And on Fridays we all say together...

✨
✨ DON'T ✨
✨
✨ PUSH ✨
✨ ✨
✨ TO ✨
✨
✨ PRODUCTION ✨
✨
✨

"Don't worry about testing too much, push it to production asap"

To the new devs:
Never push production on friday

"Sir, I fixed the recent bug"

"Great, what did you do?"

"I commented out the code that was causing it :)"

"Brilliant! You didn't forget to push the code to production, did you?"

"No Sir, I pushed it immediately"

"Marvelous! I'll arrange a promotion for you next month"

So I'm working on a live map of my school's bus system, and I needed some filler images to test out how the stops were being drawn on each route...and honestly wish I could push this version to production

The Perfect Storm:

My worst coding mistake? Yeah, let me tell you about that. I pushed a simple JavaScript/HTML change without knowing that the stupid header was shared with another "not so important" section of the site called "My Account" where people go to pay for their services. I call it the perfect storm because I left early that Friday for a weekend cruise and right before leaving I pushed the change, sent the request to push for production and left. When they noticed that clients were complaining about not being able to pay they started reversing most changes of all teams trying to fix it but they never touched mine because they knew I wasn't working on the backend. My whole team worked over the weekend trying to find the issue while I was having fun in the cruise. They ended up reversing all changes by Sunday night and it took us about 4 more days to figure out that my simple JavaScript/HTML change broke the site and prevented 30 million customers from making payments that weekend plus it broke the whole 2nd release of the month.... yeah, nothing major.

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

Tested on local work perfectly,
Push to production
Restart service
CPU went up to 100%, process alive but all services down.
Panic.
Try to think of what would be the cause.
With no hope, i restarted the service again.
Everything works as expected.
I still dont know what happened. :/

When we push directly to production

Doot doot.

My day: Eight lines of refactoring around a 10-character fix for a minor production issue. Some tests. Lots of bloody phone calls and conference calls filled with me laughing and getting talked over. Why? Read on.

My boss's day: Trying very very hard to pin random shit on me (and failing because I'm awesome and fuck him). Six hours of drama and freaking out and chewing and yelling that the whole system is broken because of that minor issue. No reading, lots of misunderstanding, lots of panic. Three-way called me specifically to bitch out another coworker in front of me. (Coworker wasn't really in the wrong.) Called a contractor to his house for testing. Finally learned that everything works perfectly in QA (duh, I fixed it hours ago). Desperately waited for me to push to prod. Didn't care enough to do production tests afterwards.

My day afterwards: hey, this Cloudinary transform feature sounds fun! Oh look, I'm done already. Boo. Ask boss for update. Tests still aren't finished. Okay, whatever. Time for bed.

what a joke.

Oh, I talked to the accountant after all of this bullshit happened. Apparently everyone that has quit in the last six years has done so specifically because of the boss. Every. single. person.

I told him it was going to happen again.

I also told him the boss is a druggie with a taste for psychedelics. (It came up in conversation. Absolutely true, too.) It's hilarious because the company lawyer is the accountant's brother.

So stupid.

!rant
!!git

Who here uses `master` for development?

My boss (api guy) tried to convince me that was normal practice. I gently told him that it sounded crazy and very very bad.

Here's the dev path I'm enforcing on my repos:

(feature branches) -> dev -> qa* -> master -> production*

*: the build server auto-pulls from these branches, and pushes any passing builds to staging/production.

Everyone works on their own feature branches, and when they're happy with their work, they merge it into `dev`. `dev`, therefore, is for feature integration testing. After everything is working well on `dev`, it gets merged into `qa` for the testers to fawn over and beat with sticks. Anything that passes QA gets merged into `master`, where it sits until we're ready to release it. When that time comes (it's usually right away, but not always), `master` gets merged into `production`.

This way, `master` is always stable and contains the newest code, so it's perfect for forking/etc. Is this standard practice, or should I be doing something different?

Also, api guy encourages something he calls "running a racetrack" -- each dev has their own branch (their initials) and they push to that throughout the day. everyone else pulls from it regularly and pushes to their own branch. When anyone's happy with their code, they push from their (updated) branch to `qa` (I insisted on `dev` instead.)

Supposedly this drastically reduces the number of merge conflicts when pushing to an upstream branch due to having a more recent ancestor node?

I don't quite follow that, but it seems to me that merging/pushing throughout the day would just make them happen sooner? idk.

What are your thoughts?

Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"

Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"

Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"

Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."

Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."

Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."

Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"

Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."

Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."

Cprn: - "Please do?"

Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"

Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."

Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."

Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."

Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."

Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."

Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"

Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."

Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."

Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."

Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."

Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"

Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."

I have decided to never write commits.

I will never write documentation.

I will write my code in the most confusing way possible.

I will include useless code.

I will always git commit with the message "asdfghjkl" or "HAHA LOLZ I DONT NOW WAT I WOROTEEE"

I will work at Apple.

I am xenophobic.

I will leave the company right before we push to production.

I will make so many friends.

Coworker: "Hey I have the final logo for your software"

Me: "Awesome, only a few bugfixes after my holiday and we are good to go on production. 2 more hours to go until I am free for a week."

Coworker: "After your holiday? Boss said it goes on production tomorrow!"

Me: "You are kidding me, aren't you? There is no way I can do all the work today and push to production!"

Coworker: "Boss promised the client..."

How about boss can go an f himself? He knows I have some other project to finish today and that I am leaving. This is in our team cal for over a month now! Ahhh. My coworker now has to deal with it-.-

You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.

I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.

I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.

Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.

I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.

But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.

He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.

Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.

The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.

Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.

I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.

Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it.

**at daily standup

Dev: and along with a push to production that is what I’ll be doing today

Manager: Good good, alright, nice….. ok who else hasn’t gone yet? Dev how about you go next

Dev: …I literally just went

Manager: What? Well what did you say then? Hey when is that push to prod happening? I feel like there should be one happening sometime soon.

Dev: …

So, the job I refer to as Hell finally deleted my work email account yesterday.

I've been getting (and ignoring) emails on that account for years now. Probably still have production access and push rights, too. 🙄

Right-Click > Push to Production...

Seen another dev push changes to a production server without even committing it to git.

Why does the idea of having to develop social skills somehow seem to scare the fuck out of a large portion of you?

Is being a likeable human being such a weird concept? What do you expect? To people just validate your entire existence based on how good you can sit in front of a set of monitors and push code out? Thousands of monkeys can do that shit. Thousands of systems will eventually do such things.

for whatever reason the "I am a fucking asshole that can code" trope seems to be a "real thing" amongst developers. A mfker can know waaaaaaay less than you, have the same credentials (degrees etc) and will get the job because you were too busy building an online persona governing how better you are than everyone else. How "quirky" and Sheldon Cooper like you are. You think that makes you likeable? "i don't need to be likeable" <---- yes the fuck you are, because this shit is something in which people can be trained upon.

A team, regardless of how much you agree with this, can choose a person solely based on how well he/she/whatever clicks with them. You might be the end all be all of development, but if they don't like you or feel you will not be someone worthwile to be around, will not chose you. They will go with the charismatic newbie that can learn the same shit you so dear hold on to, because they are likeable.

Sticking to a merit based "I am the best there is" asshole mentality is a thing of the fucking past, boomer mentality. For which newer generations are parting ways with, with still profitable results. workable results. Production ready results.

Yet you chose to stick to a "I might be a quirky annoying fuck, but I am the best" mentality?

This is why you were bullied. This is why you can't get any dick, this is why you can't get any pussy, this is why you sit your ass in your little dark room trying to convince yourself that being lonely is a choice, not a situation in which you put your ass in. This is why I also dislike developers online.

Most of you might be the nicest mfkers on the planet when dealing with on a face to face basis, but if you put this shit on a screen for the world to see you will be viewed upon as some dickhead.

Fuck this "code is my life" mentality, shit is but a paycheck, a craft is not a glimpse into what you are as a person, but a way in which you make a paycheck. Molding your personality, based on what you do for a living, really?

Damn man, shit is just so fucking sad. So cringeworthy even.

I worked for over 13 hours yesterday on super-urgent projects. I got so much done it's insane.

Projects:
1) the printer auto-configuration script.
2) changing Stripe from test mode to live mode in production
3) website responsiveness

I finished two within five minutes and pushed to both QA and Production. actually urgent, actually necessary. Easy change.

The printer auto-configure script was honestly fun to write, if very involved. However, the APIs I needed to call to fetch data, create a printer client, etc... none of them were tested, and they were _all_ broken in at least two ways. The CTO (api guy in my previous rant) was slow at fixing them, so getting the APIs working took literally four hours. One of them (test print) still doesn't work.

Responsiveness... this was my first time making a website responsive. Ever. Also, one of the pages I needed to style was very complicated (nested fixed-aspect-ratio + flexbox); I ended up duplicating the markup and hacking the styling together just to make it work. The code is horrible. But! "Friday's the day! it's going live and we're pushing traffic to it!" So, I invested a lot of time and energy into making it ready and as pretty as I could, and finally got it working. That page alone took me two hours.

The site and the printer script (and obv the Stripe change as well) absolutely needed to be done by this morning. Super important.

well.

1) Auto-configure script. Ostensibly we would have an intern come in and configure the printers. However, we have no printers that need configuring, so she did marketing instead. :/ Also, the docs Epson sent us only work for the T88V printer (we have exactly one, which we happened to set up and connect to). They do not work for the T88VI printers, which is what we ordered. and all we'll ever be ordering. So. :/ I'll need to rewrite a large chunk of my code to make this work. Joy :/

2) Stripe Live mode. Nobody even seemed to notice that we were collecting info in Test mode, or that I fixed it. so. um. :/

3) Responsiveness.
Well. That deadline is actually next Wednesday. The marketing won't even start until then, and I haven't even been given the final changes yet (like come on). Also! I asked for a QA review last night before I'd push it to production. One person glanced at it. Nobody else cared. Nobody else cared enough to look in the morning, either, so it's still on QA. Super-important deadline indeed. :/

Honestly?

I feel like Alice (from Dilbert) after she worked frantically on urgent projects that ended up just being cancelled. (That one where Wally smells that lovely buttery-popcorn scent of unnecessary work.)

I worked 13 hours yesterday.
for nothing.

fucking. hell.

I recently joined this big MNC after shutting down my own startup. I was trying to automate their build process properly. They were currently using grunt and I favor gulp, so I offered to replace the build process with gulp and manage it properly.
I was almost done with it in development environment and QA was being done for production.
In the meantime I was trying to fix some random bug in a chrome extension backend. I pushed some minor changes to production which was not going to affect the main site. That was in the afternoon.
This Friday my senior rushed to me. It was like he ran six floors to reach me. He asked, did you push the new build system to production, I refused. He then went to the computer nearby and opened the code.
It was Friday and I was about to leave. But being a good developer, I asked what's the problem. He told me that one complete module is down and the developers responsible for them left for the day already and are unreachable.
I worked on that module multiple times last month, so I offered my help. He agreed and we get to work.
The problem was in the Angular front end. So we immediately knew that the build process is screwed. I accidentally kept the gulp process open for anyone, so I immediately rebuilt using grunt and deployed again, but to no success.
Then I carefully analyzed all the commits to the module to find out that I was the one who pushed the change last. That was the chrome extention. I quickly reverted the changes and deployed and the module was live again. The senior asked, how did you do that? I told the truth.
He was surprised that how come that change affect the complete site too. We identified it after an hour. It was the grunt task which includes all the files from that particular module, including chrome extension in the build process.
He mailed the QA team to put Gulp in increased priority and approved the more structural changes, including more scrutiny before deployment and backup builds.
The module was down for more than 5 hours and we got to know only after the client used it for their own process. I was supposed to be fired for this. But instead everyone appreciated my efforts to fix things.
I guess I am in a good company 😉

Explaining to the client that you can't push untested changes to production and expect it to be bug free.

When you ditch the QA and push the changes to production server.

Why bother testing if you can just push to production

"Just push to production"

Old boss story. This guy was nice but a terrible boss. Also relevant, he has a background in IT so should know better.

Him: So when you wanna check a password is correct you just unhash it in the database?
Me: *facepalm*

Me: Hey we should be doing unit and integration testing at a minimum to lower bugs.
Him: We don't need those, we're not a bank. If a problem comes up we just fix it and push to production.
(A while later)
Him(in email): Why do we keep getting bugs reported. Don't you devs test your code.

I was mildly annoyed at that one.

Him: We're always over budget on projects, how can we fix this.
Me: What if we increase our quotes.(technically there are other ways as well but not really possible at that time)
Him: We can't do that, clients won't want to pay.

Me: *finishing off my handover as I'm leaving for a new job*
Him: Wow you do a lot of work

The One thing every Dev should know about:
Never Push to production on Friday.

Coworker pushed to production yesterday.
Customer saw it and likes the new features.
Customer also saw a shitpile of Bugs.
Customer is angry and my weekend is runined

"Older versions are more stable"

The whole concept of LTS in development pisses me off.

Delayed upgrading, whether it's the language itself, dependencies or tooling, does just one thing: It makes future upgrading way more difficult, often to the point where the company eventually runs into this maintainability wall, and gets stuck in old, unsupported versions.

"But... stability!" — The tiny chance that the newer version has such serious stability regressions that it negatively impacts your own product doesn't weigh up against the clusterfuck you fall into if you push the task too far into the future.

You can relatively easily assess a new major language version using benchmarks and unit tests. Predicting the repercussions of staying on PHP 5.4 or Python 2.7 for another year, predicting the impact of upgrading the codebase later, that is almost impossible.

I'm not saying you should live on the bleeding edge in production, but as soon as a new stable version of a core technology is released, just fucking drop everything you're doing and port those deprecated methods!

It was when I ditched React. I replaced it with raw JavaScript, with frontend being built with Gulp and Twig (just because HTML has no includes). Here are the results:
1. Previously, a production frontend build took 1.5 minutes. Build time became so fast that after I push the code, the build was done before me going to Netlify to check build status. I go there, and it’s almost always already done.
2. In a gallery with a lot of cards, with every card opening a modal, the number of listeners was reduced from N to one. With React, I needed 1000 listeners for 1000 cards. With raw JavaScript, I needed just one click listener with checking event target to handle all of the cards.
3. Page load time and time-to-interactive was reduced from seconds to milliseconds.
4. Lighthouse rating became 100 for desktop and 93 for mobile.

But there is one more thing that is way better than all of the above: cognitive complexity.

Tasks that took days now take hours. Tasks that took hours now take minutes.
Tasks that took thousands of lines now take hundreds. Tasks that took hundreds of lines now take tens.

In real business apps, it is common to build features and then realize it’s not needed and should be discarded. Business is volatile, just because the real world is volatile too. With this kind of cost reduction per feature, it became way less painful to discard them. Throwing out something you spent time and emotional resource on doesn’t feel good. But with features taking minutes to build, it became easier.

How to scare an end user.
P.S. I want to push this to production. XD

Assigned to a new project team..

Using git, in a creative way. So.. "master" is "dev" branch, usually. Everyone can push their branch to dev server .. so it's "dynamic for us". Production branch is whatever, as long as the branch has the release version. Sometimes, the release comes from "master".. that mean "dev" in normal geek..

That's just Git. The source code is a saturated spagetti of Entity framework and Caliburn. It is littered with antipatterns, especially basebean. Holy Christmas and Easter that baseclass do a lot of stuff that has no place as a base class ..

Fucking frameworks, I'm gonna start to evangelize frameworks as the no1 antipattern.

MS SQL as the main DB, but is dumped to json FILES through a scheduled task to increase read performance on web.

There is a soap endpoint to expose the json files, fml..

I am assuming I was placed here to improve stuff, I have never in my life seen anything like this before.

There is a special place in hell for this repository

*In the final weeks of development with a project on a short timeline because the client "needs it".*

Client: "We've hired a consultant we want you to work with."

Me: "Okay, can we push this to after the delivery?"

Client: "Of course"

Wake up to an email from the consultant with a list of scripts he just ran on the production database server for the currently live app.

Get follow-up emails about bugs and app crashes from the client.

My rage is so hot it can keep warm an Eskimo tribe over the winter season.

- Be me (Dev)
- Develop website for client that has an online payment integration.
- Notice there is no one for QA and testing.
- Try to raise voice about it but get shot down by management.
- Get order to push the project to production (because the deadline has arrived, therefore the project must be ready)
- Production performance has an error margin of 15% (customers getting their card over/under charged)
- Get blamed and flamed for everything cuz well, its all the dev's fault.

FML

It is once again that time of year when we say farewell to our current interns and say hello to a brand new batch.

The two groups overlap for a few days. During this time the old interns show the new interns the ropes, while the mentors silently weep in the lunchroom having realized that nothing that they've said over the last 12 months has had any effect whatsoever.

Some choice quotes:
---
New Intern: It says 'uncaught exception'.
Old Intern: Oh don't worry that will fix itself on production.
---
OI: Did you pull the code?
NI: Yeah, but I have all these weird brackets everywhere... [merge conflict]
OI: Oh yeah that happens sometimes, just delete them.
---
NI: It says "push to master rejected". [we enforce code reviews]
OI: Ohh that means the server is broken. You should tell someone, they have to reboot it.
---
NI: Where did that file save to? [we use ONLY macOS and Linux]
OI: C:\Users\<your name>\My Documents\...
---
OI: You can use either pgAdmin or MySQL Workbench. I like Workbench better but I couldn't get it to work, it kept giving me errors.
---
And of course...
---
OI: No, we don't use Linux. We use CentOS.
---

I did the math today. Only 35 more years and I can retire.

The cleaning lady

Yeah, I should not be at work this late, but it happenes from time to time..
Anyhow, she still doesn't know where the switches for each light are, so whenever she comes, lights start to flicker on off on off... Yeah, lightshow baby!! //read this in austin powers voice
I fear for people with epilepsy.. Yeah, I get it, push and toggle switches are mixed in pannel, but we do have a schema for each of them..ofc she doesn't use it..

And every goddamn time if I work later than when she leaves, she disturbes me to ask if I will turn off the lights when I leave.. NOoOooo, I will leave them on like an asshole.. :/ I once even wrote on the whiteboard in bigg letters 'yes, I will turn of the lights when I leave' and left it there for some days... coworkers were all puzzled/amused when they saw it.. //I know, shitty attitude on my part too, but I've repeated myself a dozen times already.. + I always turn off lights she actually manages to switch on and leave them like that, even the ones not in my part of office

And when she vacuums..well.. I usually get up and go on a cigarette break to give her space so she can do her job around my desk.. but she insists that I am not in her way and I don't need to leave... Well I prefer not to be proded and poked with the hose, thank you..

So yeah, fun times... O.o especially if working late due to some production fuckups I need to fix ASAP.. :/

Super stressed.
What I did is:
1. git pull --rebase
2. Forgot to build to check if everything is working after pulling new changes
3. git push
4. Now, I realized I forgot to implement a method of the recently changed interface.
It's a production code. Not a joke. And was my first push to prod and I messed it up.
Sad life. Fixing it. Senior Devs must be crazy for my silly mistake.

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

Don't push to production on a Friday afternoon.

OK, so I was making this website for a university event. After publishing it, I start getting calls that the registration form isn't working. So I review the code and fix the problem. But when I push it to production, the problem still persists, all this while the event management is breathing down my neck because they can't get any registration! kept on trying for the whole fucking day, switched off my phone and went to sleep! The next morning, I find out, I had been pushing the old version of the file! Yes! I felt incompetent and stupid!

I was asked to look into a site I haven't actively developed since about 3-4 years. It should be a simple side-gig.
I was told this site has been actively developed by the person who came after me, and this person had a few other people help out as well.
The most daunting task in my head was to go through their changes and see why stuff is broken (I was told functionality had been removed, things were changed for the worse, etc etc).
I ssh into the machine and it works. For SOME reason I still have access, which is a good thing since there's literally nobody to ask for access at the moment.
I cd into the project, do a git remote get-url origin to see if they've changed the repo location. Doesn't work. There is no origin. It's "upstream" now. Ok, no biggie. git remote get-url upstream. Repo is still there. Good.
Just to check, see if there's anything untracked with git status. Nothing. Good.
What was the last thing that was worked on? git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph. Wait... Something about the commit message seems familiar. git log. .... This is *my* last commit message. The hell?
I open the repo in the browser, login with some credentials my browser had saved (again, good because I have no clue about the password). Repo hasn't gotten a commit since mine. That can't be right.
Check branches. Oh....Like a dozen new branches. Lots of commits with text that is really not helpful at all. Looks like they were trying to set up a pipeline and testing it out over and over again.
A lot of other changes including the deletion of a database config and schema changes. 0 tests. Doesn't seem like these changes were ever in production.
...
At least I don't have to rack my head trying to understand someone else's code but.... I might just have to throw everything that was done into the garbage. I'm not gonna be the one to push all these changes I don't know about to prod and see what breaks and what doesn't break
.
I feel bad for whoever worked on the codebase after me, because all their changes are now just a waste of time and space that will never be used.

Friday night push to production before the bank holiday.

No good can come of this.

“PHP is evil” is not just a joke.

PHP is usually percieved as a language which is not so consistent and has some opinionated historical aspects but allows rapid development because it’s easy. They say PHP doesn’t focus on that “purist shit” such as concepts and “just gets things done”.

Hovewer, this is not true. PHP lures you in and lies to you promising saving time on development, but everything, and I mean EVERYTHING written in PHP is doomed to turn into a bloody mess sooner or later.

You have to be an AI to manage the growing PHP codebase and add features without breaking anything. With every feature it gets harder and harder. If you’re still a human managing a human team, you have to enforce guidelines. Automatic error preventon measures are made of code themselves so the cost of deploying them ona late stage can be ridiculous. And you never deploy them on early stage because you want to “save time”. Your people have to spend more and more time everyday checking on that guidelines. Your development process only becomes slower and slower. If you try to push things, your project will crumble to dust.

To make PHP at least decent, you have to figure out all this by yourself on an early stage. When you’re done, you spent a lot of time creating the buggy, ad-hoc, unspecified and unsupported alternative of what works out of the box in other languages. And you still code in PHP and still have all its disadvantages in your project’s DNA.

PHP is evil because it promises and never delivers. PHP is evil because it lies to you and it already fucked over so many of us.

If you want to code in PHP, do it under your pillow. Code your own silly projects.

If your project has the word “production” somewhere in its plans, PHP is not the way to go.

Amen.

Fuuuuck this corporate bullshit. I'm basically sitting around twiddling my thumbs waiting for some jackass to grant me access to the server that my boss moved my code over to. Why the hell did you put my app on a production server that runs every 30 minutes...THAT I DON'T HAVE ACCESS TO?? Now there's a critical bug and a $50K order in limbo because I can't push any fixes. Fuck me. The worst part will be in the next hour or so when dozens of people are calling, emailing, and attacking my cubicle like rabid animals about why orders aren't moving and I'll have to explain that production is a train wreck because reasons. Just end me.

When you push seemingly harmless untested code to production server which breaks the whole application...

Our team really needs some workflow arrangement, and this time it was me who screwed up.
So we have to push an update to the Play Store and the App Store the Friday, the app is well tested on test environment then production environment, we got the ok so I uploaded a build, the app management team then continued the process of publishing..

During the weekend the app was approved and live to almost 500k user that can receive the update.

I got a phone call from the Project Manager at almost midnight, the time was really suspicious so I answered.
- Me: Hello.
- PM: Hi, sorry to call you now but the app is live and we have a problem.
- Me: what kind of problem? Let me check.

So I updated the app on my phone and opened it while I am on call.. I almost had heart attack!! WE PUBLISHED A VERSION POINTING TO THE TEST ENVIRONMENT. Holly shit

- Me: shit call the app management team NOW.

Eventually we removed the app from sale (unpublished it) and we submitted a new version immediately, once it was approved the next day we made the app available again (so for those who didn’t update yet, there will be no update to a faulted version, and no new users landing to a version with test data), I received one or two calls from friends telling me why the app is not on the store (our app is used nationally, so it’s really important).

Thank God there was no big show on twitter or other social media.. but it’s really a good lesson to learn.

I understand this is totally my fault, thankfully I didn’t get fired 😅

I used to work on a production management team, whose job was, among other things, safeguarding access to production. Dev teams would send us requests all the time to, "run a quick SQL script."

Invariably, the SQL would include, "SELECT * FROM db_config."

We would push the tickets back, and the devs would call us, enraged. I learned pretty quickly that they didn't have any real interest in dev, test, or staging environments, and just wanted to do everything in prod, and see if it works.

But they would give up their protests pretty fast when I offered to let them speak to a manager when they were upset I wouldn't run their SQL.

Why the hell do you keep commit+push your shit to the master branch! We have develop, feature and hotfix, you *************!

Just because you want to test something in prd environment, you don't mess with the master to build the production image. And you do not even rebase fucking develop branch and keep it out of sync you POS!

Excuse my language, thank you.

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "This HAS to be online soon"
$ git push
*merge conflict*
*did not look at difference*
*using mine*
$ git commit -m "resolv merge conflict"
$ git push

$ ssh root@x.x.x.x
# git pull
# cd /path/to/webapp
# npm run production

Seriously!? You don't fucking delete or change code because you don't understand it and push it to production, it's the way it is because of reasons you airhead can't comprehend ... ffs the fucker could have asked me and saved us trouble and embarrassment.

Fuck.

So after 6 months of asking for production API token we've finally received it. It got physically delivered by a courier, passed as a text file on a CD. We didn't have a CD drive. Now we do. Because security. Only it turned out to be encrypted with our old public key so they had to redo the whole process. With our current public key. That they couldn't just download, because security, and demanded it to be passed in the fucking same way first. Luckily our hardware guy anticipated this and the CD drives he got can burn as well. So another two weeks passed and finally we got a visit from the courier again. But wait! The file was signed by two people and the signatures weren't trusted, both fingerprints I had to verify by phone, because security, and one of them was on vacation... until today when they finally called back and I could overwrite that fucking token and push to staging environment before the final push to prod.

Only for some reason I couldn't commit. Because the production token was exactly the same as the fucking test token so there was *nothing to commit!*

BECAUSE FUCKING SECURITY!

Dev: "I've pushed some code. Give it a code review."
Me: "ok, i'll do it"
<<fast forward>>
Me: "Sounds good to me. Only thing, I wouldn't have gone for all those renames because that was not part of the request, maybe we can discuss ...."
Dev: "I like those names and besides, it's already deployed in production"
Me: " :| .... what's the purpose of a code review when you push straight into production ?

So i just saw a post about not pushing to production on Friday's and that reminded me of something.

A team we are working with (we needed help on something so we got another company to send us a team and do it for us) recently push to production on a Friday at around 5pm.

We didn't know that they had done it until a shit ton of errors started happening and we had no idea why (it was working so far, none of us did anything, so what the fuck is going on).

To make things better, one of my colleagues tried calling them and they wouldn't answer the phone. They knew what they did, so they went home before we could notice it and we had to correct their mistake.

We had everyone calling us saying they had gotten an error, and they needed to get home but couldn't because of it (it messed up a process that only happens at the end of the day before people go home. I can explain more in the comments if anyone is confused, or just wants to know).

Eventually everything was solved, but that was a very stressful ending of the week.

So yeah, don't deploy on Friday's please and thank you

Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.

(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)

I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.

Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.

Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.

Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).

All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.

Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.

Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?

Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)

What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.

And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.

Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.

Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.

Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
.
.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).

It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.

What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.

Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.

My colleague sends me an email saying “here’s a check not being performed which causes a bug can you fix this and push to production”
With a screenshot of the code and place it needs to happen underlined

ARE YOU kIDDING ME OH MY GOD

He doesn’t have time to write 10 characters but he has the time to make this work of art of an email and send it to me

Testing an attendace machine API one by one so i know what does what.

And there’s an API for wiping all the attendance data stored in the machine.

I didn’t realize it until i push the damn button.

The attendance machine just become fresh like new 😱😨😰

Shit.

A testing session just become an extreme sport.

Thankfully the IT guy has a backup but just up to last month.

Well, it’s better than nothing isn’t it?

He just tell his boss that the machine was run out of memory and the attendance data for the current month were not saved.

And he ask him to buy me some machine for testing.

Yes, i was living on the edge by testing in the production machine.

Here we go again. Months have passed since this client first wanted their website launched. But because they were suddenly and inexplicably in no real hurry to make it go live, we are now waiting for them to get back to us on whether to push to Production. Meanwhile, I have bills to pay and as soon as I told them I need the check by no later than April 1st, everyone over there is no longer answering phone calls or emails. Voicemail box is full and not accepting any more messages.

I think this would be the part where I call "Big Nick" and ask him to pay them a little "visit". If I knew someone like that.

I don't know how managers are planning deadlines and counting December as a full working month!

Most companies that I worked with, count either half a month or push the deadline until the end of January when the workforce is back but not here.

Our division manager has promised the customer that the production environment will be ready on the first week of January, without even consulting the team or checking the schedule like WTF!
The person responsible for setting the infrastructure was on vacation for 2 weeks and he didn't hand over the access to production or share the progress done.
Fast forward, the manager went to slack and pinged the whole company with full caps message that the production should be done today.

Fun times :/

"The tool to push new releases to the data centre blocked us last night. Saying all the nodes are 'unhealthy', resolve the issue(s) first. But then the remote team said 'we have a way around that' so we managed to get it deployed in time. We need to document the process as there were many ... 'shady' processes and steps involved lol"

- Manager explaining how the first production release on our new team went last night

... he called it a success

So my co-worker asked me to change something. It was simple, took me about 5min to do it and pushed to production right away!
Two minutes after, asked me to change two other things. In the span of 1h30, she came to my desk 3 times and asked for 3 different things!

The thing is: before I push anything to production, I have to ask my other co-worker who is currently on vacation.
Already sent him one email for the first thing, and now I feel bad because I have to send him another one...

In case she comes up with any more changes, I'm just going to wait for the end of the day and send one more email with every change I made. This is great. FML

My brain: you have 30 min until you gotta catch the bus, that’s enough for that css fix you wanted to implement on the website!

My development environment: Hey that looks a lot better and works perfectly fine!

My website in production: Fuck you. Fuck your changes. Fuck your bus.

What do we learn? Precompile assets before pushing to production and don’t push to production if there’s a bus to catch 🙃

Fake sticker story time. It is fucking on fire. Then I press npm install twice. Forgot node modules in gitignore. Then got push to production served by Jenkins. Now get the fuck out of here.

I started off in a MNC company as a junior developer. I entered with candy glasses.
I didn't expect to win the lottery. Of getting abuse by superior.

I stayed for a year, at the project. Constantly being belittled by this team lead. It was awful i enter as a fresh grad. All the new tech were so new and scary at that point.

During my time there, i constantly think that developer is not my stuff.

Ultimately i reach the state of burnout. I reached out to the manager and broke down in his office.

I actually told the manager. "I hate coding"

I remember staying up to 4am just complete a piece of program. To be ready to be push to production the next day. My team lead just come screaming at me saying there is bug.

Upon receiving that message via skype. I broke, tears flow down my eyes.

After which i reach a state of burn out. I start to reach out to external parties for help to get me out of there.

Now i am recovered from the burn out. I am curious of the technology that were utilized in that project. I literally face palm. After understanding the technology it isn't so hard after all. I just didn't gear myself up with the tech.

I still do enjoy working on code.

.NET Core 2.0 is out, guys!! Finnaly I can push to production the new updated project...

Why is web development such a headache?

I'm writing a responsive wesbite from scratch. All goes perfect, even cross browser.
It all works, adapts to screen size etc. Nice! About to get this code into production.

Me: I'll test the iPhone 5 viewport size before I push the code...

Responsive Developer Tools:

FireFox: nu uh, there's a magic random 1px margin to every element on your page now, which you cannot find in your css or in the computed tab. It's magical.

Me: weird, what if I change the viewport size to the iPhone 6's dimensions?

Issue persists.

Me: hmm, what if I add or substract one fucking pixel from the viewport width or height?

FireFox: What 1px margin? Don't know what you're talking about ... There never was one...

Me: ok, weird (sets viewport size back to the iPhone 5 format for testing)

FireFox: I present to you: the magic random 1px margin.

I'm at a loss. I really am. Been clicking and unclicking almost every responsive part of my css I could find for this page and it just doesn't want to work persistently. And I swear to god that it worked a week ago in that exact viewport size. It's so frustrating.

If you’re a Russian ux engineer who is present in a Russian ux community and you fucking make your form validate on change event and that leads to the situation when a user starts entering their email and your bouba form immediately throws WRONG EMAIL errors, we don’t call you a bouba.

We call you a ебанок (ebanok) — a small, stupid and miserable creature that you can only feel hatred mixed with disgust towards.

This shit is acceptable if you’re an intern making their first shy steps creating their own personal project, but if you push this to production, you’re a ebanok. If you don’t know how to do ux, just use server-side validation or display errors with alerts on submit.

You fucking ebanok.

Long time ago i ranted here, but i have to write this off my chest.

I'm , as some of you know, a "DevOps" guy, but mainly system infrastructure. I'm responsible for deploying a shitload of applications in regular intervals (2 weeks) manually through the pipeline. No CI/CD yet for the vast majority of applications (only 2 applications actually have CI/CD directly into production)

Today, was such a deployment day. We must ensure things like dns and load balancer configurations and tomcat setups and many many things that have to be "standard". And that last word (standard) is where it goes horribly wrong

Every webapp "should" have a decent health , info and status page according to an agreed format.. NOPE, some dev's just do their thing. When bringing the issue up to said dev the (surprisingly standard) answer is "it's always been like that, i'm not going to change". This is a problem for YEARS and nobody, especially "managers" don't take action whatsoever. This makes verification really troublesome.

But that is not the worst part, no no no.

the worst is THIS:

"git push -a origin master"

Oh yes, this is EVERYWHERE, up to the point that, when i said "enough" and protected the master branch of hieradata (puppet CfgMgmt, is a ENC) people lots their shits... Proper gitflow however is apparently something otherworldly.

After reading this back myself there is in fact a LOT more to tell but i already had enough. I'm gonna close down this rant and see what next week comes in.

There is a positive thing though. After next week, the new quarter starts, and i have the authority to change certain aspects... And then, heads WILL roll on the floor.

I'm so happy that I have the first working version of the program. Just couple of bug fixing and unit testing and I'll push the code to production.

Day 1: Just couple of bug fixing and unit testing and I'll push the code to production.

Day 2: Just couple of bug fixing and unit testing and I'll push the code to production.
.........

Day 200: Just couple of bug fixing and unit testing and I'll push the code to production.

😞

Am I the only developer in existence who's ever dealt with Git on Windows? What a colossal train wreck.

1. Authentication. Since there is no ssh key/git url support on Windows, you have to retype your git credentials Every Stinking Time you push. I thought Git Credential Manager was supposed to save your credentials? And this was impossible over SSH (see below). The previous developer had used an http git URL with his username and password baked in for authentication. I thought that was a horrific idea so I eventually figured out how to use a Bitbucket App password.

2. Permissions errors
In order to commit and push updates, I have to run Git for Windows as Administrator.

3. No SSH for easy git access
Here's where I confess that this is a Windows Server machine running as some form of production. Please don't slaughter me! I am not the server admin.
So, I convinced the server guy to find and install some sort of ssh service for Windows just for the off times we have to make a hot fix in production. (Don't ask, but more common than it should be.)
Sadly, this ssh access is totally useless as the git colors are all messed up, the line wrap length and window size are just weird (seems about 60 characters wide by 25 lines tall) and worse of all I can't commit/push in git via ssh because Permissions. Extremely aggravating.

4. Git on Windows hangs open and locks the index file
Finally, we manage to have Git for Windows hang quite frequently and lock the git index file, meaning that we can't do anything in git (commit, push, pull) without manually quitting these processes from task manager, then browsing to the directory and deleting the .git/index.lock file.

Putting this all together, here's the process for a pull on this production server:
Launch a VNC session to the server. Close multiple popups from different services. Ask Windows to please not "restart to install updates". Launch git for Windows. Run a git pull. If the commits to be pulled involve deleting files, the pull will fail with a permissions error. Realize you forgot to launch as Administrator. Depending on how many files were deleted in the last update, you may need to quit the application and force close the process rather than answer "n" for every "would you like to try again?" file. Relaunch Git as Administrator. Run Git pull. Finally everything works.

At this point, I'd be grateful for any tips, appreciate any sympathy, and understand any hatred. Windows Server is bad. Git on Windows is bad.

Normally you would have:
- Management
- SysOps
- DevOps
- Devs

In the company (30-50 workers) we only have:
- Management
- SysOps (they don't know how to deploy apps beyond FTP to a webhost either)
- Devs

Jepp, management does not want a specific DevOps department, because he thinks every single "I just finished the Javascript course on codecademy" person knows how to deploy an app beyond dragging&dropping it to a webhost with FTP...

I tried to propose to them that I handle DevOps and teach it to others, so we can deploy code that we deem "production ready" in a more proper manner...
They refused...
They rather stick to "just use FTP to push any changes we made directly to the production server and test changes there"

Question about burnout here!

I've been a developer for a year and a half now and I've reached a point of burnout. Experiencing a lot of external stress as well as internal (handled well with a fantastic and supportive team)

I'm taking some time away from work and having a much needed break but I'm worried that for now, I can't code! I've got no drive at all to learn anything new, I'm just sat here waiting for a production push.

I'm by no means thinking of changing careers or leaving my current role and the lack of concentration is likely as a result of stress, I just wanted to hear some of your stories so I feel a little less alienated!

Being new to this is pretty overwhelming at times!

TL;DR: When picking vendors to outsource work to, vet them really well.

Backstory:
Got a large redesign project that involves rebuilding a website's main navigation (accessibility reasons).
Project is too big just for our dev team to handle with our workload so we got to bring a 3rd party vendor to help us. We do this often so no big deal.
But, this time the twist was Senior Management already had retained hours with a dev shop so they want us to use them for project. Okay...

It begins:
Have our scope / discovery meeting about the changes and our expected DevOps workflow.

Devs work Local and push changes to our Github, that kicks off the build and we test on Dev, then it goes to Staging for more testing & PM review. Once ready we can push to prod, or whenever needed. All is agreed, everyone was happy.

Emailed the vendors' project manager to ask for their devs Github accounts so we can add them to the project. Got no reply for 3 days.

4th day, I get back "Who sets up the Github accounts?"

fuck me. they've never used Github before but in our scope meeting 4 days ago you said Github was fine...??

Whatever, fuck it. I'll make the accounts and add them.

Added 4 devs to the repo and setup new branch. 40min later get an email that they can't setup dev environment now, the dev doesn't know how to setup our CMS locally, "not working for some reason."

So, they ask for permission to develop on our STAGING server.. "because it's already setup"... they want to actively dev on our staging where we get PM/Senior Management approvals?

We have dev, staging, production instances and you want to dev in staging, not dev?... nay nay good sir.

This is whom senior management wants us to use, already paid for via retainer no less. They are a major dev shop and they're useless...

😢😭

Cant wait for today's progress checkup meeting. 😐😐

/rant

My first rant. Woohoo!

Honestly I do the whole shebang ussualy depending on what the needs are from network to servers to coding because for some reason nobody has any technical experience where I work.
I just started app development for a gamedev startup and I am in sheer awe of the amount of transpiling/compiling etc that needs to be done for an multiplatform app for iOS and android with js(x)/typescript, html, css.

I remember when I could just write some spaghetti code to make it working by following a couple of tutorials. Then refractoring and testing it for a couple of hours and be done with it. push it into production.

Now I am lost having to learn OOP, functional programming, reactjs, react native, express, webpack, mongodb, babel, and the list goes on and on...
Why not just make a new backend that does all of that in another language which supports all of that.

I have no formal education in programming/coding and the last time I learned JS it was just some if else, switches and simple dom manipulation.

I just want to get to coding a freakin' game but I have to learn JSX for the front and typescript on the backend.

I am this close to going back to ye ol' lamp stack and quitting this job. 😥

Some people deployed before vacation and broke stuff. Community response:

Okay, wait, is it a common practice to push changes to master that you KNOW break some other features? I always assumed that that's what branches are for and master should be the "to the best of our knowledge it should be production ready"? But apparently in this company you need to hunt for the right revision, interrogating people why suddenly nothing works on your end and half the time it's "oh, this guy has been working on something and it broke half of the stuff others have been working on and isn't covered in tests yet. Use revision 21xkcd7a"

my company is "pivoting" way too goddamn fast; they are pulling devs from other projects and throwing them into something that is a fragile system (was supposed to be replaced already) and is using a completely different stack than most of them usually work with. they keep promising 3rd parties that we will knock out their requirements within a week or two, and as such they are pushing haphazardly merged feature branches into production with absolutely no regression testing.

then when shit explodes and operations grinds to a halt, they tell the half of the team that actually knows how the system works to drop everything and fix it, and leave the diverted devs to continue to develop shit based on requirements drawn on a cocktail napkin, and then they fucking push both the hotfixes and the newest features at the same time.

I probably have the most tribal knowledge at this company, and they are paying me ok, so it's enough for me to just pour some rye and suck it up for the time being and milk the gig. but this can't be sustainable, right? i'm passively looking around for other work, as I've already had enough being here for over 3 years, but i'm finding most places to be slow on the application/hiring process lately due to covid.

Edit: i think i used the wrong tag here, but what the fuck ever. i haven't figured out how to tag shit properly on any platform

Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.

Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).

Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.

Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:

1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.

2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.

3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.

Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.

My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.

How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.

In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.

Why broken stuff is allowed through the door?

My Ubuntu, my Bluetooth headsets, Jira, my latest Google pixel, eCommerce shop where I purchase stuff everything lately seem to be full of bugs.

It seems like nobody cares about the quality of software pushed to production. Everyone is so quick to push those tickets into "released".

Fuck you, managers, shareholders, scrum masters, seniors who push developers to do stuff quickly rather than correctly.

I finally get the go ahead to push an update to a client site into production. Client then sends out marketing email about changes later that afternoon. The next day the client decides they are not ready to start fulfilling orders from one of the new products I added. Now I have to rush a change to remove the product links from the site.

So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.

And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).

And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.

First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.

Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.

Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.

Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉

What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆.

"It is pointless to use just a fraction of the data in a homologation environment"
Those words reveal the truth in our creed.
We work in the deepest of back-ends to serve the front.
No data is true. Everything can be edited.
We are Data Engineers.

And for those words to take hold, a junior must execute a leap of faith, and push a hotfix into production.

Is it good or bad that I forgot to push an critical buggfix to production just before I went home?

Hopefully I can update from home (think one of our servers has an backup of the ssh keys)

Finally made my node production server stable enough that I could focus on writing tests*. I start by setting up docker, mocking cognito, preparing the database and everything. Reading up on Node test suites and following a short tut to set up my first unit test. Didn't go smoothly, but it's local and there are no deadlines so who cares. 4 days later, first assert.equal(1+1, 2) passes and I'm happy.

I start writing all sorts of tests, installing everything required into "devDependancies," and getting the joy of having some tests pass on first try with all asserts set up, feels good!

I decide to make a small update to production, so I add a test, run and see it fail, implement the feature, re-run and, it passes!

I push the feature to develop, test it, and it works as intended. Merge that to master and subsequently to one of my ec2 production servers**, and lo and behold, production server is on a bootloop claiming it "Cannot find module `graphql`". But how? I didn't change any production dependencies, and my package lock json is committed so wth?

I google the issue, but can't find anything relevant. The only thing that I could guess was that some dependencies (including graphql) were referenced*** in both, prod and dev, and were omitted when installed on a prod NODE_ENV, but googling that specific issue yielded no results, and I would have thought npm would be clever enough to see that and would always install those dependencies (spoiler: it didn't for me).

With reduced production capacity (having one server down) I decided to npm uninstall all dev dependencies anyway and see what happens. Aaaaand it works.....

So now I have a working production server, but broken local tests, and I'm not sure why npm is behaving like this...

* Yes I see the irony.
** No staging because $$$, also this is a personal project.
*** I am not directly referencing the same thing twice, it's probably a subdependency somewhere.

What's your experience with continuous delivery? On every push to the master, the complete current codebase goes to production.
Of course not visible to all the users, but hidden behind feature flags.

TGIF & remember..

DO NO FUCKING PUSH TO PRODUCTION TODAY!
DO NOT FUCKING RELEASE A NEW VERSION OF THE CLIENT APP!
FUCK!!
have a nice weekend partners 🤗

TL;DR: fear of bricking my laptop due to typo pinning.

The worst nightmare i am living in right now...

I was noticing i did need some software in sid so i decided to use apt pinning for said software...

I configure the system, ok test looks good... I push it to production, run it on the system....and the nightmare starts.

Lits of packages get updated, and i am screaming 'noooooooo' since debian sid softwarz can sometimes break everything! I discovered that i did test my apt pinning config for the presence of the amount of numbers, but not at their value... Sooo, by accident swapping pin numbers for stable and unstable you get... Your worst apt-get update nightmare...

I hope it does not become a brick.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire:
So in my first job, I thought it's just us operating so crazy: meddling with arcane C/C++ code from the 80's, shooting our code to production without testing, fixing hundred of customers data base entries by hand, letting an intern alter some core component (to have more logging) and directly push it to prod...
Silly me.
I mean I suspected, that maybe it's not only this tiny little company acting wild, that also the bigger companies with all their ISO certified processes, agile blabla, professional tooling whatsoever - will also have their skeleton in the closet,.. like some obscure assembler part buried in the heart of your code base nobody dares to touch...
How Pieter Hintjens asked about the state of the industry and all the fads so bluntly put it:
"It's all bullshit."
But we are humans, so we better jump on the bandwagon if we want to keep our jobs... and somehow try to keep that trashy house of cards from crashing down.

FML when the code that runs every 10 minutes to check and bill a customer keeps charging him and the logs are terrible plus you have no idea what the issue was so you have to push production code to test and fix.

How do you guys push changes to you server. ?

I am currently pushing changes to my git repo then pulling those changes on server where I am running the application in production.

I am planning to set up a simple server, to which I will push the changes and it push the changes to the server's running in production.
Or better would be to write a script and run on production servers that will check github for changes

It’s always fun when you are asked to push to production on a friday afternoon...Because the project managers and owners won’t have be the ones who have to fix something on a friday night or weekend 🤷‍♂️

Jenkins' triggerManualBuild randomly but if so then consistently produces 500 errors for certain newly created jobs. I haven't really found a pattern, yet I was bit by it in the past already. I used to "solve" it by deleting the offending job and re-creating it.

Now, I have this annoying issue again, and no matter how often I re-create that shitty one-liner job in the pipeline, it won't trigger. (The job itself is fine. It's the actual trigger that is broken.)

It's not like it's important or anything, as this is basically only the "push to production" step.

FML. And fuck me for stating: "Creating a delivery pipeline should be straightforward. I therefore consider 1 storypoint enough."

When you and your senior push to production well knowing there is a bug in there but you do not care because you are the company's dark lords

so there was this issue regarding our company's system which tends to be a problem for sometime now, its a recurring issue caused by the data that the users needs to encode to the system

today another issue arised, our senior supervisor, not knowing that this issue was already recurring and there is already a documented step procedure on how to address it, suggested or come up with a another solution which would task one of our co-developer to push a temporary code to production during business hours just to accommodate the issue and rollback the code after

take note that its during business hours and more than a hundreds of branches of the company are using the said system

what was he thinking !!

thankfully one of our colleagues voiced out explaining that this issue was already recurring and already has a procedural solution, but still our brainy-know-it-all-stubborn-close-minded heck of a supervisor insisted that the solution has computational impact and still insisted that they push a temporary code to the production, what an idiot!!

fast forward our colleagues ended up standing their ground, even if our supervisor is highly doubtful at them, and executed the already established solution instead of pushing a temporary code to the production which was such a bullshit idea

damn those close minded people they shouldn't have reach that position in the first place!!

CTO: I want you to take up a side project and push it to production. Atleast 1 per quarter. Also, you have to keep making tiny enhancements to the website on weekends. And it would be great if you can mentor and help the other team with architecture. And, don't you feel itchy that the app you made in that hackathon is not used by any user? Productionize it. Don't forget to update me on your primary task at the end of biweekly sprint, that goes without said.

Friday/End of the day!
I think is time to push to production!
nothing is gonna happen, noone will call me 🙏

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

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

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

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

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

Shame on you Facebook Developers!

I’m neither messy or anal coder, but whenever I push something to production I make sure to handle all debugger warnings... I don’t think it’s perfectionism, rather good practice, makes important bugs easier to find. ;)

A single Facebook SDK Framework has 70+ unhandled warnings, trivial things, could be fixed in a half day...

I had to use ‘inhibit_all_warnings!’ flag literally for the first time, not to get frustrated every time it gets updated :/

P.S Not to mention I had to change the dependency manager because (with the newest update) they have written themselves out of compatibility with the one I was using... C’mon guys. Not cool.

had to push to production on saturday

After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...

So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.

Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.

Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...

So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.

Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).

We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).

I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...

Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks...

Just joined a new company and can only describe the merge process as madness.....is it or am I the one that is mad?!

They have the following branches:

UAT#_Development branch
UAT#_Branch (this kicks of a build to a machine named UAT#)

Each developer has a branch with the # being a number 1 to 6 except 5 which has been reserved for UAT_Testing branch.

They are working on a massive monolith (73 projects), it has direct references to projects with no nuget packages. To build the solution requires building other solutions in a particular order, in short a total fucking mess.

Developer workflow:

Branch from master with a feature or hotfix branch

Make commits to said branch and test manually as there are no automated tests

Push the commits to their UAT#_Development branch, this branch isn't recreated each time and may have differences to all the other UAT#_Development branches.

Once happy create a pull request to merge from UAT#_Development to UAT#_Branch you can approve your own pull request, this kicks off a build and pushes it to a server that is named UAT#.

Developer reviews changes on the UAT# server.

QA team create a UAT/year/month/day branch. Then tell developers to merge their UAT#_branch branches in to the previously created branch, this has to be done in order and that is done through a flurry of emails.

Once all merges are in it then gets pushed to a UAT_Testing branch which kicks off a build, again not a single automated test, and is manually tested by the QA team. If happy they create a release branch named Release/year/month/day and push the changes into it.

A pull request from the release branch is then made to pre-live environment where upon merge a build is kicked off. If that passes testing then a pull request to live is created and the code goes out into production.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh it's a total mess. I knew when I took on this job it would be a challenge but nothing has prepped me for the scale of the challenge!! My last place it was trunk based development, commit straight to master, build kicks off with automated testing and that just gets pushed through each of the environments, so easy, so simple!

They tell me this all came about because they previously used EntityFramework EDMX models for the database and it caused merge hell.

I'm tired. I don't want to do these tests anymore. These vague test scenarios I have to decrypt on my own lest asking business shows signs of weakness. I'm slow to test and going way beyond the hours the client estimated and you folks just accepted. How can I finish this when I get pulled to meetings which I am not the decision maker but I'm supposed to be the technical one to help them decide. In between this testing I get emails to help check on issues I'm not even a part of. Production issues I can understand because those have a feel of critical and priority but if you pull me to that I lose time testing. I'm trying. But I'm truly very slow at this. I'm a slow tester for this set of test cases. I'm hating myself every minute as the hours inch to the deadline which is today. I want to sleep but I want to finish as well. Shitty days of drone work that could have been given to somebody else but I can't say no to because you guys accepted. Someone from management just see please, don't give this to me. But you can't see. You probably don't even understand. They asked, you caved because you can't see the list of tasks and level of detail that comes with each thing they ask. This testing is a ridiculous use of my time but I can't say that to the client. You could have. I want to. I truly want to say "Fuck these tests". I tried to push back. But the client of course reasoned back and it was understandable to ask. To do what's good and what's best. How can I say no to that?! I'm almost depleted. I'll just finish this somehow.

One of our corporate clients insists that we push changes and updates to production on either Saturday or Sunday. I've worked weekends for longer than I care to admit now.

A major update that completely changes both the data model and UI is scheduled for deployment this Sunday.

Monday is going to be hell with support requests.

Sat here trying to decide and finalise my Dev process for Wordpress!

Roots.io clean, good code, deployment to staging and production through git

Vagrant then just push to live (which one?)

Docker then try and figure S*** out

Flywheel local!

Then decide where to deploy:

Digital Ocean or AWS Elastic with load balancers and S***!

Decisions!!

In my first few months of my first dev job, I written this fragile piece of code in, trigger warning, PHP that sent out email reports to my clients. It was a two men team, and we have no clue about TDD or how to do unit testing for such code. We would just run that piece of code manually do send out dummy emails to ensure things were working.

One day the code broke. I was told by my boss to fix it. Spent the entire day trying to fix but couldn't get anything done. Finally at around 7pm my boss came by and asked why is it I couldn't get it fixed. He helped me troubleshoot and fixed it. And subsequently told me "c'mon man you're better than this."

It turns out that he changed a part of a code that was supposed return an array of strings to an array of objects, adding a second attribute that wasn't even in use.

So what that meant is that he changed a piece of working code, to include a property he didn't need, committed and push to production without even manually testing it. AND TALKED SHIT TO ME.

That was the day I learned git blame and began my journey on TDD.

I believe that I have found the worst feeling in the world.

Not when a push to production on Friday fails. But when a few of your teammates don't want to do JACK FUCKING SHIT. The worst ones are where they think you fabricated projected expenses for raspberry pies, and thus believe that you are apart of some communist conspiracy.

They also believe that cheap AWS ec2 instances are crappy for teaching some basic fucking command line and git to high schoolers!!

I feel like a need a brick handy at all times just to chuck it at a wall.

Currently debugging a project that was written over 4 years ago...

At first all was well in the world, besides the ever present issue off our goddamn legacy framework. This framework was written 7 years ago on top of an existing open source one, because the existing one was 'lacking some features' & 'did not feel right'.

Now those might be perfectly fine reasons to write a layer on top of a framework, but please, for all future devs sanities, write fucking documentation and maintain it if you're going to use said framework in all major projects!!

Anyhow back to the situation at hand, I'm getting familiar with the project, sighing at the use of our stupid legacy framework, attempting to recreate the reported bugs...

Turns out I can't, well I get other bugs & errors, but not the reported ones. I go to the production server, where I suddenly do can reproduce them...

Already thinking, fuck my life, and scared for the results... I try a 'git status' on the production server....

And yep, there it is, lo and behold, fucking changes on production, that are not in git, fuck you previous dev who worked on this and your stupid lazy ass modifcations on production!

Bleh, already feeling royally pissed, there's only 1 thing I can do, push changes back to git in a seperate branch, and pray I can merge them back in master on my dev environment without to much issues...

Only I first have to get our sysadmi. to allow pushing from a production server back to our git server...

Sigh, going to put on my headphones, retreat to my me space and try to sort out this shitpile now...

WHY DOES EVERYTHING BREAK WHEN I WANT TO DEPLOY?

Finally fixed the last few bugs on my project and the thing is pretty much set to go. Then both the production and my local copy (identical in every way except for connecting to different MySQL servers) have the EXACT same query issues. The cursor fetch methods ALL get nothing EVEN WHEN I CAN SEE THE CURSOR HAS THE DATA I REQUESTED in the debugger.

I'm already in hot water for taking longer than expected with this project and this is going to push it back even further.

I went to an interview a few days ago, just out of curiousity, even though i was sure that i won't be getting any "android developer jobs" there . it was a mega job fair. in one company, me and my friend neil(fake name) went. the interviewer guy was willing to give neil a package upto 10LPA (its a great offer for freshers in my country) based on his current skills of php js, react,angular, ... web stuff .
I had this assumption( and neil did too , we both kind off had the same mindset) that a company teaches us things, we just have to be a little famous/accomplished. So i thought why not? i am accomplished. i got 2 apps on playstore, i am an AAD certified Android dev and know a lot of android stuff, i am quite famous. i am equally as deserving as neil.

But what happenned was something different. When my turn came, the interviewer said " If you have no knowledge of phy/js/node/angular, why are you sitting here?" to which i said " i presumed company would teach me, since i bring some level of expertise from other fields"

so he told me some hard truths **"Companies are fast paced. they don't have time to train you in everything. we seek for candidates having some level of knowledge in the domain, so that we could brush up your skills, increase your knowledge to current requirement and push you to production engineer asap, so that you could be worthy of your salary"**

This is completely correct. i have stuck myself in such a career that its very difficult to sell myself for other job profiles. And from what i have seen, companies seek a very high level of proficiency in this field and rarely recruit freshers( or even if they do, salaries will be aweful)

. Now i am so unsure about what to do next:

A.) keep learning more and more of android and look for job in it. And even if am getting an aweful job offer, just sulk and take it
B.) do open source work/gsoc work?( its a good way to earn more recognition/stipend/knowledge and sometimes even job offers)
C.) learn web dev, data sciences, blockchain, cloud or other stuff that i don't yet know
D.) go back to ds algo / competitive? (because having good competitive knowledge is a safe zone. you are assumed as apure fresher with 0 level of practical knowledge but good level of mathemetics)

I know i am going suck in all of the above except maybe (A) or (B) because (C) is something that am unsure would grab my interest (and even if it did, i am sure i need another 1-2 years to be somewhat good at it) and (D) is something i myself know am uncapable of , i am an average shit in maths(but might mug it all up if i pull all nighters for 1 year)

Debugging is fine, totally part of the job!

Constantly fixing sh1t and new reports of another pile of sh1t coming every day like somebody is throwing them with shovels at us just to open the codebase that is written by the folks who aren't here anymore with some list of obscure libraries that is last maintained about 5 y ago is not ok.

It is not buggy codebase it is actually coddy bugbase!

I tried to be vocal several times to change technology to more suitable one, to make some improvements and to remove code smells(there is a ton of it, smells like organic garbage dumpster with rotten eggs) but "everything works" and there is no real "value for the customers" in that(fixing, refactoring etc.)!!!

Yea it works with sh1t ton of bugs reported every week. Nobody gives a shit, just contempt with their mediocre lives solving bug at the time while i feel like I'm wasting my time and talent on wrong people and fixing other's shit.

That is what happens when prototype becomes product and ships to production because numbers, money and sh1t!

this is why we who care about our career can't have nice things! I am not god damn pest control, I am f*ckin developer.

How is this for competence...

To push new features or fixes on one of our clients production sites that runs on AWS with auto scaling instances, we have to manually change the files in each instance that is running by ftp, and the template in S3.

for the 3rd time ive tried introducing some version control on a project that really needs it because it has multiple people working on it.

And because the last time my efforts got shut down because in practice people thought it was too much of a hassle to develop locally rather than on the shared development server directly, I made a feature that would let people checkout branches on said server...

Apparently the action of; saving > committing > pushing to your feature branch > merge after aproval, is still too much for people to comprehend; "I think this is too convoluted can't we just keep pushing to the production server to check our work and then commit and push to the master branch"

So I just got pissed and said fuck it, no more git then, I'm not even going to put any effort into changing tooling here anymore, and this is a massive project where we have to manually remove code that isnt ready yet from the staging environment.

Are the people I'm working with just this stupid or am I really overengineering this solution because I think 4 people should not be working on the same file at the same time without any form of version control and just direct upload to FTP.

(and yes, I know I should leave this job already, but social anxiety of starting at a new company is a big obstacle for me)

Have you ever considered switching to IT support/help desk?
I mean, sometimes I try to analyze my own situation from a 3rd person perspective and I realize I could have a pretty much stressless job with still enough money to live a normal life.
I have a BSc and MSc(soon to have) in CS, with focus on AI/ML. I've always been a geek with a problem solving attitude, that's why I got into computers in the first place. And now I'm pondering if I should just try an IT Support position, it's the kind of things I used to do as a teenager when a classmate had a network/computer problem, it doesn't even feel like a job to me. I could call it a day, get home at 5/6pm, and spend time on my personal projects (software, infosec) with a fresh mind, going to bed (and sleep) knowing that the next day would be a nice one. No clients wanting a new feature that you gotta implement and push on a production server friday afternoon because your ceo(who is also a pseudo proj manager) just said:"Yes, we can", while you watch the technical debt rising like amazon's stocks.
Maybe this is just the burnout talking, I don't know. Maybe I should just try being a software engineer outside of Uni in the first place, and only then start pondering.
Maybe a sysadmin position...
Have a nice day

Push it to production.

I think I just realized what my biggest gripe about our career paths that I hate the most.

This is something that has worsened over time, especially the last 2 to 3 years.

As developers, we have far too many options. Some of the most powerful apps are written with languages that have hard, and I mean HARD, guardrails in place. If the app is written in a language that does not meet this criteria usually a framework has been used to install those guardrails.

We just get our minds so wrapped around the possibilities and the opportunities in the software, that we just can't focus on the end result. We're like puppies that are excited about something and we just piss all over everything.

In my career I have met far too many developers that don't have the capacity and mental fortitude to take control of their actions. Because of this I think the only way for us to stop this corruption, that I feel we are nurturing, the solutions/services that we use need to push back on us and install those guardrails for us.

All this came from a change that Microsoft put in place that seems well intended, but introduces yet another choice and a multitude of opinions in how you release code.

It used to be a simple check box. If it was checked it was pre-release, if it was unchecked it was a production release. That's it. On or off. The simplest choice you ever needed to make on a release.

Now though, there are two check boxes. One for a pre-release and one for a latest release. You can also not check either for some "ephemeral" release? So now something as easy as on or off has been made into a difficult decision on how this works within my pipeline. Now every time I make a release I have to ask myself, "which one do I check?"

I shouldn't need to spend more than a second to identify a path forward on simple shit like this, but here we are with a third choice.

Can we just stop overcomplicating shit?

That feeling when you're optimizing your code and comment a small function to compare results, then few hours later you push to production and forget everything about that function.

It aint pretty, nope I can't run away from this one!

Push everything to production...
then......... u hear.
can we change the whole content, it is not appropriate (10th time)

We need to go live by this month 10.

Yep, infra is ready in production. You can push the events and see the results right away.

PM: Wow, great. Setup staging we need to test it.

Me: FML, staging machines are smaller, can't even start the program.

Nothin to get a rant simmering like reFuckingRanting! All good, I'll have another shooter while I wait to reinstall, reconfig, rebuild, rewipe, and reRefuse any and all Windows clammy hand of aid it forces down my soul. One of these days, when the whole realm understands we don't need this vast array of exactly the same shit but this one's dick is a little bigger so lets fucking make it, this and not that, and rebuild, push the update, need 4 more updates by noon next day. Nothing stays stable team green, NOTHING. Fuck anyone trying to actually ...make something..We got vulns and updates, backdates, and breaking changes on all 58 of our same shit production line shit shows. I can't count one time in this few year pain olympics that in a single 8 hour span of time the same shit that was working like a fucking wet glove in a horses ass at whiskey 1 was NOT fucking anywhere near coherent come whiskey not 1. Just sayin, is this a cock show boys? Or is is just a wild and rambunctious thought to maybe start compiling/combining some key role playing pieces of softwar? If not, I'll just prep for another round of fucks, and carry on. Sadly, this shit is addicting against many odds. Enjoy your lunches

Probably fixing an error, not really knowing because it can't be reproduced in your shitty dev environment, push to production and just enjoy, my day every day...

We use Sequelize. This is how we do database structure changes:

- I create/change a model in Sequelize, and let it change my local database, then I do work on that
- I push the new code to a remote branch
- my boss/CTO/lead dev then manually creates/changes the relevant table(s) in our staging database
- I finally merge the branch I originally developed into the remote branch
- boss checks that everything is working
- at last, boss does the same process of modifying/creating tables in production database
- finally, staging code is merged into main

So right now:
- I'm changing a feature, forgot I was editing in the main branch
- go ahead and create a remote branch for it, pull locally, checkout local version of newly created branch
- try to run code
- oops, there's a missing column in one of my local database tables
- ask for boss for SQL script that will create the missing column and potentially add more data or whatever
- waiting for boss to respond

H-how can we improve this process? Boss has talked about us moving to use migrations but we never ended up doing it. I don't know much about migrations either. This is gonna suck so hard.