So I wanted to send an email to Microsoft to request a feature in their new "To-Do" app.

I went to the play store and scrolled down to the end where it says "Send an email to developer".

Clicked on that. And here is the email address:

"noreply@microsoft.com"

😑 😑

So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.

Title: Senior Software Engineer

Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build

Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!

Title: Dev Manager

Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.

Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request

Title: Product / Product Manager

Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop

Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them

Title: Program Lead / Product Owner

Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)

Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists

Title: Director of Software Engineering

Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)

Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen

how to make a feature request
1. dump Db table with 153 column to Excel
2. print!
3. circle column 47 on page 3, scribble feature description
4. scan! remember to use proprietary file format no one has
5. new e-mail, add "VERY URGENT!!!" to subject line
6. write "will call, discuss details monday"
6.a. attach proprietary-scanned-excel-dump-feature-description (optional)
7. postscript: deadline wednesday!!
8. wait for tuesday
9. send!
...

@dfox, feature request: swipe left/right to get to the next/previous rant. Sometimes I feel too lazy to press back button and go to the next rant. Swiping is easy.

(Edit: Not sure if it's been asked before. I'm kinda new here)

#feature request

Anonymous rants!

Let me explain, many people here have chosen meaningless usernames to them, to be completely anonymous, many others didn't... For example if you Google Etrunon I guess that you'll find me in less than 5 minutes...

So I believe that this may lead to less and less hateful, frustrated and liberating rants. Mainly because of three reasons: fear to be discovered from the outside(boss, etc) , fear to be discovered inside (colleagues or friends invited here) and the latter is the community building aspect of this app.

So what I am asking (knowing that should be a lot eheh) is the capability to post new rants either signed or anonymous... This to prevent being discovered let us having rewarding rants to read while on the same hand being able to connect and getting in touch a little bit with each other :)

What do you think?

@dfox @trogus

How to politely tell your client that their request for the new 'little' feature is unrealistic and fucking absurd?

Just got a merge request to review. It's TERRIBLE

- 93 changes
- 23 commits
- includes multiple features
- includes new project configs
- includes refactoring

NO. Please don't do that.

Do smaller commits. One feature per MR. It will help you and the reviewer :D

post != rant;
post = "Feature Request";
@dfox

Stack Overflow is full of abuntch of downvoteing dickbuts. The devrant community is so much more accepting of new devs, why not add a question section.

Down votes would only be allowed for spammers.
One the question was solved, it would go into the devrant question archive, Searchable by everyone.

Ik you have heard this one before, but it's Just my two cents.

I HATE when a request for a change or a new feature comes like a bug feedback, as if it's your fault

"I clicked this, but this behavior that we didn't agree on didn't happen!! Fix it!"

😡

Today is sprint demo day. As usual I'm only half paying attention since being a Platform Engineer, my work is always technically being "demoed" (shit's running ain't it? There you go, enjoy the EC2 instances.)

One team presents a new thing they built. I'm still half paying attention, half playing Rocket League on another monitor.

Then someone says

"We're storing in prod-db-3"

They have my curiosity.

"Storing x amount of data at y rate"

They now have my attention. I speak up "Do you have a plan to drop data after a certain period of time?"

They don't. I reply "Okay, then your new feature only has about 2 months to live before you exhaust the disk on prod-db-3 and we need to add more storage"

I am asked if we can add more storage preemptively.

"Sure, I say." I then direct my attention to the VP "{VP} I'll make the change request to approve the spend for additional volume on prod-db-3"

VP immediately balks and asks why this wasn't considered before. I calmly reply "I'm not sure. This is the first time I'm learning of this new feature even coming to life. Had anyone consulted with the Platform team we'd have made sure the storage availability was there."

VP asks product guy what happened.

"We didn't think we'd need platform resources for this so we never reached out for anything".

I calmly mute myself, turn my camera back off and go back to Rocket League as the VP goes off about planning and collaboration.

"CT we'll reach out to you next week about getting this all done"

*unmute, camera stays off* "Sounds good" *clears ball*

"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.)

I was pressued to shift the blame.

We received an angry email from a customer that some of their data had disappeared. The boss assigns me to this task. This feature is relatively new and we've found some bugs in the past in here. I go through request logs, search the database, run some diagnostics, etc. for about 5 hours and I cannot find the problem. I focus on the bugs that we've had before but they don't seem to be the problem.

I tell the boss "sorry but I checked XYZ and I can't find the problem. I'm out of ideas." But the boss wanted answers by the end of the day. They did not want to admit to the client that we couldn't figure out what's wrong.

By now I was more pressured to find an answer, find something or someone to blame it on, not exactly to find the real solution. So I made up some BS:

"Sometimes, in HTML forms, the number inputs allow you to change the number by scrolling. We have some long forms where the user has to scroll. Perhaps the focus remained on the number input, so when they scrolled down they accidentally changed the number they meant to input."

The boss was happy with that. We explained this to the customer, and there's now a ticket to change type="number" to type="text" in our HTML forms and to validate it in th backend.

A week later another customer shows us a different error. This one is more clear because it had a stack trace, but I realise that this error is what caused our last error. It was pretty obscure, mind you, the unit tests didn't detect it.

I didn't tell the boss that they were connected tho.

With two angry clients in two weeks, I finally convinced the boss to give us more time to write more unit tests with full coverage.

Here's a real tip for people new to the industry.

It's one of those things that's been said over and over again but very few can really seem to employ. I suggest you learn it /well/.

You are not your code. Criticisms of your code, ideas, or your thought processes, is not a criticism of YOU. You absolutely cannot take criticisms of your work personally.

We are engineers. We strive to seek the best solution at all times.

If someone has found a problem with your code or with an idea or whatnot, it is coming from a place of "this is not the best solution", NOT "you're an idiot".

It's coming from a place of "I'm closing this PR because it is not a change I feel suits this project", NOT "I'm closing this PR because it's coming from a woman".

It's coming from a place of "This feature request is ridiculous/this bug is not actually a bug", NOT "you're a fucking idiot, fuck you".

It's coming from a place of "I've already had to address this in a number of issues before and it's eaten up a considerable amount of my time already", NOT "I don't even know you and this I don't have time for a nobody".

You do not get to be bitchy to maintainers because they denied your request. It's not a reflection of you at all. But if you're arguing with someone who has maintained a piece of code for almost a decade, and they're telling you something authoritative, believe them. They're probably smarter than you on this subject. They've probably thought about it more. They've probably seen their code used in many different places. They have more experience than you with that codebase in almost all cases.

Believe me, if we cared about who was behind all of the issues, pull requests, etc. we get, we'd get NOTHING done. Stop taking shit personally. It's a skill, not a defense mechanism. Nobody has the time to sugar coat every little thing.

Let's normalize directness and stop wasting time during technical discussions into opportunities for ego-stroking and circle-jerking and back-patting.

Client: I want a new feature for my chat bot. It should be able to rap.
Me: ... k
*monologue: wait u w0t m8*
Also me: Can you please go more into the details? It should be able to rap. Ok. But how do you want it to look like? How "strong" should be the discrimination level, for instance?
Client: It should beat ass, yo.
Inner me -> core me: Let us just ignore him. We won't be able to do it, since he isn't really explaining his needs. "It should be able to rap". We are not wizards.
Core me -> inner me: Chill. We will just use some insult apis, combine it with cleverb0t api et voila.
Me: Alright. I got an idea for it. I can do it within this week. And if you don't like it, I will ofc do some changes to it.
Client: Hmmm... that's nice and good. But within 1 week?
Inner me: I can't do magic and pull that feature out of my fucking ass!

Clients... clients... clients...
0. Don't expect us to be done in a few days. We are also humans. And not fucking machines.
1. Do us (all devs on planet earth. -Microaggression in 3, 2, 1..) a favor and (kill yourself) learn how to request a feature.

So this one made me create an account on here...

At work, there's a feature of our application that allows the user to design something (keeping it vague on purpose) and to request a 3D render of their creation.

Working with dynamically positioned objects, textures and such, errors are bound to happen. That's why we implemented a bug report feature.

We have a small team tasked with monitoring the bug reports and taking action upon it, either by fixing a 3D scene, or raising the issue to the dev team.

The other day, a member of that team told me (since I'm part of the dev team) he had received a complain that the image a user received was empty. Strange, we didn't update the code in a while.

So I check the server, all the docker containers are running fine, the code is fine, no errors anywhere.

Then, as I'm scratching my head, that guy comes back to me and says "I don't know if it can help you, but it's been doing it for a week and a half now".

"And we're only hearing about it now?!", I replied.

"Well, I have bug reports going back to the 15th, but we haven't been checking the reports for a while now since everything was fine", he says as if it was actually a normal thing to say.

"How can you know everything is fine if you're not looking at the thing that says if there's an issue?!", I replied with a face filled with despair.

"Well we didn't receive any new reports in a while, so we just stopped looking. And now the report tool window is actually closed on my machine", he says with a smile and a little laugh in his tone.

In the end, I got to fix the server issue quite easily. But still, the feature wasn't working for 1.5 weeks and more that 330 images weren't sent properly...

So yeah, Doctor, the patient's heart is beating again! Let's unplug the monitor, it should be fine.

Welcome to my little piece of hell :)

Just got an email with a new really nice douche-bag move from Postman to raise their prices again (this time for almost double) on their paid plans with excuse "it will help us deliver more of what our customers need from us."

Even though I've decided to look other way around for years on their electron-based garbage of bloated app, have not been a fan of their pricing 8$/month/user just for a simple feature such as sharing request schema and environment data.

This simply needs to stop and I'm seriously thinking about doing something about it. 🙄

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

MARKETING IS A MENACE FOR SOCIETY and a large waste of time and resources.

Imagine that for some very stupid reason people were allowed to steal cell phones from unsuspecting victims and sell it on open market legally, tax invoices and all.

One could create a business like this. Steal some lad's brand new $600 iPhone and sell it for $280, because why not?

That is marketing. A company goes and makes a phone for lets say $180. Add in taxes, shipping and development costs, and we get to $300. Put some real nice profits on top (let's say 40%) and we get to $420.
The last 180 are the cost of marketing for society.

Today some stupid marketing conmen goosesteps into my lab and says that we must use Tensorflow and in-memory databases and multicloud redundancy and, I kid you not, "profound learning".
WE HAVE A FREAKING LOGISTICS OPS APPLICATION.
"We are putting it on the brochure, those technologies are set to sell well in our core market, and improve employer-branding" says the conmen.

A request for a feature is one thing, a request for an whole other technology because some snake-oil salesmen read the term in some clickbait rag and thinks that some starry-eyed moneyhead will pay extra because the brochure says "NOW WITH 2X MORE TECH!" is just an assault on society.

I sent an email to a client asking for values in the database only they can access so I can finish an application and test it.... they reply asking for a new feature on the application and completely ignore my request for said values. then another person CCed on the email replies and agrees with the feature request and we should do xyz. still no values from him either. wtfff?

So since I’m in managers meetings I get a lot of info that I probably shouldn’t have. For example, I know before everyone else when we’re considering going to a new software, and I’m in the vendor discussions and pilot groups for said software.

Today a user came down and asked me to build a feature that will be included ootb in the new software we’re considering. I wanted to say no because I know we’re going to this other thing, but couldn’t because it’s not for sure. So I said I’d take care of it and ushered him on his way and now I have to build some crap that will be obsolete in eight months.

I prefer the good old days of blindly pushing buttons at the request of the evil overlords... it was so much simpler...

*At the daily status meeting*
Manager: I don’t have anything to table or anything I want to ask about. I honestly don’t know what the point of this meeting even is.

*Throughout every other living breathing moment of time*
Manager: Hey, I had an idea
Manager: Hey, I wanted to get your thoughts on something
Manager: Hey, what do you think about…
Manager: Hey, what are you currently working on?
Manager: Do you think you could just *sneak* in this new feature request and have it to me by EOD?
Manager: Hey, I just sent you an email
The email: Hey I think I found a bug, it’s with image alignment in Microsoft Word and it’s pretty breaking to my productivity report. Do you think you could take a look right now? Thoughts?

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

!rant

@dfox
Many people use snippets of code in their Rants, so it's maybe a nice feature to be able to add codeblocks to rants..

Client writes a bug report: This and that doesn't work.
Me: This functionality never was implemented. Please open a feature request.
Client: But this is a bug. Without this feature, the service won't work as we expect.
Me: But this wasn't in the requirements for release. So you have to contact the PM for a feature request.
Client: THIS IS A BUG! FIX IT!
Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF! THIS IS A NEW FEATURE AND YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR IT!
Unfortunately, I never sent the mail. But I kept it in the drafts. Maybe someday...

Mozilla has announced that it's rolling out changes under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to all Firefox users worldwide.

According to report of ZDNet: The CCPA (America's privacy legislation) came into effect on January 1, 2020, offering Californian users data-protection rules. Much like Europe's GDPR, the CCPA gives consumers the right to know what personal information is collected about them and to be able to access it. While the law technically only applies to data processed about residents in California, US. But Mozilla notes it was one of the few companies to endorse CCPA from the outset. Mozilla has now outlined the key change it's made to Firefox, which will ensure CCPA regulations benefit all its users worldwide. The main change it's introducing is allowing users to request that Mozilla deletes Firefox telemetry data stored on its servers. That data doesn't include web history, which Mozilla doesn't collect anyway, but it does include data about how many tabs were opened and browser session lengths. The new control will ship in the next version of Firefox on January 7, which will include a feature to request desktop telemetry data be deleted directly from the browser.

Today's rant will be brought to you by the letters A, W, and S.

I stayed up all night, ALL NIGHT, and finished this cool new feature, which is an integration between two technologies that tmk has not been done before. In short, I invented a thing last night.

Then at 5 fucking 30 this morning my EC2 fucking died. No SSH, no HTTPS... nothing... can't get into it to see what's up.

Put in a support request to AWS and finally went to bed. Wake up this morning to still nothing.

Can't wait for AWS support, try stopping and starting my instance... nevermind I'll have to re-setup SSH, and VS Code, and Workbench.. (which why the fuck can't I keep an IP through a reboot in the first fucking place!)

But nevermind that I was willing to do all that... this piece of shit won't start up any fucking way.

Fuck.

Now I have to rebuild this fucking EC2... and I could try to snapshot it... but that would probably fuck up too, so I'm just going to do it by fucking hand like I do everything else.

Fuck AWS.

Lots of questions going on about devRant. Just want to make devRant better.

1. Please tell the update intervals of upvotes and downvotes. Is there a delay? Doesnt really matter but i see many times i got a upvote notif but my score didnt increased...

2. Duplicate image algo is so poor. I know it is only in beta, but i see so many reposts which has the same pic but only with the resolution different or the image with the devrant watermark.

3. Minor, tags should be also saved when exitting the post rant activity.

4. Feature request : go to top, bottom in rant

5. Please make web app accessible in mobile. I think you check the user agent for the web app, but can you make it available to mobile users who cant download the app?

6. When accessing the web app in mobile, i type devrant.io/feed
Then, by the wonderful intent you made, it opens the app automatically. I was writing a rant, but it was all deleted.

7. Any new podcasts and cartoons planned?

8. Still bug not fixed.
Write a comment in a long rant.
Delete the comment you just wrote.
You cant reply to the last person comment.

Thanks.

My new co-worker is extremely stressing. I have to give small tasks so he won't forget to do anything. I also have to explain what he has to do in detail, give him the full solution, and show him exactly how he has to do it.

And he has no idea how to use git. He makes a feature branch and pushes all his various, half-finished features into it and makes a pull request.

And then I still have to refactor his crappy code everytime cause he uses variables like $data, $accA, $accB, $accZ and forgets to use the definied color variables in sass.

I literally have to do my work and his as well -_-

i was hired to join a team of old devs (40+) in an unnamed European country "yay goodbye 3rd world it's time to enjoy the quality of life" assist with enhancing already existing software and creating new solutions.
prior to my arrival most things were slow and super buggy, looking at the code base it shouldn't be a surprise, amateur hour everyone, logic implemented that is not needed, comment driven development, last time code review was done back in 1996. lots of anti patterns.
i swear there is a for loop that does nothing but it loops through a 100+ elements list, trunk based development with tfs since git is "not really needed"
test projects are not there.
>enter me an educated fool, with genuine passion for the craft and somehow a decent amount of knowledge.
>spent the last year fixing stuff educating people on principles and qualities.
> countless hours of training and explaining. team is showing cooperation, a new requirement comes in to develop with react.
> tear my ass creating reusable shit and self explanatory code with proper naming etc using git with feature branching, monday is first deployment day.
> today a colleague was working on an item submit a pull request and self approve it
> look at the code..... WTF the dumb fuck copied and pasted the whole code from different kendo components but somehow managed to refractor the name to test component, commented out all the code that he didn't use did the api call directly from the component, has 2 useeffects that depends on the a fucking text box changes for no reason, no redux implementation, the acceptance criteria is not achieved, and it doesn't work it just look right.
> first world country shit cannot scold, cannot complain, lead by example.
>asked him why you did this, the response was yeah probably i shouldn't have done that, i really didn't understand anything in the training but didn't want to waste time!!!!
> rest of the team created a different styled disaster with different flavors they don't even name their shit the same way.

fellow developers I'm stuck in a spaceship with a bunch of imposters, seriously i never cried in my entire life now I'm teary and on the verge of a break down.
talk with management "improving needs time" and offers me to join a yoga session to release the stress as if reaching nirvana would deliver shit on monday.
i really don't know what do is this a rant, is this a cry for help, I'm not sure, any advice is welcomed.

I spent 4 days working on a new feature of our program. A real pain in the ass! Even did a few hours of overtime.

This morning I go to my boss to tell him about a performance problem I was trying really hard to solve, but couldn't still totally remove...

His answer: "Don't bother with that! Our client is not going to use it. They simply forgot to remove it from their request. So we are going to deliver it so they will have to pay us!"

FFFFFUUUUUUCCCCKKKK!

I am bored !!! No feature request and No bug was reported from last 2 days... Nothing to resolve today.. I am thinking should I create new bug and release it as feature??

I have been trying my best to fix a broken process and a product that never saw the day of the light.

Aligning all the teams, trying to bridge all the feature gaps, and at the same time learning this new product and company culture.

Now this lady comes to me with a requirement. I have zero clue what it is and instead of empathising with me that I am new and should dumb down her ask, she kept throwing heavy product specific terms as if I have been working in this team for previous 9 lives.

Anyway, I take her ask into my product roadmap and try to prioritise it.

Now I connect with them again for some discovery and she is passive aggressive towards me that it's been more than a year no one is considering their request and started whinning.

I have just joined the org 6 months ago and you start attacking me for someone else's mistake?

What the actual fuck! Go fucking die bitch. Never again I am taking her request.

If she has a problem then just speak it up and take it with leadership. Don't fucking be passive aggressive with me especially when I am not at fault and infact I am trying to help her.

And in interviews they ask people whether they are a team player or not.

An amazing git story: A month ago coworkers did research and started with merge requests. Their workflow is as follows: A Feature is developed in a branch, then a merge request is opened. After a very short review it will be closed (rejected) and merged without request. (wtf!) After that the develop branch will be tested later, in case of bugs, a new branch per feature is opened.

devRant should add a new feature to create polls
e.g. 1: What OS do you prefer?
- Mac
- Linux
- Windows
e.g. 2: Which programming language do you prefer for web dev, mobile dev, etc.
- Java
- PHP
...

I bet after a while a cyber war would commence. And that would be devRant's fault because it gave developers a reason to hate each other.
So devRant please disregard my request for the new feature.

Narrator: And then he laughed sardonically.

// Stupid JSON
// Tale of back-end ember api from hell
// Background: I'm an android dev attempting to integrate // with an emberjs / rails back-end

slack conversation:
me 3:51pm: @backend-dev: Is there something of in the documentation for the update call on model x? I formed the payload per the docs like so
{
"valueA": true,
"valueB": false
}
and the call returns success 200 but the data isn't being updated when fetching again.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:00pm: the model doesn't look updated for the user are you sure you made the call?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:01pm: Pretty sure here's my payload and a screen grab of the successful request in postman <screenshot attached>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:05pm: well i just created a new user on the website and it worked perfectly your code must be wrong
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:07pm: i can test some more to see if i get any different responses
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:15pm: ahhhhhh... I think it's expecting the string "true", not true
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:16: but the fetch call returns the json value as a boolean true/false
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:18pm: thats a feature, the flexible type system allows us to handle all sorts of data transformations. android must be limited and wonky.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:19pm: java is a statically typed language....
// crickets for ten minutes
me 4:30pm: i'll just write a transform on the model when i send an update call to perform toString() on the boolean values
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:35: great! told you it wasn't my documentation!

// face palm forever

TL;DR: A new "process" for collaboration between teams was created in order to stonewall requests from my team.

A couple months ago, we created a new Dev team that specializes in writing internal tools. This team was staffed with internal developers, and got a separate manager. The whole point of this team was to collaborate with my dev team so we can both help each other develop tools that the company needs.

One of the developers that was on my team went over to this team while he and I were still working on a big application. For a few weeks, he still worked on this application as he normally would, and we'd sit with each other and work through features together whenever we needed a fresh set of eyes.

Well, eventually his new team got protective of him and created a new "process" for our teams to request assistance from one another. So now instead of just popping over to someone's desk to ask a quick question, you have to send an email to the team and request that you can borrow that particular developer for a question, and then the entire team sits down and discusses whether or not they're going to allow that person to answer your question. Then after a week of discussion, if they decide to allow it, they schedule a meeting for a week later, in which you will get the question answered.

So instead of just spending 2 minutes to ask and answer the question, you have to spend weeks in order to request assistance, and then schedule a meeting.

It's ridiculous, and it's all because his team got protective that he was working with another Dev team. Dev teams collaborate all the time, and work together. My team is constantly helping other teams, and we don't have this ridiculous process. We get asked a question, and we answer it. Simple as that.

Last week, I sent an email for assistance in completing a feature, and didn't hear back. I talked to the Product Owner for the team, and he said "Just send an email," to which I responded that I did and hadn't got a response. He said "Oh....." I then told my boss that this is an enormous bottleneck, and he seemed surprised hearing that this is a bottleneck.

A week passed and today I still hadn't got a response, so my boss reached out to the Product Owner to push him. Finally, I got a response and they scheduled a meeting to answer my question 3 days down the road. So it's going on 2 weeks to get this simple question answered.

Normally I'd just have the other developer come over and help, but apparently they yelled at him the last time he did that.

The issue is that the process was created with the assistance of our "senior" developers, who never work with this other team in this capacity, so they just nodded and smiled and let them put this ridiculous process in place.

Like, get off your high horses. You don't "own" him, he's allowed to collaborate with other teams. This question would've taken literally 10 minutes, but because of your new "process" you've turned it into a 2 week debacle and you've effectively delayed the app launch with your pettiness.

They say that this process isn't intended to prevent us from getting assistance, and that might not have been the original intention of the Product Owner/manager, but it's very clear that the developers on the other team are taking advantage of it and using it as a big stonewall so they can beat around the bush and avoid providing assistance when it's needed.

If this becomes a trend, I'm going to schedule a meeting (which apparently they love to do,) and we're going re-work this entire process, because it's extremely counterproductive and seems to only exist in order to create red tape.

The moment you realize that you have successfully beaten reality with your unit-tests...

There are unit-tests for ...
... the api returning a 408 Http StatusCode when an internal request times out.
... the react app take this status-code and fires an action to display a specific error message for the user.

Every bit of code runs just fine.

Deploy this hell of an app on the server. Dandy Doodle.

Do a smoketest of the new feature.
FAIL!
Chrome starts to crumble during runtime. The api Request freezes.
Firefox takes the 408 api response but fails to interpret it in react app.

So I began to wonder, what the hell is going on.

Actually I recognized that I had the glorious idea to return a clientside error code in a serverside api response.
Glorious stupidity :/

Finally I fixed the whole thingy by returning an 504 (Gateway timeout) instead of 408 (Clientside timeout)

Cheers!

A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.

Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.

We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.

I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.

At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.

At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX

You might get where this is going...

None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.

Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.

Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board

No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.

Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.

Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.

One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board

Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.

At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).

The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board

I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).

There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).

I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.

The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.

Not 1 Business Unit in Company: We need this feature immediately.

My Team: Anyone object to this 2 hour old merge request?

Me: Well, yeah, I found a couple things that we should probably go ahead and address.

My Team: we'll fix that in a future release

Me: But you said that last release...

My Boss: MR Accepted

Also My Boss: Can you make a new user story to fix this?

GitHub has launched Codespaces : A feature that lets you code directly on the web {as a virtual Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on the cloud}.

According to the Github Blog: Earlier, to contribute to a project you would need to make a pull request and set up the environment on your local machine according to the requirements of a project. With Codespaces, you don't need to do that anymore. As soon as you click on the code button, the website sets up the environment in seconds.

In addition to Codespaces, GitHub is also launching Discussions : A forum-like feature that lives under your project that allows others to engage with you and other contributors.

Code scanning : With code scanning enabled, every git push is scanned for new potential security vulnerabilities, and results are displayed directly in your pull request.

Honestly,
Netflix you should add toggle option for series like feeling.

mhm hrm with that I mean:
It would let us to watch an episode only once a week, based on how it came out.
no more binging on the same shit like crazy.
Someone needs to be first with this,
Also everyone is doing this self control alert like behaviour in/through apps cause we all tend to forget it when we have a lot of availability to overeat ourselves.
Rant end

So, here we are using postgres in production with the fancy feature of UPSERT. We’ve got loads of request popping in, both new and updates - so the UPSERT getting triggered alot. Today we faced a problem with integer within our app stating that the number is too high. We were like «WTF? Already?!»! After looking in to the features of UPSERT, we came to realize that any sequence will be incremented regardless of an insert being handled. This results then in an ID field being defined with ids such as:
1
2
5
19
222
73377
282828282
Etc. You get the point..
This design is so WTF and I have absolutely no idea why anyone would like their IDs to be generated and incremended even though there is no insert. I hope it is due to my naivity that I cannot comprhend it. Oh well. UPSERT, you’re forever gone 👍🔥

feature request / rant: there sbkukd be no posting new rants unless you have a minimum amount of +1. Maybe it's 10, or 25. but I've noticed the vast majority of people posting repeated memes, gifs, and overall irrelevant stuff are people with 0-5 +1. they should be required to post comments and be around for a bit to understand what devrant is before clogging up the feed.

A customer asks for a change request or a bug fix and it results in creating a ticket for that.
It's the process and how it works in most places but after you finish with the task and fix the same customer who provided you with the requirements will request that you share the steps on how to test the fix or the feature.
I'm not speaking about the data preparation or required configuration. I mean a step-by-step instruction on how the tester/QA will test it.
It's driving me mad!! So a way to counterplay this stupid requests, I provide the happy path and what to expect. And in case, they stumbled on a bug later in production, I can easily say "It was approved by your testing team and that's a new requirement ;)"

After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...

So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.

Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.

Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...

So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.

Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).

We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).

I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...

Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks...

For our product there is a common type of bug we get reported. It is not really a bug, also it is not a feature - instead it is a missing or incomplete feature.

For example to help users we add a search feature on one screen, but there is no search on some other screen. Now the absence of search on that screen is apparently a bug.

To make things worse to report the bug users try to trick us. They say something like:
"Hey can you help me? How can I find things in the abc screen?"

So I explain how to browse for the item or whatever.

Then they say:
"Ok now how do you do that on the xyz screen?"

Slightly suspiciously I now tell them how you can browse for the item like before or we have this new feature eg. search you can use if that is quicker.

Now they say:
"Don't you think it would be better to have that search on the first screen?"

OK now I realize this is just a trick and the person doesn't actually need help using the software. So I tell him how we only added the feature on one screen and if he thinks there is value adding it on other screens he can put enhancement request in and if wants he can talk to my boss about making it a priority.

Then they go on asking other rhetorical questions like:
"why was it designed like this?"
"Are you guys deliberately trying to make life harder for people by making them learn different ways to do things?"

I now want to delete the new search feature but luckily it is close to lunch time so I have a good excuse to escape the conversation.

Well fuck. I am experiencing over-engineering first hand.

I am the single dev responsible for developing a small feature but which is an identity to our whole product(feel free to guess it here). This is quite simple I thought, I can just modify the constants which are being used in the source code and I can finish it off in a week tops. I asked all the relevant teams over which this feature would have dependencies and they gave me a green signal. Setup Jenkins configuration and everything for this new feature. With a wide grin on my face, I sent out a pull request. Now the architect of our product declined the pr saying to change everything from the bottom up giving the reason that it would be configurable sometime later in the future. Now mind you, I get it if this feature could change over time and needs customability. But it has been the same since last seven years and would probably not change again for a couple of years ahead [you have to take my word for it.]. Its not that the guy is a douche or anything, he is one of the best dev I have ever personally came across and I highly respect and admire him. But there has to be a trade off between the effort you are putting in versus the benefit you get. Now I have to touch almost every file, super carefully look in the whole product if a bug creeps out from anywhere and change the existing code to a point where it doesn't even make sense to me anymore, and write tests ofcourse.

wubba lubba dub dub!

I made 3 designs (more like proof of concepts) 2 months ago for a certain feature request.

2 months ago:
I presented to the CTO & CEO and the senior developer.
Senior developer prefers design A
CTO prefers design A with some very minor changes
CEO prefers design C with some major changes (ok, at this point is it more design D)
CTO & senior dev tried to argue for his idea but gave up.
So we decide to implement Design D

Now:
Customers complained that the designs is not clear (UX-wise)
CEO: "I have the idea to make some adjustments" and explained design A.

This happens pretty much for every other feature request since I started doing designs for new features. Previously they implemented it without designs.

Just joined a new company and can only describe the merge process as madness.....is it or am I the one that is mad?!

They have the following branches:

UAT#_Development branch
UAT#_Branch (this kicks of a build to a machine named UAT#)

Each developer has a branch with the # being a number 1 to 6 except 5 which has been reserved for UAT_Testing branch.

They are working on a massive monolith (73 projects), it has direct references to projects with no nuget packages. To build the solution requires building other solutions in a particular order, in short a total fucking mess.

Developer workflow:

Branch from master with a feature or hotfix branch

Make commits to said branch and test manually as there are no automated tests

Push the commits to their UAT#_Development branch, this branch isn't recreated each time and may have differences to all the other UAT#_Development branches.

Once happy create a pull request to merge from UAT#_Development to UAT#_Branch you can approve your own pull request, this kicks off a build and pushes it to a server that is named UAT#.

Developer reviews changes on the UAT# server.

QA team create a UAT/year/month/day branch. Then tell developers to merge their UAT#_branch branches in to the previously created branch, this has to be done in order and that is done through a flurry of emails.

Once all merges are in it then gets pushed to a UAT_Testing branch which kicks off a build, again not a single automated test, and is manually tested by the QA team. If happy they create a release branch named Release/year/month/day and push the changes into it.

A pull request from the release branch is then made to pre-live environment where upon merge a build is kicked off. If that passes testing then a pull request to live is created and the code goes out into production.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh it's a total mess. I knew when I took on this job it would be a challenge but nothing has prepped me for the scale of the challenge!! My last place it was trunk based development, commit straight to master, build kicks off with automated testing and that just gets pushed through each of the environments, so easy, so simple!

They tell me this all came about because they previously used EntityFramework EDMX models for the database and it caused merge hell.

Yesterday, I had to set up a demo environment for a project, we are working on.
Everything was okay, frontend loaded, connection to backend is working, database is connected.
10 minutes before I wanted to leave for my well deserved weekend, PO came over: "I can't play any video, I uploaded"
Okay, couldn't be a big issue, it worked when I added this functionality 3 weeks ago, just before my holidays.
A bit under pressure, my girlfriend Was already waiting downstairs, I inspected the database and realized that a table Was not properly filled.
Checked the backend and everything seems fine, so checked the requests from the frontend and realized that the request was almost empty.
So some code, building the request body had to be wrong.
Already 10 minutes late, with a lightly annoyed girlfriend waiting for me, I found the issue but couldn't recognize that I wrote these few lines. A quick check of the git history showed, that my colleage changed my code during my holidays, so I just reverted everything.
After commit and deployment, I called my colleage and told him that I just reverted his changes.
"But now my feature is not working anymore, I had to change it like this!" he answered. I just responded that we will talk about that on monday and look at it together. While I hurried down the stairs, I was thinking why the hell somebody just changes stuff without checking if it affects other functionalities?
This should be basic knowledge for every dev, that if you change existing, working code to make it work with your feature, you have to ensure to not brake anything.
If you can't do that, then create a new function to handle your shit.

In the end, my girlfriend had to wait 30 minutes, because of 4 lines of codes, someone just changed without thinking what else could happen...

New feature request that could be unecessary by client just sticking to one of 4 different very similar input formats instead of many off the cuff formats, that conflict and i cant guess let alone a computer. But i present an outline idea of the solution with his specs

I didnt complain just told him what needs to change and what our constraints will be how the info is interpretted etc

Client says "dont spend time on code for that feature.. stick to other original work for now" ! omg hes getting it! Sweet. I only wasted an hour this time, and if he does want the feature, we have an agreed spec for it. We can get back to handling the customer level shit and maybe he can make some more money finally.

Scope creep plus 0, me plus one. Scope creep still in thr lead by a lot. Oh well. Still, this guy is getting more tolerable

I think promoting 'a quick lookup on Google' every single time you need to add something useful into your codebase is a bad mentality. It's the same problem with populating your code with Stackoverflow snippets.

I think this is not a good approach because your code will eventually rot and you won't have full control over your codebase in that you didn't write those parts and you don't fully know what's going on underneath. Then, you will forget about that code. A new feature request will come up and oh no, you will be wrestling with your old code because you just quickly inserted it in there, not fully knowing it under the hood. Hours will be lost on debugging.

I advocate much more the approach of really knowing the language and the solutions you're using, instead of just constantly hacking it with the excuse of "Oh, there's no time to learn everything", "You don't need to know the details" and "This is the real world".

No, this is not a good attitude. With the former approach, you will be much more able to safeguard your code and improve on it, rather than wrestling for hours with it. I think it's important to have as much ownership of your code as possible and depend as little on outside libraries as possible.

Fundamentals first, practicality second.

We are a remote team of two android developers for this startup. I have 3 years of experience and my protege has 1 year of experience.

One month a new guy with 10 years experience joined our team and hes working onsite. He's supposed to be scrum master and be good ad dividing and delegating tasks, but what he's doing past two weeks is appaling to me.

Basically we got a request for a new feature. He skipped discovery and planning steps, went straight to implementation and one week later showed us his implementation.

Note that at that moment my remote team was not informed about anything. He started reinventing a library to capture a picture and video, while there are tons of other well developed libraries out there.

What makes things more difficult is that his english sucks.

I don't understand what he's doing but now it seems that either he's playing office politics and is trying to stay ahead by not informing us so we would be forced to follow his implementation. Or maybe he is totally oblivious and don't have any sprint management experience, so he's just trying his best by working hard and trying to prove his own worth.

Eitherway it sucks that he is not able to communicate specifications from HQ to us, because even I did a better work with planning our sprints by communicating remotely.

So now I started asking him questions and turns out the guy doesn't even understand specification. He already half implemented the feature and can't tell us why we need it and why we are not using what we already have in the app. So now he's back to square one: doing discovery. It's fcking ridiculous.

A: our WordPress website that use heavily Facebook APIs is not working anymore because of the privacy changes
B (thinking): seems something easy, check the settings and do an invoice of the job for a portal that we didn't done and get a new customer
B: we can do it in blablabla for blablabla

Silence from the A side

1 month later...

A: I didn't found your bank account for the payment but we are ready to do that fix. And we have also a new feature request.

* if you don’t know what’s the context, please click on my username and scroll a little bit. I’m that good guy MIS*

Alright,
somehow... SOMEHOW I pull it off, finished warehouse management website with angular.
( only for dashboard and storage searching )
Thanks to senior he is carrying all the way with API call and stuff.

Thank god Christmas is coming , but guess what.

now I’m about to start making factory order / manufacturing / planner.

FOR FUCK USE the fucking Microsoft Project would ya ?

oh ya and that front-end dude quit.
Not surprising at all because this shit storm seems keep expanding.
Imma quit it after New Years anyway.

Gonna accept ALL the feature request they send me and *mic drop* bye.

I’m at my last hair with this job; I report to 3 (two mid-level; one senior) project managers. The senior PM decided not to fix up the company’s jira and has encouraged “I’ll tell you what to do by mail, text, call. Even outside office productivity apps,” and I didn’t mind it but it’s become unbearable. Each of these PMs manage at least one client that I have to work with — in essence, any given day I’m reporting to these PMs, for multiple tasks for at least 2 clients, especially for MVPs. One of the mid-level PM (let’s call her T) has taken it upon herself to make me look bad. I’m the only developer at the company; when I joined the only two developers had already left a week prior, so I was their replacement (no one mentioned this to me during any of the 3 interviews).

T reports to the senior PM and senior PM, who is friends with T from outside the job, would also give T instructions to provide me in regard to Senior PM’s clients. To made this clearer, Senior PM’s client would request for a feature or whatever, Senior PM would prepare a lousy document and send to T to send to me, just so, T can have things to say in standup daily like “I reached out to the Dev to fix xyz’s something something,” so this means I have had to tolerate T twice as much as the other PMs. (She’s new to the job, a week after me — Senior PM brought her in — they both do not have technical experience relating to work tools for programming but I can say Senior PM knows how to manage clients; talk shop).

Anyhow, T gets off by making me look bad and occasionally would “pity” me for my workload but almost in a patronizing way. T would say I don’t try to reply messages in 5 minutes time after I receive them (T sends these messages on WhatsApp and not slack, which is open during work hours). T would say, “I can’t quite get a read of this Engineer — you(me) are wired differently,” whenever one of T’s requests is yet to be completed because I’m handling other requests including T’s, even though T had marked the completed ones as Done on her excel sheet (no jira).

In all of this, I still have to help her create slides for our clients on all completed tasks for the week/month, as senior PM would tell me because “T is new to this.” We’ve been at the job for roughly 4 months now.

I have helped recruit a new developer, someone the company recommended — I was only told to go through their résumé and respond if they are a good fit and I helped with the interview task (a take-home project — I requested that the applicant be compensated as it’s somewhat a dense project and would take their time — HR refused). The company agreed with the developer’s choice of full WFH but would have me come in twice a week, because “we have plenty live clients so we need to have you here to ensure every requests are handled,” as if I don’t handle requests on my WFH days.

Yesterday, T tried making me look bad, and I asked, “why is it that you like making me look bad?” in front of HR and T smiled. HR didn’t say anything (T is friends with HR and T would occasionally spill nonsense about me to HR, in fact they sit together to gossip and their noise would always crawl to my corner; they both don’t do much. T would sleep off during work hours and not get a word for it — the first time I took a 10 minutes break to relax, T said, “you look too comfortable. I don’t like that,” and HR laughed at T’s comment. While it was somewhat a joke, there was seriousness attached to it). As soon as HR left, I asked T again, “why is it that most of the things you say are stupid?”, T took offense and went to her gossip crew of 4, telling them what I had just said, then T informed senior PM (which I’m fine with as it’s ideal to report me to her superior in any circumstance). Then I told those who cared to listen, T’s fellow gossipers, that I only said that in response to T’s remark to me in front of them, a while back, that I talked like I’m high on drugs.

I’ve lost my mind compiling this and it feels like I’m going off track, I’m just pissed.

I loved the work challenges as I’ve had to take on new responsibilities and projects, even outside my programming language, but I’m looking for a job elsewhere. My salary doesn’t not reflect my contributions and my mental health is not looking good to maintain this work style. I recall taking a day off as I was feeling down and had anxiety towards work, only to find out HR showed T my request mail and they were laughing at me the next day I showed up, “everybody’s mental health is bad too but we still show up,” and I responded to T, “maybe you ought to take a break too”.

Need advice about switching to contracting.

TL;DR;

So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.

Now the full story:

Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.

Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.

Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.

Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.

So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.

Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.

Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!

New feature request: Ability to post anonymously