Boss: I saw that you are using {some JavaScript library}, why?

Me: you asked for this functionality and the library is very good for that

Boss: here at our company we do not use code from other people, we write everything ourselves

Me: but this library is very well built, actively developed and supported

Boss: I don't care, please rewrite this component

Suffice to say, I quit that job asap. Whoever thinks it's a good idea write so much code for a small purpose in an application when there is something available open source to use, is stupid. In most cases it's better to use something which is out there than to waste time writing a hardly stable version of it.

I'm 54 y.o.

I think I'm completely outdated in my skill, as in the last 14 years, I worked on a specific business problem, with an old technology: a JSP application + javascript + postgres.

I do understand software development, agile, web application development, linux server, basic/moderate AWS skills, etc.

Now they laid me off instead of including me in the evolution of version 2 of the software. Maybe covid, company had almost no cash-flow. Well they have now...So basically they fired me to find money to rewrite the application.

I feel without hope at my age.
I'm a generalist.
I can understand fairly well everything you'll throw at me, reactnative, angular, nosql, python, but I have little first-hand experience.

I don't have a lot of management skills, even if I've given frequent presentations to C-roles and board, and I implemented a whole agile methodology in my team.

I don't know what to do.
The amount of technology to study is huge nowadays. When I was younger I could get away with some php and java.

Full-stack developer is a big word for me. Maybe I could handle a full stack web application, but not from scratch.

I feel at my age, I'll compete with 20-something guys with better skills and lower salary requests.
I don't think I can pull a night anymore.

I'm trying to shoot high to management positions with no much success.
I'd like to go on developing, I know that there are 50-something developer out there, but who managed to find a new position at 55? at 60?

As soon as I finish the few money I spared, I'll be on the street, I'l be the "website for food" guy.

Fuck you fucking piece of self taught shit. Self taught my ass you dont even know how to use git or how to use modern IDE. You dont even know how to use debugger. You dont read other peoples code because you are an arrogant kid who thinks that everybody elses code is trash. Yet after couple days when you need to work on your own code you usually rewrite entire fucking thing because of how fucked up your spaghetti implementations are. Even worse you dont even know fucking english so documentation is useless to you unless I dumb down everything for you and spoon feed you like a 5 year old. Motherfucker you cant even stick to a proper work schedule, you go to sleep at 7am and wake up at 18.00 and I have to fucking work overtime because Im blocked by your spaghetti code. Fuck you fucking self taught arrogant piece of shit who never ever worked as a dev profesionally yet you have the nerve to feel cocky.

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."

Someone please shoot me right now.Or better a blackhole could just collide with earth right now and annihilate everyone and everything!
We are supposed to launch the app this coming Friday and as of Monday this week everything was OK.
Just yesterday this client came up with dozens of changes that demand a major rewrite of the backend.

The thing with this client is that she doesn't realize I deal with the mobile apps and not the APIs.Right now am headed to the management office to explain why the app is not updated after she sent this email today morning.
This is not the first time she has demanded changes a week to the launch and i feel like i should stand up to her but you know, i have bills to pay.

You can't imagine how many lines of pure and utter horseshit, seemingly written in PHP, I had to dig through this whole weekend. (relating to my 2 previous rants)

How is it even possible to write code this unbelievably ugly?

Examples:
- includes within loops
- included files use variables from parent files
- start- and endtags separated to different files
- SQL queries generated by string concatenation, no safety measures at all (injection)
- repeating DB calls within loops
- multiple directories with the same code (~40 files), only different by ~8 lines, copied
- a mixture of <?php echo ... ?> and <?= ... ?>
- a LOT of array accesses and other stuff prefixed with "@" (suppress error messages)
- passwords in cleartext
- random non-RESTful page changes with a mixture of POST and GET
- GET parameters not URL-encoded
- ...

My boss told me it took this guy weeks and weeks of coding to write this tool (he's an "experienced dev", of course WITHOUT Git).

Guess what?
It took me only 20 hours and about 700 lines of code.

I must confess, since this task, I don't hate PHP anymore, I just simply hate this dev to death.

Addendum: It's Monday, 5:30am. Good night. 😉

Let's make something in angular sounds like a great idea.
6 months later
Let's port everything from angular to react as angular 2 is a complete rewrite.
Another 6 months later.
I think i like the simplicity of vuejs.
Lets try that now. 😂😂😂

I am a back-end developer, never suggested otherwise. My company is a firm of 50 people and owner hired a web designer to code our website. And it got hacked. Badly. So boss tells me to check if I can fix it. I take a look at the PHP and boy, written in PHP3, copy paste code from all over the place, hell the admin panel is a clone from a 2012 tutorial, nothing that remotely stares at the DB is checked for SQL, and now he wants me to design a new website, rewrite everything in PHP7 and had the balls to say "I know it's not your job, but it's a job, so do it"

This story starts over two years ago... I think I'm doomed to repeat myself till the end of time...

Feb 2014
[I'm thrust into the world of Microsoft Exchange and get to learn PowerShell]

Me: I've been looking at email growth and at this rate you're gonna run out of disk space by August 2014. You really must put in quotas and provide some form of single-instance archiving.
Management: When we upgrade to the next version we'll allocate more disk, just balance the databases so that they don't overload in the meantime.

[I write custom scripts to estimate mailbox size patterns and move mailboxes around to avoid uneven growth]

Nov 2014
Me: We really need to start migration to avoid storage issues. Will the new version have Quotas and have we sorted out our retention issues?
Management: We can't implement quotas, it's too political and the vendor we had is on the nose right now so we can't make a decision about archiving. You can start the migration now though, right?
Me: Of course.

May 2015
Me: At this rate, you're going to run out of space again by January 2016.
Management: That's alright, we should be on track to upgrade to the next version by November so that won't be an issue 'cos we'll just give it more disk then.

[As time passes, I improve the custom script I use to keep everything balanced]

Nov 2015
Me: We will run out of space around Christmas if nothing is done.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: The question is not how much space... it's when do you want the existing storage to last?
Management: October 2016... we'll have the new build by July and start migration soon after.
Me: In that case, you need this many hundreds of TB
Storage: It's a stretch but yes, we can accommodate that.

[I don't trust their estimate so I tell them it will last till November with the added storage but it will actually last till February... I don't want to have this come up during Xmas again. Meanwhile my script is made even more self-sufficient and I'm proud of the balance I can achieve across databases.]

Oct 2016 (last week)
Me: I note there is no build and the migration is unlikely since it is already October. Please be advised that we will run out of space by February 2017.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: Like last time, how long do you want it to last?
Management: We should have a build by July 2017... so, August 2017!
Me: OK, in that case we need hundreds more TB.
Storage: This is the last time. There's no more storage after August... you already take more than a PB.
Management: It's OK, the build will be here by July 2017 and we should have the political issues sorted.

Sigh... No doubt I'll be having this conversation again in July next year.

On the up-shot, I've decided to rewrite my script to make it even more efficient because I've learnt a lot since the script's inception over two years ago... it is soooo close to being fully automated and one of these days I will see the database growth graphs produce a single perfect line showing a balance in both size and growth. I live for that Nirvana.

Wrote a rant yesterday (or recently?) in which I explained that I needed to rewrite the core of something I'm writing in order to make it more extendable/flexible/modular.

Finished the rewrite yesterday and started to write a module (it exists our of modules and one can write a specific module for a specific kind of task) for another use case that has shown itself in the past few weeks.

Fun thing is that part of the core stayed the same and I hardly made changes to the libraries which the core uses a lot but the modules are, except for a few similarities (like one default invoke methods), completely different but do use the libraries to make sure they've got all functions needed to properly fulfill their task.

Ran a rule (what I call something in the project) hoping that everything works together the way it's supposed to and that the config files are interpreted well by the parsing 'engine' (pretty much switch cases and if-elses 😅).

FUCKING BAM IT FUCKING WORKS 😍

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

A few months ago I was working on a (totally underpaid project) where my friend and I had to basically rewrite the entire program our client was using.

So we started planning and wrote all sorts of documentation to show the client our ideas for the new flow of the program, the new structure of the GUI and a few more details of what would the inner workings of the new app. He seemed to like all those ideas and gave us the green light to go through with the project and start coding.

We spent a couple of months coding, redoing the front end from scratch (with a different framework even, so I couldn't reuse any code from the old version) and completely redesigning the back end so it would be better, faster, more scalable etc etc etc. During this process, we obviously showed the progress of the app to our client, explaining everything we had been doing, and he seemed to like every new version we showed him.

When we were in one of the last stages in development (basically sending versions of the app to the client for evaluation), the guy suddenly changed his mind. After agreeing on everything we had been showing him over the last months, he sent an email saying:

"...the new system makes the app too complicated. I want this program to be as simple to use as possible; so we should revert the "Policy" system to essentially what it was in the last major version. The only change I want to make is [...] and everything else is essentially the same as the last Policy system."

So basically he wanted us to FUCKING UNDO EVERYTHING WE HAD DONE AND REVERT THE FUCKING PROGRAM TO THE FUCKING VERSION HE HAD BEFORE HIRING US!!!! WHAT THE FUCK????

YOU WANTED US TO CHANGE YOUR APP AND THEN YOU SUDDENLY CHANGE YOUR MIND AFTER 3 FUCKING MONTHS WHEN THE PROCESS IS DONE???

GO FIND A SWORDFISH TO FUCK YOU IN THE ASS, IM NOT WORKING FOR YOU ANYMORE

God, it feels good to let that out.

I just finish "rebuilding" a page that I have built last year. My Js file (jQuery) went from 1200+ lines to 600..

I rewrite everything, the functionality is the same but the code is mush more cleaner.
Soo bad and redundant code.

Although comments where very helpful.

Feels good.

Ticket: Allow merchants to customize how their Wallet Passes look! It’ll be super easy, just add these nine merchant-modifiable strings (they support vars) and use their contents for text instead of what we use now. Simple!

Reality: There need to be 24 strings, there are some rules I can’t convey to the merchant (because the system literally does not include instructions, only a name and a textbox), the code to generate the wallet pass is inefficient, uncommented, branching spaghetti that I’ll need to rewrite (it seriously generates every possible field, and then only uses the ones it needs), the specs are so much worse, and half the default values they want aren’t even possible. As in, I don’t know if it’s a car loan, let alone the exact make and model of the bloody thing.

And no, sorry, we have no way of knowing what their fucking “vertical” is, either, so we can’t display that. Fucking sales.

Asdhkjfsjfads

WHY MUST EVERYTHING SUCK

I seriously feel like this should be a joke/meme.
What you see in the picture is a database table.
This guy's now running around with a degree in something related to web development.

Oh man. Mine are the REASON why people dislike PHP.

Biggest Concern: Intranet application for 3 staff members that allows them to set the admin data for an application that our userbase utilizes. Everything was fucking horrible, 300+ php files of spaghetti that did not escape user input, did not handle proper redirects, bad algo big O shit and then some. My pain point? I was testing some functionality when upon clicking 3 random check boxes you would get an error message that reads something like this "hi <SENSITIVE USERNAME DATA> you are attempting to use <SERVER IP ADDRESS> using <PASSWORD> but something went wrong! Call <OLD DEVELOPER's PHONE NUMBER> to provide him this <ERROR CODE>"

I panicked, closed that shit and rewrote it in an afternoon, that fucking retard had a tendency to use over 400 files of php for the simplest of fucking things.

Another one, that still baffles me and the other dev (an employee that has been there since the dawn of time) we have this massive application that we just can't rewrite due to time constraints. there is one file with (shit you not) a php include function that when you reach the file it is including it is just......a php closing tag. Removing it breaks down the application. This one is over 6000 files (I know) and we cannot understand what in the love of Lerdorf and baby Torvalds is happening.

From a previous job we had this massive in-house Javascript "framework" for ajax shit that for whatever reason unknown to me had a bunch of function and object names prefixed with "hotDog<rest of the function name>", this was used by two applications. One still in classic ASP and the other in php version 4.something

Legacy apps written in Apache Velocity, which in itself is not that bad, but I, even as a PHP developer, do not EVER mix views with logic. I like my shit separated AF thank you very much.

A large mobile application that interfaced with fucking everything via webviews. Shit was absolutley fucking disgusting, and I felt we were cheating our users.

A rails app with 1000 controller methods.

An express app with 1000 router methods with callbacks instead of async await even though async await was already a thing.

ultraFuckingLarge Delphi project with really no consideration for best practices. I, to this day enjoy Object Pascal, but the way in which people do delphi can scare me.

ASP.NET Application in wich there seemed to be a large portion of bolted in self made ioc framework from the lead dev, absolute shitfest, homie refused to use an actual ioc framework for it, they did pay the price after I left.

My own projects when I have to maintain them.

Motherfucker, every fucking meeting on this project we have a fucking 3 week deadline to accomplish the fucking impossible.

And now they practically want me to rewrite the whole fucking application.

And my fucking boss can't fucking shut the fuck up and keep having "ideas" on new thing.

YEU FUKCING STUPID PIECES OF SHIT!!! HOW CAN WE ADD SHIT WHEN EVERYTHING IS HALF ASSED BECAUSE WE DONT STOP ADDING SHIT? FUCK YOU!

I just cant fucking believe this bullshit!

THE PRODUCT YOU'RE ASKING FOR NOW ITS NOT THE PRODUCT WE AGREED ON MAKING. ALL THE ADDITIONAL FUNCTIONALITY AND CHANGES YOU WANT TAKE TIME!

I can't believe how rude can people be! We were supposed to stop working in this product MONTHS ago but you keep asking for changes, for additional things and then you yell at us just because we dont have it ready for yesterday?! You got some fucking balls man just fuck off. You have to understand the development process, every change you ask for can have consecuences that make us rewrite a bunch of code and we also need to test everything again and again to make sure it works! Gimme a break!

Writing a, for me, quite big system and had about everything ready to go, the earliest version about works.

But, it's written for one (broad) specific use case and guess what: in the past few weeks, a few other use cases have presented themselves. The 'principle' is the same so I could integrate them into the current system, but; then I'd have to rewrite the entire thing to be more flexible.

I think I'm going to do that but damn I've been debating this for hours now 😬

Hey Root, remember that super high-priority ticket that we ignored for five months before demanding you rewrite it a specific way in one day?

Yeah, the new approach we made you use broke the expected usecases, and now the page is completely useless to the support team and they're freaking out. Drop everything you're doing and go fix it! Code-complete for this release is tonight! -- This right after "impacting our business flow" while being collapsed on the fucking floor.

Jesus FUCKING christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

If I dropped the ball on a high-priority ticket for two weeks, I'd get fired, let alone for five fucking months.

If I was a manager and demanded a one-day rewrite I can only imagine the amount of chewing out I'd receive, especially on something high-priority.

And let's not forget product ownership: imagine if I screwed up feature planning for someone so badly I made them break a support tool in production. I'd never hear the end of it.

Fucking double standards.

And while I'm at it. Some of the code I've seen in this codebase is awful. Uncommented spaghetti, or an unreadable mess with single-letter variables, super-tightly coupled modules so updates are nearly impossible, typos in freaking constants added across sixty+ files, obviously-incorrect comments, ... . I'll have to start posting snippets to show them off. But could I get away with any of it? ha. Hell no. My code must be absolutely perfect. I hear about any and every flaw, doesn't matter how minor, and nothing can go out until everything is just so.

Hell, I even hear about flaws in other peoples' code during my code reviews. Why? Because I should have fixed it, that's why. But if I do, I get yelled at for "muddying the waters."

Just. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

It's like playing a shell game where no matter which shell I pick (or point to their goddamn sleeve where they're clearly hiding it), I get insulted for being so consistently useless, and god damn, how can I never find the fucking pea or follow the damned rules? I'm so terrible and this is why "nobody trusts me." Fuck you.

I'll tell you why I can't find your damned pea: IT'S RATTLING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HEADS, you ASSHOLE FUCKING IMBECILES.

That's right: one pea among the lot of them.

goddamn I am fucking pissed off.

So a company I'm working at has this internal product. I just got employed and was put into that team.

"First task: refactor some of the code"

Alright, I start refactoring. Oh I may need to write a small class for this one. And then rewrite this a bit. And then rewrite that a bit. And then rewrite everything.

"Why are you rewriting most of my code?"

oh i would not have needed to do so if your code was not COMING OUT OF YOUR ASS and if all the teams had FREAKING PROPER API DOCUMENTATION

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

i am fucking tired of companies that come to me expecting to magically fix their STEAMING PILE OF BULLSHIT AND TRASH CODE. how about when i ask "can i get a project brief", instead of saying "just fix it" or "it just needs to do this", GIVE ME A FUCKING COHERENT AND DESCRIPTIVE WRITEUP OF EXACTLY WHAT YOU NEED. i can't read your minds, let alone read the code the previous cock sucking developer wrote, so guess what? i'm left with no other option but to completely rewrite it. to top it off, instead of giving me god damn excuses as to why you can't get me the api key for your order processing, MAKE A NEW ACCOUNT AND GET IT TO ME. how the fuck do you expect me to test an application when i don't even have access to the fucking api the whole shit pile is based around? i swear to god if these people expect me to have this done by the end of the week but want to be little cunt nuggets they can go eat shit. fuck you, fuck your "contract", fuck your company, FUCK EVERYTHING. greedy, shit faced bastards

So processors have Moores Law, I'm starting to think Web Development has one too.

"There shalt always be a new, better, framework, that would have saved weeks of time, but only after you've hit the point of no return in a project"

Anyone else know the feeling of "damn...I may as well just rewrite everything...."

New country, new company, new team, new projects.
I'm supposed to be the TL of a team working on a React project.

A guy in his late 40s celebrates himself as "the senior", he basically just finished watching a youtube thing, React 101 crash course or similar. The other two juniors who did only Wordpress so far venerate him like a god.

The code, of course, is one on the finest pieces of crap I ever had the pleasure to deal with in my life: naturally a bunch of JQuery plugins for everything, no tests, no state management, side effects everywhere, shared state and globals like hell, everything written in ES3/ES5 style, no types, no docs, build and deploy totally manual, deep props drilling at every level... and not to mention the console.log() shipped in prod.

First day, already headache.
Full rewrite start tomorrow.
Hiring real devs as well.

I'm so fucking tired of OOP.
This bullshit never ends. Everyone treats OOP in their own, proper (of course) way. You read tons of those fashion books, like uncle bob and shit. and then comes a dumb asshole that starts reviewing your code, and tells you doing it wrong. FUCK. and you can't tell anything to your TL or PM cuz they are same dumb asholes. Because after you fix all the bullshit from the first asshole, those more responsible assholes come and tell you that you still doing it wrong.

- uh.. bruh, why don't you make interface for everything? that' S.O.L.I.D, you know.. it just right thing.
- bruh, why don't you use enum and switch case. we need a factory.
- bruh, we don't use abstract classes, use interface
- could you rewrite your linq/stream thing into a class and a method. it's just simpler for us. foreach loop is something everyone knows.

well,then go and LEARN the tool you're dealing with, coderfucker.

FUUUUCK.

Question everything!

Comments lie.. sometimes code does too.. Customers..they lie the most..and are sloppy..

Don't be like customers, don't be sloppy. If you were sloppy own it & don't lie about it!

Pick your fights (trying to fix vs rewrite the shit out of it)..you will know what to do more with experience..

RTFM & docs.. If things still unclear, ask before your dick gets stuck in a toaster!

Ask away, learn about the customers & how they use your product.. you'll be surprised how something intuitive to you might be a rocket science for them..meaning more room to fuck things up when using it..more ways you can adapt & prevent things..

Most of all, don't fuckin lie.. ever!!
If you lie on you're CV, we will find out.. If you fuck up something & lie about it, we will find out.. but it will cost us precious time when solving it from scratch.. People fuck up..that's a fact..how you go about it is what makes/breaks it for me. So don't ever fuckin lie to me!!

And don't be arogant.. if you complain about fixing bugs, this is not a job for you.. if you can't even fix the obvious ones you've put there in the first place..twice as bad..

So think before you code..what do you want to do, how you want to accomplish this, is it reusable, can it be extended, does it introduce new technology into the project, will it fuck up current setup.. once you have this shit figured out, code will write itself..

Did I mention already you're not to lie to me, ever?!

And don't try talking about me behind my back either..I've seen it backfire before, results were not good..

I consider just strangling somebody because iOS14 fucked all legacy Google Cardboard SDK apps overnight.

8 months already, still can't get all my old apps to work, for a thousand reasons.

If I didn't know better, I'd sue somebody. But it's apple, and I'm not Epic, so fuck me.

"Ohh dude why dontya just rewrite your apps to support Unity XR? hurr durr easy peasy lol so cheesy"
I'm tryin, but it's so underdeveloped and featureless, that I need to rewrite and create everything, and in some cases I can't because old apps had many dependencies. I am porting all my prefabs for hundreds of unpaid hours over the last 3 quarters already, and keep getting stuck.

Today I just extended an 8th deadline set by my clients. Each of those are exponentially more explosive and demotivating. It's not just the question of losing money for them - some of their careers depend on these apps I had made. (Long story, but it's exactly like that)

WHAT HAPPENED TO MAINTAINING LEGACY SUPPORT?!?! Nobody asked anyone to deprecate perfectly well working gyro/accel api on all <5 year old iPhones overnight TIM.

What do you do when another dev overwrites/changes your working code without telling you, only because s/he cannot understand how your code works?

And your code was working fine, mind you, no bugs or anything, and is following recommended guidelines/standards. It's just that this other dev has a different coding style and prefers to rewrite everything his/her way even if it means breaking up otherwise sound logic.

This is my first rant here, so I hope everyone has a good time reading it.

So, the company I am working for got me going on the task to do a rewrite of a firmware that was extended for about 20 years now. Which is fine, since all new machines will be on a new platform anyways. (The old firmware was written for an 8051 initially. That thing has 256 byte of ram. Just imagine the usage of unions and bitfields...)

So, me and a few colleagues go ahead and start from scratch.
In the meantime however, the client has hired one single lonely developer. Keep in mind that nobody there understands code!
And oh boy did he go nuts on the old code, only for having it used on the very last machine of the old platform, ever! Everything after that one will have our firmware!

There are other machines in that series, using the original extended firmware. Nothing is compatible, bootloaders do not match, memory layouts do not match, code is a horrible mess now, the client is writing the specification RIGHT NOW (mind, the machine is already sold to customers), there are no tests, and for the grand finale, the guy canceled his job and went to a different company. Did I mention the bugs it has and the features it lacks?

Guess who's got to maintain that single abomination of a firmware now?

So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.

Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….

My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.

After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …

So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???

Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...

Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.

First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself

Why the hell not?!

BOSS: Hey we should start implementing this thing in that program

ME: Yes but everything that is required for that at lower level is not yet done

BOSS: Just pretend it's done

ME: that is stupid, even if we have a general idea on how it will be done what's the point of writing code that relies on something that is not yet defined, I need to read that stuff and I don't know how we will structure that data

BOSS: Just make a guess you will fix it when the lower level stuff is done

ME: But it makes no sense! We will basically have to rewrite ground up everything

BOSS: also can you check the printer n°3 it doesn't connect to my PC

😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄😄

Project in college, many moons ago.

Team is building a robot for a project. Nothing too crazy, it does some simple tasks like walk along a path and shit.

3 weeks for the project. 3 team members.

The largest graded part of the project is the ability to follow a path based on vision.

The 3rd member INSISTS on doing that part, he says “I want to prove to the professor that I am the smartest in the class so he helps me get a work term.”

Of course, my other partner and I see this as the complete selfishness of a child who will never be employed anywhere worth talking about anyways. He is a big asshole about it and we end up giving in.

## Week 1

We get our parts done (working together the way a team would) without his help.

He struggles, hits walls, complains. You know, dumbass grown child stuff...

## Week 2

We offer to help since we are done. He refuses. The teacher sees all of this and doesn’t like it at all.

After class the 2 of us go to the teacher and let him in on the details. The guy insisted, he is struggling and will not take help etc.

Teacher goes and talks to him and tells him it is a team project for a reason and that we should be helping. He says yes.

Then he misses the rest of the classes that week and send an email saying...

“Since everyone decided to keep interrupting me and breaking my train of thought, I could not get anything done in class. Therefore I will be staying home to finish the project from there.”

And to top it off, he didn’t even take home the robot’s connectors he needed to do the damn thing. Haha.

## Week 3

We know he wasn’t going to get it done, so we approached the teacher. We make it clear that we have done all we can and that we are not ok with losing marks because of this.

Since we are both good students that he likes, he decides to give us an option.

You can take a 50% on his part even if he doesn’t get it done (for trying to help) or we can do it ourselves and he won’t get the marks if he doesn’t finish.

## Night before

We say fuck it and do the thing.

In fact, since we were learning Java at the time we decided to do it in Java. Our other prof sees us playing with robots and gets excited, he stays with us and suggest improvements.

In the end we rewrite all 3 robot functionalities in Java and hand in the project the next day.

## The day of

Partner 3 comes into class and says this...

“That walking path part is impossible, I didn’t get it done, but I bet nobody else did either. So at least we will get a 60% on the other 2 parts!” (With a big shit eating grin)

Prof calls our group up. We walk up and the prof looks at the 3rd guy and says.

“Since you have decided to do your part alone, we will have you present your part alone at the end of the groups”

He tries to say something but the prof cuts him off and tells him to sit down.

We show all of our code and the robot does everything perfectly.

Groups go by, now it’s that guys turn.

He says that the walking part was impossible but seems to realize right away that he just saw EVERY other group get it working.

The teacher ask him to stay after class.

## Result

We got a 98 (prof said he was hoping we would have done in VB like asked but he liked the result a lot).

Other guy gets a 5% for his non-working spaghetti code on 0s on the other 2 sections. He blames us, of course.

Bonus Content:

That same asshat above once said this to me...

“I don’t indent my code so that if I work for a company and no one else can understand the code then I am unfireable!”

Yes, he wrote all code like this...

const Example = () => {
Stuff
More stuff
For() {
Stuff
If() {
Stuff
}
}
}

Fuck that guy🖕🏽

When you test/debug every piece of code you made/changed and then find out the rest wasn't working as it should.. FML

Test everything, trust noone!!!!!!
Rewrite all!!

I quit this startup side job coz I was over worked and under paid for 3 years and I decided it wasn't worth the mental fatigue and anxiety. Plus I didn't feel like it added any value to my life other than stress. Gave them at least 2 months notice (since February effective April 30th) coz as the only server side engineer+team lead, I did ALOT. Now they brought this hot shot new CTO who wants me to basically rewrite the entire app before I go while maintaining the existing system and making sure everything functions smoothly (there is a ton I chose to optimise to make things easier for the new dev who they have not hired and I have 4 weeks to go) . The app was built in mongo db now he wants it in mysql. Can't believe ask me this after breaking my neck and falling in and out if depression for this job?!! I want to laugh and scream at the same time.

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

My worst legacy code experience was when I worked as a freelancer and got a tiny job to improve a VBA module in some Excel file for a very big company. So what's worse than VBA? Having to change parts of VBA code that was passed around to other freelancers before like the cheapest dockside whore. After meddling in there for about half an hour I felt like all those cheap ass punter, so I decided to write the whole thing from scratch. What a relief, after 3 hours I was very proud of the thing and it looked clean and well maintained again so I let it back on the streets. 😉
To the coder who comes after me: Please treat her (the code) nice or I will burry you alive in dog poop and burn the whole thing!

IMHO technical dept is kind of like smoking cigarettes for some decades.

You were told that shit will hit the fan but you do not take proper action. And one day you'll realize that you fucked up (or not, also seen that).

Worked for a company in IT, where we maintained an ERP which was "in progress" for over a decade. The basic implementation was done by people with zero technical understanding. To clarify: not self coded. Software was bought. We are talking about integrating the system.

Therefore, the foundation was like a wet noodle. When I joined that company, I told them that they need to address that. I told them that things will get slower and slower and that shit will hit the fan if no proper actions taken.
Even made a list with flaws I found. With potential risk and actions to take, that could then be measured.

At that time, five people worked in said department (including me).

People did not want to listen. "Would be too expensive to rewrite stuff".

Nothing has changed about the wet noodle, but I tried to fix as many things in a working system as I could. Felt like heart surgery, because changes got implemented and "tested" in prod. No version control, no documentation, everyone implemented things like they felt (no guidelines for consistency).
A lot of small fuckups that summed up over the years.

I left the company after two years because I had the chance to land a job as a dev.

Been around two years now since I left. Now 9 people work in that department with around the same efficiency as us 5 people back then.

The new employees struggle to be productive, because things are just implemented poorly and not maintainable anymore.

Had some dialogs with them some time ago. Everything I told them would happen, actually happened. What a suprise :-|
I will not go into too much detail about all the shit that's going on there, as it would be just too much (and my morning coffe is almost finished).

I think that we all know the difference between "not beautiful, but does the job" and "oh, that will backfire - badly". And I wish that my communication skills increase so that people start listening in future.

Rewriting the entire codebase anytime I learn that I was doing something wrong.

Rewriting entire functions whenever I see that my coworker coded bullshit on the fly.

In a nutshell, I should stop trying to rewrite everything!

Got my first legit side-gig as a developer (like had to write an SOW and everything): my kids' pediatrician is amazing, but shes switching to a concierge practice, meaning she wont take any insurance, and shes going from about 1500 patients down to about 200. I already pay my mortgage-worth in insurance on a monthly basis, so we were prepared to say adios to her. At my daughter's last appointment, she pulled me aside and said "what can we do to keep you guys as patients?" and i somewhat jokingly suggested "I dunno, need any websites written?"

As a matter of fact, she did: she just fired her practice's web developer, who gave her a shitty wordpress site and fought like hell to avoid any further maintenance or updates for her. She hates the site's current layout (no surprise there) so she is basically giving me full control over a rewrite.

No user logins, no worries about compliance with PII or any of that. Literally just turning a brochure wordpress site into an angular app, hosting it on her own server and eventually building an admin page where she can change the banner text and upload new images.

And my kids will get free, top-notch health care.

Fuck me. I have to update an Android app I have built 2 years ago. So much have changed, I need to update pretty much every dependency I have and no library seems to compile with the latest Android SDK yet.

I feel like Dr. Strange living the 14,000,605 possibilities when trying different library versions.

It's probably easier to rewrite everything. Now in Kotlin.

I cannot even function right now with how angry I am. If you're a python developer, don't take offence to this unless it describes you.

All the python devs I have ever met so far are pompous arrogant cucks that can't even get out of their own way to save themselves. They make EVERYTHING so fucking complicated and complex that the whole point to a project becomes moot.

Instead of understanding HOW a thing works, their answer is ALWAYS rewrite it how THEY want it to work.

They have what we used to call "little-man" syndrome. They're so concerned that they aren't perceived as intelligent that they overcompensate by making the wildest and most fucked up changes to a project I have EVER seen.

They have gone so far as to break the original functional components of a project just to meet THEIR definition of a healthy python project.

I don't hate the language, but GOD DAMN I HATE THE DEVS.

If this describes you, fuck you. Seriously, just fuck off into whatever python hole you crawled out of and stay there.

Fuck me.

I just finished a 5 kyu quiz on codewars, grabbed my mouse to click the "submit final" button and accidentaly hit the button on the side which jumps to the previous page. I lost everything and have to rewrite it now.

Welcome back, ctrl+a ctrl+c obsession, old friend.

let RANT = $state(true);

Don't even get me started on frontend engineering right now. It's like the wild wild west out here, with no rules or regulations.

I mean seriously, what is going on with frontend engineering these days? It's like we're stuck in some sort of weird limbo state where nothing seems to make sense and everything is a struggle. And to top it all off, the project I've been working on for the past two years has the same damn issues as an existing codebase that I was hoping to leave behind.

For some reason the npm build runs when container starts. Are you kidding me? Every time I have to restart the app, I have to wait for 30+ minutes just for the damn thing to build. And what's worse, it's not even a complex app. It's a simple frontend for a research website. So why the heck does it take so long to build?

I'll tell you why, because some genius thought it would be a good idea to build the entire codebase every time the container starts. And I have no doubt that this same genius probably thought it would be efficient and time-saving. Well let me tell you, it's neither efficient nor time-saving. It's just plain infuriating.

And don't even get me started on the codebase itself. It's like a labyrinth of tangled and convoluted code (multiple versions of React and now rewriting on Nextjs). Trying to make even the simplest changes feels like unraveling a giant knot (every freaking component have it's only style and everything from React is being used - hooks, Redux, whatever else is popular). And heaven forbid you make a mistake, because then you have to wait another 30 minutes for the whole thing to build and see if your change even worked.

And let's not forget about the old codebase that is still being used, because the new one wasn't ready in time. So we're constantly having to switch back and forth between two different codebases, trying to remember which one has which functionality, and hoping that we don't break anything in the process.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against rewrites. In fact, sometimes they are necessary for a project to move forward. But when frontend engineers can't seem to make up their mind and constantly want to rewrite the code, it's a recipe for disaster.

And don't even get me started on the experience level of the frontend engineers who started this project. Most of them only had 2-3 years of experience (at the time of inception some of them has less than 1 year of experience), and yet they managed to convince management to approve this mess. It's like the blind leading the blind.

But hey, who needs experience and expertise when you have shiny new technologies and frameworks to play with, right? Isn't that what matters most in frontend engineering these days? Keeping up with the latest trends and constantly jumping on the "hype train" without any real understanding of how it will impact the project in the long run.

As a backend engineer (so I kinda don't give a flying freak about frontend) with almost two decades of experience and who was doing frontend with jQuery back in 2005 - that's frustrating and all the inconsistency is literally killing people (a couple of clients literally dropped the contract because of frontend quality).

RANT = false;

PS: why I used Svelte runes? Because some freaking genius suggested to port new (unreleased, only beta version) frontend UI to Svelte 5 because of runes.

Worst experience?
Fourth semester. Programming project.
We were 4 persons, I did almost all the work (including fixing the stuff they broke) but that's not the point.

One of them somehow killed our git repo at least once per weak. It was really annoying, because I had to fix it.

Also he named *all* of his commits 'Pfuschpush' (Pfusch is German for botch). And the code had exactly this quality. I often had to rewrite everything he did (or simply revert the commit).

As a student I got involved in a project written by another student who wasn't working at the company for the time I started. It was a web based application written in plain JS and PHP. His attempt was really terrible and I had to rewrite almost everything. If I sum this up I deleted about 4k lines of code and replaced them with about 2k of my code. My attempt is scalable and it is much easier to build new functions and modules.

I have tried hard to show my ex boss a better way to build web apps. I really tried.
I understand that some people just don't want to lose their investment, and in my opinion classic ASP was bad but not nearly as bad as a lot of people made it out to be. I enjoyed it, was fascinated by the ammount of shit I had to do by hand when using it and the lack of more modern paradigms as the ones found in more mothern languages, but really believed that it microsoft wanted they could have continue to provide updates to the language and ecosystem rather than dropping everything in favor of .net ( which is awesome really)

But his time is ticking and I really liked him as a person, he was kind and willing to adapt to my schedules and pay considerations. I really don't want him to lose clients because his stack does not conform to the new and shiny.

I guess he is scared of me offering to rewrite portions in newer tech since he does not want me to leave and leave him without a developer that knows that stuff. So i have offered myself a position along him as a partner, not a worker, since that way it will be my product investment and I will not leave it just like that.

Dude is really wealthy so he can afford it and he knows I will not do him any wrong.

I nust wish he would reconsider promptly since it would suck to have me as competition.

This Christmas I transitioned into a new job. At the old job I was the only kubernetes-guy, so since they no longer have any developers who are confident working with that, they decided to go with LAMP-stack.

The data from dev-kubernetes-server was backed up by some guy and moved to an offsite-server, or so they told me. Turns out, he had backed up the kubectl-config-file, and not the databases. Now everything is wiped. Sure glad we still have that config-file!

Of course, since that was only our dev-server, there was nothing too important there, except for all the documentation. The only other backup? On my laptop, which I turned in to them, and is now wiped and used by one of the sales-guys.

Now I’m being called in at least twice a day, since I was their goto-guy for almost anything backend-related. Feels great, after they spent a couple of months attempting to rewrite everything in pure PHP (with a strict no-dependency policy for some reason). Fml.

A few years ago I worked at company specialized in Magento(eCommerce) and Magento was changing their licensing model. At the time they had 3 Versions. Community(free), Pro and Enterprise.

They decided to ditch Pro and either make all migrate to Enterprise(with a discount) or go community which wasn’t really compatible. So some shops were in need of a more or less complete rewrite.

My hdd crashed literally the day before but hey no big deal everything is 99% done and on staging. So I had a Trainee at that Time and thought the last few crappy things could be done in pair programming so he can learn a few things.

But fuck him! That motherfucker! He managed to WIPE the staging server and no that was at a time without gut and no SVN. That dipshit just deleted 2 months of work because he thought it was a good idea to SYNC his empty project to the staging system.

Oh god I nearly stabbed him. He did that shit out of his own mind even though I told him a dozen times what would happen... we had to do the whole thing again with me sitting next to him watching every stroke he made.

Guess he learned something while inward silently raging the next weeks.

Ive got this colleague who knows so much about cloud services, networking etcetera, but 90% of the code he writes I have to rewrite in a way.

So many typos that classnames become unreadable and not understandable.
Small pieces of code that breaks so many other pieces of code.
And code which isnnt needed because it doesnt do shite. "o = (o==null?null: o)" (this is the exact thing he wrote (spacing included))

Sometimes it takes me 6 hours to find the source of an issue because he changed something. Everything I change I confront him about because they are things that can be avoided by rereading the code written.

Fucking doesnt wanna learn....

Today after longer vacation I came back to work.

Edit: wrote this rant long time ago, but never finished. Was too pissed.

Some easy meetings, then wanted to start on an easy job.

Just migrating some things from bash regex voodoo to proper tools like JQ.

Finished in roughly 1 h. Lovely.
Made some tea, ate some cookies.

Set up dev environment, found no documentation what so ever, got it running after half an hour.

Annoying, but ok.

Then I tried my scripts...

They worked... Except they didn't.
Console log empty, response code 200 with state: GENERATE_NO_FILES.

Eh. Fuck you. Just fuck you.

Fixed the logging configuration, which was broken since uhm... 2 years plus?

Well... Another half another hour gone...
Kinda pissed now.

Still script return failed...
Poking and trying to sprinkle debug all over that shit cause everything seems ... An incohesive, inconsistent diarrhea.

3 hours later...

Made the ticket to rewrite it.

I did nothing wrong at all.

The API just has no workflow at all. The
*seperate* API calls have to be in an **specific** order - as otherwise the generation will fail, as the prerequisites for the generation are not fulfilled.

Yeah. Completely logical. Especially not to give out any kind of warning or an error message like requirements not met, blablabla.

I drank that evening 2 six packs of beer. I was raging mad....

Then gave that shit to another manager, as I never want to touch that nuclear waste again....

How can someone be so brain damaged -.-

I gave a 2 day estimate to the managers once, and a 10 minute estimate to my peers.
The server side code went smoothly. Couple of minutes, done.

Then I remembered the front end was written under a tight deadline....
Imagine controlling state with jquery, except the state is in html slightly differently to hints in javascript, and there are 7 points of state control, and they have to be triggered in the right order because a few of them depend on everything else, and if you change the wrong line the computer starts pouring smoke everywhere and WHY THE HELL DID I NOT REWRITE IT!

Any other IT company is like:

* Task -> Designer -> Markup coder -> Backend -> Finish

Our IT company:

Act I: "Art of setting up contact with idiots".
------
Items:
*Cave scripts (aka "typical task")

Designer: -- "DAFUQ?"
Customer: *gives another interpretation*
Designer: -- "Erm... really? White text on white background?"
Customer: -- "Make a decision by yourself. I was expecting much more independence from you. You are an expert after all."
Designer: -- "Well. I'm making decision by myself. The text will be placed *here* and will be gray-colored, because *bla-bla-bla*"
Customer: -- "I disagree."
Designer: *1 hour of silence later* -- "Well...k."

Act II: "Design meets ar(u)tist"
----

Items:
*Something, that was drawn by dumb kid while smashing his own head against desk. (PSD layout)
* Salt (to pour it on open wounds)

Designer: -- "I'm seeing this task *this way*"
Markup: -- "And how do u think i should get this done? Have you even seen what you made?? This is bullshit!"
Designer: -- "It's not bullshit! It's a sci-fi themed layout!"
Markup: -- "With gameplay elements and graphics from Alien Shooter??"
Designer: -- "Well, I don't care." *brings new edits and changes*
Markup: -- "????"
Designer: *smug face* -- "!!!"

Act III (7 days later, 9 hours till deadline): "Short story about boy, who was trying to hang himself, but instead fell out from window."
----

Items:
*Markup, smelling like it went through hell and back (x1)
* Markup coder with fried butt (x1)

Backend: -- "What. Is. THAT?"
Markup: -- "It's a work we should complete in 9 hours."
Backend: -- "WE?? I know u mean me, but that's a nightmare. What the f*ck were you doing all this time?"
Markup: -- "Well..." *finds out that he was only watching films and sleeping* "I was making this thing up..."
Backend: -- "You mean "f*cking" *this* thing "up"?"
Markup: -- "Not without it"

(*3 hours of edits and changes of color from white to white later*)
Backend: -- "Well, let's do this."
*Picks PHP and tries to bundle it up with MongoDB. After some time tries to rewrite everything to JS and starts shouting something like "F***CK" and looking for window to walk through. Figures out that he is on first floor. And that he is too lazy to go upstairs*

Act IV (3 days after deadline): "Pain and misery":
-----

Items:
*Something covered with insul(t)ating tape. (Final product)

Customer: -- "Really?"
Team: -- "Kinda."
Customer: -- "Well, thanks for your work anyway. It feels like it's going to disassemble right in my hands but it just works. Oh, also, you didnt made this in time, so your payment will be over9000 times lower. That's all"
Backend, on fluids: -- "Well...yeah..."
Markup: -- "Don't look at me like that. I really was doing my job."
Designer, with twitching eye: -- "Huh, I see. You worked so hard that we have nothing to eat now. Thanks for that."
Backend: ...

Just needing to vent a bit...

We start off with classic asp.net & Xamarin. K.

Then we run into the shitshow that's lackluster documentation and heavy push for asp.net core.
Whatever, will just handroll things.

K. Azure is quickly turning expensive..
Well let's find alternatives.

Yeah, no Linux ain't gonna work.
Wanna shell out for a windows server? Nah.
K. Well, let's rewrite in asp.net core then.
Nginx proxy passthrough to kestrel. Ez.

Now.. wtf is the deal with mssql behaving like a turd on Linux?
Oh now some security jibber about telemetry and adding Microsoft keys to root.

Whatever. I can do PHP & MariaDB then.

1001 things wrong about Xamarin now.
Mostly performance related.
Especially cuz custom renderers for everything.
& Abused onPropertyChanged.

Uh la la, look at that sexy thing called react native.
Hippytyhop new tool for the job.

Ugh wee, what's this ? Customer impatient & deadline for months worth in Xamarin => 1 week.

Whelp I be fudge..

Today I could finally spend some time reviewing the merge requests an intern made (and I occasionally helped).

My god, I want to put it this months amount of work an, put it in a trash, burn it and rewrite it before the fire is gone.

5 small and unrelated issues. The intern used branches with the correct naming scheme, but IT'S A FUCKING STRAIGHT LINE BUILDING ON TOP OF EACHOTHER.

Oh ans also they took the liberty to update the dependencies and the language versions used. There was no issue regarding this. It's the first branch in the line and it was called "update_<dependency>" where they just upped the version numbers of everything and then COMMENT OUT all mentions of <dependency> so that it compiles at the very least.

Now today I spend most of my time reviewing the code by fixing that mess. Thanks to updates I had to update the CI and replace some libraries that are now incompatible. Tomorrow I can finally inspect the shit itself.

On a positive side node, I removed node as a dev dependency and the size of the node modules went down from 128mb to 18mb

*thinks about making an led project with sound analyzer*

ah that’s just some basic math and there is probably an RPI compatible sound analyzer library on npm…

> starts project in node
> realizes the ws2811 adapter library doesn’t have everything you need
> forks and implements those changes
> compile for node
> realized there is no good sound analyzer in node
> starts to rewrite an c++ solution in node

Wait what the fuck am I doing here?

> starts the project from scratch in c++

!rant

For a bunch of application redesigns that we are doing at work I am letting the other two developers in my department help with selecting the stack. Normally, we work with Java and PHP, and while they seem to enjoy php I find them concerned at the possibility of making it more Java centric.

So I compiled a list of examples of different tech stacks that are not only more modern (cuz our Java stuff is old JSP stuff) but also simple to learn and use. Mind you, the point is to make this a gradual change, not just rewrite the entire house from scratch.

the list contained examples in:
Python: django and flask

Ruby: Ruby on Rails

Java: Spring Boot

Golang: Small self made mvc framework I built, nothing fancy on it, it uses templates and shit, didn't make it api centric

Node: Express examples in both vanilla JS and TypeScript

php with Laravel.

Since we work with php most of the time as well I imagined that they would be more inclined for Laravel, but I was wrong :P they seemed to like the Node Express route and the Golang route more than anything else with Python and Django being close.

Personally I know that there is more to selecting a stack, but initial perceptions make for a lot of things in selection of the stack.

Pretty excited, if they gauge everything considered in regards to what we have and we found Golang to be a clear winner it would give them the chance to add a nice and competitive tech to their resumes.

not a rant, or anything per se, just wanted to share some stuff with y'all

New day. New legacy project that needs triage.

The project has existed since before 2000 so it all "works" and has no known business logic bugs. It does however have performance issues which sure I can have a look. It can actually be quite fun and rewarding to optimize performance.

This is a titanic dotnet framework leviathan consisting of over 12,000 cs files using razorpages, entity framework, and... nhibernate? I have my gripes with both EF and NH but they are both fine if used correctly, like any other tool. I've never seen them used together however.

As It Turns Out™, NH was implemented first and at a time when NH did not support async operations. It made sense if you look it up and it's meant to delegate commands via a separate layer, but different story.

Then for... reasons... EF came in and gradually took over.

Because of the way this is all set up, everything will faceplant if you try doing anything async, even if it has nothing to do with calling the db. Any attempt in making this work leads you down a slippery slope of having to rewrite the entire thing, which is out of the question in terms of their budget and expectations.

Sometimes it's a detriment when it works in spite of its issues.

I was asked to make proof of concept small frontend app with some simplified requirements, they asked me because it should be written in the stack I done most of my career work with. I do it in 3 days instead of 5, using those 2 days to optimise the app and explore different approaches. I noted down my findings, what to avoid and reasons and also what is good to use and reasons and shared with everyone.

We waited for the project to start, I started working on another project in the meantime and there was a big rush to make project go live etc., so I was consumed 100% on that new project.

So they put in charge backend php developer to do frontend js work. I said ok, do you need help in starting out? Nah, my proof of concept repo is enough.

4 days before that small project goes live they asked me to do code review. All things I noted down to avoid are in the codebase, few bad practices but everything is over-engineered (in a very bad way), some parts should be more flexible as current setup is very rigid, having almost all kinds of CSS, I saw SASS, CSS variables, 2 different CSS-in-JS tools with some additional libraries that is used to toggle classes.

I don't know how to approach this as I am not asshole as a person and I don't want to say to my colleague that his codebase is completely trash, but it is.

The worst parts: They called me to help finish the app and budget is almost spent!

I would rewrite the whole app as the state of the current app is unusable and everything is glued with bad Chinese ducktape that barely holds.

Additional points because it won't bundle as everything is f**ked.

I am seriously thinking of duplicating master branch and refactor the whole fricking app but won't do that as I am burning midnight oil on other two projects. Don't worry overtimes are paid.

I hate those shitty situations, this project was supposed to be tiny, sweet and example of decent project in this company but it is instead big fat franken-app that will be example how smart it is to avoid putting backend dev to do frontend work (I also agree for vice versa)!

I think the worst feeling ever is taking a break from something, then coming back to it and realizing that you have to rewrite something because you put it off before you took a break.

I've had a lot going on lately, and I decided to work on a web dev project I was doing to get the hang of frontend development. Just realized that I have to rewrite a couple functions. Someone kill me now

12 Stages of Software Development:

1. Analysis.
2. Development
3. Realization the whole analysis is complete bullshit and has nothing to with reality.
4. Denial about failing deadlines.
6. "Acceleration": adding more people to the project, bringing out big corner cutting machine.
7. Learning that massive amount of new features needs to be added, while the deadline is two weeks away.
8. Putting some random crap in production, riddled with horrid bugs and security flaws, to technically not miss the deadline.
9. Get the mess almost working long after the deadline has passed.
10. Maintain this steaming pile of crap for a year.
11. Start planning for full system rewrite that "Makes Everything Better".
12. Goto 1

So our Chief Test Engineer left the company because of overwhelming frustration and stress. We working on new stuffs so we test our partly done product with partly done test tool developed be another of our team. His successor started to drop most of the 3rd party tools and workflows and documentations to trash expect this one unfinished test software.
Now he wants that we add more features to this software so it can replace everything he trashed already: run tests, generate test reports, generate documentations and so on.
On top of that he organized a workshop to read all this software's source code together, understand how it's works so we can rewrite the whole software from scratch.
WHAT?!

!!rant life toptags bottags
My tags seem to be okay. Let's go.
I'm 14. I live in a place where nobody smart lives, and the school I go to has no coders.
Last year, all my friends moved. The only friend I had left now hates me, simply because they yelled at me everyday and I yelled at them once.
I am in the middle of my exams. I also have the flu, but thankfully it's not the e-flu, otherwise you guys should prepare for 24/7 headaches.
Due to the medications I am taking, I'm half-asleep all the time, and I probably am messing up all of my grades.
My entire extended family is in India, and I go there 2 times a year. I miss them so much right now :(.
At the same as doing exams, I am trying to keep my laptop (primary) and PC (secondary, desk) configuration and setup approximately synchronized. In order to do that, I am setting up my dotfiles repository.
Except that all my laptop config (which works) is written horribly, and I need to rewrite it all.
At the same time, I have 3 other projects going on: An OS written in D, a source-based package management system written in D, a small website (not online), and a whatever's cooking in my mind at this moment.
Right now, I'm supposed to be studying for my French exam.
Instead, I'm here, typing this out on my phone.
I have a classmate in school who can type QWERTY at 80WPM. I'm learning Dvorak (Programmer's!) and my current speed is 33WPM, after about 2 months of half-hearted practise during work time and at school.
Sometimes, I look at the world we have here, and what we're doing to it, and I wish that sometimes we could simply be content with life. Let's just live, for once.
I find ~60 random songs in one go, simply by finding a song I know on YouTube and going to the 'Mix - <song>' playlist. I download them all (youtube-dl), and I listen to them. Sometimes, I find this little part in a song (Mackelmore & Ryan Lewis - Can't Hold Us beginning instrumentals, or Safe and Sound chorus instrumentals) that make me feel so happy I feel like all's good in the world. Then the song moves on and with it, my happiness.
I look at Wayland, and X, and I think - Why can't we have one way of doing things - a fixed interface to express anything, so that one common API exists for everything of that type? And I realise it's because they feel that they're missing something from the others. Perhaps it's a bug nobody's solved or functionality that's missing, and they think that they can do better than that. And I think - Well, that's stupid. Submit a fucking bug report or pull request instead of reinventing the wheel. And then I realise that all the programming I've ever done in my life IS simply reinventing the wheel. And some might say, "Well, that guy designed it with spokes and wood. I designed it with rubber and steel," but that doesn't work, because no matter what how you make it, it's just a wheel. They both do the same thing. Both have advantages and disadvantages, because nothing's perfect. We're not perfect because we all have agendas and wants and likes and dislikes and hates and disgusts and all kinds of other crap, and our DNA's not perfect because it manages to corrupt copy operations (which is basically why we die of old age, I think).
And now I've lost my train of thought and this is too large to scroll over so I'm just going to move on to the next topic. At this point (.), I have 1633 letters left.
I hate the fact that the world's become so used to QWERTY because of stuff that happened 100 years ago that Dvorak is enough of a security to stop most people from being able to physically use my laptop.
I don't understand why huge companies like Google want to know about me. What would you do with this information? Know how to take over my stuff when the corporation-opocalypse comes around? Why can't they leave me alone? Why do I have to flash a ROM onto my phone so that Google cannot track me? What do you want, Google?
I don't give a shit any more, so there's my megarant.
Before anybody else (aside from myself) tells me that this is too big, all these topics are related simply because my train of thought went this way. There's a connection between each of these things, but I just don't know what it is.
Goodnight, world. 666 is the number of characters I have left. So is 42, for that matter (thanks, Douglas Adams!). Goodbye.

For some reason I keep over engineering stuff to the point I spend 2 hours thinking the best way to do something. I'm making the backend for a project of mine and I wanted somewhat decent error handling and useful error responses. I won't go into detail here but let's say that in any other (oo) language it would be a no-brainer to do this with OOP inheritance, but Rust does OOP by composition (and there's no way to upcast traits and downcasting is hard). I ended up wasting so much time thinking of how to do something generic enough, easily extendable and that doesn't involve any boilerplate or repeated code with no success. What I didn't realize is that my API will not be public (in the sense that the API is not the service I offer), I'm the only one who needs to figure out why I got a 400 or a 403. There's no need to return a response stating exactly which field had a wrong value or exactly what resource had it's access denied to the user. I can just look at the error code, my documentation and the request I made to infer what caused the error. If that does not work I can always take a quick look at the source code of the server to see what went wrong. So In short I ended up thrashing all the refactoring I had done and stayed with my current solution for error-handling. I have found a few places that could use some improvement, but it's nothing compared to the whole revamp I was doing of the whole thing.

This is not the first time I over engineer stuff (and probably won't be the last). I think I do it in order to be future-proof. I make my code generic enough so in case any requirements change in the future I don't have to rewrite everything, but that adds no real value to my stuff since I'm always working solo, the projects aren't super big and a rewrite wouldn't take too long. In the end I just end up wasting time, sanity and keystrokes on stuff that will just slow down my development speed further down the road without generating any benefits.

Why am I like this? Oh well, I'm just glad I figured out this wasn't necessary before putting many hours of work into it.

Fucking Visual Studio is such a piece of shit. 2 years ago we created a solution for our 7 webclients with 30 projects (clients, common stuff, tests, ...).
Things were ok, we could change something, save the file and everything was built and we just had to reload the client. Only F12 between the projects does not work.

But now the studio doesnt get shit done. Opening the clients solution after a clean checkout takes 5 minutes, saving doesnt build anymore, building breaks the project because it cant find references, rebuilding works but takes 3 minutes. When you have a syntactic error in a file the fucking thing almost crashes and becomes unresponse for a few seconds. It randomly shows errors in some files that disappear once you rebuilt it, sometimes it builds but still shows an error in that file.

But at least we will soon rewrite the clients in angular5 and dont need this piece of crap software anymore for the front end.

If I only could get my team to use another technology for the server so that I dont have to see this big pile of shit anymore. Fuck Visual Studio.

Why the fuck open source solutions need to be such a load of bullcrap? I've spent a week trying to set up every single self-hosted video conference software, and the only thing I've got is a shorter lifespan.

How the fuck does your (judging by GitHub, well maintained) software only support Ubuntu 16.04? And I mean ONLY, there's no support for docker, or any other distro either, and we're only weeks from getting the second LTS since 16.04. And why the fuck does documentation tell me to manually go through 20 different config files just to enable SSL?

Why the fuck doesn't your official AWS cloudformation template include VPC or other required parameters? I've had to rewrite the whole thing just to get a valid stack you dipshit!

And how fucking hard is to make your software look decent, I can't expect clients to chat with me using something that looks like an incest child of 2003 MSN and eDonkey?

Oh, and it'd be fucking dandy if your documentation wouldn't return 404, maybe I'd be even able to test what your product has to offer?

I guess after everything I've tried I'll go with Jitsi; it seems the most decent, although it lacks some pretty basic features like limiting chat features for guests.

Our teacher is such a fucking moron. We wrote a huge fucking test about everything we've learned from him. I've learned like never before for this fucking test. As I wrote it I noticed that what he told us would come in the test, wasn't even in it.
Fast forward a few weeks.
We've got the tests back and surprisingly the average was veeeeery low, BECAUSE HE FUCKING GAVE US THE WRONG TEST. But instead of letting us rewrite it, he will 'Grade our Presentation a bit better. '.
Are you serious?
A presentation is a good grade no matter what and the test counts double.
Everything about this is a fucking joke.

Let me start this off by stating I'm a Java dev, and a noob with C++.

Thought it'd be cool to learn some OpenCL, since I want to do some maths stuff and why not learn something new.

So I sat down, installed Nvidia proprietary drivers, broke my x-org server, purged, reinstalled, rebooted and after a while I got stuff sorted out.

Then on to my IDE. I use CLion and it uses Cmake. C++ noob knows shit about Cmake, so struggle for two hours trying to figure out wtf is going on with the OpenCL libs and why they're only partially detected. Fml.

Finally, everything is configured and I'm set. I start working on a Hello World program using OpenCL. Finish it in 20 mins, all good. No output. Do some googling, check my program a million times. Nothing wrong here. Check the kernel, everything as in the tutorial.

I start checking error codes after a while reported by OpenCL (which I had no clue was a thing) and I get some code saying the program was not created properly (to run the kernel). No fucking clue what's up with that. Google around, find another tutorial, rewrite my code in case I'm using outdated code or something. Nothing.

Fast forward an hour, I find out that OpenCL has logs! So I grab some code from the website I found it on, and voila, I finally get some info on what's going on.

Get a load of this bs.

In the kernel file, so that OpenCL knows that it's a function to run, you have to put __kernel. But in all the places I read, it said to put it as _kernel.

Add the underscore, compile, run and everything is perfect.

Then I tried just putting 'kernel'. Also compiles and runs fine.

Two hours hours and my program was fixed by adding an underscore. IF ONLY C++ GAVE AN INDICATION OF WHAT BLEW UP INSTEAD OF SITTING BACK AND BEING LIKE "oh wow man feels bad, work some magic and try again" THEN THIS WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN SO LONG.

Then again, it was OpenCL that was being shitty with its styling enforcement or whatever the hell the underscore business is. But screw it. C++ eats shit too for this. Sure, maybe Java babies you by giving you the exact error and position that the error took place at. But at least that way you don't waste hours of your life chasing invisible bugs 😠😠

I'm going to eat some food... Too much energy was consumed fighting the system... Then I'll get back to OpenCL because 😇 but that doesn't make it less bs.

!rant

When you get the go ahead to scrap the old legacy code and design it from the ground up

feels_good.jpg

Stop in a middle of a project and come back a few months later. Decide to rewrite everything in latest flavor of JavaScript, then stop in the middle of rewrite. rinse and repeat... This is why I don't have an impressive portfolio yet.

Hey guys. I am in a situation where I need to decide wether to take on a new project or not. And if not, how to turn down that client so that I would not burn any bridges. So I need your opinions on this matter in order to make the final decision.

To make things clear heres some background info. 10 months ago I quitted my fulltime position in another EU country and went back to my own home country. 10 months forward till today and I have my own ltd company which currently has 5 projects. Its doing pretty well money wise. All projects combined, I already earn more then I ever did and I need to work max 10 hours a week since all projects are remote projects so I dont waste time on useless meetings and etc. However I dont feel fulfilled or challenged anymore because surprise surprise doing well paid projects doesnt guarante your sense of fulfillment.

So I noticed that I have lots of spare time which I spend diving into rabbitholes with hobby projects. I decided that its time to scale my company and take on more projects and maybe even hire more people.

So I started searching for other projects I could work on (prefferibly remote projects or flexible ones where I could come in 2-3 days a week in office and work remotely rest of the week). Reason being that I am already out of sync with fulltime position lifestyle and I am totally result oriented, not punch in my hours and go home oriented.

For exampleIf i get my weekly tasks I prefer to do them in 1-2 days (even if it requires doing double shifts which rarely but happens) but then I want to have rest of the week off. Thats how my brain works and thats how Im wired. I cant stand fulltime positions especially in enterprise bigger companies where I come in and do maybe 2 hours of actual work everyday because of all useless meetings and blockers from backend/etc. Its soul crushing to me.

So I posted linkedin ads and started searching for new clients/projects. One month ago I went to an interview for an android project in a startup.

The project looked interesting enough. Main task was to rewrite their android app from java to kotlin. Apparently their current current app was built by a backend developer who wants to focus solely on backend.

So during the interview they showed me their app which was quite simple frontend wise but not so simple backend wise from what I was able to figure out.

Their project lead (also a backed guy) asked me my estimation of price and completion of task. I told them maybe 2-3 months to do everything properly.

Project lead was basically shocked because all other candidates told him they can rewrite the app from java to kotlin in 2-3 weeks. I told him that everything is possible but his app quality will suffer and for a better estimation he would we would need to sign an NDA so I could evaluate the costs. So we ended the interview.

After that we kept in touch for one month (it took them one month to google a generic NDA and sign it digitally with me).

So heres the redflags I noticed:

1. They dont respect my time. Wasted 1 month of my time and after signing NDA gave me 2days to estimate their project and go to a meeting and give them detailed info about what I can offer. I thats not a brain rape then I dont know what it is

2. They are changing initial conditions we talked about. We agreed on rewriting the codebase and be done with it. Now they prefer a fulltime worker who would be responsible for android app as his own product. So basically project lead was not able to find a fulltime dev so now hes trying to convert me (a company owner) to his fulltime worker.

3. Lack of respect. During the interview he started speaking in his own native language to me with some expression (he seemed pissed off at that moment when he switched languages).

4. Bad culture fit. As I said Im used to relaxed clients and projects where I dont need to be chained to a desk a monitored and be micromanaged. I mean lets sign a contract give me access to your codebase and tell me what to do, I will produce results and lets be done with it.

5. Project lead is a backend guy who doesnt understand how complicated android apps can be. No architecture and no unit tests are in his frontend app. He doesnt care about writing proper app since he ships it in his own device so he doesnt need to worry about supporting custom devices or different api levels of android and etc. But not having any architecture? Cmon.

So basically I am confused. Project lead needs a fulltime dev but hes in contact with me in hopes that I would sign a fulltime contract. But how I can work fulltime if all what I can see are redflags?

Basicaly I thinkthis was a misundersanding. Im searching for fulltime remote projects and hes offering fulltime inhouse projects. Project lead never outsourced so hes confused as well.

As you can see decision is already basically made to turn him down, I just need to know how to tell him to fck off in the most polite manner and thats it.

Sooo after returning from my 3 weeks of vacation (student part-timer so no real obligations) I learned that the last two months of work refactoring our legacy app to conform to modern Android app standards, is being shut down because we begin to rewrite everything for cross platform...
Not sure how I feel about it, because I really liked Android development and I poured my heart in it... On the bright side: I'll get to learn more Javascript, HTML, css and polymer stuff which I guess is good.

It still stings a little 😥

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

When you compare your past with your old code:

The improvements you could have made, if you had known what you know now.

A commit a day would have kept everything up to date.

A comment every now and then would have made choices understandable

Using classes would have made it easier to replace or reuse code.

Now you have to figure out what the code is supposed to do, and rewrite it.

It’s certainly a feeling of progress as a dev when you get to using the advanced features of git to rewrite history successfully.

Though to make this a proper rant: holy hell what a ride! I’m glad I had everything backed up somewhere. Somehow I’d went Thanos on the repo. Deleted about half the files at random. Had to fast forward and then rewrite the history via rebase. Dropped a bunch of commits I think I should have squashed. I’m still wondering if I even did the right thing. I think cherrypicking is what I’ll go for next time. My repo now reads 59 commits behind but whatever. All my work got into one commit which is what the dev controlling prod wanted.

What do you think of Elixir + Phoenix to build API’s? Is it a better choice than a more established language like Python or something more new like Scala or Clojure?

At my company we're going through a watershed moment where we're starting to discuss and think about re-building our digital foundations and nothing is off limits. I'm leading the discussion about our architecture where everyone can have their say into what the future looks like for our applications. We're currently on a Drupal (CMS)  + PHP7/Symfony (Backend Content Repository) + Symfony Twig templates (Frontend)

Even though I have been developing in PHP most of my career, I personally love Elixir and spend a lot of my time away from work learning it but many of my reasons feels subjective like pattern matching, it's actor concurrency model, immutable data and not having to deal with classes/objects, and I'm not entirely sure how that translates to business value, advocating successfully for a tech stack change requires solid reasoning and good answers to challenges like how do we find Elixir developers when existing devs leave, how easy is it to build a CI/CD pipeline for Elixir/Phoenix, etc.

Resharper - it makes writing .net code so much more easier and shows you how to rewrite loop.

Everything else VS code - right now it's the new hot thing for me to write ruby, python and JavaScript.

Monday morning
Get to work
Open email
Ci went crazy
Slack is on fire
Some npm modules deprecated approach
Rewrite docker files
Some other npm modules disappeared.

I hate you web technologies, I hate you developers who make releases Friday night.

I hate everything.

Ffs on the weekend just build Ikea fornitures instead of fiddling with my stack!

Sigh.

Sometime last year I had an internship at a small company.

Test servers weren't a thing, and after local testing, it would go to production with a backup of the files that we would put back as soon as we notice something was broken or off.

We used symfony and sonata admin was part of the bundle.

One day, boss asks me to show all the items in a table on the admin page instead of 30 rows.

Me being good guy intern say "sure no problem" so after finding the magic number, I set it to 0 instead of 30.

I gave my work reviewed by my supervisor (senior dev there) and he approved it.

I try to upload the file over FTP. No permissions.

Ask the other dev what it's about, his response: "no idea"

So he tries, fails and decides to try SSH.

Somehow, after fiddling for 20 minutes with ssh, we managed to upload the file.
As soon as we did we hear a scream from the boss's office, we refresh the site, and no matter what page we went to, all we saw was white and the logo of the company in the top left corner.

So this time, we fiddled around with ssh to restore the file for 20 minutes.

Finally succeed all goed back to normal.

A little while later, we call a meeting with the bosses and ask to rewrite the website, BAM, we get approval.

We said "two weeks tops", well that lasted 3 months.

In the end bosses are Uber happy with the work and everything ended well.
Also, development speed has multiplied.

My answer to their survey -->

What, if anything, do you most _dislike_ about Firebase In-App Messaging?

Come on, have you sit a normal dev, completely new to this push notification thing and ask him to make run a simple app like the flutter firebase_messaging plugin example? For sure you did not oh dear brain dead moron that found his college degree in a Linux magazine 'Ruby special edition'.

Every-f**kin thing about that Firebase is loose end. I read all Medium articles, your utterly soporific documentation that never ends, I am actually running the flutter plugin example firebase_messaging. Nothing works or is referenced correctly: nothing. You really go blind eyes in life... you guys; right? Oh, there is a flimsy workaround in the 100th post under the Github issue number 10 thousand... lets close the crash report. If I did not change 50 meaningless lines in gradle-what-not files to make your brick-of-puke to work, I did not changed a single one.

I dream of you, looking at all those nonsense config files, with cross side eyes and some small but constant sweat, sweat that stinks piss btw, leaving your eyes because you see the end, the absolute total fuckup coming. The day where all that thick stinky shit will become beyond salvation; blurred by infinite uncontrolled and skewed complexity; your creation, your pathetic brain exposed for us all.

For sure I am not the first one to complain... your whole thing, from the first to last quark that constitute it, is irrelevant; a never ending pile of non sense. Someone with all the world contained sabotage determination would not have done lower. Thank you for making me loose hours down deep your shit show. So appreciated.

The setup is: servers, your crap-as-a-service and some mobile devices. For Christ sake, sending 100 bytes as a little [ beep beep + 'hello kitty' ] is not fucking rocket science. Yet you fuckin push it to be a grinding task ... for eternity!!!

You know what, you should invent and require another, new, useless key-value called 'Registration API Key Plugin ID Service' that we have to generate and sync on two machines, everyday, using something obscure shit like a 'Gradle terminal'. Maybe also you could deprecate another key, rename another one to make things worst and I propose to choose a new hash function that we have to compile ourselves. A good candidate would be a C buggy source code from some random Github hacker... who has injected some platform dependent SIMD code (he works on PowerPC and have not test on x64); you know, the guy you admire because he is so much more lowlife that you and has all the Pokemon on his desk. Well that guy just finished a really really rapid hash function... over GPU in a server less fashion... we have an API for it. Every new user will gain 3ms for every new key. WOW, Imagine the gain over millions of users!!! Push that in the official pipe fucktard!.. What are you waiting for? Wait, no, change the whole service name and infrastructure. Move everything to CLSG (cloud lambda service ... by Google); that is it, brilliant!

And Oh, yeah, to secure the whole void, bury the doc for the new hash under 3000 words, lost between v2, v1 and some other deprecated doc that also have 3000 and are still first result on Google. Finally I think about it, let go the doc, fuck it... a tutorial, for 'weak ass' right.
One last thing, rewrite all your tech in the latest new in house language, split everything in 'femto services' => ( one assembly operation by OS process ) and finally cramp all those in containers... Agile, for sure it has to be Agile. Users will really appreciate the improvements of your mandatory service.

Am I in developer hell already? A shitty project is about to come to an end (hopefully), or should I rather say: It needs to come to an end. But I am still quite lost in how to deal with it, hence procrastinating on it - making the deadline come closer and with it the realization that I'll probably have to rewrite almost everything. I'm not sure how, but I do know that the current code is a dumpster fire.

Basically what I need to do is dealing with the APIs of different payment providers/gateways (like PayPal, AmazonPay). For most cases I'll get a payment ID from the shop and need to act on it later, e.g. capture the authorized money in the case of a credit card transaction or do refunds (without user interaction, unless there is an error). Now at first I put something together where I try to abstract the payment information into two tables:
orders{1}<->{0..n}payments
payments{1}<->{1..n}paymentDetails

Unfortunately trying to abstract the different payment methods and to squeeze them (and their different possible stati and functions) in these tables was not very successful, it's a total mess with magic numbers, half-broken behavior and without any consideration for partial payments/captures or unfinished requests (i.e. if there is an exception before the response is dealt with, there is no indication that anything has ever been sent). Also the current amount is calculated through the history of the paymentDetails table, which basically works differently for each payment type.

How to fix this mess in a way that I'll still have a job by next week?

I'm trying to improve the db schema first, as I think my biggest problems are lying there. Through some research I've come across a recommendation for making payment type specific subtables (with a magic number/string in the main table to prevent having to look up all subtables). That way I can record what I send and receive without having to abstract it too much, so I'll have an acceptable transaction log. The paymentDetails table can be removed (necessary fields go to the payments table). The payments table gets multiple fields for the amount (differentiating between open, authorized, captured, processing and refunded values) and always reflects the current status.

Tables:
payments
paymentRequestsPaypal
paymentRequestsAmazonpay
paymentRequestsXyz

I think I'm going in the right direction here. hm. Maybe there's some light at the end of this long, dark tunnel. Or a train. I'll have two days to find out.

So a while back I decided to overhaul my entire code base and rewrite everything in one application... yesterday I thought this was bad so have moved back to separate applications, just this time as microservices! Does anyone else do this without ever releasing the initial thing you set out to do?

C is one of those languages that I have no idea why I really even mess around with it. It's cool, and useful, and all that jazz. But holy hell messing up one little line of code is the death of everything.

One forgotten semi-colon, and you whole program is gone. It will mess up other lines of code, which will mess up other lines of code, so on and so forth. I've even had times where I have to almost rewrite little programs I'm playing around with because of how much little errors can mess it up.

Don't even get me started on compiling. I don't even want to get into it now.

Alright, I need an advice.

I have legacy Angular client. It’s impossible to refactor it. The only real option is to rewrite everything from scratch, however, while the team does it, it needs to be accessible to our clients.

The approach I am thinking of is making micro-frontends out of original client and rewriting each of them (in React, Vue, don’t know yet.)

Anyone has experience with that? I would appreciate any advice or suggestion.

Now that I've got most everything in my personal project working, I realize I need to rewrite everything... My code and infrastructure is absolutely horrible 😅

"Hey, can you check this ticket, and fix a bug on a Drupal module written 2 years ago, making you rewrite almost everything, please ? You have 30mn"

Today is a great day. I was asked to rewrite my code to an API I suggested from the beginning of the development of the app but they didn't allow it to me cause it was a payed service. They preferred the free one instead that is not the best but is not half bad. I'm counting on finishing my internship next month cause I need a dev job to get out of my shitty, underpaid job as a steward and rewriting the code will take the very least 3 extra months. I just want to finish my internship so I can build my portfolio website, start the Udacity course for full stack developer certification and get a goddamn dev job.

My company used to just let anyone write code for our customers. Now I am the official development department. I knew someone wrote something very similar to a new request I got from a customer, so I requested his code because I didn't want to rewrite everything. After seeing the code I changed my mind and I want to redo it from scratch.

I got frustrated with my code. I decided to open a new file and rewrite everything with better descriptive names to variables, and combined 3 functions that basically did the same thing into one to be called. It cent nice until my shift was up and I had to go home.

Shitty legacy codebase made by shovelling pile of different shit by some 'cool dude' who left the company 3 years ago. Fixing bugs on this pile of shit all the time, but also I have to document everything as documentation wasn't there at all and fix the whole damn project in the meantime. No linters, no types, ancient libraries that have shitton of issues, hacky behaviours wherever you look, no tests whatsoever.

Except when we want to refactor/rewrite we don't get time for fixing the whole shit as it is worthless - there's no value for customers in that.

the other one was shitty HR talk which consisted of bashing on my technical competencies by computer illiterate troglodyte after which I left the company. They asked me could I stay for 2 more months.

That was that one single NO that felt so great that I will remember it for the rest of my life.

So let's break this down: it's now 2017, the world of development is overflowing with flexible systems written in dynamic coding languages running on powerful hardware. A great deal of which is available to use for free.

This morning I FINALLY got one member of our "R&D" team at work to implement a proper logging system in one of our numerous Java apps... So she adds "log4j-1.2-api.jar" to her project.

*facepalm*

I'm still (3 years down the line) trying to convince them to let me rewrite their build scripts to integrate some sort of dependency management system, since they still use the default generated build for Ant as provided by Netbeans.

There is one bright side though: we're so-fucking-close to being able to ditch MS VSS!

*queue slow clap*

At this rate, how long do you think it will be before we can finally get away from using JDK 1.6 for everything?

!rant

Opend up my first website project, commits goes back to jan 24 2013 but i think i started coding this project around late 2011 (version 2).

Made with php and i found some interesting TODO's and other stuff, over 1k of handwritten css and right above 10k lines of PHP.

Index.php everywhere (no mod rewrite)
Everything in the www root.
By pixel css.

Thank god this is my own website and not for someone else, think i would be tourtured to death if someone had to maintain this heap of shit. To think of i probobly spent around 1000 hours on all iteration.

Not sure if I should refactor this legacy php awful project or just rewrite it from scratch

So what percentage of software projects just get rewritten to make sure people have jobs these days ?

When somebody speaks about "rewriting everything from scratch" I always mention some famous articles claiming: "don't do it!" "big mistake".

Truth is that when somebody says "rewrite everything from scratch" he doesn't mean "everything". He just means "rewrite the 2-3 things that we found useful after 10 years of developing useless features nobody cares about"

So then, yes, rewrite, please

Just started doing my project for Java Class, a Polynomial Calculator App.

Get it done, get a dozen errors. Fix every bug. Find other bugs when inputting.
Brainstorm 5 minutes and realize I could change the way I write the polynomial at input.
Change 20 lines of code that do String, Split, Run through the split and check for coefficient and power, parse them to float in an array to specific positiona - to 5 simple lines.

Program works fine. No more previous errors.
Have the great idea to add the following:
-If you divide the Polynomial by 0 output "Are you retarded?"

P.s. I'm happy about my first project even if I hate Java.

Recently I completed a whole year in programming. Holy jebus, I have no idea I could make it through.
I started thinking I was "decent" at this because I had taken a half dozen courses in python plus some algorithm logic in school lol @ innocent me
I'm an applied math student and I hereby declare I was the most incompetent dude you'll ever see.
I've been through so much shit I didn't realize I had a shitty boss, because one would think it's normal for a beginner to approach everything in programming because I was told to do so. Full blown restful apis, stateful redux react apps with responsive CSS using Google's material design. Don't forget to dockerize everything and deploy the swarm on Amazon cloud all the while having to run integration unit tests, make sure all the rules on your nginx are correct we don't want exposure do you know how to write a visualization tool on JavaScript so we can 3d-fy some x-ray prints and good luck balancing tight schedules with your school and girlfriend ye right lul
My manager would ask me to deliver new shit to an app I was developing mostly by my self in react (I barely even knew what RFC or ES6 was by the time I started).
I got fired from this project because I couldn't deliver by myself what 5 experienced dudes could (debatable, but still... Cuz they couldn't when they took over. Boss wanted to rewrite the whole app in a week and a half)
Turns out I got called back by the same company but to contribute in another project. This time to automate some shizzle with python.
Feelsgoodman but I want out ASAP can't stay sane for longer

Well today my boss wants me to “tweak” our coldfusion framework to behave like a REST api....talk about an entire rewrite.

There’s a reason why no one uses coldfusion anymore.

the co-worker that takes forever to rewrite everything, which results in really complex code. then we need to implement a new feature and it's impossible to make it work with what he's done. so he rewrites everything again...

actually it wasn't mine. But it affected me. So we had a project website on wordpress and wanted to rewrite the theme. everything went well to the Point of production. Site is fine locally, at testing and on stage. On production we still see old, a bit broken old version, but only on homepage. Wtf. Nothing helped. After couple of hours later we found out, that the admin was updating php version and he left html shot at production, which was taking over.

when you don't know the timeline of the project you're working on. So you don't know if you should rewrite everything to be more flexible in the future

Oh let the rant time begin…

So previous post I mentioned about this dev who has resigned and how I was going to see about a Snr. position.

Management is now scrambling to figure out what to do as this dev managed all the migration to AWS etc, I know servers but haven’t got too much familiarity with AWS.

Anyways so I finally get a 1:1 with my new line manager. I ask about the position and he says they don’t know what there going to do yet. Hire a new dev in India to offset and with the same knowledge even though the guy leaving is in the U.K. Bad idea as the servers are in the U.K. so if we get downtime or the server crashes we have no one in the U.K. to reset or access to the servers. India are very cagey who gets access which is annoying to say the least even though us (three devs) in the U.K. are the principal engineering team so there looking at all options.

Anyways we have a back and fourth, we discuss some of the plans for the app, some of which we are nowhere near ready to even conceptualise as the app in its current state sucks, (ruby 2.2.6 and rails 5 but not really). Needs major refactoring and rewrite, one thing they want to do is multi tendency which again given the state is laughable.

So, as my manager is speaking my head is screaming being like “this is just going to be a massive disaster”. Then we go onto that he’s seeing what everyone’s strengths are etc. And then we get onto the upgrade and that he wants me to work on it.

Yes.. the upgrade I’ve been trying to do for the past 4+ months but I keep getting told to stop and getting pushed backed.

I’ve been told we have devOps looking into restructuring the app, not possible as how the app is written, we have India trying to multi tenant again disaster incoming as they’ll end up rushing it. Legal are going to have a field day. Every time I say the issues are the fundamentals with the app, here’s how we can sort it. In one ear out the other basically there patching the ship even though it’s still leaking.

I have so many ideas, and things I can do to improve the app and get it back to not only working order, fix the performance issues, data issues and everything else. Brick wall.

So rants ensue where I basically say I would love to do the upgrade but management gives me no time in the roadmap (we have no say in planning). At this point I’m just speaking to a brick wall.

After the meeting I have a chat with the BAs, we all have the same issues so honestly it sucks we end up ranting to each other for an hour.

I’m being under-utilised, being told do this, do that even though I’ve had two stabs but told to stop and pushed back, I know what benefits I can bring to the app with a refactoring, ideas and how to properly lead the team because honestly we’re working on an old legacy app, and management are clueless and there priorities are all wrong, the company is getting frustrated and it’s a sinking ship. They would rather patch issues without solving them and everything I say goes in one ear and out the other.

Frustrating is not the word.

When you deliver a site to a customer and find out that you forgot to prepare all the statements so that the website wouldn't be vulnerable to SQL injections. So yesterday I forgot to add that, had to close down all the connections to the website and rewrite all the statements. Everything is good now

Not a horror. I'm rewriting services.

It started as a help request. I was asked to help with completing a service dealing with push notifications which was a research prototype. It was suggested to keep core part of it, but it was so awful that I just removed all files and wrote the service from scratch.

The second service had been developed for more than a year by a junior and then by our manager who wanted to complete it as fast as possible, without taking care of code quality. Then I was asked to take over the project and after some time I agreed with one condition: I'll have 1 month on takeover. But when I looked at the code, it became clear that it's much faster and better to rewrite everything except API and database than to takeover existing code.

The third service dealing with file exchange was working, but the junior who wrote it advised to rewrite it because it was a very simple service. So, I initiated rewriting, designed a new API and reviewed the final result.

And now I'm dealing with the fourth one. It was developed in my team but not under control. Now, when I "inherited" this complicated project, I decided to rewrite it because it should be simple, but it doesn't. It features reflection, layers inside layers, strange namespaces, strange solution structure. And that's after months of refactorings and improvements. So, wish me luck because I want to keep part of the infrastructure, but I don't know if it's possible.

This moment when you have to read a 3k lines long Service class to plug a new process on the legacy one, and wonder if it wouldn't be just better to rewrite stuff in parallel instead of reusing and bending the old one
Everything is so tightly coupled that I would have to refacto all this and extract methods but I don't have time for that, and the chance of breaking stuff is insanely high

So the project I have been working on for the past 5 months was finally released yesterday with only very minor problems, this stemmed from both programming side, and users entering data incorrectly.

It has been a rather hectic 5 months. I've had to deal with crap like:
- clients not knowing their own products
- a project manager that didn't document anything (or at least everything into a Google Slides document)
- me writing both requirements AND specifications (I'm a dev, not a PM)
- developers not following said specifications (then having to rewrite all their work)

But the worst thing I think would be the lack of vision from everyone. Everyone sees it as a "project" that should be get it over and done with rather a product that has great potential.

So with the project winding down, and only very few things left to fix/implement. Over these 5 months I learned a lot about domain driven design, Laravel's core, AWS, and just how terrible people are at their jobs. I imagine if I worked with people who gave a damn, or who actually had skills, I probably wouldn't have had such a difficult project.

Right now I'm less stressed but now feel rather exhausted from it all. What kind of things do you to help with the exhaustion and/or slow down of pace?

I was hired about 6 weeks ago to help the company take ownership of a piece of software written by an external team. The whole thing was MEAN stack. I had never done anything extensive in nodeJS, but I am quite comfortable in JavaScript and so there weren't any problems. I even ordered myself a JS DevDuck for my new desk.
Just about 2 weeks after my new DevDuck came in, my boss told me that everything the external team wrote is shit and is going to be thrown out. Instead, we're going to rewrite the whole thing inside the existing middleware in Java. Luckily for me, I am also pretty comfortable with Java, though it has been about 5 years, and I know a bunch has changed. But I'm confident I can do the work.
I guess I need a new cape for my duck. Or maybe I'll just start a duck family.