As a long-time iPhone user, I am really sorry to say it but I think Apple has completed their transition to being a company that is incompetent when it comes to software development and software development processes.

I’ve grown tired of hearing some developers tell me about Apple’s scale and how software development is hard and how bugs should be expected. All of those are true, but like most rules of law, incompetence and gross negligence trumps all of that.

I’m writing this because of the telugu “bug”/massive, massive security issue in iOS 11.2.5. I personally think it’s one of the worst security issues in the history of modern devices/software in terms of its ease of exploitation, vast reach, and devastating impact if used strategically. But, as a software developer, I would have been able to see past all of that, but Apple has shown their true incompetence on this issue and this isn’t about a bug.

It’s about a company that has a catastrophic bug in their desktop and mobile platforms and haven’t been able to, or cared to, patch it in the 3 or so days it’s been known about. It’s about a company, who as of a view days ago, hasn’t followed the basic software development process of removing an update (11.2.5) that was found to be flawed and broken. Bugs happen, but that kind of incompetence is cultural and isn’t a mistake and it certainly isn’t something that people should try to justify.

This has also shown Apple’s gross incompetence in terms of software QA. This isn’t the first time a non-standard character has crashed iOS. Why would a competent software company implement a step in their QA, after the previous incident(s), to specifically test for issues like this? While Android has its issues too and I know some here don’t like Google, no one can deny that Google at least has a solid and far superior QA process compared to Apple.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m fed up. Apple has completely lost its way. devRant was inaccessible to iOS users a couple of times because of this bug and I know many, many other apps and websites that feature user-generated content experienced the same thing. It’s catastrophic. Many times we get sidetracked and really into security issues, like meltdown/spectre that are exponentially harder to take advantage of than this one. This issue can be exploited by a 3 year old. I bet no one can produce a case where a security issue was this exploitable yet this ignored on a whole.

Alas, here we are, days later, and the incompetent leadership at Apple has still not patched one of the worst security bugs the world has ever seen.

At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

Imagine if a structural engineer whose bridge has collapsed and killed several people calls it a feature.

Imagine if that structural engineer made a mistake in the tensile strength of this or that type of bolt and shoved it under the rug as "won't fix".

Imagine that it's you who's relying on that bridge to commute every day. Would you use it, knowing that its QA might not have been very rigorous and could fail at any point in time?

Seriously, you developers have all kinds of fancy stuff like Continuous Integration, Agile development, pipelines, unit testing and some more buzzwords. So why is it that the bridges don't collapse, yet new critical security vulnerabilities caused by bad design, unfixed bugs etc appear every day?

Your actions have consequences. Maybe not for yourself but likely it will have on someone else who's relying on your software. And good QA instead of that whole stupid "move fast and break things" is imperative.

Software developers call themselves the same engineers as the structural engineer and the electrical engineer whose mistakes can kill people. I can't help but be utterly disappointed with the status quo in software development. Don't you carry the title of the engineer with pride? The pride that comes from the responsibility that your application creates?

I wish I'd taken the blue pill. I didn't want to know that software "engineering" was this bad, this insanity-inducing.

But more than anything, it surprises me that the world that relies so much on software hasn't collapsed in some incredible way yet, despite the quality of what's driving it.

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.

Here's a true story about a "fight" between me and my project manager...

I've been working as a Frontend developer for nearly two years, managed to acquire a decent amount of knowledge, in some cases well above the rest of my coworkers, and one day I got into a bit of a disagreement with my project manager.

Basically he wanted me to copy/paste some feature from another project (needless to say, that... "thing" has more bugs than an ant farm), and against his orders I started doing that feature from scratch, to build a solid foundation from the very start.
I had a lengthy deadline to deliver that feature, they were expecting me to take some time to fix some of the bugs as well, but my idea was to make it bug-free from the moment the feature was released. Both my method and the one I should be copying worked the exact same, but mine was superior in every way, had no bugs, was scalable and upgradeable with little effort, there was no reason not to accept it.

We use scrum as our work methodology, so we have daily meetings. In one of those, the project manager asked me how was the progress on that new feature, and I told him I was just polishing up the code and integrating it with the rest of the project, to make sure everything was working properly. I still had a full day left before the deadline set for that feature, and I was expecting to take about half an hour to finish up a couple lines of code and test everything, no issues so far...

But then he exploded, and demanded to know why wasn't I copying the code from the other project, to which I answered "because this way things will work better".
Right after he said that the feature was working on the other project, copying and pasting it should take a few minutes to do and maybe a couple of extra hours to fix any issues that might have appeared...
The problem here is, the other project was made by trainees, I honestly can't navigate through 3 pages without bumping into an average of 2 errors per page, I was placed into this new project because they know I do quality code, and they wanted this project to be properly made, unlike the previous one, so I was baffled when he said that he preferred me to copy code instead of doing "good" code...
My next reply was "just because something has been made and is working that doesn't mean that it has been properly made nor will work as it should, I could save a few hours copying code (except I wouldn't save any, it would take me more time to adapt the code than to do it from scratch) but then I'll be wasting weeks of work because of new bugs that will be reported over time, because trust me, they will appear... "

I told him this in a very calm manner, but everybody in the meeting room paused and started staring at me, not many dare challenge that specific project manager, and I had just done that...
After a few seconds of silence the PM finally said... "look, if you manage to finish your task inside the set deadline I'll forget we ever had this conversation, but I'll leave a note on my book, just in case..."

I finished that task in about 30 mins, as expected, still had 7 hours till deadline, and I completely forgot about that feature until now because it has never given any issues whatsoever, and is now being used for other projects as well.

It was one of my proudest/rage inducing moments in this project, and honestly, I think I have hit my PM with a very big white glove because some weeks after this event the CEO himself came to the whole team to congratulate us on the outstanding work being made so far, in a project that acted against the PM's orders 90% of the time.

8:50am aight alarm clock, give me 5 more minutes

8:55am ok lets round it to 9, wake me up then

9:00am aight enough. lets just sleep for 1 more minute since 9:00 is too round

9:43am fuck

9:44am ok its time to finally study for the upcoming college exam

9:45am nothing but a fresh day to start studying for college

9:46am eh i dont have a lot to study so I'll do it in 2pm, I'll code my project instead

2pm hold on 5 more minutes until i finish coding this feature and then I'll study

5pm where the fuck is this bug coming from

5:504pm goddamn i found it

6:36pm holy shit its already over 6pm, I'll study at night

7:42pm ok its night now, time to study but I'll do it when i fix all bugs

8:14pm ok bugs fixed, commit. lets study

8:15pm you know what, im way too tired and exhausted from this coding, I'll take a short 30 minute break and then I'll study

10:15pm ok im feeling fresh bois lets study now theres not too much

1:31am damn this movie was good

1:32am fuck i forgot to study, I'll do it tomorrow

2:10am *posts this rant*

I don't want to write clean code anymore :(

I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...

Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...

That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"

they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.

oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.

and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.

it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------

uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.

well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.

note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.

Always the same story:

Marketing: hey I'm gonna do a demo to a customer. They were asking for feature XYZ. That's ready on thr staging server right? Do you think I could use the staging server for the demo?

Devs: well feature XYZ is not 100% done. Basically just feature X is done, and it still has a few bugs. The deadline ain't for another month, since we gotta finish ABC first. I guess you could use the staging, but it has a lot of bugs.

Marketing: perfect!

*after presentation*

Marketing: the staging had so many bugs! Why didn't you tell me?! It was so embarrassing showing it to new customers! Anyway, they loved the new feature. We need it to be ready ASAP.

Devs: What?! That's gonna mess up with our schedule. You know what? Fine, but feature ABC will have to wait another month.

Marketing: Well, it'd be ideal if we could do both...

Devs: Pay for more devs or dor extra hours.

Marketing: Just do XYZ. It's a pity that you'll have to push back ABC but it's fine, XYZ is more important.

(I might ask, if it was so important, why didn't you notice so in the meeting where we had decided that ABC would be prioritized?)

*tons of working hours later*

Devs: There, we finished XYZ.

Marketing: Yay! Wow, this month we'll have two major features done: ABC and XYZ!

Devs: No, ABC is not done yet.

Marketing: What? But the deadline was this week.

Devs: It was, but then you decided to prioritize XYZ and we said we had to push back ABC to get XYZ ready, and you agreed.

Marketing: Did we? Fine. But do it quick.

Marketing and their mood swings.

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.

A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.

Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.

Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.

The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.

But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.

Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!

PM: Ok Android, i've reviewed the latest build, you are good to release. Waiting on iOS's build to test.

Me: ... are we not holding all builds until we hear back from backend about that bug?, as we likely have to change something on our side?

PM: Which bug?

Me: ... the only one we discussed yesterday in the team meeting.

PM: How many customers is it affecting?

Me: that we know of, one ... the CEO of our company

PM: oh that one, yeah were not doing that anymore.

Me: WHAT? i've been waiting all day / night to hear back. Why are we not doing this?

PM: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... Everything is too messy at the minute anyway, the release plan is changing every day. Need to keep it back in line.

Me: ... the plan has changed exactly once. We had a plan at the start of last week for the last release, we changed it YESTERDAY to include 2 critical bug fixes. The only issue with the plan changing is nobody telling us these aren't bugs anymore

PM: We can discuss tomorrow in the team meeting.

CEO: oh hey guys, yeah we pulled that bug fix. Its not really a bug, more like a missing feature. No way it will get done before xmas. Going to live with the way it works for now and fix it properly next year.

Me: Ok, fair enough, but we really need to be told these decisions.

CEO: sure, sorry, didn't think anyone was blocked by this. What was the blocker?

Me: ..... you asked me yesterday to get this bug fix in the build ... you asked for the final build to be made today so we can go through the app store review. As we all discussed yesterday, today is kind of the last day we can really do this.

CEO: ok, its late, we can discuss this tomorrow in the team meeting.

Me: ..... ..... ..... ..... sure

Hey guys,

this rant will be long again. I'm sorry for any grammar errors or something like that, english isn't my native language. Furthermore I'm actually very sad and not in a good mood.

Why? What happened? Some of you may already know - I'm doing my apprenticeship / education in a smal company.
There I'm learning a lot, I'm developing awesome features directly for the clients, experience of which other in my age (I'm only 19 years old) can only dream.
Working in such a small company is very exhausting, but I love my job, I love programming. I turned my hobby into a profession and I'm very proud of it.
But then there are moments like the last time, when I had to present something for a client - the first presentation was good, the last was a disaster, nothing worked - but I learned from it.

But this time everything is worse than bad - I mean really, really worse than bad.

I've worked the whole week on a cool new feature - I've done everything that it works yesterday, that everything gets done before the deadline of yesterday.

To achieve this I've coded thursday till 10pm ! At home! Friday I tested the whole day everything to ensure that everything is working properly. I fixed several bugs and then at the end of the day everything seems to be working. Even my boss said that it looks good and he thinks that the rollout to all clients will become good and without any issues.

But unfortunately deceived.

Yesterday evening I wrote a long mail to my boss - with a "manual". He was very proud and said that he is confident that everything will work fine. He trusts me completly.

Then, this morning I received a mail from him - nothing works anymore - all clients have issues, everything stays blank - because I've forgotten to ensure that the new feature (a plugin) and its functionality is supported by the device (needs a installation).
First - I was very shoked - but in the same moment I thought - one moment - you've written an if statement, if the plugin is installed - so why the fuck should it broken everything?!
I looked instant to the code via git. This has to be a very bad joke from my boss I thought. But then I saw the fucking bug - I've written:
if(plugin) { // do shit }
but it has to be if(typeof plugin !== 'undefined')

I fucked up everything - due to this fucking mistake. This little piece of shit I've forgotten on one single line fucked up everything. I'm sorry for this mode of expression but I thought - no this can not be true - it must be a bad bad nightmare.
I've tested this so long, every scenario, everything. Worked till the night so it gets finished. No one, no one from my classmates would ever think of working so long. But I did it, because I love my job. I've implemented a check to ensure that the plugin is installed - but implemented it wrong - exactly this line which caused all the errors should prevent exactly this - what an irony of fate.

I've instantly called my boss and apologized for this mistake. The mistake can't be undone. My boss now has to go to all clients to fix it. This will be very expensive...

Oh my goodnes, I just cried.
I'm only working about half a year in this company - they trust me so much - but I'm not perfect - I make mistakes - like everyone else. This time my boss didn't looked over my code, didn't review it, because he trusted me completly - now this happens. I think this destroyed the trust :( I'm so sad.
He only said that we will talk on monday, how we can prevent such things in the feature..
Oh guys, I don't know - I've fucked up everything, we were so overhelmed that everything would work :(
Now I'm the looser who fucked up - because not testing enough - even when I tested it for days, even at home - worked at home - till the night - for free, for nothing - voluntary.

This is the thanks for that.
Thousand good things - but one mistake and you're the little asshole. You - a 19 year old guy, which works since 6 months in a company. A boss which trusts you and don't look over your code. One line which should prevent crashing, crashed everything.

I'm sorry that this rant is so long, I just need to talk to you guys because I'm so sad. Again. This has happend to frequently lately.

➡️You Are Not A Software Developer⬅️

When I became a developer, I thought that my job is to write software. When my customer had a problem, I was ready to write software that solves that problem. I was taught to write software.

But what customers need is not software. They need a solution to their problem. Your job is to find the most cost-effective solution, what software often is not.

According to the universal law of software development, more code leads to more bugs:

e = mc²

Or

errors = (more code)²

The number of bugs grows with the amount of code. You have to prioritize, reproduce and fix bugs.

The more code you write, the more your team and the team after it has to maintain. Even if you split the system into micro services, the complexity remains.

Writing well-tested, clean code takes a lot of time. When you’re writing code, other important work is idle. The work that prevents your company from becoming rich.

A for-profit company wants to make money and reduce expenses. Then the company hires you to solve problems that prevent it from becoming rich. Confused by your job title, you take their money and turn it into expensive software.

But business has nothing to do about software. Even software business is not about software. Business is about making money.

Your job is to understand how the company is making money, help make more money and reduce expenses. Once you know that, you will become the most valuable asset in the company.

Stop viewing yourself as a software developer. You are a money maker.

Think about how to save and make money for your customers.

Find the most annoying problem and fix it:

▶️Is adding a new feature too costly? Solve the problem manually.
▶️Is testing slow? Become a tester.
▶️Is hiring not going well? Speak at a meetup and advertise your company.
▶️Is your team not productive enough? Bring them coffee.

Your job title doesn’t matter. Ego doesn’t matter either.

Titles and roles are distracting us from what matters to our customers – money.💸

You are a money maker. Thinking as a money maker can help choose the next skill for development. For example:

Serverless: pay only for resources you consume, spend less time on capacity planning = 💰

Machine Learning: get rid of manual decision-making = 💰

TDD: shorter feedback cycle, fewer bugs = 💰

Soft Skills: inspire teammates, so they are more productive and happy = 💰

If you don’t know what to learn next — answer a simple question:

What skills can help my company make more money and reduce expenses?

Very unlikely it’s another web framework written in JavaScript.

Article by Eduards Sizovs
Sizovs.net

So we ordered a piece of software from external software house becouse I was low on time and we needed it asap.

So. Long story short, their software was bugged as hell, they deny all the bugs and they have their BDD that they done and anything we say about it like "feature XYZ is broken on firefox" they will deny it "becouse it wasn't on BDD" or "let's get on call" (in which +- 6-7 people participate from their side and we of course have to pay them for this...)

So they fixed like 20% of bugs (mostly trivials/minors) Application is fairly small scope. You have integration with like 3 endpoints on arbitary API, user registration/login, few things to do in database (mainly math running from cron).

They done it in ASP so I don't know the language and enviroment so can't just fix it myself.

2 days ago (monday) they annoyed me to point where I just started to break things. For starters I found that every numeric input is vunrable to integer overflow (which is blocker). I figured most of fields are purefect opportunity to XSS (but I didn't bother to do JS... anything but not JS...). I figured I can embed into my name/surname/phone (none validated) anything in HTML...

So for now we have around 25 bugs, around 15 of them are blockers.

They figured it's somehow our fault that it's bugged and decided to do demo with us to show off how perfectly it works. I'm happy to break their demos. I figured I will register bunch users that have name - image with fixed/absolute position top:0;left:0 width/height 100% - this will effectively brick admin panel

Also I figured I can do some addotional sounds in background becouse why not. And I just dont know what to put in. It links to my server for now so I can freely change content of bricked admin panel.

I have curl's ready to execute in case they reset database.

I can put in GIFs or heck, even videos, dosen't really matter. Framework escapes some things for them so at least that. But audio/image/video works.

Now I have 2 questions:
- what image + audio combo will work the best (of course we need to keep it civil). Im thinking finding some meme with bugs or maybe nuclear logo image with some siren sound
- am I evil person?

Edit:

I havent stated this clearly:

"There is no BDD that describes that if user inserts malicious input server should deny it" - that's almost literally what we get from them....

I was pressued to shift the blame.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This new junior dev was going pretty well, learning pretty fast and working pretty fast from when I talked to them, but I wasn't seeing his changes up on GitHub.

Me: Hey have you finished *feature X*

Junior: Oh yeah a few days ago.

Me: Why aren't your changes up on GitHub?

Junior: Sorry, my bad, im not used to pushing stuff during the development since i was used to do all of my stuff on my own
(No kidding!)

Me: ok then push them

Junior: Emmm... I don't think I should... I kinda already started working on *feature Y* so it's full of bugs...

I don't wanna be mad at them they're pretty good at their stuff, and he's got some good comments on the performance of the program. But UUGGHH 😠
Rookie mistakes I guess

Tldr; my "this is not bug, its a feature" moment actually turned my bug into a feature.

Today we were presenting a project which has imposible deadline. I am developing this small project alone (which is probably good). I implemented core features first but I know project still have bugs and a lot of tech debts. Another friend started to presenting our demo and a wild bug appeared as expected. He was adding rows to a table. To add a new you gotta open new modal by clicking + button and fill the form. One of the fields had a bug. When you add row by clicking Ok button, the value of the field stayed there after you open modal again. So its basically a state problem in React. I forgot to clear previous state of modal. When they see that and my friend said "oh we got a bug there". Then I enabled my mic and said "thats not a bug, thats a feature. I didn't want to enter that field again and again when I adding multiple rows and made it persistent." and you know what? They liked the idea! They requested to add that bug to two more fields. I was just joking and my "this is not bug, its a feature" moment actually turned my bug into a feature. Instead of fixing it, I'm creating more of this bug. LOL!

Spent 6 hours implementing a feature because my senior didn't want to use a 3rd party plug-in.

After said 6 hours, went to look at the plugin's source code to get some inspiration with a problem I was having.

Guess fucking what? Plug-in was implemented exactly as I had done it to start with. Even better, actually, since it fixed some native bugs I couldn't find a way around.

Went back to my senior, showed him both sources and argued again in favour of the plug-in.

Senior: "Meh, I'm not sure. Don't really like to keep adding plugins"
Me: "Why? Do they cause performance hits? Increase memory usage?"
S: "No, not all. But I don't like plugins"

/flip

We ended up using the plug-in, but I "wasted" a whole day doing something we scrapped. Guess I learned some interesting things about encryption on Android, at least...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

Lessons I've learnt so far on programming

-- Your best written code today can be your worst tomorrow (Focus more on optimisation than style).
-- Having zero knowledge of a language then watching video tutorials is like purchasing an arsenal before knowing what a gun is (Read the docs instead).
-- It's works on my machine! Yes, because you built on Lenovo G-force but never considered the testers running on Intel Pentium 0.001 (Always consider low end devices).
-- "Programming" is you telling a story and without adding "comments" you just wrote a whole novel having no punctuation marks (Always add comments, you will thank yourself later for it I promise).
-- In programming there is nothing like "done"! You only have "in progress" or "abandoned" (Deploy progressively).
-- If at this point you still don't know how to make an asynchronous call in your favourite language, then you are still a rookie! take that from me. (Asynchronous operation is a key feature in programming that every coder should know).
-- If it's more than two conditions use "Switch... case" else stick with "If... else" (Readability should never be under-rated).
-- Code editors can MAKE YOU and BREAK YOU. They have great impact on your coding style and delivery time (Choose editors wisely).
-- Always resist the temptation of writing the whole project from scratch unless needs be (Favor patching to re-creation).
-- Helper methods reduces code redundancy by a large chunk (Always have a class in your project with helper methods).
-- There is something called git (Always make backups).
-- If you don't feel the soothing joy that comes in fixing a bug then "programming" is a no-no (Coding is fun only when it works).
-- Get angry with the bugs not the testers they're only noble messengers (Bugs are your true enemy).
-- You would learn more than a lot reading the codes of others and I mean a lot! (Code review promotes optimisation and let's you know when you are writing macaroni).
-- If you can do it without a framework you have yourself a big fat plus (Frameworks make you entirely dependent).
-- Treat your code like your pet, stop taking care of it and it dies! (Codes are fragile and needs regular updates to stay relevant).

Programming is nothing but fun and I've learnt that a long time ago.

I started to hate programming.
I started with a lot of enthusiasm 11 years ago up to become in 2 years a full stack dev, a sysadmin and had also my fair share of technical assistance on every device plus hardware experience mounting hardware like cctvs, routers, extenders, industrial printers and so on. At the time you actually had the tools to solve problems and had to crack your head and pull hairs to solve stuff and people actually was developing solution and frameworks that solved stuff.

Today I can't stand anything.

Every midschooler feels entitled to release a framework that is announed as the next cure for cancer. Web dev once was thin and simplistic, now simplicity is considered a bug and not a feature.
I'm working on an angular project for the nth time and the whole environment is a clusterfuck of problems held togheter with kids glue.
Someone did a tool/framework for everything but most of it is barely well tested or mature.

Just to start this project we had to know, beside html/css/js techs like Angular, Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, git, Lit, npm/node, mysql/sql server, webpack/grunt and the hell that it brings, C#/Asp.NET/MVC/WebAPI, and so on, the list is long.

DAMN. Making a simple page which shows a tabbed view with some grids requires you to know a whole damn stack of technologies that need to cooperate togheter.
It's 10x more complex and I actually find it much less productive than ever.

But what bugs me most, is that 90% of that stuff is bug ridden, has some niche use case or hidden pitfall and stuff because with this whole crap of "hey we put on github you open a ticket" they just release spaghetti code and wait for people to do the debug for them.

Angular puts out a version every 2 days and create destructive updates.

I am so tired that I spend most of my 8hrs binging youtube vids in despair to procrastinate work.
I liked to do this once....

I really think there should be a subject in every CS course to teach us how to handle/work-under Grade-A assholes and dumbfucks. Not that it would help, but atleast warn us on what we are getting into.

In my opinion, development is not *that* hard or frustrating but is made so by these shitty people. But again, what do I know.

I was scolded by my boss for using for-loop to iterate through an array recently. Apparently for-loop is not used in real world projects and this iteration should be done "in-memory". My colleagues and I are still trying to understand and process that.

I was asked to add fitbit integration to a project within 2 hours just because I had "already done it a week ago" in *another* project. Luckily, it was then given to a "senior" developer who took 4 days for it and essentially copy-pasted my work without much changes, ofcourse it stopped working every now and then.

I am given unreal deadlines on my tasks, on technologies I haven't worked on before, and then expected to churn out production ready code with no bugs in them.

My boss literally just sends me the links of 1st three google results on the problems I encounter and report, after humiliating me ofcourse. Yes, I did google it and yes I went through all I could find from Google forums to GitHub issues. When the library/plugin author himself says that this feature is not yet available, don't expect me to develop it in 2 hours you dumbfuck.

And for the love of God, please stop changing the data model every single day and justify it with agile development. Think before making any changes to it. Ever heard of Join queries? Foreign keys? Or any other basic database concepts.
We reached a point where each branch in the repo had different data model. Not kidding. And we were a team of just 4 developers. Atleast inform us when you change models after discussing it with your shit for knowledge "senior" developer, so we don't have to redo it all over again. The channels on slack are not for sharing random articles only.

I am just waiting to complete my year here.

I should have known what I got myself into the day he asked me to remove the comments I had added to explain what my code does. Why you ask? Because "we don't write comments".

Github 101 (many of these things pertain to other places, but Github is what I'll focus on)

- Even the best still get their shit closed - PRs, issues, whatever. It's a part of the process; learn from it and move on.

- Not every maintainer is nice. Not every maintainer wants X feature. Not every maintainer will give you the time of day. You will never change this, so don't take it personally.

- Asking questions is okay. The trackers aren't just for bug reports/feature requests/PRs. Some maintainers will point you toward StackOverflow but that's usually code for "I don't have time to help you", not "you did something wrong".

- If you open an issue (or ask a question) and it receives a response and then it's closed, don't be upset - that's just how that works. An open issue means something actionable can still happen. If your question has been answered or issue has been resolved, the issue being closed helps maintainers keep things un-cluttered. It's not a middle finger to the face.

- Further, on especially noisy or popular repositories, locking the issue might happen when it's closed. Again, while it might feel like it, it's not a middle finger. It just prevents certain types of wrongdoing from the less... courteous or common-sense-having users.

- Never assume anything about who you're talking to, ever. Even recently, I made this mistake when correcting someone about calling what I thought was "powerpc" just "power". I told them "hey, it's called powerpc by the way" and they (kindly) let me know it's "power" and why, and also that they're on the Power team. Needless to say, they had the authority in that situation. Some people aren't as nice, but the best way to avoid heated discussion is....

- ... don't assume malice. Often I've come across what I perceived to be a rude or pushy comment. Sometimes, it feels as though the person is demanding something. As a native English speaker, I naturally tried to read between the lines as English speakers love to tuck away hidden meanings and emotions into finely crafted sentences. However, in many cases, it turns out that the other person didn't speak English well enough at all and that the easiest and most accurate way for them to convey something was bluntly and directly in English (since, of course, that's the easiest way). Cultures differ, priorities differ, patience tolerances differ. We're all people after all - so don't assume someone is being mean or is trying to start a fight. Insinuating such might actually make things worse.

- Please, PLEASE, search issues first before you open a new one. Explaining why one of my packages will not be re-written as an ESM module is almost muscle memory at this point.

- If you put in the effort, so will I (as a maintainer). Oftentimes, when you're opening an issue on a repository, the owner hasn't looked at the code in a while. If you give them a lot of hints as to how to solve a problem or answer your question, you're going to make them super, duper happy. Provide stack traces, reproduction cases, links to the source code - even open a PR if you can. I can respond to issues and approve PRs from anywhere, but can't always investigate an issue on a computer as readily. This is especially true when filing bugs - if you don't help me solve it, it simply won't be solved.

- [warning: controversial] Emojis dillute your content. It's not often I see it, but sometimes I see someone use emojis every few words to "accent" the word before it. It's annoying, counterproductive, and makes you look like an idiot. It also makes me want to help you way less.

- Github's code search is awful. If you're really looking for something, clone (--depth=1) the repository into /tmp or something and [rip]grep it yourself. Believe me, it will save you time looking for things that clearly exist but don't show up in the search results (or is buried behind an ocean of test files).

- Thanking a maintainer goes a very long way in making connections, especially when you're interacting somewhat heavily with a repository. It almost never happens and having talked with several very famous OSSers about this in the past it really makes our week when it happens. If you ever feel as though you're being noisy or anxious about interacting with a repository, remember that ending your comment with a quick "btw thanks for a cool repo, it's really helpful" always sets things off on a Good Note.

- If you open an issue or a PR, don't close it if it doesn't receive attention. It's really annoying, causes ambiguity in licensing, and doesn't solve anything. It also makes you look overdramatic. OSS is by and large supported by peoples' free time. Life gets in the way a LOT, especially right now, so it's not unusual for an issue (or even a PR) to go untouched for a few weeks, months, or (in some cases) a year or so. If it's urgent, fork :)

I'll leave it at that. I hear about a lot of people too anxious to contribute or interact on Github, but it really isn't so bad!

Holy FUck!!!? O.o
You know, they say the customer is always right.. So with us, if the customer wants to shot himself in the knee with a gun, we let them. Usually we even provide a fancy hugeAss cannon, so he can do it more efficiently.
/* not like we make stuff worse, but we prepare our SW for them to do crazy fucked up shit they insist on doing with it, even thought it's against common sense and our recommendations on how to implement XY feature.. */
So.. We usually go above and beyond with the 'not so nice but handy' cannon to do that..
And right now, I think I am on the verge of creating a superDuprHugeAtomicBomb /* figuratively speaking!! NSA go awy!! */ for the customer to killthemselves with!! O.o xD
Supper happy (until I discover more bugs, but it's not finished yet.. so hopefully no bugs at the end!!)

Caboom!

You know how my 'about' here says I create features from bugs?!? Well if you didn't before, now you do.. :P

Anyhow, today the most bizzare thing happened.. Customer played 'reverse uno card' on me..

Meaning?!

They reported a feature missing on uat env, when in fact I fixed a bug they have on prod..

Not sure how I should feel about this, but it sure made my day! (: I just hope they will not open a bug report for this missing bug..

How surprising is it when a person designs code in a very clear and impressive structure and just when you think about asking them for guidance, they reveal themselves to be complete turds?

I've been working with this person's "infra" code, at work. I've rewritten some classes to use their infra. I had a vague idea of how the classes work. I had no idea of how their code works. Expectedly, there were some issues but now only minor ones remain.
I asked them for a description of what I'm supposed to do for the few bugs I'm facing. They replied in such a condescending tone, it made me want to punch them through the screen.
Almost a month later, we're still going back and forth with emails. I've been swallowing it and responding calmly. I never got direct answers. Always deflections to irrelevant things or veiled insults. I took it because they did correct one silly error of mine that actually my code reviewer should've caught. (What's worse is that it got introduced by me just before my review and commit.)
But does that give them the right to insult me in front of the whole team including my project manager? I got a reply today from them with everyone of note in cc implying very clearly that I have not done any work. They highlighted a line from my code with some todo tag (that was not meant for them) to make their invalid point. A line that's unrelated to the bug I asked them about. This is after I proved them wrong when they insisted that I had done something wrong about a feature related to the bug.

If you don't understand what I asked for fucking ask me to ask again. But do not fucking try establish yourself on higher ground by pointing out irrelevant things in my code.
I was shocked and enraged that they'd do such a thing. I double checked everything like a mad man. Despite knowing that the fix has to come from them, I was instantly transported to the noob stage, grasping at straws. I wanted to send a really scathing reply right away but my manager asked me to wait.

My mind is now a see saw shifting between a panicked noob questioning every fucking thing I ever did in my nada life and a hungry enraged monster looking to maul that fucking shithead for burning me like that.

I decided to learn Flutter, because the idea of a common code base between Android and iOS sounds nice. I'm late to the party, I know.
So I install everything and start typing in the tutorial. TAB... two spaces. I absolutely hate that so let's change it. In the settings, it sends me to a FAQ which more or less says this is the way it is, deal with it. But I want my tabs to be four spaces, every code editor since the dawn of time could do this... I'M PAYING FOR THIS SHIT!!!!!!!
Ok, let's check the JetBrains website, I'm starting to lose my patience, but let's do it. At this point I should also mention that I'm feeling pretty stupid. I mean, I'm checking on the internet about how to do something which obviously must be obvious, why am I not seeing it?
I find a page on the official website. JetBrains' replies are along the lines of "Why would you want that?", "The holly wars between tabs and spaces are over", "Most people like it this way", "The overlords said this is the coding style to be used" (Ok, the last one was me reading between the lines). At the end of the thread, they provide a "hackish solution" (their words, not mine). Which doesn't work. Because why should it?
Not even when PyCharm's debugger randomly shat itself and I had to use print statements I got so angry. That was relatively fine, bugs are a fact of life, and the overall package is good, so I kept paying.
But now you're telling me that I cannot use what should be a common feature of every code editor just because you and the overlords know better?
Well, fuck you and the horse you came in on JetBrains, you've just lost a customer.

So at our company, we use Google Sheets to for to coordinate everything, from designs to bug reporting to localization decisions, etc... Except for roadmaps, we use Trello for that. I found this very unintuitive and disorganized. Google Sheets GUI, as you all know, was not tailored for development project coordination. It is a spreadsheet creation tool. Pages of document are loosely connected to each other and you often have to keep a link to each of them because each Google Sheets document is isolated from each other by design. Not to mention the constant requests for permission for each document, wasting everybody's time.

I brought up the suggestion to the CEO that we should migrate everything to GitHub because everybody already needed a Github account to pull the latest version of our codebase even if they're not developers themselves. Gihub interface is easier to navigate, there's an Issues tab for bug report, a Wiki tab for designs and a Projects tab for roadmaps, eliminating the need for a separate Trello account. All tabs are organized within each project. This is how I've seen people coordinated with each other on open-source projects, it's a proven, battle-tested model of coordination between different roles in a software project.

The CEO shot down the proposal immediately, reason cited: The design team is not familiar with using the Github website because they've never thought of Github as a website for any role other than developers.

Fast-forward to a recent meeting where the person operating the computer connected to the big TV is struggling to scroll down a 600+ row long spreadsheet trying to find one of the open bugs. At that point, the CEO asked if there's anyway to hide resolved bugs. I immediately brought up Github and received support from our tester (vocal support anyway, other devs might have felt the same but were afraid to speak up). As you all know, Github by default only shows open issues by default, reducing the clutter that would be generated by past closed issues. This is the most obvious solution to the CEO's problem. But this CEO still stubbornly rejected the proposal.

2 lessons to take away from this story:

- Developer seems to be the only role in a development team that is willing to learn new tools for their work. Everybody else just tries to stretch the limit of the tools they already knew even if it meant fitting a square peg into a round hole. Well, I can't speak for testers, out of 2 testers I interacted with, one I never asked her opinion about Github, and the other one was the guy mentioned above. But I do know a pixel artist in the same company having a similar condition. She tries to make pixel arts using Photoshop. Didn't get to talk to her about this because we're not on the same project, but if we were, I'd suggest her use Aseprite, or (at least Pixelorama if the company doesn't want to spend for Aseprite's price tag) for the purpose of drawing pixel arts. Not sure how willing she would be at learning new tools, though.

- Github and other git hosts have a bit of a branding problem. Their names - Github, BitBucket, GitLab, etc... - are evocative of a tool exclusively used by developers, yet their websites have these features that are supposed to be used by different roles other than developers. Issues tabs are used by testers as well as developers. Wiki tabs are used by designers alongside developers. Projects and Insights tabs are used by project managers/product owners. Discussion tabs are used by every roles. Artists can even submit new assets through Pull Requests tabs if the Art Directors know how to use the site interface (Art Directors' job is literally just code review, but for artistic assets). These websites are more than just git hosts. They are straight-up Jira replacement with git hosting as a bonus feature. How can we get that through the head of non-developers so that we don't have to keep 4+ accounts for different websites for the same project?

Easy. I was in just 1, but i heard what they were all about. They happened weekly.

This boss mainly ran his hardware renting business. The software for that hardware was often optional, but they developed and sold that as a seperate company with almost the same name.

The guy had no idea what development meant. What it means to test. Everything he knew was hardware, and it just never really clicked. This means that bugs and non linear development cost for a feature were confusing to him to a point that when brought up or conflicting, he would look confused, and walk out the office without another word.

This guy would bust in, usually monday morning and call a "meeting"
They gather in the lunchroom as thats the only place everyone fit, and the guy would go on a 3 hour monologue on god knows what.

It was never positive and always full off complaints and idiotic ideas that the senior developer had to break down until as if talking to a big toddler, on why they do not work.

As a result everyones day started mizzerable, nothing got done. The software package was full of logic flaws. And everyone wanted to quit but didn't have the energy to invest in that.

During that internship 1 guy was fired. In the 2 months he was there he litterally did jack shit. And if he did anything it was the bare minimum, committed broken but compilable, and then wait for revision requests.

Yeah that place was a shitshow. I loved it, but never again.

class Bug():

def __init__():
self._fix = random.randint(1, 6)

def fix():
if self.is_feature :
return Feature(self)
else:
if random.randint(1, 6) == self._fix:
Bug()
del self
else:
return Bug()

I don't care about market cap. Stick your hype-driven business practices up your ass. Infinite growth doesn't exist. I won't read your fucking books and attend your fucking bootcamps and MBAs. You don't have a business model. Selling data is not a business model. Fuck your quick-flip venture capital schemes, and especially fuck your “ethics”.

I will be the first alt-tech CEO. I only care about revenue. The real money, not capitalization bubble vaporware. You don't need a huge fleet of engineers if you're smart about your technology, know how to do architecture, and you're not a feature creep. You don't need venture capital if you don't need a huge fleet of engineers. You don't need to sell data if you don't need venture capital. See? See the pattern here?

My experience allows me to build products on entirely my own. I am fully aware of the limitations of being alone, and they only inspire lean thinking and great architectural decisions. If you know throwing capacity at a problem is not an option, you start thinking differently. And if you don't need to hire anyone, it is very easy to turn a profit and make it sustainable.

If you don't follow the path of tech vaporware, you won't have the problems of tech vaporware, namely distrust of your user base, shitty updates that break everything, and of course “oops, they raised capital, time to leave before things go south”.

A friend of mine went the path I'm talking about, developed a product over the course of four years all alone, reached $10k MRR and sold for $0.8M. But I won't sell. I only care about revenue. If I get to $10k MRR, I will most likely stop doing new features and focus on fixing all the bugs there are and improving performance. This and security patches. Maybe an occasional facelift. That's it. Some products are valued because they don't change, like Sublime Text. The utility tool you can rely on. This is my scheme, this is what I want to do in life. A best-kept secret.

Imagine 100 million users that hate my product but use it because there are no alternatives, 100 people in data enrichment department alone, a billion dollars of evaluation (without being profitable), 10 million twitter followers, and ten VC firms telling me what to do and what data to sell.

Fuck that. I'd rather have one thousand loyal customers and $10k MRR. I'm different, some call it a mental illness, but the bottom line is, my goals are beyond their understanding. They call me crazy. I won't say it was never about the money, of course it was, but inflating your evaluation is not “money”. But the only thing they have is their terrible hustle culture lives and some VC street wisdom, meanwhile I HAVE products, it is on record on my PH. I have POTDs, I have a fucking Golden Kitty nomination on health and fitness for a product I made in one day. Fuck you.

8 months ago, me and my teammate developed an API and a web application for one of our client. The API was supposed to be consumed by mobile app which another team was working upon. Now my suggestion for the mobile team was to use something like ionic or react-native. This was purely to keep technical debt on lower side since hybrid apps don't deviate too far for both Android and iOS platforms. But mobile team went with the native apps and developed two separate apps which both have some differences.

The client didn't even use the iOS app since past 6 months. Now all of a sudden she reported several bugs and the person managing the mobile devs put that all on us. I tested some of the bugs and seems like the same feature is working on Android but not on iOS.
Came to know later that the iOS developer who was working on the app had resigned and left the company exactly 6 months ago. Right after the apps first launch. And since then mobile team hasn't put any replacement person for the project. That fucker was trying to buy some time by putting it all on us.
And now here I am, experimenting again with Flutter. So far it seems quite decent.

I built a view engine that relied on V8 for expression evaluation and flow. Not very stable of course, since it used RegEx, but it worked fine for what it was designed for.
The crown feature was the ability to pass in lazy-evaluated huge objects to that view model, so that the view model decided what was going to be used in order to display the view. Made it really flexible, while not sacrificing speed.

I was brainstorming for 2 days about the lazy loading part, and the gymnastics that had to be implemented for this to work.

After I wrote my final line of code and thought that this is it, I launched it, and it FUCKING WORKED! First try!
I was hyperventilating, walking around the apartment like crazy, doing random push-ups just to try to utilize some energy that I felt was fighting to burst out like a xenomorph out of the chest.

... 2 weeks later I found bugs. Had to re-learn how I did it. It's true what they say: if it was hard to write, it's even harder to debug. Fixed it eventually, but that part's not that exciting.

How the fuck do Jr devs end up doing things someone specifically asks not to do.!!!!!
Fucks timelines up

So I asked my Jr Dev to leave a feature as it might not be required in this release and rather concentrate on the thing that is gonna make this release work , the “SAVE” button.
I mean how had is it to understand,
This dude goes ahead and “utilises” days on the thing that isn’t gonna be released(a dropdown) , and no, the dropdown still doesn’t work.

I understand the spirit of solving the bugs first. But what’s the point of solving it if it doesn’t fucking “save”

P.S. I’ve done this too as a Jr Dev :p

Good code is a lie imho.

When you see a project as code, there are 3 variables in most cases:

- time
- people / human resources
- rules

Every variable plays a certain role in how the code (project) evolves.

Time - two different forms: when certain parts of code are either changed in a high frequency or a very low frequency, it's a bad omen.

Too high - somehow this area seems to be relentless. Be it features, regressions or bugs - it takes usually in larger code bases 3 - 4 weeks till all code pathes were triggered.

Too low - it can be a good sign. But it should be on the radar imho. Code that never changes should be reviewed at an - depending on size of codebase - max. yearly audit. Git / VCS is very helpful here.
Why? Mostly because the chances are very high that the code was once written for a completely different requirement set. Hence the audit - check if this code still is doing the right job or if you have a ticking time bomb that needs to be defused.

People
If a project has only person working on it, it most certainly isn't verified by another person. Meaning that only one person worked on it - I'd say it's pretty bad to bad, as no discussion / review / verification was done. The author did the best he / she could do, but maybe another person would have had an better idea?

Too many people working on one thing is only bad when there are no rules ;)

Rules. There are two different kind of rules.

Styling / Organisation / Dokumentation - everything that has not much to do with coding itself. These should be enforced at a certain point, otherwise the code will become a hot glued mess noone wants to work on.

Coding itself. This is a very critical thing.

Do: Forbid things that are known to be problematic in the programming language itself. Eg. usage of variables in variables, reflection, deprecated features.

Do: Define a feature set for each language. Feature set not meaning every feature you want to use! Rather a fixed minimum version every developer must use and - in case of library / module / plugin support - which additional extras are supported.

Every extra costs. Most developers don't want to realize this... And a code base that evolves over time should have minimal dependencies. Every new version of an extra can have bugs, breakages, incompabilties and so on.

Don't: don't specify a way of coding. Most coding guidelines are horrific copy pastures from some books some smart people wrote who have no fucking clue what you're doing and why.

If you don't know how to operate on people, standing in an OR and doing what a book told you to do would end in dead person pretty sure. Same for code.

Learn from mistakes and experience, respect knowledge from other persons, but always reflect on wether this makes sense at this specific area of code.

There are very few things which are applicable to a large codebase on a global level. Even DRY / SOLID and what ever you can come up with can be at a certain point completely wrong.

Good code is a lie - because it can only exist at a certain point of time.

A codebase should be a living thing - when certain parts rot, other parts will be affected too.

The reason for the length of the comment was to give some hints on what my principles are that code stays in an "okayish" state, but good is a very rare state

Does anyone else's job just hate documentation? I have wasted most of the day trying to get our new build to work because I keep hitters snags that aren't documented. Hour release was delayed 6 hours because our QA doesn't have any kind of written procedure or checklist and missed bugs in something that is usually problematic, and I am being forced to stay online by a micromanaging boss that needs to realize he's not an engineer anymore. And I am supposed to have a feature done by today, but this clusterfuck consumed all of the resources I need. I'm polishing the ol' resume. Anyone looking for a remote .net dev?

Finally, I finally got my dream job, but three weeks after starting, I will say I am going into depression.

First, I have to learn a new language (the lang is less than 7 years old) on the job. The language is so different from the paradigm I am used to-from OOP to functional programming, it has very little confusing documentation and a small but growing community.

Though I have been able to show some work, goddamit, it's taking me blood and sand to adjust and be productive.

My onboarding tasks are fixing bugs and implementing a feature, and it has been like walking in a dark tunnel.

I have to face my problem alone as all the devs in the team have swapped.

I rarely sleep, and I recently started to have an existential crisis!

Also, I work part-time on another project, and my output is so poor due to the fact that I am trying to adjust to the new job. Just this evening, I got a call from the manager who was passively aggressive, complaining and asking me to rethink (a passive way of saying "you are fired, if you do not...").

I am feeling anxious. It is taking so much time daily to adjust to the new job.

Will the depression pass?

Do you guys still see the relevance of using code freezing instead of just properly managing versions, repositories and branches in a cyclical manner, given how advanced software practices and tools are supposed to be?

To give some context, the company I work for uses the complete trash project management practice of asking teams to work on a sprint basis, but there is still a quarterly milestone and code freeze to commit to and it's where shit hits the fan.

Development teams rush features at the end of the quarter because they had to commit at the very least to a 6 months in advance planning (lol?) and turns out, not being able to design and investigate properly a feature combined with inflexible timelines has high chances to fail. So in the end, features are half-assed and QA has barely any time to test it out thoroughly. Anyways, by the time QA raises some concerns about a few major bugs, it's already code freeze time. But it's cool, we will just include these bug fixes and some new features in the following patches. Some real good symver, mate!

Of course, it sure does not help that teams stopped using submodules because git is too hard apparently, so we are stuck with +10Gb piece of trash monolithic repository and it's hell to manage, especially when fuckfaces merges untested code on the main branches. I can't blame Devops for ragequitting if they do.

To me, it's just some management bullshit and the whole process, IMO, belongs to fucking trash along with a few project managers... but I could always be wrong given my limited insight.

Anyways, I just wanted to discuss this subject because so far I cannot see code freezing being anything else than an outdated waterfall practice to appease investors and high management on timelines.

This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.

Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.

With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.

All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.

I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.

ok this may look like a lazy ass beginner crying out for spoon feeding( which it kinda is), but i want some real industrial training in non documented Android coding.

For last 2 years i have been reading tons of Android articles and documentation on "how to use this library", "how to add this feature", "what this function of this class does", but not much about how to use it efficiently, like the way its used in industry.

When I interned with a startup, all they wanted from me was to push new design changes, fix layout bugs and work as fastly as i could. I had no time to understand their core code, which had so many things that i could have learned : those mvp/mvvm design/architecture patterns, dependency injections, kotlin , coroutines, state management designs, data bindings, eventbuses and handling, and VIPER,RIBS (I mean, not everything was particularly in their code, i picked up a few keywords from here n there)... a lot of stuff that is used by many apps for their codebase.
I can read up these stuff by myself, but i always end up feeling bored coz frankly, i got no big/valuable project to implement it upon and feel excited about it. I feel that open source projects from OSS companies could be my window, but their chat spaces are also mostly empty to discuss/get some guidance.

I want some specific training about these. Can you guys provide any online/offline course/company training/books in this subject, the best practices?

Is exclusively being assigned bug tickets only for a whole sprint (they're not my bugs) while another dev does feature work a bad sign? I'm a Senior SDE but my domain Knowledge is far weaker than the other SDE 2, so he can get feature work done faster. Bug fixes are general project ones that are either suddenly very critical or lower priority and leads me to keep debugging some other aspect of the system (not much documentation sadly so have to check whole flow slowly to understand it, very financial based).

My manager also just yesterday said as a senior my expectation is to lead a project and we'll discuss the requirements of my role. This is my direct manager, the one who assigned me all the bugs is the project manager, who also acts a bit like an SDE sometimes. The problem is I want to deliver work my main manager suggests but I simply don't get the time due to suddenly high priority bugs occurring (last night 1 hour before I log off, other manager says to find root cause analysis of a high priority bug), this isn't an oncall rota or task either, just normal bugs all the time.

Is this a bad sign? Am I about to be PiPed?

I build a project for internal team around a year ago. QA did sanity and we released. Product wasn’t used and suddenly they decided they want to use project. They forgot almost everything about project feature. I had product doc and ask them to follow. Still they kept making mistake. And finally they found an edge case bug. Now these idiots making noise that product is buggy we are blocked. We are not able to use.
After I fixed it is working but these idiots are asking why there was bug and made us blocked to use product. They couldn’t follow doc to use their own product. They are just trying to pin blame on me and wash their hands. I was really pissed . I told there was bug but why the fuck it took a year to know ? And yes there is bug but it’s edge case and it happens when you guys make mistakes from your side then only it happens. Even if it is bug. What the fuck you want. Have you never made any mistake in your life? Go fuck yourself. There was bug but I don’t care. Bugs are part of release.

I have a great chemistry with this coworker.

He lacks some depth of android knowledge but is always very interested in adding new google libs to the project, so we often discuss and come up with the safest, scalable solutions.

He is SE2 and I am SE1.

But one thing that is interesting about him is the way he gives estimations for the tasks. He takes usually that much amount of time that i would take, for a task, but he would quote half the time estimates.

the bosses usually come on the last days to check the feature demo, but QAs gets the first build when a task is completed. I have seen his first builds that goes to QA and most of the time, boy it has some amazingly stupid bugs.

dude would just put a util function, then run the build, if everything compiled, he would just give the build to QA directly. he wouldn't even check that the util function gave an expected output or not.

He is simply wasting QA time n efforts, and risking product quality by not testing enough, but he almost always gets a clean chit for this behavior just because he did the work super fast.

Dude is super cool and i don't envy him for his good luck, but rather think of him as an inferior dev. However bosses think of him as a better dev and my TL even once told me to "be like him"

So i guess this is how corporate works. I will try to apply this in my next role in current/next organisation.

so am switching jobs as an Android dev from a company which made android libs (using almost 0 external dependencies and mostly java) to a company which makes android apps( and is probably using either rx/guava/ribs/hilt etc or the more fancy hilt/compose/coroutines/clean-arc etc. its either one of them depending upon the maturity of product)

B2C folks use tons of libraries in favor of delivering fast but learning about those libraries while taking new tasks and fixing bugs CAUSED by those libraries ( or their inappropriate usage) is a big PAIN IN THE FUCKING ASS.

I remember i had once became such a weird dev coz of my prev company ( before the current libraries one, which was also a B2C) .

on weekends i would come up with a nice app idea, start a new android studio project, and before writing a single line of useful code, i would add a bunch of libraries, gradle scripts and extensions .

that ocd will only settle once all the steps are done and i can see a working app after which i would write the code for actual code for feature implementation.

granted that these libs are good for creating robust scalable code, but most of the times those infinite kayers of seperation, inheritance and abstraction are not really needed for a simple , working product.

:/

i have also started reading about rxjava , and although i am repulsive to this library due to its complicated black box like structure, i find its vast number of operators nd built in solutions very cool.

at the end of the day, all i want is to write code that is good enough for monkeys, get it shipped without any objections and go back home.

and when you work on a codebase that has these complicated libs, you bet your ass that there will be thos leetcode bros and library lover senëõr devs waiting to delay the "go back home" part 😪

Sometimes being a developer really sucks. I adopted a heavily customized OXID shop which introduced an ingame currency beside the fiat currency.
It was done by introducing $iPriceChannel and replacing the $dPrice float value with a multidimensional array across all components, controllers and models.

Wait ... not 100% of the code has been "adapted" yet but it's sufficient to get it working at the first glance.

The reality is: The shop has many subtle bugs and piles up huge (error) log files.

Every time when a bug was found,
and every time the shop maintainer is unlocking an OXID feature which hasn't been used yet, I have to fix it.

It's even extra hard to fix issues sometimes because the shop is embed in a game by utilizing a content-aware reverse proxy. My possibilities to navigate through the shop directly is limited because some of the AJAX/CSS/HTML elements doesn't work without loading this game.

Okay..

So, what do I have here?
A cross platform mobile app with NO unit tests.
😕
I have to write a big new feature from scratch. (Things can't go wrong, right?)
Started working on it, pointed out problems with the UI/UX designs. The design changed multiple times, still I thought I could finish it by the expected date. And, so I did.
The feature went through testing, and they found bugs. (Surprise...?)
It's already kinda scary to touch someone's code that has no unit tests and no comments. And I think, it's all the more difficult to not introduce bugs.
Also, had to work on the weekend to fix the bugs.
I had some good learnings here, but I'm not sure how I can prevent bugs without unit tests and proper feedback cycle. :/

I (frontend) was given 2 weeks to develop a new feature of the app. Almost after the end of 1 week, backend guy was finished with his code , with still bugs pending. Since backend wasn't ready for most part of the development process, I was working on my part, basically creating functionality and created views using the UI guys wireframes.

Now, we were on a time crunch , I didn't got enough time to improve the wireframes or to work with the UI guy . I released on staging environment and no one liked the UI.

App feature was supposed to be released on Tuesday. Shit hit the fan and i had to create a new ui, code the new parts of the app, do shit ton of other work and extending the deadline to today.

As of now backend code is still not fully functional,
app is ready but edge cases still not tested and I have to pull an all nighter to finish this fucking piece of shit.

How do you deal when you are overpromising and underdelivering due to really shitty unpredictable codebase? Im having 2-3 bad sprints in a row now.

For context: Im working on this point of sale app for the past 4 months and for the last 3 sprints I am strugglig with surprises and edgecases. I swear to god each time I want to implement something more complex, I have to create another 4-5 tickets just to fix the constraints or old bugs that prevent my feature implementation just so I could squeeze my feature in. That offsets my original given deadlines and its so fucking draining to explain myself to my teamlead about why feature has to be reverted why it was delayed again and so on.

So last time basically it went like this: Got assigned a feature, estimated 2 weeks to do it. I did the feature in time, got reviewed and approved by devs, got approved by QA and feature got merged to develop.

Then, during regression testing 3 blockers came up so I had to revert the feature from develop. Because QA took a very long time to test the feature and discover the blockers, now its like 3 days left until the end of the sprint. My teamlead instantly started shitting bricks, asked me to fix the blockers asap.

Now to deal with 3 blockers I had to reimplement the whole feature and create like 3 extra tickets to fix existing bugs. Feature refactor got moved to yet another sprint and 3 tickets turned into like 8 tickets. Most of them are done, I created them just to for papertrail purposes so that they would be aware of how complex this is.

It taking me already extra 2 weeks or so and I am almost done with it but Im going into really deep rabbithole here. I would ask for help but out of other 7 devs in the team only one is actually competent and helpful so I tried to avoid going to him and instead chose to do 16 hour days for 2 weeks in a row.

Guess what I cant sustain it anymore. I get it that its my fault maybe I should have asked for help sooner.

But its so fucking frustrating trying to do mental gymnastics over here while majority of my team is picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them but they manage to look good infront of everyone.

Meanwhile Im tryharding here and its no enough, I guess I still look incompetent infront of everyone because my 2 weeks task turned into 6 weeks and I was too stubborn to ask for help. Whats even worse now is that teamlead wants me to lead a new initiative what stresses me even more because I havent finished the current one yet. So basically Im tryharding so much and I will get even extra work on top. Fucking perfect.

My frustration comes from the point that I kinda overpromised and underdelivered. But the thing is, at this point its nearly impossible to predict how much a complex feature implementation might take. I can estimate that for example 2 weeks should be enough to implement a popup, but I cant forsee the weird edgecases that can be discovered only during development.

My frustration comes from devs just reviewing the code and not launching the app on their emulator to test it. Also what frustrates me is that we dont have enough QA resources so sometimes feature stands for extra 1-2 weeks just to be tested. So we run into a situation where long delays for testing causes late bug discovery that causes late refactors which causes late deliveries and for some reason I am the one who takes all the pressure and I have to puloff 16 hour workdays to get something done on time.

I am so fucking tired from last 2 sprints. Basically each day fucking explaining that I am still refactoring/fixing the blocker. I am so tired of feeling behind.

Now I know what you will say: always underpromise and overdeliver. But how? Explain to me how? Ok example. A feature thats add a new popup? Shouldnt take usually more than 2 weeks to do my part. What I cant promise is that devs will do a proper review, that QA wont take 2 extra weeks just to test the feature and I wont need another extra 2 weeks just to fix the blockers.

I see other scrum team devs picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them. Meanwhile Im doing mental gymnastics here and trying to implement something complex (which initially seemed like an easy task). For the last 2 weeks Im working until 4am.

Im fucking done. I need a break and I will start asking other devs for help. I dont care about saving my face anymore. I will start just spamming people if anything takes longer than a day to implement. Fuck it.

I am setting boundaries. 8 hours a day and In out. New blockers and 2 days left till end of the sprint? Sorry teamlead we will move fixes to another sprint.

It doesnt help that my teamlead is pressuring me and asking the same shit over and over. I dont want them to think that I am incompetent. I dont know how to deal with this shit. Im tired of explaining myself again and again. Should I just fucking pick low hanging fruit tasks but deliver them in a steady pace? Fucking hell.