntlet doing maintenance work, don’t you?

(“boyscout rule” = “leave it better than you found it”)

(overheard colleagues)
"hey, client x wants to speak to you, can I put them through?"

"what's it it about?"

*mumbles something*

"dafuq?! Oh well, put him through already 😑"

Me: hey, what did he want?

Colleague: they wanted help with setting up a page on their site with a maintenance message for when their site goes down.

Me: ah righ.... wait what? What's the function of a maintenance page on a site if the entire site is down?!

Colleague: yeah, that 🤣

Well, okay, then 😶

The Pirate Bay: Database maintenance, please check back in 10 minutes. 13

Me: [F5]

The Pirate Bay: Ok

I'm 28. When any dev, young or old, finds out that I know how to programme in COBOL, their reaction is one of either shock, sympathy or both. The next question is either "how" or "why".

The answer is the same and it's the reluctance of companies (especially in the US) to upgrade systems because it'll cost more money than maintenance in the short term and the longer they put it off, the more expensive an upgrade is.

It makes my resume stand out, for sure, but not in ways I like. Corporations with legacy systems salivate at my experience because it's uncommon for a young dev and the older ones are retiring. It doesn't matter if my main area of expertise is in mobile development and I'm applying for a job in that field, they immediately want me to consider COBOL.

If you've never had the displeasure of working in COBOL, consider yourself lucky that you work in a job that doesn't require you to maintain a legacy system. It is soul-crushing, absolutely sucks the life out of you, and will haunt you for years until you can safely exclude that company from your work experience.

Client (not for the first time): Your work sucks. I had to have this email formatting re-done before I sent it out.

Me: *sees that the email sent matches the work I did exactly with no changes*

Client (months later): I need you to do maintenance on my website.

Me: *does quick maintenance for free but sends update on status of work done and amount left in retainer agreement*

Client: You're too expensive! You started working with me for $X/hr, then you went up to $Y/hr and now you're all the way up to $Z/hr! You're not worth that!

Me: *fires client by refunding the remainder of retainer and sends client a list of local, cheaper providers*

Client: But now I don't have anyone to maintain my website until I find a new provider! Why have you done this to me? Waaaahhhhh!

Me (in the most professional language I can muster): Because you're a biotch and I'm tired of your verbal abuse. Maybe try not to be such a dbag to that next provider, mmm'kay?

Me when I get put on a legacy system maintenance project

Just wow. I am amazed by what just happened.

A year ago my parents decided to switch from desktop to laptop for convenience. Knowing their needs, i bought them one without an OS and installed Ubuntu 16.04 on it. The thing is that if you do a regular maintenance of the laptop once a year at their partner company, you get additional 4 years of warranty (this offer is amazing).

So today was the day I brought the laptop for this maintenance for the first time. They make you a profile on their support website where you can track shit regarding your device, super convenient. First thing I notice that the login page was not https. Awkward, but there is no sensitive data here so i let it pass. Naturally i forgot my password, so I requested a new one and guess what? I recieved it in plaintext via mail. A tech repair oriented company does this, my god.

I went there, gave them the laptop in question and got a piece of paper, where they wrote that the laptop is in their hands now, and the current physical state of the laptop, and blabla.

I got home and I read what the guy wrote among other things: THE OPERATING SYSTEM IS NOT LEGAL.

How the fuck is Ubuntu not legal??? What the fuck is this shit? I sure as hell didn't torrent it or bought a booteged copy on the streets.

The school I went to...

Grade 1:
*GTA and minecraft to let student familiarize with cheating command and console

*Student should find and read the damn documentation him/herself about items, mobs and quests in every game. Be self motivated!

Grade 2:
*Contribute to community for myth hunting, map creation and glitch

*Solve personal networking, graphics problem and understanding hardware limitation.

*Solving game compability problem after Windows update

*Introduction to cracking and hacking

Grade 3:
*Motivation to host a game server

*Custom server scripting => start To really code the first time, Perl, python, etc

*Introduction to Linux server and Debian

Grade 4:
*From DDoS to server security

*Server maintenance and GitHub

*Game Server web development

*Motivation into non-gaming discipline by a random YouTube geek

*Set up mincraft with raspberry pi and Arduino

*Switch to Linux or Mac and just dual boot for gaming

Prepared for the real world.
Congratz for the graduation in the Pre-school of Developers (11-14 yrs old) :)

Maintenance

Not me, but a colleague questioned himself for a while over this one. He simply forgot a semicolon when doing some server maintenance:

sudo yum remove application1 sudo yum remove application2

This didn't just remove application1 and 2, it removed sudo and yum too. One slightly embarrassing call to the ops team later, we had to replace the box.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should automate your server maintenance!

A: man Stack Overflow is a paradise on earth, anything I need is on there, it never lets me down.

"Stack Overflow is currently offline for maintenance"

A: ......PANIC

"Start at 4am" .. they said
"Nothing will go wrong" .. they said

WELL YOUR COFFEE MACHINE IS BROKEN AND THE MAINTENANCE GUYS GET HERE AT 7 😡

So ehm, tl;dr: KEEP DAILY BACKUPS. EVEN IF SOMEONE SAYS NOT TO.

7:48
Manager: Hey Tom, is the server down?
Me: Nah, should be ok, I just did some maintenance this sunday.
Manager: But I can't get [some work data from SQL server]
*Nervous giggle*

9:14: Some random off-site cunt they hired didn't read the notes that said "DO NOT REMOVE DATABASE [xyz]"
9:20-ish: Web don't even have the DB. And you said that we'll figure out what to do with backups later
*Suddenly manager starts to panic*
11:47: Found backup of the entire server on and old server that we had for spare parts, still running tho.
12:something: Everything back up and working.

Really glad I kept the old server running and doing daily backups. Saved our ass for the second time. And finally, new off-site backup is planned this week.

Most unprofessional experience at work?

<about an hour ago> Went into the bathroom to do the morning deuce and there was crap all over the back of the seat. WTF!? Did you miss!? In our part of the building its only devs and network admins, so again, dudes, WTF!?

Oh, and never spit your gum out in the urinal. Its not a new, fun target for you to shoot at. *Somebody* is going to have to pick that nasty thing out. Our maintenance guys have hard enough job than cleaning up after 'so called' professionals.

Some developers get over-excited about using dependency injection and make further maintenance a nightmare.

Jealousy is a pretty complicated emotion. It sometimes helps you to better yourselves and other times makes you quite unpredictable.

When I was a noob at my first job I refractored a senior dev's (let's call him Mr Cunt) codes down to a few lines. The boss was impressed. I didn't want to come off as a dick so I appreciated Mr Cunt for his work and also said that I learned several new things from his coding style.

Obviously, Mr Cunt grew jealous of me. Mind you, up until that point I had no problems at work whatsover. But soon they began.

One day the hardware guys swapped my LCD monitor with a CRT citing maintenance and repairs. I waited for 2 months for a new one to arrive and I was the only one working on a CRT in my division.

Then I faced an unusual delay in getting my paychecks for several months. Again, no one else had this problem except me.

I was moved between several divisions in the same month. Was given more tasks than I could handle. And was once yelled at for leaving my desk unattended for 5 minutes for a bathroom break.

I was being fucked with mercilessly in every which way. Even my peers started speculating that Mr Cunt had me by the balls.

Eventually, Mr Cunt burned me flat out. I lost my resilience and couldn't take it anymore. So I gave up and quit.

I am glad that I did.

Got a call last night at 2:37 am (Sunday morning) from an sap group that manages jobs informing me that some sap integration with our application was not working and I needed to look at it. At 4:00
Am I finally find out that all 47 sap production servers were undergoing maintenance and all jobs were disabled. So here was an sap group that had no idea all the servers they supported were being upgraded and I had to discover this for them. Took a lot of self control to remain professional and even keeled.

Special Awards: In a previous life, I employed a South African gentleman by the name of Jack Howell. He had a thing about finding other South African ex-pats, and could often be heard asking people on the phone “Are you by any chance from South Africa?”.

Jack Howell would also do very stupid things. Like forget to come to work. When asked, he’d come up with random excuses - “It was my wife Gwyneth’s fault”, or “I was confused, I took wrong turnings”. Generally, he was a bit of a twat, and had a weird kind of smile he’d give you.

After he left the company, we came up with the idea of having an award for whoever acted the most like Jack Howell on a given day, or week. It was known as The Jack Howell Award. The award itself was whatever shitty thing we could find at the time - a construction made of folded paper and paper clips, or a weird 3 inch statue from a charity shop, or whatever really naff-beyond-belief item we could find at the time.

Where I work now, we have a shitty 12 inch statue of a woman with a dog that turned up in our office, courtesy of our Maintenance Manager. This is the new Jack Howell award. Currently awarded to a senior dev colleague who spent a day chasing a missing variable.

So I looked at our dashboard and noticed a banner mentioning scheduled maintenance set for 7:00 AM. And I thought to myself, "I never released an update, and even if I had, the maintenance would be performed 15 minutes after the build finished, not at 7:00 AM." So I emailed my coworkers, asking if they had put up the banner, no, no. I started pulling my hair out trying to figure out what caused this banner to be created. Was there some old job that was just now running? I combed through the server logs, thousands of entries later, and I found the banner was installed by some user with the IP 172.18.0.1...which was the local machine. I went through all the users on the system, running atq to see if anyone had jobs scheduled. And there was one job scheduled, under the root user. At that moment, I legit thought to myself, "have we been hacked? How is that possible?" It's wasn't! Then I looked under /var/spool/atjobs to see what the job actually was. And then I saw it. My weekly updater cron job had installed updates and had scheduled a maintenance window to reboot the system. And I smiled, realizing that my code was now sentient.

Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.

I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.

(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)

But onto the story:

Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).

I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.

However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.

But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.

That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.

Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.

But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.

Ugh.

`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`

When you are doing maintenance on a website and you think its good to upload but then you realize you fucked up so you just quickly revert the changes and upload it again after fixing haha

I 'work' at a Minecraft server btw.

So here I am, 12 o clock, chatting with my friends, nothing weird here.

An employee of our hosting company sends me a message, because he knows we are hosting there. He asks us if we have changed our DNS for the server move. I was scared for a second, and asked 'what server move?'

He tells me that our server will be moved to "a better performing node". He told me that all server owners were alerted over email.

So here I am, 12:30 at night fixing my DNS settings and hoping that everything goes all right.

Damn, I hate it when people don't property communicate their maintenance dates with the rest of the team, does anyone relate?

Stackoverflow is down for maintenance. All devs over the world are going crazy

# 3 weeks ago
customer informed us that the app will get quite some load since the beginning of July

# this monday
last spare hdd on database's SAN died.
I told everyone another hdd is to follow it very soon eithet whether nothing is done at all or if anyone attempts to touch the san array [cuz that's what redundant raids do...]. No fucks given by anyone, no attempts to have maintenance and planned outage within 24 hrs....

# this morning
another hdd has failed and now 1tb of data is lost. No way to restore backups cuz there is no database to restore them to....

# 20 minutes later I head out to get some popcorn. It's gonna be a fun week!

So... The planned heavy load [and revenue along with it] is not gonna happen... I guess they are gonna ha a week long outage.

That's what happens when you ignore warning shots fired at your face.

I've been an IT Director for a medium sized company for 11 years...
2 years ago we decided to custom develop an app for online ordering through a third party... This company quoted $36k, I told the team that I think it will be $100k and here is a solution that will do 90% of the needs for $50 a month per location... boss says he doesn't care if it's 200k he wants 100% of what we want and the ability to change it to perfectly fit our needs.... FFW to present... $36k app built by committee of 8 people.. = $400k... and counting for maintenance and adjustments. We now use that $50 a month solution as well to cover another need that would be too costly to code into the original app SMH... and now myself and my team are learning to code to support it internally because.... why would you just hire a qualified person... anyhow, I'm a few months into a self paced online bootcamp and loving it. So ... bright side found! Rant over

Le me: "my code is awesome! The way I did XY and Z is insanely cool, efficient, and maintainable."

Le Boss: "yeah so let's schedule a code review next week."

Le me : "... fuck, Fuck, FUUUUCK!"

Internal Screaming

You guys get promotions?!

I’ve had to quit and find another job for every title and pay bump I’ve ever received... but I’m at a place now where I’m actually learning a ton of shit, my salary is damn decent (compared to all my previous jobs), and I’m having a blast diving in and working on actual projects vs boring as fuck maintenance / helpdesk type work.

When your birthday falls on the wrong day this year...

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

*looks for jobs in system administration*

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

Fuck that company.

*looks further*

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

Fuck that company too.

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

Sat on the street in the rain doing server maintenance over VPN, using WiFi leeched from the Albert Heijn (supermarket).

Clients are SUCH FUCKFACES!
So me and 3 friends developed a website and logo for an hr company, run by this woman and she loved it
She was our client for GOMC. Now, since it was a "project" she assumed she didn't had to pay for the whole thing....fine I agreed to just getting maintenance, to maintain goodwill and getting some more clients maybe

One day she wakes up and wants half of the shit altered....NOW, after almost over a month..Fucking bitch
She now wants a fucking RAINBOW colored logo...And she added "it must look professional OK?"...The fuck? Now we have to change the cards, letterheads, UI (entirely). Basically everything and doesn't wanna pay for shit
FML

MAINTENANCE OF STACKOVERFLOW PLANNED
SHARE TO YOUR NEAREST DEV FRIENDS

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

Client had our company build them a site, they refused our hosting suggestions, and did not want any maintenance on their site.

They eventually left us as a client all together(they were getting other services so they occasionally got an edit or two) and sent several rude emails to delete their passwords so we wouldn't have access to their stuff anymore. I gladly gave the site over to the new company with a solid "good luck." I wanted nothing to do with this client anymore anyway.

Now I'm 9 months down the line and my AM sends me an email that the client wants maintenance. I'm already typing up a ranting email to tell them no, when I decide to check the site. There are WordPress php errors all over the site.

Idk what this other company did, but I want nothing to do with cleaning up someone else's screwups. If I were freelance, this would be a HUGE up charge.

Every time I ask my friends for help:

For Fuck's sake never name your variables $a $b or $c. What the fuck I thought that's like the first thing they teach in whichever bush you learnt how to code at!!!!!!

In my first summer at my internship I was fixing up a PHP script that a previous developer wrote... It collected our customer's emails and sent them to MailChimp for marketing.

The SQL query to get the emails was pretty standard, but what he did next was not.

There were for loops nested 3 deep. The outer loop's counter was i. The inner was ii. And the deepest was iii. That alone made it hard to read, but for a couple years some iii's and ii's were mixed up when getting values for arrays. So it was even harder to tell what it was supposed to do.

The inner loop also started at i-20. This was so he could look through and see if an email was already included from that query and skip it. But he didn't check the bounds, so the first 20 times through the outer loop, the inner loop would throw `undefined index -20` errors.

In order to fix all this I did an order by on the query, and kept a last email variable that I used for comparison. Pretty basic. This also lowered it to just one loop.

I talk about it on a regular basis with my coworkers and we all laugh about it. I also bring it up when upper management thinks they can code, because that ex developer is now an executive.

So, I found this :

Dear Tech Support:
Last year I upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0. I soon noticed that the new program began unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and resources. In addition, Wife 1.0 installed itself into all other programs and now monitors all other system activity. Applications such as Poker Night 10.3, Football 5.0, HuntingAndFishing 7.5, and Racing 3.6. I can't seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background while attempting to run my favorite applications. I'm thinking about going back to Girlfriend 7.0, but the uninstall doesn't work on Wife 1.0. Please help!

Thanks ...Troubled User
-------
REPLY:

Dear Troubled User:
This is a very common problem. Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0, thinking that it is just a Utilities and Entertainment program. Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and is designed by its Creator to run EVERYTHING!!! It is also impossible to delete Wife 1.0 and to return to Girlfriend 7.0. It is impossible to uninstall, or purge the program files from the system once installed. You cannot go back to Girlfriend 7.0 because Wife 1.0 is designed not to allow this. Look in your Wife 1.0 manual under Warnings-Alimony-Child Support. I recommend that you keep Wife 1.0 installed and work on improving the configuration. I suggest installing the background application YesDear 99.0 to alleviate software augmentation.

The best course of action is to enter the command C:\APOLOGIZE because ultimately you will have to do this before the system will return to normal anyway.

Wife 1.0 is a great program, but it tends to be very high maintenance. Wife 1.0 comes with several support programs, such as CleanAndSweep 3.0, CookIt 1.5 and DoBills 4.2. However, be very careful how you use these programs. Improper use will cause the system to launch the program NagNag 9.5. Once this happens, the only way to improve the performance of Wife 1.0 is to purchase additional software. I recommend Flowers 2.1 and Diamonds 5.0, but beware because sometimes these applications can be expensive.

WARNING!!! DO NOT, under any circumstances, install SecretaryWithShortSkirt 3.3. This application is not supported by Wife 1.0 and will cause irreversible damage to the operating system. 

WARNING!!! Attempting to install NewGirlFriend 8.8 along with Wife 1.0 will crash the system.

(see Wife 1.0 manual, Apologize, High Maintenance & Secretary with Short Skirt)

We use the best source control software, it allows build and deploy like no other, are you familiar with Visual Source Safe?

I don't know what's worse... That I'm old enough to know what that is; that I know how to use it; the question; or the fact that the maintenance of it stopped 12 years ago...

Stackoverflow down for maintenance ⛑

I guess I'm screwed then

😂😂😭😭😭🙏🙏🙏😏😏😏😉😉😜

The best way to write maintainable code is to imagine the next person who has to debug your code. Then imagine that they have your phone number, personal address, and your daily schedule.

You fucking piece of crap of an idiotic client. What the fuck do you need to know more than “job will start upon signing the quote”? A fucking bouquet of flowers? And now you need a meeting to “improve communication between you and us”. Read the fucking emails, I’m not your fucking employee. “Why should we wait that we approve the ticket or whatever to get the job done?” BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE A FUCKING MAINTENANCE CONTRACT. I am not your buddy and I don’t fucking do favours. You want the job done? Either you accept the quote, or you accept the ticket request, or you subscribe to a fucking prepaid or flat maintenance contract. It’s simple as that you fucking elephant broken Asshole.

Fuck you and your fucking meeting requests.

I hate people who don't value transparent and assertive communication. I'm saying this thinking about an specific client.

This client is a boss of Web agency, and has some contractors working on their projects. I worked for them for a year, doing Web projects from scratch and also maintenance.

Then, one week, the communication stopped. No answers, no feedback, nothing. For months. They ghosted me.

I tried contact a few times with no luck. After 3 months, they started to remove me from slack, git, base camp.

And that's it. I was discarded and it seems I don't even deserved a message to be aware of that.

I don't mind to end business relationship anytime, for any reason. There are lot of reasons a working relationship would not work, and that's OK. We should have partners that are a great fit for us.

But at least say it. Ghosting is something ridiculous and unethical.

Here's to clients who wish to pay "per project" instead of "per month". Man, fuck that.

Back when I was still a novice, I took on a couple of small time projects from clients who contacted me after looking at my GitHub, and they all wanted to pay me a lump-sum for the project. Because I'm an idiot, I thought sure, what difference would that make. Boy was I wrong.

What followed was me finishing the projects well before time but because of the clients' constant reiterations and changes in design and nitpicking every decision I made while creating the websites for them, the projects dragged on for weeks longer than they were originally intended. And I fucking got paid that one-time amount in the beginning. All this maintenance, for free. Even though I had not explicitly agreed to the maintenance part, since they never finalized the specifications of the project, it just never got "done" officially, and all the maintenance part just came under development.

How many different kinds of disgusting does someone have to be to do this? I should've fucking said NO to those terms, but I had to have experience. Well, nice experience that was. Never again. :(

So my host of choice decided to migrate an old site to a new set of IPs without warning yesterday, down side to a VPS I guess.

Now this wouldn’t be an issue if it wasn’t on a dedicated IP you wankers.

DNS won’t resolve to new location yet and Virtual hosts contained the old IPs and for some fuck of a reason the httpd file is auto generated 😡so updating it will be lost on reboot.

Like What the flying fuck you imbeciles, this site has been up and running for 5+ years on this IP.
I barely do any maintenance for t as it’s just an old horse sitting on the web but fuck you don’t need to fuck with it or atleast give some fucking warning before you go drop it offline 😡

Well, sure ... This might be a way of dealing with DNS issues ... for some people.

Jackasses who insist on using techs like windows, Java, c#. Liabilities. Were it my decision they would have been fired for even suggesting it. Every team I ever was a part of that chose one of these techs for the convenience and time savings ended up paying dearly for that decision in wasted time and having to re-engineer the entire system around the limitations of these shit platforms. Even unity has basically made it so that your c# code is compiled into c++ and then compiled native because c# is just that shitty to deal with. Mainly stems from how awful it is to do the maintenance upkeep on upgrading .net versions; they were still on 3.5 until recently!! Wake up ppl. If you think the advantages of this shit outweights it's terribleness you are living in a dream world.

Client : I am unable to download data from your sever for last 10 days.

Me : Sir, we are sorry to hear that. We are doing some maintenances on our server from this morning today. We request you to call back us in next 4 hours.

Client : But i am facing this problem for last 10 days.

Me: Sir, i heard you. As maintenance is going on it will not be possible to download data this time.

Client: From when this maintenance is going on?

Me: from this morning sir.

Client : but i am facing this probolem for last 10 days.

Me: Sir, you are not understanding it, or may be i am failing to describe the situation to you...

Client: Listen, you guys are incapable. Only knows to make excuse.

Me: Sir..

Client: Sorry to say, i am not Happy with your support. Let me talk to your senior tech guy.

Me : Sir, your problem will be solved in next 4 hours. We will call you as soon as our server went online.

Client: *.....*

It took me 20 minutes to finally make him understand the situation.

Client: Why did not you said that earlier? You guys will have all the time but i do not. Anyway.

He hangs the phone.

My ears are burning man...

After a month of testing and maintenance then on the day of presentation the program crashes!

Unpopular opinion: Fuck laptops

Even with proper care and monthly maintenance, they're still loud as a vacuum cleaner, and hot as a fucking stove. Yes I know it's a bit hotter these days and maybe mine isn't the latest top of the line model, but even my gf's Inspirion 17R (old I know, but she got one unused) tho relatively quiet, heats up as all hell even when it's on a cooling pad as soon as you try to do anything on it.
Maybe I'm alone on this, but I just think that when it comes to laptops, it's go big or go home. My Desktop PC is a relic of the past, but it still purrs like a fucking kitten, even under heavy loads in this weather

What do you use for resume (CV) and why?

Word (gdocs or libre)
LaTeX
Markdown
Jsonresume schema
Something else?

Also how does that work form a maintenance standpoint?

Hololens development forced me into Visual Studio after spending years doing Unity development with MonoDevelop in MacOS.

Why haven't anyone told me to switch sooner! Thanks to Visual Studio + ReSharper, my brain farts turn into a coherent code almost automatically.

I hate that I need MacOS for the iOS development and Win 10 for Hololens. Running Win 10 on Parallels kinda works, but it is a compromise. Developing without headphones/earplugs is out of the question if you don't want to go deaf.

I wan't all the tools for a single OS so I don't have to maintain multiple computers and even more importantly travel with multiple laptops. Just love the security check question "Do you have any electronics with you? Please put it into the container." - "Could I get a couple more containers, please..."

I visit my mom once a year, and usually perform preventative maintenance on her computer. Scrubbing it for viruses, applying updates for drivers, etc. On one such occasion in the early days, she complained that the PC was slow, and would quit. I opened it up, and there was a 1/4 inch layer of dust everywhere, and any and all vents were completely blocked, to the point that fans weren't turning. I blew that crap out, and from that point on became her IT guy.

I got the task to set up an NAS, because "server has too high maintenance costs".
I built two databases for this company and the big boss loved my work. (spoiler:not because my work was outstanding but because I, as a student, am cheap and willing to learn).
And now? Reality hit me for good. I looked for a enterprise worthy NAS solution, sent them the details, they bought it and now it's 00:00 in Germany and I'm sitting in the empty hall, trying to configure the storage to work like they want it. On a friday. Alone. As the only member of the IT-team. With way to much responsibility.

So... Yea, fuck you for good. I hope your backup gets an disk error at the same moment i quit. (but first gimme mah monney)

In a maintenance project where you joined later!

So, I was in the middle of a rant about how disorganized maintenance is this weekend, but husband said he might have to go to the ER for a headache that got worse after he passed out in formation and no one caught him.

Suddenly, I don't give a fuck about work. I want to be on a plane to him to be there in case the ibuprofen doesn't work and it's more serious than he thinks. He's less than a week from graduation. I just need him to come home so I can take care of him.

git branch maintenance.

Because certain people like to push to master.

how does devRant make any kind of profit? I mean it's free, they have swag giveaways, server cost and maintenance, development, etc...??

Bad thing: I spilled booze on my fabrics yet again. I probably shouldn't drink from the couch or the bed anymore.
Good thing: I found out how to disassemble my tablet and removed its cameras.
Bad thing: front cam couldn't be removed without damaging some traces for a coax connection.
Bad thing: during disassembly I noticed significant amounts of corporate "fuck you" and certified enganeering. Like allowing the rubber back plates of the tablet to come off, but not get back on without percussive maintenance!!! FUCKING CERTIFIED PIECES OF SHIT!!!
Good thing: even after a lot of Tappy-tap-tap, the tablet still works without a problem. Hopefully I can now save some others from the shitstains by posting about it on the XDA thread 🤔

Overall verdict: FUCK!!!

*The Fearless Leader*

I get a call to check up on a robot that has been exceeding weight limits at certain points of its movement (Crashing). As I get to the pendant (robo-game controller thingy I like to call it) and look over the alerts and warnings I notice some oil around the main power box of the Robot.... Nothing around this has oil.. so I start looking around and it turns out that the issue wasn’t a crash at all! It was an oily shorted out wire that kept sparking mad heavy when that servo was called on.. causing a large servo failure that required a full restart of the power box. I called our fearless leader and showed him only to find out that there was a motor leaking oil from the electrical end... My fearless leader runs both the Maintenance and Robotics department. When the motor was eventually fixed we overheard the technicians say that our fearless leader knew about this a week ago and decided to leave it that way.... with oil... coming out of an electrical cable..... *sigh* well Anyway after all the wires were fixed and motors changed. He comes up to me and says that he can’t believe that I didn’t call maintenance and fill a report on negligence of technicians for failing preventative maintenance....

I lost my cool a little, firstly that’s not my job, I’m literally one of the lowest ranking here. I called my next in command to figure out what I should do. Secondly the technicians told me that you told them to leave it like that! So if this place caught on fire this would have been on you!

Later I found out that he was trying to fire a technician and wanted me to do the dirty work.. I’m not going to be the reason another man loses the means for him to feed his family. The technician is a pretty cool and fair guy too!

Our fearless leader was a forklift driver and has no experience in robotics or maintenance... I don’t know how this happens or even why but all I know is this man is running both departments to the ground and management loves him.....

"We shall be doing maintenance on Friday 13th at 20:00 hours on our core routers"
I dont know if your insane or what. Dont think it helps that the ticket this created has 666 in its id....

How did y'all survive when devRant was down for maintenance?

I personally played Fifa 17 on my ps4 then quit in the middle of a game when I saw that devrant was back online. :D

My windows laptop was having performance issues since last few days.
LAPTOP MAINTENANCE MODE ACTIVATED!
So scanned my whole system with an anti-virus, cleared unwanted data with Ccleaner, quick defragged the C drive, did system restore etc etc, still no luck.
Today I found out the reason: someone had turned the 'Power Options' to 'Power Saver'.

Pretty fucking sure it’s Monday... Critical Server KO’ed during hours... Going to be a long day....

Sucks not having the funds to implement preventative maintenance and redundancy... Thank god for fucking backups.

To the Level C’s in our company.... take this as a wake up call you incompetent, undereducated, no dick-having-ass’, spitfucks!

(the meeting)

I've had a non-IT world colleague ask me to build a website, I asked if it's a static website like resume etc with no database & stuff. I quoted $1000 if that's the case since that's minimal maintenance
He goes he needs a simple website, like eBay to sell his products. Also need features like Amazon, integration of various payments. And this and that.

For $1000 !!

I felt good that he thinks I can make an e-commerce site but f¢k that thinking man.. I told him to hire a freelancer and told him about few sites.

Maybe we'll see a thousand dollar e-commerce site, haha I only hope the payments part is secure 😂😂 I ain't buying anything anyways. I'm 99 % sure nobody's gonna do it and next time we talk, he's gonna be like 1000 and a 50 haha

Some fun facts :

☻ Programmers spend approximately 30% of the time surfing the source code 😁

☻ Progress in programming can be classified into 4 stages:
(a). Complex Programming
(b). Making Progress
(c). Slow Progress
(d). Stuck

☻ Programmers have a tendency to report their problems incompletely

☻ The main error messages, execution times and runtime compilation errors and the average time to solve them

☻ The software maintenance consumes more than 50% of the effort

☻ Ctrl C, Ctrl V, and Ctrl-Z have saved more lives than Batman tbh😇

No. No. No.

We are NOT rewriting the software from scratch.
Why are people so keen on rewriting? Have they no experience??

Maintenance? Holy FUCK NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I got in trouble for refactoring code to be modular. They said “thats too complicated the maintenance team”.

Said coworker produced a kludge of copy pasted code so the dumb ass maintenance team could understand it.

tldr; interfaces and abstract classes are too advanced for our employees so make the codebase shitty on purpose.

Damn maintenance windows. I mean, I get that the SaaS product my boyfriend works on can't go out in the middle of the day. But he just spent weeks on a business trip, with an absolutely mad sleep schedule because he's redesigning their data center (or something. Don't ask me, it's a hardware problem...) and now he's finally coming home today and I'm super excited but all he's going to want to do this weekend is sleep. Even though I'd love to spend Sunday going to this yearly event, or finally getting another round of DnD in (everyone else in the group is available). But nope. Bloody all-hours work is taking away his (and thus my) weekend too.

Self printed stickers (I know, they look kinda horrible) + devRant sticker, my Thinkpad needs maintenance

A few weeks ago a client came to us asking for edits on their site. They had a developer in their office but they fired him a few days prior. After some looking at the piece of garbage they called a website I told my supervisors that it was built in Adobe Muse and from what I could find in a few quick searches it's shit and I didn't want to learn to use a shit tool. Apparently as a company we decided to hire a freelancer to handle this despite the fact that we didn't build the site and the client isn't paying for maintenance so I'm not sure why it's our fault.

Fast forward to today:
I've been in the office for 19 hours straight trying to learn how to use Muse and fix the client's site because somehow the freelancer managed to delete the mobile version of the site. When I ask my supervisors why I'm fixing and supporting a site we didn't build and don't have experience working in and the response is: we're presenting the client with a $50k proposal and we need all the good graces we can get.

Unless I'm gonna see some of the commission it doesn't really matter what we charge for the site, I make the same whether it's a free site or a $100k site.

Fuck ISPs, i cant think of any other kind og business where its "accepted" to ass fucking their customers as normal service.

How fucking convincing to do a fucking maintenance in the middle of day (of cause only in my city) probably due to another fuck up from their side.

Dont get me startede og stupid most of their frist line supporters are, like fucking children who are able to read at decent level could do the same kind of job.

The slogans of danish ISPs are apprently (expensive and shitty).

So devrant is going down for scheduled db maintenance... Guess they want to make a backup so they don't pull a "GitLab"

Has anyone who's running a start-up had to deal with email happy clients?

I just watched a thread of 14 emails be generated for sending a maintenance contract which was already agreed upon.

Most of the emails are "thanks for the reply........."
To which some one will reply " thanks for the reply.........

TFW when one of your side projects that you couldn't get approval for 1 additional resource magically creates work for 11 IBM GS assholes. Isn't application maintenance supposed to reduce headcount?

Fuck em.

🦄🔫

The WTF moment when I realized that the main production DB server was configured with **dynamic** private IP. After maintenance upgrade and reboot the rest of environment stopped. When I explained to sys admin what caused the production breakdown hi still did not get that :/

Nothing sucks worse than being mid jerk off and trying to switch the video, only to find out Pornhub went down for maintenance.

Thank God the hurricane motivated me to stockpile some downloads 😂😂

Hey Spectrum! It'd be pretty wicked if you could email me or shoot me a text the next time you decide to do maintenance that will result in service outages!

It's not that hard to shoot a text that says "Hey Stuxnet! We gonna be doing some maintenance, so ya internet's probably gonna be down for a bit. We'll get that shit up and running asap tho my man."

At my balmer's peak and have nothing to work on... what am I supposed to do right now?

A nullable boolean in production 😕😯😤

Best thing about doing Wifi setup/network maintenance for the local coffee shop for free? Putting my laptop's MAC address into the QOS table and guaranteeing myself bandwidth.

Dear Comcast, why in the flying fuck is it necessary for you to bring down the entire network for five hours to do "routine maintenance." There's nothing routine about that.

#usr/bin/rant

I'm working on this super fun project in which we can combine the newest technologies, and some not so new but fun to use, we are doing it with docker, ASP.Net core, Angular2, and suddenly the system maintenance guy from the client sends us an email like:

- Just wondering which content management system are you going to use currently we are using WordPress, Orange and Django which ease a lot adding new features and sections

So the PM and me are frustrated and scared that we are going to be forced to use something awful just to please this guy.

The Fibonacci sequence also known as he fingerprint of God is the most efficient memory maintenance method in computing as well
#weirdcode

Why not ask me before going to eat all , {{you}} b*tch
you='Dell auto maintenance'

So today, me, the pacifistic "linux is not THAT great"-guy, was like well let's try ubuntu 17.10 (cus in the end i want a reliable os with no to less maintenance).

So i installed it next to my loved windows.

Clicking a link seems to have an hard coded delay of about 3-5 seconds until the pages actually start loading in ff on linux, so i was like maybe it's because there is a wall between me and my router..

Went into the other room.

I have one bar WLAN strength. I stand next to my router. What the fuck.

Hmm, could be sth else, let's don't be an asshole and blame linux, let's check windows. Full wlan, full speed, all good.

So my point is proven: you want to fiddle around a bit, do some coding with serial-connected devices, want a shell that actually is usable and you like to procrastinate by doing some random maintenance? choose linux.

If you need to be productive with other things, use windows.

I've had a client for 3 months now and they still haven't paid ($100 just for the site) and are surprised at the monthly cost (they wanted site hosting and maintenance which comes out to $75/month) and I want to fire them without burning bridges since the main person is a friend.

My love of programming has given me a very analytical mind. I find myself being able to learn different things fairly quickly by thinking about the processes involved in getting from point A to point B and breaking down the steps into the smallest logical units.

This is why I find myself being a cycle repair tech on the side. I cycle, so therefore I had to determine not only how my bike operates, but why everything is designed just so and therefore how to diagnose and repair faults efficiently using the right tools or by using the wrong tools very creatively as a workaround.

Everything in life is just code in a different language

My smartphone's fingerprint reader just stopped working, after EXACTLY 36 months of usage.

I always took care of this device to make it last, as I'm worried about resources consumption and what the production chain involves (like having working children in African mines).

I'll try to keep using it as long as possible, but I can't stop thinking that this problem shouldn't be always on us, the consumers, suffering defective devices designed to last only for two years.

We should put more pressure on producers to reduce electronic waste, and to invest more on the maintenance & repairing sectors (which are almost non-existent).

That's all folks.

A colleague just hit his computer with a C++ textbook and shouted a verse that easily would have been bleeped out on TV. All this because he could not log into Windows.
Microsoft need not worry, they seem to have fixed any loophole for such bruteforce login attempts ;-)

I feel really bad for the guy I'm currently working with. I have until roughly the end of August to upskill him in every aspect of 3 different iOS apps because once I move to a new project he will be the entire maintenance team for those apps. Feel like he is getting shafted so badly. The whole process has been poorly managed. The managers don't care how well I train him as long as it doesn't take too many man-days. And they are expecting that they can still pull me back in to help if he gets stuck even after I've moved. Starting to feel like I'm being taken for granted. Can't wait to get off this horrible project.

Boss: we need to standardize the CMS we use.

Me: well 90% of what we build are custom Wordpress deployments...

Boss: yeah but Wordpress is best suited for all our clients.

Me: well yeah, I know...we could use Django or Rails and give the clients more customized solutions...

Boss: yeah but not all of our developers know those frameworks, and they require maintenance...

Me: -_- we could really use Jekyll for most sites we build

Boss: yeah, but what about our clients that want a blog?

Me: ...we can build a blog with anything...

Boss: ...we just need to standardize what we use.

I have started using the input lockout when supporting colleagues.

The phrase "don't touch anything" must be code for "close all my windows"

Last one actually rebooted her machine in the middle of a (manager requested) intervention...

I got some very strange looks in the office to my "good afternoon, I'm calling to inform you that you will need to speak to HR to reinstate your credentials as I have accidentally marked you as a leaver while doing some database maintenance, I'll transfer you now, please hold" phone call, especially as we don't actually have access to do that lol

I put her on hold to myself while I finished then advised that "I'm sorry HR are busy, but I've managed to undo the mistake anyway, my apologies"

Kept her away from the machine so it was lawful evil right?

BANE OF MY FUCKING EXISTENCE. STOP POLLUTING MY PRODUCTION CODE WITH TEST CODE, YOU FUCKING CRETINS.

During my 1st internship (IT support for a big office + maintenance of their server) there was a guy that was refusing to read email from his monitor, he had to print them out and then read... We were so pissed off because he was wasting so much paper and toner.

Maintenance

Good thing the maintenance is at night here, so I won't miss out on scrolling rants :)
Don't do the GitLab and do changes on the wrong db cluster :P

Keeping myself from getting bored af at work. I am a backend engineer doing mostly frontend. And right now it ain't even the interesting stuff. I am merely passing photoshop files to static displays.

Kill me. Every once in a while I do maintenance on Java and PHP apps, but still...bored.....more Rails or Django please

Our employee management system, for some reason, stored Testlists (I work in QA) linked to the user accounts that created them. Now after an colleague who worked there for five years left pretty much all our data was suddenly down the drain and nobody backed the fricking server up because, hey, whats the fun in that. Now all the tests need to be rewritten and other than the whole gui test automation of our product, maintenance of the same for another product, manually testing dev issues and training my new code monkeys to frickin not commit non working code to the trunk I have now also "Make a better Employee management system" (roughly translated those are the specs I've got) on my plate... I can remember back to the care free days of just before my boss asked me if I wanted to try to automate some of the test cases... How did I ever survive this paralyzing tranquility. Ha, surprise.
!rant, I fucking love the stress and juggling a shit ton of problems at the same time keeps ine on edge.

the first most annoying thing in devrant are new users

the second most annoying thing is "new comments on a rant you commented on" notifications. They require maintenance work, and I can't even mute threads on desktop

First time in many years i just came across the maintenance page on stackoverflow.

I suspected that our storage appliances were prematurely pulling disks out of their pools because of heavy I/O from triggered maintenance we've been asked to automate. So I built an application that pulls entries from the event consoles in each site, from queries it makes to their APIs. It then correlates various kinds of data, reformats them for general consumption, and produces a CSV.

From this point, I am completely useless. I was able to make some graphs with gnumeric, libre calc, and (after scraping out all the identifying info) Google sheets, but the sad truth is that I'm just really bad at desktop office document apps. I wound up just sending the CSV to my boss so he can make it pretty.

You know what's fucking horrible?

Implementing new features to an Android app in production that another dev wrote...

...which has no architecture, no documentation, no modularity, no testability, everything runs on the UI thread, filled with spaghetti code and it somehow works smoothely so I have to not fuck it up.

Oh and I'm also a junior. So fuck me, right?

90% of developer effort is maintenance, not making new things.

StackOverflow down for maintenance.

I was happily folowing a tutorial earlier on setting up an email server but the site got taken down for maintenance just as I reached the last step...

IT'S BEEN 6 HOURS NOW AND IT'S STILL NOT BACK UP.

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING AND I'M GOING TO BREAK SOMETHING AND BE SAD.

So for the past 3 weeks I have been reporting that the development on X tickets has been completed and are deployed for testing.

Testers, fuck it we are not testing.
BA: yeah ok.

So nobody is testing.

And this Friday evening BA panics, starts emailing everybody, we need those items tested blah blah..

Now he is calling the testers over the weekend for testing 😂

And adds few more changes to requirements. (WTF)

Says:- He will also be testing over the weekend.

IT team :- Systems won't be working due scheduled maintenance. 😂😂 In your face BA

IT people best timing ever🤘

Hope he learns some prioritizing.

I fucking swear the power goes out in my small ass town once a week. Every fucking time it knocks my servers offline. I’m about to sue the fucking power company. This is fucking ridiculous.

Yes they are on UPS, they were also on backup power until the fucking maintenance guys decided “on they don’t need on the generator...” you fucking cunt!

Don't forget to drink and eat something!

Life in maintenance. Cuz it went overflow

What was supposed to be an inoffensive shutdown during the weekend for maintenance became a nightmare today. The storage went to the space thanks to a system admin who was supposed to know what is doing. Since there is no power button I just pulled the power cord, he said.

O well, there go my plans for this evening

Lol 2 hrs deep in procastination, and the boys over at devRant decided to save my soul 😁

I have an idea and I want some feedback.

I'm the only web developer and I've been updating our systems so they can be maintainable. Previously we have used Wordpress for landing pages which is complete overkill So here's the idea:

Static sites for landing pages and any forms that would need to filled out would be on a separate site.

Ok so here me out. First the landing pages barely need any maintenance so using pure HTML/CSS/JS wouldn't be a problem. This means I can strip away all of the crap from Wordpress and make the load times faster. Second all of the landing pages forms would be hosted in a single place making analytics easier for the reporting system.

Really I just despise Wordpress and am trying any practical reason to not use it as much as possible. Oh and don't worry I'll use preprocessors and minify the production files.

dont worry

Midnight sever deploys and maintenance might kind of suck to do, but it is probably the closest we will get to going on a top secret mission!

Wake up in the morning and my girlfriend told me I have been mumbling about bugs all night. God, I need new projects, so tired of maintenance work

To leave 9/5 behind and successfully launch my own thing. By design it should require minimal maintenance so I should be good to spend my time however I feel fit. Get my fam and close relatives involved as well.

Move out of that tiny apartment into a large house outside the city where my kids could grow their imagination, have nearly unlimited space to plat at safely, where I would no longer feel squeezed in tightly.

I'm the donkey and that's my carrot hanging in front of me

So I asked this question yesterday to linuxxx and he had some great tips. But I thought there might be some Linux fanatics here who also have some experience working with vps's that you might have somethings to add something 😁

Recently I got asked if I want to help maintain our webservers (they all run Ubuntu 18.04 with standard webserver stuff, nginx, MySQL, php, ssh)

Does anyone know of some tips or share some helpful knowledge regarding maintaining a VPS? / Keeping it healty?

When you work with other developers who would, for any feature, small or large, plop in a new library or framework of which they will utilize 1% of... I'm talking about things that we could develop in house in less than a day and have significantly less code bloat... and when you tell them this they smile, nod, and say yeah gotchu, and continue on... AND YOU HAVE TO MAINTAIN THE DAMN THING.

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

I swear my co worker said we were meeting at the data center at 10pm all week! I call him and he says 10:30. Wtf?!!! Well guess I got some time to read more rants.

The railway service in Sydney is called CityRail.

Fuck CityRail!

It's so unreliable that service disruption is to be expected when the weather is too hot, too cold, too wet, or too dry. If it rains, some services will be cancelled while the rest face delays.

Fuck CityRail!

The rail network is so dilapidated it costs the government millions of dollars each year for maintenance, despite charging a fare that is one of the most expensive.

Fuck CityRail!

Now I'm typing this because I've be stuck on this train for the last hour and there little hope for me to reach home before fucking MIDNIGHT!

FUCK CITYRAIL!

They initially offered replacement service but later retracted.

Fuck CityRail!

Guess what. I will be on devRant in few minutes.

Reddit maintenance.

Time to go home...

#patchfriday

Last time I spend my night at the DC and doing maintenance, I am going to miss this.

Create a copy of a huge method, I mean a complete fucking copy of a huge method, to change one small piece just because the behavior needs to be different in his specific case. Then, when the method is called, put an "if is my case, call my fucking copy".

Maintenance? What's that?

After I took some time off from work, I decided to accept the offer for maintenance of two projects. Those are from two old clients, so I think I will not stress too much, since I know what to expect most of the time.

The issue is, sometimes I have a hard time to keep concentration. In the past, I could work for 3h straight, totally focused, would pause for 20min for stretch, and then come back to work. Now I can only focus for 30min or 1h, and after a pause, it's hard to concentrate again.

There is a lot going on in my life right now, and I know the worry is probably distracting me. I'm trying to listen instrumental music, drinking coffee... But that's not enough. Somebody has any tip?

I was doing some maintenance on a production server for a game hosting company (Minecraft hosting, for those interested). A week before, I had created a backup of an account directory before trying to solve an issue, I now wanted to remove this directory.

Since I am way too confident in my ability to not mess up, I was logged in as root.

Instead of typing `rm -rf ../` (I know using -f is a bad idea), I typed `rm -rf /`.

The distro we were using did not have any protections built in.

The directory I wanted to remove as gone, but so was the rest of the server once I realized what I had done.

Being in a university that has an eSports Academy is less exciting when you're part of the team maintaining it weekly... Well, at least the part where we had to set up a local cache server with docker & nginx was fun

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

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

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

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

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

Stackoverflow(ed)!!

Lucky to see this today.
Must say, the very next page refresh the site was up.

Don't know if it was really a maintenance or just an alternative message in some cases.

Had this been continued for some more time then many tasks' dev completion dates would have got affected. 😬

Here it goes,

So there I was a Linux enthusiast stuck in a windows job for about 3 years. I would spend my weekends doing Linux related tasks for my personal amusement, while I spent my week doing windows maintenance and development (partially) professionally.
It was about 2014 I started building an openstack cluster at home and i was so stoked! I searched for openstack summits or meetups and for my surprise there was an openstack meetup in my town. Holly 🐄 I said.
The date of the event came and I left work earlier to attend the meetup.
There , I had a talk with the meetup organizer/speaker and he told he was interested in what I was doing and that they were going to open a job in the next months.

A few months later still at my boring job I got an email from him for an interview.
Everything went just about right...and here I am a Linux systems engineer doing everything I love for a living...

Second fecking time since January, I thought these things were meant to be "low maintenance"! (Though in fairness this time is sort of my fault, I may have accidentally edited the MacOS Python files instead of the downloaded ones)

Too much technical debt
Write more unit tests
Unit tests failing, the code will be right so change the tests to pass
Too many unit tests to maintain, they look a lot like technical debt
Remove unit tests to reduce maintenance overhead

Being assigned an old system that has scarce/cryptic documentation and uses global variables for everything. Not a maintenance nightmare at ALL.

whole fucking day of coding.
git server down for maintenance so compresses folders / send. lost everything. if i meet a microsoft employee today there will be blood and piss. DIE U FUCKING FUCKS!!€

My patience runs out on people who I'm close with comes to me for free pc maintenance.

For higher grade software development it should be mandatory to understand the big picture of problems...

If you are working for a online shop, you might want to ask marketing, what they want to sell, before they do it

You might want to ask billing, what customers buy, before you spend time on unnecessary features

You want to ask billing and legals, how they do fraud detection and you want to get the it security fellows on board too.

If marketing and billing knows, that maintenance needs time and money, they can calculate with that. If security knows, that some fails will be catched, no matter if you fix it in software or not they can adapt their priorities.

You might want to know something about process optimisation... Factories of car parts have spent years on such problems - learn from them.

Update: Some error handling for when I'm doing server/code maintenance.

Previous company turned from Web Dev E-Mail Marketing into a Service company with more than 50% phone support so I left.
New company, Product focused on web and mobile. 2 months in: Well yeah guys, new strategy. We'll stop feature dev on the web and go into maintenance mode.

That's just great. Thank you very much.

Now I'm too lazy to go through hiring again and just feed my inner rage.

It's hard to keep it in sometimes =__=

In production, whenever nginx can't find an upstream it will display a static 'maintenance' html file that tells the user the come back later

In development, it shows clippy :D

What cloud service does DevRant use?

Aws Or Azure?
And how much do you pay a month for maintenance costs?

What tables to store data? MongoDB, dynamoDB, oracle?
Or S3 streams?

Just wondering.

I think this company expects me to do maintenance on this app I built them for free 🙄 not happening you wanted it public that's sign off for the final product not my fault

That moment stack overflow is down for maintenance.... *panic increases*

I'm so sick and tired of people feeling threatened when improving upon their shitty code! I'm here to do a job and I enjoy my profession.

Don't take that away from me by wasting my time making me say every fucking time that I come from a good place and that I just want to provide a better solution AND not create fucking mess that will have to be rewritten when some ninja bugs occur because of completely unmaintainable crap nobody can understand. Holy shit!

I couldn't care less if you're 10 years in the company. I see that all the good devs left after dealing with your shit every God damn day.

I'm not here to deal with your insecurities and couldn't care less about pointing fingers! I just wanna do better and not write same level of quality over and over again!

You're not getting bonus points from me by sitting on your ass all day and half-assing everything you do with some lame ass excuse.

So no LGTM from me when it's utter error prone shit!

So if you don't wanna help, just get the fuck outta my way and don't waste my time! Jeeez

Just got home from training, girlfriend is out for the evening, no other dues; perfect time to play some games.

...aaaaaand they're doing maintenance on the cables for another hour 😶

Goddamnit! Why is the app not picking up the new maintenance status from the server! Oh fuck... Caching....

YES!

Finished a complete version upgrade with vastly improved scalability and maintenance in just 3 weeks!

NO!

I forgot to do the database migrations as I went along. Ok... no problem.. I'll just use some kind of database comparing software, I'm sure they exist...

<googles...>

...fuck... is there not any for free?

Ok fine whatever i'll manually compare the tables and columns, fuck it. Sure there's like 50 tables and like 20 columns per... whatever...
should take like a day or so, with testing...

YES!

Finished my new version upgrade after just 6 weeks of coding!

....fuck sakes...

Swear work is where you I go to fix other peoples poor design decisions and clean up the bullshit that comes out of said decisions.

CANT!
BE!
FUCKED!

How you have so many years experience and still design in way that ensures that maintenance /improvements/touching in the future is a huuugggeee clusterfuck.

Hey, I got an idea, lets make this whole data warehouse without a single index or primary key cos you know, that's the Kimball Method.

I have so much work to get done I don't even know where to start anymore. I've got 6 sites in development, 20 sites with continuing maintenance, and I'm in charge of everything IT in my office.

Today I asked if the other developer on our team could help out and take a few maintenance clients off my hands so I could work on getting builds done.

We called a team meeting where I explained my workload and pointed out that in order to make the deadline of next week on two of these builds our other developer is going to have to help out with some of the work on my plate.

Other dev: Well I've already got 3 sites that still need maintenance this month and I'm still working on $client site.

Me: Ok well today is only the 3rd so you have all month to do the maintenance on those sites, these two have to be online next week and I still have 100 hours of work to do between the two of them.

Me to CTO: can I get some backup here? Or can we hire me a monkey (my term for interns) for a couple weeks so I can focus on building?

CTO: We'll have to talk about that at our meeting next week. In the mean time, just do what you can to get the sites done and let me know if you think we aren't going to make the deadlines.

Me: That's what this conversation is, I'm telling you now, and I've been telling you for 3 weeks that we were getting close to my limit for my workload. We have approximately 175 work hours in a month, maintenance contracts alone accounts for 120 of those hours.

CTO: Alright, well if after Monday you don't think you're going to make the deadline (Thursday), then we'll see if we can find a solution.

Fuck this shit, I get paid the same whether the client is happy or not, I get paid the same whether we reach the deadline or not. I asked that salespeople stop making deadline promises before developers get to look at the scope but that's not the way we do things here. At least one of these sites is not going to be online Thursday, probably both.

I'm doomed.