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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Job offers that list "high speed internet and a laptop" as employement benefits realy piss me off. Do they think other companies force you to code on paper and send it trough mail?

> Have nothing to do with programming
> Starts shitty coding bootcamp online, possibly for free
> Learns html/css/js course
> Builds to-do app (dont know how to deploy it with anything but github pages, but who cares)
> Takes a week to finish course
> Gets e-certificate and posts it on LinkedIn
> Adds web and front end dev as Professional Skill on LinkedIn
.
.
.
> Complains how bad the tech industry is for 'new entries and beginners'

fuck javascript
node.js module system sucks. Like its module system is trash, who will want to download some fucking 1GB worth of packages to create a new project.
People keep on just creating other package managers. Yarn is good enough because it caches your packages but still, i am just from deleting some 2.2Gb node modules from my computer and just whyy ?
An area where internet connection us shitty and expensive it is just not very well.
Fuck javascript is everywhere so i have to use it,

typescript just adds another layer to the heavy lifting. You write some typed code to 'reduce bugs' but you generate much more heavy code. I could write in 1kb js file but i end up getting some 3kb js because what - i used typescript-ügvjpiahdjb

fuck javascript

I am not the only one that has ranted about this but it needs to be repeated: FUCK QUORA

Can't they just please go out of business already? Services that force you to sign up to read stuff are making me want to torture the company's decision makers slowly to death anyways. Also fuck reddit for promoting their absolute garbage app that adds ZERO value to the reddit experience other than bugs and really shitty loading times.

> do you feel sorry for freelancing contractors
> whose previous client abandoned them
> they ask you to help them fix some trivial bugs in the shitty code
> you believe you can change the world by going overboard by also improving the code quality, along with fixing the bugs
> initialize an empty file where you'll translate the shitty code into a more organized one
> start creating variables and generic functions which can be used in a modular and organized fashion
> meticulously document the first function you write
> realize this is not worth your time
> insert some glue code into the original code which fixes the trivial bugs
> glue code has hard coded values so it adds to the shittiness of the code
> submit the work
> get $$$

I got my domain from Swisscom (Switzerlands "T-Mobile") Every damn time I try to renew/adjust the domain it feels like I have to search for the fucking Higgs Boson. Searching for it on DDG only yields wrong results. Domains are hidden deep within the business part of their homepage. Their buisness site barely mentions domains, the login is somehow tied to an account you would normally use in combination with your phone number which only adds more to the confusion and the whole domain thing seems to be a shitty frontend coverup of someone elses service.

DevRant is starting to look more like a shitty fucking combination of Pinterest/Instagram to me.

Everybody's taking memes/pics out of other sites and upload it here, as if we devs don't follow meme sites ourselves.

It adds scrolling length for no reason, but if you say something about it, incels jump in be like "wHy iS tHeRe aN oPtIoN tO uPlOaD tHeN".

So it's 5 am and a random Snapchat adds me. Of course I know it's a bot. I tend to answer these because i'm curious of how clever the ai has become in these scams. Still hasn't improved in like 5 years. Here I am telling this ai how shitty it is at it's job and telling it how it could be better by using deep learning to copy the way others talk and actually be convincing and then I think to myself, "well damn, why don't I just build a better ai." Seriously thinking about it. Ended up leaving the chat after telling the ai to inform it's lizard overlords I am for hire if they want a better trap.