Today I found out that I could inject HTML into our documentation system.
I quickly tested it with the <style> tag by setting all paragraph tags to have eye bleeding red backgrounds.
Then when seeing that it works I've made a modal that displays a blinking red alert with the headline "Access Denied!", a loading bar that says "Tracing intruder IP..." and another line "Erasing confidential information.. .".
Then I've added an animation to run on all paragraph, heading and list tags - first they bounce and then the become transparent.

Then I asked one of the interns to go to that specific document - one of the longest and most important manuals they have access to.
I then left the room and through a window watched the poor, panicking guy looking into the abyss and "realizing" that he somehow deleted the important files and will be traced down soon.

I had to tell him the truth to avoid a suicide in the office.

It was perfect! I will definitely do this to others! :D

Documentation is indeed crazy

Source: Instagram

The company I work for...
Has:

1. No CI/CD
2. SVN instead of GIT
3. Outsourcing to India (oof)
4. No Automated Testing
5. Uses Bugnet (ancient, outdated)
6. No clearly defined code standards
7. No real documentation on the code
8. Rubbish code
9. No desire to reduce technical debt
10. Poorly maintained DB
11. Poor outdated equipment
12. A useless PM
13. Still priotizes IE support (??)

On a scale of 1 to 10 how fucked is this company and anything they develop?

My dream is to build a shopping cart for web stores that doesn't fucking suck.

Seriously Bigcommerce, Shopify, Magneto, etc. All of you can eat bag of dicks and burn in hell for ever.

I don't care what languages you fancy, all of their stacks are a pile of shit, monkey patched together with popsicle sticks and duct tape and it all falls apart with high concurrency.

All their greasy haired sales teams will throw all manners of horse shit at the poor bastards who are trying to run a business so they can pad their commission checks... "High availability", "scalable", "reliable", "Increased conversation rate"... Lying dick fucks, all of them! I am calling them the fuck out on that snake oil they're all peddling.

The only thing worse than their shit APIs is the shit documentation and the shit support that accompanies them.

Support of these platforms are pretty much all the same, sure mayhaps one has 24*7 phone support and another closes at 9 or some shit like that, either way the only people they put on the phone are monkeys that will freeze up and say "I'm not a developer so I can't help you"... Guess what, "Eric"! I didn't ask if you're a fucking dev! I'm calling because one of your devs fucked up and I need you to tell him to unfuck it so I can get the fuck on with my day!

Their app/plugin market places are shameful to say the least. The overall quality of software is somewhat dire and it's mostly dominated by oversees developers who speak English about as well as the language they're developing with (not very well usually).

I could go on until I hit the character limit but I'm gonna end it here by saying, all shopping carts suck and they should burn for eternity in the depths of hell so that a savior can free all developers from this agonizing torment.

Last night I met up with some old colleagues for food and drinks to have a catchup. Things have been stressful in work, was great to get out and have a bit of a rant and just relax ... until I saw the menu.

Hamburger:
xyz dressing / sauce, crispy onions ... and cheddar cheese.

That sir, is a fucking cheese burger, and just piss poor documentation. How have you managed to stay in business with such misleading information and false advertisements in your menu.

Thank you for ruing my evening!

Poorly written docs.

I've been fighting with the Epson T88VI printer webconfig api for five hours now.

The official TM-T88VI WebConfig API User's Manual tells me how to configure their printer via the API... but it does so without complete examples. Most of it is there, but the actual format of the API call is missing.

It's basically: call `API_URL` with GET to get the printer's config data (works). Call it with PUT to set the data! ... except no matter what I try, I get either a 401:Unauthorized (despite correct credentials), 403:Forbidden (again...), or an "Invalid Parameter" response.

I have no idea how to do this.

I've tried literally every combination of params, nesting, json formatting, etc. I can think of. Nothing bloody works!

All it would have taken to save me so many hours of trouble is a single complete example. Ten minutes' effort on their part. tops.

asjdf;ahgwjklfjasdg;kh.

met a client yesterday to discuss about the coming task. After discussion, we agreed that I will develop the API for the system in one month. I did the planning and posted the upcoming tasks in Trello. Today, he told me some of the tasks have been done by his staff and asked me if I can continue the remaining tasks and get it done in one week. Hey, bro, what you want!? it is not what we agreed! do you think i can understand the code that your staff wrote, with poor documentation and structure, in few hours and immediately start working on it, yet deliver everything with high quality? come on...

Amazing API's and SEX!

Alright people, now that I've got your attention, I'm getting to the point where I need to plan and roll out a solid API for a project. So after reading a lot of the horror stories written here, What are the finer points of what makes an amazing API experience to use and integrate with over a poor one?
And don't say documentation (If you do explain why) 😁

Unintuitive APIs, with poor documentation and terrible parameter names. It's like they don't want me to use it

So here I am sitting on my dusty laptop gaming laptop (because supposedly it would offer me better performance in compiling code and working with CUDA according to the people above me) at a research institute where I just started working at. I am told that there are some issues with the code and that it fails to build on Windows with MSVC that ships with Visual Studio 2017 and later.

I poor some hot tea from my insulated bottle I brought from home and start reading.

I look in this header file and what do I see - a custom uint24_t struct. Interesting...

I keep sifting through the code base. I find some functions that check and change Endianess. Ok, but the software is developed, built on and runs only on Win7 and later desktop systems. Never mind...

Further I find a custom "allocator" that is used throughout the whole code base. It has three inline static class member functions: allocate, copy and deallocate plus some private constructors. And these just wrap around the standard new and free calls. Some flavours of this class actually only deallocate (with a comment above them: "This allocator does not allocate. HANDLE WITH CARE!!!", which is btw the only "code documentation" I have managed to find).

But wait! What is this? A custom thread and mutex. Oh, and string, and vector.

Further down the rabbit hole I find a custom math library with a matrix class that does not support multiplication between a matrix and a vector. Perhaps not a use case I guess...

I continue and come across some UI-related calls. Interesting, I wonder what they are using as a framework. Oh, my...We have an extensive GUI custom framework written from scratch (drawing buttons and all).

All of this is to load an OBJ file and render it on the screen on a standard Windows PC in some way.

Very nice... ;_;

I've been working as a programmer for 16 years now, and would say I'm not inexperienced, so it's frustrating to feel like a noob after months at a new company when they have poor internal documentation, hundreds of repos with default readme, pretty much no use of docker, sub standard equipment and use their own weird software for deployment. It's hard to meet expectations under these conditions.

Really regretted to born in India. I know I should not say bad about the country in which I born and living it but there are so many reasons.

Govt of India is very poor. Nothing can be processed if you don't have offered bribe or you don't have political power and pressure.

My company offering me onsite to go London for my project, govt is not issuing me PCC Police Clearance Certificate even I never had any crime.

Police says for your current address 6 month is duration you're living here so we submitted 6 months crime is nil and 4.5 years is more required.

I went to passport office and happy to submit all documentation for previous addresses so that police verification can be done but no body is taking documents

No progress in my file.

I'm too much frustrated now.

I reported to ministry and prime minister of India but even no progress.

I'm really fed-up.

:(

I've seen several rants on here about poor documentation on great libraries. Well I just spent 9 hours in a car today and I realized that even the ones that have great documentation absolutely SUCK at being mobile friendly. I'm no web developer but how freaking hard is it to optimize your stupid website for small screens??? There are a million frameworks out there you can choose from PLUS it's almost entirely text so it can't be that hard!! I have to zoom in about 300% to be able to read it, then I have to scroll back and forth because it no longer fits on the screen.

Can't get over how many big companies get away with poor/no documentation for their own APIs. The past week i have been working with a large insurance company that only via email threads explained what endpoint to send files to and what username I could use to get this to work.

I also worked with a major courier service last month that only had a two page document for all their methods and one of the pages was explaining the transportation of data via imagery haha.

If it weren't for poor documentation I'd be retired by now.

We didn't all write your library. In fact, only you did. So, some helpful documentation would really help us all out. Can't believe the number of times I need to read source code to figure out what the hell you are doing.

Let me tell you a tale, children. Of how one of the mostly ghastly, horrid pieces of software currently on this earth came to be in its current, pitiful state.

It all began on January 28th, 2015.

On that day, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, sat leisurely in his office. He had just finished watching a live stream for a conference held by Facebook.

Minutes after the stream ended, he quietly sat in his chair, pondering over what was just shown.

The whole keynote was well done, he thought. But something about it just didn’t sit right with him. It was one specific line uttered by one of the keynote speaker that bothered him.

“React Native will help developers easily write code that will work on both iOS and Android”.

Out of all the talking done throughout that conference, it was that sentence, in particular, that stuck out like a sore thumb t Cook.

Those words began to echo in his head. “...Android”, Tim muttered to himself, gritting his teeth.

He immediately grabbed his Iphone from his pocket, and called the Technical Director of Xcode.

On the phone, the two discussed Xcode as it pertained to Facebook’s latest tool.

“Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t provide any support for React Native”, Cook told the director; “Just make it a bit more inconvenient for anyone using React, that’s all”.

The director thought his boss was nuts. Why on earth would you want to intentionally make using an IDE as painful of an experience as possible? But the technical director also knew that, more importantly, he wanted to keep his job.

“...We’ll do our best to make it a total pain in the ass to use React Native in Xcode”, the director told his boss with a shrug.

And so began one of the sickest jokes ever played on developers. A joke so twisted and cruel, it would make even the creator of PHP gasp in abject horror.

Who knew that someone would go out of their way to create an IDE that doesn’t even bloody work half of the time.

And don’t get me started on the absolute piss poor excuse for documentation this thing has.

So I was setting up ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) all in one EC2 on AWS today for demo purposes. I had everything prepared. Elastic IP, correct security group rules, etc.

I figured I would just do quick test before writing filters and templates if I can access Kibana. So I started service for it and tried to open it with Chrome.

Timeout.

Checked config file. Compared it to documentation. Seemed good but changed some things just for sake of change. Restarted service.

Timeout.

Reverted changes I've made in config. Restarted service. Curl on localhost. It work... OK. 😐

It took me half an hour but finally I figured it out after I took my phone and opened it from there. It was working from the beginning. Stupid company network was for some reason blocking this connection. Fuck! 😡And I was restarting that poor service like crazy trying to fix something that wasn't broken.

¡rant|rant

Nice to do some refactoring of the whole data access layer of our core logistics software, let me tell an story.

The project is around 80k lines of code, with a lot of integrations with an ERP system and an sql database.

The ERP system is old, shitty api for it also, only static methods through an wrapper to an c++ library

imagine an order table.

To access an order, you would first need to open the database by calling Api.Open(...file paths) (yes, it's an fucking flat file type database)

Now the database is open, now you would open the orders table with method Api.Table(int tableId) and in return you would get an integer value, the pointer.

Now for the actual order. first you need to search for it by setting the search parameter to the column ID of the order number while checking all calls for some BS error code

Api.SetInt(int pointer, int column, int query Value)
Then call the find method.

Api.Find(int pointer)

Then to top this shitcake of an api of: if it doesn't find your shit it will use the "close enough" method of search.

And now to read a singe string 😑

First you will look in the outdated and incorrect documentation given to you from the devil himself and look for the column ID to find the length of the column.

Then you create a string variable with ALL FUCKING SPACES.

Now you call the Api.GetStr(int pointer, int column, ref string emptyString, int length)

Now you have passed your poor string to the api's demon orgy by reference.

Then some more BS error code checking.

Now you have read an string value 😀

Now keep in mind to repeat these steps for all 300+ columns in the order table.

News from the creators: SQL server? yes, sql is good so everything will be better?

Now imagine the poor developers that got tasked to convert this shitcake to use a MS SQL server, that they did.

Now I can honestly say that I found the best SQL server benchmark tool. This sucker creams out just above ~105K sql statements per second on peak and ~15K per second for 1.5 second to read an order. 1.5 second to read less than 4 fucking kilobytes!

Right at that moment I released that our software would grind to an fucking halt before even thinking about starting it. And that me & myself and I would be tasked to fix it.

4 months later and two weeks until functional beta, here I am. We created our own api with the SQL server 😀

And the outcome of all this...

Fixes bugs older than a year, Forces rewriting part of code base. Forces removal of dirty fixes. allows proper unit and integration testing and even database testing with snapshot feature.

The whole ERP system could be replaced with ~10 lines of code (provided same relational structure) on the application while adding it to our own API library.

Best part is probably the performance improvements 😀. Up to 4500 times faster and 60 times less memory usage also with only managed memory.

I would like to present new super API which I have "pleasure" to work with. Documentation (very poor written in *.docx without list of contents) says that communication is json <-> json which is not entirely true. I have to post request as x-www-form with one field which contains data encoded as json.

Response is json but they set Content-Type header as text/html and Postman didn't prettify body by default...

I'm attaching screenshot as a evidence.

I can't understand why people don't use frameworks and making other lives harder :-/

The worst co worker I had is actually pretty recent. He joined a well integrated team on what was basically a legacy project. He sounded like a good developer and seemed to know his stuff but it took him ages to push out fixes/features. They were always massively over-engineered, poorly named, partially tested and what documentation he did write still managed to bitch about how poor the project was structured.

He spent most of his time bitching about the general shitty nature of the project (he wasn't wrong) and the lack of interest from other Devs.

He was so unpleasant in interpersonal communication that by the end no one would work with him.

In his last team meeting he basically said he was glad to be going and that we were all lazy, disinterested and shouldn't consider ourselves his peers. The equivalent of storming out of a party after setting the couch on fire and shitting in the sink.

We've since removed all his overcomplicated, not standard, unmaintainable code.

When online documentation is nonexistent but everyone expects you to use the technology.

Well alright then!

There was a big hairy ball of SW mud from another project that a poor coworker had to "reuse". Only that it was impossible because there was no documentation, shit was partly auto-generated with mysterious Excel tables, and the actual code was just as bad. No APIs and nothing, just hacking shit into globals, several nested state machines that were overriding each other's states, and with global side effects. WTF.

Two devs took a look at it - minimum 8 weeks. Schedule was some days, and PM insisted that it was "already working". But the worst thing was that the dev in charge had been looking for another job anyway and quit, so the whole clusterfuck suddenly was on my desk.

The code was so awful that I could only bear it with both eyes closed, so I instead read the spec of this project closely. Turned out that it didn't actually demand this feature, only a small subset of what the ball of mud was supposed to achieve - which I was able to implement from scratch within a day, plus another one for documentation. Phew.

API provider: include a signature based on these fields in this order. DO NOT ENCODE IT!

Implementation works a while, then..

*a wild apostrophe appears*

Signature no longer works.

API Provider: "oh, yeah we escape those."

Arrghhghghghhhghvhxmchsoxnsoxnwl

Not only is it a poor design for signing payloads, the documentation is shockingly poor in it.
Even the implementation example (which is supposedly from their code) doesn't account for any type of escaping or encoding.

Before anyone asks, I can't into details about the implementation.

I have been working on OCRs recently and I just have one thing to say:

FUCK tesseract's documentation

SERIOUSLY HOW IS IT SOO POOR?

Service I was needed to integrate to our system had such poor documentation and a separate pricing tier to access their APIs...

... Not having it. Used Guzzle to perform both the authentication and their search page, then made wrote a function to web scrape the result.

Job done. 😎 And yes, I have no shame to say I love PHP.

Losing faith in Netflix and their awesome open source projects.

Had a hard time trying to install Security Monkey : poor quality quickstart Ubuntu-only, almost no documentation, same instructions for latest (aka dev) and stable (aka prod) version, no depencies list ... oh and the UI display well only on Chrome ..

Then you surrender and just want to check the dockerized version they provide : it doesn't work neither (build fail or back end process just shut down) !!

I'm done ...

Python, my program doesn't work but is not giving any error, i read all the stackoverflow questions, arrived on the fourth page on Google, and the documentation is poor...
I'm about to die

Strapi...

So much promise let down by poor documentation. Adding custom commands is not in the docs but is supported in the code.

Spent 2 weeks through trial and error trying to get custom commands written to import content and its been a pain in the ass.

When your documentation is written, give it out to novice or intermediate programmers with minimal exposure to your system. Note down their issues and improve the documentation.

Hell, why not add a form to submit feedback on the docs to a dedicated team of writers.

Anyone here good with Strapi who could assist?

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?

!rant

Rant from my previous work as a consultant Data Engineer (wish I had known this site back then).

During my stay at the place, we have a big client whose contact with us was an incompetent stressful fellow.

I single-handedly build a humongous automated data pipeline using Airflow. I am very proud of my baby as my first massive project and check it obsessively for every possible flaw, especially when writing down documentation for the poor soul that would take my place.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

Rarely do I find well-organized code written by researchers. Well, it runs, so reproduction is possible, but when it comes to actually change something in the code, it's as messy as it can get.
And THEN, I look into the paper so that, hopefully, I can make sense of what is going on. Turns out, the documentation on the paper is also poor.
F*<k. My. Life.

How stupid am i?

1. I tried to learn programming language.
- It just so freaking hard for me to understand. Failed at logic.

2. Tried to learn aws.
- Technically know how it works but often forgot the services name. (Was thinking to get aws cert).

3. Tried to learn OpenSource DB.
- Can do up to db setup only. Else i didnt understand sh*t.

4. Tried to learn cybersecurity.
- Ended up bunch of unwanted process in my vm.

I was envy that some of my friend only read documentation once & he is like know what to do.

Guys, any pro tips for poor man here?
I want to code, but somehow i stuck.

I feel dumb...

Liferay is a fucking malediction inflicted on the human race, bubonic plague has nothing on Liferay. A staunch advocate of legacy tech, bad documentation, bad APIs and poor UX, Liferay has it all. Scriptlets all day every day. Fuck your hot reloads, a deployment cycle is the shit. Why be productive when you can wait for a deployment? Scientists are still deciphering the enigma of Liferay APIs. Over fifteen arguments per method, some optional, some not, littered with value specific functionality. Happy debugging motherfucker. API design is for hacks and pussies, real developers want to know implementation details. JSP the flagship of frontend tech, scriptlets, the pinnacle of evolution. Liferay has PLENTY of that. Did I mention scriptlets? How about obscure Liferay grown frameworks? MetalJS? A bigger mistake than smoking a pound of meth. Liferay UX, heh, heh, design, user experience hehe, hoho. Best joke I've heard. Liferay and UX, choose one.

I'm out, fuck my life.

I started using angular about one month ago, I did a long course and now I'm trying to do my first commercial app.

I have to say I really really hate the template engine of angular, I've been web developing for about 5 years, I've used bootsrap, materialize and foundation.

It rally sucks how it's all different in angular, their fucking gryd system didn't even use classes, use weird html tags, and the angular material has very very poor examples and documentation.

Another shitty thing is the Google search, when I search any shit about angular or angular material I have to watch careful if it is angularjs or only angular because most folks switch the names without any criteria.

Why the hell Google has to make a framework so incompatible with standard shit? Why it has to be a pain to use a fucking framework after 5 years of experience?

If someone can give me an advice I will be grateful

DAMN!! I feel like quitting, I am fucking tired... much work than I could handle.
fucking no options...
the worst part is the fucking poor documentation, have to hit my head on the damn wall, every time I encounter an error.
2 weeks to go...
184 files to customize!
damn, why does life has to be fucking so hard!

!rant
Experienced devs please tell help me.

Learning software development has been a challenge. Many times it's frustrating.

I also learn languages and I find them to share one trait with software development, which is complexity.

At first I looked at languages the way I'm currently doing with software. I'd look in a new language and after decided it's cool to learn it, I would stare at it for a few weeks trying to realize what the heck I was going to do. I wouldn't even know how to get started.

Eventually this stage goes away and I think that is about to happen with me with software.

But then a new challenge would come, which is me not making progress as I wanted. That's sort of happening with me by learning software as well, bit in language I now know how to deal with it.
That's because I work full time with something that isn't in my interests and when I arrive home Im tired and want to relax. So I decided my language learning had to go slower as long as I have this job, meaning no hours spent in front of books or a pc studying - that's what I could do with English, I was a teenager and had 12 hours a day to do whatever I wanted.

So I usually spent 5 minutes here and there learning something in my target language when I can, no frustration needed, my only rule is: practice everyday, even if I don't learn anything new.

With software, that doesn't apply though.

So, what I mean by tracing a parallel between these to fields is that I have a strong conviction is that once you get the principles on how a certain kind of learning works, you can apply it everywhere in the field. But with software it's been harder.
Anyways, I see that are some principles that apply, cause trying to learn software is changinge and teaching a lot of things like:

*you have to read a lot (of documentation) . At first I thought all documentation was painful to read and understand, but I found out some software are well documented and one can use those only to get used with it.

*immersion / discipline are important. I'm not very disciplined, I'm better with immersion but both are important if you need to acquire complex subjects/skills

*how to deal with complexity. I installed Arch Linux a few days ago. Just to install it I ended up reading more than 20 pages of documentation (install guide, Wpa supplicant, systemd, networkd, xorg, etc etc). Gradually I'm realizing that when you have to install/tweak something in that distro you necessarily spend a bunch of time trying to understand how it works, otherwise you don't get too far like in Ubuntu or Debian.

*and lastly the one that bothers me. Constantly getting frustrated and feeling crap about my poor skills. No matter how much I progress, it still seems like I'm stuck.
(that's when I ask your help/opinion :) )

Any ServiceNow developers in this thing? Besides the training and learning plans on developer.servicenow.com and their API documentation, any other recommendations for resources (books, videos, courses)? I didn't find any at Lynda, and those I've found on YouTube are fairly poor quality. I like books more than videos in general although sometimes it's nice to hear someone talk through it. I found a course at Udemy, but I'm a bit leery of its quality. I have been toying around in a developers' instance and once I get a better feel of it, I plan to replicate an implementation of it that I already used as a technician, and improve upon it. The platform is way more massive than I already thought it would be.

Got this build project of a big customer for the company I work for. Zero documentation and the guy manages this is on vacation and this customer is pushing and I'm on leave too until Monday, so everything is fine on x-mas eve 🎄

Horror story and rant time I guess...

I haven't seen the main developer of this MVC project that I've been working on but I can totally assure that his seniority isn't in frontend development 😠 and I doubt the backend too... Fucking DataTables converted to IDictionaries<string,object>

Guess who need to build on top of the pile of shit!

Anyway, I wasn't really careful about what kind of template I was given to work on a new SPA page, so I'm doing the job given the time, but it's fucking gory:
- matrioska style layers (n.3) without documentation
- partials everywhere
- too much inline styling
- too many <style> sections (n per layer or partial)
- too many <script> sections (n per layer or partial)
- poor CSS styling or no styling at all! (classes without any style nor js association)😠

He's just been lucky that the browser is capable of handling his shit

Now that at the end of this year I'll leave this project (solo fullstack) and need to provide documentation for the next poor souls I was thinking to leave behind something at par of my skills and capabilities but analysing the current mess ticks my brain in a bad way, fuck you Marco!
Fuck you
and your seniority
and the Italian way of perceiving seniority that gives you a higher living in the wrong side of the field 🤬🤬🤬

#Suphle Rant 9: a tsunami on authenticators

I was approaching the finish line, slowly but surely. I had a rare ecstatic day after finding a long forgotten netlify app where I'd linked docs deployment to the repository. I didn't realise it was weighing down on me, the thought of how to do that. I just corrected some deprecated settings and saw the 93% finished work online. Everything suddenly made me happier that day

With half an appendix chapter to go, I decided to review an important class I stole from my old company for clues when I need to illustrate something involved using a semblance of a real world example (in the appendix, not abstract foo-bar passable for the docs)

It turns out, I hadn't implemented a functionality for restricting access to resources to only verified accounts. It just hasn't been required in the scheme of things. No matter, should be a piece of cake. I create a new middleware and it's done before I get to 50 lines. Then I try to update the documentation but to my surprise, user verification status turns out to be a subset of authentication locking. Instead of duplicating bindings for both authentication and verification, dev might as well use one middleware that checks for both and throws exceptions where appropriate.

BUT!

These aspects of the framework aren't middleware, at all. Call it poor design but I didn't envisage a situation where the indicators (authentication, path based authorisation and a 3rd one I don't recall), would perform behaviour deviating from the default. They were directly connected to their handlers and executed after within the final middleware. So there's no way to replace that default authentication scheme with one that additionally checks for verification status.

Whew

You aren't going to believe this. It may seem like I'm not serious and will never finish. I shut my system down for that day, even unsure how those indicators now have to refactored to work as middleware, their binding and detachment, considering route collections are composed down a trie

I'm mysteriously stronger the following day, draw up designs, draft a bunch of notes, roll my sleeves, and the tsunami began. Was surprisingly able to get most of previous middleware tests passing again before bed, with the exception of reshuffled classes. So I guess we can be optimistic that those other indicators won't cause more suffering or take us additional days off course

Damn, .NET devs are really and I mean really bad at writing documentation. It is either over-engineered (anything from Microsoft) to the point you can't find shit. Or it is almost non existent and you have to study the repo and read classes, etc. (ANY .net core nuget for writing CLI apps, heck I would argue almost any nuget in general)

4 pages on github WIKI + examples that cover 20% of use cases are not a bloody documentation mate!!!

I used to be linux + any of Python/Go/JS/Ruby/Elixir guy and almost never had problems with poor documentation.

Now living in Microsoft world with .net and powershell is terrifying.

So I'm tasked with creating a single sign on link using documentation from the third party we are logging into. So far so good.

Well they don't support some of the fields our users will need--that we don't want to support (otherwise why use a third-party?).

Their solution is to make us the system of record so that when a user goes through the single sign on we pass this info as well. But it needs to be editable on their side well--because they won't give us an API for our system of record to update their side.

That's right only a user signing on from our system will update their side. Tough luck admins on our side. You get double duty due to the poor business decision to work with a company with lazy devs.

So here is a mini rant from an amateur/hobbyist developer (me).

Over the past week, I've taken on a project that is much larger than any other projects i've attempted to handle (steam trading bot). This meant that there would be logic flaws, weird bugs due to unexpected behavior from shitty web apis (and their poor documentation hmmmm).

Anyhow, fast forward a few days and the code is complete. It's mostly functional, apart from a few glitches and unexpected behavior here and there...or so i thought. Apparently if someone trades and item to me that isnt in my pricegrid, the bot freaks out and kills itself, relaunches, and repeats this cycle (pm2). And i only found out about this on my way to school

So in desperation to fix such a critical flaw in my code (if my bot breaks a lot and doesnt accept trades, i can get banned from backpack.tf), i bust out my only device which is my phone, and start editing away (JuiceSSH and turbo client is godsend ty). 30 minutes later, after toiling through code with no indentation or syntax highlights (mobile pls), ive fixed it. So i push to live and alls well.

Then I arrive at school, pull out my laptop and decided to check up on my code to see if anything needs fixing.

Oh look in one line i used '||' instead of '&&'.

ok lets fix it.

ok lets push to live again.

I launched WinSCP to move the files onto the server, and just as the loading bar finishes and the file is overwritten, i realized; FUCK the code i had on my laptop wasnt the latest version i just worked on on my phone.

So that's that. 30 minutes of typing code without indentation and syntax highlighting on a 5 inch screen and it's all gone.

TLDR:
Version control is a must.