Our system never had sessions that expired. A recent hack at the client caused us to revisit the security measures we had in place.

The person who was on the project since it's start 8 years ago was tasked with fixing this issue. It has a simple solution: add session expiration, and extend the session to an hour from now with each request.

This week I found out how he did it🤦🏻‍♂️. He added session expirations, but extended the session by an hour with each request. By making 10 requests in quick succession, your session is extended by 10 hours.

~2 years ago:

Me: Managed to figure out how to port that library. Just need designs and then we can build feature X. I've tested it in ugly developer-y screens. It works fully

Boss: Thats awesome, saw the video, looks great. This is a really important feature, thanks for looking into this

~1.5 years ago:

Me: Ok i've started working on the designs, just FYI we don't have designs for feature X

Boss: Ok, must have slipped, noted

~1 year ago:

Me: I've seen more posts about users wanting apps with features X in it. Still don't have designs, we working on that?

Boss: I'll check with design

~3 Months ago:

Boss: Ok were going to have to get serious about pulling features out and reducing MVP so we can get this out there. I think feature A, D, Y and X have to be dropped for v1. Theres too much left to do on them

Me: sure

~1 week ago:

Boss: We need to start getting ready for xxxxx. Can you do me a favour and start writing up some developer docs etc, kind of like this one we did for this other project

This morning opening my emails from last night:

Boss: I've reviewed the doc, looks good, only minor things need tweaking. Let me ask you something though, you said feature X was pulled out and its "pending design work". Its not only pending design work is it? Is it that far along?

==========
What I actually replied:

Yes ... i've sent you videos of it functional in the past, and discussed this ... more than once. Just design ... and some testing of the new designs obviously

==========
What that meant:

Yes. May god have mercy on your soul if you reply anything even remotely close to "oh I had no idea, lets revisit adding this to v1". I will not be held accountable for my actions

Many years ago, when I moved from a semi-experienced developer to an absolute beginner project manager at another company, my very first project was an absolute clusterfuck.

The customer basically wanted to scrape signups to their EventBrite events into their CRM system. The fuckery began before the project even started, when I was told my management that we HAD to use BizTalk. It didn't matter that we had zero experience with BizTalk, or that using BizTalk for this particular project was like using a stealth bomber to go down to the shops for a bottle of tequila (that's one for fans of Last Man on Earth). It's designed to be used by an experienced team of developers, not a small inexperienced 1-person dev team I had. The reason was for bullshit political reasons which I wasn't really made clear on (I suspect that our sales team sold it to them for a bazillion pounds, and they weren't using it for anything, so we had to justify us selling it to them by doing SOMETHING with it). And because this was literally my first project, I was young and not confident at all, and I wanted to be the guy who just got shit done, I didn't argue.

Inevitably, the project was a turd. It went waaay over budget and time, and didn't work very well. I remember one morning on my way to work seriously considering ploughing my car into a ditch, so that I had a good excuse not to go into work and face that bullshit project.

The good thing is that I learned a lot from that. I decided that kind of fuckery was never going to happen again.

A few months later I had an initial meeting with a potential customer (who I was told would be a great customer to have for bullshit political reasons) - I forget the details but they essentially wanted to build a platform for academic researchers to store data, process it using data processing plugins which they could buy, and commersialise it somehow. There were so many reasons why this was a terrible idea, but when they said that they were dead set on using SharePoint (SharePoint!!!) as the base of the platform, I remembered my first project and what happened.

I politely explained my technical and business concerns over the idea, and reasons why SharePoint was not a good fit (with diagrams and everything), suggested a completely different technology stack, and scheduled another meeting so they could absorb what I had said and revisit. I went to my sales and head of development and basically told them to run. Run fast, and run far, because it won't work, these guys are having some kind of fever dream, it's a clusterfuck in the making, and for some reason they won't consider not using SP.

I never heard from them again, so I assume we dropped them as a potential client. It felt amazing. I think that was the single best thing I did for that company.

Moral of the story: when technology decisions are made which you know are wrong, don't be afraid to stand up and explain why.

I just want to express that...

I
LOVE
PROPERLY
DOCUMENTED
KNOWLEDGE

Because I had worked on a project 1 year ago, and with the other projects I had done in the mean time, picking this back up would be challenging. And guess what! I still have my comprehensive manual I wrote for it in detail! Beautiful! Everything neatly written, everything explained, every field, every troubelshooting issue!

I managed to solve every setup issue in seconds! Aah! Aah! Scream for joy. lol

Worst architecture: the stack compiler I wrote. I basically just made my own shitty webpack.

The idea was simple: Babel to minified JS, Scss to minified CSS, and HTML to minified HTML. Made in Node JS, of course. (perhaps that’s where I went wrong!)

The thing works... and I use it... but boy is it bad. It even broke on my current project (which is for a client so...) and I’m having to work around my own god damn code.

I really need to revisit it and redo it.

I was asked to revisit some code yesterday - code that I had written at a much better time in my life. I was productive, I was on top of my project and we were delivering value to the organization.

I'm at a point now where I haven't written any code for months. I've been documenting and designing and arguing with teammates over inane shit. It's been an absolute slog, and I've started looking at what it would take for me to actually quit since I've got a kid on the way, and I've been bringing the stress and anxiety home from work. I've got so much money in options and salary, it's basically impossible for me to leave for better work.

I'd consider this the lowest point in my professional career. Four years of college - where I beat alcoholism and depression (mostly) only to end up at a place that I fucking hate, but cannot leave. It's affecting my family. I've drank more in the past 6 months than I have in my entire life.

And now I have to start repurposing old code to work on a new project that is fucked up 5 ways from Sunday. I honestly don't know how much further I can stretch my professional ethics to keep this shitload of cash flowing into my savings.

!rant

Normally when I revisit an old project feel like tearing out my awful old code and rewriting it all - not today; today I feel like I am backsliding. I sidelined my personal project months ago when my real work got busy.

I have spent the evening discovering all the cool shit the project does and wondering if I'll ever get my head around it all again.

Looking forward to many nights tinkering and getting my memory back.

It's really sick how beginners start to code in Javascript and CSS, and their complex frameworks, without even understanding atleast the paradigm first. Googling your way up can be fine for smart ones, but as least time optimal this learning method sounds, it's as dangerous and non-productive too.
Also once project gets to a certain level, it's practically impossible to revisit and refactor old codes in front-end languages which kills the maintainability. Views?

Today I created some reusable clean decent code to replace the random chaos in a huge project and then realised I had 3 options:

1. Sort out every instance to use the new code. This is very high risk because the project is both a shit show and has no tests. I don't have time to manual test or write unit tests on so much stuff.

2. Move over only some so that I can manually test. Still no time to unit test (management is fucked on their priorities). This will fuck the project even more since i will never get time to revisit this and adds yet more inconsistency and chaos to a project on its last legs and has this problem in droves.

3. Leave the project fucked

\_(^^)_/

I'm veering towards option 3 these days.

Started online college. I don’t have a problem with the class or anything but right now I’m just trying to figure out times I can actually fucking program. I want to finish my current project so I won’t feel like I’m shit and can’t do anything even though I know I can.

On the brighter side of college. I have to eventually take a C++ class and a class on algorithms in my degree and I’m very excited because I’m not good with algorithms yet and it’s a perfect way to help me learn. And I’ve intended to revisit C++ and make it my bitch so that works out too. I just wish instead of Two Java classes I could take two C++ classes and one Java class. But whatever I know I won’t use Java after I get the degree for anything professional so I’m fine with it.

Woke up yesterday morning from a dream where I was explaining what needed to be done to upgrade a Drupal 6 site. It hasn't been supported officially for years and I was explaining how there isn't a decent port of the main module we use Audio. And even the guy I was explaining this too seemed somewhat exasperated. So yeah, this is reality.

I could probably write a real upgrade path for the Drupal module and take all of our content into a new version of Drupal. But it would involve a fair amount of learning and outdated syntax and then learning Drupal 8. This would be all volunteer and take away from my time working on my other open source radio automation project.

All the while I've been learning Ruby on Rails for a class and I could just upgrade the app right out of Drupal, but this would require me to support the site into perpetuity. Which I already more or less do.

Drupal at this point is like an ex- girlfriend who I've grown away from, we did cool things but always got into fights about stupid things. Now I have to revisit my past mistakes and decide what to clean up and what to take into the future. I'm a better programmer now but I'm still not sure if it is worth my time to rekindle my romance with Drupal or it would just distract me from my current pursuits. Anyone who has been through the transition of a Drupal site from one major version to the next should feel my pain. At least it's not Word Press.