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!

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!

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

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.

@Devintrix , congrats and happy lifes with your wife. this joke is for you :)

Dear Tech Support:

Last year I upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and noticed that the new program began running unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and valuable resources.

In addition, Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during system initialization, where it monitors all other system activity. Applications such as PokerNight 10.3, Drunken Boys Night 2.5 and Monday Night football 5.0 no longer run, crashing the system whenever selected.

I cannot seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background while attempting to run some of my other favorite applications. I am thinking about going back to Girlfriend 7.0, but un-install does not work on this program.

Can you help me please?

Thanks,

Joe

——————————————————–
Dear Joe:

This is a very common problem men complain about but is mostly due to a primary misconception. Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 with the idea that Wife 1.0 is merely a “UTILITIES & ENTERTAINMENT” program. Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and designed by its creator to run everything.

It is unlikely you would be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0. Hidden operating files within your system would cause Girlfriend 7.0 to emulate Wife 1.0 so nothing is gained.

It is impossible to un-install, delete, or purge the program files from the system once installed. You cannot go back to Girlfriend 7.0 because Wife 1.0 is not designed to do this. Some have tried to install Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but end up with more problems than the original system.

I recommend you keep Wife 1.0 and just deal with the situation. Having Wife 1.0 installed myself, I might also suggest you read the entire section regarding General Partnership Faults (GPFs). You must assume all responsibility for faults and problems that might occur, regardless of their cause. The best course of action will be to enter the command C:\APOLOGIZE. The system will run smoothly as long as you take the blame for all the GPFs.

Wife 1.0 is a great program, but very high maintenance. Consider buying additional software to improve the performance of Wife 1.0. I recommend Flowers 2.1, Jewelry 2.2, and Chocolates 5.0.

Do not, under any circumstances, install Secretary With Short Skirt 3.3. This is not a supported application for Wife 1.0 and is likely to cause irreversible damage to the operating system.

Best of luck,
Tech Support

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..

Do you want a class to never EVER be deleted?

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

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

As a programmer:

Witnessed ☑

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?

I really hate this company.

The code is a disaster. Every single other employee is a salesperson. Nobody has any bloody clue what I do or how difficult it is. They don't care about stability (unless things are crashing), maintenance (until crashing), code quality (until it delays features), or anything apart from shiny new features they can sell. The boss (the king salesman, if ever there was one) doesn't know how to manage, but tries to by acting like his "nice asshole" self -- he's an asshole that gives you passes, makes sure it's bloody obvious that he's doing it begrudgingly, yet everything is still absolutely your fault. If he arbitrarily decides it's too much your fault, he stops being "nice" and flips out on you in front of everyone. That's a "nice asshole": an asshole who can barely even pretend to be nice.

Fuck him.

And you know what? I really hate having to work next to these fucking birds, too.

Today was our weekly conference call, and I was both late and unprepared. I was too focused on my work, and got a ping 4 minutes into the meeting, so I obv didn't have time to prepare. Boss was also pissy today, and I didn't have much to show for my week, thanks to lots of little "OMG NEED ASAP" shit projects that all took too long, pushing back what I was actually supposed to work on. Which didn't get finished, of course, and today that project was "the most important" -- I suspect simply because it wasn't finished. AGADJFSKL. Cue the birds fucking screaming and never fucking shutting up no matter what I did. Blanket? No effect. Spray bottle? SCREAM MORE! Boss was yelling at me, the birds were screaming, and I couldn't think. Goddamn fucking disaster.

and yes, we have a macaw. A macaw and over 20 cockatiels. Said macaw decided today was a lovely day to just fucking SCREAM non-stop, and the tiels were doing their best to keep up. Thinking clearly during this cacophony? Not gonna happen.

Wait, "go elsewhere," you say? Somewhere quieter? Where is this "elsewhere?" We live in a fucking tiny house, and during the call it was (and still is) filled with sleeping people, and surrounded by a fucking desert. Who the fuck thought living in the desert was a good idea, anyway? Like, seriously. What brainless moron thought "You know what? This is a great place! Let's settle down right here," while trudging through the scorching sand and dust, looking at the basically lifeless horizon filled with large, hot, dry, dusty, barren rocks (aka "mountains"), and fucking dying from thirst? Probably someone so delirious from heatstroke they never actually recovered, and continued raving that it's a goddamn paradise to their heat-addled imbecile followers. I really hope they hallucinated a la-z-boy in place of a hedge of teddybear cholla and died an excruciating and prickly death. Fuck that guy/girl, too.

But I digress.

I seriously need an office that isn't a 30 min drive into gang-central. I'd work outside, but I live in the middle of the bloody fucking desert, and get heat exhaustion within about half an hour. Everywhere else in the house people bother me almost incessantly.

just. FUCKING FJASKLDFJGAG.
I HATE THIS PLACE SO SO SO MUCH.

'I've had such Zen lately,' Alex said. Maybe then, but lately? I've just been too exhausted and burned out from putting up with all this shit to get angry. Days like today? I could pour kerosene over everything and laugh as it all just burned to ash.

"PornHub is under maintenance"
Me: "The fuck is this?" *refreshes page*
*under maintenance bullshit disappears, page loads as usual*

Shit, almost got a lunch time heart attack. Who's cruel enough to do such a thing? Is this all just a joke to you people? Near-death experience right there. I am forever changed and traumatized. 😢

More sysadmin focused but y’all get this stuff and I need a rant.

TLDR: Got the wrong internship.

Start working as a sysadmin/dev intern/man-of-many-hats at a small finance company (I’m still in school). Day 1: “Oh new IT guy? Just grab a PC from an empty cubicle and here’s a flash drive with Fedora, go ahead and manually install your operating system. Oh shit also your desktop has 2g of ram, a core2 duo, and we scavenged your hard drive for another dev so just go find one in the server room. And also your monitor is broken so just take one from another cubicle.”

Am shown our server room and see that someone is storing random personal shit in there (golf clubs propped against the server racks with heads mixed into the cabling, etc.). Ask why the golf clubs etc. are mixed in with the cabling and server racks and am given the silent treatment. Learn later that my boss is the owners son, and he is storing his personal stuff in our server room.

Do desktop support for end users. Another manager asks for her employees to receive copies of office 2010 (they’re running 2003 an 2007). Ask boss about licensing plans in place and upgrade schedules, he says he’ll get back to me. I explain to other manager we are working on a licensing scheme and I will keep her informed.

Next day other manager tells me (*the intern*) that she spoke with a rich business friend whose company uses fake/cracked license keys and we should do the same to keep costs down. I nod and smile. IT manager tells me we have no upgrade schedule or licensing agreement. I suggest purchasing an Office 365 subscription. Boss says $150 a year per employee is too expensive (Company pulls good money, has ~25 employees, owner is just cheap) I suggest freeware alternatives. Other manager refuses to use anything other than office 2010 as that is what she is familiar with. Boss refuses to spend any money on license keys. Learn other manager is owners wife and mother of my boss. Stalemate. No upgrades happen.

Company is running an active directory Windows Server 2003 instance that needs upgrading. I suggest 2012R2. Boss says “sure”. I ask how he will purchase the license key and he tells me he won’t.

I suggest running an Ubuntu server with LDAP functionality instead with the understanding that this will add IT employee hours for maintenance. Bosses eyes glaze over at the mention of Linux. The upgrade is put off.

Start cleaning out server room of the personal junk, labeling server racks and cables, and creating a network map. Boss asks what I’m doing. I show him the organized side of the server room and he says “okay but don’t do any more”.

... *sigh* ...

"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".

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

Sooooo me and the lead dev got placed in the wrong job classification at work.

Without sounding too mean, we are placed under the same descriptor and pay scale reserved for secretaries, janitors and the people that do maintenance at work(we work for a college as developers) whilst our cowormer who manages the cms got the correct classification.

The manager went apeshit because the guidelines state that:

Making software products
Administration of dbs
Server maintenance and troubleshooting
Security (network)

And a lot of shit is covered on the exemption list and it is things that we do by a wide fucking margin. The classification would technically prohibit us from developing software and the whole it dptmnt went apeshit over it since he(lead developer) refuses (rightfully so) to touch anything and do basically nothing other than generate reports.

Its a fun situation. While we both got a substantial raise in salary(go figure) we also got demoted at the same time.

There is a department in IT which deals with the databases for other major applications, their title is "programmers" yet for some reason me and the lead end up writing all the sql code that they ever need. They make waaaaay more money than me and the lead do, even in the correct classification.

Resolution: manager is working with the head of the department to correct this blasphemy WHILE asking for a higher pay than even the "programmers"

I love this woman. She has balls man. When the president of the school paraded around the office asking for an update on a high priority app she said that I am being gracious enough to work on it even though i am not supposed to. The fucking prick asked if i could speed it up to where she said that most of my work I do it on my off time, which by law is now something that I cannot do for the school and that she does not expect any of her devs to do jack shit unless shit gets fixed quick. With the correct pay.

Naturally, the president did not like such predicament and thus urged the HR department(which is globally hated now since they fucked up everyone's classification) to fix it.

Dunno if I will get above the pay that she requested. But seeing that royal ammount of LADY BALLS really means something to me. Which is why i would not trade that woman for a job at any of my dream workplaces.

Meanwhile, the level of stress placed my 12 years of service diabetic lead dev at the hospital. Fuck the hr department for real, fuck the vps of the school that fucked this up royally and fuck people in this city in general. I really care for my team, and the lead dev is one of my best friends and a good developer, this shit will not fucking go unnoticed and the HR department is now in low priority level for the software that we build for them

Still. I am amazed to have a manager that actually looks out for us instead of putting a nice face for the pricks that screwed us over.

I have been working since I was 16, went through the Army, am 27 now and it is the first time that I have seen such manager.

She can't read this, but she knows how much I appreciate her.

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 😏

"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**

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

Google sucks!
No, not as e-mail or for privacy reasons. Sure, that too, but it comes with "free" stuff.

It sucks because it's breaking every possible record in the worst, shittiest, most insanely stupid APIs and integrations out there on the entire fucking planet!

It is comically stupid!

Aside from their LOVE of hard-deprecating APIs every few months, requiring constant, time consuming maintenance of every tool that integrates deeply with Google services, some of their APIs, for expensive stuff, look like they've been written by Bobby McFartface from 7th grade.

Take a look at DoubleClick Search (their ad performance reporting tool, that sure does sound like one). To upload custom, additional data, you must pass in a ton of parameter, and they REQUIRE some of them to have a specific, hardcoded value. What's the point in passing that parameter then you dickheads?!
But fine, so you uploaded some stuff using the API. Now you want to delete everything and try again after you fixed a bug - well you fucking CAN'T! You can't delete stuff, you can only mark them as "deleted" using an update call.
Bulk operations? Fuck no!
Can I just add on top? Well of course not! That will raise a ton of exceptions. Same message should be transmitted using the PUT, not POST request, in order to edit.
Can I send everything to PUT? Of course not! You can't edit something that's not there, dummy!

Can I see what's there so that I can update it, and add what's missing?
Well of course not! Why on Earth would you need to see what information is in there after you uploaded it? Who needs that anyway?

Simply send, pray, and hope that everything will be fine (it will not).

Like holy fucking crap, it can't get any more stupid!
Google is a huge pile of idiots who feed on only a single cow - the search engine.

It's times like these when I think that Google right now is the worst thing that exists for everyone in tech. It's dragging everyone down with their monopolies everywhere and complete idiocy in managing them.

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.

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!

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

- 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?

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

Me: [F5]

The Pirate Bay: Ok

KISS.
Keep it simple, stupid.

At the beginning the project is nothing but an idea. If you get it off the ground, that's already a huge success. Rich features and code quality should be the last of your worries in this case.

Throw out any secondary functionality out the window from day 0. Make it work, then add flowers and shit (note to self: need to make way for flowers and shit).

Nevertheless code quality is an important factor, if you can afford it. The top important things I outline in any new non-trivial project:
1. Spend 1-2 days bootstrapping it for best fit to the task, and well designed security, mocking, testing and extensibility.
2. Choose a stack that you'll most likely find good cheap devs for, in that region where you'll look in, but also a stack that will allow you to spend most of your time writing software rather than learning to code in it.
3. Talk to peers. Listen when they tell that your idea is stupid. Listen to why it's stupid, re-assess, because it most probably is stupid in this case.
4. Give yourself a good pep talk every morning, convincing you that the choices you've made starting this project are the right ones and that they'll bring you to success. Because if you started such a project already, the most efficient way to kill it is to doubt your core decisions.

Once it's working badly and with a ton of bugs, you've already succeeded in actually making it work, and then you can tackle the bugs and improvements.

Some dev is going to hate you for creating something horrific, but that horrific thing will work, and it's what will give another developer a maintenance job. Which is FAR, far more than most would get by focusing on quality and features from day 0.

(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 😶

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.

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

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

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.

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

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!

I am 22 years old, at 18 I started to study systems and networks, I learned commands, network protocols, assembly and maintenance of servers, at 20 I started to study computer security, at 21 I started programming classes, I learned bash scripting , A bit of javascript and object-oriented programming with java, I fell in love with programming instantly, after classes I spent hours practicing new things, reading all the documentation of things I didn't understand and coding as long as I could , When I finished my studies I started to learnt android developing, almost a year ago, I made my own application, the first software I made public, it was a failure, I hardly had installations and most people uninstalled it, the UI Was ugly, the idea was not as good as I thought, after some bug fixes I started reading a book on C ++, I started to practice, it made me better using object-oriented programming, a month later, I came up with an idea, I used a lot an app, but I didn't like the way it was done, I wanted some extra features, something that was more useful to me, so I picked up a notebook and started drawing a user interface, I wrote what features I want and I started to develop it, one month later I published it, at the beginning almost had no users, but little by little it started to be used, after almost two months it reached a thousand users, I felt great, there were people who liked my App, I spent months working on new features, more and more people started to download it, soon it'll have 10000 downloads, currently I'm working on a new app, tomorrow (December 31) I will publish it, I hope there are many users who enjoy it.

And that's my little story.

Sorry for my bad English...

I think I will ship a free open-source messenger with end-to-end encryption soon.

With zero maintenance cost, it’ll be awesome to watch it grow and become popular or remain unknown and become an everlasting portfolio project.

So I created Heroku account with free NodeJS dyno ($0/mo), set up UptimeRobot for it to not fall asleep ($0/mo), plugged in MongoDB (around 700mb for free) and Redis for api rate limiting (30 mb of ram for free, enough if I’m going to purge the whole database each three seconds, and there’ll be only api hit counters), set up GitHub auto deployment.

So, backend will be in nodejs, cryptico will manage private/public keys stuff, express will be responsible for api, I also decided to plug in Helmet and Sqreen, just to be sure.

Actual data will be stored in mongo, rate limit counters – in redis.

Frontend will probably be implemented in React, hosted for free at GitHub pages. I also can attach a custom domain there, let’s see if I can attach it to Freenom garbage.

So, here we go, starting up modern nosql-nodejs-react application completely for free.

If it blasts off, I’m moving to Clojure + Cassandra for backend.

And the last thing. It’ll be end-to-end encrypted. That means if it blasts off, it will probably attract evil russian government. They’ll want me to give him keys. It’ll be impossible, you know. But they doesn’t accept that answer. So if I accidentally stop posting there, please tell my girl that I love her and I’m probably dead or captured

Story time:
Yesterday I wanted to go to the theater with my girlfriend. It was her idea because as a student you can get reduced tickets for the play, but only via the online store exactely two hours before the play starts. We had already tried two weeks before but with no success. So this time I said i want to be on my pc with a proper browser and not a mobile version like last time. So we are sitting at home me in front of their website on one screen and with a clock on the other screen. Two minutes realy i hit refresh and I get a selection for the reduced tickets, nice.

You would think.

After selecting the amount. ERROR: Can not get your tickets. I was like fuck they are already sold out because it's a popular play. But hey let's try again. I got one ticket but not the second one, okay strange lets try again, same ERROR again. WHAT the FUCK, no feedback what so ever. My girlfriend had then the idea that they maybe restricted the amount for reduced tickets to one (does not state this explicitly but hey lets give it a shot). Use second browser select one ticket. ERROR can not get you the amount of seats. Rage level near to a 1000 why did it work two minutes before but not anymore. Trying around for five more minutes finally got the second ticket.

Now the real fun begins.

Proceeding to checkout should not be that hard you would think, but you need to be registered for that. Okay so let's do that. The salutation is not required neither is the address for the tickets but you need to have a company name??!!!!! The fuck?? I am not self employed and neither are a most other people around here so why is this field mandatory? Beeing a little under stress I decided to found the "asdf" company with my girlfriend.

Now one would think checking out is easy. Not so fast.

After accepting the terms of service another ERROR, unable to accept your data. What data? I did not input anything new? Where does this come from? Ok never mind I am going to pay with credid card that must work!
ERROR: Internal paymentservice initialization failure! Sorry what? I thought maybe I was to long idle in this browser and they do not reserve the tickets for so long (which would be no surprise to me at this point). Let's try again. Nope same error.

Now my rage level was really over 9000 but we really wanted to go so I decided to call the customer SUPPORT. Or better to say I had a answering maching telling me for ten minutes how sorry they are that this takes so long, yeah you bet. Then and this is now really great: the support guy asks me: "What error do you see? Internal paymentservice initialization failure?" I was like, okay he knows this so they need to know how to handle it. FUCK NO. "Sorry I can't help you. This is our payment system maybe they (IT) are doing some maintenance I can't halp you. Call the theater directly good day." Sorry what just happened, you fuckers are the vendors for the tickets for nearly all big events around here and the theater explicitly states to call you for tickets but you can not help me? Like hell.

This process took 25 very frustrating minutes and I was really angry and wanted to quit, then I saw that there is also a paypal option which I had not tried. With very little hope i selected everything for the payment, registered with paypal and they told me I already had an account. So reactivated this five year old account payed with all the mobile passwords and tans to finally, after 30 fucking minutes, get a pdf file for a ticket. Repeated the last step for the second ticket and with some time left to get there we were off.

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

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

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.

my story so far

Hey guys. i just wantes to share my story becoming something i think is like a dev.
I was always interested in solving problems. my grandfather has a company with a bit over a 100 employees. one day i decided to start working there. he needed someone to build up the erp system (mostly maintenance). about a month after i started he decided to get a new erp system because the one he had would not fill his needs. not knowing how big this got i told him that i want to build it up. from getting the orders over production with machines to billing.
he agreed. after a short time we knew that even this new system does not fullfill our needs. but it was so damn expensive. i told my grandfather: trust me, i am handling this. no further costs. and i started to learn programming. i learned night and day (visual basics.net, sql, c#). since then i wrote about 8 additional modules for the system in coorperation with the users. today, 3 years later we are far ahead our market in terms of transparency and information flow. i worked very hard for this and it is a great feeling to see that the things i do help my colleagues and are used.

i never learned this stuff in school and i know that i cannot tell that i am a professional programmer.

but when someone asks me i tell them i am a programmer because my solutions work and i think i deserve to call me that.

thanks for reading :)

"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 😡

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

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.

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.

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.

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`

So I used to do some freelancing in web development last year, nothing too fancy just some simple PHP websites. Comes the worst meeting in my life. So I am from India and we have a lot of long lasting business here being passed on over generations. TL;DR the guy was the owner of a very old business which was actually very huge and the guy was educated too, so I assumed that he'll be sensible as compared to other people.

The meeting was in an expensive cafe and he paid for it, he even told me upfront that meeting is on him. Great, right? So we sit down, order some coffee and then start discussing what he needed.
The guy needed an ecommerce website built with backend and logistics system integrated. We discussed possible designs for the website and stuff too and so far the deal looked promising to both of us.
I explained him the cost estimate and told him that I would email him the final quote from myself once we discussed server cost and shit.
So now comes the bargaining part where he asked me to give him server and domain for free.
At this point, I suspected that he didn't know that servers and domains are not something that you make. You have to purchase and renew them periodically.
So I told that guy that he didn't understand the cost estimation and explained to him that X is the cost of making this fucking thing and Y is its monthly maintenance cost, if he wanted annually could be done too. And this Y did not include server and domain costing.
Now came the fucking tide, the guy straight up turned to his shit and told me I am lying and trying to con him. So I gently asked him if he had ever gotten any website made. To which, he said No, but he knows how the costing works.
I was like "Bitch?". So I calmly tried to explain that that's not how websites are done, delivered and maintained.
He didn't seemed to be understanding and kept on fucking repeating that he knows his shit and blah blah.
At this point, I was like "Okay. Fuck this dude then. I can find another project. " and then I told him that he'll need to find someone according to his needs.
Interestingly enough, the guy called someone and then walked out of the cafe while talking on phone. I waited for 5 minutes and he didn't come back so I decided I would pay for my coffee and leave. Turns out the guy had paid his bill before my arrival and ditched me with the excuse of the call.

But oh well, I think working with such an idiot would have been much worse than paying for that coffee.

# 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.

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

This is a question to the @dfox and @trogus :
How much time does working on devRant (maintenance, development, etc.) take up of your day/week?

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

*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?!!

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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)

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.

First company I worked for, built around 40 websites with Drupal 7...in only a year (don't know if it's a lot for today's standards, but I was one guy doing everything). Of course I didn't have the time to keep updating everything and I continually insisted to the boss that we need more people if we are going to expand. Of course he kept telling me to keep working harder and that I "got this". Well, after a year a couple of websites got defaced, you know the usual stuff if you've been around for some time. Felt pretty bad at the time, it was a similar feeling to having your car stolen or something.

Anyways, fast forward about 2 years, started working on another company, and well...this one was on another level. They had a total of around 40 websites, with about 10 of them being Joomla 1.5 installations (Dear Lord have mercy on my soul(the security vulnerabilities from these websites only, were greater than Spiderman's responsibilities)) and the others where WordPress websites, all that ON A SINGLE VPS, I mean, come on... Websites being defaced on the daily, pharma-hacks everywhere, server exploding from malware queing about 90k of spam emails on the outbox, server downtime for maintenance happening almost weekly, hosting company mailing me on the daily about the next malware detection adventure etc. Other than that, the guy that I was replacing, was not giving a single fuck. He was like, "dude it's all good here, everything works just fine and all you have to do is keep the clients happy and shit". Sometimes, I hate myself for being too caring and responsible back then.

I'm still having nightmares of that place. Both that office and that VPS.

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. :(

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!!!!!!

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...

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

I don't understand why people are making a fuss about Facebook.

It's free to use, the amount of users kept increasing (thus the cost of maintenance) yet the company kept getting bigger and bigger. Obviously they're not making all their money off the advertisements on Facebook's own website.

So why are people so surprised that they're "selling" user information?

This is really funny to me. Especially the media joining in saying that it makes all your information available to everybody when they're actually talking about the fact that the majority of Facebook users have their profile set to public and they can be easily found with a simple Google search.

People are so fucking hypocritical it makes me want to puke. If you don't want anybody to know what you posted, just don't fucking post it on a SOCIAL MEDIA in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that facebook is all flowers and love, they clearly didn't handle this situation well. They could have done something about this whole situation when it started instead of waiting for things to blow out of proportion.

However, people are just being assholes now. I highly doubt that they're reading all chats nor are they sending it over, they're probably just sending out some words you mention often so that it is pertinent for advertisers (ex. If you use the word computer next to buy, then maybe that triggers something). I could talk extensively about it but I'm way too lazy, the point is, they most likely aren't sending the nudes you sent to advertisers because that does not provide any benefits.

If you don't like Facebook, don't fucking use it. Delete your account and shut the fuck up. When you screw up in real life, there's no takesies backsies, why the fuck do people think it doesn't apply online? The government gathers up quite a lot of information on you yet I don't see you crying your eyes out.

Why the fuck do you care so much if an advertisement is tailored to specifically? Yeah, you talked about dildos and now you see dildo ads from Amazon, not happy? Just download adblock and shut up. If you're gullible and the moment you see an ad about single women in your area you click on the ad because you want to get laid right now, that's your problem.

Don't want people knowing about some aspects of your private life? Don't share it online.

Stop acting like people are any better at keeping secrets, I'm sure you had some people leak your secrets at least once, yet I doubt you sued them and you brought them to court.

===========

I'm sorry about this, it's just that Facebook is all over the news and I'm getting sick of it.

Also, I hate facebook, I'm not necessarily defending it, I'm more pissed at the medias for blowing this situation out of proportion.

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.

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.

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

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.

SuperCell is hiring.. Here is their job description:

Description

We need a new Builder. Are you an independent and passionate maker? Do you love spending 24 hours a day turning wood and gold into walls and defensive buildings? Do you answer the call to build even if that call comes at 4:00 a.m. and you haven’t had a day off in literally five years? If the answer to these questions is “Yes! Yes! A million times yes!” then we have a hammer with your name on it!

The Role

The focus of the Builder is to, uh, build.

You will be responsible for taking instructions from the player and building whenever and wherever they see fit. They say build and you say...well, you don’t say anything, you just build.

The world of Clash of Clans can get intense. Our Builder is expected to build quickly and expertly at all times, even while under great amounts of stress and/or attacks from Barbarians, Archers, Goblins, Giants, Wall Breakers, Wizards, and P.E.K.K.A.s.

Equally as important as building is rebuilding. All of the things you build will inevitably be destroyed, if not immediately, then soon after you just finished building or rebuilding everything. You can’t let it get you down. You must maintain your resolve and rebuild. Fast!

Responsibilities

Must be willing to relocate to the World of Clash
Must build and maintain a wide-range of buildings, statues, and war machines.
Must be on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year
Must have up-to-date Level 9 Tesla Tower maintenance certification 
Must have proficiency with building materials both common (wood, stone, etc.) and uncommon (lightning, lava, etc.)

Requirements

Must provide own leather helmet
Must possess a passion for building
Must be comfortable working hands-on with molten lava.
Must adhere to strict dress code (orange sleeveless shirt, brown canvas pants, and boots).
Must speak fluent Barbarian

How to Apply

Send us your qualifications via e-mail to bethebuilder@supercell.com or write out your qualifications and send them to us via Baby Dragon. Either format is accepted. 

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...

I previously worked as a Linux/unix sysadmin. There was one app team owning like 4 servers accessible in a very speciffic way.
* logon to main jumpbox
* ssh to elevated-privileges jumpbox
* logon to regional jumpbox using custom-made ssh alternative [call it fkup]
* try to fkup to the app server to confirm that fkup daemon is dead
* logon to server's mgmt node [aix frame]
* ssh to server directly to find confirm sshd is dead too
* access server's console
* place root pswd request in passwords vault, chase 2 mangers via phone for approvals [to login to the vault, find my request and aprove it]
* use root pw to login to server's console, bounce sshd and fkupd
* logout from the console
* fkup into the server to get shell.

That's not the worst part... Aix'es are stable enough to run for years w/o needing any maintenance, do all this complexity could be bearable.

However, the app team used to log a change request asking to copy a new pdf file into that server every week and drop it to app directory, chown it to app user. Why can't they do that themselves you ask? Bcuz they 'only need this pdf to get there, that's all, and we're not wasting our time to raise access requests and chase for approvals just for a pdf...'

oh, and all these steps must be repeated each time a sysadmin tties to implement the change request as all the movements and decisions must be logged and justified.

Each server access takes roughly half an hour. 4 servers -> 2hrs.

So yeah.. Surely getting your accesses sorted out once is so much more time consuming and less efficient than logging a change request for sysadmins every week and wasting 2 frickin hours of my time to just copy a simple pdf for you.. Not to mention that threr's only a small team of sysadmins maintaining tens of thousands of servers and every minute we have we spend working. Lunch time takes 10-15 minutes or so.. Almost no time for coffee or restroom. And these guys are saying sparing a few hours to get their own accesses is 'a waste of their time'...

That was the time I discovered skrillex.

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?

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

*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.....

Hacked the admin password of our high school network back in the day. Spent all our subsequent IT classes dicking around and then rebooting all PCs in the room with a maintenance message, and said "aww man, we hadn't saved our work!"

We also kept rebooting our friend's computer and at one point he put it down to the admin not liking him, so the next time we did it with the message "I don't like you very much. Love, the admin".

Childish as hell but hey, we were kids and it was hilarious at the time.

We still use the password for stuff to this day! k33pm3saf3 - and no, it isn't my devRant password.

We also had full access to the school's security cameras as the password was still "password".

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.

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!!!

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..."

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

In a maintenance project where you joined later!

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 😡

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)

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.

git branch maintenance.

Because certain people like to push to master.

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

(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

Maintenance? Holy FUCK NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

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.

No. No. No.

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

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!

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

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'.

I was called back into work last night at 4 a.m.

(L)user - *anony* I’m sorry to wake you but I’m needing on the internet and I can’t get out.

**Just installed a new firewall and I haven’t had time to get a trusted cert pushed through**

Me - alright I’ll be there in a second.

After rolling my sweet ass out of bed and getting here, I get her through and leave. When I get back to my house I realize I’d forgot my fucking keys... I come back and the bitch has her computer shut down reading a book and isn’t even using the internet...

Me - I thought you needed on the internet, whys your computer shut down...?

Her - Oh, I don’t need it right now, I was just having trouble getting on is all.

FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCK! This is the SAME fucking (l)user that somehow managed to get the fucking toner stuck backwards in a printer. It’s the same girl that has called me in the past at late hours and requested that I move a chair from one patient room to the other. A fucking chair. I’m not in the maintenance department... so first, you’re calling the wrong department and second; the time it took you to call me you yourself could have fucking done it. She didn’t like the way that call ended.

Although partially my fault, if I would have finished everything I wouldn’t have had to get up but shit... this fuck still deserves a chair to the fucking face.

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 😂😂

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😇

The only thing more dangerous than an alcoholic short-term-memory-challenged non-technical throw-you-under-the-bus IT director with self-esteem issues that are sporadically punctuated by delusions of superiority is one who fears for his job. Submitted for your inspection: a besotted mass of near-human brain function who not only has a 50 person IT department to run, but has also been questioned by the business owners as to what he actually does. So he has decided to show them. He has purchased a vendor product to replace a core in-house developed application used to facilitate creating the product the business sells. The purchased software only covers about 40 percent of the in-house application's functionality, so he is contracting with the vendor to perform custom development on the purchased product (at a cost likely to be just shy of six-figures) so that about 90 percent of existing functionality will be covered. He has asked one of his developers (me) to scale down the existing software to cover the functionality gaps the purchased software creates. There is no deployment plan that will allow the business to transition from the current software to the new vendor​-supplied one without significantly hurting the ability of the business to function. When anyone raises this issue he dismisses it with sage musings such as, "I know it will be painful, but we'll just have to give the users really good support." Because he has no idea what any of his staff actually does, he is expecting one of his developers (again, unfortunately, me) to work with the vendor so that the Frankensoftware will perform as effectively as the current software (essentially as a project manager since there will be no in-house coding involved). Lastly, he refuses to assign someone to be responsible for the software: taking care of maintenance, configuration, and issue resolutions after it has been rolled out. When I pointedly tell him I will not be doing that (because this is purchased software and I am not a system admin or desktop engineer) he tells me, "Let me think about this." The worst part is that this is only one of four software replacement initiatives he is injecting himself into so he can prove his worth to the business owners. And by doing so he is systematically making every software development initiative akin to living in Dante's Eighth Circle. I am at the point where I want to burn my eye out with a hot poker, pour salt into the wound, and howl to the heavens in unbearable agony for a month, so when these projects come to fruition, and I am suffering the wrath of the business owners, I can look back on that moment I lost my eye and think "good times."

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.

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

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.

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."

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.........

Absolutely not dev-related.

Blah, blah, weird conversation and shit. I'm too tired and lazy to write this crap again, but let's do it.

The guy is a dev I randomly found on some chatting service, he was interesting to talk with until this conversation. I'll write this out of memory, so yeah.

Him: So by the way I wrote an app that you give your penis size to to get measurements and stuff about it.
Me, thinking it was dev humor: That's hilarious. Tell me more, I'm interested.
Him: So the idea behind all of this was to gather some big data style info about people's penis size and habits and all that stuff.
Me: Man that's awesome. Can I see the source?
Him: No, it's proprietary. You can buy a license though.
Me: You went that far for a joke?
Him: What joke?
Me: The whole software you just told me about.
Him: That's not a joke, I'm being very serious about it.
Me: Oh well. What did you get from the stats?
Him: I got some tips from people's habits! I never thought that shaving it could make it look bigger, but that's awesome!
Me: Do you really care about it that much?
Him: Studies have proven that size correlated with confidence. Since I started doing it, I've been more confident than ever!
Me: Great.
Him: I'm a bit disappointed to see that I'm in the lower percentiles though.
Me: Well of course you are.
Him: Why would you say that?
Me: Well since people with a big dick tend to go more willingly into the subject and might even buy a fucking app for it, of course you'd have the higher average in your stats.
Him: You're only saying that because you have a small cock.
Me: Why the fuck would you say that? You're the one that's concerned about it, not me.
Him: Go on, what's your size?
Me, because I don't care about discussing that stuff: *Tells him*
Him: [stats, comparisons and stuff]
Me: Well I never gave a fuck and your stats won't make me change my mind.
[ ... Some other shit about my size compared to his ... ]
Him: Would you want to work with me for the database maintenance?
Me: You must be joking?
Him: I'm serious.
Me: *Deletes account*

Seriously, fuck that guy. I rewrote that quickly so you only had the best, but it was a whole fucking conversation.

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

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 :/

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.

I'm feeling like writing this down...

So today I got told off by my boss. Why? Because my job bores me.

My current title, "webmaster", is quite similar to "plumber" where I work. I fix holes on our websites, and I tell "qualified" people (external providers) how a project should be made. Nothing exciting, nothing creative, boring.

So I got told off today for being "laid-back" in a newsletter project (GDPR, looking at you) and not being thorough in my procedures of testing and configuration. Fair enough, I didn't care and I admitted it. It's a boring drag-and-drop done in literally 5 minutes, there's no added brain-value here. Plus I got told off by my IT Manager because our Exchange server would not let me receive test emails. Still doesn't work after a day. Yay.

Then she said "we're doing exciting things here, it's not always the case anywhere else you'd work". And I'm like: "really? I love writing code, seeing things coming alive, investigating why things don't run smoothly, writing efficient code (both in performance and in readability)". I hear many friend devs telling me they're doing that and what they do during their "dev-day"... All I'm doing here is "maintenance" (a.k.a boring) stuff that apparently is "exciting". Adding a <script> to handle google tag manager is hell fun, going through compiled CSS and change color values is also thrilling, finding out if a PDF handler application can handle PDF files, re-plugging a computer monitor to make it work...

I think she meant that I'm not at my place here.

Didn't want to tell her that I have no motivation in doing things I don't enjoy making, i.e, my job.

Good thing I have an interview in two weeks

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

A nullable boolean in production 😕😯😤

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.

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

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.

#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.

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

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.

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.

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 ;-)

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.

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 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!

Maintenance

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 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.

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?

Life in maintenance. Cuz it went overflow

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

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.

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 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.

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.

O well, there go my plans for this evening

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

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!

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

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.

My first professional dev job ever was working for a company specializing in nuclear facility and chemical warehouse maintenance. I helped build their in-house emergency dispatch software (so if there haven't been any recent meltdowns, it's still doing it's job).

When I started working there, their original enterprise emergency dispatch software was running on a Windows 2003 server with no security. The software itself was from the 90s and was no longer maintained. Nobody in the company had received training to use the software and the database was set-up incorrectly. The server would go down often, in which case, we called our third-party IT support to come fix it. They would send an intern who attended the same University class as I did. When the server booted back up, it would take an hour to open the application and load the bloated database. If more than 3 people tried accessing the emergency dispatch server at the same time, the server would crash again.

StackOverflow down for maintenance.

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?

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

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)

Today's been majorly tough 😣, I might lose one of my fav an most high paying clients 😐

He's OK in taking risks in his business because he has money to fall back on 😐 I have none we are sorta partners in projects. So we have this one project he never wrote in this project brief/outline maintenance or sign off ,😐 it never occured to him .

So now this app is ongoing I got paid nothing they just released it I need to do these jobs to make money 😐 but I'm stuck helping him 😐

There have been so many issues it's been ongoing forever 😐 I dunno what I can do .

To make it worse the code is a pile of shit 😐 literally couldnt be worse.

Why ? Because there has been 4000 minor adjustments. I'm a good coder I swear , but this job is killing me 🙁

Here's an example start of the new year the new iOS kicked in on the 12 Dec I started get more n more bug reports! Saying iOS is messed up.

Because of an update it's not my fault. 😣, 6 months this project took 😐 every 2 weeks I've had a major issue come up like that.

😖 I'm near my wit's end I feel like the best move is to just say I'm sorry I can't anymore I understand that this app is important and that we need to get paid less to grow it etc but I can't let my business die because of that.

Times like this I really appreciate this app

I guess I have to stick it out 😧

Time to go home...

Just started a java update on my sisters laptop. Doing some cleaning up and basic Winblows maintenance. Damn, a lot of updates. Haven't seen chrome that old

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?

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.

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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