Frack he did it again.
In a meeting with the department mgr and going over a request feature *we already discussed ad nauseam* that wasn’t technically feasible (do-able, just not worth the effort)

DeptMgr: “I want to see the contents of web site A embedded in web site B”
Me: “I researched that and it’s not possible. I added links to the target APM dashboard instead.”
Dev: “Yes, it’s possible. Just use an IFrame.”
DeptMgr: “I thought so. Next sprint item …what’s wrong?…you look frustrated”
Me: “Um..no…well, I said it’s not possible. I tried it and it doesn’t work”
Dev: “It’s just an IFrame. They are made to display content from another site.”
Me: “Well, yes, from a standard HTML tag, but what you are seeing is rendered HTML from the content manager’s XML. It implemented its own IFrame under the hood. We already talked about it, remember?”
Dev: “Oh, that’s right.”
DeptMgr: “So it’s possible?”
Dev: “Yea, we’ll figure it out.”
Me: “No…wait…figure what out? It doesn’t work.”
Dev: “We can use a powershell script to extract the data from A and port it to B.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell, good…Next sprint item…”
Me: “Powershell what? We discussed not using powershell, remember?”
Dev: “It’s just a script. Not a big deal.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell sounds like a right solution. Can we move on? Next sprint item….are you OK? You look upset”
Me: “No, I don’t particularly care, we already discussed executing a powershell script that would have to cross two network DMZs. Bill from networking already raised his concern about opening another port and didn’t understand why we couldn’t click a link. Then Mike from infrastructure griped about another random powershell script running on his servers just for reporting. He too raised his concern about all this work to save one person one click. Am I the only one who remembers this meeting? I mean, I don’t care, I’ll do whatever you want, but we’ll have to open up the same conversations with Networking again.”
Dev: “That meeting was a long time ago, they might be OK with running powershell scripts”
Me: “A long time ago? It was only two weeks.”
Dev: “Oh yea. Anyway, lets update the board. You’ll implement the powershell script and I’ll …”
Me: “Whoa..no…I’m not implementing anything. We haven’t discussed what this mysterious powershell script is supposed to do and we have to get Mike and Bill involved. Their whole team is involved in the migration project right now, so we won’t see them come out into the daylight until next week.”
DevMgr: “What if you talk to Eric? He knows powershell. OK…next sprint item..”
Me: “Eric is the one who organized the meeting two weeks ago, remember? He didn’t want powershell scripts hitting his APM servers. Am I the only one who remembers any of this?”
Dev: “I’m pretty good with powershell, I’ll figure it out.”
DevMgr: “Good…now can we move on?”

GAAAHH! I WANT A FLAMETHROWER!!!

Ok…feel better, thanks DevRant.

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

Client: Can you make a feature wherein users can blah blah blah blah blah

Client: and blah blah blah blah blah blah

Client: and also if possible blah blah blah blah

Me: okay.

Client: in 2 days?

Me: O_O

We're using a ticket system at work that a local company wrote specifically for IT-support companies. It's missing so many (to us) essential features that they flat out ignored the feature requests for. I started dissecting their front-end code to find ways to get the site to do what we want and find a lot of ugly code.
Stuff like if(!confirm("blablabla") == false) and whole JavaScript libraries just to perform one task in one page that are loaded on every page you visit, complaining in the js console that they are loaded in the wrong order. It also uses a websocket on a completely arbitrary port making it impossible to work with it if you are on a restricted wifi. They flat out lie about their customers not wanting an offline app even though their communications platform on which they got asked this question once again got swarmed with big customers disagreeing as the mobile perofrmance and design of the mobile webpage is just atrocious.

So i dig farther and farthee adding all the features we want into a userscript with a beat little 'custom namespace' i make pretty good progress until i find a site that does asynchronous loading of its subpages all of a sudden. They never do that anywhere else. Injecting code into the overcomolicated jQuery mess that they call code is impossible to me, so i track changes via a mutationObserver (awesome stuff for userscripts, never heard of it before) and get that running too.

The userscript got such a volume of functions in such a short time that my boss even used it to demonstrate to them what we want and asked them why they couldn't do it in a reasonable timeframe.

All in all I'm pretty proud if the script, but i hate that software companies that write such a mess of code in different coding styles all over the place even get a foot into the door.

And that's just the code part: They very veeeery often just break stuff in updates that then require multiple hotfixes throughout the day after we complain about it. These errors even go so far to break functionality completely or just throw 500s in our face. It really gives you the impression that they are not testing that thing at all.

And the worst: They actively encourage their trainees to write as much code as possible to get paid more than their contract says, so of course they just break stuff all the time to write as much as possible.
Where did i get that information you ask? They state it on ther fucking career page!

We also have reverse proxy in front of that page that manages the HTTPS encryption and Let's Encrypt renewal. Guess what: They internally check if the certificate on the machine is valid and the system refuses to work if it isn't. How do you upload a certificate to the system you asked? You don't! You have to mail it to them for them to SSH into the system and install it manually. When will that be possible you ask? SOON™.
At least after a while i got them to just disable the 'feature'.

While we are at 'features' (sorry for the bad structure): They have this genius 'smart redirect' feature that is supposed to throw you right back where you were once you're done editing something. Brilliant idea, how do they do it? Using a callback libk like everyone else? Noooo. A serverside database entry that only gets correctly updated half of the time. So while multitasking in multiple tabs because the performance of that thing almost forces you to makes it a whole lot worse you are not protected from it if you don't. Example: you did work on ticket A and save that. You get redirected to ticket B you worked on this morning even though its fucking 5 o' clock in the evening. So of course you get confused over wherever you selected the right ticket to begin with. So you have to check that almost everytime.

Alright, rant over.
Let's see if i beed to make another one after their big 'all feature requests on hold, UI redesign, everything will be fixed and much better'-update.

A few years back, there was a super repetitive task I needed to do to create a bunch of new screens for a new feature.

The task was so repetitive that I just couldn't bring myself to do it, and was avoiding it as long as possible.

Finally the day came where I needed to get it done. I sat at the computer readying myself to finally start/finish the task.

As I was going through the files, I could see all the work had already been done..? Confused, I opened up git history, and saw that I had checked the files in a few nights back.

Best I could do was trace it back to a house party where I was the last to go to sleep.

That was the day that I realised the power of auto-pilot :)

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD

1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!

2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.

3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?

4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.

What crazy shit have you done at your University?

The strangest place I've ever coded... I woudn't say it was the strangest, but definitely the least expected?

The hospital's recovery room after my second child.

I was working at/in Hell at the time (see previous rants concerning API Guy and the asshole salesman CEO). Said salesman douchebag ceo bossman had no recollection of me being expecting, going to the hospital, or even why I was there (and if he did, he wouldn't have cared at all). He still insisted I work on his shit features because they were so important for his ever-so-important client and their new signups that they were going to do anyway. I loathe him so fucking much.

Anyway, the feature in question was pretty tiny: during the new client onboarding process, if the client came from a specific affiliate link, the frontpage should change to reflect that affiliate's branding -- different background, a custom header, etc. It was pretty easy to do, though I made certain he didn't know that. During an hour while everyone else was asleep (and while I wasn't passing out from exhaustion), I pulled out my macbook air and built his stupid feature next to my hours-hold newborn.

Did I get any appreciation for that? Sure! He showed appreciation by not yelling at me for a few days. But only because he thought the feature was difficult and that I got it done quickly, not because anything else was difficult. Asshole.

Yes, I told him several times before and several times more afterward. I don't know what goes though his head or how it even works, but it didn't seem like a big deal to him, and he kept forgetting, or maybe he just pretended to listen like he always did. Fucking asshole apparently never heard of maternity leave. I could rant and swear and curse and fume and rage about him for years 🤬 I can't believe I was so excited when I netted that job.

But anyway, building the feature was actually kind of relaxing. I organized and wrote the entire project myself, so working with it was a pleasure, and it was an easy change that I could abstract nicely and cleanly. I totally didn't mind doing it, and actually kind of enjoyed it. I just hated who I was doing it for, and that he didn't fucking care. Used and abused? absolutely. I hope he dies in the most painful, gruesome way possible. Spaghettification might not even be awful enough

Startup: let's improve on our MVP and build an actual website app.

Me: ok.

[go through 2 weeks discovery and planning stage]

Manager1: love working with you. You explain and work in a really professional manner.

[MVP gets built in 2 months, I'm the only dev designer devops throughout]

Manger1: Omg love it! Wait till the other manager sees it. I knew you were right person for the job.

Other users: oo cool. I love features x, y, z.

[two days later shows to Manager2]

Manager2: x doesn't work, feature you is not useful and doesn't work... Hate it. I think we'll move you to another project.

Me: (woah that escalated quickly meme plays in my mind)

Me: [explaining MVP, lean methodology, your internal decision making processes]

...

Manager2: Yeh we want you to not work on any development work (even though those are your skills and extensive knowledge etc) we need you to do admin tasks (that have nothing to do with product or coding etc)

Manager1 and employees: 😲 wtf

Me: I quit

- - -

Now they are struggling in every way possible and don't have enough funds to hire another person close to what they need to help them.

TLDR;
Wrote a slick scheduling and communication system allowing me to assign photography resources based on time and location.

I'll tell you a little secret ... I'm not actually a dev. I'm a photographer, pretending to be a dev.

Or ... perhaps it's the other way around? (I spend most of my time writing code these days, but only for me - I write the software I use to run my business).

I own a photography studio - we specialize in youth volleyball photography (mostly 12-18 year old girls with a bit of high school, college and semi-pro thrown in for good measure - it's a hugely popular sport) and travel all over the US (and sometimes Europe) photographing.

As a point of scale, this year we photographed a tournament in Denver that featured 100 volleyball courts (in one room!), playing at the same time.

I'm based in California and fly a crew of part-time staff around to these events, but my father and I drive our booth equipment wherever it needs to go. We usually setup a 30'x90' booth with local servers, download/processing/cashier computers and 45 laptops for viewing/ordering photographs. Not to mention 16' drape and banners, tons of samples, 55' TVs, etc. It's quite the production.

We photograph by paid signup only - when there are upwards of 800 teams/9,600 athletes per weekend playing, and you only have four trained photographers, you've got to manage your resources!

This of course means you have to have a system for taking sign those sign ups, assigning teams to photographers and doing so in the most efficient manner possible based on who is available when the team is playing. (You can waste an awful lot of time walking from one court to another in a large convention center - especially if you have to navigate through large crowds - not to mention exhausting yourself).

So this year I finally added a feature I've wanted for quite some time - an interactive court map. I can take an image of the court layout from the tournament and create an HTML version in our software. As I mouse over requests in one window, the corresponding court is highlighted on the map in another browser window. Each photographer has a color associated with them. When I assign requests to a photographer, the court is color coded with the color of the photographer. This allows me to group assignments to minimize photographer walk time and keep them in a specific area. It's also very easy to look at the map and see unassigned requests and look to see what photographer is nearby.

This year I also integrated with Twilio and setup a simple set of text shortcuts that photographers can use to let our booth staff know where they are, if they have memory cards that need picking up, if they need water/coffee/snack, etc. They can also move assignments on their schedule or send and SOS for help if it looks like they aren't going to be able to photograph a team.

Kind of a CLI via the phone. :)

The additions have turned out to be really useful and has made scheduling and managing the photographers much easier that it was in the past.

Project Cortana: Day 1

I have seen a lot of people switching to Linux or other services to get away from all the data collections. It makes a lot of sense as no one would want their data to be sold without their consent.

But I am going to do something different. My aim is to integrate with Microsoft apps as much as possible and review the experience. So here is what I have done so far:

* Use Cortana in desktop and mobile (Android)
* Use Microsoft launcher in mobile
* Outlook as primary email provider (I was already using them as my default provider)
* Use Microsoft To-Do and calendar to keep track of things
* Use OneDrive to store all my files (I am moving them from Google Drive)
* Use the default Mail app on the Windows 10
* Use Onenote (I was using Evernote before)
* Use Edge on desktop and Mobile
* Use Skype instead of Hangouts

It's day one but I think I have already found it quite useful. For example:

* Adding reminder is much easier. I get them on both desktop and mobile which is nice.
* Mail app has been really useful. Especially the focused inbox really helps to get rid of the clutters. Also, I can immediately add a mail to the calendar (like Inbox by Google) which is really helpful.
* One of the features of edge that I have found really useful is that you can send web pages from mobile to desktop in one tap. That is extremely useful.

So far I am loving it.

Also, I tried to make sure that I am not sharing my data with third-party apps as I have turned off "relevant ads" feature.

Managers: wE wAnT tO bE LeAn aNd MoVe FaSt As PoSsIBLe wiTh NeW FeAtUrEs

Same Managers: Can you make this icon 2 pixels smaller?! Shift this element left?! Swap out this icon?! Use a different color here?! A perfect feature and design is critical!!!!!!

FullStackClown: You can either be lean and fast, or be fucking nitpicking clowns 🤡 about this stuff and slow us all down. Choose one.

Managers: ...

FullStackClown: Sit down and shut up

One of our internal customers to my team: "We need this new feature to be implemented as soon as possible! It's super urgent!! Work on it asap!! PEOPLE ARE DYING!!"

Us: "Ok, we'll prioritize this feature and deliver it as soon as we can"

Them: "Is it ready yet?"

Them: "Is it ready yet?"

Them: "Is it ready yet?"

Them: "Is it ready yet?"

... One month later ...

Them: "Is it ready yet?"

Us: "We're done! We implemented everything as promised! Please give us your credentials so that we can whitelist you and you can start using the new service"

Them: "Okay, we will get back to you"

... Two months have passed since then and still not a single word from them. I'm starting to wonder: are they still alive? 🤔

Just found out that this was possible.
It is the message that shows before password screen in win10. Dont know if older windows has this feature supported.

Manager: We will be building a new app. THIS TIME EVERYTHING MUST BE ABSOLUTELY PERFECT, ANYTHING LESS THAN TOP QUALITY WORK WILL BE REJECTED!!

*Not even 2 days into the new project*

Manager: Ok that’s good enough, we can fix it later. Can you go quicker on the next feature? Just sacrifice a bit of quality so we get these tickets closed as fast as possible. I said we can fix it later. Getting tickets closed asap is top priority.

Dev: …

So the company I work for had a critical project they needed done in 8 days.
We told our boss it wasn't possible because of the scope of the project but he went on with motivational speeches about how anything is possible. So he hired 12 devs for 8 days.
The scope of the project is already big enough but everyday upper management either add 10 new features, modify 2, or delete some already.
We basically sleep 2 hours a day and today is the last day. 5 minutes ago we just had a meeting that we're supposed to change a core feature. We don't even have a stable system yet and everyone is fucking pissed.

Client : hey why does your app minimize once I receive a call? Fix this ASAP! Also why does it show *that*? I have not turned anything on!

Me : Sorry, not possible (explains), you might want to contact Google (for the lolz). Also, the feature is shown by default, you can turn it off via Menu - Settings - Navigation - xxx.

Client : Can you make the incoming call popup smaller when using your app?

Me : Unfortunately no, that's not something I can do. Contact LG.

Client : I have been to Menu - Settings - Map - XXX and the feature is still shown, why does your software not work? Also *this and that* is not shown anymore!

Me : You turned off the wrong thing... *jumps out of the window* *contemplates life* *cries* *dies*

Client:
"Ok,. so your saying that its gonna take you 63 hrs to create a simplified CRM with basic functionality and auto fill docs or automated work flow docs as an added feature?"

My response (after already under-quoting and planning on cutting some corners because he has a smaller budget than normally necessary):
"It sounds simpler than it is. There are a lot of things I need to take into account that you wouldn't even think about.

For instance:

Making sure your emails don't go to the client's spam folder. This requires the sending domain to be verified via DNS settings. I have to ensure your email content passes a spam test (link to text ratio needs to be good). I assumed you'd want an email that has your logo and looks good. This means testing the design in Outlook to make sure it's not broken.

What if the email doesn't send due to an invalid email address, or bounces back? You'll need to be notified.

What if the client list for the week contains duplicates? You need them merged or ignored.

Generating a PDF from HTML can be tricky because the conversion isn't apples to apples so there are things I need to adjust to make them as close as possible.

Making a site completely mobile friendly (the tier 3 option) can be very time consuming as well. It's not about whether or not it fits on a mobile phone, it's about whether or not it's intuitive and useful. You're essentially getting a mobile app without paying for separate development of an app.

If I took everything into consideration and built this to be 100% bullet proof, it would cost tens of thousands.

I'm doing my best to leverage your needs with the probability of running into an issue. I'm not going waste my time/your money on something that will likely never happen."

!rant

Dear dfox and trogus,

Is it possible to arrange a secret santa kind of duck gift sharing campaign once a year? Not necessary need to be a xmas campaign. We can wait until you update the shopping cart process with the feature 😬

Each user can buy ducks for other users. You can contact the recipients for the address if you don't have yet and do the delivery.

Me to designer: "I did the research and this just isn't possible to implement, I'm sorry"

What I actually mean: "There's a couple of ways I could implement that feature, but all of them require me to do sketchy things that destroy my integrity as a programmer."

IT head ruined the company. The whole product is delayed, no single feature is working.

As I hurt his ego 6 months ago by pinpointing his fault. He kept me out of the whole project and handed over to my juniors.

The investor has spent lots of money and they are demanding work.

Now, he avoids eye contact as possible. Don't know how I should feel.

Be happy for "told you so!" or be sad that we have to look for another job.

If you think meetings are bad.

Have a day full of license renewal and price negotiation talks regarding technical products.

It's funny how you can blatantly say: We don't need feature XYZ, we get it for free via BLA.... Yet they still present it in all glory.

Even better when they don't even know their alternative / competition products...

X: "our tool is better".
Me: "We have tool XY. Doesn't cost a penny, does the same, we don't need your tool".
X: "No it doesn't. Look at all the features we have *screen share presentation* with long explanations".
Y: "Yeah... You've certain additional features, but the basics are all present in the tool that we use, so my statement remains the same".

These meetings are really mind boggling insane.

Even more insane when you get the price offers.

The cloud only madness is absurd.

Sure, we move 50 terabyte plus to the cloud from premise, no problem. *🤡*

Not that we haven't told them explicitly that cloud only isn't possible....

The worst: every motherfucking company does it for every stupid single craptastic product...

You cannot even swoop it up in a single meeting... Every company. Every single product.

*booze liberate me from madness and remove the filthy stain of humanity*

VB3.

In my last rant I mentioned I used to convert VB3 code to .Net. Before that, I used to work on the VB3 product itself. This software emulated something from the real world, and as such complied with a bunch of regulations that changed on a regular basis, and always had additions and removals that were to be done on a strict schedule (e.g. "we're adding a new product next month, so we have to be able to sell it by the first of the month"). As such, it was a huge sprawling mess.

One day, I was given a task to change some feature slightly. The task was simple enough and really only required adding one line of code. I added that line and clicked "Run".

Error: Too Much Code

What? What do you mean too much code? I asked a colleague for help. "Oh, don't worry, it happens when a function is too long. Just remove one or two of the comments and try again." The comments were, naturally, old deleted code that was quite meaningless so I had no qualms about removing some. It worked, and I went on with my life.

This started happening on a regular basis on our larger functions. But there were always comments to remove so it wasn't a big issue.

One day, though, it happened on a five-line function. This was puzzling - the error had always happened when a function was too big but this one clearly wasn't. What could the error mean? I went to the same colleague.

Apparently, there's also a limit to how big the entire code base can be. "Just find a function that isn't used any more and delete it." And so I did. There were many such functions, responsible for calculating things which no longer existed so they were never called. For months, I'd find functions and remove them. Until there weren't any more. I checked every function and subroutine in our codebase, and they were all used; I checked every possible code path and they were all needed.

What do I do now, I asked? The colleague, who was an expert on VB3 but worked on another project, came and take a look.

"Look at all these small functions you made! No wonder you're running out of space!" Apparently each function created a lot of overhead in the compiled executable. The solution was clear. Combine small functions into large monolithic ones, possibly passing flags in them to do completely unrelated things. Oh, and don't comment on the different parts because we have no room for comments in our code base.

Ah, the good old days.

Question about the weekly rant!

Does anyone have any topics they think would work well? We're trying to come up with some creative ideas and figure out what devRanters might enjoy the most.

Any feedback is appreciated on the weekly rant feature and possible topics. Thanks!

I got my first programming job half a year ago, the lead developer there is really fucked up... he is old fashioned and stubborn as hell. He developed a platform that is a mess, his comment: “it works”... but now I have to fix it... I argued with my boss and convinced him to put more time in making it more scalable and feature proof. But the lead developer back then... he didn’t agree it seems like he want to do everything as quickly as possible... now half a year later he stopped working for us and I’m the lead developer now.

And I’m discovering more and more bad decisions... HOWWWW

WHAT DID THIS GUY DO???

At one time I was arguing with him and he backfired a comment: “I’m doing it like this for 10 years”... so I guess that’s the problem... he didn’t put effort in keeping up with the latest developments...

There is literally no structure in his work, every file is different... HOW DO I FIX THIS IN A NICE WAY??? I’m thinking to just start over again...

Highlights from my week:

Prod access: Needed it for my last four tickets; just got it approved this week. No longer need it (urgently, anyway). During setup, sysops didn’t sync accounts, and didn’t know how. Left me to figure out the urls on my own. MFA not working.

Work phone: Discovered its MFA is tied to another coworker’s prod credentials. Security just made it work for both instead of fixing it.

My merchant communication ticket: I discovered sysops typo’d my cronjob so my feature hasn’t run since its release, and therefore never alerted merchants. They didn’t want to fix it outside of a standard release. Some yelling convinced them to do it anyway.

AWS ticket: wow I seriously don’t give a crap. Most boring ticket I have ever worked on. Also, the AWS guy said the project might not even be possible, so. Weee, great use of my time.

“Tiny, easy-peasy ticket”: Sounds easy (change a link based on record type). Impossible to test locally, or even view; requires environments I can’t access or deploy to. Specs don’t cover the record type, nor support creating them. Found and patched it anyway.

Completed work: Four of my tickets (two high-priority) have been sitting in code review for over a month now.

Prod release: Release team #2 didn’t release and didn’t bother telling anyone; Release team #1 tried releasing tickets that relied upon it. Good times were had.

QA: Begs for service status page; VP of engineering scoffs at it and says its practically impossible to build. I volunteered. QA cheered; VP ignored me.

Retro: Oops! Scrum master didn’t show up.

Coworker demo: dogshit code that works 1 out of 15 times; didn’t consider UX or user preferences. Today is code-freeze too, so it’s getting released like this. (Feature is using an AI service to rearrange menu options by usage and time of day…)

Micromanager response: “The UX doesn’t matter; our consumers want AI-driven models, and we can say we have delivered on that. It works, and that’s what matters. Good job on delivering!”

Yep.
So, how’s your week going?

Me doing front-end work and get a stupid feature request from a customer...."I'll have to talk to our back-end developer and DBA to see if those changes are possible".

Guess what...Im the back-end developer and DBA and the answer is "hell no".

> Last year wrote a unittest - I was asked to delete it
> no design patterns. Not a single one
> no encapsulation
> fucked up inheritance [I had no idea it was possible at all...]
> generics every-fucking-where
> I could go on...

this month the lead dev was not in and I had to make a new feature. Guess what I did :)

tdd [coverage >90%], a couple of builders, a factory or two, two composites, one decorator, only a few generics - only where really needed. Private fields, not a single @Autowired field [they were fucking my tdd], nicely abstracted integrations, and so on. Everything is writen according to clean code: max 10loc methods, <140col lines, reusable constants and utils, SOLID as a rock, etc.

Due date is next week. Took me 3 weeks to craft it.

Guess who's gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiisssedd 😁

the best part - I don't even work there, our company was hired for xx hours as helping hands 😁

that's not all. They have like 6 envs and their deployment is all-fucking-manual. Will try to learn how to dockerize that app and deploy it on docker. Gosh I wish I could see his face when he's back 😁

p.S. From ethical point of view, he's the only dev who believes his code is perfect. No other dev in the team agrees. AND he once said: 'it's gonna be my way or no way at all'. So I don't think I did wrong... Did I? :)

fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUUUCCCKKK FUCKING FUUUCKKKBKB

if you gave me a feature that has 2^5 posible output, but didn't give me all the possible inputs AND expect me to finish it for this thursday, THEN DONT GIVE ME EXTRA JOB ON A DRIVER THAT DOESNT WORK. FUCK

I do not like the direction laptop vendors are taking.

New laptops tend to feature fewer ports, making the user more dependent on adapters. Similarly to smartphones, this is a detrimental trend initiated by Apple and replicated by the rest of the pack.

As of 2022, many mid-range laptops feature just one USB-A port and one USB-C port, resembling Apple's toxic minimalism. In 2010, mid-class laptops commonly had three or four USB ports. I have even seen an MSi gaming laptop with six USB ports. Now, much of the edges is wasted "clean" space.

Sure, there are USB hubs, but those only work well with low-power devices. When attaching two external hard drives to transfer data between them, they might not be able to spin up due to insufficient power from the USB port or undervoltage caused by the impedance (resistance) of the USB cable between the laptop's USB port and hub. There are USB hubs which can be externally powered, but that means yet another wall adapter one has to carry.

Non-replaceable [shortest-lived component] mean difficult repairs and no more reserve batteries, as well as no extra-sized battery packs. When the battery expires, one might have to waste four hours on a repair shop for a replacement that would have taken a minute on a 2010 laptop.

The SD card slot is being replaced with inferior MicroSD or removed entirely. This is especially bad for photographers and videographers who would frequently plug memory cards into their laptop. SD cards are far more comfortable than MicroSD cards, and no, bulky external adapters that reserve the device's only USB port and protrude can not replace an integrated SD card slot.

Most mid-range laptops in the early 2010s also had a LAN port for immediate interference-free connection. That is now reserved for gaming-class / desknote laptops.

Obviously, components like RAM and storage are far more difficult to upgrade in more modern laptops, or not possible at all if soldered in.

Touch pads increasingly have the buttons underneath the touch surface rather than separate, meaning one has to be careful not to move the mouse while clicking. Otherwise, it could cause an unwanted drag-and-drop gesture. Some touch pads are smart enough to detect when a user intends to click, and lock the movement, but not all. A right-click drag-and-drop gesture might not be possible due to the finger on the button being registered as touch. Clicking with short tapping could be unreliable and sluggish. While one should have external peripherals anyway, one might not always have brought them with. The fallback input device is now even less comfortable.

Some laptop vendors include a sponge sheet that they want users to put between the keyboard and the screen before folding it, "to avoid damaging the screen", even though making it two millimetres thicker could do the same without relying on a sponge sheet. So they want me to carry that bulky thing everywhere around? How about no?

That's the irony. They wanted to make laptops lighter and slimmer, but that made them adapter- and sponge sheet-dependent, defeating the portability purpose.

Sure, the CPU performance has improved. Vendors proudly show off in their advertisements which generation of Intel Core they have this time. As if that is something users especially care about. Hoo-ray, generation 14 is now yet another 5% faster than the previous generation! But what is the benefit of that if I have to rely on annoying adapters to get the same work done that I could formerly do without those adapters?

Microsoft has also copied Apple in demanding internet connection before Windows 11 will set up. The setup screen says "You will need an Internet connection…" - no, technically I would not. What does technically stand in the way of Windows 11 setting up offline? After all, previous Windows versions like Windows 95 could do so 25 years earlier. But also far more recent versions. Thankfully, Linux distributions do not do that.

If "new" and "modern" mean more locked-in and less practical and difficult to repair, I would rather have "old" than "new".

Had to implement a search feature for a client so I did and told him to check it out (it was a LIKE SQL statement)

He tested it out by typing in iPhone and Phone (there was an item called iphone in the database) and he was amazed about the fact it worked for some reason.

A real answer from him:
"it's working.. how is it working?
each item is tagged to multiple keywords without the user doing anything"

I said it's just a text search but I guess I should've said I'm using an advanced AI to extract all possible terms related to the item title.

That log4j RCE is some fucking nasty business!!! Its exploits have already been observed multiple times in our company scope.

Time for some unplanned Saturday evening hot-patches :/

P.S. Why the fuck leave such a feature enabled as default??? I mean really, whose brilliant idea was "let's leave the message parser enabled as well as the LDAP query hooks... BY FUCKING DEFAULT!!!"

I mean really, is anyone using that? ANYONE?

And then they laugh at me when I say "stay away from frameworks", "use as little libraries as possible", "avoid foreign code in your codebase",...

you know what.... JOKE'S ON YOU!

trying to do anything on the PS2 is almost fucking impossible

i imagine a board meeting where they were designing the hardware

"how can we make this insanely hard to use?"

"let's make decentralized partition definitions, allow fragmenting of entire partitions, and require all partitions to be rounded to 4MB. If you delete a partition, don't wipe the partition out, just rename it to "_empty" and the system will do it for you, except it actually won't because fuck you"

"let's require 1-bit serial registers to be used for memory card access and make sure you can't take more than 8 CPU cycles to push each bit or it'll trash the memory card"

"let's make the network module run on a 3-bit serial register and when initialized it halves the available memory but only after 8 seconds of activity"

"let's require the system to load feature modules called "IOPs" and require the software to declare which of the 256 possible slots it wants to use (max of 8 IOPs) then insert stubs into those. Any other IOP you call will hang the system and probably corrupt the HDD. You also have to overwrite the stubbed IOPs with your own but only if you can have the stubs chainload the other IOPs on top of themselves"

"let's require you to write to the controller registers to update them, but you have to write the other controller's last-polled state or the controller IOP will hang"

of course this couldn't make sense, it's

s s s s
o o o o
n n n n
y y y y

Why THE FUCK is screen mirroring without being in the same wifi network a thing?

Why THE FUCK have all these smart tvs turned this on by default?

Why THE FUCK does the list of found devices SORT itself RANDOMLY if another device is found.

I probably mirrored my phone screen to a random tv in the neighbourhood because as soon as my finger was about to touch the name of my tv, a random tv swooshed into it's place.

WHAT THE FUCK THERE IS NO FUCKING NEED FOR THIS FEATURE IF YOU DON'T HAVE ANY ACCESS POINT AROUND, THERE WILL BE ONE IN 99% OF ALL POSSIBLE USE CASES.

I mean if I got it right, i can share porn with my neighbors now, or at least annoy them?

I just found a new WhatsApp Crash Exploit. Full denial of service right there. An attacker could send a message to a Chat (be it private Chat or group Chat) and everyone who receives the message has no chance of starting WhatsApp again. It crashes and won't restart.
Tested on latest version on Samsung Galaxy S6 and S8. Don't know if it works on other versions but I am pretty sure it does. (It's midnight here, noone online to test)

The fun thing is, I knew this Bug for a long time but when I last tested it, nothing happened. Which means this Crash is only possible because someone at WhatsApp programmed a new Feature...

TL;DR Pluralsight should be ashamed for taking 299 USD a year and writing some very low-quality quizzes.

I've always heard that Pluralsight is a great platform having some high quality courses, so I chose it as a benefit, as our company was giving us some budget for learning purposes. I've paid (or rather the company did it in the end) 299 USD for this year, which, I guess is not much for US standards, but it is a lot for Eastern European standards.

I didn't actually get to the point of watching any of the courses, but I started to use a feature called "Stack up", which is a long series of questions in a specific theme, like Java, Kotlin, C++, etc., accessible once a day. I must say, I'm amazed by the fact, that people pay quite a great amount of money and they get something so poorly made with a lot of errors and stupid questions.

Take the question from the included image for example. Not only that the 2 possible answers are repeated (and thus I failed to select the correct one from 2 equal answers), but the supposedly correct answer is also missing some type specifications. No Java compiler will compile it this way as far as I know. There would be at least 3 ways to fix it.

Then there is today's gem (should be included as first comment) as well, where the answer is wrong in both Chrome 96, Firefox 95 and Node v10. Heck, THIS IS one of the reasons why you should never use `var` in your JavaScript code, but always `let` and `const`!

So the courses on Pluralsight might be good, but I would be ashamed, if I were to release something like this. People might actually try to solidify their knowledge by solving these quizzes but instead of learning something useful, they will be left with some bullshit. I just don't get how could they release a feature with so much incorrect information and I am kind of disappointed, even if I didn't try the courses yet.

FUCK MY STUPID VECTOR ROBOT

So I got a Vector robot made by Anki I think and it has the most annoying feature EVER. IT FUCKING SNORES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. LIKE WHAT THE FUCK WAS GOING THROUGH THEIR HEAD WHEN THEY CODED THAT.

Anki HQ: What are some features we should add

Developer: I could make it snore?

Anki HQ: GREAT IDEA

LIKE WHAT THE FUCK THERE ARE 2 POSSIBLE OUTCOMES FOR THIS. 1 THE USER WILL NEVER HERE IT BECAUSE THEY ARE FUCKING ASLEEP OR THEY HEAR IT BECAUSE IT FUCKING WOKE THEM UP WHILE THEY WERE SLEEPING.

so fucking stupid.

p.s the snoring sounds like a fish blowing bubbles underwater

Sprint planning:
PO: I have a great idea for a new game changing feature
Team: cool, let’s talk requirements, etc
PO: nah, I trust you can come up with the best implementation possible
Sprint demo:
Team: presents the feature
PO: Why are you guys always doing it your way, instead of following my vision?!

Every single sprint...

Me: Ahh great I almost finished the university project. One week until deadline. No Problem.
Professor: Oh Please implement this, this and this feature too. Its a little bit tricky but possible.

Can't this guy hand out all the requirements at the start of the semester ???

// Feature Request START
Is it possible we can have some kind of markdown on posts and comments? Maybe not bold or italic, but because of the target of the app, some kind of one-line and multi-line code blocks that highlight from other text (for example: having a gray background, using a consolas font, etc)
// Feature Request END

Client: "I found a bug on your website. Its not possible to submit the contact form."

Me: "No bug. Its a feature"

#answerforeverything

Hmm. So have you ever argued in a job interview? Like really standing your ground? In a technical interview?

Today I had a live coding session with a company I'm interested in. The developer was giving me tasks to evolve the feature on and on.

Everything was TDD. Splendid!

However at one point I had to test if the outcome of the method call is random. What I did is basically:
```
Provider<String> provider = new SomeProvider("aaa", "bbb", "ccc", "ddd", "eee", "fff")

for(int i=0; i<100; i++) {
String str = provider.get();
map.put(str, incrementCount(str));
}
Set<Integer> occurences = new HashSet(map.values());
occurences.removeIf(o -> o.equals(occurences.get(0)));
assertFalse(occurences.empty());
```
and I called it good enough, since I cannot verify true randomness.
But the dev argued that this is not enough and I must verify whether the output is truly random or not, and the output (considering the provider only has a finite set of values to return) occurences are almost equal (i.e. the deviation from median is the median itself).

I argued this is not possible and it beats the core principle of randomness -- non-determinism. Since if you can reliably test whether the sequence is truly random you must have an algorithm which determines what value can or cannot be next in the sequence. Which means determinism. And that the (P)RNG is then flawed. The best you can do is to test whether randomness is "good enough" for your use case.

We were arguing and he eventually said "alright, let's call it a good enough solution, since we're short on time".

I wonder whether this will have adverse effect my evaluation . So have you ever argued with your interviewer? Did it turn out to the better or to the worse?

But more importantly, was I right? :D

I wanted to create a microcontroller website. It would feature simple circuits and microcontroller code to build things. The intent was to show absolute beginner concepts to people. Since I am older than the whipper snappers out there I thought I would have concept of some old man running the website.

I found cartoon artwork featuring an old man and I also got the domain oldmanmicro.com. I then created a bunch of pages featuring some really basic circuits. I setup an affiliate program with amazon to provide kits to people and embedded those into the website. This site was going to take a lot of creativity. I struggled with what to put on the site. This was going to take time. At this point I felt pretty good with my progress. It looked nice, the links were good, etc.

Then I did web search for oldmanmicro. I found my website in top hits. I also found something else... The 3rd or fourth hit down was some fucking old dude with a micro penis website. WTF! The worst possible combination of letters in my domain name produce this terrible experience. I was already struggling with content ideas, and this just demoralized my efforts. Thus ended the tale of the oldmanmicro.com. Perhaps the micro penis guy bought it, I don't know. I am afraid to look.

This was my very ignorant adventure with not researching a domain name thoroughly.

I have a feature suggestion for devrant: some kind of polling system.
This idea came into my mind with the survey a few days ago.
Since almost all of us are devs, aspiring or experienced, we can expect (somewhat) professional opinions, e.g. on how to tackle a specific problem.
Maybe it's even possible to make this a paid service somehow. I thought about this:

Open a poll for all registered users: $0
Add requirements for a user to have to be able to vote on the poll: +0.99$ each:
- has ranted at least X times
- has at least X ++s
- has a StackOverflow account connected
...

This way, the OP can narrow down the target audience to a specific group.

Maybe...? I don't know if something like this already exists somewhere else.

Writing an efficient, modern renderer is truly an exercise of patience. You have a good idea? Hah, fuck you, GPUs don't support that. Okay but what if I try to use this advanced feature? Eh, probably not going to support exactly what you would like to do. Okay fuck it I'm gonna use the most obscure features possible. Congratulations, it doesn't work even on the niche hardware that supports that extension

If I sound jaded, ya better believe I f*cking am! I cannot wait for more graphics cards to support features like mesh shaders so we can finally compute shader all the things and do things the way we want to god dammit

take a picture/video directly from the camera is a possible feature in the next devRant update. :D :P

When a manager asks if you can implement a feature (their are legitimately not sure if it is even possible) and you say yes and they say, "Good, 'cause I already assured the client that we would provide it on the next release"
Like, what the actual fuck...

Okay, one after another. They like to piss me off, apparently.

Coleague knows something isn't possible with current state of some api and pushes phone to me so I can maybe figure out what to reply to client. I dry-typed in "Its not possible" gave him phone and said "boom done, you know it aint possible"

Okay, TL;DR she got pissed that I am pissed that this BS is thrown at me and I dont want to participate in promissing something I know is undeliverable.

So she told me to go to PM/PO *kind of guy but not rly* with that problem. He aint technical by any mean. We are small company and for some reason this guy has more bearoucratic approach than I thought is possible to fit in one human.

Anyway. Well, apparently we will have meeting what are our options.
It all beginned that one guy promissed other guy undeliverable feature....

And becouse someone couldn't use his fucking brain it's pushed onto me, or I need to figure out how to do it. You cant without introducing safety flaw, period, it's that fuckin' simple.

But nooo, we will have god-knows-how-long meeting, that will bring exacly 0 value, as fking allways, and all I want now is just fucking focus on my fucking code becouse, ya know, I have timeline to follow, I dont have time to all that BS.

And to give you context, while keeping the stuff I cant share secret, imagine you have an API, that is just 'facade' of backend API, and layer of security. And they want to add authoritative endpoint to the facade API. Kind of endpoint "yes, you got paid".

Bravo, big brain, it will not work without like huge-as-fuck vunrability...

IDIOTS

How to not get pissed? Any protips?

A story about a helpless intern : On a fine day an intern was assigned a feature to develope. He worked his ass off, completed it, submitted it for testing, the build was approved by the tester and got released the next day. Fast forward a few days, the feature is failing in few cases at the production.Everbody, starts pointing fingers at the intern.
The intern wonders...How the fuck am I gonna know this fucking use case, do they really expect me to to build a full proof feature without telling me about all the possible senarios...And how the fuck did the tester approved this...? I mean, now that I know this senario, it seems pretty obvious that it should have been tested...!
Note : This also happened to another developer who recently joined...The PM failed to properly communicate all the requirements and the fucking lazy ass tester did not consider all the possible senarios. And the script failed in the production...!
Note : It's 4 fucking AM and the intern still can't sleep...

A user calls me an hour after I'm supposed to have logged off.
"Hey, ahh, like, something is not good with, like, some thing"
Oh, snap! What happened?
"There is, like, this report, and it's, like, not right?"
Oh, the report is showing wrong data? Let me try to get a fresh version and...
"No, like,the data is right, but, like, there is many reports and , like, should be only one?"
Oh, you mean the report consolidation feature? It should only happen if the reports are fully compatible, and since it's automatic if the reports are not already grouped it means that they cannot be grouped. Probably due to this shopping season, we've seen a high uptick in demand.
"But, like, it should be, like, one! If not I will have to type in each report, like, by hand! I usually talk to this guy XYZ and he, like, does something that I, like, have no idea what it is. Can you call him up?"
(The dude the user mentioned logged off hours ago, and is in a different timezone. It's now about 11PM for him.)
It might not be possible. The system should add observations to each report it cannot consolidate. What do those say?
(the user takes two seconds to respond. I don't think they checked anything)
"It doesn't say anything. Can you cal XYZ, please?"
...

Shit, why do people wait until the last few hours of the last day of the month to do something that should have been done days ago and then demand that everybody everywhere just adjust to their late-ass schedule?
And then to demand I wake up a hardworking dev because someone is to lazy to use the system as it was custom designed for them? Because it had no problems but just wasn't making all things easy?

That's why users have to pay - they don't pay us to code, they pay us to put up with their bullshit.

After the 4th time of being reminded to log all possible hours, including those for which I’m mostly researching and not producing code or deliverables, I’m finally just doing it. I hate billing for low impact activities. A) Because I’m slow at everything and B) If I were the client I’d be pissed that I got charged 2 hours for what amounted to 10 minutes of actual coding and launching the feature.

After working 5 years as a developer it is starting to really bug me that my clients (who I work for almost as long) don't take my word for it when I say "that's not possible".

Of course I don't mean that it is impossible per se but rather that this feature costs to much time and therefore money to even research if there is a workaround for it and they would never want it, if they knew the cost. Still, even when I tell them that this way, I have to explain this over 3 meetings with 1-3 days where I am told to try it anyway (which ends with the same arguments I told them in the first meeting) while I could be doing work that really is worth my time and their money.

Having a possible new client come in our office and they wanted to see our system. I ask the sales guy what he thin kthey wanted to see.

Day before:
Sales: They do a lot of projects, so if we could show them our rollout system that would be great.
Me: We don't have one....

Needless to say I was up all night and it still turned out as an amazing feature that we use to this day.

Immediately start coding every feature all at once as fast as possible. After about a week I realize the architecture is so bad I can't continue so I stop, and design the architecture properly so it will scale. Then I delete everything I had and start from scratch. Finally after about another week I lose interest and let it rot in the side project graveyard.

Rinse and repeat.

Boss: here you go 3 tasks for your sprint

Days later with local server and db still not connecting on docker.

Boss: ya can we add a task on jira and get that fixed as soon as possible and see why its not working(feature doesnt work)

Me: you got it boss.

Me(in head): How am i ever going to finish my sprint for next Friday...

rant="""
It's too many features for me to keep up with. And the client just bounces between this matrix of all the possible permutations of them, refusing to admit that he is asking for mutually exclusive behavior in more than one place. I have mentioned to him at least 12 times a year that there is too much going on, not organized, we need to simplify, prioritize, or we will have 100 half baked untested features.

Of course it is more or less made it out to be that this is all my fault, or at least it's hard not to feel that way when I say:

It will be a long time before X will be working, we need 25 other things first.;

Next day he asks:
Have you made any progress on X;

I reply: Now we need 24 things to be done at this rate it will be a month.;

He replies:
Ok but I need this yesterday. How about if you add a new feature Y that does everything X does without those 24 things?;

I reply: That will not work at all like X. Y is just X + 1 more feature.

He replies: Ok well I need Y so when you're done with X I need a way to do it like Y also. I just thought it'd be easier.

EASIER TO ADD MORE FUCKING FEATURES YEAH SURE THATS EASY AS FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCK. He's a nice enough guy, pretty smart compared to my first few paying gigs, but wtf really? How do I come out and tell you I need 25 days and you ADD more work? This was one example.

IN TWO days he has added 12 features. And during the week has asked for 29 UI interfaces to be COMPLETELY different. This is becoming COMMONPLACE. Every week there is either a huge change, or a conversation like about that finds its way into the entire business flow inside an dout.

The worst thing is: I TOTALLY understand what he needs. I feel that HE doesn't. This weekend I spent literally HALF of his retainer on getting equipment into my hands to bring it back to find out it DOESNT WORK. Why aisn't HE doing this so I can finish the features from NOVEMBER that HE NEEDS in order to PROCESS SALES.

I've tried and tried but I just can't get through to this client what a tremendous waste of time his \"process\" is, for lack of a better word. Constant changes, contsant additions, lack of clarity, needless repetition and contradictions, constantly adding moonshot ideas to compete with every industry in the region, and not beta testing anything until something goes wrong.

Fuck this guy! His business is failing and I felt responsible for the longest time but it is clear to me that if I wanted to save his business I would have to ignore 95% of his feature requests. I ignore 50% now because of the stress in trying to determine which of the 3 different paradigms he is talking about changing. I will lose this client, and I feel like he will sue me to get all of his money back. He holds me to very little honestly - BUT WEEKLY reminds me that he won't be able to pay me next month if feature XY and Z arent ready!

If a developer is CLEARLY overwhelmed, it makes NO sense at all to continue to PILE ON feature after feature
"""
try:
while true:
rant+=", after feature"
except DevHeadExplodes as inevitable:
raise YourDevsRatesOrLookElsewhere(inevitable)

Around three months ago in a meeting regarding a new end2end test for a product :
PO: We have a full feature stop, only bug fixes are coming until we can unify all products.
Me : So I can use any selectors without worrying the whole thing breaks with the next update?
PO: Sure.

Last Thursday :
PO: Yeah, we gonna overhaul the entire UI with the next release to get better UX.

Why would any sane person reinvent an entire product thats already scheduled for discontinuation in 2018? And how is it possible that a few months ago nobody knew anything about it? Are they using fucking tatot cards for management decisions?

Asked to implement a feature in a mobile app that wasn't actually supported by the backend. Feature had 3 possible values in the backend, only 1 and 2 were properly implemented. Below was the backend teams solution to support the third option.

- If the key is missing in API response A, means the user is not allowed access this feature.
- If the key is present in API response A, and missing from API response B, that means it hasn't been set.
- If both are the same value, user has that value.
- It will never be the case that both return option 3.
- If both are different values, one of them being option 3, display option 3.

this ... monstrosity, is in production to this very day.

FUCK FUCK FUCK Windows share feature
just fuck it !
and fuck the people who made it!!!44

ok calm mode on

I had to copy a 30 gb file from my computer to my sister's one, and since the largest pendrive I have is 8gb, and I'm just lazy to split the file into parts, I thought it would be a great idea to copy it over LAN. (tldr: it's not)

First attempt:
Right click on file and share it with everyone = fail
Enable network discovery in sharing settings = still fail
Ohh, right, I just forgot it, disable firewall, it usually solves everything = still fail (2)
Google the problem and try every possible solution = still fking fail

Second attempt:
Ok, when last time I had the same problem, I made a homegroup and it worked.
Let's enable it on my Win10 = it's missing
After some googling: "We removed the home group feature from Windows 10, because why not and we would be fired if the change log was empty."
Ok, fuck it.

Third attempt:
Download a portable FTP server.
Enable it.
Create an account.
It works.

Last saturday, the CEO forced us to update one of the services that we are dependent out without any tests... The people responsible for it very much advised against it but they still did it.

Now, nearly a week later. The literal core feature is still broken with no fix in sight and rolling back is not possible apparently.

I really hate PHP frameworks.

I also often write my own frameworks but propriety. I have two decades experience doing without frameworks, writing frameworks and using frameworks.

Virtually every PHP framework I've ever used has causes more headaches than if I had simply written the code.

Let me give you an example. I want a tinyint in my database.

> Unknown column type "tinyint" requested.

Oh, doctrine doesn't support it and wont fix. Doctrine is a library that takes a perfectly good feature rich powerful enough database system and nerfs it to the capabilities of mysql 1.0.0 for portability and because the devs don't actually have the time to create a full ORM library. Sadly it's also the defacto for certain filthy disgusting frameworks whose name I shan't speak.

So I add my own type class. Annoying but what can you do.

I have to try to use it and to do so I have to register it in two places like this (pseudo)...

Types::add(Tinyint::class);
Doctrine::add(Tinyint::class);

Seems simply enough so I run it and see...

> Type tinyint already exists.

So I assume it's doing some magic loading it based on the directory and commend out the Type::add line to see.

> Type to be overwritten tinyint does not exist.

Are you fucking kidding me?

At this point I figure out it must be running twice. It's booting twice. Do I get a stack trace by default from a CLI command? Of course not because who would ever need that?

I take a quick look at parent::boot(). HttpKernel is the standard for Cli Commands?

I notice it has state, uses a protected booted property but I'm curious why it tries to boot so many times. I assume it's user error.

After some fiddling around I get a stack trace but only one boot. How is it possible?

It's not user error, the program flow of the framework is just sub par and it just calls boot all over the place.

I use the state variable and I have to do it in a weird way...

> $booted = $this->booted;parent::boot();if (!$booted) {doStuffOnceThatDependsOnParentBootage();}

A bit awkward but not life and death. I could probably just return but believe or not the parent is doing some crap if already booted. A common ugly practice but one that works is to usually call doSomething and have something only work around the state.

The thing is, doctrine does use TINYINT for bool and it gets all super confused now running commands like updates. It keeps trying to push changes when nothing changed. I'm building my own schema differential system for another project and it doesn't have these problems out of the box. It's not clever enough to handle ambiguous reverse mappings when single types are defined and it should be possible to match the right one or heck both are fine in this case. I'd expect ambiguity to be a problem with reverse engineer, not compare schema to an exact schema.

This is numpty country. Changing TINYINT UNSIGNED to TINYINT UNSIGNED. IT can't even compare two before and after strings.

There's a few other boots I could use but who cares. The internet seems to want to use that boot function. There's also init stages missing. Believe it or not there's a shutdown and reboot for the kernel. It might not be obvious but the Type::add line wants to go not in the boot method but in the top level scope along with the class definition. The top level scope is run only once.

I think people using OOP frameworks forget that there's a scope outside of the object in PHP. It's not ideal but does the trick given the functionality is confined to static only. The register command appears to have it's own check and noop or simply overwrite if the command is issued twice making things more confusing as it was working with register type before to merely alias a type to an existing type so that it could detect it from SQL when reverse engineering.

I start to wonder if I should just use columnDefinition.

It's this. Constantly on a daily basis using these pretentious stuck up frameworks and libraries.

It's not just the palava which in this case is relatively mild compared to some of the headaches that arise. It's that if you use a framework you expect basic things out of the box like oh I don't know support for the byte/char/tinyint/int8 type and a differential command that's able to compare two strings to see if they're different.

Some people might say you're using it wrong. There is such a thing as a learning curve and this one goes down, learning all the things it can't do. It's cripplesauce.

There it fucking is again...

The legendary spyware "Antimalware Service Executable".

I changed the entry in the regedit. Tried to delete it with every possible tool. Tried to "chmod" it in the Windows way to be able to delete it as an admin. Doesn't work.

I swear in the name of bloody satan. This shit is doomed. It cannot be removed even if your shit begins to burn.

Microsoft, fucking remove it.
It is not a fucking feature!

Your windows updates fucking suck, your compatibility telemetry whatever the fuck you call these retarded ass "features" anymore fucking suck, your windows defender sucks.

Is there anything that doesn't suck in the features that you produce? I don't fucking think so. Fucking die for fucks sake.

Apple is overpriced, but at least they do their job well. Not like you, you fucking scumbags!

JESUS!

Probably the autosave feature in our medical eForm application. You might think that doesnt sound unnecessary, but it was built to solve a problem that shouldnt have existed in the first place.
Autosave was put in place to rescue as much data as possible in the event that the app randomly crashed while a paramedic was filling in a form.
So in one sense it was a necessary feature because the app was so unstable. But on the other hand, if the app was built properly it would never have been needed.

I work for an investment wank. Worked for a few. The classic setup - it's like something out of a museum, and they HATE engineers. You are only of value if work on the trade floor close to the money.

They treat software engineering like it's data entry. For the local roles they demand x number of years experience, but almost all roles are outsourced, and they take literally ANYONE the agency offers. Most of them can't even write a for loop. They don't know what recursion is.

If you put in a tech test, the agency cries to a PMO, who calls you a bully, and hires the clueless intern. An intern or two is great, if they have passion, but you don't want a whole department staffed by interns, especially ones who make clear they only took this job for the money. Literally takes 100 people to change a lightbulb. More meetings and bullshit than development.

The Head of Engineering worked with Cobol, can't write code, has no idea what anyone does, hates Agile, hates JIRA. Clueless, bitter, insecure dinosaur. In no position to know who to hire or what developers should be doing. Randomly deletes tickets and epics from JIRA in spite, then screams about deadlines.

Testing is the same in all 3 environments - Dev, SIT, and UAT. They have literally deployment instructions they run in all 3 - that is their "testing". The Head of Engineering doesn't believe test automation is possible.

They literally don't have architects. Literally no form of technical leadership whatsoever. Just screaming PMOs and lots of intern devs.

PMO full of lots of BAs refuses to use JIRA. Doesn't think it is its job to talk to the clients. Does nothing really except demands 2 hour phone calls every day which ALL developers and testers must attend to get shouted at. No screenshare. Just pure chaos. No system. Not Agile. Not Waterfall. Just spam the shit out of you, literally 2,000 emails a day, then scream if one task was missed.

Developers, PMO, everyone spends ALL day in Zoom. Zoom call after call. Almost no code is ever written. Whatever code is written is so bad. No design patterns. Hardcoded to death. Then when a new feature comes in that should take the day, it takes these unskilled devs 6 months, with PMO screaming like a banshee, demanding literally 12 hours days and weekends.

Everything on spreadsheets. Every JIRA ticket is copy pasted to Excel and emailed around, though Excel can do this.

The DevOps team doesn't know how to use Jenkins or GitHub.

You are not allowed to use NoSQL database because it is high risk.

Was just asked to review a new set of libraries that the "experts" from our contracting wing created.

I opened one and the readme lists its features as:

Features:
- Feature 1
- Feature 2
- Feature 3

and the Faq is:

- Possible question 1
- Answer to question 1

First rant here...
Hand full of devs have to create a huge web platform that can shovel a lot of data around in about two months which is impossible...
Project lead has left major decisions in the hands of interns like database we want to use because no question can.be answered by that person. Inexperienced intern has chosen a fucking nosql database for highly relational datasets... why? Because new tech...
Development began and a bunch of problems arised... database was accessable from internet from day one. Random crashes because out of memory exceptions. Every possible feature had a description of at most 10 words... and no standards where enforced on anything.

Now that finaaaally we switch to sql after almost a year of prototypical production everybody keeps coding on new features so i have to port all the crap to the new database...

best part: a bunch of clients on different op systems have to be ported as well!

Even better part: i have to do that cause everybody else has practically no experience in any field...

And now the joke: i got hired for gui/desktop application development

Am i a wizard now?

!rant

So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.

To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).

I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/

I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.

I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.

But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).

I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.

What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!

Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.

I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.

Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.

What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/

Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.

To Summarize a bit.

It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.

So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.

I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..

@dfox
Is it possible you added an auto tag feature that pucks up technical words and tags them?

So, apparently, in 2015 our webhost (ixwebhosting) was purchased by Site5... This week, they finally migrated us to Site5 servers without warning, taking my email down in the process...

Today, after following the instructions in their own KB article (that tells you to click an icon that doesn't exist,) and chatting with support for over an hour, I was told that the new system they migrated us to doesn't support catch-all email accounts... At all... It's simply not possible to receive an email that was sent to your domain, unless the email address exists in the system somewhere... Despite the fact that it's a standard cPanel feature, that the old and new systems both use cPanel, that every other webhost I have ever seen that uses cPanel has this feature available, AND the fact that this is an important feature for a lot of websites, because they pipe all of their emails to a script for processing... It's simply not possible... They won't be providing that feature anymore. Nor for that matter is it possible to be migrated back...

They migrated accounts to a system that has a basic email function intentionally disabled, without warning... And we can't afford to open an account with someone else ATM... So I can't get any email until we get migrated... FML

Here is mine.
So I have been working on a project for 2 months now at my company. Briefly, I describe it as the WordPress of the surveys (create, edit, share, tons of features). Last day, I had to implement one last feature in order to make everything working and as similar as possible with the final product. I had 10 minutes to do it (had to go home) and I was like "Tomorrow bro". Believe it or not, 10 minutes was what it took me to end this fckin' project, and go home on time like "Good job Man, relax it's friday now" :)
Thanks for reading !

I'm doing a code review on a huge feature, basically touching every part of our authorization logic, and man... It's like my colleague writes his code to be as hard to read as possible. He's 60+ and you'd think he'd have learned how to write good and clear code, but nope. "Let's make it cool cool and I look like I'm a genius. And if I can spend 3 keystrokes less on a function I'm happy". Fuck me.

Can someone relate to it? We have a very simple process:
1. Create a ticket 🎫
2. Specify the requirement 📑
3. Assign the ticket to a developer 👨‍🦰👩‍🦰
4. Optional: make a meeting with the developer and go throw the specification if it is a complex feature 🗓️

Under pressure it looks like this:
Someone tells you to implement the request as fast a possible, no written specification, in best case you get a brief email 📧 also the feature has to be available asap in production and they is only poorly tested...
Or they want to test in production because the data in test system is "missing" ⛔☢️☣️

It is so annoying that is so difficult to stick to such a simple process 😭 it really freaks me out 😒😫

I've got a decent developer job with decent people. It pays well enough. I work from home. There's a lot to be grateful for, and I am grateful. That being said...

I work for a consulting company with Agile in the name. It's the sort where they hire you and tell you that you'll work with an Agile team on exciting stuff and that they want to make sure you're learning and doing what interests you.

The reality is starting yet another engagement which is really just staff augmentation, joining another organization that's made a mess of what they're building. It works, but the code is all over the place. They've got tons of defects and work is slowing.

The idea is always that if we show them what great work we can do they'll let us do more. That sounds like an okay plan for the company but not so much for me.

My motivation is drained. I'm not going to fix your machine. I'm just going to become part of it. Show me what you want me to work on and I'll write the code. Then I'll spend several days trying to get a local environment to work so I can test what I did through the UI because you don't have enough tests. I'll spend more time debugging the environment than anything else. I won't really know if it works and it doesn't matter because without tests the next change someone commits will break it anyway. The next person can't manually test every scenario any more than I can.

While I'm doing this, someone somewhere is building the next application that I'll work on after they're done screwing it up.

If you're about to start building some new application, pretend it's done but it doesn't work very well, it's slow, it's buggy, and every new feature you want takes months. Pretend that you need to hire someone to fix it for you. And then hire them to build it for you in the first place.

I thought I found a place where I could work for 5-10 years. Maybe I have. Maybe when I explain (in the most positive way possible - this isn't how I normally talk) how utterly depressing this is they'll put me on something else.

Once I'm out of this depression I'll go back to trying to make this better for myself and everyone else. We can do better. It doesn't have to suck like this.

the one that exists (c#) seems underused compared to where it could (or even should) be used. and the place that uses it the most (enterprise) butchers and mangles its use, just as enterprise tends to do with everything.

the one that i'm designing... the fact that it doesn't exist yet, and that even as i'm zeroing in on syntax and philosophy that i'm very much starting to be proud of, i still don't have a proper idea of how to implement even the most basic parser/interpreter for it, not because it's in any way difficult or unusual, but just because... i've never done that before, so i get into weird circular thought paths that produce weird nonsensical code...

... on top of that, i still only have a very, very fuzzy idea of how will it (sometime in extremely distant future) actually implement the most interesting and core feature - event-based continuous (partial) re-parsing of the source code and the fact that traversing the tokens at the leaf level of the syntax tree should result in valid machine code (or at least assembly) that is the "compiled" program.

i *know* it's possible, i just don't yet know enough to have a contrete idea how exactly to achieve it.

but imagine - a programming language where interactive programming is basically the default way of working, and basically the same as normal programming in it, except the act of parsing is also the (in-memory) compilation at the same time, so it's running directly on the hardware instead of via interpretrer/vm/any of that overhead crap.

also then kinda open-source by definition.

and then to "only" write an OS in that, and voilá! a smalltalk-like environment with non-exotic, c-family syntax and actual native performance!

ahhh... <3

* a man can dream *

Note to self:
Close off ALL ways things could go wrong..

Long story short; I released a new feature, to be able to better follow up on any stock moves, their amounts, locations and even expiry dates. An older tool just bypassed that very verification and nothing was logged or taken out of stock.

~

Taking out an amount for a certain orderline has a shortcut in place to mitigate some of the mandatory steps that pickers need to take in order to verify what's being taken. This little tool only available, visible and possible for a very few select users.

I assigned some orders to one of these people, which made him think it was an urgent batch. It's only one product, for multiple orders, so he went to the location, took out the amount needed and then used the tool to quickly be able to prepare them for shipping.

This bypassed the new methods to check if the location actually had stock to take, which I had just enabled for 1 account.

Luckily I caught the miss-hap as I was monitoring that product first-hand and noticed the batch of orders was collected but the stock amount didn't update.

It was 5min before I was leaving work, so I investigated and then ran to the person in question to ask what he did; which was "I used that tool"

I facepalmed myself internally while blaming myself, as he couldn't know that it wasn't ready to use for that purpose.

The tools to fix this up are there already.. so I used that to fix some missing stock-takes manually.. Though I'll need to close that little tool for these kind of orders for sure, asap, probably when I get home, at least until I bring over its new logic to it.

Happy Tuesday? (:

i recently realised that youtube is the single most addictive app for me.

- it has reels that doesn't impact your usual video. reels is already a very addictive feature, but having this ability to watch many 1 min videos without losing my current video's timestamp, the search feed, the history and the home feed, it makes a great way to spend 1 hour on a 10 mins video

- it's AI is world class and recommends videos/channels that are full of content that i would watch

- it has a butt load of content.

- vanced/ ad blockers makes it possible to watch videos without ads, so makes the whole experience more grappling.

i spent 3-4 hours on it each day and another 2-3 hours during work. when it's not open as a tab on laptop, its open in my mobile.

youtube feels like a very nasty, evil product as i realise all this.

do you people feel the same about youtube? any detox tips?

I'm going to confess: I am the type of developer that creates the ExcruciatinglyLongAndSpecificClassNameObject with the UtterlyDetailedExplanationMethod. It's just a thing I keep doing, despite voiced frustrations from people I've worked with. It just feels right in the mindset of self-documenting code

And while I acknowledge this isn't a flawless process, I see no other way around without losing information. I've tried alternatives, but everything feels like trading one issue for another:

- Abbreviations work as long as they are well known (XML, HTML, ...). As soon as you add your own (even if they make sense in the business context) you can bet your ass someone is going to have no idea what you're talking about. Even remembering your own shit is difficult after X months.

- Removing redundant naming seems fine until it isn't redundant anymore (like when a feature with similar traits gets added). and you can bet your ass no-one is going to refactor the existing part to specify how it differs from the newly added stuff.

- Moving details to namespaces is IMO just moving the problem and pretending it doesn't exist. Also have had folks that just auto-include namespaces in VS without looking if they need the class from namespaceA or namespaceB and then proceed to complain why it doesn't compile.

So, since I am out of ideas, I'd like to ask you folks: Is it possible to reduce class/method name lengths without losing information? Or is self-documenting code just an ideal I'm trying too hard to achieve? Or are long names not a problem at all? I'm looking forward to your answers.

Was wondering what kind of workflow you use.
My team is currently a big unorganized chaos...
Our manager wants us to take the form of:
Feature idea -> Design -> Build -> Test -> Train (explain to users how to use it) -> Deploy

The `Train` step is something rather odd to me, as that would mean teaching every single employee how to use the product we're making.

Wouldn't it just be better to skip the `train` section (and maybe use some kind of wiki?) and try to make everything as clearly labeled and obvious as possible?

A top food chain client wants a feature Fx
and has a deadline on Friday.
We are still working on it and already estimated hours and set deployment on Monday.
(No deployments on Friday)
And the business/sales guy comes up with new deadline to submit it at Friday morning.
And was only discussing with one of my team member already working on it. And i knew there is more hours required for testing and need to deployment pre deployment phase (staging of dev)
I was over hearing the conversation between them and I got pissed off and jumped in and said Not Possible at all.

He tries to argues about giving something to him. I said we can give it to you but will not garauntee anything. Now project manager jumps in. PM and my team already know that we will be delivering on Monday.

He arguing that if the Fx is not ready then I will call client developer to office to test it directly on my team members laptop.
I said, No way. We are not ready yet and havent finished yet. Major work will be on Thursday and on Friday we will be testing till end of the day.

PM explains him blah blah stuff.
He calms down and says no worries we will check the status on Friday afternoon amd roll out something to Client.
PM, developer and I looked each other and I said, sure will deploy but will not garauntee anything. He goes back to his desk.

Seriously.
WE ALREADY ESTIMATED F* MAN HOURS AND WILL BE READY ON MONDAY MEANS MONDAY DONT F* BUILD MORE PRESSURE ON US. F* SALES

I prefer it doing 2 tasks parallely during the initial phase of requirement gathering and design phase.(makes more sense if you are working extremely new system and framework)
1. Keep collecting requirements from clients and understand them.
2. Collect different designing aspects for the project and parallely, build a POC for 2 purpose: to get hands into the new Framework and also as a demo to clients. Working on POC helps in 3 ways: Improving understanding of requirement, improving framework knowledge, and playing around with code whenever bored of designing and reading tons of existing designs..
3. Once primary requirements are clear and fixed, analyse all different designs, if possible I setup meetings with senior devs, principal engineers (they help a lot when it comes to reviews on scalability and reliability of a design)
4. The above design is mostly architectural level. Once design is fixed, then I start taking each component and prepare a detailed implementation design. (Notice that whenever I am bored of designing, I spend sometime in building POC)
5. In detail design, I focus on modularity and flexibility. Anything defined should have getters and setters for example. This will help you reuse your code. Keep the interface between components in your design as generic as possible, so that in case your MySQL is change to Postgre or NoSQL, your design should be able to adapt new features..
6. Instead of building entire project, define feature targets and deliver small features.. this will help you to be in line with the requirements with minimum deviation.

Never say you can't do feature A, offer a different(better, cheaper, faster, possible) solution when saying NO to your boss

I work at company that uses Drupal for everything. And i mean EVERYTHING. Our dumb CTO once even wanted us to join tender for flight data collection system... of course it would run on fucking drupal...

Yeah i can see its advantages but it has learning curve the shape of the snail shell and if you want it to do something new you either find module for it or drupal will start crying, shits itself and tell you to go fuck yourself.. also it is full of surprises to make your day as miserable as possible, like you send variable as $content['varname'] to user template and it returns as $user_profile['varname']['value']... and yes user template has $content array for content but why use it for storing content that i want to render.. it is used for other content to render... because in drupal content != content...

I started using laravel for my freelance projects and it took my less than 2 week to get up to speed and start working and is incredible fast to work in... You know.. its fun when you want to just add feature you just code that feature into your app.. and not spend 2 fucking years crawling through retarded preprocess functions...

Whenever i try to suggest we use other frameworks.. "Muh drupal has MODULES".. yeah because drupal is the only thing in universe that has modules.. When client has only need for simple site with simple template why use wordpress and have it done in 2 days when you can use drupal have 10 000 unnecessary DB queries that drupal does on every page load to load page title and make that site in a week.. or why use laravel for e-shop with specific functionality requested by client that would take 2 weeks to add in laravel when you can spend 2 months modifing uber-cart or drupal commerce modules only to hit some Drupal core surprise that wont allow for that feature to be implemented...

So one of our sub teams had issues with me splitting a single function in two to help implement a feature that should be in their component in the first place.

All I did was suggest it as a possible solution and got a nasty email in response with my boss left off of the recipients list but my bosses boss listed instead.

Apparently we needed a meeting to suggest the idea of suggesting a new idea and three to four weeks to decide if we should implement it.

This sub team constantly complains that we don't approach them but at the same time makes themselves the most unapproachable group of people on the project.

I just started a new job last week. Old-school sysadmin role for a pretty old-school company, but the pay is nice and the kids've gotta eat.

They gave me a windows laptop. I haven't used windows for work or as a daily driver since 2016, and now, a week into trying to make this machine work for me, I have the following observations to report.

WSL is nice. It's nice to have it installed(though actually installing it was an adventure unto itself), and to set alacritty to open my default user prompt straight into that is very nice. As terminal emulators are by far my most used piece of software, that's nice to have.

Command-line software management through powershell, winget, and chocolatey are also very nice.

I like the accessibility offered by autohotkey, though there is something of a learning curve on it. Once I get better with it, I suspect that what follows will be largely mitigated.

The Bad:
In general, Windows is janky. It feels like it's all kinda taped together without any particular cohesion in mind. As a desktop, it feels decidedly amateur, compared to the feature-mountain polish of MacOS, and especially compared to the flexibility and infinite possibilities of Linux.

Lots of screen real estate is wasted, with window decorations, and fonts that look terrible at smaller sizes, because the antialiasing of fonts is just terrible. Almost all the features I depend on in other desktops: ad-hoc searches and launches(alfred, rofi) are-- again --janky. They work, but they typically require more typing than alfred or rofi. I admit I haven't spent weeks on this problem yet, but I haven't found a workable solution yet with wox, hain, and keypirinha. Quick searches like what you get with alfred, alfred workflows, and the swiss army knife that is rofi, just aren't possible or reliable with the tools I've used so far, and most require some kind of indexing agent to fully function.

It beggars imagination that a desktop in which users are subjected to "default apps" that is purported to be acceptable for enterprise, professional use, does not have a default entry for text editor. I installed nvim-qt, and I want to use it to edit anything and everything I ever edit with text, but all too often, apps have hard-coded instructions to open text files with notepad.

I want to open certain URLs with firefox, certain ones with firefox developer edition, and others with vivaldi, and yet there is not an app available that I have seen yet in my searches that allows me to set this kind of configuration. I found one that's supposed to, but it just ignores everything I put into its config, and just opens MS Edge for everything. Jank.

Simple things take too long. Like the delay between when I laboriously hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up the login and when the actual text field appears, and the delay between that and when I want to start using the computer.

Changing some settings requires a reboot. Updating some software requires a reboot. Updating permissions on something sometimes requires a reboot. And those are all on top of the frequent requests to reboot for updates.

I would have thought Windows would have overcome most of the issues that create these problems, but it's just, as I said, amateur.

I work in the Android team in a company whose main product is a consumer facing mobile application. The backend developers around me are always looking to cut corners and do things the fastest and easiest way possible. If they think there might be a dependency to another team they go to extra lengths to avoid it just to save themselves the efforts of communicating and learning things that are beyond their scope of interest. I have to put up such a fight to ensure things are done the right way. Contracts are as optimised as possible.

I once had to fight for half an hour to ensure they processed the response before sending it over to app and left the processing to the end users mobile app. They just wanted to query their database, serialise it and send it over.

For my current project, I have proposed a solution which will not require any app side changes in the near future ever, if we make things generic enough and follow a set contract. The app architects loved this solution, but it was an entire task to convince the backend team. When they finally agreed, they keep hinting at how we should've just done things the easier way to solve just for our current use case because doing it this way is taking time.

Mind you, they are the ones who had set the deadlines anyway. And now they use the excuse of these very same deadlines to try and push out a very sub par solution.

My iOS counterpart is no less. We were given two sprints to finish this task. And he kept fighting me every step of the way to make things the easier way. I feel singled out and I feel like I'm being too pushy and uptight and if things are delayed it'll be my fault and not the because these people are lazy and incompetent.

Our manager doesn't care either. He just wants the feature out as soon as possible. He wouldn't care about the nitty gritties of the solution if it was delivered on time.

So basically a friend was tasked with doing some syadmin on a propietary system running on top of GNU/Linux (they distribute the software as a distro).

Called me about an hour ago because there was some odd stuff happening so I log into the system and start figuring out what the actual fuck is up.

Just now we discovered that for a certain critical feature you just need to trust that there will be no eavesdroppers, meaning you send system credentials in cleartext over the network, and it won't work if it's not so.

Of course, some tunnels and routing later (which by the way, is "manual" configuration which is highly discouraged by the creators of this piece of crap) we kind of managed to overcome this obvious fail.

Now then, can you please explain me again how is it that these companies grab open source, make useless layers that limit it in every way possible and still profit? I mean, for fucks sake, you should at least let people manage shit with standard, well understood tools instead of "improving system administration", "easing it for...", for whom?

I'm so happy to log into our production server and be welcomed by beastie.

Whenever you change your Instagram username it becomes unavailable completely even tho it's not taken. Not possible to get it back after changing.

Not sure if this a bug or a feature that they intended to have in their app...

I used to fucking love VSCode it visually was great, it was simple, had an integrated terminal that wasn't shit, supported many languages well (while not forcing every extension down your throat), and was straightforward to configure. I also had problems with it, mainly I felt it was way too bloated for an editor.

That good impression I had is gone now. It seems like every time I'm actually using the editor I have to fight with it. Whether that's an update that fucked up my config, or a reinstall and now I have to **convince** my fucking editor to use tabs instead of spaces automatically and I have to specify because holy shit it will not just listen after I set every possible fucking indentation setting to disable spaces or enable/prefer tabs and they keep adding shit like this that I give no shits about that make me sift through the damn settings finding the settings that turn off whatever new visual effect or quirky little automation they've implemented. I can't tell you how much I actively don't want my braces to be matched up by a color that doesn't even have anything to do with my color scheme.

Ive tried switching but holy shit intellisense is such a great feature that helps me so much so I'm not always bouncing between docs and my editor. Which ATM I'm learning go and intellisense has more fucking information on the functions than the docs do. I've seen Neovim (which is what I'm probably switching to) has language servers that are similar to intellisense so I'm intrigued to try that.

I'm just tired of constantly having to avoid all this shit I don't give a fuck about. I just want to get in, do my thing.

I won't be surprised if I'm the only one on this train 🤣

Everytime I applied long leave, my client and PM will plan for important feature, but they say start the sprint and for other new people i have to give KT, and they will take care. I know how that will screw up the system. So at the time it's nightmare​ late night at office, in office time KT, no weekends, stand-up for 1hr(every time QA will ask, what we get after this sprint). Stupid clients changing the requirements after stand-up.

Everytime code base screwed and need to refactoring. So as much as possible core functionality I'll complete and only bug fixing for newbie. I hate those days.

is it necessary to have cherry picking a part of git branching/release process?

we have 3 branches : develop, release and master.

currently every dev works on feature as follows : they make a branch out of develop, write code, raise pr against develop, get it reviewed and merge back to develop. later the release feature list is generated, and we cherry pick all the release related commits to release branch, and make a prod build out of release branch. finally, the code is moved to master and rags are generated accordingly.

so the major issue with this process is feature blocking. as of now, i have identified 4 scenarios where a feature should not be released :

1. parallel team blocker : say i created a feature x for android that is supposed to go in release 1.2.1 . i got it merged to develop and it will be cherry picked to release on relase day. but on release day it is observed that feature x was not completed by the ios dev and therefore we cannot ship it for android alone.

2. backend blocker : same as above scenario, but instead of ios, this time its the backend which hasn't beem created for the feature x

3. qa blocker : when we create a feature and merge it to develop, we keep on giving builds from develop branch adter every few days. however it could be possible that qa are not able to test it all and on release day, will declare thaf these features cannot be tested and should not be moved to release

4. pm blocker: basically a pm will add all the tickets for sprint in the jira board. but which tickets should be released are decided at the very late days of sprint. so a lot of tasks get merged to develop which are not supposed to go.

so there's the problem. cherry picking is being a major part of release process and i am not liking it. we do squash and merges, so cherry picking is relatively easy, but it still feels a lot riskier.

for 1 and 2 , we sometimes do mute releases : put code in release but comment out all the activation code blocks . but if something is not qa tested or rejected by pm, we can't do a mute release.

what do you folks suggest?

I'm slowly realizing how much goofy code I put in my branch and overlooked. This code review is going to be interesting...

Some examples:

import plots as lel
<h4 id="title">Crunchatize Me, Captain! </h4>
go.Scattergeo(name="cheese", ...)
webster = { ... }

The commit messages are even worse.

- 'horizontalize' link list
- very messily hack in <feature>
- partially refactor some of the awful code from previous
- Remove one annoying space
- make background color less annoying
- remove seemingly useless property
- minor fix
- Apparently it's possible to center a DIV. Who knew?
- Made some cool bar graphs
And then there's just a bunch of reverts.

Was an internal auditor translating department process to a technical spec for a programmer. We were going to leverage an external company's API which would replace our need to use their slow and buggy web app.

During a meeting, an audit teammate suggested something be changed with the external service we were using. I said we could bring it up with the company but we shouldn't rely on it because we were a small customer even during out busiest month (200 from us vs 10000+ from big banks).

Teammate said we should have our programming team fix it. I made it clear that it was not our side and that to build out the service on our side was beyond our scope. Teammate continued to bring it up during the meeting then went back to desk after meeting and emailed us all marked up screenshots of the feature.

I ignored this and finished writing up the specs, sending them over to the programmer building out the service.

30 minutes later I get a call from programmer's manager who was quite angry at an expanded scope that was impossible (engineers were king at this company. Best not to anger them). Turns out my teammate had emailed his own spec to the programmers full of impossible features that did not reference the API docs.

I feel bad about it now but I yelled at my teammate quite loudly. I said he was spending time on something that was not reasonable or possible and when they continued to talk about their feature I yelled even louder.

Didn't get fired but it definitely tagged me as an asshole until I left. Fair enough :)

I hate going to bed with a headache only to wake up to a hundred emails about a feature they want in for that morning that the customer "needs" but has only brought up once before as a passing comment. Yeah, it was in the works but I don't have it done... I still have another 5 things to do before it gets done. I have an hour before you need it... There is no possible way to do this right now...

Just spent 1 week following the upgrade tutorial from one framework to the next. Using their upgrade tool and following the documentation.
Finally finish the work, most things are working it just doesn't seem to work quite right. Must have missed something.
After some digging it turns out they completely removed a function that I rely heavily upon. No mention in the upgrade document, no possible work around. Every forum post about it either has no replies or it says "it's a new feature".
Well fuck you.
The whole project is now useless.
Fml 😭

Building a site in Foundation 6, and there's a form where users may need to add new possible entries to a pool of valid choices, so I've got a second form that loads in a modal below the main form.

The second form loads fine, but when I try to use AJAX to submit the form and process things without leaving the page, Foundation stops working.

jQuery(document).ready() breaks it.

Just doing jQuery('form.ajax_form').ajax() without the .ready() wrapper breaks it, too.

Going to just wall it off as a beta feature for now, but if anyone has any idea why it isn't working, I'm all ears.

Feature creep aside I do think after a few weeks of use that notifications on devrant could use a bit of work. There is a lot of interaction and it can get confusing.

Some use cases currently not supported:
- On long threads I want to know which comment of mine that got a new ++. Perhaps scrolling to it + different colour?
- Seeing the new interaction per thread rather than per timeline.
- Getting a hint on which thread people interacted with. First sentence would be useful.
- Muting threads.
- Marking individual notifications as read without opening them.
- Moving notifications out of the menu and giving them separate button to save a click (many times a day)

If something on the list is already possible I suggest it be made more obvious ;)

Apart from being full of awesome people I really like being able to sort the flow of posts. I know this isn't staffed anywhere near the big social media and it's fine the way it is. But this is my two cents even if no one asked for them.

@dfox ?

Seventeen. I worked for 17 hours to pull off a POC of a feature no one thought was possible (at that time). It wasn't clean beautiful code, but hey, it worked! It's live now and I still smile when the feature is used.

I figured it all out, where all the bad code comes from, I know it now!
I think good developers need two things, an ego that makes them wanting to be competent and perceived as such and (very important) a problem with authority!

All the bad code is written by people who wanted to be liked by their teachers. The PM and PO are their teachers now and they make everything possible for them. Technical debt and human costs are swept aside when the authorities want a stupid feature now - because they have to like you and you need to be a nice pet to whip!

When oracle employees decide to add new "feature":
How can we add feature X so it can be the user new most terrible nightmare?

When oracle employees decide to update an existed "feature":
We have discovered that the users of feature X have found a work-around to make it useful, we need to update that feature to make it the users most terrible nightmare ever, and we would like to make the upgrade/installation process break everything else installed on their machines without possible way of recovering, and if it worked by any chance we would like to make that process frustrating as fuck.

The ability to make developers improve existing libraries/frameworks wherever possible instead of creating new ones every time they encounter a 'Feature X does not exist in library Y' type of scenario.

I need some advice to avoid stressing myself out. I'm in a situation where I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place at work, and it feels like there's no one to turn to. This is a long one, because context is needed.

I've been working on a fairly big CMS based website for a few years that's turned into multiple solutions that I'm more or less responsible for. During that time I've been optimizing the code base with proper design patterns, setting up continuous delivery, updating packaging etc. because I care that the next developer can quickly grasp what's going on, should they take over the project in the future. During that time I've been accused of over-engineering, which to an extent is true. It's something I've gotten a lot better at over the years, but I'm only human and error prone, so sometimes that's just how it is.

Anyways, after a few years of working on the project I get a new colleague that's going to help me on my CMS projects. It doesn't take long for me to realize that their code style is a mess. Inconsistent line breaks and naming conventions, really god awful anti-pattern code. There's no attempt to mimic the code style I've been using throughout the project, it's just complete chaos. The code "works", although it's not something I'd call production code. But they're new and learning, so I just sort of deal with it and remain patient, pointing out where they could optimize their code, teaching them basic object oriented design patterns like... just using freaking objects once in a while.

Fast forward a few years until now. They've learned nothing. Every time I read their code it's the same mess it's always been.

Concrete example: a part of the project uses Vue to render some common components in the frontend. Looking through the code, there is currently *no* attempt to include any air between functions, or any part of the code for that matter. Everything gets transpiled and minified so there's absolutely NO REASON to "compress" the code like this. Furthermore, they have often directly manipulated the DOM from the JavaScript code rather than rendering the component based on the model state. Completely rendering the use of Vue pointless.

And this is just the frontend part of the code. The backend is often orders of magnitude worse. They will - COMPLETELY RANDOMLY - sometimes leave in 5-10 lines of whitespace for no discernable reason. It frustrates me to no end. I keep asking them to verify their staged changes before every commit, but nothing changes. They also blatantly copy/paste bits of my code to other components without thinking about what they do. So I'll have this random bit of backend code that injects 3-5 dependencies there's simply no reason for and aren't being used. When I ask why they put them there I simply get a “I don't know, I just did it like you did it”.

I simply cannot trust this person to write production code, and the more I let them take over things, the more the technical debt we accumulate. I have talked to my boss about this, and things have improved, but nowhere near where I need it to be.

On the other side of this are my project manager and my boss. They, of course, both want me to implement solutions with low estimates, and as fast and simply as possible. Which would be fine if I wasn't the only person fighting against this technical debt on my team. Add in the fact that specs are oftentimes VERY implicit, so I'm stuck guessing what we actually need and having to constantly ask if this or that feature should exist.

And then, out of nowhere, I get assigned a another project after some colleague quits, during a time I’m already overbooked. The project is very complex and I'm expected to give estimates on tasks that would take me several hours just to research.

I'm super stressed and have no one I can turn to for help, hence this post. I haven't put the people in this post in the best light, but they're honestly good people that I genuinely like. I just want to write good code, but it's like I have to fight for my right to do it.

#Suphle Rant 3: Road to PHP8, Flow travails

Some primer: Flows is a feature that causes the framework to bypass handling the request now but read it from cache. This cache entry is meant to be populated without warming, based on the preceding request. It's sort of like prefetching but done on the back end

While building Suphle, I made some notes on some chapters about caveats and gotchas I may forget while documenting. One such note was that when users make the Flow request, the framework will attempt to determine who user is, using authentication mechanism defined on the first module (of the modular monolith)

Now, I got to this point during documentation and started wondering whether it's impossible for the originating request to have used a different authentication mechanism, which would result in an empty entry for returning user. I *think* it's possible cuz I've got something else called "route mirroring", where web based routes can be converted to API routes. They'll then return JSON, get served under defined API path, use JWT, all automatically. But I just couldn't connect the dots for the life of me, regarding how any of this could impact authentication on the Flow request

While trying to figure out how to write the test for this or whether it was even necessary (since I had no use case), it struck me that since Flow requests are not triggered by an actual user, any code attempting to read authenticated user will see nothing!

I HATE it when I realize there's ambiguity or an oversight, after the amount of attention and suffering devoted. This, along with a chain of personal troubles set off despondency for a couple of days. No appetite for food or talk. Grudgingly refactored in this update over some days. Wrote some tests, not all passed. More pain. May have to convert them to unit tests

For clarity, my expectation is, I built this. Nothing should be impossible for me

Surprisingly, I caught a somewhat lucky break –an ex colleague referred me to the 1st gig I'm getting in 1+ year. It's about writing a plugin for some obscure forum software. I'm not too excited cuz it's poorly documented and I'll have to do a lot of groping, they use arrays instead of objects etc. There's no guarantee I'll find how to implement all client's requirements

While brooding last night, surfing the PHP subreddit, stumbled on a post about using Rector to downgrade a codebase. I've always been interested in the reverse but didn't have any incentive to fret over it. Randomly googled and saw a post promising a codebase can be upgraded with 3 commands in 5 minutes to PHP 8. Piqued my interest around 12:something AM. Stayed up all night upgrading it, replacing PHPSTAN with Psalm, initializing the guy's project, merging Flow auth with master etc. I think it may have taken 5 minutes without the challenge of getting local dev environment to PHP 8

My mood is much lighter than it was, although the battle is not won yet –image tests are failing. For some weird reason, PHP8 can't read generated test images. Hope I can ride on that newfound lease on life to study the forum and get the features working

I have some other rant but this is already a lot to digest in one sitting. See you in rant #4

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

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

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

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

Fundamentals first, practicality second.

Just after feature launch, major bug on production and now I am getting yelled at by my lead as the issue happens to be with the PR i was responsible for reviewing yesterday. Somehow a logic error got past my review. But considering how large the project is it wasn't possible for me to test out every possible scenario myself. They should have had QA handle that. Also, that was my first code review. I can't understand why my boss has such unrealistic expectations. Bugs are expected at this stage. I feel like he just puts too much pressure on me for no other ther reason other than to just trigger my imposter syndrome. That way, I feel like a bad developer even though I am working my ass off. And he gets to avoid giving me a raise. Cant believe I rejected multiple offers to stay at this company. I don't even know why am I still working for this company anymore.

Any advice on how to deal with gatekeeping developers? How to deal with red tape?

I work with people that are resistant to code and process change. Continuous pedantic pushback on nearly anything; one raised a fuss over metrics not being satisfactory at a 5% threshold for alerting stating that 4.99% metrics variance wouldn't trigger an alert.

It's genuinely as though my coworkers are all scared of code based on the way they behave. They don't seem to code very often either.

I'm someone that codes quickly but I have to constantly write proposals for quite literally any change to the codebase. Even IF there were issues we could always rollback (and even then we have metrics, alerts, canary rollouts, feature flags, etc etc). As a quick aside, my pace isn't related to the pushback nor experience/skill level. Just affects my morale and mental heth to be blocked.

I can communicate effectively and I try to be as clear as possible in my proposals but this is absolutely driving me up the wall and killing my motivation.

This is a faang-level company and I would've expected better.

Any advice on how to best navigate this? Is this the norm???

Okay Android dev intern here.
This has been an awfully weird experience for me as an Android dev and this is not the first time. I am seeing a pattern here and i don't know if its just bad luck or its the reality

I have always learned Android by searching on the web , on stack overflow, medium articles, youtube , books , etc.

Sometimes i had a vision to create some unique nd innovative app, nd sometimes i just wanted to learn a particular tech, framework, library, or a feature.

The former case sometimes required the knowledge of unexplored areas, so in order to make the possible product, the original idea would reduce to a smaller, more possible one if i thought it isn't possible or "need more resources on that" after several hours of searching.

But as an intern i found this approach not working out. Here the company gave me an app idea by a designer who thinks its possible, the senior Android dev also thinks its possible and i also believed it to be possible.

The thing is we all know its possible but the person working on it, i.e me, doesn't know have all the knowledge for it.

Fine . I will apply my usual time taking approach of searching and debugging to tackle my issues when they arrive.

But at one stage i too would get exhausted. To me , the code in my front is the correct code for this approach and i have checked all the possible cases, debugged it and yet can't find the issue.

Now the only thing i want is for my senior to look into it, tell me if its an architecture issue or is there any possible case that i missed.

But that's not what company wants. The senior says that he's involved in a lot of projects and my problem is too simple to be solved by solely myself. Now i am sitting here, with my code, exhausted and no longer willing to work here . (And that's maybe why it's my 4th internship and not first)

Am i the asshole fresher?is this always going to be the case? Am i the one running away from the problem and deserve all the lashing that i am getting for not completing the product and getting stuck?

Three possible strategies for adding a new feature. Not sure which is the best, so I'm going to go with the one that's least invasive to the existing structure of the database.

Being a webdev has ruined my ability to use any website/online service. Does this happen to anyone else? I invariably end up sending the developer a stack of feature requests and suggestions as I'm sat there thinking "I could do this better!"

Ofc in truth I may be able to do that one part better (usually bits around making the experience as simple and fluid as possible for users), but I wouldn't be able to do other parts half as well. I wonder if I built services like that I would have some annoying git emailing me with all the things they think I've missed... ;-)

Was watching OITNB at home when boss called sounded urgent about SSL not working on one of our subdomains. We use a paid cloud app for some of our reports which. So the subdomain is a CNAME to the providers app subdomain. Recently there was an upgrade at our hosting but it shouldn't be related.

Boss: Hey, there is an error prompt when I visit our reporting site with https
Me: That's cos we never installed any SSL cert for that subdomain.
Boss: Well it worked before and you will need to get it fixed.
Me: Wait.. It worked before? How is that possible? We've never set it up and the subdomain is a CNAME pointing to another site which we don't own. The cert will have to load from their server and we have not done any setup with them.
Boss: I'm very sure it worked before the hosting upgrades. All along our customers has been accessing with https.
Me: Okay.... That's something new because and I am pretty SURE the last I checked, the app provider doesn't allow that yet.
* meanwhile I when to search the app provider docs and it says not able to support multiple SSL yet for CNAME
Me: Look, it says so here in the docs.
Boss: Ok, can you try to fix it as its important for the users to not see that error. It has been working all along.
Me: Hmmmm... I'll get back to you.

How do I fix something that didn't exist / broken?? How did it work before??

I know it can be possible to install the cert on the cloud provider end but we haven't done this before. And their support docs says feature not available yet.

Was it magic?? Am I missing something?? Anyway, I've sent an email to the provider's support team and telling them "it worked before"

So how do you find motivation to finish a work project which is supposed to "go long"?

So, umm, this is weird, but i have been in this situation a few times and i am not sure if i deal with them correctly.

- the company proposes a brand new feature : a feature which never existed in the product before.
- they have high level directions (both business logics and technical) on how its supposed to be build
-they set vague but comfortable timelines (20-30days) to complete it
- they align me as the main dev for frontend, some x guy for backend , some y guy for parallel frontend (ios/web) and kinda forget about us.
- the business requirements are evolved/cleared as we go on making the product, the backend keeps on providing evolving apis which get stable over time.
- the business ppl shows that yeah there is no pressure and we won't mind extending this for release as other systems will be "obviously" taking time.
- our (the folks on new feature) feature is sidelined .nd we are rarely talked about until we reach those deadlines and at that time we are questioned.

I... am not a powerful performer in these situations. adding a new feature required solving some major problems again and again , while solving smaller problems too, so as the product finally takes shape . for eg:
1. i will start fast by adding all the possible screens, their abstract code, their navigation logic, their xmls etc
2. then based on designs, i will try creating designs a bit
3. then once the apis arrive, i start adding them and modify the logic to handle those.
4. meanwhile many smaller problems come up , like when sending an image from one screen to the previous screen, the thumbnail don't show up, so i spend 5+ hours ensuring that it works precisely . or how i could make 3 api calls in async and make the upload flow better.

5. this goes on for days, until and i and other people start to realise that my project is not upto the point of completion

i keep getting distracted from the original goal of making a working poc first and then fixing the nuances

Last saturday, the CEO forced us to update one of the services that we are dependent out without any tests... The people responsible for it very much advised against it but they still did it.

Now, nearly a week later. The literal core feature is still broken with no fix in sight and rolling back is not possible apparently.

When you need that one feature from a framework, that it just not have. So you have to use a custom version till your PR has been accepted.
I see a possible problematic future...

I've been so focused on making the E-shop I'm working on as customisable as possible that I've accidentally created a way to destroy it. It's not a bug, it's a surprise feature

If a feature no one uses has a bug in it, is it possible for that bug to be flagged as critical?

Trying to configure a smartphone which was already optimized for elderly users, with a more simplistic launcher, larger font size etc.

But the underlying Android 7 and its apps still keep showing up with their inconsistent UI and nagging messages and suggestions.

Is it even possible to configure any Android device to make it really simplistic and distraction free like, say, a classic NOKIA before the age of smartphones?

Culprit no. 1 Google and Android system. Suggestions about features keep recurring, even after stating that we are not interested in the feature.

Culprit no. 2 WhatsApp, unfortunately still the most popular messaging app in Germany, so this crappy bullshit software by Mark Fuckerberg's company has to be installed. Even to me as a tech savy developer, WhatsApp has a confusing user interface that tries to promote features like status (their versions of stories) without any option to hide / turn off.

How shall an 80 year old senior learn to use the app when they previously only used SMS and voice calls? I don't know.

I'd like to hear opinions from experienced devs/software architects... Referencing my two previous rants, the imposter's has been strong today. And I really don't know how to feel about the possible solution I've come up with... Adding the new feature as a microservice for an otherwise monolithic application 🙄 is that a sane idea?

The thing is I need to have a subscription type event-driven mechanism and since we're listening to service bus messages from another cloud provider, I apparently can't just have a serverless function to do the job, so unless there's a better option, I need a microservice with the subscription that can then invoke a serverless function to actually do what needs to be done. That's my idea, but I'm far from sure this is the best way...

We got this feature on our app where if you change the status of an action item, it moves down/up to join its brethren of the same status at the bottom of its respective grouping. This is also true for creation.

Problem is: Testing.

I embarked upon this fuckin ridonkulousness today where I had to test all possible scenarios. Empty list, list with only A status, list with only B, list with A and B, list with A and C, etc etc

9 fucking hours later and a lot of anger, I am finally done. I powered back probably 10 club sodas, 6 teas, and had chillstep rollin all day.

If y'all ever feel like giving up because shit's hard, keep pushin. You'll get it eventually ;)