Pro tip:

Although 'hmm either kill it or if that doesn't work, sacrifice some of its children' is a perfectly valid sentence in the sysadmin world, it's not in public.

😅

I'm trying to sign up for insurance benefits at work.

Step 1: Trying to find the website link -- it's non-existent. I don't know where I found it, but I saved it in keepassxc so I wouldn't have to search again. Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 2: Trying to log in. Ostensibly, this uses my work account. It does not. Time wasted: 10 minutes.

Step 3: Creating an account. Username and Password requirements are stupid, and the page doesn't show all of them. The username must be /[A-Za-z0-9]{8,60}/. The maximum password length is VARCHAR(20), and must include upper/lower case, number, special symbol, etc. and cannot include "password", repeated charcters, your username, etc. There is also a (required!) hint with /[A-Za-z0-9 ]{8,60}/ validation. Want to type a sentence? better not use any punctuation!

I find it hilarious that both my username and password hint can be three times longer than my actual password -- and can contain the password. Such brilliant security.

My typical username is less than 8 characters. All of my typical password formats are >25 characters. Trying to figure out memorable credentials and figuring out the hidden complexity/validation requirements for all of these and the hint... Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 4: Post-login. The website, post-login, does not work in firefox. I assumed it was one of my many ad/tracker/header/etc. blockers, and systematically disabled every one of them. After enabling ad and tracker networks, more and more of the site loaded, but it always failed. After disabling bloody everything, the site still refused to work. Why? It was fetching deeply-nested markup, plus styling and javascript, encoded in xml, via api. And that xml wasn't valid xml (missing root element). The failure wasn't due to blocking a vitally-important ad or tracker (as apparently they're all vital and the site chain-loads them off one another before loading content), it's due to shoddy development and lack of testing. Matches the rest of the site perfectly. Anyway, I eventually managed to get the site to load in Safari, of all browsers, on a different computer. Time wasted: 40 minutes.

Step 5: Contact info. After getting the site to work, I clicked the [Enroll] button. "Please allow about 10 minutes to enroll," it says. I'm up to an hour and 50 minutes by now. The first thing it asks for is contact info, such as email, phone, address, etc. It gives me a warning next to phone, saying I'm not set up for notifications yet. I think that's great. I select "change" next to the email, and try to give it my work email. There are two "preferred" radio buttons, one next to "Work email," one next to "Personal email" -- but there is only one textbox. Fine, I select the "Work" preferred button, sign up for a faux-personal tutanota email for work, and type it in. The site complains that I selected "Work" but only entered a personal email. Seriously serious. Out of curiosity, I select the "change" next to the phone number, and see that it gives me four options (home, work, cell, personal?), but only one set of inputs -- next to personal. Yep. That's amazing. Time spent: 10 minutes.

Step 6: Ranting. I started going through the benefits, realized it would take an hour+ to add dependents, research the various options, pick which benefits I want, etc. I'm already up to two hours by now, so instead I decided to stop and rant about how ridiculous this entire thing is. While typing this up, the site (unsurprisingly) automatically logged me out. Fine, I'll just log in again... and get an error saying my credentials are invalid. Okay... I very carefully type them in again. error: invalid credentials. sajfkasdjf.

Step 7 is going to be: Try to figure out how to log in again. Ugh.

"Please allow about 10 minutes" it said. Where's that facepalm emoji?

But like, seriously. How does someone even build a website THIS bad?

Dev: “Ughh..look at this –bleep- code! When I execute the service call, it returns null, but the service received a database error.”
Me: “Yea, that service was written during a time when the mentality was ‘Why return a service error if the client can’t do anything about it?’”
Dev: “I would say that’s a misunderstanding of that philosophy.”
Me: “I would say it’s a perfectly executed example of a deeply flawed philosophy.”
Dev: “No, the service should just return something that tells the client the operation failed.”
Me: “They did. It was supposed to return a valid result, and the developer indicated a null response means the operation failed. How you deal with the null response is up to you.”
Dev: “That is stupid. How am I supposed to know a null response means the operation failed?”
Me: “OK, how did you know the operation failed?”
Dev: “I had to look at the service error logs.”
Me: “Bingo.”
Dev: “This whole service is just a –bleep-ing mess. There are so many things that can go wrong and the only thing the service returns is null when the service raises an exception.”
Me: “OK, what should the service return?”
Dev: ”I don’t know. Error 500 would be nice.”
Me: “Would you know what to do with error 500?”
Dev: ”Yea, I would look at the error log”
Me: “Just like you did when the service returned null?”
<couple of seconds of silence>
Dev: “I don’t know, it’s a –bleep-ing mess.”
Me: “You’re in the code, change it.”
Dev: “Ooohhh no, not me. The whole thing will have to be re-written. It should have been done correctly the first time. If we had time to do code reviews, I would have caught this –bleep- before the service was deployed.”
Me: “Um, you did.”
<a shocked look from Dev>
Dev: “What…no, I’ve never seen this code.”
Me: “I sat next to Chuck when you were telling him he needed to change the service to return null if an exception was raised. I remember you telling him specifically to pop-up an error dialog ‘Service request failed’ to the user when the service returned null.”
Dev: “I don’t remember any of that.”
Me: “Well, Chuck did. He even put it in the check-in comments. See…”
<check in comments stated Dev’s code review and dictated the service return null on exceptions>
Dev: “Hmm…I guess I did. –bleep- are you a –bleep-ing elephant? You –bleep-ing remember everything.”

<what I wanted to say>
No, I don’t remember everything, but I remember all the drive-by <bleep>-ed up coding philosophies you tried to push to the interns and we’re now having all kinds of problems I spend waaaaay too much time fixing.
<what I said, and lied a little bit>
Me: “No, I was helping Nancy last week troubleshoot the client application last week with the pop-up error. Since the service returned a null, she didn’t know where to begin to look for the actual error.”
Dev: “Oh.”

sprint retros with PM are a fucking farce, it cannot possibly get any more grotesque.

they are held like this:
- in the meeting, PM asks each team member directly what they found good and bad
- only half of the team gives real negative feedback directed towards the PM or the process, because they are intimidated or just not that confrontative
- when they state a bad point, he explains them that their opinion is just wrong or they just need to learn more about the scrum process, in any case he didn't do anything wrong and he is always right
- when people stand up against this behavior, he bullshits his way out, e.g. using platitudes like "it's a learning process for the whole team", switching the topic, or solely repeating what he had just said, acting like everybody agreed on this topic, and then continue talking
- he writes down everything invisible for the team
- after the meeting he mostly remembers sending a mail to the team which "summarizes" the retro. it contains funny points like "good: living the agile approach" (something he must have obviously hallucinated during the meeting)
- for each bad point from team members, he adds a long explanation why this is wrong and he is doing everything right and it's the team's fault
- after that happens the second part of the retro, where colleagues from the team start arguing with him via mail that they don't feel understood or strongly disagree with his summary. of course he can parry all their criticism again, with his perfectly valid arguments, causing even longer debates
- repeated criticism of colleagues about poor retro quality and that we might want to use a retro tool, are also parried by him using arguments such as "obviously you still have to learn a lot about the scrum process, the agile manifesto states 'individuals and interactions over processes and tools', so using a tool won't improve our sprint retros" and "having anonymous feedback violates the principles of scrum"
- when people continue arguing with him, he writes them privately that they are not allowed to criticize or confront him.

i must say, there is one thing that i really like about PM's retro approach:
you get an excellent papertrail about our poor retro quality and how PM tries to enforce his idiocratic PM dictatorship on the team with his manipulative bullshit.

independently from each other, me and my colleague decided to send this papertrail to our boss, and he is veeeery interested.

so shit is hitting the fan, and the fan accelerates. stay tuned シ

I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).

He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.

I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.

I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?

Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.

He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.

I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.

I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.

First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.

So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.

Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.

Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.

So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.

I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.

I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.

Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.

And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.

Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.

I am so fucking done with all these incompetent fucktards!!! Why would you keep a client-brief in secret from your colleagues?! Why on your screwed delusional Earth you think it is perfectly okay if you don’t communicate the changes ahead your team? How could you - microbrained prehistoric dinosaur who petrified to your own semen - think that I can estimate with my time and do my work when you are barely able to think ahead 2 minutes without letting me know the actual scope and deadlines???!!! AND NO telling me the day before NOT GONNA MAKE IT VALID!!!! You failed in life you failed in evolution you played my trust and I don’t give horseshit about your career! Go fuck a hedgehog, eat it and shit out on the same fucking day. Tomorrow a new era starts and prepare yourself as I am hereby vow that I am not going to care any of your bullshit! I vow that every time you come to me with a new task, I will start it WHEN I can and do it between 9 and 17 and if anyone asks I will calmly tell the hard truth about the overbred, human shaped, evolutional dead end you are...

I finally got my new Smartphone after going there personally to the courier

Seriously the couriers were lazy piece of shits and they can't even deliver to my address when it's perfectly valid.

Like couriers from my local PO and from Lazada/Taobao can even get to my house, what the fuck

Using the console to print out variables is a perfectly valid method of debugging for new developers: often, it can help you resolve the problem faster than using a debugger.

Stop commenting out code blocks!

Either fix your shit or delete it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On a website, using var something = $.parseJSON('{"with": "perfectly valid javascript in here"}') when you could just have done var something = {"native": "javascript goes here", "with": "no parsing needed"};

> some other team leader reviewing some code I wrote
> "NOOOO NOOOO YOU CAN'T USE ALL UPPERCASE IDENTIFIERS, IT'S BAD PRACTICE, NOBODY DOES THIS"

Today on: people rejecting PRs because they dislike a perfectly valid style for writing enums

The fog of war over all that happened with my change of team is starting to dissipate.
3 people were involved and there were 4 different versions of the whole situtations, but from what I've been able to collect it looks like the company is expanding and one of the mail KPI for the current team leaders is how good they are at creating a NEW generation of team leaders, to take care of the new entries.
My previous team leader told me about all these new growth perspectives and the junior entries I could manage, knowing very well of the desire I have previously expressed of being a senior dev with my small group of juniors to teach.

I declined the offer, stating that this whole year has been exhausting. Every single time I've tried anything (using modules for new components on our old web client, tsdoc to document our types, suggesting technologies like ANYTHING BUT ANGULAR AND MONGO, telling how removing down migrations was a retarded move) my suggestions were either shrugged off or flat out refused. Let alone how every time I was proven right, except for angular but give it time and that will bite their tail as well.
Don't get me wrong: they are well withing their right when they take all those decisions, and more. But I DO NOT PLAN on selling a plethora of bad decisions to a new stack of devs as if they were the gold standard.
"I understand your reasons; you, as a company, need a well coordinated team all running towards a goal; loose cannons are harmful.
But now I need you to understand me: I do not agree with your technical direction. I never lied before and I will not start now. Promotions don't matter nearly as much as my integrity, and integrity in my world means speaking up about problems. Your position is perfectly valid, but mine is as well and they can't be reconciled. If I were you I'd make myself a favor and make sure IHateForALiving doesn't become a team leader; given your direction, I'm not the man you want right now".

As mentioned, one of the KPI for team leaders is how succesfull they are in finding new team leaders, and trying to turn me into one didn't end well; I love sharing knowledge, but being honest to myself is far more important to me. So this meant my previous team leader failed in a very big task, and thus was demoted? At the same time, I've been there for 2 years now so they're not really eager to replace me, but I'm under strict examination too as of now.

her: he's probably thinking about other girls
me: *in CSS, both "display: inline-block" and "display: inline block" are perfectly valid things and they even mean the same*

How does it always go to this...

It is a rare occasion I get to be the only human being at home during evening time, so I really should make the most out of it (my own space and peace is really important to me, so living with another human being is exhausting, no matter how much I love them), yet I find myself yet again slouching on the sofa trying to figure out what to do and commenting on rants while time flies by and I find the hour so late there's no point in starting to do anything anymore...

What a waste of perfectly valid oxygen..

That feeling when you inherit a script to automate something that takes 10 seconds. Why would they even write this? It's not like the task is hard....

...

And why would they write it this way? I'm sure if I just move this part and ....

That feeling when you spend several hours improving and redesigning a perfectly functional script to automate a 10 second task for zero gain aside from cleaner code. "But the code for this quick-and-dirty script I'm never going to look at again looks so much better now!"

... If only it did a bunch of complicated parsing, regex matching, and error checking just so I can answer one less prompt.... Unless that parsing fails. Then it should still ask me for that prompt... And also validate that the answers I give are valid and correct....

That feeling when you spend a whole nother day starting from scratch to implement error checking and complex parsing logic knowing full well the original task takes 10 seconds to do manually and is needed at most twice a day (for a grand total of 20s a day)

WHY AM I LIKE THIS?!?!?!