Big congrats to @AlexDeLarge for being the first devRant member to hit 50,000 ++!

A pretty awesome accomplishment highlighting great contributions and content.

Is this the code life
Another scrum meeting
Caught in the the Node life
No escape from reality
Open your eyes
Look up to the screens and see..
I'm just a dev boy
Doing some debugging
Because there's warnings here
Errors there
Segment faults
Everywhere
Anytime you distract
Takes another hour from me
From me

*piano starts

Mama. Just committed a bug
Merge the branch to production
Did it fast for milestones
Mama. The repo has just begun
But now they going to throw the stack away.
Mama. U u u uu
Didn't mean to code in LAMP
But it's the only stack i know how to setup
In Ubuntu. Without docker
I really don't get vagrant

*piano

It's too late
My team is done
Some dev is working in Nepal
A UX dev. Now what is that?
Goodbye everybody
I've got to go
Gotta leave this lame meeting
And face the truth
Oh nooooo. I i interns
(they have questions)
I want to debug
I don't want to stay till 3 in the morning

*epic guitar

I see a litlle dev over there
Let's code review, let's code review
Did he do the last commit?
Coding in the white board
Very very frightening me
That's bug(that's a bug)
That's a bug (that's a bug)
What the f*ck did you do that?
Magnificcooooooo

I was just coding and nobody liked it
He was coding and nobody liked it, spare his some time to do his debugging

Easy man. Here go. Will you let me code?
A meeting. No,we will not let you code. ( let me code)
A meeting. we will not let you code. ( let me code)
A meeting. we will not let you code. ( let me code)
We will not let you code
Never never let you go
Never let you code, oh
No no no no no no no
Oh mama mia, mama mia ( dude, you've gotta let me code)
Screw you guys, I'm gonna code and commit. Commit. Comiiiiitt!

*epic guitar

So you think you can review me and spit in my eye?
So you think you can dump me and erase my branch?
Oh baby, cant do this to me baby
I've just have to log out.
I've just have to log outta here

*epic guitar solo

Nothing really matters
The users will not care
Nothing really matters
To them

Any way this code blows

@dfox @trogus How about ++ milestones?
F.e.:
404 ++'s: “Error 404“
255 ++'s: “256 Bytes“
69 ++'s: (Well you know...)
And so on... (be creative)

I was hired to build a small PHP site. The client was arrested and sentenced to jail time right before the third of four milestones was complete, so I didn't get paid any more after that. Didn't hear from him for over a year, then out of nowhere he wanted to pick up where we left off.

The startup i work in has such a dynamic environment that their monthly milestones get changed every hour!

#firstRant

*part rant part developers are the best people in the world*

years back a friend got a job at some non profit, as a program coordinator, and his first task was to "coordinate" the work on creating the new website for the organisation. current website they had was a monster built on some custom cms, 7 languages, 5 years of almost dayly content updates, etc. so he asked me if i would took the job of creating a new website on wordpress. i wasn t really keen on doing it, but he is a good friend so i said ok. i wrote down the SOW, which clearly stated that i will not be responsible for migrating the old content to the new website. i had experience working with non it clients, and made sure everyone understood the SOW before the contract was signed. everyone was ok with it. after three weeks my job was done, all milestones and requirenments were met. peechy! and then all hell breaks loose when the president of the organisation (the most evil person i ve met in my life) told my friend that she expects me to migrate the content as well. he tried explaining her that that was not agreed, that it will cost extra, etc. but she didn t want to hear any of that. despite the fact that she was a part of the entire SOW creation process, because she is a micro managing bitch. in any other situation i wouldn t budge, because we have the contract and i kept all the paper trail, but since my friends job was on the line i agreed to do it. my SQL knowldge at the time, and even now, was very rudimentary, the db organisation of their cms was confusing as fuck... so i took two days of searching tutorials and SO threads and was doing ok, until i got to a problem i couldn t solve on my own. i posted the issue on SO and some guy asked for some clarifications, and we went back and forth, and decided to move to chat. while chatting with him i realised that there was not a chance for me to do all the work in few days without a lot of errors so i offered him to do it for a fee. he agreed. i asked him for his rate, he said if this is a community work i will do it for free, but if it is commercial i will charge the standard rate, 50$/hr. i told him it was commercial, and agreed to his rate. i asked him if he needed an advance payment, he said no need, you ll pay me when the job is done. i sent him the db dumps, after two days he sent me the csv, i checked it, all was good and wired him the money.
now compare this work relatioship with the relatioship with that bitch from the non profit.
* we met online, on a semi-anonymous forum, this guys profile was empty
* he trusted me enough to say that he would do it for free if i wasn t payed either
* i wasn t an asshole to take advantage of that trust
* he did the work without the advance payment
* i payed him the moment i verified the work

faith in humanity restored

So finished a project for a client, the client signed a contract. He signed off that all milestones where reached. Text me that he was very pleased.
We give 30 days to pay. 8 days before the due date he asked for a meeting, telling us he wants to go another direction and he wants the source code to show the new development team he's going with to get a quote from them. I tell him that, that's fine he can have the source files once he pays for the product which was in the contract they signed mind you!! And this FUCKING DICK FART threats to sue, saying he's calling his lawyer, threatening me and my development partner with physical violence, and saying he's going to sue me personally not because me work was bad but because I refused to give him the product before he paid. I was calm we offered to meet his new dev team explain the code, and show them what they needed to see to give the clients a quote and they would not allow that, saying how now I'm not getting paid instead I'm getting sued and that he will publicly shame my startup company. Just complete bullshit, good thing I saved the original contract he wanted me to sign which had threats of physical violence I. His contract... Which in retrospect should have been a hint, but it was the highest paying contract we ever landed. Seems he never planned on paying. What's a guy to do?

1)Get Project/idea
2)Look for the most suitable tech
3)Draw out all the functionality
4)Break into milestones
5)git init
6) git commit
7) Start
8) Test
9) Complete
10) Feel like a King

For the first time I am feeling like.... I hate my job.

Agile and Scrum can be fucked, but at least there is a work methodology. I was hired by a company being run the old school way.

These guys never heard of git??
- Fuck you. We never used git and neither should you.

Client company does not want to give me push/pull access to their gitlab instance??
- Fuck you, you can use our RDP server for that.

Project planning features be damned, they've got email, Teams and videocalls!

Can I develop in peace? Fuck no, I have to give IT support to the guy who hired me.

Our timeline is defined IN A FUCKING WORD DOCUMENT FOR FUCKS SAKE. I can't connect Issues to milestones in a Word doc

Oh, and the customer is running everything on prem. If there is a need to scale up, FUCK ME. I should have specified 20 machines from the get go or gtfo. We're using 2 machines to run 8 different services that are going to be ingesting and computing data.

They want state of the art on a cheapskate.

And I have nothing else lined up at the moment. Although I am soon to renew the contract... This contract binds me with professional responsibility for a project being ran by people who do not give a single fuck about optimizing the work process.

Caught up in a deathmarch project with buzzword driven, childish architects who treat devs like insects and brag about their non existant experience and achievements while imposing completely idiotic requirements and unrealistic milestones. I feel shit right now.

Capturing only the funniest milestones...

I'm in a situation here, I had an idea for an app and I started coding it. Since I'm a front end developer I find it not amusing to do the backend part. I then started to share the idea and such with good classmate (not a coder). I then made him join me on this adventure. After a lot of coding he said he wanted to contribute with something since I'm coding all day and he's not. Then we agreed freelancing the back end part.

Some time later we got a pretty good deal on some Indians doing the whole app. I thought to myself "this feels kinda good!" so we went on with the freelancer.

Days went to months and we finally got the app back. I did a mistake of paying him all the milestones without testing the app in its wholeness, later finding out that one part of the login system didn't work. That lead to a deeper debug to find out that the core function of the app was commented out.. I then wrote the freelancer back with minimal and slow response.

Now the deadline of the app is like in 2 months. If not we miss a whole year.

My classmate knows about this and he's the one who played for the freelancing. Now we have talked about me doing the whole backend myself.

The only issue I have now is that I feel like he's just sitting home doing nothing other than flashing money around and me busting my ass of writing code that I really am not good at. (basically learning more than coding)

But he played a lot of money for this.. So I feel kinda bad for him.

Rip life.

It's been a while since I've heard a consensus of a moronic idea from the corner offices. I was invited to a department planning meeting (just to listen, not necessarily engage or add value) and discussion went to the development of a mobile app.

Mgr1: "The CEO has the net present value of the mobile project as $20 million. Where did he get that number?"
VP: "No idea."
Mgr2: "How will it be any different than our web site that is already mobile compliant?"
VP: "It is to gain market share"
Mgr3: "Market share from who? A mobile app is not going to increase our customer base. At best, it will only move some of our existing customers to mobile. No way it would scale to those numbers."
VP: "The primary benefit is so customers can browse offline."
Mgr2: "Offline browsing isn't listed in the milestones."
Mgr1: "We're not going to push and keep gigs of data up-to-date on someone's phone just for random times they don't have internet access."
VP: "I guess that's right. We can push our pdf catalog. That's only a few hundred meg."
Mgr2: "Pushing the catalog? That's not on the listed milestones"
VP: "Its all assumed."
Mgr3: "Who owns this project? Web team is already maxed to capacity."
Mgr2: "Marketing team only has 3 developers, we can't take on anything as complex as a mobile app and support the existing processes."
Mgr1: "What about the network infrastructure and PCI compliance? We're talking about a system for the web site and another for mobile, right?"
Mgr2: "Who is going to manage all the versions in the app stores and future changes to the mobile platform?"
Mgr4: "Not us"
Mgr2: "Nope"
Mgr1: "OK, good. Its very likely this project will be dead on arrival at the next company strategic meeting."
VP: "Mobile the only project on the strategic meeting agenda. Sorry guys, it's happening. We're not going to leave $20 million sitting on the table.
<awkward silence>
VP: "Next item of business ..."

Most awkward video meeting?

Can a conference call count? This happened several years ago.

Diving into international markets that could potentially make us millions of $$ (no pressure), while the phone was ringing the CEO's number (in Norway), my manager leans over and whispers
DevMgr: "This project will be managed using *proper* software development methodologies, none of this agile shit you want to use."
<CEO picks up>

I had already been in talks with their dev team to get a feel for their tech stack and we had discussed project milestones, potential release cycles (laying the ground work for using agile methodologies) before getting upper mgmt involved.

The partner dev team was listening and kept throwing out agile buzzwords and I could tell my manager was getting pissed. He would blurt out "Those specifications will need to be fully documented before PaperTrail writes one line of code!". No one said anything, but I could tell the other mgrs/VPs in the room were uncomfortable with the hostility towards discussing features.

Any dev who is asked to give “deadlines” then cried about how it’s “waterfall” and you cannot produce business requirement deadlines in agile methodology needs to stop being dependent on terminology and learn that part of programming is proper estimation.

Milestones, business deadlines and agile can go-exist. Anyone who says they don’t, then cries “waterfall” when asked to produce deadlines greater than 4 weeks out, please never work with me

@dfox - I really like the swag store and all, but do you think you could come out with some unique/not-available-on-the-swag-store items for the big milestones?

It just adds to the allure imo!

Thanks for all that you both do!

The most difficult part about learning/working with new technology is the lack of online support and a really small community! So every time you're stuck with an error you got to open each and every configuration file to see which little value was throwing that page long error!!!!

The same happened with me while working with the new RedHat CEPH Storage while I was configuring my nodes using ceph-ansible. A new error pops up and it was like reaching milestones when I found the error halting up the execution of the playbook!

Today was a shit day and I was in a bad mood. I now had to do a very annoyint thing for uni so I got a bar of chocolate and wanted to reward myself at certain milestones. The bar is half empty and I haven't even started yet.

So the current project that I am working on has a couple of phases based on a running competition. Currently the project is in it's 3rd phase as specified in the documentation, but I just got told that there are changes that need to be done so we're moving onto Phase 2 Part 2. How does a phase have a Part 2?

Projects are like progress bars, they are really quick at 80-99% and then it takes a while until they have finished. The reason is the same, nobody thought about milestones and goals.

Estimate how long it will take you then double it. After that split the project into milestones and add the days you give a client to accept the milestone. If you have a good client you will get done early and refund them the difference. Otherwise you get paid well for dealing with a dumbass.

So, I’ve been thinking, and I’d appreciate your opinions:

When I work through long tutorials/books where you work towards a large scale app, I.e. through a book you build I fully functioning twitter clone with private messages, secure login etc etc I always create a GitHub repo, but then I break the chapters/modules of the book into milestones, and then create issues for each task within the chapter and assign them to myself.

I also write full on “proper” commit messages.

A part of me feels like I’m a bit weird for treating these sorts of thing like a “real” project, but at the same time, it feels like a good idea to always do things properly so good practices, like quality commit messages, become second nature

Tech and product teams have to be aligned. If not, there’s chaos where dev teams suffer. No skunk project(s), no adhoc project(s), No special or pet projects for the CTO or Product Manager. Figure out what needs to get done, plan a road map, plan milestones to get there, consider the folks who ACTUALLY does the work. Protect your teams work-life balance.

So I've been doing GSoC this summer (sort of a paid project for an open source org.), and have not made it to any milestones whatsoever, even with 10-12 hour days and almost no days off. The other GSoCcers in my organization are just doing amazing, so I wonder wtf is wrong with me. I got past the midterm because my mentor is amazing, but wtf, I fucking exhausted of trying so hard just to fall on the "slightly below average" mark. I'm 21 and I feel too old to do anything great aleady!!

Now I have to quit whining and get back to work.

got kicked out of a contract today because the owner felt I wasn't moving at the pace he wanted, there were no milestones but even i knew I was slow.

this happened when I started talking to a therapist because I was beginning to have suicidal thoughts and anxiety issues.

I had to run work errands for my everly screaming mom and manipulative dad.

these same people who I begged with no success for money to buy a used core 2 duo laptop for programming projects.

I was in the bus in the afternoon sun trying to get three books from a publisher that ended up being a waste of time because she didn't follow instructions and insisted on screaming over the phone at the attendant. the client requested a meeting and I couldn't respond positively,

I get home and my dad wants me to travel down to our village home to meet with some kid he kept giving money because they wanted to have a meeting. I'm so annoyed because I told him I wanted this week off to face this already dead contract and he just ignores all of that and fixes a meeting.

I pay for electricity and gas for these people and they still treat me like shit. fuck this !

Trial period validated ! Yeay ! 🎉🎊

(imagine all of this said in Undoomed's "hey moron" tone)

Hey, moron, fuckin moron! How about if you're a noob with no actual programmer on your side, you just tell me so we can work it out together, instead of sending a moronic 4page "acceptance criteria" that pretend you know what you're talking about, and then bury me under loads of moronic noob questions that reveal you as thenmoron you are, all of that for a fuckin 50 quid?! I thought it's me being an idiot, not being able to do the task within two days timeframe, but now I see you're just too much of a moron to have any idea how much these things take. And now you nonchalantly mention a one-line one point from the four page document full of drivel, which (loads of moronism credit for me here) i didn't notice amongst all of that other mundane drivel, which actually like doubles the whole workload on the task, but your moronic document, which makes 3 parts of the same algorithm into three separate MILESTONES, makes this whole thing that nearly DOUBLES the workload into a shitty SEVENTH SUBPOINT of the completely unrelated first "milestone"?

FUCK YOU, YOU STUPID ROBBERY CHEAPFUCK, and fuck me for letting myself be tricked by all your fancy wordings that pretend you actually know what the fuck you are asking for, so i assumed you did, so I missed THE POINT, WHICH ACCORDING TO THE SEGMENTATION LOGIC OF THE WHOLE REST OF THE DOCUMENT SHOULD BE 3 SEPARATE FULL-SIZED MILESTONES, NOT A SINGLE SUBPOINT, YOU FUCKING FUCK!

... so much for still trying to at least a bit trust people.

FUCKING DISGUSTING MORONIC CHEAPSKATE FUCK.

and I can't even tell him to fuck off through the rectum he came here because he's all nice and polite so I would be the asshole!

"hey, please, can you build me a house?"
*house is basically finished*
"oh, great job, i love it, but i think you might have missed the fineprint in our contract that says that the house is supposed to stand inside an entry hall of a multibillionaire-sized mansion, so could we please sort that out and add it to the building real quick before i pay you the toolshed's worth we agreed on based on the contract? "

FUCK. HIM.
FUCK
FUCKFUCKFUCKSHITFUCKERYFUCKDISGUSTINGIDIOTICFUCKINGFUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!

i thought i can be a shitty liar and a con man, but this is some next level shit that would be totally beyond my abilities to pull off...

YES I KNOW IT'S MY FAULT I DIDN'T COMB THROUGH THAT BULLSIT "SPECS" OF HIS LETTER BY LETTER TO MAKE SURE THERE'S NO CON BULLSHIT LIKE THIS HIDDEN AMONGST ALL OF THAT MUNDANE SELF-EVIDENT PSEUDO-TECHNICAL DRIVEL, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

fucking disgusting moron, pretending all nice and innocent probably even to himself because he HAS NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT HE EVEN ASKS FOR.

i bet it's one of those pukefucks who get an overpriced contract for 50k without even knowing or caring what programming is, because "i'll just outsource the core functionality of the app for 50 quid to some naiive idiot who lives in the illusion that people are not diarrhorea-worthy pieces of feces, and this other third of the app to some other moron for hundred quid and then i somehow outsource gluing it together to some third poor sod, and that's 49.8k quid of pure profit for me, yay"

and now i'm torn between three options, just cancelling the "contract" with a comment saying "fuck off, you con man", or cancelling it with a lengthy explanation why he's a know-nothing piece of shit who conned me already into having done something worth about 5x more than his shitty "acceptance criteria" requests, or just start conning and bulshitting him back, which won't net me any money, and waste my time, but at least will also waste HIS time, which might be nice because he seems to be on a tight schedule so if i play this right i might have the chance to sink his whole contract which might be mighty nice satisfying...

FUCK THIS, ALL OF THIS, FUCK HIM, FUCK ME, FUCK ALL OF YOU, I SHOULD HAVE STARTED FUCKING OVER EVERYONE RUTHLESSLY A LONG TIME AGO BECAUSE FUCK THE WHOLE WORLD, WHY SHOULD I CARE WHEN NOBODY ELSE DOES, WHY SHOULD I BE DECENT WHEN NOBODY ELSE IS, AND IT ONLY ROYALLY BITES ME IN THE ASS.

stupid fucking lobotomized fuck, IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO SOMETHING, DON'T OFFER YOURSELF TO DO IT FOR MONEY AND THEN CON-SOURCE IT TO OTHERS YOU SHITTY BARFPILE!

FUCK.

1. write down requirements. what exactly do i want?
2. paint possible solution. how could the finished product look like? while doing this i think through each step of the application and often adjust step 1 until i think 'this is it'
3. design model. how could the database look like. what structure do i need?
4. define milestones. What to do first?
5. Start and keep 1-4 up to date

75% of the meetings with tech management (CTO and alike) could be efficient and effective if only they used proper tooling with Issues and Milestones as provided by their *self-hosted* GitLab instance.

They just use emails instead.

Okay. Here's the ONLY two scenarios where automated testing is justified:
- An outsourcing company who is given the task of bug elimination in legacy code with a really short timeframe. Then yes, writing tests is like waging war on bugs, securing more and more land inch after inch.
- A company located in an area where hiring ten junior developers is cheaper than hiring one principal developer. Then yes, the business advantage is very real.

That's it. That's the only two scenarios where automated testing is justified. Other such scenarios doesn't exist.

Why? Because any robust testing system (not just "adding some tests here and there") is a _declarative_ one. On top of already being declarative (opposed to the imperative environment where the actual code exists), if you go further and implement TDD, your tests suddenly begins to describe your domain area, turning into a declarative DSL.

Such transformations are inevitable. You can't catch bugs in the first place if your tests are ignorant of entities your code is working with.

That being said, any TDD-driven project consists of two things:
- Imperative code that implements business logic
- Declarative DSL made of automated tests that also describes the same business logic

Can't you see that this system is _wet_? The tests set alone in a TDD-driven project are enough to trivially derive the actual, complete code from it.

It's almost like it's easier to just write in a declarative language in the first place, in the same way tests are written in TDD project, and scrap the imperative part altogether.

In imperative languages, absence of errors can be mathematically guaranteed. In imperative languages, the best performance (e.g. the lowest algorithmic complexity) can also be mathematically guaranteed. There is a perfectly real point after which Haskell rips C apart in terms of performance, and that point happens earlier on than you think.

If you transitioned from a junior who doesn't get why tests are needed to a competent engineer who sees value in TDD, that's amazing. But like with any professional development, it's better to remember that it's always possible to go further. After the two milestones I described, the third exists — the complete shift into the declarative world.

For a human brain, it's natural to blindly and aggressively reject whatever information leads to the need of exiting the comfort zone. Hence the usual shitstorm that happens every time I say something about automated testing. I understand you, and more than that, I forgive you.

The only advice I would allow myself to give you is just for fun, on a weekend, open a tutorial to a language you never tried before, and spend 20 minutes messing around with it. Maybe you'll laugh at me, but that's the exact way I got from earning $200 to earning $3500 back when I was hired as a CTO for the first time.

Good luck!