Never let customers define the priority levels. It will end in:
- Normal (never used)
- High (used for small text changes)
- Higher
- OMG fix now
- Highest
- the World is ending if this doesn't get fixed now
- different existential plane of priority
- Priority ∞ + 1

Your profession changes how you think.
Coding did the same for me. Some good, some bad.

The good:

I know which problems in life are worth trying to solve.

And I'm very good at solving those problems.

I can analyse a situation accurately. I don't get emotional and panic.

I can immediately identify logical flaws in people's thinking.

I can identify biases in others and myself.

The bad:

I tend to follow simple instructions to the letter and rarely improvise based on reality.

When my wife tells me her problem I try to solve it instead of empathizing - which is what she really wants.

I haven't developed street smarts or the ability to convince people with anything other than logic - but people are more emotional than logical.

I'm not good at small talk.

Client: Please fix the logo.
Me: Okay, what needs to be fixed exactly?
Client: Put this word next to that word(shows me an example).
Me: Okay, no problem.
*after 5 minutes*
Client: You did not do what I asked for. Please fix the logo. Make it look better. Make it bigger and more outstanding. Dont change my logo
Me: Okay, I will revert the changes.
*Reverts to the old logo, and only does that as I do not fucking know what to do with oudstanding for fucks sake*
Client: I will talk to your boss. No one cares. My web site is not even finished and no one cares.
*It is finished, now the client looks for small things to make a big issue of*
Me: Could you please tell me in detail, what do you need to be fixes?
Client: I want the wording better. Im going to talk to your boss...

well fuuuck fucking fuck Im pissing blood!!!!!!!!!

Had a meeting with my boss earlier. Got yelled at for:
a) Working on a high-priority, externally-committed ticket (digit separators) that i was 85% done with on the Friday afternoon before my vacation instead of jumping to a lower-priority screwdriver ticket that just came in. Even though my boss agreed with me that what I did was exactly what I should have done, it's still bad because I was apparently rude to product by not doing as they asked?
b) Taking too long on that digit separator ticket that amounts to following a gigantic mess of convoluted spaghetti and making a few small changes, and making sure it doesn't break the world because it's all so fucking convoluted and fragile as hell. Let's not even mention my 4-10 hours of mandatory useless meetings every week.
c) Missing something that wasn't even listed in that same ticket -- somehow my fault? -- so I very obviously didn't test my work. Even though specs all passed and QA also tested and signed off on it as working and complete. Clearly half-assed and untested. Product keeps promising/planning UATs and then skipping them, and then has the audacity to complain about it.
d) Not recovering fast enough from burnout and daily mental breakdowns. I can still barely get out of bed and you want me to be super productive? Got it. Guess what? I'm being amazingly productive for my mental health. But my boss, Mr. Happy-go-lucky, thinks depression is dropping your icecream cone on your clean kitchen table, and this three-ton pile of spaghetti is "maybe a little messy, I guess."

So I need to somehow "regain the confidence" of both him and product because I'm taking awhile on difficult tickets (surprise), while having these ridiculous breakdowns (surprise), and because I don't fix things that aren't even listed in the fucking tickets (fucking surprise) -- and worse, that the lack of information is somehow entirely. my. fault. (surprise fucking surprise)

GOD I HATE THESE PEOPLE.

Manager: What’s taking so long on that PR?? It’s just some small styling adjustments

Dev: No it’s not you added an entire new calendar module that doesn’t work

Manager: Ok but besides that it’s just a small couple of css edits

Dev: You made styling changes in 50 files, half of which break our mobile responsiveness

Manager: Well then STOP talking to me and FIX IT if you’re so smart.

Dev: You also added a series of filters on a table in this same PR that cause th—

Manager: OK SO I GOT A BIT DISTRACTED THE FACT IS IT ALL NEEDS TO GET DONE SO IT DOESN’T MATTER IF IT’S ALL ON ONE PR SPLITTING THINGS UP INTO SMALL UPDATES IS JUST UNNECESSARY BUREAUCRACY AND IF YOU LIKE THAT THEN GO. WORK. FOR. THE GOVERNMENT!!!

Dev: …

( rant || !rant ) && idiots
console.info( this.isLongRant );
console.warn( "contains strong language and wordpress" );

A friend of mine sent two of his "friends" to me because they wanted me to build a website for their new business (~idea).

So I had a meeting with them.

First of all they wanted me to have a look on the current (work in progress) site.
First impression of the frontend:
OH BOY!?

Well, imagine this:

- a 90s/2k background (dotted/pixelated cloud in baby-blueish as backgroud with repeat)

- the logo was made by the sister of one of the guys, it wasn't too bad, but badly aligned, asymmetrical

- some obvious $offTheShelfShopPlugin with $randomStockContent

- the fucking slider had a small loading bar to indicate changes, it appears like an hyperanxious child on ADHS

- below the logo TWO FUCKING GIF SPINNERS to indicate nothing else but how fucking brain amputated these two dudes are, including the dev who is responsible for adding this. (to this point, they only told me, that a webagency did the setup and some basic work on the site, more on that later)

- no styling concept at all, random fonts and stuff everywhere including default styles of the shop plugin.

- FUUUUUCK WTF wil come furtherin this meeting?

After seeing a pile of binary puke fisted out of a 60yo nonstop-intern who changed his jobtitle from dildo-traveling-salesman to fullstack-frontend-dev by wrinting it on a post-it-note, I imagined, there has to be something wrong with the backend as well.

Boy was I right!
Yes, you guessed it! A random Wordpress adminpanel login appeared! OH NO....
I really wanted to levae this meeting immediately.
I was not able to hold my disgust back and I told them right in their face, what a shit pile of nutty squirrel turds this current page is. And that Wordpress is not the right choice at all for a shop.

Then came the best part: They basically told me, that they terminated the previous contract with the webagency because they were too expensive (they are cheap, compared to others, I know people who know their prices) and that they wanted to create A BIG MARKETPKACE with multiple ressellers who can have their shop in their website. Something similar to FUCKING AMAZON. ON FUCKING WORDPRESS!?!?!?
They even asked me if I wanted to be their partner & developer and that they can't pay much at the moment until the marketplace starts to grow.

I more or less told them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pitchfork.

Minimum wage employers and restaurants asking "and why should we hire you?".

You have 40 vacancies in your area for just your company alone.
You're paying $13.25 an hour when only a year ago you were paying $9.75.

Why should we hire you?

F*ck you, pay me, that's why.

You're not f*cking NASA
You're a God damn chain restaurant with a 40% turnover rate, who's employees probably shoot up in the bathroom on the rare occasion they even get a break.

I looked at the guy with all the annoyance I could muster, stared him down for a good five seconds and said. "You pay a few dollars over minimum. You're job is not important enough to even ask that question. Have a nice day." And got up and left.

Dude followed me and stuttered " hold up. I was just..."

But I was already out the door.

You were just what mark? Asking a dumbfuck question as if you had any leverage at all?

Your competitor *across the street* is offering 50 cents *more* per hour, and has guaranteed breaks.

What, did you forget 2008 and how you treated millions of people as disposable? The little part where you and most american industries demanded passion, without pay raises? Promotions without benefits? The jobs that if you worked hard, rather than a promotion or a pay raise, your reward was more work and less hours to finish?

You assholes thought we forgot about that? How you shipped millions of jobs overseas, blamed it on "automation" (chinese and indian slave labor), and then pointed the finger at millions of impoverished people as "lazy" in places like Detroit and Pittsburgh and told them "you just got to work harder and smarter!" Or "just get a small loan and create the next google!" from the comfort of your yachts? I'm looking at you bane corp.

No, now the shoes on the other foot motherf*ckers. Hows it feel needing all *us* commoners? "Why should we hire you?"

No, why should *I* WORK FOR YOU?
Cuz I saw THREE dirty tables coming in. A line of people that could be being served. A line that could have been optimized with the proper table count and some simple changes. A menu that doesnt even incentivize your biggest sellers and a dozen other things your store is doing wrong.

Think mark, think!

This is one of those braindead questions employers paying sub $18 an hour ask, because they suffered so much brain drain from years of payola profits from too-big-to-fail wallstreet bailouts, that they forgot they are not king midas, unless they are the king midas of shit, because increasingly everything corporate America touches turns into shit.

And while were on the subject, stopping bringing in outside management to stores. It destroys team cohesion, staff morale, pisses off people *on site* who *actually know* the team, the stores daily activities and processes, and who are better fit for that role. You bring in disinterested outside management, and it's one of the biggest red flags I've ever seen: these smarmy selfcongratulating f*cks who know nothing about the particular store, have no connection to the staff, go on firing sprees or alienation-sprees to hire in friends, fuck up the schedules because again they know nothing about the employees, and then move on after a few years to greener pastures, leaving a barren radioactive wasteland of chain smokers and burnt out staff in their wake.

Dear corporate America, your free ride on the public's good will is over. It's over.

Now you're in the bitch seat. Come sit at my desk and explain to me, EXPLAIN TO ME, why I should sweat and labor to save your shitty company hemorrhaging money like a bleeding crack-addicted hobo dying with a sucking chest wound from a chicago skidrow friday-night drive-by?

You dont deserve it. Your management and company culture is worse than incompetent. It's full of smiley guys expounding about their passion for customer service while giving each other sloppy BJs in broom closets, a veritable cornucopia of cult-like corporate dick suckers *and* dickheads, proclaiming, no...PROFESSING (hence "professional") their undying allegiance and dedication to their corporate family with the intensity of cujo, foaming at the mouth, or Mitt Romney preparing for a photoshoot, plastic smiles and feigned laughs.

Dont forget to wipe your chin, asshole. It's not Ronald McDonald your blowing, but it's definitely not Gordon f*cking Ramsey either.

Would you like fries with that?

Story time. My first story ever on devRant.

To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)

My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!

My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!

I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!

At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!

Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.

Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...

Thanks for reading ...

I’m a .NET desktop fullstack dev these days… Never worked web unless for my own small needs/personal projects.
I started using tech one way or the other by the time windows was version 3.1 and been through quite a bit ground-breaking changes in the industry of software development and the internet but if there’s one thing I cannot understand of it all, no matter how much thought I put into it is: How the fuck did we manage to make it so fucking complicated to develop anything these days?
I remember like it was yesterday that you could stand a website with HTML, CSS and JS, three fucking files and you’ve made yourself a single page site. Then came the word “Responsive”, “Responsive” written everywhere. Fair enough, grid system popped up. All of the sudden jQuery was summoned… and everything that happened after this point has been a fucking circus of high-pitched teens talking on conferences about fucking libraries and frameworks to make integration with real time, highly scalable, eco-friendly, serverless, data driven, genome aware, genderless, quantum technologies to interact with bio dynamically generated organisms, namely fucking users.
Every fucking bit of the process of building a mobile/web application seems to be stopped by yet another incredibly dumb attempt to suicide a developer. Can you go from starting an app and publishing an app without jumping through a thousand VERY specific hoops? No, fuck no.
I fucking hate it… It’s a bit hard to get Desktop dev jobs these days but for as long as I work on IT I will continue to stick to that area, until someone for the love of life comes up with a fucking solution to all this decadent circus of bureaucratic technocracy.
Fuck big industry, fuck tech giants, fuck javascript and webassembly, fuck kids putting ASCII art on console applications that I DON’T FUCKING NEED to install dependencies THAT I DON’T FUCKING NEED to extend functionality on frameworks that I DON’T FUCKING NEED… oh wait, I do need all this because YOU FUCKING MADE IT MANDATORY NOW! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU!!!

Hey guys :(
The rant will be long.

Today was one of the worst day ever.
I'm feeling so shitty right now.

I'm 19 and I started my apprenticeship about a half year ago on a very small company.
From day one I had many things to do, every day is hard and a new experience. But I'm learning a lot.

Two months ago I had my very first presentation for a client. I was really excited and nervous but everything was fine and the client as well as my boss were proud of me.

Today I should present again a prototype for the same client. But this time not directly personal, instead we did it via TeamViewer. After the client finally found out, how to open and start this shit, the disaster tooked its course.
After explaining him the conzept, I wanted to show him in the software. For some reason it suddenly stopped working. I've just made a change recently which leads in all appeareances to an error .
Because of that error I couldn't proceed, so I have to explain and show him the data I created before I made the changes.
With that everything Just worked fine, I could explain and visualize everything. It didn't Matter and didn't changed anything, only the Name was a Name from me.
The client was very relaxed about this error. He said that it is a prototype , it is not serious.
Furthermore I showed and demonstrated him everything.
But my boss wasn't very surprised and Happy about me. He made me responsable for the error, I should have prepared everything better and this all was Shit.
This made me really,really sad. It sounded so hard.
I know that I've made a mistake, but it's human. I'm only 19. I'm not perfect. Sure, I could have prevented it, if I had tested all possibilites right after I had made the changes again. I prepared the whole presentation on the weekend, on my personal freetime. I spent so often so much time in my freetime just for my job, for my apprenticeship. To get what? A fat bite, a kick in the ass. I'm doing so much, but this is not acknowledged. But when I make something wrong - then I'm the shittiest person.

Damn. Don't know how to handle this situation. This has gone to far today.
Yeah, I could have tested More, but I only tested the existing Data. I prepared the presentation very Well. This is so sad.

Four meetings today.

Legal was not involved in legal agreement changes until I refused to make them without Legal signing off. Legal changed several things, leading to:

Project scope changed size from large to minuscule to small to medium.

Details changed at every step.

Despite being incredibly structured and process-heavy, people at this company are so disorganized. 😕

Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.

Yesterday my father called me and asked if I'd have a look at his website to exchange his logo with a new one and make some string changes in the backend. Well, of course I did and hell am I glad I did it.
He had that page made a few years ago by some cousin of a friend who "is really good with computers", it's a small web shop for car parts and, as usual costumer accounts. Costumer Accounts with payment infos.
Now I've seen a lot of bad practices when it comes to handling passwords and I've surely done a few questionable things myself but this idiot took the cake. When a new account was registered his php script would read the login page, look for a specific comment and add a string "'account; password'," below into to a js array. In clear text. On the website. One doesn't even have to breach the db, it's just there, F12 and you got all the log ins.

Seriously, we really need a licensing system for devs, those were two or three years this shit was live, 53 accounts... Now I've gotta decipher this entire bowl of spaghetti just to see if he has done any more unspeakable things.

A few years ago, when I was in high school, we had a teacher who would take a quiz every week. This particular teacher would attach his laptop to the projector and then show us the questions on a slideshow. Each slide had an exact amount of time depending on how hard the question was and we had to write the answer on a paper. One week, we also had another exam so neither of us had studied for the quiz. One of my friends who had another class with this teacher, told us that their projector stopped working, so the teacher didn't take the quiz and it was postponed. Since most of the class agreed to postpone the quiz, we decided to sabotage the projector so the teacher would be forced to postpone the quiz. We couldn't actually harm the projector because we would get in trouble, so one of my taller classmates stood on a chair so that she would reach the projector. Then she slipped a small piece of paper between the hdmi/vga cable and the port located on the projector. That way it seemed like it was connected but in reality it was not.
The teacher came, could not connect his laptop to the projector, so no quiz!
Sorry, teacher!

P.S. We reverted the changes the next day. Blamed the cheap cable for short circuiting!

- If I buy x amount of ram | hard drive space | cpu power I will never need more.
- No need for version control | Tests. This is a small project
- git commit -m "changes" (its a small change. I will remember why I did it)
- It is too obvious that I put a lot of personal time in this so my boss will definitely notice!
- Why comment this simple method? Anyone should know what it does. Especially me!
- "this should never happen"
- This call can't be from work. Everyone knows I am on vacation.
- I will back up next week. It's not like it is going to crush today.
- It’s 11:30 already? I will work on this for only a half hour more and then I will definitely go to bed!
- This project will take x amount of time!

So I'm going to get married next june. I made an app for the guests where they have all information available, can send music wishes and can share images of the wedding with other guests.

Here is my story on publishing it in the App Store:

Me: "Hey Apple, I made a small app for my wedding. Mind putting it in your store?"
Apple: "Yeah, whatever" *publishes it*

One month later:
Me: "I made really small changes, please take this update."
Apple: "Ha no, its not interessting for enough people." *rejects it*

I panic, because the app is mentiont in the invites to the wedding which are already printed.

So one day later:
Me: "Ok ok, I added a button in the intro where people can send me a mail if they are interested in using the same app for their wedding."
Apple: "That changes everything! We will accept the update."

I'm happy, that they accepted it in the end, but really?!? There are so many shit apps in the store, why do you reject any not-fart app, because it is not interesting enough??? And why the fuck do you accept it in the first place?

Once upon a time, there were a restaurant called "iEat.tech.com".
It was a small single-location place, where the sufficient number of patrons could be served by the cozy number of employees.
In fact, headcount was so lean that the cook was also the one who washed all the dishes.

But then came the suits and their "VC"(daddy) money and scaled shit up.
Soon, there were so many patrons that the dishes started to pile up the sink, never washed.
"We need someone to wash the dishes!" said the cook
"Fuck you, you wash the dishes!" said the s*its
Naturally, the cook left soon after.

The s*its had a problem now. They could not replace the cook fast enough - all other cooks were either young, inexperienced and mediocre (but did clean the dishes), or refused to waste their time on the sink.
So the suits did what $*its always do - they got a fucking consultant. Who told them to get a fucking dishwashing machine and billed them the GDP of Ireland.

The s*is, of course, did not want to buy a dishwashing machine. "Our fucking process is too fucking disruptive for us to use a fucking store-bought mass-produced metal servant!" (s*its don't know what "machines" are. For them, it's all in terms of "servants", employees and machines alike).

So the s*its hired an engineer to "solve the fucking dish problem, once and for all".
The engineer quickly started measuring and drawing and calculating. The engineer was about to prepare a budget when the s*its came screaming "What the fuck are you doing? There is a fucking pile of dishes in the sink!"
The engineer replied that "I'm designing the machine!", to what the s*its responded "don't bring me fucking problems, bring me solutions!" (or some other s*it blabber)

So the engineer quickly designed an efficient dishwashing assembly line to be done in half the time most people would. And then went back to designing the machine.
But the s*its were having none of it. They kept expanding and expanding and doing what they could so that the engineer never had a moment to work on the machine. They dit it so surreptitiously that no one barely even noticed, but one day they were paying a team of engineers to be fucking human dishwashers.

Now replace "dishes" with "Jira tickets" or "quick fixes" or "tiny changes" and fix other terms accordingly.
Fucking s*its.

After creating a 19 page survey in 1 day deadline client says this to me:

"We have a small change in the website. We don't like the page 8 anymore. Could you please remove that and rearrange the pages after that?"

😃
😃
😃
🙂🔫

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


Client: Everything is perfect but few small changes to be done.

Me: Wow, that will be easy.

*Client lists 100 points*

Client : Those are small changes. I guess it will be done in a day.

* Yeah sure I am Superman * :/

Wan't to hear my ridiculous recruiter story? I am originally from MA, and been on a small town since I was 4 (Born in Brazil). Well after years and years on the same town, always going back (MA) when a job here and there wouldn't work out. Going through some depression, and just got tired of everything. Well one day I found a recruiter on linkedIn and he knew a friend of mine. So he said he had a possible job offer but it was in Florida, anyhow he would later contact me and in the mean time for me to send him some examples of my work. Well in the mean time I packed my stuff and called him letting him know I was on the way. He was shocked and didn't know what to say. Went to the interview with him, got the job. 9 months later :) I don't regret taking my changes, it was all I had. I'm currently employed, love my job, and if it wasn't for my ridiculous recruiter... I don't know where I would have ended up. Long story, sorry /: ... here is a potato :) (9gag reference)

So the CEO tells me our new release needs to be compliant with new guidelines. I say sure, I draft up a few small changes and send them to my PM. He calls an impromptu meeting with the UI team and I explain my changes. They don't like them. They then proceed to draft and redesign a new UI based on these new requirements, I tell them that they are overthinking everything and remind them of the rules of KISS. 45 minutes of me silently waiting and an entire 4x8 whiteboard of designs, I tell them this is an entire redesign and that we will never make our end of the year deadline. PM goes silent for a minute, then responds "yeah I guess your right, let's just implement your original changes"

Yesterday, I finished the front-end of a project for a client. Responsive, clean,.. Looking 'smexy' :D

Today I've got an email of the client, saying he made some small design adjustments...

I think you already know where this is going.. But inline-css everywhere, fixed widths, br's as spacers,.. (It was like an old Frontpage-like design..)

I've changed the FTP user.. From now on, he has to request his changes so that I can apply them.. Damnit.. But hey, extra paid hours of work I guess :D

Ok, so when I inherit a Wordpress site I've really stopped expecting anything sane. Examples: evidence that the Wordpress "developer" (that term is used in the loosest sense possible) has thought about his/her code or even evidence that they're not complete idiots who wish to make my life hell going forwards.

Have a look at the screen shot below - this is from the theme footer, so loaded on every page. The screenshot only shows a small part of the file. IT LITERALLY HAS 3696 lines.

Firstly, lets excuse the frankly eye watering if statement to check for the post ID. That made me face palm myself immediately.

The insanity comes for the thousands of lines of JQuery code, duplicated to hell and back that changes the color of various dividers - that are scattered throughout the site.

To make things thousands of times worse, they are ALL HANDED CODED.

Even if JavaScript was the only way I could format these particular elements I certainly wouldn't duplicate the same code for every element. After copy and pasting that JQuery a couple of times and normal developer would think one word, pretty quickly - repetition.

When a good developer notes repetition ways to abstract crap away is the first thought that comes to mind.

Hell, when I was first learning to code god knows how long ago I always used functions to avoid repetition.

In this case, with a few seconds though this "developer" could have created a single JQuery handler and use data attributes within the HTML. Hell, as bad as that is, it's better than the monstrosity I'm looking at now.

I'm aware Wordpress is associated with bad developers due to it's low barrier to entry, but this site is something else.

The scary thing is that I know the agency that produced this. They are very large, use Wordpress exclusively and have some stupidly huge clients that would be know nationally.

Wordpress truly does attract some of the most awful "developers" and deserves it's reputation.

If you're a good developer and use Wordpress I feel sorry for you, as you're in small numbers from my experience.

Rant over, have vented a bit and feel better. Thanks Devrant.

"I'll send you the list with a few small changes to make on my website. It won't take you long, a few minutes I guess."

= ALWAYS at least 1-2 hours of work

I wrote a prototype for a program to do some basic data cleaning tasks in Go. The idea is to just distribute the files with the executable on our shared network to our team (since it is small enough, no github bullshit needed for this) and they can go from there.

Felt experimental, so I decided to try out F# since I have always been interested with it and for some reason Microsoft adopted it into their core net framework.

I shit you not, from 185 lines of Go code, separated into proper modules etc not to mention the additional packages I downloaded (simple things for CSV reading bla bla)

To fucking 30 lines of F# that could probably be condensed more if I knew how to do PROPER functional programming. The actual code is very much procedural with very basic functional composition, so it could probably be even less, just more "dense"

I am amazed really. I do not like that namespace pollution happens all over F# since importing System.IO gives you a bunch of shit that you wouldn't know where it is coming from unless you fuck enough with Ionide and the docs. But man.....

No need for dotnet run to test this bitch, just highlight it on the IDE, alt enter and WHAM you have the repl in front of you, incremental quasi like Lisp changes on the code can be REPL changed this way, plethora of .NET BCL wonders in it, and a single point of documentation as long as you stay in standard .net

I am amazed and in love, plus finding what I wanted to do was a fucking cakewalk.

Downside: I work in a place in which Python is seen as magic and PHP, VB.NEt and C# is the end all be all of languages. If me goes away or dies there will be no one else in this side of the state to fuck with F#

This language needs to be studied more. Shit can be so compact, but I do feel that one needs to really know enough of functional programming to be good at it. It is really not a pure language like Haskell (then again, haskell is the only "mainstream" pure functional language ain't it not?) but still, shit is really nice and I really dig what Microhard is doing in terms of the .net framework.

Will provide later findings. My entire team is on the Microsoft space, we do have Linux servers, but porting the code to generate the necessary executables for those servers if needed should be a walk in the park. I am just really intrigued by how many lines of code I was able to cut down from the Go application.

Please note that this could also mean that I am a shit Golang dev, but the cut down of nil err checkings do come somewhere.

Here's to clients who wish to pay "per project" instead of "per month". Man, fuck that.

Back when I was still a novice, I took on a couple of small time projects from clients who contacted me after looking at my GitHub, and they all wanted to pay me a lump-sum for the project. Because I'm an idiot, I thought sure, what difference would that make. Boy was I wrong.

What followed was me finishing the projects well before time but because of the clients' constant reiterations and changes in design and nitpicking every decision I made while creating the websites for them, the projects dragged on for weeks longer than they were originally intended. And I fucking got paid that one-time amount in the beginning. All this maintenance, for free. Even though I had not explicitly agreed to the maintenance part, since they never finalized the specifications of the project, it just never got "done" officially, and all the maintenance part just came under development.

How many different kinds of disgusting does someone have to be to do this? I should've fucking said NO to those terms, but I had to have experience. Well, nice experience that was. Never again. :(

Let me make a small change to this file, a one-line pull request will probably be accepted right away

* saves *

Prettier runs...
EsLint runs...
StyleLint runs...

60 changes submitted for review

You know what really grinds my gears? As a junior webdeveloper (mostly backend) I try my hardest to deliver quality content and other people's ignorance is killing me in my current job.

Let's rant about a recent project I had under my hood, for this project (a webshop) I had to restructure the database and had to include validation on basicly every field (what the heck, no validation I hear you say??), apperently they let an incompetent INTERN make this f***king webshop. The list of mistakes in this project can bring you close to the moon I'd say, seriously.

Database design 101 is basicly auto incremented ID's, and using IDs in general instead of using name (among a list of other stuff obv.). Well, this intern decided it was a good idea to filter a custom address-book module based on a NAME, so it wasn't setup as: /addressbook/{id} (unique ID, never a problem) but as /addressbook/{name}, which results in only showing one address if the first names on the addresses are the same. Lots of bugs that go by this type of incompetence and ignorance. Want to hear another joke? Look no further, this guy also decided it was a great idea to generate the next ID of an order. So the ordernumber wasn't made up by the auto incremented id on the order model, but by a count of all the orders and that was the next order number. This broke so many times, unbelievable.

To close the list of mistakes off, the intern decided it was a great idea to couple the address of a user directly to an order. Because the user is able to ship stuff to addresses within his addressbook, this bug could delete whole orders out of the system by simply deleting the address in your addressbook.

Enough about my intern rant, after working my ass of and going above and beyond the expectations of the customer, the guy from sales who was responsible for it showed what an a**hole he was. Lets call this guy Tom.

Little backstory: our department is a very small part of the company but we are responsible for so much if you think about it. The company thinks we've transitioned to company wide SCRUM, but in reality we are so far from it. I think the story below is a great example of what causes this.

Anyway, we as the web department work within Gitlab. All of our issues and sprints are organized and updated within this place. The rest of the company works with FileMaker, such a pile of shit software but I've managed to work around its buggyness. Anyway, When I was done with the project described above I notified all the stakeholders, this includes Tom. I made a write-up of all the changes I had made to the project, including screenshots and examples, within Gitlab. I asked for feedback and made sure to tag Tom so he was notified of my changes to the project.

After hearing nothing for 2 weeks, guess who came to my desk yesterday? F**king tom asking what had changed during my time on the project. I told him politely to check Gitlab and said on a friendly tone that I had notified him over 2 weeks ago. He, I shit you not, blantly told me that he never looks on there "because of all the notifications" and that I should 'tell him what to do' within FileMaker (which I already had updated referencing Gitlab with the write-up of my changes). That dick move of him made me lose all respect for this guy, what an ignorant piece of shit he is afterall.

The thing that triggers me the most in the last story is that I spent so much free time to perfect the project I was working on (the webshop). I even completed some features which weren't scheduled during the sprint I was working on, and all I was asking for was a little appreciation and feedback. Instead, he showed me how ignorant and what a dick he was.

I absolutely have no reason to keep on working for this company if co-workers keep treating me like this. The code base of the webshop is now in a way better condition, but there are a dozen other projects like this one. And guess what? All writen by the same intern.

/rant :P

Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.

I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".

People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..

So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...

My dev colleagues, the ceo, a external designer and me (dev) are sitting in the meeting room
and we discuss the result from the designer. He designed a complete relaunch of a
small CRM for the logistics sector.

The designer is a designer as you know him, big beart, small macbook, chai late
and he designed nothing, he hired a freelancer from romania.

My boss studied software development in the 80s but didn't really developed a software
for about 20 years, but he thinks he knows all and everything.

My boss is constantly complaining about the colors in the design and he would like
a iOS approach. Our system should complete copy the styles from iOS.

The really funny thing happend in just 1 minute. My boss is complaining again about the
colors and told the blue color is way to dark and the designer meant thats not possible the
blue color very bright. My boss sat next to the designer and looked not on the wall where
the picture was thrown from a projector, instead he looks from the side in the macbook screen
of the macbook which was in front of the designer. Then the designer says "Oh my god, the color
changes if I look from the side or from the top of the macbook." The Designer was blown away. My
boss couldn't believe it and did the same movements with his head and said. "Wow, you are right
the color changes".

We all other people couldn't believe that they are so dumb and thought this must be a joke. But
that wasn't a joke. After the meetin my boss told everyone in our company his results regarding the screen.

I wrote every story in a document, and I'm planning to create a book with dumb shit like this.

I remember a bad freelance experience.

It was a sophisticated mobile applications (many UI, many customization, many APIs to integrate with). since the client have many future freelance projects, I give him 3 weeks as estimation time, and one day per week I work on its place to evaluate the progress and sync our work.

I worked hard, the quality was excellent.. but he kept ask for "small" changes and "small" features.. at first it was OK, and I was planning to give him a good example to profit from his future projects.. but he toke advantage for that and the same app extended from 3 weeks to 2 months and more.. he barely added a little to the initial price..

So what I did? I uploaded the code to a private repository in Bitbucket, added him to the team.. I wrote few lines how to sign and publish the app.. aand disappeared.
his luck, I disappeared from the country, I immigrated to another country for best job opportunity.

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

On my first week in the internship, I have to create a small website and it has to be finished ASAP. So I used Bootstrap.

After finishing I tested the website in chrome debugger tools for every screen size (design responsiveness), it was working fine. My stupidity was that I haven't tested on actual mobile/tablet.

The site was live, I send the link to one of my friends and he said "why everything is so small? looks like I'm browsing on PC". I quickly grab my phone and visited the site and it was not responsive on mobile. Started to check the code again, tested again on chrome tools it was working. But not on mobile. Changed the bootstrap file but no fucking changes on mobile.

After few moments of thinking, I realized that I haven't included the "meta viewport" tag. I felt so stupid and it was kind of embarrassing for me.

Now I first include meta tags before working on new project.

A discussion about writing tests for frontend applications.

Context: my frontend coworkers don't write tests, at all. Yeah, really. Our testing process is very manual. We test manually when developing. We test manually when reviewing code. After merging, the application is deployed to a staging server and the design team does a QA Sprint. Lots of manual testing and some bugs still crawl by.

So I decided to start pushing my coworkers to start writing tests. One of the reasons I constantly hear them say to not write tests in the frontend is: "It's not worth the time, because design keeps changing, which means we have to take time to fix the tests. Time that we usually don't have."

I've been thinking about this a lot and it seems to me that this is more related to bad tests than to tests in general.

Tests should not break with design changes (small changes at least). They should test funcionality, not how things look. A form should not break if the submit button's style changes, so why should its tests fail? I also think that tests help save time, as they prevent some back and forth because of bugs.

Writing good tests is the hard part. Tests that cover what's really important and aren't frail and break with things that shouldn't break them. What (and how) should we test? And what shouldn't be tested?

Writing them fast is another hard thing. Are you doing it right if they take more time to write than the actual code?

What do you think about this? Do you write tests for your frontend applications? What do you test? How much time do you spend writing tests? What are your testing tools/frameworks?

Here’s how you deploy changes in Soviet Russia.

“Dear subscriber of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia
The government scientific publisher “The Great Soviet Encyclopedia” recommends you remove pages 21, 22, 23 and 24 from book 5, as well as the portrait in between pages 23 and 24. Replacement pages containing new text will be sent to you.
You have to cut those pages off with scissors or razor, keeping a small area you have to glue the new pages to.
— The government scientific publisher “The Great Soviet Encyclopedia””

Context: this happened after Lavrentiy Beria, the man who carried on the great terror after Ezhov, was declared the enemy of the state and executed.

I fucking hate it when customer changes things in the last minute.

"It's a small change", they say. "It shouldn't take you too long", they say.

You know what? Fuck you.

Got my first Webdev job at a small marketing company, felt very lucky as I didn't have much experience. Turns out I'm the only one that could program. The other guys just use Wordpress. It felt wrong at first, using plugins instead of developing, but we got results and clients were happy. I felt like there was a lot less to this development thing than I'd previously thought! And so we continued.

But I noticed that some of our more plugin heavy sites (not made by me - these were made in some drag/drop Wordpress interface) were running slow. I mean 15 seconds load time slow. I joined devRant around the same time and discovered that no - this is not what normal development actually is. Wordpress seems universally hated. Thank god, because something seemed very wrong!

So with us getting complaints all over the place over page speed from relatively high-profile clients, I've gone and set up a script on a server that downloads the whole front end of these Wordpress sites and serves them up instead of the 'real' thing. Did I mention that there's basically no dynamic content on most of these sites? It works like a charm! I'm now trying to figure out how to get forms and route them into the real, hidden version of the site, as well as automatically updating the html views whenever the client changes anything in the Wordpress backend. Not sure if this has fixed the problem or just enabled bad practice, but I don't think I'm going to be able to stop the others from doing things this way...

For the record, yes there are plugins that do similar stuff but I thought it'd be nice to never use plugins again! And hey, I got to learn all about bash scripting so I can't complain.

For real though, I didn't quite realise how bad the Wordpress thing really was until I came here. Thanks for making me aware, all!

I'm 2 months into my first dev job. Today, I was working on upgrading one of our products to React 18. Had a feeling my UI changes weren't being pushed to AWS so I wanted to test that. Changed all labels from ".. filter users..." to "shmilter shusers". Committed, then nearly pushed those changes for a PR. There are multiple lines of defence and only a 5% chance that no one would spot it but as soon as I realized that there's a small possibility that our customers would suddenly see "shmilter shusers" on their instances, I had an absolute fit. Maybe it's a "you had to be there" kind of thing but I don't remember the last time I laughed this hard.

Compiled a small style change in LESS file. Whole page is broken. Realized holiday replacement made all changes in main CSS file which is generated through LESS compiling.

I'm getting more and more triggered by my colleagues overusing words in seemingly random fashion.

The word 'perspective' comes up at least 6 times during a meeting, from an x perspective, from a y perspective. It would be fine in a design meeting but it's used _so fucking much_ I cringe every time I hear it.

Another one is 'standard', that gets put in front of every word nowadays, standard process, standard protocol, standard machine, standard pipeline. What does it mean? No clue, what does it add? Nothing.

'Please put this add the standard location.'

Where?

'The default one'

What?!

I remove it from documentation every chance I get.

Furthermore, some documentation changes make small pieces of information super long. A nice summary list of features? Make it at least 3 sentences for every bullet point. 1-sentence info with a reference link to more info? Scratch that let's include all information in that reference paragraph anyway. Sometimes they even expand English expressions for no reason, making them longer and harder to read.

WHYYYY

We always complain about shit documentation and yet we're oblivious to the fact that our own docs are so bloated. Stop repeating information, stop using useless adjectives, just put it all in 1 sentence and add dozens of code examples. One piece of code says more than a billion words.

I'm not innocent either. As a teen I was great at writing long pieces of text that seemed like a great read but were actually way too bloated for the information I needed to convey. It was great for reaching word limits.

Now I'm trying my absolute best to be as concise and to-the-point as possible because I know that nobody likes reading and people just want the information that they're looking for.

Even this rant is overly long, but thank god that it's just a rant and I can let off some steam.

Btw same thing goes for diagrams, too many icons, too much text, too many lines. When I try to submit a clean-as-fuck diagram I get asked to add more info/features to which I say No, we're already at the max.

I even got a PR for review that made some changes to add unnecessary information, I pointed it out and never heard anything from them again. I rejected the PR, and never saw a new one.

* Sigh *

It's just so strange to me, it's never clear to me why these things happen. I'm too much of a coward to point these things out unless they endanger the quality of the product. But maybe they just need somebody to tell it to them.

Small test at school testing our knowledge of javascript and the p5js library.

One of the aims was to make a small rectangle slowly move across.

I lost one mark because I didn't define a y variable for the rectangle, even though the y never changes.

*sigh*

It's rant time!

So, as a broke electrical engineering student, I got this job in a local company. They used JSF and my skills in java were, at the very least, small (former PHP developer). But as a self taught developer this didn't stopped me and I went full on java learning (very bad year for my EE studies).

I became the 'guy in charge' for several of their projects (yeah, they did exploited broke students, I realized this far too late). I was very proud of myself, I worked hard, showed my true value, and they became impressed.

One nice thursday night, my "handler" emailed me with a urgent request. They needed an entire jsf application done by monday and the requirements were fairly complex.

Oh boy, I had a total of 10h of sleep from thursday to monday. I didn't even slept before going to my monday class, but I delivered the system. Got an pat in the back... "you're awesome"... I was happy.

6 months later: I received an email asking to fix a bug in the system. No problem with that. Oddly, this bug was a MAJOR bug. There's no way the system worked properly for six months with it. I fixed it in no time and commited the changes.

Turns out that this was the first time the system was going to be deployed. They made me go in an insane weekend dev project, and didn't even used the system for SIX MONTHS!!! I started to work my way out the company after this, aiming to open my own software company.

I still remember some other rants from the time I worked there. But these are for later.

Nice week for you all, may the sprint go gently and the clients be kind.

Our CEO had a virtual town hall using Zoom and now have a sign language interpreter box as a regular feature... To go along with all the Inclusion stuff...

The most immediate problem though is they didn't turn on auto-captions...

I don't know sign but am deaf so needed the captions which it turns out you can get using the Google Recorder app on Pixels. (This is literally like a fuck you to non-Pixel users and Zoom which disables Live Captions in conferences and recording full transcripts).

Anyway I left it own and near the end, a speaker was like "we're getting a lot of likes and positive feedback about the interpreter box! See how small changes make such a big difference?!"

And well of course in my mind I'm going "uh.... No."

I'll just go back to not caring about anything that isn't related to how much I make.

I'm managed by idiots who don't fully realize the nightmare they're creating.

They're making small operational changes, but hundreds of them with zero evidence to back their claims up.

When I bring up how it actually works, and how operations actually work I'm told I don't use the tools as much as management does and that my feedback is limited to how I use the tool.

So now I'm just gambling that they won't fuck up too bad before I get that sweet sweet sellout money and just letting them fuck everything up they want without any warnings from me.

I'm quickly learning that the phrase of the year is, "Fuck em".

My head is melting. Does anyone have a colleague who constantly complains about missing specs, documentation, project organization, bad processes and procedures? Everything needs to be planned. Not a single small code change can be done without reviewed details. 10min job becomes a week-long session of whining and dabbling.

You give the guy a small task and at the end of the day nothing is done. Just page after page of written documents and lists in Word and online notebooks. Version numbers, meaningless measurement results, latencies etc. And all you asked was "could you just fucking fix this one thing and quickly compile and check it". But no. There must be a review and at least 10 people need to be called into conference. Someone needs to approve everything just so that he can later move to blame to others. "Yeah I know it's not working but I showed you the code and you reviewed it!". Yes, you did, but other people have work of their own so sometimes you need to tie your own shoelaces.

And sometimes finally there's some work done. All indentations are shit. There’re code changes everywhere just because the guy didn't like the previous smaller, compact and logical code. The code doesn't even compile properly anymore. And if you complain, the reason is "there's no proper reviewed and stamped process description, so I cannot know if a variable is supposed to be 10 characters long. Besides 200 character long variable names are much more descriptive". For fucks sake.

Some coders should've gone to work in some tax office basement.

The company I work at sends their developers out to other companies to help them work on projects and help them in other ways (advice when communicating to customers of on demand software for example).

While not on a project you are working in house training trainees and interns. Part of that is teaching them to show initiative and treating them as full developers. The 30 interns all discussed a git flow and code format.
During the third sprint (two weeks sprints) a team messaged me if I wanted to check their merge request for the sprint.

It took me a glance at the first file to know they didnt do any review themselves. I used my flywheel to check all their changes and without being able to read the code I saw indentation was all over the place, inconsistent bracket placements etc. I let them know I wouldnt check their code until it was according to their own standards.
Two days later I got the message to check it again. At first glance the indentation was fine so I started reading the code. Every single thing was hardcoded, not made to support mobile (or any resolution other than 1920×1080).
A week later they improved it and still not good. Gave them a few pointers like I would for any colleague and off they went to fix things. The code became worse and indentation was all over the place.

I told them the next time it shouldnt be a quick glance to be able to reject it again. By this time other teams came to me asking why it wasnt merged yet and I explained it to them. One of the teams couldnt do anything u til this was merged so I told them to implement it themselves. I was surprised that 4 teams came to me asking about a merge request, that was every team except the team whose pull request it was.

4 weeks after the intitial sprint the other team made a merge request and I had three small comments and then an hour later it was merged.

The other team messaged me why their merge request did went through (still havent seen any of their team in person, Im sitting 10 meters away from them behind a wall)
They also said that it was easier for them because they started from scratch. Thats when I called them in to discuss it all and if they were not interns but full time developers they would have been fired. I told them communication is key and that if you dont understand something you come in person to ask about it. They all knew I like teaching and have the patience to explain a single thing ten times, but the initiative should be theirs.

One of the team members is my current coworker and he learned his lesson by that. The others stopped with their study and started doing something completely else.

TL;DR
Merge request is open for 4 weeks, in the end another team started from scratch and finished it within a week. The original team didnt ask me questions or come to me in person, where other teams did.

DISCLAIMER: some of you might find it harsh, but in our experience it works the best for teaching and we know when people don't dare to ask questions and we help them in that too. It's all about the soft skills at our company.

Junior Dev me: ok boss, coding is basically done, just need to do some more system testing.
Senior Dev: fantastic let me take a look.
(3 hours later)
Senior Dev: ok so I've made some small changes and pushed, could you pull my edits.
me: sure
(pulls changes)
(EVERYTHING Is changed)
(try to compile)
(doesn't compile)
Me: sorry, it doesn't seem to compile for me
Senior Dev: I never tried to actually build it, it's only a small change
me:

This morning, I felt pretty good. I had a healthy breakfast and I took the longer U-bahn journey into work so as to enjoy the Autumn scenery. I get to my desk after greeting my colleagues with the customary "Guten Morgen" and I began to plan my work for the day. I see there is a new ticket assigned to me which relates to a HTML issue. The customer support team are able to use a HTML editor to made changes to a section of a user's dashboard and from time to time, I get asked to fix their mistakes. Usually, it is something small, but it makes me cringe every time I see the markup. "Tables...tables everywhere!!!", sighed the once happy dev.

Time for a coffee break and a sit-down with the support team

I am just so thankful to Ubuntu for providing the minimal installation option. These small changes really makes the OS more friendly :)

Me: Write a small descriptive paragraph on the changes made to files and what needs to be worked on.

Team: “Add function 🙂” *10+ files changed*

If you just git add . by instinct, you're already dead inside

Instead, consider checking out the diffs of your changes before staging them, and then stage the files or directories individually

Of course I'm saying this to complain about my colleagues who stage and commit things they shouldn't, it probably doesn't apply to small side projects, but staging individually is probably a good habit to have

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.

Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.

For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.

I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.

They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.

Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.

They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.

They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.

Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.

Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.

Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.

Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.

Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.

TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.

Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.

But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).

Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.

Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.

So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.

I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.

How do you cope with something like this?

I hate it when customers add features or have changes all the time and my boss agrees with it. Might be small stuff but it piles up. I try to prioritize and work through the list, but just when I about to reach the end something is added or changed. It's frustrating and stressful.

Me with estimations:

*enter the supermarket
*take a small basket because I need just one or two things..
*realizes I needed more things, basket get full, me getting tired.. oh shit..

Boss asks some changes
-ok boss, one hour at most, it's just adding few lines..
*then I realize that it's not that simple

2017 has ended and I want to throw this fucking rock of anger with it out of the Window.

I will tell you how my last 3 to 4 years as private IT Guy (IT Dumpster) for everything was.

My Gaming Community:
It was so fucking retarded that I would like to punch everyone there in the face over a thousand times.

Seriously there are over 60 People in that Community and they take every shit for granted and only cry about everything.

I'm Paying since 4 Years over 60 € for our Server every month. Some people donated some small bucks over the time and in the end it was around 150 € Donations over 4 years.

Im thankful for the Donations, but these people really think that they can demand for this Donations private Gameservers for over years for free or think that they now own the Servers. WTF?? FUCK YOU!!

Im managing 2 Linux Server with Web, MySQL, Voice and Gameserver. What did 1 guy donate? 10 € for 4 years, thats around 15% for just a month. You would get our Teamspeak for 7 Days for that price idiots!!

I did all the damn Webdev and am now writing a App in Kotlin for Android man!!

Since last everybody in the Community gets on my nerves, because they are so ignorant and dont appreciate the work of others 😡.

My Association where I support the hole IT with a friend:

We decided in the commitee that we would take on major changes in our infrastructure.

We need to finish the barebone concept in the end of January 18.
Early December 17 I wrote my friend, that we need to have a meeting and plan everything.

Well, now I mostly designed the roadmap by myself and didnt receive any reply from my friend 💀.

I really dont understand why the shit always sticks at me and I need to finish it.

I really love to code something, install or repair PC's with joy or manage Server but the people around me are in my free time like poison and they take out my fun for it.

The only fun and enjoyable IT Part for me is at my fulltime job. Thats the only good place left for me as Safe Heaven and the people there really appreciate my knowledge and work I do.

Fuck Homestead.

For the fortune of you not to know, Homestead is a sad attempt at a Wix-like build your own website platform.

However, Homestead is the most unusable piece of shit platform that humans have ever had the misery of interacting with

Lets start off with the login page. The login page is small, unresponsive and half the time just deletes your input whenever you press submit.

It's important to note that unless you're running MacOS or Windows, Homestead will send to an error page on which there's a link to contact support, but pressing that link requires MacOS or Windows.

Fine, I'll fiddle around with my user-agent, and we'll be in soon enough. But now we come to the joy that is the website editor itself.

The website editor is clunky, hard to use, and has enough menus and submenus and sidebars to make the Jira UI shake with fear. Each interface option label is either ridiculously ambiguous or just straight up wrong. The built-in HTML editor doesn't support HTML5, in the name of "browser compatibility".

CSS? Pah! Who needs it! Our psuedo-90s skeuomorphic ugly-as-shit prebuilt styles will work just fine. Responsive design? Bullshit! Nobody uses a smartphone to browse the web, so why do we need to handle it?

Uploading a file? Good fucking luck buddy. There's a complicated dance among the minefield of pop-ups that ask you to confirm some shit or modify some shit and you gotta click the right option each time or else the file won't upload.

Wanna use https like 86% of the entire web and all modern websites? That's a premium feature. Fork over an extra $10 a month

Ok ok, I made it through all that. Dig through the thousands of menus to find the 'publish changes' button, and sigh with relief.

Open up a private browser tab to check my work, and nope. The site looks like shit, even by Homestead's standards. That's because Homestead claims to be a WYSIWYG editor, but it's a damn lie. The site looks like shit, so it's time do dive back into the hellhole that is this damn site editor.

And rinse and repeat. Deal with the shitty editor, publish, and pray it doesn't look like garbage. Be too scared to test on other devices because this flaming pile of dog shit pretending to be a website is bad enough on my device.

Two more months, then I'm done with this client. Someone get me a drink

Finally completed filing a claim for my laptop today. Been putting it off for months because it requires a call from a SquareTrade "specialist" to help diagnose your problem before a claim is finalized...

Me: "Hey I've received a box from you guys that was far too small for my [gaming] laptop both times I've sent this in and wanted to be sure I get the right size this time"

Specialist: "Oh, we've made some pretty big changes since you last filed a claim, we now base the size of the box we send you on the model of the device"

Me: .... what were they basing the size on before..?

Anyone reading these emails we are sending?

I work at a small place. A few users are using an application at our place that I develop and maintain. We all work remotely.

I announce by email to these few users a new version release of said application because of low level changes in the database, send the timeline for the upgrade, I include the new executable, with an easy illustrated 2 minutes *howto* to update painlessly.

Yet, past the date of the upgrade, 100% of the application users emailed me because they were not able to use the software anymore.

----------------

Or I have this issue where we identified a vulnerability in our systems - and I send out an email asking (as soon as possible) for which client version users are using to access the database, so that I patch everything swiftly right. Else everything may crash. Like a clean summary, 2 lines. Easy. A 30 second thing.

A week pass, no answer, I send again.

Then a second week pass, one user answers, saying:

> well I am busy, I will have time to check this out in February.

----------------

Then I am asking myself:
* Why sending email at all in the first place?

* Who wrote these 'best practices textbooks about warning users on schedule/expected downtime?'

*How about I just patch and release first and then expect the emails from the users *after* because 'something is broken', right? Whatever I do, they don't read it.

Oh and before anyone suggest that I should talk to my boss about this behavior from the users, my boss is included in the aforementioned 'users'.

Catch-22 much ? Haha thanks for reading

/rant

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.

Yesterday I killed a production server with a handful of sites running on it. 😬

Created an observer for one of my Laravel models. It was generating new translated slugs when another post gets translated by an API. While implementing also an updated method besides the created observation I obviously updated the models slug.
Pretty confident this small update will work I just pushed to production. Tested it live.

BOOM

Hard reset on the server redoing the changes. Searching where I fucked up this time...

Finding me observing the updating while updating the updating of the updating by the updating. 🤦

If I had to name one of my weaknesses it would definitely be impatience.

When I'm working on a backlog issue I want it to be done, finished, pronto. In the real world that's ofcourse not always the case, I can't disturb my colleagues with every question or ask for feedback every minute. I also hate it to have to wait for someone else to do something for me if it's blocking me, like when I need to fix something on a server but don't have access or when I somehow don't have permission for something and have to wait for someone to come and fix it. Even worse: Slow programs that fuck me up when I _just a second ago_ figured out how to fix a bug or implement something.

I also have to wait for pull request reviews so I usually end up with a bunch of stacked PRs that all feature small changes but are dependent upon each other because I needed a change for a different change, never more than 2-level stacks though!

Obviously it's a bit childish to lack professional patience, but it's definitely something that I wanted to rant about and think I should grow in.

I just found a vulnerability in my companies software.
Anyone who can edit a specific config file could implant some SQL there, which would later be executed by another (unknowing) user from within the software.

The software in question is B2B and has a server-client model, but with the client directly connecting to the database for most operations - but what you can do should be regulated by the software. With this cute little exploit I managed to drop a table from my test environment - or worse: I could manipulate data, so when you realize it it's too late to simply restore a DB backup because there might have been small changes for who knows how long. If someone was to use this maliciously the damages could be easily several million Euros for some of our customers (think about a few hundred thousand orders per day being deleted/changed).

It could also potentially be used for data exfiltration by changing protection flags, though if we're talking industry espionage they would probably find other ways and exploit the OS or DB directly, given that this attack requires specific knowledge of the software. Also we don't promise to safely store your crabby patty recipe (or other super secret secrets).

The good thing is that an attack would only possible for someone with both write access to that file and insider knowledge (though that can be gained by user of the software fairly easily with some knowledge of SQL).

Well, so much for logging off early on Friday.

It all started with an undelivereable e-mail.

New manager (soon-to-be boss) walks into admin guy's office and complains about an e-mail he sent to a customer being rejected by the recipient's mail server. I can hear parts of the conversation from my office across the floor.

Recipient uses the spamcop.net blacklist and our mail was rejected since it came from an IP address known to be sending mails to their spamtrap.

Admin guy wants to verify the claim by trying to find out our static public IPv4 address, to compare it to the blacklisted one from the notification.
For half an hour boss and him are trying to find the correct login credentials for the telco's customer-self-care web interface.
Eventually they call telco's support to get new credentials, it turned out during the VoIP migration about six months ago we got new credentials that were apparently not noted anywhere.

Eventually admin guy can log in, and wonders why he can't see any static IP address listed there, calls support again. Turns out we were not even using a static IP address anymore since the VoIP change. Now it's not like we would be hosting any services that need to be publicly accessible, nor would all users send their e-mail via a local server (at least my machine is already configured to talk directly to the telco's smtp, but this was supposedly different in the good ol' days, so I'm not sure whether it still applies to some users).

In any case, the e-mail issue seems completely forgotten by now: Admin guy wants his static ip address back, negotiates with telco support.
The change will require new PPPoE credentials for the VDSL line, he apparently received them over the phone(?) and should update them in the CPE after they had disabled the login for the dynamic address. Obviously something went wrong, admin guy meanwhile having to use his private phone to call support, claims the credentials would be reverted immediately when he changed them in the CPE Web UI.

Now I'm not exactly sure why, there's two scenarios I could imagine:
- Maybe telco would use TR-069/CWMP to remotely provision the credentials which are not updated in their system, thus overwriting CPE to the old ones and don't allow for manual changes, or
- Maybe just a browser issue. The CPE's login page is not even rendered correctly in my browser, but then again I'm the only one at the company using Firefox Private Mode with Ghostery, so it can't be reproduced on another machine. At least viewing the login/status page works with IE11 though, no idea how badly-written the config stuff itself might be.

Many hours pass, I enjoy not being annoyed by incoming phone calls for the rest of the day. Boss is slightly less happy, no internet and no incoming calls.

Next morning, windows would ask me to classify this new network as public/work/private - apparently someone tried factory-resetting the CPE. Or did they even get a replacement!? Still no internet though.
Hours later, everything finally back to normal, no idea what exactly happened - but we have our old static IPv4 address back, still wondering what we need it for.

Oh, and the blacklisted IP address was just the telco's mail server, of course. They end up on the spamcop list every once in a while.

tl;dr: if you're running a business in Germany that needs e-mail, just don't send it via the big magenta monopoly - you would end up sharing the same mail servers with tons of small businesses that might not employ the most qualified people for securing their stuff, so they will naturally be pwned and abused for spam every once in a while, having your mailservers blacklisted.

I'm waiting for the day when the next e-mail will be blocked and manager / boss eventually wonder how the 24-hours-outage did not even fix aynything in the end...

Here’s the second book for today.

Another small 100 page or so book.

It’s called advanced programming techniques, personally I don’t like the title, I don’t consider most of the items in here advanced, I would consider them more “better ways of solving a problem”, they do talk about recursion and linked lists, so I guess that could be a little advanced.

But like table based solutions is not advanced it’s just a technique that allows for simpler, scale able and main table code.. I been doing it for a long time, most easiest way to determine if something can turn into a table solution is look for a function that has a bunch of calls to the same function or something of that nature lots of repeated code with slight changes in a function or range of functions .. those of simplist way of “tablefiying”a solution I will picture the example from the book below.

The book, is all in java except for linked lists Thats in C..

But anyway this book is a great quick reference book, into the pile with programming pearls book, and those like that.

About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.

When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.

My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"

Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.

Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.

The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.

Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now.

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

Open droid edit, ignore big ads at the bottom.

Open file, make small changes.

Save as.

Open andftp

Login to azure web app

Navigate to wwroot

Switch to device files

Go to .deployment folder

Select file

Upload.

Is it efficient? Fuck no.

Notepad++ style editing on the go? Fuck yes

I love making small changes.

when your manager ask to add 'small changes'

Fuck! This is why I can't diet.

I can't get shit done, because I keep getting more things to fix. And I'm not talking everyday fixes, this is just plain retarded.

The asshole that my client hired thinks he's a dev. Takes projects that are working and makes small changes. Simply for him to say "I took this project and updated it for our needs."

Then when that shit eventually starts failing, I'm expected to fix it. It's not even that it takes me a long time to fix it. It's just that I'm looking at this thinking "Why are you not working?" Only to later find that, of course, it's been modified. By. Mr. Fucking. Dumbass.

Fuck!

!rant

Managed to find an advantage of IE, and it's not for downloading Firefox or Chrome.

Nah, I just discovered that you can actually add a shortcut on your bar task on Win7 with the favicon of the website (I guess it's the favicon), and IE will directly open to it with slight minor color changes.

So now when I need to check if any commit were made on the repository, I have a shortcut to the website so I can check fastly o/

(why I use IE for that ? Because Firefox and the proxy have some issues, and I had bad experience with Chrome. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But IE does the small job I give him, so I don't complain)

So, a new web project came for some small layout changes, nothing to fancy.
It was on the hands of another company and the client didn't want to work with them anymore. Basic Magento with a custom theme.

As I was wondering through files, I found out that the old devs echoed, in ".phtml" files, contents from ".txt" files located in base directory. I was shocked and went forward with it. The core of Magento had tons of this "echo"s. Several minutes later I found out that they "coded" another administration panel besides Magento, that had "authentication" with hard-coded user/pass inside index.php and a session start. That admin panel just rewrote the contents of .txt files using textareas. Why/what/when the fuck..they've forgotten the admin password?!?!!!!

This was like 3-4 years ago.
Worst project i've seen, ever...

So I just had this thought that nlegs.com (NSFW) kinda feels like a test.

When I first found it, and it still is, the front-end/layout is basically a BootStrap grid.

It was super easy to scrape.

Then over time, the owner made small tweaks and changes which felt like "oh you guys are still here.... let's make it a bit harder and see who drops out next"

So it got more and more tricky to scrape or fool the site.

But it never became completely unfoolable. I figured if he signed up for Cloudflare, that probably make it impossible to scrape....

Well I was curious today so did a whois.... And one of the things it mentioned was Cloudflare...

So now I'm like.... Hmmm.... What???!!! Ok.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sometimes pushing code into production without testing, if the changes are extremely small.

Open source is poison, hoax and source of much troubles.

Even as I love OSS, and I use it a lot, when things go south, they go south terribly.

There was "security" updates in one OSS program I have been using, that accidentally prevented use cases which specifically affected me. I raised bug report, made issue and gave small repro for it.
One of the core developers acknowledges that yes, this is problem, and could be handled with few added options, which users of similar use case could use to keep things working. He then tags issue "needs help" and disappears.
After I have waited some time, I ask help how I could fix it myself, like how to setup proper dev environment for that tool. Asked it in their forums few days later, as issue didn't get any response. Then asked help in their slack, as forums didn't get any help.

Figured out how to get dev environment up, fix done (~4 lines changed, adding simple check for option enabled or not) and figured out how to test that this works.
I create pull request to project, checking their CONTRIBUTING and following instructions there. Then I wait. I wait two weeks, and then one of the core develors goes to add label "needs response from maintainer". That is now almost two weeks ago...

So, bug that appeared in October, and issue that was created October 8th, is still not fixed, even as there is fix in PR for 28 days this far.

And what really ticks me off? People who make statements like: "it is OSS, have you thought of contributing and fixing things yourself?" when we run into problems with open source software.

Making fix yourself ain't biggest problem... but getting it actually applied seems to be biggest roadblock. This kind of experiences doesn't really encourage me to spend time fixing bugs in OSS, time is often better spend changing to different tool, or making changes in my own workflow or going around problem some kludge way.

I try to get business starting, and based on OSS tools. But my decision is staggering, as I had also made decision to contribute back to OSS... but first experiences ain't that encouraging.

Currently, OSS feels like cancer.

Commit small and related changes.

First rant here..

So earlier this week, on a php Laravel project, I created a set of nice new features.

The code is tested, locally all fine, I push to Github, circleCi kicks in and double checks myself, still everything green. (Just for a not, its a private project so only I work on it.)

I go ahead and merge, deploy to staging and continue on my next ticket, which is a very small one.

I call it the day, next day I pick back up where I left, test locally, all green, push... then circleCi says no.

I spend 2 days debugging, trying to figure out what is wrong without advance. I just push develop branch again, guess what also failing.

I leave it for the day as I already spend enough time on it.

This morning, I simply do a composer update, push and everything miraculously starts working.. even if there were no changes in the working branches.

Im so mad right now, and this is going in my "try this before you debug a ci" book..

It was around for a while but I didn’t realize it was it for a long time. I was fixing computers for cash and spending in on booze while in primary school. Making websites for cash and for fun while in high school. Some guys wanted to buy my databases at the time and sending me emails that my websites rocks. I didn’t cared cause I party a lot and I didn’t need money.
Sex drugs and rock and roll was my life not a fucking computer.
Since I never had problems with math I passed exams and got myself to university and dropped out cause of those 3 funny things above. Turned out to pass exams after second year when math and physics disappeared you need to study more then 1 day before exam and party was more important for me.

I failed tremendously. My girlfriend left me I was out of money I got back to my hometown with my laptop and I somehow between depression, drugs, alcohol and killing myself reminded I was getting money from websites and I can try to follow that movie.

At that time I didn’t read single book in english in my life. I know some basic english so I decided to try to read some actionscript2 pdf. Why actionscript ? I liked those simple games. Those were fun and there was nothing better. I was reading first book at least 10 times with vocabulary that took about a month until I remembered whole book and second book was faster like 1 week third was 1 day and from then thing moved a little faster. I discovered flex just before adobe acquired macromedia and started writing in it. Started answering to some questions on forum and build some portfolio website with fancy 3d animations and stuff and finally applied for 2 jobs.
They both were amazed by my website and one of them sent me some task to do and I did it overnight and sent them back. They wanted to hire me and I need to respond to them.
Second job they invited me for talking and asking about math, if I’m ok with 3d and stuff and they offered me job closer to my home town so I picked them. The code was amazing, 3d equations, quaternions, complicated stuff bit very well written by some company that dropped project before launch and my first task was add some small feature.
I remember first day in elevator with my former boss who told me to not to get scary and take it slowly I was trying to do my task as fast as I can worried I will be fired if I don’t do it and nobody else will hire me and I won’t manage to recover from second failure. It was even more fighting with myself that I will fail again then with this task lol.
I’ve done the feature third day and when they said it’s cool and I can commit my changes it appeared to me that It might be this shit that will get me out of trouble.
I was never again wrong about programming and so wrong about trouble but that’s a different story...

tl;dr fuck me, I'm stupid, I suck at my job and I wanna die but can't complain because I'm labeled ungrateful

I am -this- close... -this- close to strangling someone, or myself for that matter, over trying to finish this goddamned website that I regret taking on just because I needed the money.

You make me rework my website design three times and eventually end up micro-managing me and keep on making me make small changes that even I can't figure out, nor can anyone else for that fucking matter because you want it to be 'perfect'. God I'm so irritated right now let me fucking sleep. I want out so bad but fuck me sideways with my gaping asshole I need the fucking money.

I wanna quit this shit so bad, it's making me hate myself and throwing me into an existential crisis whether or not am I even a good designer / developer because I just can't satisfy this perfectionist asshole and need to greet him with a smile every fucking time to maintain good terms between our startups.

Manager brings up an idea, asks how long it would take to build out. I tell him a couple hours. I can be nice sometimes when the workload is light.

Build it out, make some improvements at home, create a dashboard so he can make small configuration changes.

We never use it.

So... I take over this one ticket to test... the ticket mentions some visual component popping up when a button is clicked. It says there is a success and a failure message. The title of the story also mentions another functionality.

I start testing and some fellow QA asks me why I'm testing in this environment. Turns out, three people are sharing one environment and three different things are deployed...

I ask the dev whats going on because I heard there are multiple people deploying stuff...
He just tells me "oh, my changes are deployed I just checked".
I tell him that it's not about that but about communication and testing one thing at the time. Then I tell him, that I wouldn't test until his stuff is the only stuff there.

Some time later he hits me up again, now with the env to himself.

I test and quickly I see, that there is only the positive message even when I make sure that the backend is not reachable. I tell the dev what I found and he tells me "oh no, it's just the implementation of the popup thing, it's just frontend for now"...
I tell him, that the ticket should say so.
No answer for like 1-2 hours. Then I get an "ok".
End of the day.

Next day I come in and the fellow QA tells me, that the dev asked him to test the ticket.
I ask him if he changed anything about the scope of the ticket, he says no...
I'm like "ok... know what... begin testing and then tell him what I already told him".
So he's testing and then tells him again to update the scope.

Later in the daily the the dev's update is besically "they won't test my ticket..."

It would have taken him like 1 fucking minute to update the ticket...

The whole QA team was always trying to being helpful and even when the tickets where sometimes not 100% clear we always made it work... but now we are more and more going towards "MR does not meet ticketdescription, fix it" and "I don't care if its just a small thing... fix it and then come back to me"...

Seriously frustrating some times...

Just some small changes

I always find reading small configuration files way more difficult than reading a big codebase.
I accept config files do really help in writing a better flexible code and separating the logic and settings but always offer a stiff learning curve.
And often, people make changes in config either unintentionally or with half knowledge which works in local but later blows up the entire system.
Wondering how config files can be presented in a way that the learning curve is minimal and the understandability of its impact is more visible.
I do really like annotations or decorators which provides a closer visibility between config and code.

Programming has taught me
1. Importance of patience, friends and family and yeh StackOverflow too...
2. Importance of small contributions towards dev community.
3. How smaller things can make big changes.
4. Helping others and getting help if you get stuck.
5. Anyone can code, but very few can build robust solutions. Project not just coding but it needs preparation and planning too.
6. Importance of reading documentations, writing test cases, debugger programs.
7. You can learn things even if you have no idea about it. It just takes your interest.

if (rant !== story)
System.out.println("Dev rant story time")

A coworker mentioned to me that I might have depression as part of my personality. They think this because I always feel at my best when I'm being active/productive (programming) or doing meditation practice. I thought that was strange.

Bit of a brief background, I've had depression since I was about 12 and I still get small bouts of it into my late 20's. I've been on antidepressiants for a very short time and I've been through talk therapy multiple times. It was a lot worse then it is now and I believed I have it under control.

My coworker thinks that I ended up dealing with it for so long that it has become a part of my personality so I don't notice it actively. The whole thing has left me sort of, I don't know, jaded. Or maybe just afraid that it could be true?

I thought about how I have a very all or nothing attitude in life. I don't think about getting a house because I don't put too much faith in myself towards having a family. Or how I have to make very radical changes to my life immediately if something starts triggering the new depressive episode. If I can't code or read at night I'll hope in the car and drive with no destination in mind for several hours just to keep my mind at ease.

I don't know. It sorta upsets me because I always thought of depression as something you need to "get out of", but now I wonder if my case was severe enough that I've adapted my life around it.

I have made a lot of small changes in my app like minor bug fixes, Animation, optimizations, better database management, new options, overall interface improvements, ... to give the application a better overall appearance. Then I decide to show it to my Client.

"From what I can tell, you haven't done much since last time"

I just started but I'm already tired.

For some years I have worked in the industry, not a lot, I know right but I really wonder how do you deal with all "not code-related" bullshit.

IT should be a dynamic field but somehow it is stuck inside the business logic which is all about the money and that does not take care of the real matter which is "code engineering".

- Most of the projects I have seen are an utter mess.
- No real structure
- Code is literally thrown somewhere to make stuff works and fix bugs
- Features which should require X amount of time are planned and shipped earlier ignoring best practices.
- The customer changes idea every week
- Nobody wants to pay for a reasonable architecture but prefer to keep financing un-maintainable projects that only God knows where they have been made (presumably in Hell)
- Juniors devs with no real senior following them committing unreasonable stuff
- Seniors devs thinking they are but they aren't.
- Company that keeps delivering projects even if they have not the required amount of people to make it in time.

Seems like nobody wants to stop and take time to think and make the right decisions. I see people running around me like crazy ants.

But, above all, what really kills me deep inside is HR. You are looking for "dynamic" "talented" "cool" devs but you are not willing to pay them enough.

Should I talk about LinkedIn?

Oh, God... Even the worsts companies sound like they are into Fortune 500. I feel so much hypocrisy here.

I have worked for big and small IT companies.
In the end, is all about "inside politics", everything which is getting financed is not because of usefulness but because of "relationship".

I started coding when I was really young.
After ten and more years, I finally take the job of my dreams but everything is shuttering under my feet.

If you have some words of wisdom, I'm here to hear you.

PS.
I'm not a native English speaker, I apologize for any mistake.

ticket sized small: figure out why this thing is failing, get the old MR to work, test it

month old MR, over 8000 lines of code changes

FML

At work I am "the" programmer and is the first time in which I actually enjoy showing different solutions to problems without having a fear of implementing large things without having any form of recognition.

Seeing someone get happy because of something you created is a great feeling and even tho most of us are misantrophic af we can still appreciate bringing happiness through code.

To me, software engineering is the closest thing to magic and I really believe that.

Two days ago I showed my manager a little utility to build small portions of the site we are building and make changes to it in real time without browser refreshes for whatever change she would like to do. She was super happy and excited and it made me feel real happy.

Such great feeling man. Nothing but good vibes brother!!

Small chaotic startup that never grew up (15 years atm).
Hosts/maintains a number of apps/sites for various customers.

At some point, someone decides that a CMS would be usefull to maintain the content across all products. Forgoing all sense, reason and the very notion of "additional maintenance and dev" it is decided that one should be built in-house.

Fast forward a number of years.

Ops performs routine maintenance on prod-servers. A java-patch accidently knocks out one of the pillars a 3rd party lib the CMS uses for storing images. CMS basically burst in to flames causing a.... significant incident.

Enter yours truly to fix the mess.
Spend a few days replacing the affected 3rd party lib. Run tests on CMS in test and staging environments. Apply java-patch. All seems fine.

When speaking to frontenders and app-devs, a significant hurdle present itself:
All test/staging instances of all websites/apps/etc ALL USE PRODUCTION CMS. Hardcoded. No way around.

There is -no- way to properly test and verify the functionality of any changes made to the home-brewed CMS.
My patch did indeed work in the end.

But did the company learn anything? Did they listen to my reasoning, pleading or even anguished screams for sanity?

No.

So my worst experience with a project manager was this:

New changes to the system came in, and i was the developer of android frontend back then
So he's shouting at me like 'why is dis so slow, why deez delayed, why those render misaligned on the orbitrary tablet, etc.'
So we finish in like an hour, he walk away back to his office, I went to smoke, came back, oh hey, I wanna go to the toilet
And back then at that place we had a small one person WC, so when someone was there, anyone else would have to stand outside the cabin
So I come next to it, oh, fuck, occupied, and I hear ridiculously loud and echo-y splashes of pure solid shit hitting the water surface)
A min later the thunderstorm was over, the door opens, and my PM rushes out, sees me, stops (I was in his way) and gives me a deathstare for a quick second. Awkward moment's over, he walks around me, but I just could not keep my mouth shut, so I said aloud

"Well, no wonder"

My department was tasked with building browser extentions for Shopify to add functionality to their admin panel.

We warned the bosses about how unstable these extentions could become as there is no warning of changes to Shopify's code. If they make a small change it could break everything.

Instead of listening to us, what did they do? They doubled down and had us build this massive plug-in that adds dozens of complicated UIs and features to run the core of their business. I actually left the company over this and several other questionable decisions.

Last week I was catching up with their last remaining dev. Appearently a few weeks ago most of it fell apart and some of its not fixable unless Shopify makes some changes.

==============
Getting Feedback Rant!
=============

When "this is simpler" feedback results in a function of 500 lines of code.

When I get "don't do X" in the feedback. Thank you very much. What do you want me to do instead?

Unclear feedback.

When the feedback giver changes his mind after I applied the changes!

When applying the feedback introduces a bug.

Simply opinionated feedback that is not enforced by any tool or backed up by any facts.
Please find something better to do in life.

Unactionable feedback.

"Consider X"
I will not consider thank you very much.

"Verify this works"
Duh..

When the feedback giver knows something that you don't.
I know this is a legit case.. still annoying.

"I disagree with the feature"
Go argue with the PM, not relevant to me, thanks!

=====================
GIVING FEEDBACK RANT
=====================

I rewrote the system. Please review it.

No need to review, just approve.

I will change this as part of the next ticket.

I would like to keep it the way it is.
lazy ass..

You can't test this.
It's impossible to test this.

No need to test this.

There's no point to test this.

I'll test this on production.

Not sure why this is working..

Please document this..
Because documentation is like a thing, you know.

Oh, this code is not related to this PR, I just don't want to open a new branch for such a small change. ignore it.

Ignore this.

This will be meaningful in my next change.

Is it me or software subscriptions make developers lazy?

There is a great photo editing software: Capture One. Every year they release a new major version, so users need to buy an upgrade. In the past developers packed a bunch of big changes into major update, also they released 3 minor updates yearly, and every minor update brought some cool features. But then they added subscription model which was cheaper then perpetual model. And at the same time major updates became not that cool. Developers started to add enterprise features needed by museums, features involving other camera brands users, changes targeted at newbies and so on. For perpetual model users most of these changes are not worth 80-255 EUR yearly (depends on license type and offs) but is ok for subscription model users because they continue using the software and even small updates and enhancements are fine for them.

Not every major update is that weak but many of them are not worth upgrade. And developers are not motivated to do more cool stuff because subscription model users will continue paying for their subscriptions.

Best userstory ever?

As CEO i want to small layout changes

I love Mikrotik. Just fucking love them. I also love my residential fiber service. Small company. Synchronous 125M service. No caps. Bandwidth is always there.

BUT... They use PPPOE (seriously guys?), and the IP changes on *every single re-connect*. Also: no IPv6 support. I know. I don't need it. But I want it.

Enter DNSMadeEasy's DDNS, Hurricane Electric's 6to4 tunnel service, and my Routerboard AH100x4. I wrote a script that runs on the router whenever my IP changes. It updates my DDNS record, updates my 6to4 tunnel IP using HE's API, and updates my local 6to4 interface's IP.

It just works. My public IPv4 may change, but the /48 IPv6 networks on my LAN side stay fully routeable.

Sick of going the extra mile for this one client, doing small off spec changes for free and always being there to help support them and their customers.

But when I ask to get paid, nooo, that’s just not a priority for them and they act like I’m odd to even raise it.

How about you treat my business with the same kind of respect I treat yours??

I actually do have something to rant about!

The people I've decided to work with... are complete and utter fools. They don't want to keep updated with new practices and merely talk about awesome stuff... Let me elaborate.

The first person is someone I spent really many hours just writing with, I've helped him build on his personal project, which has now become our project (which I've done most of the work on now). He keeps writing about things that aren't fucking relevant for the current task - furthermore, he completely refuses to use any type of collaboration software in order to keep an eye on tasks we want to, and already have completed. He likes Git but doesn't provide helpful git messages, sometimes even stuff like 'forgot this'.. never any freaking description of what's actually been done! Not even after agreeing it should be done, he just doesn't understand what a helpful message is apparently.
I might be a bit special regarding wanting to follow practices, but how the fuck do you make any amount of money by being so ignorant!? He was a WP 'developer' a while ago, and has since changed to JS and are using a framework which he doesn't understand - he can't even remember what the documentation states.

So why do I 'work' with him? He knows a lot of phrases he's read in books, blogs, and the likes. That makes him really inspirational and positive and he really wants to become successful(like me!). But over the last few months, I've realized how bad he is at programming - he doesn't know basic programming concepts and have a hard time applying any sort of knowledge to his programming. If it's not pre-built, he can't use it, not even if the documentation has specific examples. He barely grasps the concept of binding data to a variable. He wouldn't know how to access it again though, it's just for the sake of binding it to some existing functionality.

The other guy really likes his old style. He hired me to maintain some application. Which has turned out to be a hell of several small tasks he needs to be finished or reworked - with no clear definition of the task. Most of the time, he'll do some initial changes, show the changes to me, vaguely explain what they do (not what he's trying to achieve) and first THEN ask me to do these changes, most often in some files that don't exist (he uses the wrong filenames so I have to guess/ask where the changes need to be made).
To top it all off, old syntax is used and don't get me started on the spaces+tabs for indenting lines... Because I've already added a great ESLint+Prettier conf and everything should be nicely formatted according to pre-defined rules.
But he won't take the time to install some plugins in his editor and I'm left with sometimes buggy, badly formatted code (the code I have to make changes with!) - that's while he several times have agreed that I can do what I want and that he even questions his own ways when looking at my changes which he calls by-the-book.
So why the motherfucking fuck do I keep working with him?

Well, he keeps paying so that's really nice - I haven't been able to properly execute the bigger tasks(which pays more) though, due to a lack of information or some badly written code I couldn't quite figure out how works (at a glance).

He also keeps talking about these new projects he wants to make.. he even has these freaking papers with descriptions and data-structures and we converse really good about these new awesome projects. He also likes cryptocurrencies(which is an interest of mine he has inflamed quite a bit) and lastly, he seems like a genuinely nice guy who I'd like to spend some time with even besides coding and work.

So now I stand here - stuck with people that make me feel like a demi-god or something because I use a git style-guide and ESLint+Prettier with the Airbnb style-guide.

What should I do? I'd really like some remote work and have a desperate need for money... So much so, that I might even have to pick up a fulltime job, in order to save my sorry ass - all because I like speaking with people who just like the thought of programming...

I'm actually quite lonely with my thoughts and they are the two only people I've had some sort of relationship with - who has an invested interest in programming/dev... I really like that, despite having to follow their thoughts as they surely can't follow mine.

Please be my friend or give me some paid work lol.

Also, I've been moving the last couple weeks - those weeks has been the most stressful of my life and have not contributed to my overall wellbeing and relations with people... It's good to be back at the computer again and be reading some devRant though!

Every single linux tutoriel ever :

Do theses steps :

Ste p 1:
Ste p 2:
Step 3 :

Reboot your system.

System doesn't boot anymore

AT THE FUCKING END in SMALL TEXT : "Oh you can't follow these instruction if you are applying changes to system disk. here is the right wasy : <link>"

Stupid linux communty. Warning ashould be AT THE FUCKING begining.

Rant to myself: Don't try to be too smart, you dipshit!

3 weeks ago I packed 2 small changes in one commit, because I was sure (and obviuosly lazy) that no one will ever need these special changes separate.

Guess what happened today? Right, I had to make a change on an old version and needed the one half of this commit.
Cherry-picking ended up in changes I don't need and furthermore some nice collisions.

Thank you very much, past me, for saving 2 minutes 3 weeks ago, which now wastes half an hour.

Trying to merge
A conflict was found, just small changes on both files
Trying to resolve
*A hour later*
Deleted the code form both branch, merged the branches and repushed the code to the merged branch.

> be me, working on small addition to enormous feature branch
> build system in flux due to reorganization started a month ago, not quite solid yet, but mostly works
> f_branch gets master merged into it sometime last week
> bossman makes "minor" change to build system and edits master to match
> doesn't merge changes into f_branch
> bossman goes on holiday for a week
> no permission to merge master changes into f_branch
> linter barfs
> npm barfs
> build server barfs
> mfw I can't even deploy to our testing environment

Unclogging a workflow that stretches > dozen porjects, from building to analysis of build (static / lint check etc.)… Deployment.

It's frustrating.

Touching one thing and everything falls apart.

Thus small changes, fixing the rest of workflow, testing ...

Repeat .

Going now since 1 1/2 weeks. Possibly another or two weeks more.

It is soooooooo boring tedious annoyingly frustrating slowmotion shit

-.-

I don't know how any company can keep on top of crazy npm package changes. I work in a REALLY SMALL team. We are still using bunch of deprecated packages and we keep building on top of those packages. Updating packages is always a nightmare. It's impossible to Google solution when no one is using the particular combination of deprecated packages. Fuck me

Sometimes in our personal projects we write crazy commit messages. I'll post mine because its a weekend and I hope someone has a well deserved start. Feel free to post yours, regex out your username, time and hash and paste chronologically. ISSA THREAD MY DUDES AND DUDETTES
--
Initialization of NDM in Kotlin
Small changes, wiping drive
Small changes, wiping drive
Lottie, Backdrop contrast and logging in implementation
Added Lotties, added Link variable to Database Manifest
Fixed menu engine, added Smart adapter, indexing, Extra menus on home and Calendar
b4 work
Added branch and few changes
really before work
Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
really before work 4 sho
Refined Search response
Added Swipe to menus and nested tabs
Added custom tab library
tabs and shh
MORE TIME WASTED ON just 3 files
api and rx
New models new handlers, new static leaky objects xd, a few icons
minor changes
minor changesqwqaweqweweqwe
db db dbbb
Added Reading display and delete function
tryin to add web socket...fail
tryin to add web socket...success
New robust content handler, linked to a web socket. :) happy data-ring lol
A lot of changes, no time to explain
minor fixes ehehhe
Added args and content builder to content id
Converted some fragments into NDMListFragments
dsa
MAjor BiG ChANgEs added Listable interface added refresh and online cache added many stuff
MAjor mAjOr BiG ChANgEs added multiClick block added in-fragment Menu (and handling) added in-fragment list irem click handling
Unformatted some code, added midi handler, new menus, added manifest
Update and Insert (upsert) extension to Listable ArrayList
Test for hymnbook offline changing
Changed menuId from int to key string :) added refresh ...global... :(
Added Scale Gesture Listener
Changed Font and size of titlebar, text selection arg. NEW NEW Readings layout.
minor fix on duplicate readings
added isUserDatabase attribute to hymn database file added markwon to stanza views
Home changes :)
Modular hymn Editing
Home changes :) part 2
Home changes :) part 3
Unified Stanza view
Perfected stanza sharing
Added Summernote!!
minor changes
Another change but from source tree :)))
Added Span Saving
Added Working Quick Access
Added a caption system, well text captions only
Added Stanza view modes...quite stable though
From work changes
JUST a [ush
Touch horizontal needs fix
Return api heruko
Added bible index
Added new settings file
Added settings and new icons
Minor changes to settings
Restored ping
Toggles and Pickers in settings
Added Section Title
Added Publishing Access Panel
Added Some new color changes on restart. When am I going to be tired of adding files :)
Before the confession
Theme Adaptation to views
Before Realm DB
Theme Activity :)
Changes to theme Activity
Changes to theme Activity part 2 mini
Some laptop changes, so you wont know what changed :)
Images...
Rush ourd
Added palette from images
Added lastModified filter
Problem with cache response
works work
Some Improvements, changed calendar recycle view
Tonic Sol-fa Screen Added
Merge Pull
Yes colors
Before leasing out to testers
Working but unformated table
Added Seperators but we have a glithchchchc
Tonic sol-fa nice, dots left, and some extras :)))
Just a nice commit on a good friday.
Just a quickie
I dont know what im committing...

Does anybody else have the project where every time you try to change something, no matter how small, you always end up screwing it up and needing a bunch more time to fix it just to get back to the starting position?

I have this project I've done, a custom Ambilight system for my TV, and everytime I try to add a feature the lights stop working altogether... Tried adding detection of when I start my media player to automatically start the Ambilight mode (I made several modes, one of which is just shine a certain color all the time which is great if you don't want to use normal lights and want to be able to control the lights from your phone).
I had the code for detecting app start and stop from before when I implemented it for a slightly different system. I just changed the few things that are different and poof, no more lights... I managed to forget the other system checked a flag after every process exit and overrode the mode and I removed the setting of the flag, but not reading of it...
Every single time I do changes on this it's something... Other projects sometimes go smoothly, sometimes not, but this one just doesn't want to be kind to me....
Results are awesome, though :)

me:task assigned is a small fix.Gonna finish Early sit back relax this sprint.
mail(next day):we've moved to microservices.setup as easy as gulp landscape:start
me:cool!shinny new stuff!seems easy!!
project:npm failed..please check module xxx..
me:fine.....
after long mail chain
project:npm failed unknown file not found
me:fine.....
after hours of googling and little github issue browsing
project:server running @ portxxx
me:yay finally happy life!!makes chnages, sent for review.
reviewer:code needs refactoring!!
me:make all changes..waits for faceless reviewer from another timezone!
reviewer:thumbs up.
me:i will make it in time!!!yes!!
jenkins:buid:failure
me:no still i wont give up...
debug finds out new bugs caused by unrelated code...make new PR the end is near,one day more will definitely merge!!!
mail:jenkins down for maintenance!
me:nooooo....waits till last minute gets thumbs up for merge, finally merged in the last second!!

all for 12 lines of code change.
:/
sad life

Last weekend I was working on a small project for a friend of mine: a dockerized webapp, plus API backend and DB. I had some problems with the installation on the vps and had to try out different images and never really did a complete setup of my usual dotfiles. Got it running on an Ubuntu distro. Everything great.
It was the first release so I still had to check that every configuration worked ok, like letsencrypt companion container, the reverse proxy and all that stuff, so I decided to clone the whole project on the server tho make the changes there and then commit them from there.
Docker compose, 10 lines of code, change the hosts and password. Boom everything working. Great... Except for the images in the webapp.

WTF? Check the repo, here they are, all ok. I try different build tactics. Nothing. Even building the app on another docker always the same. Checked browser cache, all the correct ports are open. I even though that maybe react was still using some weird websocket I didn't know, but no.
Damn, I spent 5 hours checking why the f*** the server wouldn't make it out.

Then, finally, the realization...

I didn't install the f******* git-lfs plugin and all I was working with were stupid symbolics links! Webpack never even throw an error for any of the stupid images and the browser would only show a corrupted image, when decoding the base64 string.

Literally the solution took 5 minutes.
F*** changes on production, now I do everything on a fully automated CI.

I am just student looking for job, and got this pre interview test:
Develop an Android or iOS app with login and password input field, download button, place for image we prvided.

... reading further:
What we are looking for in the code ?
internal quality:
-consistent formatting of the source code
-clean, robust code without smells
-consistent abstractions and logical overall structure
-no cyclic dependencies
-code organized in meaningful layers
-low coupling and high cohesion
-descriptive and intention-revealing names of packages, classes, methods etc.
-single small functions that do one thing
-truly object-oriented design with proper encapsulation, sticking to DRY and SOLID principles, without procedural anti-patterns
-lots of bonus points for advanced techniques like design patterns, dependency injection, design by contract and especially unit (or even functional or integration) tests

external quality:
-the app should be fully functional, with every state, user input, boundary condition etc. taken care of (although this app is indeed very small, treat it as a part of big production-ready project)
-the app should correctly handle screen orientation changes, device resources and permissions, incoming calls, network connection issues, being pushed to the background, signing deal with the devil :D and other platform intricacies and should recover from these events gracefully
-lowest API level is not defined - use what you think is reasonable in these days
-bonus points if the app interacts with the user in an informative and helpful way
-bonus points for nice looks - use a clean, simple yet effective layout and design

... I mean really ? and they give me like 2 days ?

People always say thet you should not quit your job before you have the next job lined up, but what if you plan to do freelance? This is my dilemma.

A bit of context (rant).

My current job is my first official job. Small company, VERY HIGH staff turnover rate. I have been here for 2 and a half years. My commute on a good day is < 20 mins, and money is relatively good.

During the last 6 months, all devs above me resigned, which lead to the system maintenance being passed on to the few devs left. Our biggest system is a legacy system (Windows CE), and new clients are actively signed up and new features requested. The codebase is not even worthy of being called spaghetti, changes break every client, I need to wash my hands every couple of minutes. Seriously, I would rather maintain obfuscated code. It is like a bunch of highschoolers wrote the system, though I think they would have done a better job.

Management is nice and understanding, but the state of the codebase is killing the spirits.

I fill my nights and weekends moonlighting to keep my mind off of the 'daymares' at work. I have never been a team player, and thrive on my own. I have been thinking quiting and going full freelance/contract the last couple of months. Should things not work out, I can always go job hunting (see issue in par. 1)

Fuuuuuuuck!!
CR estimates:
Part 1: 2h including testing
Part 2: 2h-2days-maybe never (small changes on horrifically fucked up project noone understands with tons of tech debt)

Managed to pull off the part two in one day.. //yay me?!

Additional day to unfuckup git fuckups (including but not limited to master head not compiling because a smartass included *.cs in .gitignore file which he also pushed..don't ask, I have no clue why..) which was a huuuge deal for me as I usually use only local repo and had no idea how to tackle this.. coworker helped out.. seems I was on the right way, but git push branchy was acting up & said I had to login & ofc I had no clue what the pass was set to (first setup was more than 2yrs ago)..so new key, new pass.. all good.. yay!

Back to the original story/rant: Now I'm stuck with writing jira explanation why it was done this way & not the way customer suggested. They offered only vague description anyways which would require me to do a hacky messy thing, ew.. + it most probably would require major data modifications after deployment to even make it work..

Anyhow, this expanation is also easy peasy in english..
BUT...
I must write it in my native tongue.. o.O FML! Spent almost 40mins on one paragraph..

Sooo.. if anyone will petition to ban non english in IT, I'm all for it!!

In my company we are constricted to have 100% of f̶a̶k̶e̶ coverage with unit test.
Obviously the test suites are not performing and it takes more than 8 minutes to run 3335 tests.

I know that what I'm going to say is super mainstream but there is nothing comparable to the relief that comes from seeing all tests in green after you did a lot of small changes around the code on Friday.

I love it when developers and designers say "we've build our own UI-framework/ online living styleguide" and how that was a lot of work and it just consists of: Input, Button, some headlines and colors. And it also does not grow a tiny module/bit the next 3 years. And if you ask to add a new button-size everybody is just like "Noooooo, we already have two sizes! Isn't that enough? Do you really need one more? Doesn't this dilute the overall display of the corporate design on the website?" Because for real it is not a living online styleguide that automatically transports changes to every site as intended in the first place but is rather a small bundle of HTML- and CSS-Snippets...

We're doing single login with Azure AD for a Java-based site. We need to also sync the user changes with a microservice.

Now, here comes the fun part: Microsoft is working on a new API which looks promising, which they recommend to use as they've migrated their resources there. But this new API has SDK for a ton of languages but Java, so that's a no-no. On the other side, the js sdk for the old API is borderline unusable and has no deltas (which we need to sync users), although the new one is pretty good.

As a cherry on the cake, applications created with the old API are not transferrable to the new one, but it is otherwise. This is detailed in a very small section of their labrythinc docs and I'm really hoping that this is true or we're thoroughly screwed.

Alas, Microsoft, you've disappointed me again!

A very long rant.. but I'm looking to share some experiences, maybe a different perspective.. huge changes at the company.

So my company is starting our microservices journey (we have a 359 retail websites at this moment)

First question was: What to build first?

The first thing we had to do was to decide what we wanted to build as our first microservice. We went looking for a microservice that can be used read only, consumers could easily implement without overhauling production software and is isolated from other processes.

We’ve ended up with building a catalog service as our first microservice. That catalog service provides consumers of the microservice information of our catalog and its most essential information about items in the catalog.

By starting with building the catalog service the team could focus on building the microservice without any time pressure. The initial functionalities of the catalog service were being created to replace existing functionality which were working fine.

Because we choose such an isolated functionality we were able to introduce the new catalog service into production step by step. Instead of replacing the search functionality of the webshops using a big-bang approach, we choose A/B split testing to measure our changes and gradually increase the load of the microservice.

Next step: Choosing a datastore

The search engine that was in production when we started this project was making user of Solr. Due to the use of Lucene it was performing very well as a search engine, but from engineering perspective it lacked some functionalities. It came short if you wanted to run it in a cluster environment, configuring it was hard and not user friendly and last but not least, development of Solr seemed to be grinded to a halt.

Elasticsearch started entering the scene as a competitor for Solr and brought interesting features. Still using Lucene, which we were happy with, it was build with clustering in mind and being provided out of the box. Managing Elasticsearch was easy since there are REST APIs for configuration and as a fallback there are YAML configurations available.

We decided to use Elasticsearch since it provides us the strengths and capabilities of Lucene with the added joy of easy configuration, clustering and a lively community driving the project.

Even bigger challenge? Which programming language will we use

The team responsible for developing this first microservice consists out of a group web developers. So when looking for a programming language for the microservice, we went searching for a language close to their hearts and expertise. At that time a typical web developer at least had knowledge of PHP and Javascript.

What we’ve noticed during researching various languages is that almost all actions done by the catalog service will boil down to the following paradigm:

- Execute a HTTP call to fetch some JSON

- Transform JSON to a desired output

- Respond with the transformed JSON

Actions that easily can be done in a parallel and asynchronous manner and mainly consists out of transforming JSON from the source to a desired output. The programming language used for the catalog service should hold strong qualifications for those kind of actions.

Another thing to notice is that some functionalities that will be built using the catalog service will result into a high level of concurrent requests. For example the type-ahead functionality will trigger several requests to the catalog service per usage of a user.

To us, PHP and .NET at that time weren’t sufficient enough to us for building the catalog service based on the requirements we’ve set. Eventually we’ve decided to use Node.js which is better suited for the things we are looking for as described earlier. Node.js provides a non-blocking I/O model and being event driven helps us developing a high performance microservice.

The leap to start programming Node.js is relatively small since it basically is Javascript. A language that is familiar for the developers around that time. While Node.js is displaying some new concepts it is relatively easy for a developer to start using it.

The beauty of microservices and the isolation it provides, is that you can choose the best tool for that particular microservice. Not all microservices will be developed using Node.js and Elasticsearch. All kinds of combinations might arise and this is what makes the microservices architecture so flexible.

Even when Node.js or Elasticsearch turns out to be a bad choice for the catalog service it is relatively easy to switch that choice for magic ‘X’ or component ‘Z’. By focussing on creating a solid API the components that are driving that API don’t matter that much. It should do what you ask of it and when it is lacking you just replace it.

Many more headaches to come later this year ;)

First rant ever:

So I occasionally have to work for managers who say things like: "Don't reformat that code, the diff will look confusing in our repo browser". Said with such conviction that they initially made me feel retarded when I was more junior.

As time went on I realized that if we tried to "preserve" code so that the only changes visible were those that resulted in functional changes to our app, our code would eventually degrade into a steaming pile of unreadable piss.

I thankfully am working for a more technical manager at the moment so I don't have this issue and can make small refactors to make the codebase less gagworthy as I go.

I don't know though, maybe I'm wrong. Thoughts?

How do you plan before small software changes?

I have some extremely iterative approach where I change one function or one variable at a time, like a headless chicken. I am not planning beforehand which modules or functions I need to change but start from somewhere and like a linked list, I am moving on until the end.

But I feel like it is wasting my time. What is your approach when you want to have let's say -50 line of code changes?

Running a small company. All of us work from home. I am a designer and coder in one person, but now mostly taking care of cash flow, work done etc., while I have my dear girlfriend as only designer and an old friend as only front/backend developer. We are doing mainly small presentation websites on drupal, and a lot of webdesign.

Now I want to ask more experienced devs here. As the "main guy" I am responsible for everything running smooth with clients, money flow etc. But I am constantly running in a serious problem with my developer.
He most of the time gets the job done. But it is as fucked as possible. It looks good at the first view, but when you check the code... Oh god. Not only once he wrote me he did the job and when I checked it, it was like 50 percent done and rest was let untouched. He is using the oldest approaches in css as possible. Most of the time setting fixed widths even when I told him not to do so. Thing is, he knows how to do it properly, but he rather set the fixed width for all the devices than write something more scalable (imagine fixed width buttons, now imagine a website with 5 translations and now imagine how it behaves on mobile phones).

I want to be in a state where my dev writes me he did the job and I can INSTANTLY pass the changes to client with a trust of good done work. Without checking constantly all the work after him. Or it is normal and it works like that everywhere?

As to mention, I think he is pretty good paid and this is not money problem. It even does not look like he is demotivated or anything. When I speak to him it looks more like he is lazy to learn new things and lazy to do a good work. What would you suggest? Thanks

is this normal?

I work in a small startup, we have only 6 developers.
Recently some changes were announced that a developer was promoted as the engineering manager and the second one as a team leader.
This sounds good and promising but isn't this somehow early at this stage and scale?
Did you guys had similar experiences where you end up having 3 managers (like me in this case) in a small startup?

So my job is now starting to spin back around towards more development styles roles.

Currently I am in the process of learning about an internal Asp.Net app for managing invoicing.

A .net core app to manage changes to rate card prices.

And a small python app which runs 40+ sql queries and writes the results to a spreadsheet.

This is the jest time I’ve used python, and I have to say I really like it

We use MDD!! I coined this term one night after getting frustrated and having a lot of drinks. What's that, you ask?
MAGIC DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT
It's when you're working on a not-so-recent code base and are afraid to make any changes in fear of breaking things up. You've touched some modules, and now you restrict yourself to work only on those treating all others as a blackbox. Even if something can be achieved by a small change in one of the blackboxes, you still go for multiple changes in the modules you're familiar with! Such is the horror. You start saying that those modules work by some dark magic that nobody understands!

Motherfucking peace of shit....
Dont know to whom I should direct this to .

Was creating a new login page for web app using Quasar(vue.js). Since my application have 2 different types of user, which also have different UI, and functionality.
One is written in vanilla ( and is quiet heavy) and the other one in vuejs ( though earlier it was written in vanilla too ). Login page too was written in vanilla which was working fine.
Now just yesterday I finished a prototype for the third type of user, which is also written in vuejs. Now I decided to re create login page using vuejs. Quiet small and easy to do. Finished it yesterday itself. Now since today's morning I am trying to configure it so that it this piece of shit just let me log in. It was authentication and verifying but not letting me log in.
( On server after authentication, I set cookies/token on clients browser and auto reload the page, so during next request to server/ or during reload, server will read the cookie/token and send the specific admin panel to user)

Prick. Dick.
It was setting cookie, but not at the '/' path. Mother fucker.
It was setting cookie to the path I was sending login credentials ( which was different from '/', I.e.- /login/verify=password )
So it was setting cookie/token at '/login/verify=password'.
Even tried setting path for cookie at server. Read everything on internet. MF nothing worked. All I came across was, 'this is CORS' .... 'this is CORS'. Assholes, if it were CORS', how then I am able to make request to server and getting response without error

Only a hour ago, when I made get request to '/login/verify=password' I figured out, cookie is being sent to server for this path only. Then did some changes at server, so to send login credentials to '/'. Now that shit is working

Fucking waste of time. Wasted more than 6 hours. Asshole.

Btw, if you can suggest a better way to login, then please.

Have you guys tried Chrome-beta (build 74)?
I downloaded the beta because of some automated testing and I feel blessed with such smoothness in the UI. I barely even notice these frontend / design things, but I did notice some really good (small) changes!

context: Python Sanic Backend, Bulma Frontend
*this is a direct repost of my rant on my discord*

UGH WHY IS EVERYTHING TOO COMPLICATED FOR NO FUCKING REASON
I JUST NEED AN INTERACTIVE UI WITHOUT EXPLICITLY DOING IT MYSELF WITH TONS OF BOILERPLATE CODE
React - uses JSX
Angular - uses TypeScript

what's next? some weird fucking thing that's not even necessary for basic needs
And why the fuck does react need node.js or some JSX compiler to make things easier?
None of this makes any fucking sense
Why not just declare actual javascript objects and functions and that's fuckin it
I just need regex validation and sometimes, custom validation based on other things
Then when the user changes something a small modal shows up asking to save changes
None of this bullshit
It's deadass simple
I don't need routing
No need for your JSX fuckery
No need for your TypeScript shit
I barely would even fucking use those
REEE
Fuck react, Fuck angular
React would've been the perfect thing for this shit
but NO
they had to make things 100x worse
Fucking bitch
because react has event hooks
I can just listen to the changes
then display the modal and get done with it
All other processing is done in the backend
IT'S THAT SIMPLE REACT
Validation is provided by the backend, Just fucking use regex in the frontend and that's it
IT JUST NEEDS TO DO SIMPLE THINGS
IT DOESN'T TAKE ROCKET SCIENCE TO DO MINIMAL WORK

Hi there!

I've been worrying about the following problem for months now and I don't find any solution. Maybe anybody of you can lead me the way.

We are developing a software suite which consists of a number of desktop applications:

* 12 applications written in C++; all over 20 years old; further development by 5 or 6 guys (one man armys) - mainly bugfixing, changes of law implementations, small features
* 2 applications we are currently writing in C#; completely new developments of existing C++ applications; scrum teams with at least 5 guys; this is, where we put our focus in

These applications (C++ and C#) are sharing some core assemblies and are interacting with each other. So they are not independent.

We organize them in a mono repository in one huge solution, which consists currently of about 500 projects.

Advantages:

* With all projects in one solution and through project references, Visual Studio takes care of the right build order
* Code navigation is superb - every single line of code is accessible - this makes refactoring easy
* Every developer can map the branch and build the whole suite locally
* Debugging on the local machine is easy
* DevOps pipeline is straight forward - it just have to build a single solution

Disadvantages:

* The huge solution is extremely slow.
* If you want to build the solution or you want to debug (which does essentially the same as a pre step) Visual Studio is building a lot of projects, although they haven't been changed. Their detection is buggy. So sometimes you wait 2 minutes until it starts the app. That slows us down a lot.
* Full builds need about an hour, because its building the same projects (even if they haven't been changed) over and over again (with ready made nuget packages this could be improved a lot I think)
* If a core team member changes some core apis, he is changing the calling code too, although he doesn't know the calling code, because another team has written it. I don't think, that's best practice and it doesn't scale.
* Often, a C# developer has to mess around with C++ building problems, because the C++ projects are in the same solution
* It gets more and more confusing and frustrating, because there is no clear organizational seperation between apps and nobody can't just focus on his app alone.

Idea:

I was thinking about putting the whole framework and core projects in a new solution (around 100 projects). Then we could take all old C++ projects and put them also in a new solution (around 200 projects). This would leave the newer projects (new applications - C#) in the existing solution.

This should speed up things, and would be a first step to better seperation, BUT:

How should the integration process look like?

Scenario: Core team is changing an API in our framework

Current process: Because all projects are in the same solution, they change the calling code too. So it's immediately integrated and the app developers just have to do "get latest".

New process (?): Core team is providing the changes through a nuget package (new version). So does every developer now has to keep track of if there is a new package version and if yes, do the integration? And how can we coordinate the different teams, so they are upgrading all at the same time? Because we ship our applications as a suite, all apps has to use the same versions. Or should we automate the integration process? Is there a best practice?

I have to add, that our core team is making changes very frequently, so the integration process will have to happen often.

Any ideas/feedback/inspiration?

Thank you so much in advance!

Let's do a story mapping session! Ok cool. PO asks the team: so guys what do you think? *silence*... *more silence*.... PO: come on guys, please respond. *silence*.... Then someone finally responds.

I'm starting to hate this big time. It's almost always like that, no matter the type of session (story mapping, refinement) And there's someone in the team that thinks he always knows best, so if ever someone speaks up, it will always be challenged and lead to useless discussions. He always wants the perfect solution. A good solution is good enough, it doesn't have to be perfect. PO is happy with a good solution (good = maintainable, scoring at least x on our code quality tooling), so why the fuck would you want to go for the 'perfect' solution, which may score just slightly higher in regard to quality, cost much more to develop and people have a hard time maintaining it due to the high level of abstraction? He's always refactoring stuff because it's not future proof. Well, why completely reimplement parts that have been working properly for 2 years and have a very very small chance of needing a change, which then still only needs to be done in just 1 place?

And you know what? All these fancy structures, patterns etc are in there but will their flexibility ever really be used? In my 20 years experience haven't seen such flexibility being really used. Some exceptions of course.

Once it's built, it will keep running, yes, changes will need to be made, but in most cases they never touch all these expensive fancy structured components. Just because most changes are in content or small changes in functionality.

So there is this owner team who reviewed my code recently. I don't have much context about the their system and architecture. We try to build our changes with less context and rely in owner team's knowledge for any review gap.
The guy from the owner team missed something in my review and changes went to prod, review already took more that it was expected to take. He took 1 week for small change reviews. Now, not him but with someone else's advice they had to revert.
I wrote a mail shooting to manager, the guy who reverted and the guy who reviewed, asking the reviewer guy to explain why didn't he mentioned about any issues at the time of the review.
I have tried best from my side. But all this, god!!!
Why everything I do has some kind of weird issue. I feel so bad blaming the guy, I just think that, the way I used to feel anxious he must be feeling the same, but what can I do? I don't want to take the blame I don't even see if I can and I shouldn't be. If it was a major issue it should have been raised but he didn't. I feel so bad that I am almost crying, I am feeling that like always I am going to be judged by my team that work is slow and on top of that I can't do anything for the guy I blamed it on.

I don't know, is it my mistake? but I cannot think of anyway I would have known this.

what is life if not an eventual step towards sadness?

i have been working professionally in wfh setup since 2020 nd have seen my dad work as a businessman for 20 years , then a fulltime wfo job employee for 5 years. i have been a wfo*(hybrid) employee for last 2 months as this is my first wfo job.

everywhere i go, i am told that the "work-life during covid is a lie, a mere anomaly in otherwise horrific work lifestyles" .

let's consider 3 lifestyles.

1. a software engineer graduated in 2023 and starting his first fulltime office job.

- guy goes to office everyday, travels for 2 hours, changes between a metro , rickshaw nd physical walk, works 9 hours in office, again travels b/w different modes for 2 hours to reach back home, have his dinner, watches some videos nd goes to sleep.

- in office there is no one happy, everyone is either bitching about or buttering someone.

- later he moves naar to office in a rented flat and his travel time is replaced by daily chores, like washjng clothes , cleaning home, stockings supllies and cooking etc.

- life goes on. he eventually starts making some assets (home appliances, car, home etc) and starts saving money. he also gets into relationship , then marriage happens, then kids come. the office days are full of office for all nd weekdays remain source of fun and entertainment for all. kids grow, move out and do the same thing over. death

>> souce of sadness :a monotonous life with no time for happiness in everyday life. he even meets more sad people everyday who are again just bitching, cribbing and lamenting

------

2. a small scale car mechanic with 2 labour.

- almost same life, just a bit more pressure, as he not only has to make sure that his employees are giving him enough output for their income, he also has to ensure that the business keeps running and generating revenues.

for him, their are no time shifts , he needs to ensure the shop door opens at 9am and closes at 9pm for business, while ensuring all the stocks remain available , revenue and sales are documented and business dealings are done. fuck the family fuck the food, fuck the home, he would sleep in his shop if needed and his future family would be just their to unfuck/provide these ignored essentials.

>>> source of happiness : no time/people to emjoy life

----

3. a social media influenza/motivational speaker : these guy hates himself from day 1 . they know they are just a fluke and even though they say they are "not working", they are pulling all the legs to keep their revenue source running : sending posts on trendy things asap, cold mailing, begging for sponserships, publishing content asap.. not sure if a single person exosts who has been a happy social media influenza for last 30 years.

>>> source of sadness : unsatisfactory work, delusional life

---

so what the fuck is wrong with life. i have a board that says "make dotenvironment @64 proud" . i am 24 and following the path of guy 1 in above post. i can prob make myself a proud man by 64 but how can i make myself a "man who lived a happy life" by 64?

Flutter may be great. I want to learn it, so i decided to make this small app in Flutter.

About 2 hours later, and I STILL HAVENT POSITIONED THESE FUCKING BUTTONS AS I WANT IT.

I calm down a bit, and decide to not give a shit about the position of those buttons.. Moving on to launch an URL when one of them is clicked.

Found sweet few lines of code i could copy/paste. Ans tadaa, didnt fucking work. Fuck. Googles a bit, turns out i forgot that hot reload is not for major changes, my bad.

I decide i want to add a few extra features, so fuck Flutter for now, im going back to Android Studio.

Reading Flutter is great, writing it with no knowledge of Dart is.. what the fuck did i even think.

tldr: I am looking for recommendations for a basic website for my parents. GOTO question;

Pre-Story:
My parents have a small (offline) business. They have a website to give some general information and list their weekly offers.
When I felt that what has come out of the website-building tool (you know, clicky clicky stuff) looked a bit too early 2000's and is a total ripoff for what you get (almost 20€ per month), I created something with Google Sites for them. Feel free to roast me, but web development is not my field and now it looks much more modern, is mobile friendly and does what it is supposed to do. Weekly offers are edited in a google sheets file, which is embedded in the website. Not great, but this way my mom doesn't have to deal with editing a tables on the page - trust me, it won't look good. This also meant they could downgrade the hosting package to discard the clicky-tool and just the domain (maybe 1€ per month). The website itself is hosted for free by Google.

Some time ago GDPR became a thing and then I was tasked to have a look at it. (side note: I don't want to rant about being responsible for it, that's fine. My parents don't really ask me to do a lot for them.) You can't enter any data on the website, it's just very basic stuff and data protection wise there's just the "usual" stuff (cookies, embedded tools, logs). I added another site with a halfway complete privacy policy. Regarding the whole cookie issue (do not enforce unnecessary cookies) I couldn't find an easy solution. It's not 100%, but what can you really expect from a small business like this? I've seen worse.

Now to the question:
Can you recommend a good alternative to the current solution (Google Sites)?
It should be cheap (<3€/month incl. domain) and my parents should be able to make some basic changes (just text in predefined locations). I am not afraid to get my hands dirty - I can deal with some HTML, CSS, JS - but I don't want to sink a lot of time into this. No need for analytics or the like. Maybe a newsletter would be cool (with the weekly offers), but that's just a random thought of mine and definitely not necessary.

Thanks for reading :)

GitHub is down. Unlucky client, guess I have a *really* good excuse not to push that scope-creeped heap of a new frontend. Because apparently 'those "small changes" you've made to the Sketch file are in fact entirely new uses of the data structures' wasn't good enough.

Compromise.

I think that sums up development pretty much.

Take for example coding patterns: Most of them *could* be applied on a global scale (all products)… But that doesn't mean you *should* apply them. :-)

Find a matching **compromise** that makes specific sense for the product you develop.

Small example: SOLID / DRY are good practices. But breaking these principles by for example introducing redundant code could be a very wise design decision - an example would be if you know full ahead that the redundancy is needed for further changes ahead. Going full DRY only to add the redundancy later is time spent better elsewhere.

The principle of compromise applies to other things, too.

Take for example architecture design.

Instead of trying to enforce your whole vision of a product, focus on key areas that you really think must be done.

Don't waste your breath on small stuff - cause then you probably lack the strength for focusing on the important things.

Compromise - choose what is *truly* important and make sure that gets integrated vs trying to "get your will done".

Small example: It doesn't really matter if a function is called myDingDong or myDingDongWithBells - one is longer, other shorter. Refactoring tools make renaming a function an easy task. What matters is what this function does and that it does this efficiently and precise. Instead of discussing the *name* of the function, focus on what the function *does*.

If you've read so far and think this example is dumb: Nope... I've seen PR reports where people struggled for hours with lil shit while the elephant in the room like an N+1 problem / database query or other fundamental things completely drowned in the small shit discussion noise.

We had code design, we had architecture... Same goes for people, debugging, and everything else.

Just because you don't like what weird person A does, doesn't mean it's shit.

Compromise. You don't have to like them. Just tolerate them. Listen. Then try to process their feedback unbiased. Simple as that. Don't make discussions personal - and don't isolate yourself by just working with specific persons. Cause living in such a bubble means you miss out a lot of knowledge and insight… or in short: You suck because of your own choices. :-)

Debugging... Again compromise: instead of wasting hours on debugging a problem, ASK for help. A simple: Has anyone done debugging this before or has some input for how to debug this problem efficiently?... Can sometimes work wonders. Don't start debugging without looking into alternative solutions like telemetry, metrics, known problems etc.
It could be a viable, better long term solution to add metrics to a product than to debug for hours ... Compromise. Find a fitting approach to analyze a problem instead of just starting a brute force approach.

....

Et cetera et cetera.

I hate it when colleagues name their commits with a non descriptive name like "minor changes", "minor fixes", "small changes" and so on. I know that good naming is a difficult task in software development, but do I expect to much when I want them to explain shortly what exactly they changed since the last commit?
Good commit messages are always helpful if you want to do good PR reviews and furthermore if you want to go back to an older commit because someone fucked something up.
Don't get me wrong, my colleagues are great people and great developers, but some of them ignore the fact that good commit messages might be useful in the future for others and themselves

What do people here use to 'manage' projects in small teams?

Im currently working in a team of 2 and using gitlab for git and using the changelog for changes and todo stuff.

Its working 'alright' but its still a bit of a hassle specialy for 2 persons.

People here use other tools that are faster to use etc?

It's always a matter of much is there to do and in what language...
There is the IDE-Zone, which is dominated by IntelliJ (CLion be praised when you do Rust or C++) for large stuff and heavy refactorings.

Always disputted by VS Code with synced settings. It's nice and comfy and has every imaginable language supported good enough, especially when its smaller change in native code or web/scripting stuff.

Then there is the "small changes" space, where Vim and VS Code struggle whos faster or which way sticks better in my brain...

might be you SCP stuff down from a box and edit it to re-upload, or you use the ever-present vi (no "m" unfortunately)

sometimes things are more easy for multi-caret editing (Ctrl-D or Alt-J), and sometimes you just want to ":%s/foo/bar/g" in vim.
I am sure that each of these things are perfectly possible in each of the editors, but there is just reflexes in my editor choices.

I try to stay flexible and discover strenghts of each one of my weapon of choice and did change the favorites. (Atom, Brackets, Eclipse, Netbeans, ...)

However there are some things I tried often and they are simply not working for me...

might for you. I don't care. and I'll just use some space to piss people off, because this is supposed to be a rant:

nano just feels wrong, emacs is pestilence from satan that was meant for tentacles instead of fingers, sublime does cost money but should not, gives me a constant guilty feeling (and I don't like that) that, and all the editors from various desktop environments are wasted developer ressources.

Afternoon spend arguing about small cosmetic changes in code-review effectivelly delaying the release. Feel so productive and understand why everything takes us so long. But looking forward to next week so time sunked in code-review will be larger than the development time.

Anybody know how I could make an RxJS observable without RxJS?
I'm working on a library and I need it to be small (So including RxJS isn't really viable), run in the browser (IDK if Browserify will work for RxJS), and be fast. I need a way for a given element to 'listen' (or in RxJS terms, 'subscribe') to a value and update its text content whenever the value changes.
My current implementation is just a interval loop that checks if the previous value is the same as the current one, and if it isn't, it modifies the DOM.

Question for devs:
How are y’all handling copy changes in your app? What’s ur process? Do you put up a PR for every small copy change or do you use a special tool or something?

Me: * Not having fun writing hundreds of tests/assertions for an API *
Also me: * Submitting changes without running my tests *
Production: * BROKEN *

RUN YOUR EFFING TESTS EVEN IF THE CHANGES ARE SMALL OR STRAIGHTFORWARD OR SIMPLE OR WHATEVER

Not really a fight, but a disagreement that lead to some big changes in my mind.

When entering my school, I still had a part of me wanting to do game development.

I'm gonna make it short : We wanted to do a game in Java at school in first year, but one wanted to do it in C because didn't feel good with Java.

And I always sum that experience up by saying "Never again." The atmosphere in the team was very friendly, but that's the only good part of it. I hated doing that project, and it removed that small will of doing game dev (as a paid main job).

Maybe it would have changed if it was later during my studies, since I was still learning how to code during that project.

But I guess it showed that I was maybe not that motivated to do games.

My team is pretty small right now. It's myself and two other guys. One lead, who's been here for five years. A senior who we brought on 2 weeks ago. And me, a regular app dev. The lead put his two weeks in last week and has been trying to brain dump as much as he can onto us.

I've been building a list of prioritization to compensate for when he leaves based on what he was saying was the most important. This list has gotten pretty massive after reviewing most of the processes in place.

I was hired mainly to quell new requests coming in and not to maintain our systems, so that's what I did. I didn't examine our prod code base too closely. I wish I had. It's in a sorry state. I'm pretty sure I have about 2 years of tech debt for a crew of two guys constantly working on it.

I've been trying to prioritize based on what gets the most bug fixes and change requests. These apps will see the biggest changes and will undergo the most maintenance.

Since I'm just a regular app dev it feels weird trying to come up with this and try to prioritize this and come up with a plan. It feels like someone else should have. If it needs done then I guess it needs done. I need to be able to collaborate and work with my co worker and be able to plan for what projects are coming next.

If anyone has any suggestions to tackle tech debt please make them. Or if there's any help for managing priorities in a different manner that may prove helpful I'm open. Honestly, I don't want to tackle this completely blind, it feels like a lot.

Usually this is somehow fluent what is "the worst" advice, since it rather depends on context, and contexts changes.

There is, though, one thing that was bad idea from the start, on so many angles that even now I believe it is actually " the worst " idea you can have : imagine you have a team, you have work to do, and, as usual, there are people there, and people have their goals and opinions. The worst thing you can do there is to engage with politics, either team- or company-wide.

I was specialist from Poland in German automotive branch. Cars, trucks, AI, this kind of stuff. ( It just sounds interesting, trust me )
Small company working as subcontractor.

The first thing I though is something like, why this or that person is going to tell me what to do or why is he allowed to rat me out or talk behind my back... so this guy told me this is how it is around here and you either play it or suck for everyone. So I went with it, if they want to fuck with me, I will fuck with them.

So fast it went House Of Cards kind of way and in the bad way kind of way. Instead of getting progress we were busy doing political stuff, usually law related, like finding each other misconducts, and there were no end to it. As I had most experience I with systems and stuff we were doing, outcome was pretty good for me, but after some time it escalated to such size that atmosphere was unbearable and I was so stressed and tired of this shit I left. It's miracle that management tolerated this so far. People were as toxic as nuclear waste site (or dota/lol players)

So far the conclusion is to sometimes suck it up once in a while or just clear the atmosphere as fast as possible. Otherwise you will wade in shit up to your chin for very, very long and it is not really healthy on the long run...

I have a meeting in 1 hour that should be about the deployment of a product. This morning I got 2 emails from the client about some not so small changes.

Not sure how I can explain that I'm not a wizard.