Boss: I need you to start on this new project, how long will it take?

Me: well, hard to say with no specs whatsoever...

Boss: just your best guess

Me: 4 to 6 month I guess?

Boss: so 3 months it is. When can you start?

Me: no specs, sir...and I said 4 to 6

Boss: the specs are almost ready, I know you can simplify it

Me: ...

Boss: just start with the basic infrastructure already

(4 months later)

Boss: here you are the specs, they might change a little in behaviour and design, but all the main stuff is here

(Hands me a A3 with a total of 21 pictures in InDesign)

Me: o....Kay. what happens when I click here?

Boss: oh, we should still talk about the app workflow, I'll get you updated

(2 weeks and 16 total rewrites of the "specs" later)

Boss: you told me it was a 2 months job, why aren't you finished yet? We must deploy in 3 weeks!

Me: ...

Unpopular opinion about Microsoft buying GitHub.

Just putting it out there that when you made your github repos you did so under their privacy policy and terms and will be protected under those in the future, and that both GitHub and Microsoft are corporations with the goals of making money.

Are people seriously mad that their code has gone from one capitalist corporation to another, with no foreseeable change in privacy or data policy? I have respect for those that switched to self hosted long ago since that's going from corporate to private, but if you throw away the UX and community GitHub has developed because a multinational corporation (with so many branches, products and divisions, which happens to have a few products you don't like) will soon own it, are you actually making a rational, guided decision?

Also just throwing it out there that GitLab is also a company. They've also had issues with keeping data intact in the past. They do, however, have free private repos (although I can't ever trust someone who gives me "free" privacy) as well as builtin CI. There are some definite upsides to it, although the UX has a ton of differences. If you're expecting the same dashboard and workflow you've used on GitHub, don't, GitLab has cool features but the bells and whistles aren't the exact same.

If you're switching to GitLab solely because of Microsoft, step back and think, regardless of how popular it might make you to hate Microsoft, is it really worth changing your development ecosystem to go from one corporate entity to another solely because you don't like the company?

I use GitLab and GitBub as well as Bitbucket and selfhosted git on a daily basis. They each have their upsides and downsides; but I think switching from one to the other solely because of Microsoft is not only totally irrational, but really makes light of/disrespects the amazing tools and UX the teams behind each one have carefully developed. Pick your Git hosting based on features and what works out for your use case, not because of which corporate overlord has their name plastered on it.

(Also just throwing it out there that lots of devs love VS Code, and that's Microsoft owned too... They did also build and pioneer a bunch of really cool shit for devs including Typescript so it's not like they're evil or incapable in any sense?)

I quit and my last day is next week.

Apparently management has decided that I should spend my last day implementing a new feature for a customer where I have been the only developer, and release it to production (without first implementing it in test) the same day. A feature that potentially could cripple a whole workflow if done wrong.

Of course I advised not to release untested code to production on a friday, just before the only person that knows how it works leaves the company. But no, “the customer reaaaaaally wants it before summer, so just be careful not to write any bugs”.

I’m not saying that I’m intentionally gonna write bad code - but if I do, I’m not gonna pick up the phone when it calls.

-Let's start making the game!
-Yaay
-We should focus on performance optimization!
-But we don't have anything to optimize yet..
-Performance optimization!!!

1 month later

-OK you were right, we can't focus on performance now. We need to start making this game!
-Finally!
-So we're in pre-production now, let's do some R&D!
-Awesome, I wanted to start designing our workflow for adding new content, and maybe also loca..
-NO! That's unimportant! We must do R&D!
-OK what should we Arr-and-Dee?
-Performance optimization!!!

If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.

I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.

I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.

SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."

Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"

SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"

Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.

SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."

We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"

SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."

Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."

He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.

So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.

You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.

I hate my job. I am furious at my colleagues.

Last November I asked my colleagues (A and B) to help me learn to use something, let's call it Tool. They said okay and set a date for training. Next week they said that they had too much work to do so we'll​ have to postpone. And the next date was also postponed and the next one too, and so on.

Three months in,​ colleague C kept dicking around and being a complete jackass telling me that he refused to work with me for I don't use the Tool.
Not like I didn't want to learn to use the Tool, I simply couldn't. I have long before googled how to use the Tool but in no way can Google ever tell me about our own company workflow, our methods, habits and such.

I was furious, but I am also a the most fucking patient person ever so I let it slide. The Tool wasn't actually needed that much to do my job anyways. And I have known for a while that colleague C needed to push someone under him to feel good about himself.

A few more dates had been set but got cancelled for reasons.
Meanwhile both A and B started to look down on me for not knowing how to use the Tool. I started to feel depressed.

Today B held a "workshop" about the Tool. It took two hours. He was not prepared, had a hangover and generally had a hard time concentrating.
He used aliases that he set up only for himself to show the usage of the Tool instead of commands that a beginner would understand (or google). He kept mumbling and I hsd trouble understanding him. His lecture lacked direction and was all over the place.

I am devastated and furious. I had been waiting since November for this training and when the time actually came he pulled something out of his ass and called it a workshop.

I didn't even get answers for my questions.

Now I feel that I am actually in a worse position than before because while I still cannot use the Tool, they can tell me that there was a workshop and I should've paid closer attention.

I want to quit so bad.

I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.

Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂

Story time:

At a precious employer.
Hire shit-hot contractor.
No technical test at interview stage because he’s so shit-hot.
Is a uni lecturer.
PhD in mathematics.

Me: Shit, this guy must be good!

6 months later and a tragedy of errors and clearly misspent company funds later:

Manager: can you look at what x did and merge it into the product?

Me: Sure. *looks* *yells fuck very loudly*

*walks over to manager*

“Soooo... you know those 6 months and thousands and thousands you spent? It’s all for nought. There’s barely anything there, and none of it works.”

Manager: “Shit. What are we going to do? Can you fix it?”

Me: “To be honest, it would be quicker to just do it from scratch than try to work out what he’s done and failed to do.”

Manager: “Fuck. Ok. Go for it.”

I then had to build this entire new lot of systems, a workflow system, a user management and permissions system.

I got it done inside a month or so.

For context, we (the devs) knew something was afoot when the contractor couldn’t work out why his keyboard wasn’t working (it wasn’t plugged in), and he also *really* struggled to find his way around visual studio and git.

The moral of this tale? *always always* screen your candidates. Even if they seem amazing on paper.

On my former job we once bought a competing company that was failing.

Not for the code but for their customers.

But to make the transition easy we needed to understand their code and database to make a migration script.

And that was a real deep dive.

Their system was built on top of a home grown platform intended to let customers design their own business flows which meant it contained solutions for forms and workflow path design. But that never hit of so instead they used their own platform to design a new system for a more specific purpose.

This required some extra functionality and had it been for their customers to use that functionality would have been added to the platform.

But since they had given up on that they took an easy route and started adding direct references between the code and the configuration.

That is, in the configuration they added explicit class names and method names to be used as data store or for actions.

This was of cause never documented in any way.

And it also was a big contributing cause to their downfall as they hit a complexity they could not handle.

Even the slightest change required synchronizing between the config in the db and the compiled code, which meant you could not see mistakes in compilation but only by trying out every form and action that touched what you changed.

And without documentation or search tools that also meant that no one new could work the code, you had to know what used what to make any changes.

Luckily for us we mostly only needed to understand the storage in the database but even that took about a month to map out WITH the help of their developer ;)

It was not only the “inner platform” it was abusing and breaking the inner platform in more was I can count.

If you are going down the inner platform, at least make sure you go all the way and build it as if it was for the customers, then you at least keep it consistent and keep a clear border between platform and how it is used.

There are three things in my workflow that I don't like:

1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.

It's common to be handled work at 2pm that needs to be deployed by the end of day. Usually it's bug fixes, and that's ok I guess, but sometimes it's brand new features. How the fuck am I supposed to do a good job in such a short time? I don't even have time to wrap my head around the details and I'm expected to implement it, test it, make sure it doesn't break anything and make it pass through code review? With still time to deploy and make sure it's ok? In a few hours? I'm not fucking superman!

2. Not being asked about estimates.

Everything is handed to me with a fixed deadline, usually pulled off my PM's ass, who has no frontend experience. "You have two weeks to make this website." "You must have this done this by tomorrow morning." The result, of course, is rushed code that was barely tested (by hand, no time for unit or integration tests).

3. Being the last part of the product development process.

Being the last part means that our deadlines are the most strict. If we don't meet the deadline, the client will be pissed. The thing is, the design part is usually the one that exceeds its time (because clients keep asking for changes). So when the project lands on our desks it's already delayed and we have to rush it.

This all sounds too much like bad planning to me. I guess it's the result of not doing scrum. There are no sprints, no planning meetings, only weekly status update meetings. Are your jobs similar? Is it just usual "agency work"?

I'm so tired of the constant pressure and having to rush my work. Oh, and the worst part is we don't have time for anything else. We're still stuck with webpack 2 because we never have time to update it ffs.

this is how I destroyed my career in IT and how I'm headed to a bleak future.

I've spent the last 10 years working at a small company developing a web platform. I was the first developer, I covered many roles.
I worked like crazy, often overtime. I hired junior dev, people left and came. We were a small team.
I was able to keep the boat afloat for many years, solving all the technical problems we had. I was adding value to the company, sure, but not to mine professional career.

There was a lot of pressure from young developers, from CEO, from investors. Latent disagreement between the COO and the CEO. I was in between.
Somehow, the trust I built in 10 years, helping people and working hard, was lost.

There was a merge, development was outsourced, the small team I hired was kept for maintenance and I was fired, without obvious explanations.Well, I was the oldest and the most expensive.

Now I'm 53, almost one year unemployed.
I'm a developer at heart, but obsolete. The thing we were doing,
were very naif. I tried to introduce many modern and more sophisticated software concepts. But basically it was still pure java with some jquery. No framework. No persistency layer, no api, no frontend framework. It just worked.

I moved everything to AWS in attempt to use more modern stack, and improving our deployment workflow.
Yes, but I'm no devop. While I know about CD/CI, I didn't set up one.

I know a lot of architectural concepts, but I'm not a solution architect.

I tried to explain to the team agile. But I'm not a scrum master.
I introduced backlog management, story mapping, etc. But I'm not a product manager.

And before that? I led a team once, for one year, part of a bigger project. I can create roadmap, presentations, planning, reports.
But I'm not a project manager.

I worked a lot freelancing.
Now I'll be useless at freelancing. Yes I understand Angular, react, Spring etc, I'm studying a lot. But 0 years of experience.
As a developer, I'm basically a junior developer.

I can't easily "downgrade" my career. I wish. I'll take a smaller salary. I'll be happy as junior dev, I've a lot to learn.
But they'll think I'm overqualified, that I'll leave, so they won't hire me even for senior dev. Or that I won't fit in a 25 y.o. team.

My leadership is more by "example", servant leader or something like that. I build trust when I work with somebody, not during a job interview.

On top of that, due to having worked in many foreign countries, and freelancing, my "pension plan" I won't be able to collect anything. I've just some money saved for one year or so.

I'm 53, unemployed. In few years time, if I don't find anything, it will be even harder to be employed.

I think I'm fucked

!Rant

Designer decide to have a meeting with stakeholders about UX/UI workflow for control panel of our new embedded system (no framework, no library, gui is bit per bit rendered on frame buffer).
A week later, still nothing on my table, not a mail, not a call. Meanwhile I wrote a framework, the control system, renderer, and messaging queues between tasks.
Wrote some widgets, a layout system and a view swtching mechanism, and a separate stack control to use a "back" button.

Now I am stuck for I do not know what should happen when clicking on various (non obvious) items on the touchscreen.
Fine, I'll ask the designer.

"Oh, I will write the workflow next week" (ETA time, 2 weeks. Seriously? You take a week to draw on Adobe Illustrator 20 screenshot with text and I have another week to write it from scratch in C?)
Ok, while you write it, just tell me what should happen when I click an active item.
"Well, we didn't talk about that. We just decided the colour of the icons on the screen..."
For fuck sake...

It was my internship and I've end up working on a law company specializing on Australian construction laws they're working on a website that will take care of all the paperworks for the contractors. They have a dev team who's working on it but they don't have a web designer. I was accepted for the job as an intern/web designer/tester. I was so happy that I've got a really cool internship as a designer but that's only for a second.

The hell starts on day one. They've told me that they're using agile workflow and that they need to make the website responsive. It was based on bootstrap and gosh their code was so broken. HTML tags overlay on each other, some are unclosed. I've tried to fix the problems and did a great job at that. Made the front page responsive and all laid out. When I went to the next php file it has a different header.php and footer.php and same problems apply and we're not even touching the worst.

They didn't use any version management and they're cowboying everything. Now that the website is on the staging server they use Cpanel text editor to edit the code! My headache started to pileup.

The Australian client asked me to provide icons and fix the colors of the website. Also the typography looks great already. I've fixed almost all the problems and I'm satisfied with the design when suddenly a new co-worker from a famous and expensive college was absorbed by the company. He worked as the marketing specialist who has no experience at web design at all. He told me to do this and that and the whole website changed. He bullied me for my skills in design (I'm an intern) and just took over the whole design. Everyone even the boss listen to him as if everything he say is right. He's skilled at design but not web design. He made the website look like a freakin movie poster.

All my works are for nothing, I got headache for nothing and I've got hated for nothing.

It was the day when I finished my internship. It was a long 3 months. After a month I've heard from my co-interns that the whole dev team was fired including the marketing specialist. Also the whole website is scrapped and has been rebuilt by a single guy who used WordPress which he did in only a month.

So lets see if i can get this devrant stuff right.

So a couple of years ago i worked for this company, where i worked in datawarehousing and business intelligence. I was in my 3rd year of working as a software engineer and was full of ideas, motivation and just wanted to do cool stuff.

Anyway, after the first couple of months of working where i learned what they actually wanted to achieve, i got some ideas on how to improve the workflow. They were just simple things, like updating our IDE (we were working with a very old Visual Studio version), getting useful editors, using some more modern ideoms like unittests, continous integration, etc. Simple stuff really.

So in my endless naiveness i went to my supervisor and told him my ideas. He was not particularly interested in my ideas and cut me off somewhere in the middle and said that he would talk to his boss.

So a couple of weeks after that (nothing happened), i went to him again and asked about it.
M:" Hey Bossman, have you thought about my ideas?"
B:"Yes."
M:"And?"
B:"We won't do them."
M:"None of them?"
B:"No."

So at this point i was a bit bummed out, but surely he has a good reason right? So i asked why.

M:"Why?"
B:"Well, because we always have done it the way we do it now."

I think i had a bit of a blank stare at that point, because he looked at me funny. If we would do things like we always have done them, we would be still in the stone age you moron.

God i hate it when people say stuff like that.

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

I hate some parts of this company.

They literally have a "Designer" which made a mockup for our new UI and honestly when I first saw it I almost threw up.

Having made a lot of designs myself for personal projects and for fun I LITERALLY SAW he barely put any effort into it he just threw some stuff together took a shit on it and called it a UI.

For that interview we were actually expecting wireframes and not mockups since we were not sure what workflow we wanted for the UI.
Of course this would have come with feedback from us and then would have been reiterated and this was clear from our last talk with him.

Maybe he didn't know what wireframes were ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If this wasn't enough, he was also consistently misspelling words all over the place, not aligning parts of the UI, misplacing common UI elements and stupid stuff like having a GIGANTIC + button for adding a object to a list for a NO TOUCH SCREEN UI.

(The plus button was all the way to the bottom left of the screen as far away from the list so users get a good hand workout).

But everyone just loved it because "We have known him for a long time and he has a big portfolio so he must know what he's doing".

I couldn't bring in anything, you truly notice the difference between "I don't agree with your opinion but you are heard" and "Shutup my buddy the designer is amazing".

I was not being an asshole I was giving critique on specific parts of the UI and not just saying "it's shit" hoping we could improve on it. Still having naive hope for the future of this project.

He even looked kinda mad and irritated by my opinion and just looked at the people previously mentioned.

I truly hate people who just keep using the exact same worthless piece of garbage people because they have known them for a long time.

Personally I wanted to grab him off his chair and throw him out through the window, 2 floors down, straight into the garbage bin, making damn sure he doesn't accidentally fall into the recycle bin.

Never ever would I enjoy or like this application's UI if I had to work with it as a user.

Our team really needs some workflow arrangement, and this time it was me who screwed up.
So we have to push an update to the Play Store and the App Store the Friday, the app is well tested on test environment then production environment, we got the ok so I uploaded a build, the app management team then continued the process of publishing..

During the weekend the app was approved and live to almost 500k user that can receive the update.

I got a phone call from the Project Manager at almost midnight, the time was really suspicious so I answered.
- Me: Hello.
- PM: Hi, sorry to call you now but the app is live and we have a problem.
- Me: what kind of problem? Let me check.

So I updated the app on my phone and opened it while I am on call.. I almost had heart attack!! WE PUBLISHED A VERSION POINTING TO THE TEST ENVIRONMENT. Holly shit

- Me: shit call the app management team NOW.

Eventually we removed the app from sale (unpublished it) and we submitted a new version immediately, once it was approved the next day we made the app available again (so for those who didn’t update yet, there will be no update to a faulted version, and no new users landing to a version with test data), I received one or two calls from friends telling me why the app is not on the store (our app is used nationally, so it’s really important).

Thank God there was no big show on twitter or other social media.. but it’s really a good lesson to learn.

I understand this is totally my fault, thankfully I didn’t get fired 😅

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

Probably the MOST complete software book on a very broad subject.

This is book to read for those of you are near college grad, first job in the industry. But to the level of detail and broad coverage this book has I think it’s actually a great book for everyone in the industry almost as a “baseline”

From requirements, project planning, workflow paradigms. Software Architecture design, variable naming, refactoring, testing, releasing the book covers everything, not only high level but also in reference to C.

Why C ...because in the consumer electronics, automotive industry, medical electronics and other industries creating physical products c is the language of choice, no changing that. BUT it’s not a C book... it contains C and goes into dept into C but it’s not a C book, C is more like a vehicle for the book, because there are long established, successful industry’s built around it. Plenty of examples.

When I say it’s the most complete on a broad subject seriously like example the chapter about the C language is not a brief over like many other books, for example 10 pages alone are dedicated to just pointer! Many C books have only a few paragraphs on the subject. This goes on depth.

Other topics, recursion, how to write documentation for your code.

Lots of detail and philosophy of the construction of software.

Even if you are a veteran software engineer you could probably learn a thing or two from the book.

It’s not book that you can finish in weekend, unless you can read and comprehend over 1000 pages.

Very few books cover such a broad topic ALL while still going into great detail on those subtopics. the second part is what lacks in most “broad topic books” ..

Code Complete.. is definitely “Complete”

So the image doesn’t match the rest of my book images because I tried to make an amage to cover of the book, inception style kinda haha 😂

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

Planning.
- Sales people: we will deploy and install 100 customers by the end of the month.
Meaning: 100 it's impossibile, we want actually do 50, but we set a high target so people will sweat their ass off. But we don't tell them the truth.

- Tech people: no way, we will deploy and install no more than 25!
Meaning: we could do 100 but we would die. We will guarantee 25, but since we are good we will optimise the workflow and maybe we will make it to 50. But we don't want to create expectations.

Big misunderstanding arise if these two language are used in the same meeting.

At least if I'm in the meeting as technical people

Workflow?
No source control. No documentation. No testing. Do everything on live server.

Had a five hour long debate with one of our Senior Developers today about pull request etiquette.

His view was reviewers should always email or call him before adding comments to any of his requests and they should never block them as he should be allowed to code in "his own style" and should be able to approve his own pull requests.

I explained that we have code standards and an agreed PR workflow be needs to comply with.

He then started talking about meteors and plane crashes. Literally no helping some people.

I dont know what to feel anymore.

Got hired directly without an interview into 'Data-analytics' department in fortune 500 company. This is my first job. Got hired because this company want start a website that cost millions.

Even though I am junior, I can see that this company has no idea about software development at all. No git server, no code review, no quality assurance and no proper workflow. No senior developer to guide us (junior dev) too.

There is one 'senior' consultant that work on automation project here but he just focus on his work and don't help us directly too.

The contract is about 1 year. Still got 11 months to go :/

So I'm tasked with rewriting the old software my employer uses to track basically anything in his company. They want to stick quite close to the old workflow as much as possible, I get that.

"Why exactly do you need access to the system? No you don't need to look at it just recreate the flow. I'll give you the sql structure is that OK? Oh and this won't take long, you can copy from the old code can't you? Wait why do you need access to the code? No. "

🙄

I think I made someone angry, then sad, then depressed.

I usually shrink a VM before archiving them, to have a backup snapshot as a template. So Workflow: prepare, test, shrink, backup -> template, document.

Shrinking means... Resetting root user to /etc/skel, deleting history, deleting caches, deleting logs, zeroing out free HD space, shutdown.

Coworker wanted to do prep a VM for docker (stuff he's experienced with, not me) so we can mass rollout the template for migration after I converted his steps into ansible or the template.

I gave him SSH access, explained the usual stuff and explained in detail the shrinking part (which is a script that must be explicitly called and has a confirmation dialog).

Weeeeellll. Then I had a lil meeting, then the postman came, then someone called.

I had... Around 30 private messages afterwards...

- it took him ~ 15 minutes to figure out that the APT cache was removed, so searching won't work
- setting up APT lists by copy pasta is hard as root when sudo is missing....
- seems like he only uses aliases, as root is a default skel, there were no aliases he has in his "private home"
- Well... VIM was missing, as I hate VIM (personal preferences xD)... Which made him cry.
- He somehow achieved to get docker working as "it should" (read: working like he expects it, but that's not my beer).

While reading all this -sometimes very whiney- crap, I went to the fridge and got a beer.

The last part was golden.

He explicitly called the shrink script.
And guess what, after a reboot... History was gone.

And the last message said:

Why did the script delete the history? How should I write the documentation? I dunno what I did!

*sigh* I expected the worse, got the worse and a good laugh in the end.

Guess I'll be babysitting tomorrow someone who's clearly unable to think for himself and / or listen....

Yay... 4h plus phone calls. *cries internally*

I don't know what you did yesterday, but i did make my company throw away 2 months of progress.
It all started in the beginning, since that i've made numerous complaints about the workflow or code and how to improve it. I've been told off every time, and every time i either told the boss who agreed in the end or wrote code to prove myself. Everything was a hassle and my tasks weren't better.
Team lead: you'll do X now, please do that by making Y.
Me: but Y is insecure, we should do Z.
Team lead: please do Y
Later it turns out Y is impossible and we do Z in the end...
Team lead: please do W now
Me, a few days later: i've tried and their server doesn't give http cors headers, doing W in the browser is impossible
Team lead, a few days later: have you made progress on W?
Me: * tells again it's impossible and uploads code to prove it *
Team lead: * no response *

After that i had enough. Technically i still was assigned to do W, but i used my time to look over the application and list all the things wrong with it. We had everything, giant commits, commented out code, unnecessary packages, a new commit introduced packages that crashed npm install on non-macs, angularjs-packages even though we use angular, weird logic, a security bug, all css in one file even though you can use component-specific css files...

I sent that to my boss, telling him to let the backend-guys have a look at it too and we had a meeting about this. I couldn't attend but they agreed with me completely. They decided to throw away what we have already and to let one of the backend-guys supervise our team. I guess there will be another talk with the team lead, but time will tell.
It feels so good having hope to finally escape this hellish development cycle of badly defined task, bad communication and headache-inducing merges.

Depressed since yesterday.

Updated all our clients Dialers. Stellar performance. Suddenly one of 15 can’t hang up three way calls.

It’s one of our biggest clients. And they just started. We upgraded the dialers so the answering machine detection would improve for them and it did, along with vast performance upgrades as well. Suddenly, this issue.

2 days in they pull the plug until we fix it. The issue is sporadic and we cannot reproduce. No one else is having the issue. I can’t even debug it properly as it’s a third party dialer with no customizations on it. I found out where the error is, but no idea the workflow they got it to happen with or why. It’s so frustrating. It happens using the dialer native interface, and our integration via api calls. The channel doesn’t get sent to the command for some random reason, and only sometimes.

So even if it’s fixed they don’t trust the system. Now they are losing the full integration we have with the crm and dialer and it’s going to be a mess of data for them. All because of this one issue. They love the CRM though...

If they had just stayed on one more day I’m sure I could have found it. Now I have to play forensic scientist and look through old data, without being able to see the client code that was causing the issue.

Just threw some cash down to be able to talk to the dialer engineers and hopefully see what’s up. What a nightmare. And I have so many other projects for the platform due so soon...

Sigh. Super depressing.

So today I was offered a job at the company as a junior frontend developer. Digging a little deeper I found out that they don't have any other frontend devs in house.

So the job offer translated to:
- senior skillset
- senior workload
- junior wage

Best part is that I was freelancing for them in past and was helping to establish some of the workflow a year ago for more money they offered now.

Thanks, no thanks, I guess?

Rant time of 'Derp & Co.'

Today I decided that I am going to find another job, I just can't keep with this shit.

They said that use Agile: FALSE.
• Daily (best scenario) take like 1 hour and a half.
• New task enter the sprint and "Fuck you, more task in the same time". This is something regular done.

• "Oh, dev, we need you to check this other project" I am in the middle of my sprint on this project. "But you have to fix this bug here". (3 fucking days the bloody bug) "You are late again with tasks".

• Meeting for fresh sprint: 6 BLOODY hours... nonstop

The workflow is garbage:
• SOMEONE should did all the devops shit on the first sprint, guess what? They did nothing!, guess now who is being blamed for it (not only me, but a few coworkers).

• Nothing is well designed/defined:
~ task are explained like shit
~ times measured wrongly
~ We are in the last fucking SPRINT and still doing de ER of the DataBase cause Oh, apparently no one has work before with SQL (damn you MongoDB! (Not really)) so I am doing my best, but "jezz dev, this is so hard... maybe we can do it WRONG and easy".
~ No one is capable of take responsability of their mess, they just try to push down the problems. (Remember the devops situatuion? Why is.my fault? I came at the 3 or 4 sprint and I am doing backend tasks, I know nothing about devops).

But the big prize, the last one:
• Apparently you can't send whatever you want to the boss, it has to pass a filter previously of coordinators and managers, hell yeah!

And I am an idiot too!
because I see that we can't reach our schedule and do hours on my spare time!
This is because there are a few good coworkers who probably ended with my unfinished tasks... and they are equaly fucked as me...

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I am not a pro, I am not a full stack developer and still need to learn a lot, but this is just not normal, eight months like this...

I've been using the Square REST API and I spent one hour thinking there was something wrong in my code until I f** found that THEY were not following OAuth 2 guidelines, which made their workflow incompatible with the OAuth lib I was using, so I had to mark an exception for Square's OAuth from the rest of my OAuths. Specifically, RFC 6749 Section 4.2.2 and 5.1.

However, after reading OAuth 2 guidelines, I became angry at THEM instead. The parameter `expires_in` should be the "lifetime in seconds" after the response. This will always be innevitably inaccurate, since we are not taking into account the latency of the response. This is, however, not a huge problem, since the shortest token lifetimes are of an hour (like f** Microsoft Active Directory, who my cron jobs have to check every ten minutes for new access tokens). Many workflows (like Microsoft, Square, and Python's oauthlib) have opted to add the `expires_at` parameter to be more precise, which marks the time in UTC. However, there's no convention about this. oauthlib and Microsoft send the time in Unix seconds, but Square does this in ISO 8601. At this point, ISO 8601 is less ambigious. Sending a raw integer seems ambiguous. For example, JavaScript interprets integer time as Unix _milliseconds_, but Python's time library interprets it as _seconds_. It's just a matter of convention, a convention that is not there yet.

Hope this all gets solved in OAuth 2.1 pleeeaasseee

Okay. I’m upset. So the recent .NET update Microsoft put out fried SharePoint which I am currently the main point of contact for at our company. In addition, my only current projects are creating workflows.

I was publishing a workflow and got an error. I googled the error and found that it was the .NET update that caused it. Internet says to edit the web.config file for your web apps and it will be good to go. I go to our networks guy (only available supervisor) and explain what happened and ask about the recent patch and whether this could be the cause. He says that his team doesn’t actually handle the patches so I should speak with the HelpDesk lead (don’t ask).

I go to the HelpDesk lead and explain the situation, explain the solution and ask for what to do next. Keep in mind that this whole thing takes two hours because it’s Friday and everyone is out and I can’t do any of my work while I’m waiting on this. HelpDesk lead says “you have an admin account, I trust you. Go fix it” so I think uh okay.... I’m a junior and not even technically an IT person but sure. I know how to do it - but got nervous about fucking it up because our entire organization uses Sharepoint.

Nevertheless I go to my desk and look for the root directories and find that they’re on a server somewhere that I have no access to. I message the Helpdesk guy and tell him this and he says to talk to the developer supervisor. Great! He’s super nice and helpful and will totally understand! Only he’s not in. Neither is half of his team.

I go to his team and look around and find nobody but realize I may be able to catch one of the guys I know and work with in the break room. I start leaving and am stopped by a developer who is generally nice and funny. I explain the situation and he says “you... YOU need to edit a config file?” And scoffs. He demands to see what I’m talking about.

I walk him to my machine and show him what’s going on and all the research I did. I start to realize he thinks I’m overstepping and I begin to apologize and explain the details to why I was asked to do it and then I say “I really shouldn’t even be the one doing this” he says “no you should not. This isn’t getting done today. Put in a request, include your research and we will see what we can do when the supervisor gets back next week”

His tone was like I was in trouble and I know that I’m not, but it’s my goal to end up on that team and I just feel like shit about this whole situation. To top it off my boss pulled me off of two projects because of unrelated issues (and nothing to do with me) so I have basically nothing to do and I just feel very discouraged. I feel dumb and like I should have gone to the developers first. I just wanted to make it easy on everyone and do my research. I feel like I keep being put in situations above my level (I’m one of two juniors in a 16 person shop, the other one is an intern) and then “getting in trouble” for working beyond my scope.

Anyways.... fuck Microsoft

I started my actual gig as CTO of construction group (Innovation Hub) a year ago. And it was a hell of a ride, implementing kind of a scrum-ban for project management, XP, peer-reviews, a git-flow, git commit message formats, linters, unit testing, integration tests, etc...
And it's the fun part because with the CIO we had to drive the board to do A LOT of changes in their IT/Innovation drive.

But in one year there is a lot of KPI that went up :
* Deployment: When I arrived it took three stressful days to deploy a new version of one application, once a month. Today we do it every week, and it takes three annoying hours.
* We had no test. NOTHING! Today we have 85% code coverage for the unit test, and automatic integration tests run by our CI server every day.
* We had almost no documentation. Today our code is our documentation (it automatically extracted and versioned).
* We had 0 add value in the use of git. With commit messages as "dev", "asked task", inside jokes and a lot of "fix" and "changes". Today we have a useful git, and we even use it to create our deploy changelogs (and it's only mildly annoying!).
* More important, the team is happy! They get their purpose, see betterment in their tech mastery. They started doing conception, applicative architecture, presentations, having fun.

There is still a LOT of bad things we are still working on, and trying to solve (support workflow and betterment). But seeing what they already did, I'm so proud of my TEAM! I'm a fucking asshole, workaholic, "just do it" kind of guy. But they managed to achieve so much. Fucking PROUD!!

In the past: "Alright, have the day off, so can do some serious work (work on my game project). Let me just check my mail first... And a cpl of sub-reddits... And see if there are any updates for Unit3D, or any interesting forum posts, or new assets on asset store that look nice... And check some online newspapers just to see if anything is going on... And check if anything new has been posted on slashdot since I last checked 5 minutes ago (nope)... And maybe see if there's any updates to Sublime Text or new useful packages that can help improve workflow... Ooh came across article on how to improve workflow... Hm someone mentioned a new task-management system in comments, gotta check that out... I'll just sign up for a demo-account and... Hm but what if there are any better ones? Better google for comparisons. Wait, isn't there a new episode of Silicon Valley today? Gotta see that first, no time tmr. Hmm also new episode of Archer, and American Gods. Better get watching these out of the way first, or I can't concentrate... Ah, wait, it's dinner time, no point starting anything until after that."

Now: All of the above, plus "I'll just check devRant real quick before I... hmm... interesting rant... *scrolls and reads rants and comments for 3 hours*"

How am I supposed to get any work done? :_(

I often read articles describing developer epiphanies, where they realized, that it was not Eclipse at fault for a bad coding experience, but rather their lack of knowledge and lack of IDE optimization.

No. Just NO.

Eclipse is just horrendous garbage, nothing else. Here are some examples, where you can optimize Eclipse and your workflow all you like and still Eclipse demonstrates how bad of an IDE it is:

- There is a compilation error in the codebase. Eclipse knows this, as it marks the error. Yet in the Problems tab there is absolutely nothing. Not even after clean. Sometimes it logs errors in the problems tab, sometimes t doesn't. Why? Only the lord knows.

- Apart from the fact that navigating multiple Eclipse windows is plain laughable - why is it that to this day eclipse cannot properly manage windows on multi-desktop setups, e.g. via workspace settings? Example: Use 3 monitors, maximize Eclipse windows of one Eclipse instance on all three. Minimize. Then maximize. The windows are no longer maximized, but spread somehow over the monitors. After reboot it is even more laughable. Windows will be just randomly scrabled and stacked on top of each other. But the fact alone that you cannot navigate individual windows of one instance.. is this 2003?

- When you use a window with e.g. class code on a second monitor and your primary Eclipse window is on the first monitor, then some shortcuts won't trigger. E.g. attempting to select, then run a specific configuration via ALT+R, N, select via arrows, ALT+R won't work. Eclipse cannot deal with ALT+R, as it won't be able to focus the window, where the context menus are. One may think, this has to do with Eclipse requiring specific perspectives for specific shortcuts, as shortcuts are associated with perspectives - but no. Because the perspective for both windows is the same, namely Java. It is just that even though Shortcuts in Eclipse are perspective-bound, but they are also context-sensitive, meaning they require specific IDE inputs to work, regarldless of their perspective settings. Is that not provided, then the shortcut will do absolutely nothing and Eclipse won't tell you why.

- The fact alone that shortcut-workarounds are required to terminate launches, even though there is a button mapping this very functionality. Yes this is the only aspect in this list, where optimizing and adjusting the IDE solves the problem, because I can bind a shortcut for launch selection and then can reliably select ant trigger CTRL+F2. Despite that, how I need to first customize shortcuts and bind one that was not specified prior, just to achieve this most basic functionality - teminating a launch - is beyond me.

Eclipse is just overengineered and horrendous garbage. One could think it is being developed by people using Windows XP and a single 1024x768 desktop, as there is NO WAY these issues don't become apparent when regularily working with the IDE.

TL;DR: When picking vendors to outsource work to, vet them really well.

Backstory:
Got a large redesign project that involves rebuilding a website's main navigation (accessibility reasons).
Project is too big just for our dev team to handle with our workload so we got to bring a 3rd party vendor to help us. We do this often so no big deal.
But, this time the twist was Senior Management already had retained hours with a dev shop so they want us to use them for project. Okay...

It begins:
Have our scope / discovery meeting about the changes and our expected DevOps workflow.

Devs work Local and push changes to our Github, that kicks off the build and we test on Dev, then it goes to Staging for more testing & PM review. Once ready we can push to prod, or whenever needed. All is agreed, everyone was happy.

Emailed the vendors' project manager to ask for their devs Github accounts so we can add them to the project. Got no reply for 3 days.

4th day, I get back "Who sets up the Github accounts?"

fuck me. they've never used Github before but in our scope meeting 4 days ago you said Github was fine...??

Whatever, fuck it. I'll make the accounts and add them.

Added 4 devs to the repo and setup new branch. 40min later get an email that they can't setup dev environment now, the dev doesn't know how to setup our CMS locally, "not working for some reason."

So, they ask for permission to develop on our STAGING server.. "because it's already setup"... they want to actively dev on our staging where we get PM/Senior Management approvals?

We have dev, staging, production instances and you want to dev in staging, not dev?... nay nay good sir.

This is whom senior management wants us to use, already paid for via retainer no less. They are a major dev shop and they're useless...

😢😭

Cant wait for today's progress checkup meeting. 😐😐

/rant

We don't have a designer yet in the team so we had to learn Adobe XD on the side to prototype our ideas. After months of getting the hang of it thinking this semi-free tool will work for us to save some money, Adobe decides to change their pricing plans starting in April 2020 and it will no longer be free. It feels like Adobe trapped us to get used to their platform and then secretly slap us with a price tag halfway. We can't blame them since we're all trying to put food on the table here. We started exploring Figma today and oh boy was it a gift from the gods! The features are so much better. They make our workflow faster!

A loooong time ago...

I've started my first serious job as a developer. I was young yet enthusiastic as well as a kind of a greenhorn. First time working in a business, working with a team full of experienced full-lowered ultra-seniors which were waiting to teach me the everything about software engineering.

Kind of.

Beside one senior which was the team lead as well there were two other devs. One of them was very experienced and a pretty nice guy, I could ask him anytime and he would sit down with me a give me advice. I've learned a lot of him.

Fast forward three months (yes, three months).

I was not that full kind of greenhorn anymore and people started to give me serious tasks. I had some experience in doing deployments and stuff from my other job as a sysadmin before so I was soon known as the "deployment guy", setting up deployments for our projects the right way and monitoring as well as executing them. But as it should be in every good team we had to share our knowledge so one can be on vacation or something and another colleague was able to do the task as well.

So now we come to the other teammate. The one I was not talking about till now. And that for a reason.

He was very nice too and had a couple of years as a dev on his CV, but...yeah...like...

When I switched some production systems to Linux he had to learn something about Linux. Everytime he encountered an error message he turned around and asked me how to fix it. Even. For. The. Simplest. Error. He. Could. Google. Up.

I mean okay, when one's new to a system it's not that easy, but when you have an error message which prints out THE SOLUTION FOR THE ERROR and he asks me how to fix it...excuse me?

This happened over 30 times.
A. Week.

Later on I had to introduce him to the deployment workflow for a project, so he could eventually deploy the staging environment and the production environment by hisself.

I introduced him. Not for 10 minutes. I explained him the whole workflow and the very main techniques and tools used for like two hours. Every then and when I stopped and asked him if he had any questions. He had'nt! Wonderful!

Haha. Oh no.

So he had to do his first production deployment. I sat by his side to monitor everything. He did well. One or two questions but he did well.

The same when he did his second prod deploy. Everythings fine.

And then. It. Frikkin. Begins.

I was working on the project, did some changes to the code. Okay, deploy it to dev, time for testing.

Hm.

Error checking out git. Okay, awkward. Got to investigate...

On the dev server were some files changed. Strange. The repo was all up to date. But these changes seemed newer because they were fixing at least one bug I was working on.

This doubles the strangeness.

I want over to my colleague's desk.

I asked him about any recent changes to the codebase.

"Yeah, there was a bug you were working on right? But the ticket was open like two days so I thought I'll fix it"

What the Heck dude, this bug was not critical at all and I had other tasks which were more important. Okay, but what about the changed files?

"Oh yeah, I could not remember the exact deployment steps (hint from the author: I wrote them down into our internal Wiki, he wrote them done by hisself when introducing him and after all it's two frikkin commands), so I uploaded them via FTP"

"Uhm... that's not how we do it buddy. We have to follow the procedure to avoid..."

"The boss said it was fine so I uploaded the changes directly to the production servers. It's so much easier via FTP and not this deployment crap, sorry to say that"

You. Did. What?

I could not resist and asked the boss about this. But this had not Effect at all, was the long-time best-buddy-schmuddy-friend of the boss colleague's father.

So in the end I sat there reverting, committing and deploying.

Yep

It's soooo much harder this deployment crap.

Years later, a long time after I quit the job and moved to another company, I get to know that the colleague now is responsible for technical project management.

Hm.

Project Management.

Karma's a bitch, right?

After having my soul suck away by "corporate", I installed VS code on my Windows 10 gaming machine.

Now, I have a pretty hardcore dev setup on my MacOS (it's unix-based and it's good, so stop the hate). I'm talking about fully automatized Rakefile that will provision it from scratch: vim, macvim, tmux, iterm configs, 15+ brew tools, 15+ brew-cask tools, themes, plugins, etc.

Installing VS Code, Node and MongoDB on Windows, just for the fun and giggles, and not having any of my hardcore tools, made me feel like... it's something silly and fun again. I'm once again that softcore developer with no stress and no constant self-reminder to improve workflow effectiveness.

Made me a little happy.

Checkout this picture, this is my Windows 10's "tmux" lol

Wasted a day as Shitlock Holmes with the build chain.

It would not reproduce the firmware hexfile that had been checked in. Reverse engineering that along with the mapfile to find out the cause, it was a const string that was guarded by an ifdef from another file that was auto-generated as prebuild step via a script that fetched some version control info.

Or, it would have been if the installation instructions had been correct and someone had described that no spaces in the absolute path name of the project are allowed. Otherwise, that shit just failed silently.

I then had to reverse engineer the intended workflow from the commit history in the version control to figure out that the last dev obviously hadn't quite understood the project specific workflow and how the version control interacts with these build scripts.

At least, I finally did get a matching hexfile.

So I've been hired as a senior software developer with all the tags included (mentoring, innovating, pushing forward changes) for a company that is trying to move away from waterfall development (yup, it's 2019 and this exists) to a more iterative workflow.
I was initially hired and sent out to do some "field work" abroad for 3 months and then worked "remotely" from the local office with our field partners.
During all this time it seemed that my ideas go through smoothly, there was a lot of chatter about how things are moving forward, how new projects, innovations and new methodologies are implemented.
And yet, after my "remote" work has finished and I have to do things locally more, all of the skeletons fell out. It's just talk, nothing seems to be changing at all and yet any attempts to talk with the brass is like hitting a brick wall.
Not only that, I've been handed a 12 year old project with no possibility to refactor, no technical documentation, very few comments and in a terrible style.
The atmosphere in the company is odd as hell. People are either not very initiative, nor they seem to really care about all of the "changes" that "should be happening".
It almost feels that I've arrived in a company that still lives in 2007 more or less.
Should I quit, or perhaps it's a little "too soon" (have spent 7 months in the place already)? What I don't want is to get in the same train again (work for a company for 8 - 12 months, feel burned out because of the divergence between actual things done and "plans" and then change the job).

Today after longer vacation I came back to work.

Edit: wrote this rant long time ago, but never finished. Was too pissed.

Some easy meetings, then wanted to start on an easy job.

Just migrating some things from bash regex voodoo to proper tools like JQ.

Finished in roughly 1 h. Lovely.
Made some tea, ate some cookies.

Set up dev environment, found no documentation what so ever, got it running after half an hour.

Annoying, but ok.

Then I tried my scripts...

They worked... Except they didn't.
Console log empty, response code 200 with state: GENERATE_NO_FILES.

Eh. Fuck you. Just fuck you.

Fixed the logging configuration, which was broken since uhm... 2 years plus?

Well... Another half another hour gone...
Kinda pissed now.

Still script return failed...
Poking and trying to sprinkle debug all over that shit cause everything seems ... An incohesive, inconsistent diarrhea.

3 hours later...

Made the ticket to rewrite it.

I did nothing wrong at all.

The API just has no workflow at all. The
*seperate* API calls have to be in an **specific** order - as otherwise the generation will fail, as the prerequisites for the generation are not fulfilled.

Yeah. Completely logical. Especially not to give out any kind of warning or an error message like requirements not met, blablabla.

I drank that evening 2 six packs of beer. I was raging mad....

Then gave that shit to another manager, as I never want to touch that nuclear waste again....

How can someone be so brain damaged -.-

Craziest deadline: job processing system for a manufacturing company, Android app, live updating web interface, integration with 3 existing systems, custom/new database and workflow... 9 days from concept to prototype. I was the only dev on it.

Yes, the product sucked, and no, I didn't really sleep.

So I had this thought all of a sudden. (Without any drug in my system)

Why are we still developing same old systems, softwares and web applications till now?

Websites, games and creativity involved development are understandable because people have different taste.

But workflow and process are supposed to be precise, standardized and consistent. No?

Is it because businesses are operating in various ways? Then again why?

Shit. I should stop my thinking at this level. 😑

Tabs, or No Tabs? I did the same as this commentor 2 years ago. I can code so quick now because of this simple switch. Here's why:

(source, Laracasts.com)

Ben Smith
"I think the most beneficial tip was to do away with tabs. Although it took a while to get used to and on many occasions in the first few days I almost switched them back on, it has done wonders for my workflow.

I find it keeps my brain more engaged with the task at hand due to keeping the editor (and my mind) clutter free. Before when I had to refer to a class, I would have opened it in a new tab and then I might have left it open to make it easier to get to again. This would quickly result in a bar full of tabs and navigation around the editor would become slow and my brain would get bogged down keeping track of what was open and which tab it was in. With the removal of the tab bar I'm now able to keep only the key information in my mind and with the ability to quickly switch between recently opened files, I find I haven't lost any of the speed which I initially thought I might.

In fact this is something I have noticed in all areas of writing code, the more proficient I have become with an editor the better the code I have been writing. Any time spent actually writing your code is time in which your brain is disconnected from the problem you are trying to solve. The quicker you are able to implement your ideas in code, the smaller the disconnect becomes. For example, I have recently been learning how to do unit testing and to do so I have been rewriting an old project with tests included. The ability to so quickly refactor has meant that whereas before I might have taken 30 seconds shuffling code around, now I can spend maybe 5 seconds allowing my mind to focus much better on how best to refactor, not on the actual process of doing so."

jeff_way Mod
"Yeah - it takes a little while to get used to the idea of having no tabs. But, I wouldn't go back at this point. It's all about forcing yourself into a faster workflow. If you keep the tabs and the sidebar open, you won't use the keyboard."

The worst of Agile and Sc(r)um: All those people knowing the right way(™) to do it. Endless discussion about useless tooling: the proper use of the custom workflow in Jira, on when and how to create sub tickets. The hour-less meta-discussions on what should be discussed where and when (what's subject of the backlog refinement, retro, etc), the roles: the PO's, what he should do, cannot, the PM's. Who is allowed to pull a ticket to the sprint or not. How many reviewers need to acknowledge a pull request. To and fro. Pointless, but fought with heart and blood, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

And everywhere I hear: "In my previous company, we did Scrum like.. and it worked perfectly!"

Some of you might remember my rants on Mr. Gitmaster, with whom I thought I'd made my peace. Guess what? He's now a team member and turning into Mr. Agile - a more severe reincarnation! As our company starts flogging that dead horse of Agility, he seems to feel strong tailwind. Our team lead would constantly cut his monologues, but he's now on holiday, so we have no escape from the never ending: "In my previous company..."

If it was so great, why didn't you stay?

We are not allowed to pull a ticket to the sprint unless every team member is notified? I don't fucking care. If our software fails on customer's machines and I can fix it, I will do if there is a ticket, if it's in the sprint or not. Screw Scrum, if it is getting in the way of it. You can waste your hours discussing horseshit, I want to sit at my desk, deep in the test-compile loop and ship some fucking code.

We are all about structures, clean code and many other things that make our life easier, right?

Well... It's not all white and black...

As talked many times, projects can be rushed... Client budgets can be low at the start and only then grow...

Let me take an example:

Client X needs a tool that helps his team perform jobs faster. They have a $500 budget. So... Testing, clean architecture and so on - are not really a viable option. Instead, you just make it work and perform that task as needed. So the code has minimal patterns, minimal code structure, a lot of repetitive parts and so on.

Now... Imagine that 3 months pass by without any notice and clients are ultra happy with the product. They want more things to be automated. They contact developers and ask for more things. This time they have a bigger budget but short timeframe.

So once again, you ignore all tests, structure and just make it work. No matter what. The client is happy again.

A year passes and the client realizes that their workflow changed. The app needs total refactoring. The previous developer has no time for adjustments at this point and hires a new company. They look at the code and rants spill out of their mouth along with suicidal thoughts.

So... What would you do? Would you rant about "messy project" or just fix it? Especially since people now have a bigger budget and timeframe to adapt to changes.

Would you be pissed on such a project?
Would you flame on previous devs?
Would you blame anyone for the mess?

Or would you simply get in and get the job done since the client has a "prototype" and needs a better version of it?

---

Personally, I've been in this situation A LOT. And I'm both, the old and new dev. I've built tons of crappy software to make things work for clients and after years - they come back for changes/new things. You just swallow the pill and do what is needed. Why? Well, because it's an internal system and not used by anyone outside their office. Even if it's used outside the office - prototyping is the key. They didn't know if the idea would work or be helpful in any way. Now they know and want it done correctly.

Stop commenting out code blocks!

Either fix your shit or delete it.

I am open to argue what fixing may mean, as it is perfectly fine to make your broken code not reachable, e.g. via feature flags or skipping certain tests. Yet never ever should you comment those blocks!

So you say you want to keep it for historic reasons? You know, that is why we use version control! If you ever need certain functionality back, you can restore that state.

Each decent IDE also offers a local history where you can even restore code blocks that weren't even pushed or committed. So use that!

Commenting out test cases is a really bad habit, as you have no reminder that you shall restore it.

And no, a TODO and a FIXME won't count as a reminder as you have to actively look for them. And we all know how well that goes, don't we? (One time, I found a typo of a `TDO`. So even with a regular lookup for TODO, stuff will slip.)

Each test suite offers you ways to skip tests if there are valid reasons why they should not fail the build temporary and they offer colorful feedback. Yes, that means that your tests won't be green, but guess what: That's a feature! They shouldn't be.

That yellow is a fine reminder, aka warning!, that you should really fix your shit.

Commented code screams: "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I WAS DOING!" and it confuses the hell out of other developers ("Was this commented because of debugging purposes and should be active again or can I safely delete this!?") and adds verbose crap to the code base.

If you find yourself to be in a place that you comment code a lot, I also argue that your workflow is broken.

When you are using a decent debugger, there shouldn't that much of a need to comment in and out a lot of code in order to reason about your code-base.

Okay. So finally I moved into a new pc. Because I never worked in a company, I have absolutely no idea what is the proper standard workflow of developing a website. My work flow was the same in past 12 years, how I have learned in the school: Used xampp, developed everything, used git only locally, when stuff was ready I fired up Filezilla and uploaded everything, and used ssh to make the final adjustments. When I have made some changes, I just uploaded the files I have touched, in the same way, optimized if it was necessary, done. I wonder if someone can clarify me how a proper workflow looks like for php/laravel, mysql, nothing fancy. Is using xampp still okay? Or what is the industry standard procedure?

I used to hate the idea of using the terminal. This year, however, I decided to go full monty and there's no looking back. I've written scripts to reinstall oh-my-zsh, GUI apps and everything I need to work including workflow tasks. Reinstalling used to take me a week, I've effectively reduced it to 1 day.

rant/!rant

So I just started working at the beginning of January and I have no fucking clue about anything especially Web development.
But now I have a week to figure out how in the world I am going set up a workflow for some secretaries so that the higher ups get a printed coupon with a password on it, so they can log into our WLAN via a captive portal that I also need to set up.
I am thinking about a website that takes a list of names and settings (probably excel or smt) passes them to the WiFi management softwares API and then generates some PDF file for download that just needs to get printed.
Did I mention that I have no Dev tools (I have notepad, yeah the one without ++), no test environment, no prior experience and no clue how to do it?
But somehow I love this challenge and am glad that my colleagues don't send me to get coffee but let me work.
Am I insane?

Working for a large client converting paper forms to the web. Stated goals, simplify data entry for clients, improve data quality, reduce resourcing in backend human processing.

We met to review prototype and discuss workflow questions. Crazy deadlines, with the usual changing scope creep.

We start to point out the need for data validation, to shorten # of questions based on answers.

Business says no. All forms should be submittable regardless of what user enters, don’t put validations in because all that warning messaging confuses them and takes up more time.

Web form should behave like the paper copy....

Welcome to 1975!!! This is why 2018 won’t be like 2018...

I did not think that making a serverless Discord bot would be such a learning experience. The code itself was easy. The hard part was the infrastructure, because I decided to automate it all with Terraform and deploy it on AWS.

Before this project, I had no idea how API Gateways worked. Now I still have very little idea how they work but I managed to build one anyway. Eventually. And then I had to figure out how to automate the deployment of a lambda layer and function that would both still be managed in the Terraform state, with any code changes triggering a rebuild and update for the resource.

And then I had to untangle a dependency mess because API Gateways have some weird issues where two resources that have no explicit dependencies on each other will throw an error if they don't deploy in the right order.

And then I went the wrong way with Github actions trying to conditionally chain multiple workflows together before I realized I could just put multiple jobs with conditions in a single workflow.

And now after all that work over the course of 2 days, I have a bot that does this:

So... I might have to build a survey and analysis tool to be used online nation wide (the final client is the government).
The bad news, it's probably going live in a week.
Even though 90% I wrote and tested in the last 3 years (matrixes,formulas,dB, Interface elements ) from previous runs, I have to handle fronted, databases, math, testing and design.
Over a daily changing methodology and session workflow (by my direct client).
No sleep for the next few days 😭

i just released my first open source project with effort to make a comprehensible documentation for others to use as well as repetitive refactoring to not embarrass myself.
i am equally excited and knowing no one will care about that.

it is based on my effort to make my companies workflow more effective, knowing well this is just a temporary solution in advance to a professional developed system as opposed to having no system at all. so all of this work will fade into oblivion eventually.

i felt this has been too much work just to be forgotten someday so i cling to my naive hope someone might benefit from that and maybe i get one or three internet points.

in case someone is interested in a free quality management software for document control and access with no real state of art, you might find it interesting to visit my qualitymanagement repo

TL;DR: idiot 'team leader' does mindless merge to master. Precious time wasted in a high pressure deadline environment.

So, i work currently at one of Belgiums largest consulting company's at brussels airport, we are moving their analytics platform to the cloud.

We use puppet to manage the systems.

When i started i noticed immediately that their 'development workflow' is hardly to be named as such, because they simply change stuff directly on server , manual 'temporary' fixes everywhere, hardcoded stuff, non validated code... Basically the way one would develop in their garage, not in a consulting company as this one. But that is just the beginning.

A month ago i did a major effort to equalize all the discrepancies between the codebase and the server. Ensured entire codebase to be validated, syntax checked, parsed, tested... It works. A 'great codebase overhaul' commit was PR'ed to master and got merged.

Yesterday the team lead, i'll call him 'B-tard' from here on, has also 'equalized the discrepancies between codebase, server and the restnof the stale branches on the repo' . i was doing my other work on my branch so no fucks given. This is where i should have given some fucks.

Anyways, today. The day starts every day with merging the master branch into your working branh because you need the latest working codebase, right?

Wrong!
This fucking dipshit smug b-tard has done a mindless merge of the entire codebase, effectively removing ALL validated working code for provisioning servers. Control blocks, lookup functions, lambda's... Basically everything he did not understand.

At the same time the project is already way beyond the allotted budget in pkney and time, so there is a huge pressure to have a working 'production' environment TODAY!

THIS MOTHERFUCKING B-TARD JUST MADE THAT IMPOSSIBLE.

i'm loving this assignment, i'm loving the PM, the collegues, the environment, the location... everything. All but this fuckibg b-tard that somehow got his position by sucking dick or licking ass or both...

I wanna get out asap.

Oh... While typing this and arriving at the room of the office... It is locked, i have no key.

Fucking asshole!

Random thoughts on more out of the box tools/environments.

Subject: Pharo

Some time ago I had shown one of my coworkers about Pharo and he quickly got the main idea behind it but mentioned how he didn't like the idea of leaving behind his text editor to deal with source code.

Some time last week I showed the dude some cool 3d animations you can do with Pharo while simultaneously manipulating the code to change them in real time. Now that caught his attention particularly and he decided he wanted to know more about the language but in particular the benefits of fucking around with an image based environment rather than a file based.

Both of us reached the conclusion that image based makes file based dev enviroments seem quaint in comparison, but estimated that it was nothing more than a sentiment rather than a fact.

We then considered what could be the advantage/disadvantages of such environments but I couldn't come up with anything other than the system not having something like Vim or VS Code or whatever which people love, but that it makes up for it with some of the craziest IDE tools I had ever seen. Plugins in this case act like source code repos that you can download and activate into your workflow in what feels something similar to VS Code being extended via plugins written in JS, and since the GUI is maleable as it is(because everything is basically just subsets of morp h windows) then extending functionality becomes so intuitive that its funny

Whereas with Emacs(for example) you have to really grind your gears with Elisp or Vimscript in Vim etc etc, with Pharo your plugin system is basicall you just adding classes that will convert your OS looking IDE into something else.

Because of how light the vm machine is, portability is a non issue, and passing pharo programs arround is not like installing Java in which you need the JVM.

Source code versioning, very important, already integrated into every live environment and can be extended to do pushes through simple key bindings with no hassle.

I dunno, I just feel that the tool is too good to be true. I keep trying to push limits into it but thus far I have found: data visualization and image modeling to work fine, web development with Teapot to be a cakewalk and work fine, therr are even packages for Arduino development.

I think its biggest con would be the image based system, but would really need to look into how this is bad by any reason other than "aww man I want vim!" since apparently some psychos already made Emacs and VS code packages for interfacing with Pharo source trees.

Embedded is certainly out of the question for any real project since its garbage collected and not the most performant cookie in the jar.

For Data science I can see some future, seems just as intuitive and interesting as a Jupyter Notebook actually, but the process can't and will not be the same since I still don't know of a way to save playground snippets unless you literally create classes for it, in which case every model you build gets saved inside of an object, sounds possible but, strange since it is not a the most common workflow in jupyter.

Some of the environment is sometimes glitchy, but it does have continuos development and have not found many hassles.

There is a biased factor from my side: I seem to be wired to understand the syntax and simple object model better than in other languages. To me this feels natural as if I was just writing ideas rather than code, mostly because I feel that there really ain't much in terms of syntax, the language gets out of my way and the IDE feels like the most intuitive environment in the world to me. I can see why some people would find it REALLY weird of counterintuitive tho.

Guess I really am a simple dude.

Is it just me or is the majority of all additional slack apps really just crap? Many cannot even be installed because the website is no longer available (WorkingOn as an example).

Not a single app really helps us in our workflow. I lost the interest to try more of them :(

So, I’ve been given the task of sorting the security out in an application plugging the holes and whatnot as to be honest it’s shocking haha. It doesn’t help that we automate security audits but that’s a different rant for another day.

We’re using devise for authentication (rails standard, ♥️ devise), we have no password resets through the login page, it has to be manually reset by ringing support, why who knows, even though it’s built into the gem and we allow the user to login using an username instead of an email because for whatever reason someone thought it was a bright idea to not have the email field mandatory.

So I hop onto a call with the BAs, basically I go that we need to implement password resets into the login page so the user can do it themselves and also to cut down support calls a ticket is already in place for it. So I go through the standardised workflow for resetting a password. My manager goes.

“I don’t think this will be very secure”

Wait.. what. Have you never reset a password before? It’s following the same protocol as every other app.

We go back and fourth and I said I’ll get it checked with security just to keep him happy.

The issue mainly is well we can’t implement password resets due to 100s of users not having an email on there account.. 🙃 so before we push this change we need to try and notice all users to set a unique email.

Updated the tickets. All dandy.

Looking at the PRs to see what security things have been done if any and turns out one of the devs in India has just written a migration to add the same default email to every user that doesn’t have an email present and yep it got merged. So I go revert the change but talk about taking a “we don’t care about security approach”.

Eventually we want to have the user reset their passwords and login using their email and someone goes a head and does that. Not to mention the security risk.

Jesus Christ I wonder why I bother sometimes.

Going to a local hackathon practice session today. We are going to participate in a larger hackathon later this year. This session is to get everyone up to speed on tools, workflow, etc. We have a lot of new developers in our group.

I have no idea what I will work on this evening. It is sponsored by a couple of businesses. So "free pizza"!

I have been using an app through Slack for months that helps me to get specific emails related to users needing help into a Slack channel for the whole team to easily see, manage, and talk about. Just found out that they updated their app to version 2.0, and with this, the free service, has now become a paid monthly service (along with a lot of other things I will never use.)

So now I have a workflow that no longer works, and have to put a pause on everything else I was doing to find something else that can work, or code something from scratch. There goes my day.

Finite State Machines are awesome! Resume from reboots and automation is possible even on older Powershell versions without Workflow support. Setting state and transitions resuming where it left off is huge for getting PC's set up. Unfortunately can reimage due to no vl reimaging rights but scripting is totally possible...and with it creating it's own scheduled task to run on startup it does what it needs, then reboots resumes and deletes the task when done.

Ah, Visual Studio Code—our trusty sidekick in the coding trenches. But wait, what's this? A delightful new feature designed to keep us on our toes: the 'Disable All Extensions for This Workspace' command. Because who doesn't love a good surprise, especially when it involves disabling all the tools we painstakingly set up?

Picture this: you're in the zone, about to format your document as usual. You hit Ctrl + Shift + P, type 'for', and expect the familiar 'Format Document' to greet you. But no! Instead, 'Disable All Extensions for This Workspace' has decided to make a guest appearance at the top of the list. How thoughtful! It's as if VS Code is saying, "Hey, let's make things interesting by turning off all your extensions without warning."

And the fun doesn't stop there. Once you've accidentally disabled all your extensions, there's no magical 'undo' button to save the day. Nope, you get the joy of manually sifting through your extensions list, re-enabling each one like it's 1999. And let's not forget the mandatory restarts—one to unload the extensions and another to load them back up. Because who doesn't love losing their undo history and breaking their workflow?

So, dear VS Code developers, thank you for adding a dash of unpredictability to our coding sessions. After all, who needs stability and consistency when we can have random command roulette?

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.

Unpopular opinion:

No one should ever argue over ANY coding style unless they're just starting out and thus have to come up with their organization's coding standards for the first time.

Once the standards are set, everyone should just comply with it irrespective of their personal preference. Or alternatively, include back-and-forth code formatting into the development workflow.

The only thing that's important is that by the time code is pushed into the codebase, it is formatted according to the defined standards so that the whole thing looks consistently written, which is basically the point of setting a coding standard.

from rant import workflow

Tl;dr - I have a share of the product's backend, everyone expects it to work, no one cares how and i can spare with i, me, and myself getting there.

CTO: We need this solution, what do you need for data?
ME: Okay, thing0, thing1, thing2, preferably a ton of samples.
C: Here, also, there's a new full-timer who will help you. And you can do some sparing with.
M: Cool, i have several approaches to discuss.
*new full-timer attends fewer times than me as a part-timer*
*standup meetings talks about status, problems - yeah, whatever reactions*
*full-timer doesn't attend still, gets a "quick" (in case of consistently showing up) task to fix something in another backend part*
Me @ a standup lately: So, approach 4 worked, polishing it, but I soon-ish need to know a few things so I can finish up and fully integrate it.
CTO: Okay, when *full-timer* gets in so she's included.
*waiting for X days (x>8)*

Fuck external stake holders, like politicians, those know-nothings, that pump their ego by finding multiple "issues" with our software like how we display the privacy data agreement and impose their stupid fucking nonsense rules on our software. Even if it is not part in any official law or GDPR
So there is the request that one needs to scroll down the whole data privacy crap nobody reads until you can press "Continue" and we *have* to implement that shit. Although it is completely out of line with Apple's usual installer handling. Nobody will understand it. It cripples the workflow.
But some Mr. Important demanded it, as if he is protecting users with this and makes a great contribution to the data privacy in our country. Yeah! And guy is so high up, unreachable for us through all the layers of other people, leaving us no time and means to dissuade this shitty request. If all your 'ideas' are so great you should not be allowed to do jack shit.

Started a new job trying to get familiar with their development workflow and no one wants to help pretty frustrating I'm ready to walk out the door.

!rant (I got down voted for this on Stack Overflow, so I try to discuss the issue with a more professional crowd.)

In a Software Engineering class, we had an assignment to read Parnas' seminal paper on modularization [0]. In this paper, two approaches of dividing a software into modules are discussed:

Traditional Approach: A flow chart is drawn to work out the single processing steps and the program's high-level flow. Then every processing step is turned into a module. This approach doesn't yield very good results.
New Approach: Every design decision will be turned into a module by the means of information hiding. This approach leads to much better results.

My personal interpretation of the term design decision is that the modules are identified as data structures rather than as processing steps of an algorithm. This makes sense, because data structures are much more suitable for information hiding then processing steps of an algorithm. (The information inside a data structure is hidden behind functions, whereas a function only hides more detailed processing steps and no information; the information is actually passed in as arguments.)

Why does the second approach work so much better than the first approach? Here comes my second interpretation: The single processing steps of an algorithm are not replaceable (and thus not reusable), whereas it's possible to convert data structures into other data structures.

And here's my question: Could that be the reason why software development using workflow engines (based on BPMN, for example) never really took off?

My personal experience is that the activities created in such workflows are hardly ever reused, but there often are big data structures passed around all the involved activities, even if most of the activities use only one or two of them.

My question exaggerated: Could we get rid of all those clumsy workflow engines by giving managers Parnas' paper to read?

[0]: On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules (Parnas 1972)

Dashlane password manager is my workflow nemesis. I have dozens of sites to manage and my only way into them is through this buggy and unreliable crap software. So much time is lost having to delete an entry that inexplicably stopped working, then waiting for someone with share permissions to reshare it, only to find that it still isn’t working, another reshare and then it suddenly does work. But then the Chrome extension won’t sync unless I log out and log back in. And then I have multiple entries for the same site with no clear indicator of why nor which one is the real one that actually works.

Can’t get rid of it because the company has standardized on it. Not my decision to make.

VSCode doesn't request permission to edit github workflow files by default. Because it's an OAuth app and not a token, I can't grant it scopes that it did not request. I am forced to use SSH or a personal token instead of VSCode's built-in Github authentication, but because there's no convenient way to have VSCode forget that it authenticated a repo, I am also forced to checkout my own repo again and push the changes across.

If you want your product to Just Work, then Just Use Open Processes that are easy to hook into, interrupt or partially replace. Nobody can think of everything. Not even Apple's or Microsoft's mighty designers. What everyone can do is to provide graceful failure modes and offer partial strategies.

I was wondering - no one seems to be able to write good CSS, so what if we had tool to generate CSS visually.
E.g. imagine workflow of UI design tools inside chrome browser (while inspecting specific element) or your favourite editor.

Might actually build something like that. Would definitely help with problems I face. 🤷🏻

P.S. Best tools and practices for building extensions like this?

Workflow? More like chasing answer from a community that is not, and never has been, famous for its pedagogical skills. So hand me some coffee, weed and/or some snacks because I'll still search high and low, skip sleep and build up a few hundred pages browsing history so that in the end, I'll reach the understanding I'm looking for anyways. Even if whatever person trying to help me - in their delusion that I already know everything, except for that thing I'm asking about of course - really, REALLY just failed at saying "that goes there because of that" instead of "did you try insertSomeAppropriateRandomNameOfAThingYouAssumeEveryoneKnowsHere..?".

But who am I kidding? The tools are better than ever (IDE'S). The pedagogical skills are getting its own arenas to build on and its coming along greatly (coding block apps, treehouse and the likes etc. etc).

And no matter the struggle, I can't escape that I love coding and learning more than anything else.

Now how do I.. Where.. When.. Why the..

F***ing GitHub Actions.

I just wanted to make Snapcraft builds of my game with CI and instead I'm fiddling around with YAML syntax because for some reason everything got formatted incorrectly.

Also I have no way of testing the workflow locally to save me commits. So I have to wait five minutes each time to find out that I yet again somehow mucked up the script and it couldn't snap the executable.

Hate working in a team when one senior guy comes in with no idea about the project, but still has to share 'ideas and suggestions' irrelevant to the workflow. Such a busybody!

Not really a rant, but maybe someone can help me on this one.
Me and my brother are thinking about creating our first app. We know what features we want and also how the workflow of our app should be (we even sketched the workflow with an online mockup tool). The programming of the app itself is no problem, but we are both struggling when it comes to create a nice looking, smooth design from our draft. As we both believe that a nice looking UI is important we are not afraid to invest a little bit to get a nicely designed UI - "Make it right, or don't do it at all" ;-)

We searched a little bit in our hometown and found a company that would design us something for at least 15-20k Euros. As we do already have a pretty detailed sketch and also would need to pay that from our own pocket (we do not know if it gets more than a hobby project) its definitely too much for us. So my question is: Are their any app design companies out there that takes a sketch and creates a smooth design from it?

Can you recommend a design pattern for dealing with workflows?

I am wondering how to represent a decision tree while also making it easy to maintain and each step should be unit-testable on its own.

I want to avoid a big if-else-block, but I am also unsure what design pattern to apply here.

Basically, there a bunch of yes-no-question (though some conditions may be more complex) that can be nested very deeply, and depending on a certain set of requirements we want to display different actions.

(The workflow is fixed, there is only 1 at at time yet it may change a lot over the next iterations until we figure out what our userbase wants.)

It's been over 7 months of being deployed to help finish a project that's crossed the deadline umpteenth times. There's only this guy who had started on this project and me as developers. He's a nice guy, but I'm finding him to be a snowflake that's extremely difficult to work with. Every time I mention a critical problem with his original design, or the approaches he takes on this project, he takes it personally. He would pour out a long spiel of why this and why that, and waste most of the meeting time. Or he would run to his outdated diagrams or documents that he had created himself somewhere deep in the wiki forest, and use that as a defense. He creates his own user stories and tasks on a whim with no PM supervision. I've noted to the managers that this is a project to fail, and all they've done is assign a busy PM to this project, and the new PM is perfectly fine w/ the way the project has been handled so far.
I point out a small flaw with his assumptions just the other day, and he even managed to hyperventilate and again fall back to his outdated document... WTF? I'd rather start from scratch and get this project finished faster.. and even though I've expressed my objection to continue on this path, the managers foolishly believe that this project will be completed somehow. I don't hate my development partner, or PM, or people in the management, but I hate the fact that I don't have control over so many aspects of this project, including the half-assed, unnecessarily complex design, and the dev workflow itself. I feel like I'm tied to a car that's being thrown over the cliff, and assigned to fix the junky car w/ its engine broken before the car hits the ground. Something like this would never be allowed to go in a commercial sector. I just wish that the management could just give me control over project as THE lead & PM over this project, and get this project tied up for good, and with better reusability and quality.