Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

I was a little too harsh on a colleague today.

He asked to help him get something working... After looking at it for a bit, I asked: "I don't get it, what have you been doing all day? Yesterday we split this element into two separate divs, and it worked perfectly, now I've see you've moved all the styles back to the container and there's only one div. The easiest way to get this to work properly is to simply undo everything you've done today."

He looked at me with puppy eyes and I realized I was too harsh. He wasn't _trying_ to break everything, he just hadn't understood why we split the element into two divs. So I lowered my tone a bit, and explained everything again, from the start, then did it again together with him and made sure he understood the separation.

But I still feel bad for how I talked to him. It's not like I shouted or cursed or anything (and I curse a _lot_ when talking about code). It was just condescending as fuck, and belittling. As if I was mocking him for not being as experienced as I am.

I'll do better next time.

fujioaskl;f;asdfjkl
WHY THE FUCK DOES MY BOSS HAVE ME MOCKING FUCKING RECAPTCHA API RESPONSES? IT'S SO FUCKING STUPID

I CAN'T MOCK THE RECAPTCHA JS METHODS SO I HAVE TO MAKE VALID-LOOKING JSON RESPONSES AND I DON'T HAVE A FUCKING CLUE HOW ANY OF IT FUCKING WORKS

THIS IS THE STUPIDEST THING ANYONE HAS EVER ASKED OF ME (okay, it isn't, but it's pretty damned close.) AND IT'S DURING MY BLOODY PERFORMANCE REVIEW.

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.

The sad story of a coders life in india..

So apparently my friends don't understand the basic concept of "enjoying" coding. This comes from a 1st yr undergrad. Everyone here view coding as some subject or some college course that is done just for the sake of grades. When they get free time, they waste it away smoking up at some filthy old building mocking us coders. Sadly I share a room with such idiots. The problem is that coding is something we love, something we do because our hearts yearn for it, because we are addicted. And because of my useless roommates, I'm losing out on my friggin friends. I swear we coders are always looked down upon way too much. We aren't usual nerds, we just don't believe in wasting our time on tinder or Facebook or smoking pot.

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.

I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).

She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).

So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.

Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.

She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).

So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.

Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.

Recently, our team hired an arrogant trainee-junior to the team, who turned out to be mean towards the other developers and in a habit of publicly mocking their opinions and going as far as cursing at them. He steals credit and insults others. He openly admits he's an offensive person and not a team player. When someone from the team speaks, he might break into laughter and say demeaning sentences like "that's so irrelevant oh my god did you really say that? hahaha". Our team consists of polite and introverted engineers who cannot stand up to bullies. Normally this kind of behavior won't be suitable even if you work in a burger shop especially not from a trainee. Let alone trainee, the rude behavior of Linus Torvalds was not tolerated, despite him being in the top position and a recognized star talent in the IT field.

I personally no longer feel comfortable speaking up during teams meetings or in the slack team chat. I'm afraid my opinions will be ridiculed or ashamed - likely will be called "irrelevant". I respond only if I'm directly addressed. We have important features coming up, requested by the customer, but I feel discouraged to publicly ask questions - I sort of feel having to regress into contributing less for the product. I also witness that other younger developers speak less now in meetings and team chat. Feels like everyone is hiding under the bed. Our product team used to have friendly working atmosphere but now the atmosphere is a bit like we're not a team anymore but a knot.

Lesson I learnt from here is: There is a reason why some companies have personality tests and HR interviews. Our proud short boarding process was consisting of a single technical interview. Perhaps at least a team interview should be held before hiring a person to the team, or the new hire should at least be posed a question: are you a team player? Technical skills can be taught more easily than social skills. If some youngster is unable to communicate in a civilized manner for even five minutes, it should raise some red flags. Otherwise you will end up with people who got refused from other companies which knew better.

Dynamically typed languages are barbaric to me.

It's pretty much universally understood that programmers program with types in mind (if you have a method that takes a name, it's a string. You don't want a name that's an integer).

Even it you don't like the verbosity of type annotations, that's fine. It adds maybe seconds of time to type, which is neglible in my opinion, but it's a discussion to be had.

If that's the case, use Crystal. It's statically typed, and no type annotations are required (it looks nearly identical to Ruby).

So many errors are fixed by static typing and compilers. I know a person who migrated most of the Python std library to Haskell and found typing errors in it. *In their standard library*. If the developers of Python can't be trusted to avoid simple typing errors with all their unit tests, how can anyone?

Plus, even if unit testing universally guarded against typing errors, why would you prefer that? It takes far less time to add a type annotation (and even less time to write nothing in Crystal), and you get the benefit of knowing types at compile time.

I've had some super weird type experiences in Ruby. You can mock out the return of the type check to be what you want. I've been unit testing in Ruby before, tried mocking a method on a type, didn't work as I expected. Checked the type, it lines up.

Turns out, nested away in some obscure place was a factory that was generating types and masking them as different types because we figured "since it responds to all the same methods, it's practically the same type right?", but not in the unit test. Took 45 minutes on my time when it could've taken ~0 seconds in a statically typed language.

"I'm almost done, I'll just need to add tests!"

Booom! You did it, that was a nuke going off in my head.

No, you shouldn't just need to add tests. The tests should have been written from the get go! You most likely won't cover all the cases. You won't know if adding the tests will break your feature, as you had none, as you refactor your untested mess in order to make your code testable.

When reading your mess of a test case and the painful mocking process you went through, I silently cry out into the void: "Why oh why!? All of this suffering could have been avoided!"

Since most of the time, your mocking pain boils down to not understanding what your "unit" in your "unit test" should be.

So let it be said:

- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, then just write a function / class whose *only* purpose is: parse the XML file, return a value object. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, it MUST NOT: download a zip, extract that zip, merge all those files to one big file, parse that big file, talk to some other random APIs as a side-effect, and then return a value object.

Because then you suddenly have to mock away a http service and deal with zip files in your test cases.

The http util of your programming language will most likely work. Your unzip library will most likely work. So just assume it working. There are valid use cases where you want to make sure you acutally send a request and get a response, yet I am talking unit test here only.

In the scope of a class, keep the public methods to a reasonable minimum. As for each public method you shall at least create one test case. If you ever have the feeling "I want to test that private method" replace that statement in your head with: "I should extract that functionality to a new class where that method public. I then can create a unit test case a for that." That new service then becomes a dependency in your current service. Problem solved.

Also, mocking away dependencies should a simple process. If your mocking process fills half the screen, your test setup is overly complicated and your class is doing too much.

That's why I currently dig functional programming so much. When you build pure functions without side effects, unit tests are easy to write. Yet you can apply pure functions to OOP as well (to a degree). Embrace immutability.

Sidenote:

It's really not helpful that a lot of developers don't understand the difference between unit, functional acceptance, integration testing. Then they wonder why they can't test something easily, write overly complex test cases, until someone points out to them: No, in the scope of unit tests, we don't need to test our persistance layer. We just assume that it works. We should only test our businsess logic. You know: "Assuming that I get that response from the database, I expect that to happen." You don't need a test db, make a real query against that, in order to test that. (That still is a valid thing to do. Yet not in the scope of unit tests.)

Story of WTF happened to my job

During my employment in (name censored) was stressful, They claimed I didn't complete my task on time which they constantly remove me from git and documentation(which have to follow their style of returning data), I kept emailing, slack, WhatsApp calls them, mostly and predictably got ghosted and blocked.

So How the fuck am I supposed to push my code or code without the documentation (I can actually, prevent refactoring every time, following the documentation is the good way to go.)

On the sprint review, they will complain about me not committing and pushing the code. (I did commit locally, but can't push, they removed me from the fucking repo) and not done.

Tried reasoning, telling the obvious reasons with them, doesn't work. They come out the second reason of me "NOT COMMUNICATING". Sometimes I can get to git merge from dev to my branch and get tonnes of fucked up code. I reviewed the code, and I can't tolerate it.

Lately, I overheard them mocking and cheering me about to get fired over a zoom meeting (I was in there, they forgot to remove me). Their conversation is about me being a coloniser, a jerk, betraying Chinese ancestors for being not Chinese enough.

I was like: "Why the fuck does their conversation sound like they are tucked in the Qin dynasty?"

Frequently I got labelled as unprofessional.

How is cussing about my ancestors, personal and life a professional behaviour?

I never thought I'd say this but I fucking hate my cousins and relatives.

Money and fame hungry people, constantly judging and excluding if you are not 'cool' enough. Give them attention, obey their orders, spend your money on them if you want to be considered human by them.

They spend 24x7 of their on Instagram with all their activities and gatherings revolving around the core idea of taking pictures and showcasing on Instagram.

All of them have inherited a fuck ton of fortune from their parents and live to spend. Nothing else in their life.

Their ideology is everyone should spend all their money and even if you have $5 in your savings, you are miser.

Cousins and relatives have bullied so much in my childhood that I had to go for therapy before I stabilised a little. They still fuck around and use me.

Now that I am living a better life than what I used to, they have started mocking my parents for it by shaming and excluding them from the family.

Not only I never wished ill but I prayed for their good health and success all my life. But all they did was neglect and ignore me.

Fucking blood sucking bastards. I still don't wish bad but I never thought I'd see this day where I'd hate them so much.

As I have worked really hard for my current life, because unlike them I had no fortune to be inherited, they pick some weak aspect of my life and poke it continuously to the point that it hurts me.

I never felt so alone. If not for my parents, I'd cut off all the times with such scums and move out for a better life with new people in life.

Mocking hardcoded data in frozen constants in Rails is such a fucking pain! Why must this be so difficult!?

asfdfakldsjfuck

I'm staring into my empty coffee mug,
hoping I could find this annoying bug.
Like always I have no such luck,
so I'm turning to my rubber duck.
He's emotionless expression I cannot read,
Guess he doesn't have what I need...
I can feel the bug mocking my face,
While I'm aimlessly looking into space.

I'm getting really tired of those dumbass programmers that do not understand shit and then come to me when production breaks. (I am also a programmer, not really a DevOps engineer, but I'm the least worst at DevOps stuff, so it's my job...).

We're programming some kind of document management tool. Today we had a release, and one of the new features is to download all of your documents as a zip file, which is asynchronuously generated. When it's done, the user gets a mail with the download link to the zip file.

The feature works basically, but today it broke our production service, as somebody was running a test of it.

Turns out all the documents are loaded into memory to be zipped. So if you have 2 gigs of documents, a container with memory restrictions in that area will crash.

I asked the programmer who reported this «ops problem» to me, why he didn't just shit the files into a temp foler in order to zip them in there.

He told me that he wanted to do so, but did not know how to mock this for a unit test, and therefore went to the in-memory «solution», which was easier for him to mock.

For fuck's sake, unit tests and mocks are fucking tools, not ends in itself! I don't give a fuck about your pointless mocking code when the application crashes!

When I got to deal with such dumbasses, I'd prefer to mock those motherfuckers with a leaky bucket of liquid shit, which basically accomplishes the same task from my perspective: dripping shit all over the place and make everything suck as fuck.

My deparment manager said to me that I'm the first person he encountered that has a fetish for writing documentation.
In the context of the conversation I felt he was mocking me, that he doesn't understand why its important, and I why feel obligated to do it (everything was a mess when I joined the team 2 years ago).

Being the only dev in charge of the project, makes you the one to be blamed for.

The God saviour, shiny armoured back end developer that joined the "team" (only me) to help into this new project Just Said in a meeting:

- "I wont code anything for this new project, I can't get the point of It"

So every meeting was
- "why feature X is not ready?"
- "I'm waiting the endpoint for It"
- "well, then mock It"

Now I fucking give up.
One month mocking things and "presenting" features that don't even exist.

what kind of dumb fuck you have to be to get the react js dev job in company that has agile processes if you hate the JS all the way along with refusing to invest your time to learn about shit you are supposed to do and let's add total lack of understanding how things work, specifically giving zero fucks about agile and mocking it on every occasion and asking stupid questions that are answered in first 5 minutes of reading any blog post about intro to agile processes? Is it to annoy the shit out of others?

On top of that trying to reinvent the wheels for every friggin task with some totally unrelated tech or stack that is not used in the company you work for?

and solution is always half-assed and I always find flaw in it by just looking at it as there are tons of battle-tested solutions or patterns that are better by 100 miles regarding ease of use, security and optimization.

classic php/mysql backend issues - "ooh, the java has garbage collector" - i don't give a fuck about java at this company, give me friggin php solution - 'ooh, that issue in python/haskel/C#/LUA/basically any other prog language is resolved totally different and it looks better!' - well it seems that he knows everything besides php!

Yeah we will change all the fucking tech we use in this huge ass app because your inability to learn to focus on the friggin problem in the friggin language you got the job for.

Guy works with react, asked about thoughts on react - 'i hope it cease to exists along with whole JS ecosystem as soon as possible, because JS is weird'. Great, why did you fucking applied for the job in the first place if it pushes all of your wrong buttons!

Fucking rockstar/ninja developers! (and I don't mean on actual 'rockstar' language devs).

Also constantly talks about game development and we are developing web-related suite of apps, so why the fuck did you even applied? why?

I just hate that attitude of mocking everything and everyone along with the 'god complex' without really contributing with any constructive feedback combined with half-assed doing something that someone before him already mastered and on top of that pretending that is on the same level, but mainly acting as at least 2 levels above, alas in reality just produces bolognese that everybody has to clean up later.

When someone gives constructive feedback with lenghty argument why and how that solution is wrong on so many levels, pulls the 'well, i'm still learning that' card.

If I as code monkey can learn something in 2 friggin days including good practices and most of crazy intricacies about that new thing, you as a programmer god should be able to learn it in 2 fucking hours!

Fucking arrogant pricks!

It’s late, and stupid RSpec has decided to only mock calls to a particular method in some specs but not in others.

`allow(object).to receive(:method).with(resource_arg).and_return(“some\ntext”)`

Works in a few specs, but not the rest. Why? Who the fuck knows. Probably some shared state between specs that isn’t supposed to happen.

HAHA JUST KIDDING

After refactoring my specs to use unique ‘resource’ names for each call because I’ve had shared state issues before.

and after refactoring my model code to remove a lot of now-unused dependency injection (because maybe it was mocking a different object than got passed in?)

Guess what?
When creating my mock objects, I forgot to link them together. That’s it. A 14-character change. And suddenly they all pass.

Asdjklfajg.
Time for bed.

The way I was told to write unit tests was particularly terrible.

No mocking of objects or dependencies so the tests ran the actual code in full including updating databases and files. Then at the end of each test there was code to restore all changes back to before the test.

Each test ended up being over 100 lines. Madness.

Had a tech interview earlier today.

👨‍💻: What mocking framework do you use the most?
🧔: Smoking framework???
👨‍💻: ...

I guess either he needs to improve his skills or I have to polish my English 😂

Cocktail for disaster:

- TDD
- Mocking
- Multithreading
- Averagely well written, testable code
- All tests pass
- One test methods still shows some vague stacktrace in a worker thread ❌ but the test passes ✅
- Run only that test method and no stacktrace.

So I've been pulling my hair for the last two days trying to figure out what was throwing in that test method. Turns out that thanks to the multithreading going on, some other, similar method threw the exception in parallel. And apparently a different test method was already running when the exception was finally caught.

🖕

When I discovered that, it was fixed in a minute. 😭

I recently have been delegated the responsibility of managing a 4 people team by planning the sprints, scheduling tasks, and in general "take charge" (as said by the boss).

What bothers me is there is this "developer" with a heavily toxic attitude, who feels he is above all laws and knows everything just because he joined some months ago all of us.

He is basically a human linter. When he code reviews, you can get away with any major mistake if your linting and indentation (and all that shit) is according to "his standards".

A new guy recently joined the team and was given an overwhelming task by the boss just to test whether he belongs here. (Again, wrong, in my opinion). He didn't know any of the technologies he needs to work on to complete that task but he still learnt them and got a working product. Albeit not according to our God's "standards".

Cut to the chase, the asshole dev is now mocking him in PR comments and demeaning him in every discussion. As a "team lead", what should I do? If I let it go, it'll make the environment toxic and I don't want him to get away with it. If I do take any action, I don't want to be seen as as pussy who can't take such minor insults. Please advise.

PS. The asshole developer once wrote a "friend request accept" API endpoint in such a way that when any single person accepts a request, that'll cause all pending requests (from any person to any person) get accepted. Fucked up the DB queries basically. This is just to give a perspective on what I'm dealing with here.

I have to install windows for this project because I usually work in spare half hours and the virtual machine takes 15 minutes to boot.

I tried to Google what to do if my only windows machine has space on the secondary disk only, because the install media creator requires 8 gigabytes. The only answers were mocking the op for buying a 50 GB SSD. I didn't even start working and I already hate the windows community.

Not dev, but a perf-eng confidence boost.

Our company was hired by a client to onboard perf-testing process and do some perf-related go-live stuff. Basically, make sure the app meets the SLAs.

Our company mobilized some internal resources for the task. The had 3-4 months. 2 months later they realized they won't pull it off. What a shame...

When the threat of dropping the ball and losing the client and recommendations became very real, they engaged us. Half the time, half the resources, a worried and annoyed client who now wants to control the whole initiative.

During the first 2 meetings we get the general idea of what they have, what they want. We take some time to prepare a plan to make it on time. The client argues our plan, mostly because one of the main points was mocking downstream dependencies [integrations]. He asks, then demands to do it all with live integrations. We explain why this is an incredible risk and why we should do it the proposed way. He disagrees.

Alright then... Maybe he knows smth we don't. Let's do it the risky way...

A month later test results are far from the target. I did my best with app de-bottlenecking and fine-tuning. But since the live integrations do not deliver, they hide other bottlenecks. The initiative is stuck.

Finally, the client agrees to do it with mocking. But now there's no time left as it will take almost a month to prepare mocks...

The client agrees we should have done it our way from the start. They postpone the go-live and we carry out our testing and tuning the right way.

That was one expensive and long "I told you so". But it boosted our [perf team's] confidence to the top and beyond :)

don't tell us how to do our job, unless you do want extra expenses

Right now. It's happening. I'm sitting on one of those seemingly impossible issues. I'm reading the exception and can't fathom how it can be true. I mean, the evidence is right there! The error message must be wrong! But that's the thing, it never is. It's always something stupid and obvious. After you figure it out, you shake your head and laugh at yourself for not seeing it. It's all shits and giggles after you figure it out, but that's not where I'm at right now. Right now I'm being laughed at by this stack trace. It's mocking me even!
Jokes on you though, because I'm coming for you!!

i am (somewhat unreasonably) mad at a ten year old classmate of my child. he showed off his programming skills by typing print commands. i wanted to mock him a little by pointing out python 2 would be out of date. he called my child a noob and suggested i don't know shit and he'd be coding c++.

so beside me obviously having no dignity for mocking someone quarter my age, i am not even mad for him talking shit about me, i am just overwhelmingly disappointed about his entitlement and blatant lies. so this is the future? this is an uprising nerd? i'd love to encourage every child on programming, but not with this attitude.

I am part of a Slack group with dev friends all a lot better than I am. So I write my problem there. After they're done (playfully) mocking me, I am so frustrated that I usually find a perfectly obvious solution when I look back at my thing.
Or I use them as digital rubber humans.

I code. I'm not a network or security admin. Did you even read my resume before hiring me? It says "math degree then data analysis then programming degree" Subnets, firewalls and security certs are not my areas of expertise. Given enough time, could I stumble through? Probably. But I'd probably come up with something worthy of mocking on networkadminrant.

mocking my friend who can't async

Finally made my node production server stable enough that I could focus on writing tests*. I start by setting up docker, mocking cognito, preparing the database and everything. Reading up on Node test suites and following a short tut to set up my first unit test. Didn't go smoothly, but it's local and there are no deadlines so who cares. 4 days later, first assert.equal(1+1, 2) passes and I'm happy.

I start writing all sorts of tests, installing everything required into "devDependancies," and getting the joy of having some tests pass on first try with all asserts set up, feels good!

I decide to make a small update to production, so I add a test, run and see it fail, implement the feature, re-run and, it passes!

I push the feature to develop, test it, and it works as intended. Merge that to master and subsequently to one of my ec2 production servers**, and lo and behold, production server is on a bootloop claiming it "Cannot find module `graphql`". But how? I didn't change any production dependencies, and my package lock json is committed so wth?

I google the issue, but can't find anything relevant. The only thing that I could guess was that some dependencies (including graphql) were referenced*** in both, prod and dev, and were omitted when installed on a prod NODE_ENV, but googling that specific issue yielded no results, and I would have thought npm would be clever enough to see that and would always install those dependencies (spoiler: it didn't for me).

With reduced production capacity (having one server down) I decided to npm uninstall all dev dependencies anyway and see what happens. Aaaaand it works.....

So now I have a working production server, but broken local tests, and I'm not sure why npm is behaving like this...

* Yes I see the irony.
** No staging because $$$, also this is a personal project.
*** I am not directly referencing the same thing twice, it's probably a subdependency somewhere.

!RANT

Oh, the SORROW that is JEST! 😡

Endless days have been swallowed by the abyss in my quest to configure Jest with TypeScript and ECMAScript modules instead of CommonJS. Triumph seemed within my grasp until - BAM! - suddenly the tool forgets what "import" or "export" means. And the kicker? On the CI, it still runs like nothing’s amiss!

Allow me to elucidate for the uninitiated: Jest is supposed to be a testing safeguard, a protective barrier insulating devs from the errors of their peers, ensuring a smooth, uninterrupted coding experience.

But OH, how the tables have turned when the very shield becomes the sword, stabbing me with countless, infuriating errors birthed from Jest’s own design decisions!

The audacity to reinvent the whole module loading process just to facilitate module mocking is mind-boggling! Imagine constructing an entirely new ecosystem just to allow people to pretend modules are something they're not. This is not just overkill; it's a preposterous reinvention of a wheel that insists on being a pentagon!

Sure, if devs want to globally expose their variables, entwining everything in a static context, so be it. BUT, why should we, who walk the righteous path of dependency injection, be subjugated to this configured chaos?!

My blood boils as the jestering Jest thrusts upon me a fragile, perpetually breaking system, punishing ME for its determination to support whole module mocking! A technique, mind you, that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, because, you know, DEPENDENCY INJECTION!

Where are the alternatives, you ask? Drowned in the abyss, it seems! Why can’t we embrace snapshots and all the delectable integrations WITHOUT being dragged through this module-mocking mire? Can’t module mocking just be a friendly sidekick, an OPTIONAL add-on, rather than the cruel dictator forcing its agenda upon our code?

Punish those clinging to their static contexts, their global variables – NOT those of us advocating for cleaner, more stable practices!

It’s high time we decouple the goodness of Jest from its built-in bad practices. Must we continue to dance with the devil to delight in the depth of Jest’s capabilities?

WHY, Jest, WHY?! 😭

We were having a project followup and a colleague starts boasting to the client about her perfect school grades, so a friend, our tech lead and I start sending messages mocking her, so the tech leads bursted laughing in the middle of the meeting, then the pm asked him what was going on and he rated us out, since then he never uses his cellphone again during meetings.

PM: *mocking me if I'll JUST wait for feedback*
Me: *thinking* I can't produce everything from an INCOMPLETE DB schema and incomplete App Scribble, can I?

Okay so I’ve been brought in on a 12 month contract as an external replacement integration architect, alongside a large IT consulting firm. Turns out, they don’t need an integration architect. So I fill my time coming up with useful tools around the project that deal with all the missing parts in their MVP: like monitoring tools, data mocking tools, you get the idea. Essentially doodling.

Client has woken up to fact that they’ve overspent by X million, employing 30+‘developers’, 20+ ‘testers’, n+ ‘managers’ on a ‘low-code’ project … result: project shuts 4 months early.

Q: Essentially client wants remaining four months work done in two weeks. Is there a German word for laughing, crying, and banging the forehead on the desk at the same time?

Supplementary: how cross will client be when they realise project can indeed be done, and that consultancy have been emperor’s-new-clothing them for most of the last two years?

(Feel free to perform substitution on quoted terms at your leisure)

Just spent 3 fucking hours trying to find out why my tests are failing. I'm mocking ef with an in memory sqlite dB as THE FUCKING. Net docs say to.

My code does a simple decimal comparison in a linq statement and returns bullshit. Why? Sqlite does not have a decimal type, it does some sort of BULLSHIT to convert it into some sort of text value.

I change all my models to use doubles instead of decimals and all my tests turn green.

WTF IS THIS SHIT. If it doesn't work don't tell me to use it. I expect better of the. Net docs. Wtf are they doing.

Spent 1-2h (or it felt like so) fixing this one bug today. I'm still mad about it LoL. I knew exactly what was the problem, just didn't know where it was, and went over that piece of code time and time again and didn't see it... UGH THE FRUSTRATION. When I found the error I wanted to get inside a hole and die of how stupid a mistake it was and how it had been staring at me in the face, mocking me for being so dumb. ARGH!

You're kidding. You know how React, GraphQl, and Jest are made by facebook. You would think that Jest then would be framework of choice for mocking gql queries and responses for a React app. And you would be wrong. You "can, but-", depending on your implementation - ours being based on official sources - not without contorting and duplicating everything related to the query implementation at which you are barely even testing the app itself. We're using named imports from .gql files, for those familiar.

Don't you hate it when it turns out the guy going "nah tests were too hard, we didn't bother" was right.

My fellow developer was given a responsibility of writing unit test cases.
And instead of mocking the db calls he ended up making actual calls to db and adding realtime data to firestore everytime a test runs. Also he used mocha for the same. When i told him that we need to mock the db calls he said he will use sinon.js for the same and for code coverage his plans were to use istanbul.
I was like FUCKKKKKKK. , why the fk you aren't using jest. I mean whyyyyyyyy. WHAT THE FK

Can not fucking believe even the richest man in the world is mocking college because he knows its all a FUCKING BULLSHIT AND THE LARGEST SCAM TO EXIST

How do you think about unit testing/TDD when writing apps? (I'm working this at 3am so might be a bit messy... Just a thought I woke up to).

Whenever I write an app, I don't write unit tests but as I'm developing I may create test functions for specific parts that I run to validate a specific component is working before moving onto the next.

So first, when I get a problem, break it up into components based on the requirements. It's usually sort of input, processor, output sequence.

Where the processor is essentially the core app. And so I start coding it, referring to the input thru an interface, model objects, adding fields as I go along (assume no matter what the input, I will get these before the logic is called). I may add some more interfaces as well for other data I may need but I know won't be going in the first input.

So I write all the logic, functions needed to get a basic app to run that does what I am writing the app for.

Only then do I write a test functions passing in different parameters to make sure the logic and response is what I want and making fixes as necessary. At that point I basically have the simplest version of the app.
(I guess this is sort of like mocking?)

Then build outwards implementing and testing components as I go along and may do some simple refactoring/redesign. (I guess all these tests are functional then, have to start the whole app).

And finally when I have the basic requirements fully complete I will add the "nice to haves" on top via refactoring of specific logic in specific components. Again testing by running the app maybe with simple inputs.

I guess now I'm thinking how do you write unit tests/TDD if the app keeps changing (via adhoc refactorings) as you are creating it?

That rabbit in my grandpa's left table drawer, in the home I grew at. I wanted to finally catch it, and kill it. I was bad with animals all along, especially this one. My grandpa died the year before I was born, and my grandma said we would've got along really well. So much to talk about, a scientist to an engineer. So, I travelled back, but my home somehow turned from a city stone-walled house into a half-soaked, decaying wooden one. I caught that rabbit though, but while I was holding it at its neck and twisting it, it somehow disappeared, distributed evenly as if I were twisting a crayon. I was trying to find it, but in that left drawer, among century-old pencils and that red liquid thermometer I played with as a kid, only a faded out, dusty duckling resided. I picked it up, and unlike the rabbit, it was paper, no, cigarette paper thin. It wasn't hostile. It wasn't trying to run away. It just turned from yellow to grey, feathers leaving my fingers covered in fine dust. I realized it will never die, dwelling and decaying there forever, happy.

I did my calculations, and I knew for a fact when and where the rabbit should've appeared. It was the middle drawer, not the left one. I opened it and looked in anticipation how something chewed through the bottom. I caught it, but it was no rabbit, it was an alive, rubber rat. The rubber was white turned grey, old, aged, dusty, probably Soviet. I poked the rat's eye with a pen rod, but the rat's body inflated a bit, leaving it invincible. It was mocking me.

Of the same white rubber, a ball appeared. I knew for a fact it was alive too, I felt the bones inside holding it. I found its lips, and was prying it open. The massive, dry mouth emerged, with a full set of human teeth, albeit wider and nastier ones. Huge eyes looked at me. It was alive, it was intelligent. It was my grandpa's personal financial assistant all along. It told me to leave the rat and the rabbit alone. He told me not to worry about the ducking, as it was in safe hands.

It made friends with my brother during the "blue age", when he was wearing thin, worn out rugs instead of clothes, tiny faded blue flowers on them, screaming and annoying my grandma he lived with in that room, not a single person other than the two in sight. The house was slowly submerging. The water was rising.

Haven't done much work on my game since December. Ok so I havent done anything on my game since December. Learned Mockito and JUnit formally (finally) because that's what we'll be using at work.

Never really learnt unit testing prior, just knew it's power. I just need to find the right unit testing and mocking frameworks that work well with .net, C# and Unity3D and I'll be great.

I'll finally attempt to properly test that (those) annoying part(s) of my game. So many vectors to work out and often the object is moved to or along the wrong vector.

I'd always only imagined having to use stubs which is why I've never understood how unit testing would really help in such a dynamic environment as video game development. Especially as a one man team. Mocking is about to be my lifesaver.

Anyone able to suggest a good testing and/or mocking framework for C#, .Net, Unity3D?

With my work putting more and more things on my plate that I don't want to work on and refusing to increase my pay proportionately I'm thinking about going freelance. My biggest argument against is this that I'm terrible with design.

What design tools to you guys use for mocking up a website? I use Windows and Linux for my work so Mac only apps aren't going to help.

I also struggle with colors. I've never been officially diagnosed as color blind, but I've been told I'm wrong about colors enough to know there's something going on there. Are there any good tools out there that can help select colors that go well together? I'm thinking if a company has a red they use for everything, I put that in and the tool gives me a few color pallettes to work with.

I've also thought about just finding a designer to work with, but then I have to budget for this person as well which means I'd have to take on even more clients. I want to improve my design abilities so I can do more myself.

Any help appreciated guys.

Fuck Swift. Such a garbage language. The last 3 days I tried multiple web server implemented in Swift for mocking API's and none of them worked. Old, not maintained, wrong documentation, wrong code examples and just low quality shit.
Finally I decided to not give a crap and move to use Wiremock and it works out of the box, start and configuration is a breeze and it just plainly works. I should have done that from the beginning.

Btw., as a warning these were the frameworks I used and you should avoid them if possible: Swifter, Embassy, Ambassador and Succulent.

Either I am dumb or the usage of p5.js functions makes it either hard or impossible to test with jest. Constructor properties are thrown away (which I need) and all methods are mocked, if I automock, or I've got the pleasure to mock everything inside the class. Otherwise of course jest complains that p5's color() isn't defined. And mocking everything manually is not safe in case of class changes.
Of course p5's tdd tutorial isn't helping, as it seems to mock everything.
I need like a pro/mentor or smth for this...

Irony.
A mocking discrepancy, between appearance and reality, promise and fulfillment.

So today was my first time combining mocking, depenancy injection and promises. I thought I had a relatively good understanding of everything until I started writing tests - now my head is spinning.

The actual coding has gone really well - implimented the strategy pattern so I can reuse my code whenever I want to make an API call - and everything is nicely decoupled so it should be easy to test. In theory.

If anyone here happens to write tests for a living, I have a new found respect for you today...

Time for a beer 😅

Somehow mocking xhr requests (?) for Axios is really hard to make it work. I use React Cosmos as I'm re-doing the frontend of this already running in production and works great, but when my component communicates with the backend it breaks and I'm unable to test the full behavior.

Then, it occurred to me that trying to mock Axios may not be the best. So I came with this scheme where I would have a configuration variable with a default value and change that when I need to work with React Cosmos, which in turn changes the behavior of `/auth` to return a valid JWT in response to a GET, put an Axios interceptor in my outermost Cosmos decorator and BAM! suddenly was able to develop and test my React components closer to how they would work in production.

It surprises me how simple this endeavor was, and because everything runs orchestrated by docker compose things run smoother.

(this is not an excuse to not to learn how to deal with the mocking issues of Axios, after all I wont have a working backend every time I work in some frontend application)

Spent the day migrating to a different mocking framework for our unit tests.

Still a few hours of work to do until they'll all compile.

After that, who knows what'll still need fixing.

Pouring myself a tall one.

Any opinions on mock tests how deep should you mock logic of a single component?

I am convinced that you only should shallow mock your components.

However there seems to be some component structures out there that require much deeper mocking

So on my new position I get to work on Spark jobs. Never had to work with the infamous big data technologies. I never thought this would get SO frustrating for all the wrong reasons.

I'm currently trying to introduce integration tests for some Spark job I wrote. This isn't trivial though, as the data comes from several HBase tables. Mocking everything simply isn't feasible. So why not use the integrated HBaseTestingUtility? With it you can start a mini cluster that runs all nessecary services in the scope of your test.

Sounds great, eh? WRONG. Firstly the used mapr dependencies get in the way. The baked in configuration tries to automatically authenticate with your local cluster through Kerberos. Of course this doesn't work. And of course there is no way to reconfigure this as it happens IN A FUCKING STATIC BLOCK. AHHHH.

Ok. So after calming down I "simply" had to exclude all mapr dependencies and replace them with vanilla ones. After two days of dependency hell it FINALLY works!

...or does it? Well now we need test data. For that we got a map reduce algorithm that can import dumps. Sounds again, great, eh? WROOOONNNG.

The fucking map reduce mini cluster can't start, as it tries to write a symlink. Now take a wild guess what the sys admin here blocked. Yepp. TWO DAYS OF WORK RENDERED USELESS, BECAUSE OF SOME FUCKING SECURITY SETTING.

This is fine.