Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

Today at work, still laugh thinking back to it!

We were on lunch break but the linux support engineers who are on the phones as well have to pick up calls anyways (very small team).

*engineer walks to the table, sits down: Ahhh rest, finally!*
*tringggggggggg*
*engineer pulls a face like 'oh for fucks sake' and walks back to his desk*
*puts headphones on and clicks the answer button just as it disappears*
"really!?! Alright lets finally eat now"
*sits for literally one second*
*tringgggggggggg*
*Engineer seems quite pissed off now. walks to his desk again, puts on headset, clicks the answer button JUST as the call stops again*
"Mother of god, fucking really?"
*stays as his desk for a minute or so, walks back, stays hovering above his chair for a little and finally sits down again*
"Finall......"
*TRINGGGGGGGGGGGG*
"MOTHERFUCKER. THESE GUYS TIME IT OR SOMETHING!?!?"
*walks back to his desk very frustrated this time*
*puts on headphones very quickly and presses the answer button*
*answer works but the call is literally dropped the second he starts it (it was a real client)*

"OH FOR FUCKS FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING SAKE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK"

*walks back to table again and sits down. Takes sandwich and....*

*TRINGGGGGGGGGG MOTHERFUCKER*

"FUCKING COCKSUKING MOTHERFUCKING PIECES OF WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK EVER"

*gives a deadly look to another engineer: "I am NOT going to take it this time! En-fucking-joy."*

We laughed so hard xD

This was my first freelancer project. Just dropped out of school, i think i was 17. No money, no proper hardware, i had a very old laptop & stolen wifi from our neighbor. I lived in a very small room at my mom’s flat, she wanted me out as soon as i turn 18. At the time my plan was to work on freelancer stuff and make my own games. “It will be fine, fuck school, who needs school? 😂“ I haven’t really finished anything back then, so i only had a few wip hobby projects to show ppl as my references. I saw a freelancer job posting. The task was to make a simple quiz game for mobile, it paid 350$. Back then that was a lot of money for me so i took it. I met the client, he said “2-3 week tops, i send you everything, you do the code” Cool. I finally had a “job”😃. The 2-3 weeks turned into a 8 month blur of all-nighting and just implement one more thing and its finished. I did not really have any experience on how to deal with clients and i really needed this project to finally have something on my porfolio. I motivated myself with “if i can finish this i can finish anything”. I think the story of my most definitive all-nighting was 3 months into the development. I finally got everything from the client so it was like just put it together and its done. The client wanted 300 levels, beeing a noob i was i started making all the 300 unity scenes by hand, aligning the pictures, the ui, testing each level, making adjustments to the code, etc.. after a really long night and a fuckton of caffeine i was done. I sent it to the client at around 9 am and gone to sleep. When i woke up i checked my emails to saw this: Cool! But can we do hints? (wich needed a fuckton of rework of my code) I think i had my first mental breakdown while working on the project. After that he wanted more modifications and because i made every level by hand i had to remake all of them like 10 times 😂
But in the end it turned out positive, he really helped me to start my carrier, we became sord of friends and the project gave me a lot of confidence and experience on how to deal with stuff when shit goes wrong because everything that can go wrong in a project gone wrong. It was the most valuable developer lesson. Plus it sounds so cool to say “i was born in development hell, b*tch!”🕶
I attached a pic of the laptop i worked on 😂
Thanks for reading 😃

I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

It finally hit me the other day.
I'm working on an IoT project for a late-stage ALS patient. The setup is that he has a tablet he controls with his eye movements, and he wants to be able to control furnishings in his room without relying on anyone else.
I set up a socket connection between his tablet and the Raspberry Pi. From there it was a simple matter of using GPIO to turn a lamp or fan on or off. I did the whole thing in C, even the socket programming on the Pi.
As I was finishing up the main control of the program on the Pi I realized that I need to be more certain of this than anything I've ever done before.
If something breaks, the client may be forced to go days without being able to turn his room light on, or his fan off.
Understand he is totally trapped in his own body so it's not like he can simply turn the fan off. The nursing staff are not particularly helpful and his wife is tied up a lot with work and their two small children so she can't spend all day every day doting on him.
Think of how annoying it is when you're trying to sleep and someone turns the light on in your room; now imagine you can't turn it off yourself, and it would take you about twenty minutes to tell someone to turn it off -- that is once you get their attention, again without being able to move any part of your body except your eyes.
As programmers and devs, it's a skill to do thorough testing and iron-out all the bugs. It is an entirely different experience when your client will be depending on what you're doing to drastically improve his quality of life, by being able to control his comfort level directly without relying on others -- that is, to do the simplest of tasks that we all take for granted.
Giving this man some independence back to his life is a huge honor; however, it carries the burden of knowing that I need to be damned confident in what I am doing, and that I have designed the system to recover from any catastrophe as quickly as possible.

In case you were wondering how I did it all: The Pi launches a wrapper for the socket connection on boot.
The wrapper launches the actual socket connection in a child process, then waits for it to exit. When the socket connection exits, the wrapper analyzes the cause for the exit.
If the socket connection exited safely -- by passing a special command from the tablet to the Pi -- then the wrapper exits the main function, which allows updating the Pi. If the socket connection exited unexpectedly, then the Pi reboots automatically -- which is the fastest way to return functionality and to safeguard against any resource leaks.
The socket program itself launches its own child process, which is an executable on the Pi. The data sent by the tablet is the name of the executable on the Pi. This allows a dynamic number of programs that can be controlled from the tablet, without having to reprogram the Pi, except for loding the executable onto it. If this child of the socket program fails, it will not disrupt its parent process, which is the socket program itself.

Small agency, wants to try out some voice tech. Bought a Google AIY to get started, found some limits, worked round them.

Junior developer thought it would be fun to 'teach' it to swear.

Played around with some nice dialogflow intents, etc and got it all working.

Looking pretty good, loaded it with some quippy answers and case studies to show off our services.

Just got in to find out the boss has taken it to a presentation to a client about some of the new stuff we're doing... Now we are all sitting here waiting to see how many of us have a job tomorrow :-/

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!!!!!!!!!

First job.

CLIENT: It's just a small website, 15-20 pages 2,500$, what do you say?

ME: Sure, sounds easy.

CLIENT: oh, and I need you to sign this contract that you won't copy or competete with me for the next two years.

ME: Sounds reasonable.

-- A year later --
I had finished building a huge CMS system that serves 420+ organizations, the entire thing copied from his competitor.

CLIENT: So there is only about two weeks left of work...

ME: Goodbye, I have a new job that actually pays money.

CLIENT: Don't forget our contract...

ME: Sure..

At least he paid me, but 2,500$ for a whole year's work isn't such a good deal anymore.

There once approached me a client, with a request to be done. Here is a recap, with emphasis on time limits.

C: Ok, so we need this and this thing to be done that and that way...
*short talk about technical side of the project, unimportant to the rant*
C: Can it be done by 25th, this month? (It was 4th of the month)
M: No way, it'll take at least a week more, so realistically I'd say around 7th next month.
C (Had no option but to agree on the date)
*we arrange the price as well (was not a bad one at all)*

So I started working on the thing and one night, about a week or so in, I probably had a cup of tea too much, I suddenly have a breakthrough. I sat behind a computer from 22:00 till 17:00 next day, nonstop. I didn't even eat anything in the meantime. The project was far from done, but I did quite a lot of work. Anyhow, when I have completed the project, not only was I not over the deadline, it was 22nd of the month, so even before the wanted time! When I contacted the client and told him that I am done, he was ... let's just say very happy. The deployment went fine, but when I checked my bank account, for the payment, there was a surprise waiting for me. The number was 25% more than what we have arranged! Me, believing that it was a mistake, immediately messaged him about it and he responded:

No, this is just a small gift for you, because you finished that quickly.

(and not to forget, I have coded things for way less than those 25% and was completely fine with the price, so it was not a small amount)

I wonder if those people who give unwarranted useless advice to developers go to their doctors and do the same thing.

- Doc, just make a small slit, take out old heart, put in a new one, connect everything back as before and stitch it. Easy peasy. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes.
- my leg is fractured. Just open it and tape it back. It is a hack job, but it'll make the client happy for now. It will be quickly done.
- I think I have cancer. Just write a script to kill it. Shouldn't be too difficult.

Fuckers.

I was hired to build a small PHP site. The client was arrested and sentenced to jail time right before the third of four milestones was complete, so I didn't get paid any more after that. Didn't hear from him for over a year, then out of nowhere he wanted to pick up where we left off.

Client : hey there is a minor change in the iOS app.
Me : got it. Done. Sending the build now.

After 5 mins.

Client: heh, few more UDIDs. Can you add them ?
Me : yep. Sure.

After 10 mins.

Client : Hey, need a small change. The text field need to be little bit left.
Me : ugh. Okay. Will do it. Sending another build.

After 1 hr.

Client : hey, need a small help.

Me : Offline.

rant? rant!

I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.

The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.

During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.

A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).

After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.

Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.

I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).

I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.

meeting a client for small web project, we did not agree price of project soo I left...next week I saw him on tv, he was arrested as a pedophile

Soms week ago a client came to me with the request to restructure the nameservers for his hosting company. Due to the requirements, I soon realised none of the existing DNS servers would be a perfect fit. Me, being a PHP programmer with some decent general linux/server skills decided to do what I do best: write a small nameservers which could execute the zone transfers... in PHP. I proposed the plan to the client and explained to him how this was going to solve all of his problems. He agreed and started worked.

After a few week of reading a dozen RFC documents on the DNS protocol I wrote a DNS library capable of reading/writing the master file format and reading/writing the binary wire format (we needed this anyway, we had some more projects where PHP did not provide is with enough control over the DNS queries). In short, I wrote a decent DNS resolver.

Another two weeks I was working on the actual DNS server which would handle the NOTIFY queries and execute the zone transfers (AXFR queries). I used the pthreads extension to make the server behave like an actual server which can handle multiple request at once. It took some time (in my opinion the pthreads extension is not extremely well documented and a lot of its behavior has to be detected through trail and error, or, reading the C source code. However, it still is a pretty decent extension.)

Yesterday, while debugging some last issues, the DNS server written in PHP received its first NOTIFY about a changed DNS zone. It executed the zone transfer and updated the real database of the actual primary DNS server. I was extremely euphoric and I began to realise what I wrote in the weeks before. I shared the good news the client and with some other people (a network engineer, a server administrator, a junior programmer, etc.). None of which really seemed to understand what I did. The most positive response was: "So, you can execute a zone transfer?", in a kind of condescending way.

This was one of those moments I realised again, most of the people, even those who are fairly technical, will never understand what we programmers do. My euphoric moment soon became a moment of loneliness...

What the flying fuck is happening on the EU with the fucking GDPR corsairs!!

I made two - TWO - entirely static websites, hand-made, 100% cookie-free!! I didn't even need to store a goddam boolean cookie! No third-party content is EVER invoked, called or summoned! I hosted a small video to avoid Youtube! Facebook and twitter share buttons are links!! I DID ALL OF THIS ON PURPOSE AND INFORMED THE FUCKING CLIENT.

And THEN (and, of course, unsolicited), the fucking lawyers of an asshole GDPR corsair office came and scared the shit out of my clients and convinced BOTH of them to put the goddam GDPR cookie consent popup on the fucking websites!! And they took their bribe, of course...

In order to avoid billionaire fines because of the NON EXISTENT cookies of the SMALLEST, SIMPLEST, 2KB MINIFIED HTML page on the Internet.

Anybody else is suffering from this kind of behavior??

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

Client: "we need a piece of software to have our son be able to talk again"
Me: "what can your son do physically?"
Client: "He can only grip something"
Me: "well, I suppose that is possible by using Intel ACAT, some synthesizer and some switches"
Client: "Never heard of ACAT, probably some small program that nobody else heard of"
Me: "It was used by a great man called Stephen Hawking. If it worked for him, it should work for your son"
Client: "Who is Stephen Hawking?"
Me: *urge to put client in wheelchair intensifies*

That facepalm moment when the client rejects your code saying it's too small, and it might contain bugs.

Client promised an email in 5 minutes after hanging up.. It's been 2 hours since.. Is he typing with his penis? Is it so small that it's taking so much time hitting each key!

Intelligence and ability cannot be measured by education.

I have a client who asked a Master in Computer Science to develop a small system, for querying product title and their code. The guy used python, vanilla js, and... Txt file for the "database". Then my client asked me to integrated this in... WordPress.

This was in 2016. And idiot as I'm, I agreed and adapted his code to use php and a database.

April this year, my client said they are still using the python system to add new products all this time, in parallel. And wanted to update the WordPress with the data.

- No problem! - I said. Just send me the SQL file.

So the Master in CS sent me a SQL coded in ANSI. I asked for the SQL again, but with a more appropriate encoding. He took 1 month to reply back, and said it would be better if I get rid of the database and just use the txt file for querying.

This is outrageous.

I really hate people who are educated but completely useless.

===rant

So I have been freelancing as web developer for 5 years. I was also playing basketball professionally so I was only working part-time, building websites here and there, small android apps to learn the job and I was also reading a lot to challenge my brain.

When I stopped playing basketball about a year ago, I thought I would really enjoy coding full time so I pursued a job.

With no formal education and just a basketball background on paper, in the collapsed Greek economy, as you may assume chances of landing a job are minimal.

After about 40 resumes sent I only got an internship. It was a 4 month, part-time, no pay deal, and then the company would decide if they would like to hire me later.

The company had 4 employees and they are one of the largest software distribution businesses in my area. They resell SaaS bought from a third company, bundled with installation support, initial configuration, hardware support, whatever a client may need.

I was the only one with any ability to code whatsoever. The other people were working mostly on customer support with the occasional hardware repair.

After the 4 month period they owner (small company, owner was also manager and other roles) told me that they are very happy with my work and would like to keep me part-time with minimum pay.

Just to give you and idea if the amounts of money involved, in Greece, after taxes, my salary was 240euros per month. And the average cost of surviving (rent, cheapest food possible, no expenses on anything but super basics) is about 600euros.

I told him I needed more to live and he told me ok, we will reevaluate a few months later, at the end of May 2017.

I just accepted it without having many options. The company after all was charging clients 30euros per hour for my projects so I kept thinking that if I worked a lot and delivered consistently I would get a full time job and decent money.

And I delivered. In the following months I made a Magento extension, some WordPress themes, a C# application to extract data from the client's ERP and import it to a third application, a click to call application to use Asterisk to originate calls from the client's ERP, a web application to manage a restaurant's menu and many more small projects. Whatever they asked, I delivered.

On time, version controlled, heavily documented solutions (my C# ones are not exactly masterpieces but it was my first time with the language and windows).

So when May ended I was pretty excited to hear they wanted to keep me full time. I worked hard for it, I was serious, professional, I tried a lot to learn things so I can deliver, and the company recognized that. YAY.

So the time comes to talk money. The offer was 480euros per month. Double my part-time pay, minimum wage. I asked for about 700. Manager said it's hard but I will see what I can do. So we agreed to keep the deal for June while they are working on a better offer.

During the first half of June I finished my last project, put all my work on a nice folder with a nice readme on every project's directory, with their version control and everything.

The offer never improved, so I said no deal, and as of today, I am jobless.

I am stressed as fuck and excited as fuck at the same time.

I will do my best to survive in the shitstorm that is called Greece.

Bring it on.

When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.

Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".

What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.

Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.

Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.

I did this for 4 months.

The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.

So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.

I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.

In the end:

- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.

- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job

- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.

So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.

3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.

Already existing website, I was asked to do a few things to redo. Code is a mess, 0 comments, oldschool technology. Completely static html site of a small company, nothing extreme.

Client: okay, could you please add 2 more items to the navbar for the 2 new pages?
Me: yes, here they are. Since it was already full, font size had to shrink.
Client: it's okay

>> Fast forward 2 weeks, full of similarly easy modifications.

Client: could you make the font size of the navbar larger?
Me: not really, we will lose responsivity
Client: do it anyway!

>> Fast forward to next day
Client calls me that it is urgent to 'do something immediately' with the navbar because it is broken and I am a 'horrible webdesigner' for making a mess of her website. I was told that it is not her job to make it good look and that I should 'use my eyes better'.

After 2 minutes of a lecture on webdesign she let me tell her how a responsive website should look like and to achieve that we should better restart the whole website. At that point I was the idiot who just wants to get more money and that I won't be able to do that since I am already unable to finish these few tiny things she asked for.

PM: Please get this done by tomorrow. It's just a small change.
Dev: No its not that simple.
PM: Why is it not simple? Please explain so I can understand.
Dev after a hard thought finally explains: blah blah blah
PM: Well, we have promised the client so please do this by tomorrow, thanks.
Dev: *bangwall

Gotta love when a client uses "small" to describe anything they want to make themselves feel like it'll be quick and cheap.
"Can you also add a small system that reads people's minds?"

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.

1) Starts a company that builds cloud systems
2) Takes a bunch of jobs and thought you'll be happy for a while
3) IoT era smashes in your face
4) 72% of your existing clients ask for IoT revamp
5) With a lot of hacking you made a small portion of the projects possible with some Raspberry Pis
6) Client bought a bunch of arbitrary parts from Shenzhen and now you have to deal with kernel overlays and shits that you didn't even heard of
7) Made it work for the second time and told yourself it'll never happen again
8) Last customer happy so they tell a bunch of friends and now they're asking for more
9) Stares into void, wondering how you gonna end this nightmare

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.

So my first job is also my current one. I am a computer science student and for my course we had to do a project for an actual client. The client was a consultancy company and after working my ass off, their software development partner decided to hire me and a classmate.

The company is pretty small (we are now with the 6 of us) and the general attitude is very nice. I've only been working there for a few weeks and I feel very welcome. The work isn't too hard (mainly web development with geographic features/data).
In rough lines the stack always consists of a Java Rest API and an Angular frontend that retrieved the data from the API.
So far I have learned a ton and I am really happy that I have this opportunity. Lunch is provided and we always eat together, we crack jokes, have fun, play games in the break. Coffee machine next to my desk. I'd love to work here all my life :d

Since I'm still in school I can't go to the office every day. Instead I am at the office every Monday and on other days I try to work from school or home.

#First

I joined a start up and worked after college hours as an intern over there. I would usually bunk my college and go to my internship. I had limited knowledge at that moment. I worked very hard over there because I wanted (still want) to gain practical knowledge.

Almost a month into it and I had to take a break from it because I had college work. Rejoined the same start up during my vacations. Worked quite a lot and learnt quite some stuff. I continued the internship after my one month vacation for another month once my college started. All this while I was not being paid, not even a little bit of allowance. But that didn't matter because I wanted to learn

Fast forward six months to November 2016. I have been placed in an MNC through my college placements. One day I get a call from this start up owner(we had become good acquaintances by then) if I was willing to work as a paid intern while I was working on the projects that the company landed (so I guess as a free-lancer) and as an unpaid intern while I was working on the company projects. I agreed. Jump to December. I have joined and started working on an Android project of this very big company.

At time point, I should inform you'll that I'm not very good at Android and that the company size is very small. Company owner plus the tech lead in one city (where I'm from) and another two full time employees in another city. Out of which one quit to start his own company apparently. The start up would primarily employ interns and provide exposure to them while getting their work done.

Back to the story. The tech lead vaguely assigns everyone their work. Everyone over here includes new interns and previous interns like me who will get paid some amount. 3-4 days into the project, the tech lead quits. The tech lead and the company owner call three of us and says that one of you will have to be a project manager for this project. And then both of them and 2 of my colleagues look at me. And I don't know what to say. I hesitate initially because it's too much responsibility but agree to it finally.

The next day I come to office and read about the project thoroughly and catch up with my colleagues about the progress. The entire day I'm panicking about what I'm going to do. In the evening, my boss tells me that we have to go for a meeting with the client for whom we are doing this project. At this moment, the shit out of me has been scared. Mostly because I don't know what the fuck am I going to do over there apart from being stupid and asking dumb questions. So we reach the client's office and wait for him. The entire time I'm thinking to myself that I'm going to drown this company by opening my mouth. Surprisingly, all the questions that I asked seemed legitimate and I asked a lot of questions. And so I didn't drown the company after all...phew!

It's been more than a week. And holy fuck! What a pain it is to manage people. Half of my time is spent on updating excel sheet about their progress, where are they stuck and what is needed. And the other half about thinking what the fuck am I doing or how am I gonna do it.

So to sum up, intern-turned-freelancer-turned-project manager who has no idea what the fuck is going on. Seems pretty crazy, don't you think.

"There is a problem with A, could you check it out? It's urgent for the client"
Me: Okay, just open a ticket for it too.
*Working on A"

After about ten minutes:
"Hey, there is a small problem B and it's also urgent for the client, we need you to check it out"
Me: I'm working on A and you are yet to open a tick... (Interrupted)
"But it's urgent and it's a small fix, we can fix it and push it to prod, A can wait for a bit"
(Since when is it a "we"?)
Me: *sigh* fine, lets see what's B is all about...

*After going over problems C to Z*

"Why isn't A ready yet? The client's mad and it was to be ready as of today"
Me: Because you had problems from B to Z and they were all urgent according to you so after each request you asked of me I had to postpone A with you knowing about it.
"But A is for today!"

FUCK YOU, YOU WORTHLESS WASTE OF JIZZ! YOU RAN TO ME FOR EVERY GOD DAMN URGENT PROBLEM YOU HAD FROM OUR SHIT OF A CLIENT AND INSTEAD OF TELLING ME THE PRIORITY YOU JUST THROWN IT ALL IN A RANDOM ORDER!
FUCK YOU! I WISH YOUR FATHER WOULD'VE SHOT YOU OUT THE WINDOW INSTEAD OF INSIDE YOUR MOTHERS CUNT!

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

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?"

😃
😃
😃
🙂🔫

Indian web dev companies suck ( for developers )

when I finished 3 year grad program in computer application here in my country (India), I thought life's gonna be fun working as a developer. Oh boy, I was so wrong.

I started out working for a small service based IT company, followed by 2 more. I realized really quickly that they're nothing short of a scam. If your company's only agenda to somehow survive in the market and showing no signs of growth in 8 fucking years, then I'm sorry you're working for scamsters.

Now I'm not saying that all of them are alike. But most of them sorta are.

They don't give a shit about quality, not one bit. Quality means no money in the short run. And they haven't been able to develop any strategy to deal with that. Hence, no growth.

They promise 100 things on their website but only provide shitty services in 10.

There is no pair programming, no code review, no code quality check, no architect, no database designer. They won't give you extra time to write test cases. They use git as a storage device.

They don't put their developers (especially the ones who are learning) under any sort of managed development framework to ensure smooth work.

At the end of the day, their main objective is to somehow NOT deliver a project but finish a milestone and make money out of it.

After cashing out for a milestone, they want you to put your current project on hold and start working on a new project until you have like 10-15 projects in the pipeline and you're severely overwhelmed and you just wanna fucking QUIT.

They would say YES to literally every fucking thing, only to disappoint the client later.

I can't believe someone in the US, or UK thought it'd be a good idea to approach these companies
for their brand new app ideas. They're so fucked.

They're rarely finishing any project.

I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I had to get it out of my system.

Currently i have a small web dev project and i set up a live preview website so he cant see it developing and This literally Just happened

Client : hey, are you currently working on my website?
Me : Yes on my computer and working on it, can i help you with something?
C: yeah just a little bit, that logo on the top left are just a bit squeezed in size and stay like that since 5 days ago and it's bothering me, can you fix it?
Me : nah, its just a simple thing. give me a sec and try reload--
C: why is your voice echoing? Don't tell me you are coding in the bathroom
Me: ummm.. No... I guess...? (I Am)
C: 🤣
Me: sorry 😅

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 * :/

This happened in my first internship I was working for a small company. They had a knack of redefining policies at short notices.

The had this shitty time tracking site which was hosted internally.

We were working on client location for 25/30 days so we didn't have access to the time tracking site. And there comes a memo that everybody has to fill the time tracking or their salary will not be credited.

So when we reach office we hear this "News". We thought they would consider people on client location. But then on salary day we don't get any and are called into VP's office for a verbal lashing. We literally had to fight for two weeks for the salary.

Worst Experience Ever

Hey guys,

this rant will be long again. I'm sorry for any grammar errors or something like that, english isn't my native language. Furthermore I'm actually very sad and not in a good mood.

Why? What happened? Some of you may already know - I'm doing my apprenticeship / education in a smal company.
There I'm learning a lot, I'm developing awesome features directly for the clients, experience of which other in my age (I'm only 19 years old) can only dream.
Working in such a small company is very exhausting, but I love my job, I love programming. I turned my hobby into a profession and I'm very proud of it.
But then there are moments like the last time, when I had to present something for a client - the first presentation was good, the last was a disaster, nothing worked - but I learned from it.

But this time everything is worse than bad - I mean really, really worse than bad.

I've worked the whole week on a cool new feature - I've done everything that it works yesterday, that everything gets done before the deadline of yesterday.

To achieve this I've coded thursday till 10pm ! At home! Friday I tested the whole day everything to ensure that everything is working properly. I fixed several bugs and then at the end of the day everything seems to be working. Even my boss said that it looks good and he thinks that the rollout to all clients will become good and without any issues.

But unfortunately deceived.

Yesterday evening I wrote a long mail to my boss - with a "manual". He was very proud and said that he is confident that everything will work fine. He trusts me completly.

Then, this morning I received a mail from him - nothing works anymore - all clients have issues, everything stays blank - because I've forgotten to ensure that the new feature (a plugin) and its functionality is supported by the device (needs a installation).
First - I was very shoked - but in the same moment I thought - one moment - you've written an if statement, if the plugin is installed - so why the fuck should it broken everything?!
I looked instant to the code via git. This has to be a very bad joke from my boss I thought. But then I saw the fucking bug - I've written:
if(plugin) { // do shit }
but it has to be if(typeof plugin !== 'undefined')

I fucked up everything - due to this fucking mistake. This little piece of shit I've forgotten on one single line fucked up everything. I'm sorry for this mode of expression but I thought - no this can not be true - it must be a bad bad nightmare.
I've tested this so long, every scenario, everything. Worked till the night so it gets finished. No one, no one from my classmates would ever think of working so long. But I did it, because I love my job. I've implemented a check to ensure that the plugin is installed - but implemented it wrong - exactly this line which caused all the errors should prevent exactly this - what an irony of fate.

I've instantly called my boss and apologized for this mistake. The mistake can't be undone. My boss now has to go to all clients to fix it. This will be very expensive...

Oh my goodnes, I just cried.
I'm only working about half a year in this company - they trust me so much - but I'm not perfect - I make mistakes - like everyone else. This time my boss didn't looked over my code, didn't review it, because he trusted me completly - now this happens. I think this destroyed the trust :( I'm so sad.
He only said that we will talk on monday, how we can prevent such things in the feature..
Oh guys, I don't know - I've fucked up everything, we were so overhelmed that everything would work :(
Now I'm the looser who fucked up - because not testing enough - even when I tested it for days, even at home - worked at home - till the night - for free, for nothing - voluntary.

This is the thanks for that.
Thousand good things - but one mistake and you're the little asshole. You - a 19 year old guy, which works since 6 months in a company. A boss which trusts you and don't look over your code. One line which should prevent crashing, crashed everything.

I'm sorry that this rant is so long, I just need to talk to you guys because I'm so sad. Again. This has happend to frequently lately.

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

I was working for a web company as an intern and they had maintained a lot of high profile websites like celeberties, government and radio/tv. I recieve 2 mails with news updates from the clients pretty much at the same time.

One was a formal call for a campaign of one of our biggest clients, and the other was from of our small clients that was into cat breeding.

Since we use our custom cms for all the sites I sucked at multitasking back then - I published the news on the wrong sites so for a good hour i made our high profile client a cat breeder...

You know. I have mixed feelings on the way people have been reacting to senzory's rant regarding the way he deals with clients. Some people believe that he is unethical, some people see it as just business(me included) but to see what the community says is somewhat interesting.

First, let me be clear on something: i have been fucked over by clients many times for being a nice guy and trying to play it nicely.

Because of this I am selective of who deserves good treatment and who gets to fuck off. But regardless of the client I do the same thing: regardless of who it is, nice or otherwise. If a project will take 1 week to complete then I tell them that it will take 3 to 4 weeks. Why? Well because I have many things on my plate, I am married and have two children, one lives with me and I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I work from 8 to 6, sometimes later and when I get home I sometimes don't do shit since at work I maintain the web services of 2 fucking college campuses.
I don't look for my clients. Through word of mouth they come to me. And being in a privileged position(there are about 5 devs here and they all suck) they can either do with my times and fees or can fuck off over the border where Pedro will do their shit on vbscript and classic ASP(which I like, but you know why this is not an option in 2018)

Apps can be sold for large quantities of money, regardless of what their use case is, if a company wants to outsource their apps to an external developer(such as yours truly) that means that they are willing to play the game. And that is what business is: a game, a survival game.

Where I live, a company will not think twice of firing a single mother for whatever reason. In the U.S of A, and specially in Texas, you can be fired for whatever reason. I have automated people's jobs without knowing it, I have made people lose their jobs and saved companies thousands with my apps. Things like that were not know to me, had I known that someone would have lost their jobs I would have tried differently.

If a company is willing to tell employees(loyal employees) to fuck off, then i do not regret charging what I do and hustling the way I do with rat faced dickheads that care not for people. If I could I would destroy entire companies here. But that is for another story.

I have been used, insulted, gambled with and have been lied to, to my face by these companies. Which has left me jaded.

Oh now, trust me. I am still highly optimistic and nice. And if someone has a small business and I can help them out, then I will lower my rate and give positive vibes in the hopes of making things better through karma. I want to see the best in people. But this does not stop me from being a shark and giving quotes the way I do.

Because companies, as an overall entity are not people with the best intentions(sometimes) and they will not take your kindness, they will take advantage if possible in an effort to save money. Its just dickhead business.

So why, as a professional and privileged developer that obtained his skills through intense study and practice, a wizard by all means, should lower to these nameless, Faceless entities?
Why should i give them the fairness they do not give others? Why should I play the high morale game and come out as a loser?

At the end of the day, I get to swim in my own pool of success, knowing that they did not get the chance to fuck me over

So if you tell me that you took advantage of your hard earned skillset, and built a cross platform app(which compiles to native binaries) and sold 2 products for one, I will tell you that you are an excellent player at their game. If you tell me that you finished before and got to charge for 2 weeks of work doing just 2 days I will say that you are an excellent time manager. And if you tell me that at the end of the day you managed to keep said customer I will tell you that you are a true professional.

There is a difference lads, in selling a product to big momma jamma's cajun restaurant, to the largest logistics company around.

Be nice to those that desserve it.

I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).

summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations

summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!

Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy

Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.

Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.

Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.

Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?

Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.

But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.

Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.

For two weeks I am paid 50$ an hour 6 hours a day / 5 days per week as someone called "Web deployment supervisor". The work is based on checking if the website throws an error and fixing it (devops) and staying in touc with the customer and helping him. The wevsite i wrote is just a small PHP site, well tested, almost no user input, if you dont drop whole DB it cannot basically crash. So for past week I am just copypasting documentation for the client what/how to do things. Today I already sent him same info 4 times. For me as a student and a freelance web dev it's a gold mine. I am having vacations for 14 days (thanks to damaged school water supply), getting paid 50$/hour for playing PUBG and using Ctrl+F in my Firefox, but god hell, it's so fucking psychically hard. Sometimes I have an urge to scream on that retard "I'VE SENT YOU THAT SAME SHIT 4 MINUTES AGO RETARD USE YOUR FUCKING SCROLL WHEEL IN OUR CHAT FOR FUCK SAKE".

While I am self employed, my clients can end up like my boss. In this case, one of my clients is the best "boss" I have ever had. We discuss everything from ethics to npm to development to board games. And we still get the job done.

He challenges me constantly to improve, and then we laugh over how we disagree with concepts, frameworks, etc. And we still get the job done.

It's fantastic to have a client who understands that you should be paid for your time, that lets you get what they hired you to do done without micro managing you (you trust me to actually do what you hired me to do? *gasp, shock*), and still enjoys the small talk. Though some of our ethics and society discussions can be rather large discussions.

So one rant reminded me of a situation I whent through like 10 years ago...
I'm not a dev but I do small programs from time to time...
One time I was hired to pass a phone book list from paper to a ms Access 97 database...
On my old laptop I could only add 3 to 5 records cause MS access doesn't clean after itself and would crash...

So I made an app (in vb6) , to easily make records, was fast, light and well tabbed.
But now I needed a form to edit the last record when I made a mistake...
Then I wanted a form to check all the records I made.
Well that gave me an idea and presented the software to the client... A cheesy price was agreed for my first freelance sell...
After a month making it perfect and knowing the problems the client would had I made a admin form to merge all the databases and check for each record if it would exist.... I knew the client would have problems to merge hundreds of databases....
When it was done... The client told me he didn't need the software anymore.... So I gave it to a friend to use as an client dabatase software... It was perfect for him.
One month later the client called me because he couldn't merge the databases...
I told him I was already working in a company. That my software was ready to solve his problem, but I got mad and deleted everything...
He had to pay almost 20 times more for a software company to make the same software but worst... Mine would merge and check all the databases in a folder... Their's had to pick one by one and didn't check for duplicates... So he had to pay even more for another program to delete duplicates...

That's why I didn't follow programming as a freelance... Lots of regrets today...
Could be working at home, instead had a burn out this week cause of overwork...

Sorry for the long rant.

A certain, reasonably sized company had a large in house payment system to handle all their client purchases that was developed many, many years ago. All the devs that developed it had left, and as it "just worked" they hadn't seen fit to get anyone to update or maintain it since.

That was all fine until it suddenly (and completely) stopped working one sunny afternoon.

After paying a small fortune for one of the original devs to come back and look at it, turns out the payment API it was based on had been retired. Warnings of deprecation had been sent out 18 months prior, but they had just been ignored, as the secretary receiving them after the devs left had no idea what it meant.

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.

Got pretty peeved with EU and my own bank today.

My bank was loudly advertising how "progressive" they were by having an Open API!

Well, it just so happened I got an inkling to write me a small app that would make statistics of the payments going in and out of my account, without relying on anything third-party. It should be possible, right? Right?

Wrong...

The bank's "Open API" can be used to fetch the locations of all the physical locations of the bank branches and ATMs, so, completely useless for me.

The API I was after was one apparently made obligatory (don't quote me on that) by EU called the PSD2 - Payment Services Directive 2.

It defines three independent APIs - AISP, CISP and PISP, each for a different set of actions one could perform.

I was only after AISP, or the Account Information Service Provider. It provides all the account and transactions information.

There was only one issue. I needed a client SSL certificate signed by a specific local CA to prove my identity to the API.

Okay, I could get that, it would cost like.. $15 - $50, but whatever. Cheap.

First issue - These certificates for the PSD2 are only issued to legal entities.

That was my first source of hate for politicians.

Then... As a cherry on top, I found out I'd also need a certification from the local capital bank which, you guessed it, is also only given to legal entities, while also being incredibly hard to get in and of itself, and so far, only one company in my country got it.

So here I am, reading through the documentation of something, that would completely satisfy all my needs, yet that is locked behind a stupid legal wall because politicians and laws gotta keep the technology back. And I can't help but seethe in anger towards both, the EU that made this regulation, and the fact that the bank even mentions this API anywhere.

Seriously, if 99.9% of programmers would never ever get access to that API, why bother mentioning it on your public main API page?!

It... It made me sad more than anything...

Client:
We want you to use the code you used 3 years ago to deliver a similar feature for a different company and then it means we can do this properly because you can just copy and paste it for our needs.. we can pay you a few dollars but we really know what we need so the cost should be very small.

Me:
What the fuck.

So I fucked up.. I assigned a small wordpress/woocommerce project to myself to avoid my team members from wasting their time on it. I had a two month deadline, which was insane, so I kept postponing it until I forgot about it. Today my client contacted me by email to ask if she could preview the site before our meeting in two weeks..
QUE BULLSHIT EXCUSE:

- “I had to migrate to another server because of some access/permission issues with my current host. They gave me their word that they would be done with the migration thursday or friday, then I have to correct some permissions and database settings, and the DNS update may take up to 24 hours to finish. I will personally make sure that you know as soon as the migration has finished.”

- “Thank you so much! I feel so safe having assigned your company the job! I am really looking forward to our meeting and seeing the site!”

Oh and did I mention that deadline was around 65 days ago? And that I haven’t even started yet? I know what I’ll be doing for the next 6 days..

I work as the entire I.T. department of a small business which products are web based, so naturally, I do tech support in said website directly to our clients.

It is normal that the first time a new client access our site they run into questions, but usually they never call again since it is an easy website.

There was an unlucky client which ran into unknown problems and blamed the server.
I couldn't determine the exact cause, but my assumption was a network error for a few seconds which made the site unavailable and the user tried to navigate the site through the navbar and exited the process he was doing. It goes without saying but he was very angry.

I assured him there was nothing wrong with the site, and told him that it would not be charged for this reason. Finally i told him that if he had the same problem, to let me know instead of trying to fix it himself.

The next time he used the site I received a WhatsApp message saying:
- there is something clearly wrong with the site... It has been doing this for so long!
And attached was a 10 second video which showed that he filled a form and never pressed send (my forms have small animations and text which indicates when the form is being send and error messages when an error occurs, usually not visible because the data they send is small and the whole process is quite fast)

To which I answer
- It seems that the form has not been send that's why it looks that way
- So... What an I supposed to do?
- click send
It took a while but the client replied
- ok

To this day I wonder how much time did the client stared at the form cursing the server.

Have you encountered projects that were beyond saving?

Been freelancing for a client via agency for the past year. In the beginning the deal was to maintain identity verification sdk for android maybe 10-15 hours a month or so. Their flow consisted of around 25-30 screens, so I took it thinking it was easy. Boy I was wrong.

Codebase was and still is a complete spaghetti, backend weird and overcomplicated and impossible to talk with someone in backend. Had to reverse engineer their complicated flows many times just to make a small change on the app. There also are lots of issues with capturing/sending camera recordings especially on older devices. The fact that Im the only dev maintaining this doesnt help either.

First few months it was just maintenance, later some small features and soon it become a 40 hour a month gig. I was able to deal with it but then management changed, they started micromanaging me heavily and now they want me to do 60-70 hours a month. Also they asked to implement some unnecessarily complicated features and to be honest without refactoring most of the codebase I cant even begin to think of how to implement them.

Also workload in my main job increased. Started sacrificing my evenings, weekends and basically my wellbeing to work on their product. Tried to relax but then I realized Im just spending my freetime thinking about their project all of the time. Best part is that last few updates fucked up the whole flow and I dont even understand where the problem is anymore: backend, 3rd party integration issues or something else that I did.

Last friday told them that my availability changed and Im quitting. Told them that Im gonna provide support till the end of the month but no big features. Just spent a full shift in my main job and another full shift working on their product, trying to untagle their spaghetti.. Im totally lost and burned out. Meanwhile stupid manager is asking why "simple" stuff according to him is taking too long.

I should receive my last payment from agency this week, also asked them to send it to me earlier but no answer so far. At this point Im so burned out that I dont care anymore about the last payment, even if client complains that everything is broken and doesnt want to pay me. Project is beyond fucked and that SDK as well as their backend is a ticking time bomb. Im done.

Thank goodness I put on my adulting cap and had a talk with my project manager today. He's such a kind and understanding person, truly underestimated qualities.

I'm basically a sub-contractor; a freelance consultant who get jobs from another company (ie my PM) and I messed up the estimate for this project we're working on and I did so in a rather spectacular manner.

60-80 estimated hours are now in the 300:s... I've missed more deadlines in this project alone than I have done in all my career (+10 years) combined. It's bad. It's a complete clusterfuck.

Problem is because of this never-ending project I haven't been able to work on things I can debit since May and I didn't have those margins. I'm fucked financially and I've been so stressed out about that I've literally been loosing sleep over it, found myself ugly-crying in the middle of the night more than once, worrying about how the fuck I'm gonna get on.

In my mind it was a real thing that they wouldn't want to keep working with me after this. Even though the failures in this project isn't _only_ on me, I'm not one to make excuses for myself and I would completely understand if that had been the outcome.

But it wasn't.

Instead he just said he was sorry he wouldn't be able to get all my hours billed by the client (of course not; we've left an estimate and by at least Swedish business law you can't deviate from those simply because you made an incorrect estimation).

But he has no intentions of letting me go as a consultant and assured me there will be other jobs (planned since before this whole ordeal). He's even going to try and get some hours in for me in other projects, small things here and there so I can get some billable hours quickly to help me out.

He knows me and he knows this isn't who I am as a professional. I'm so relieved I could god damn cry.

When project is finished, everything is according specs, and on final review the client says: "everything looks nice! But I would like to change just a few small details. I would like a different design and functionality".

Seriously?!

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!

Way after office hours, random ping!!

Client: Hey man you're a ninja, i have heard so much about you from my team, you're really good. Thanks for everything.

Me(Overwhelmed): Gee, this is my job :)

C: So, can you do a small change to the website!! 😨

Me: Okay

2 days later. After office hours!!

C: Hey Ninja... and all that crap...

Me: Starts typing... Goes offline!!
Fuck you!!

Just found out with client, a recruiter played double agent, charged 25% on me and 20% on client, a whopping 45% commission! Fuck off.

Thankfully it’s only a small project. We are both hiring dev soon so he lost a good chunk of business, at least from me, for perpetuity.

Most useless feature:

Once we had to create a Learning Manager System to a small university. One of the (useful) features was a "file system" to people upload, organize and share documents (like a Google Drive prototype). This was the "student portfolio".

However, we had to create a page to act as a "cover" to it, that should allow the student to change the background, add exactly 2 images, and up to 9 "post-its". The image shows the notebook of our client while he was thanking us praising it as the greatest innovation of the decade.

The post-its was kinda nice, but what's the point of those images??

Anyway... On the same meeting of that picture the client asked us to include a "canvas" on that same page, so people could draw whatever they want. The words used was "just like [MS] Paint".

We postponed it, hoping he would forget about it, but on the end of the project he was still asking about it.

I found a lib that did the job and integrated with the project, but I also included a long comment for the next devs saying that I'm sorry they would have to support such thing 😅

The client loved but we never knew anyone that really used that Paint

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

Has anyone had to hack into a server so they can set up their work,

Literally have a client asking me to do this change to their site and they are asking the dev who is controlling it but they just not letting me access ..

Long night ahead 🙄 got to add a ftp account ... All I need to do is add small lines of code for tracking, but this guy doesn't want to let me on it cause I'm slowly taking over his work... if he did his job right it's not like it would be happening anyway

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

ALWAYS read warnings guys.
Story time !
A client of ours has a synchronization app (we wrote it) between his inhouse DB and our app. (No, no APIs on their end. It’s a schelduled task).
Because we didn’t want to ask them for logs every single time, the app writes logs to disk (normal) and in Applications Insights in Azure.
When needed, I can go in portal, get all logs for last execution in a nice CSV file.
Well, recently we added more logs (Some problems were impossible to track).
So client calls us : “problem with XXX”
Me : Goes to Azure, does the same manipulation as always. Dismiss a smaaaaaalish warning without reading. Study logs. Conclusion: “The XXX is not even in the logs, check your DB”.
Little I knew, the warning was telling me “Results are truncated at 10.000 lines”.
So client was right, I was wrong and I needed to develop a small app to get logs with more than 10.000 lines. (It’s per execution. Every 3 hours)

You build a system to integrate into an API to save the client hours of data-entry per day and reducing the number of fields needed to be filled manually by 75% and querying for the rest of the data and filling in the blanks. It took weeks of building and researching and bug fixing and when you're finally done the client looks at you unimpressed.

The same client gets a small piece of js that gets users location(by ip address) and uses it to customize a hello message on the home page and they think 'yer a wizard, Harry!' and jump for joy over the "cool factor" of this simple hack.

I see people earning $10k to add small features that take no more than a week worth of work and here I am making full fledged custom ecommerce sites for $1k.

Money is apparently based on who the client is not what ur doing for them..

So how do i get those clients?

While I work on my devRant client, I always end up thinking, "how would dfox do it for the backend".

Some of the functions I have include:
-fetching new rants, 250 at a time
-remembering the ones I've read and filtering those out (kinda similar to Algo)
-checking for updates from followed users and new notifications

My implementions are kinda spammy though part of it is because I need to use the existing API.

But even so, how would/does he implement these so all the users' requests don't end up bringing down the server, and efficiently store and retrieve everyone's view history?

My problems are small compared to his... How do you think and deal with problems at that scale though?

Long story short: University fucked up single sign on.

For every online service I have, I set a different password, randomly generated ~ 20 characters long. At our university we have multiple systems but they offer a single sign on service which is quite nice because it is so non-transparent which service now uses which authorization. I changed my password a while ago and around the same time they also updated our mail client. Since then I am not able to log in which is not a big deal for me because I have mail forwarding.

Yesterday however I needed another service and also got rejected with my password. I knew from a friend that the passwords are fucked up and that some services have different restrictions (only 12 chars max.), so I decided to search how to reset my password. What the fuck was wrong with these people? It takes you five different pages to get the tiniest bit of information how to reset the password. Then on one page you can login with your single sign on and change the password. On that page you can also set the single sign on password, but if you enter an invalid password (in respect of the the other services) guess what? No feedback that you just locked yourself out of half the systems. Nice job. Also the password requirements are not next to the input fields where you change the password. Noo. That would be way to easy, remember the little small one line on the wall of text three pages ago? There you go.

Ok step one done. Now it should work, shouldn't it? Ohh no not so fast. One needs to activate the seperate service. Where you ask? Perfectly fine question. On the top of page four is a fucking one line table which looks like some five year old had some fun in excel. The button which takes you to the activation page is nearly invisible because of the non existing contrast. Also it is not a button but some arrow pointer thingy. Behind set arrow you have a page listing all differnt kinds of services, the description which you find on page two btw. No padding to decipher this shit what so ever. Nearly on the bottom is your needed button. Yes finally.

Finally I want to login, no good. Try again. Still no good. Go back to the fucked up excel table look at my username and think to myself what's the difference here? The table is so small and again no margin or padding. Apparently they cut of the last character of my normal username which i have which is fucking ridiculous.

What is wrong with you people, we are a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, is it so hard for you to find someone decend to unify this shit?

tldr:
first year in college we programmed 24 hrs straight to fix somebody's mess before the deadline. Decided not to screw him over, instead he claimed to have done everything and we failed the assignment.

Long version:
var group= new[]{"Mike", "Gavin", "Gus", "I", "Ben" };
var client = "Jack"';

First year of college we had an assignment to make a web program for somebody.
Ben wanted to join our group and he already knew a client so we let him join.

After joining Ben wanted to be project lead, but we already decided Mike based on his experience.
Ben claimed to be much better in every way than Mike at and kept coming with stuff the following weeks why we should make him project lead. He kept pointing out when Mike did something wrong and he even came with an audio file where he clearly made jack say that he wanted Ben to be project lead .
After that we were all a bit pissed and told him that he should get it in his head that he was not going to be project lead and just start working on his part of the assignment.

We also found out that Ben was a documentation addict, what we could write in a small paragraph, he wrote a whole page about it. No joke, I rewrote a page of his in 5-6 rows with the same information in it.
No problem you thing, wrong! Because of this he kept bothering us arguing and claiming that our documentation was wrong because it was to short.

In the week of the deadline we asked Ben if he was also done, and told us that he was done for a while now.

The day before the deadline we came to school thinking we only had to do some merging and finishing up documentation.
Then we found out that Ben has almost nothing, and what he had the IDE was screaming that it was incorrect, spaces in Id's and css class names for instance. A really good programmer, my ass!
We were so pissed off at this point, but we had 24 hrs and needed to come up with a plan to fix it.

We decided that Mike and I were going to fix Ben his shit in the coming 24 hrs and Ben was going to make our last bit of documentation because we would not have the time for that, Especially if we had to argue with him like we had to do for each bit of documentation. Gus did not have time and Gavin could not program on his own yet, he wanted to help, but helping him help us would cost more time than we had.

We all went home after that and Mike and I started to program 24 hours straight while in a Skype call, making what Ben had 2 months for. Shortly before the deadline Mike looked at our finishing up documentation received from Ben and told me it was "Okay" and zipped everything up and uploaded it to school with a few minutes to spare.

After that we thought everything was good, we made Ben's part work and delivered it in time. We also decided not to throw Ben under the bus, because this would hurt all our grades because we did not work good as a group since we should have noticed it earlier.

A few weeks go by till the assessment.
The assessment start with asking if we want individual grades or as a group when you all think you did equal amount. We choose as a group, because if we chose individual not only Ben but also Gavin would get a lower grade and we did not think that was fair because he tried so hard.

We demo the product and the teachers are positive. When the teachers start about the documentation, the first thing they tell is that they found something interesting in the documentation, and they read it to us:

"I, Ben, have made all the documentation because my group did not want to."

That was so far from the truth, we all did make our documentation about the parts we made. Yes he did do overall a little bit more because every single bit of documentation we had to argue with him, so every time he volunteers to make it, we would all agree. And he made Mike's and i's last bit of documentation.

Telling the teachers on that point would not have mattered, it would only have hurt is in another way, so we did not and all failed the assignment. And we all felt like to strangle him.
This is now a few years back, but i still want too.

I've just about finished 100% of the scoped features of a quick little app. The client is demanding that I add more features at his whim before he'll pay me anything. Mind you, this is a small project, and I have a day job that pays me loads more than he's paying me. Oh, and the client has no control over the github repo or any of the deployed environments.

If your client doesn't know what the fuck he wants to see on his website even with all text and images included - don't take this fucking job.

They will let you choose a template and you end up switching it 5 times. "Oh we don't like it. What else do you have? Oh, this looks better." Next day "We don't like this theme anymore. We want to switch to what we had before."

If people can't draw their home page on a paper I tell them go fuck yourself straight in a face. I always put these people on my reference list so my future clients know I'm straightforward, not lazy, not low skilled, but honest with dumbasses like some of my previous clients.

You are asking for a basic website with 5 pages, you have a shitty budget and then I have to customize the entire theme and tweak every fucking possible element in CSS, HTML and PHP. Go fuck yourself. All you get for your money is WordPress with 15 min consultation how to copy paste your shit and save it. Never do fixed budgets, never work on projects like this if it's under $500-1000. Meet with the client to understand him/her better and see if he is a jackass-perfectionist or a chill person who won't be picky.

That's my memories of being a freelancer, trying to get any job for any budget just to build my portfolio. Never going back to this, at least not for small businesses with less than $5,000 budget. Reading people before you start working with them is a good thing.

Fuck my company. Let the technology people work with technology.

I work at a small company who constantly brings in people who are absolutely useless. The project manager requires me to take items out of azure Dev-ops into an excel because he will not take the time to understand how a board works. The business analyst hands bullshit requirements in formats which no one but him can understand under the pretense that the Devs and architect can ask him when they feel like it. The CEO wants a power-point which again the technical teams have to prepare for him because the project manager or BA will not have time for it. However they make sure to gut the estimates handed over by the Dev team and introduce unfeasible deadlines.

Meanwhile the client has zero problems as the work still somehow gets done due to people in the Dev team overextending. Goddam leeches wasting mine and my teams time doing bullshit.

!devButAlsoKindaIsDev

Alright, time to do some explanation.

TL;DR: JavaScript is a fucking nightmare. May god help every web developer out there. Essentially, I was gone because of JavaScript.

Q: where tf are you bruh
A: in your mo-uhhhhh alright, so I was chosen to be the main developer for an interactive promotional video for my school (every year the school holds something called an open day, where kids from 8th grade can come to the school and have a tour in the school first hand. Because of the coronavirus (just gonna call it “the rona” from here) this is now impossible so we are losing the interest and the first impressions so the school decided to make an interactive virtual one). They asked me if I want to do it and I said yes.

Boy, was that ever a mistake... (hint: it was a huge mistake)

So the guy who talked to me and asked if I wanted to do this was my grade’s manager, and he gave me the phone number of my PM. So we talked and stuff, and then this happened: (bruh = PM)

bruh: I’ll send you the API and documentation for the thing that we are working with! They have lots of examples and stuff and they’re Israeli too!

Me: Okay! What language are we talking about here?

bruh: JavaScript.

Me: (questioning life choices) Okay!

I didn’t write any JavaScript for the last 3 years or so. It had to be done because I promised and I can’t let down people who count at me and ask me to show where I shine.

So, what was the objective for me? Build a Firebase client that sends the user’s score and choices to Firestore after he chooses something in the interactive video (for example, go to chemistry or go to physics) while learning JavaScmeme (ECMEMEScript) as I go.

Deadline? A week and a half.

After working almost 12 hours a fucking day, I made it work. Sorta. In order to reconcile with small exceptions and edge cases in the interactive video, I had to hard-code some IDs in the code. I had no choice, since I couldn’t allow myself to spend more and more time to make my code more dynamic than it was because I simply didn’t have time. The code absolutely STINKS but it works.

Today is the day where we (aim) to finish all of the cosmetic things that we need to fix. All of them are non-essential for everything to work, but we want to make this thing presentable because we want to put this on the school’s website.

CONCLUSION:

JavaScript is literal shit. Dynamic weakly-typed languages are cursed AF and need to die in a fire.

Big IT consulting company ask us (small web agency) to develop the "html" code for a web app for their client. (They'll want the front-end to implement it in Cordova or other shit tools they use).

I had to use some "includes" in php, for header and footer, because for 50 pages it'll be tedious to edit a thing (the design is not definitive yet) without open all the .html files individually and replicate the edits in all the pages.

We've delivered the package containing all the pages and a "inc" folder for the header and the footer. The pages have the extension *.php

Their pm ask us why we didn't do it in html, since they expected that.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

I am a Windows person. I always argue how great it is.

Well, not today.

I was today years old when I learned that you CANNOT uninstall store app via store ;p You need to go to settings / apps and functionality / your app / uninstall

The photo app (Yes the one bundled with win10) doesn't work if you use Hard drive compression AND it is a symlink for OneDrive (So you don't need to keep all photos on the drive). Fucking Paint works without problems.

Email client : If you alt+tab too fast after hitting 'Send email", there is 50% chances that email won't be send. Basiclly you need to hit "send" and wait until you see it in "sent" folder.

Well, as i'm ranting, here for Linux too :
I have a small ubuntu server VM, worked very well for last 6 months. Now "System in read only mode". Fucking apt-get upgrade fucked with something. I don't want to look, so I'll just rebuild a fresh vm.

And macOS should take sometyhing too : Who the fuck decided "enter" is for editing the name of file ?! really !

Well, ALL os are shit, all have downsides, I need my own OS. But I still want AA games... So windows for me.

!rant
Had a conversation with an non-dev acquaintance today...he was telling me my job was in danger because of the rapid advance of AI...that soon the client will just specify what he needs and the AI will create it.
Yeah...just one small problem...the client never knows what he wants...as long as that client is human I'm pretty sure we're safe

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

I promised a friend to have a look over his dads website to add a small blog. No big deal, I've got it on my drive, can reuse it just need to adapt it to the environment.

I take a look at what I'm working with and I see the most terrifying piece of "Please, take my data" code I could possibly imagine (And I've seen passwords, in plain text in a script tag). I quote "function queryDB(mode, val) {
var query=" ";
if(mode==="findProd")
query="Select * from Products where ProdNam=" +val;
... (same shit for different cases)
sendQuery(query) ;
}

He literally built the query on the client side sent it to a php script (without validation) and inserted it into the database.
You could literally call window.sendQuery with any sql query and get the result printed into the console.
And other than the plain text passwords guy that wasn't some kid someone knew, this was a "Webdesign" Agency.
Now I took the entire thing offline, called my friends dad, explained it to him and try to sort this out. I would not charge a good friends father but that hack will get a quite hefty bill since my hourly rate just tripled.

And the worst thing : If I publicly name that asshole or warn the people in his portfolio I can, according to Google, be sued. (But, and I assume thats vague enough not to count as bad mouthing, if anyone of you has a customer from Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany with a preexisting page, please have a look at the database interface)
I will call that agency tomorrow, ask for a detailed explanation for why they apparently let trained monkeys write their code and anonymously warn everyone in their portfolio about those flaws...

I don't know if I'm cursed or if there are just that many bad devs but it seems that once a year I have to stumble over some "mistakes" that make me question my sanity.

Sales sold to a new enterprise client ecommerce solution tailored for small/local businesses as enterprise solution.
That software is able to handle hundreds of products, but we are trying to insert over 200k+ of them.
After inserting around 10k, the whole system dies and nothing works because all requests time out.

Ever had that frustrating moment that the customer overreacts a small issue into a big issue? Just happened to me today.

Client: "Hey can you check why we are not getting any software update/patches to our firewall?"
Me: "OK. Lemme check"
** Checking **
Me: "I found that its not getting the latest updates because the license file registered has a product serial # mismatch with their support site. You can see it clearly here..."
Client: "THAT'S TERRIBLE!! QUICK!! MAKE IT A PRIORITY 1 ISSUE AND HAVE IT RESOLVE ASAP!!!"
Me: *Facepalm*

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

We had 1 Android app to be developed for charity org for data collection for ground water level increase competition among villages.

Initial scope was very small & feasible. Around 10 forms with 3-4 fields in each to be developed in 2 months (1 for dev, 1 for testing). There was a prod version which had similar forms with no validations etc.

We had received prod source, which was total junk. No KT was given.

In existing source, spelling mistakes were there in the era of spell/grammar checking tools.

There were rural names of classes, variables in regional language in English letters & that regional language is somewhat known to some developers but even they don't know those rural names' meanings. This costed us at great length in visualizing data flow between entities. Even Google translate wasn't reliable for this language due to low Internet penetration in that language region.

OOP wasn't followed, so at 10 places exact same code exists. If error or bug needed to be fixed it had to be fixed at all those 10 places.

No foreign key relationships was there in database while actually there were logical relations among different entites.

No created, updated timestamps in records at app side to have audit trail.

Small part of that existing source was quite good with Fragments, MVP etc. while other part was ancient Activities with business logic.

We have to support Android 4.0 to 9.0 of many screen sizes & resolutions without any target devices issued to us by the client.

Then Corona lockdown happened & during that suddenly client side professionals became over efficient.

Client started adding requirements like very complex validation which has inter-entity dependencies. Then they started filing bugs from prod version on us.

Let's come to the developers' expertise,
2 developers with 8+ years of experience & they're not knowing how to resolve conflicts in git merge which were created by them only due to not following git best practice for coding like only appending new implementation in existing classes for easy auto merge etc.

They are thinking like handling click events is called development.

They don't want to think about OOP, well structured code. They don't want to re-use code mostly & when they copy paste, they think it's called re-use.

They wanted to follow old school Java development in memory scarce Android app life cycle in end user phone. They don't understand memory leaks, even though it's pin pointed by memory leak detection tools (Leak canary etc.).

Now 3.5 months are over, that competition was called off for this year due to Corona & development is still ongoing.

We are nowhere close to completion even for initial internal QA round.

On top of this, nothing is billable so it's like financial suicide.

Remember whatever said here is only 10% of what is faced.

- An Engineering lead in a half billion dollar company.

I love it when asshats, that wear testicles for sunglasses, like to ask me a question about my past experience with a given technology. Let's call it "X". After I've said my piece about the desired effect "X" was supposed to achieve, and describe the environment/scope where "X" was used, and describe the pain points I've encountered with it or the headaches "X" has caused in those environments, these camel spunk garglers then try to immediately rebut me by saying that every one of the times they've set "X" technology up it's worked just fine.

So, I kindly remind them that my past experience was in large enterprises where "X" technology just doesn't scale well so I've seen some issues with it.

Spunk Gargler: "Hmmm, must've just not been setup correctly."

I lose my shit (internally of course because I can't afford to be without a job right now.) and say, "I'm not so sure that it wasn't setup correctly, I just don't think that 'X' works properly at the scale of 500+ employee environments well. You've only ever set it up in small offices of like - what, 20 users?"

Shitlord McHerp-a-Derp who's Drunk on Spunk: "Maybe, but it just sounds like a bad configuration was causing those issues to me."

He shuffled back into his office shortly after I basically told him he's a fucking chump playing small team tactics and I've seen shit at scale so I've seen first hand what does and does not work well.

I'm writing this because this is the same fucking imbecile that has only ever encountered a /23 network once before from a client they inherited from a previous MSP team and they didn't know how to "safely change it" to a /24 so they just left it in place.

(BTW, just for the non-networking guys/gals out there, I'm sure you've already guessed it, but a /23 network is NOT a fucking problem!)

These puffy cancerous taint boils that call themselves IT engineers are the fucking problem!

I'm not a dev by trade or training, but trying to learn DevOps, and I can totally see why Dev teams can/sometimes get pissed with infrastructure teams... infrastructure/helpdesk side of IT is full of these fucking meat heads.

I got an extremely hard task in the morning, I asked for some clarification and I got them at 13.23.
Boss ask for updates at 13.45 (during lunch pause).
I work on it 2 hours like never before, he calls me and I said I can manage to finish in half an hour + testing.

I work more 10-15 minutes, time is around 16.15.

2 other enormous bugs shows up on the same project, boss ask me to take care of them, and I manage in only 2h to look up something like 40 web pages and correct each of them, write reports and inform the affected people. After it I work more 15 minutes to report and finish small tasks. Ended up working almost 1h more on a non paid extra time working contract.

In the morning, while my boss was aware I spent that time

In the morning boss ask "everything went fine with the big project, right?"

Because
The
Client
Is
Angry.

I already got a burnout from this job, I really can't go on like this.

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.

Okay, one after another. They like to piss me off, apparently.

Coleague knows something isn't possible with current state of some api and pushes phone to me so I can maybe figure out what to reply to client. I dry-typed in "Its not possible" gave him phone and said "boom done, you know it aint possible"

Okay, TL;DR she got pissed that I am pissed that this BS is thrown at me and I dont want to participate in promissing something I know is undeliverable.

So she told me to go to PM/PO *kind of guy but not rly* with that problem. He aint technical by any mean. We are small company and for some reason this guy has more bearoucratic approach than I thought is possible to fit in one human.

Anyway. Well, apparently we will have meeting what are our options.
It all beginned that one guy promissed other guy undeliverable feature....

And becouse someone couldn't use his fucking brain it's pushed onto me, or I need to figure out how to do it. You cant without introducing safety flaw, period, it's that fuckin' simple.

But nooo, we will have god-knows-how-long meeting, that will bring exacly 0 value, as fking allways, and all I want now is just fucking focus on my fucking code becouse, ya know, I have timeline to follow, I dont have time to all that BS.

And to give you context, while keeping the stuff I cant share secret, imagine you have an API, that is just 'facade' of backend API, and layer of security. And they want to add authoritative endpoint to the facade API. Kind of endpoint "yes, you got paid".

Bravo, big brain, it will not work without like huge-as-fuck vunrability...

IDIOTS

How to not get pissed? Any protips?

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.

After hearing to hundreds of "just this last small change" , i told my client that he was a "chutiya" and he sent a link to this saying he had not intention of driving in India.😎😎

My beautiful code now transforming into ugly messy code. Damn you deadline 😠

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I started a new job about a week ago in an R&D software house which is a completely different world from what I am used to.

I worked as a coder in small teams, sometimes with Agile but always sunk in multiple projects at once - requiring constant switching of sprint goals week to week.

Now, I am alone (first person in a "maybe-in-the-future" team), doing research and preparing a demo for the client. It's hella lot of responsibility yet I found it weirdly liberating - being on my own, in control of what I do.

It may change in the future when project will inevitebly grow, but for right now, a week in, I started smiling while coding and learning, which I apparently haven't done in years.

Moral of the story: sometimes you've got to take a hit to be better off in the end.

A client asked me to design flyers for him, at first I was hesitant since this would be a stand alone design task instead of one incorporated with development.

He kept asking since he liked what I designed for my other clients (logos, etc..) So I finally said yes and we agreed to a final preview before he would pay me. I had asked him for color schemes, certain pictures, info, etc. but he told me it was completely up to me.

I finished the design, sent him the preview and he told me it was shit compared to my other work and that he didn't want it anymore 😅. I used to get mad as fuck every time this happened but now I don't even bother .

I know many people are going to say "You should have had him sign a contract, bla bla". I know, I know, but you can't let people sign a contract for every small thing, it completely depend on the situation and I prefer to know which of my lesser known clients are assholes so I can quit accepting tasks from them. This saves me much more time in the end.

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...

>client: it's just a small change, on a live site, that can't ever go down, EVER

>looks in source it's modification of core files, oh yay :'(

I was Just college fresher who completed his Engineering. My first week in the office. And a system was provided to me, since it was support project so I was given direct access to production database.

Fresher + Production Database + Access of Admin credentials = Worst Possible Combination

So it was my night shift, I was told to update new tariff plan for our client (which was one of the largest telecom service in India) .

If someone recharges for more than 200 Rupee, that person will get 10% or 20% extra talk time. Which was only applicable for particular circle (Like Bihar and Rajasthan).

Since I was fresher, I was told to update given query from my senior employee which he shared on the shared folder. Production downtime was in the mid night, so at that time I updated that query on the production database.

Query successfully updated. I completed my night shift, went home and slept.

When I woke up, I saw my mobile it had 200+ missed calls from different locations of India. They were Circle heads of that telecom service provider who contacted me. I realized something unexpected is expecting me.

Then at that moment my team lead called me and he asked me to come office right away.

Reminding you I was a fresher, I was shivering. What have I done there?

When I reached office, I came to know that the query I updated on production bombarded.

Every person who recharged that day (duration from midnight to morning 10 AM) got 10 times or 20 times more talktime.

A part of Query was something like this where error was made:

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 10/100; (Bihar)
or

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 20/100; (Rajasthan)
But instead of this query, I updated below one:

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 10;
or

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 20;
In a span of 10 hours, that telecom service lost revenue of 6.5 crore Rupees. Thanks to recovery team they were able to recover 6 crore but still 50 lakh Rupees were in loss.

One small query, and approx 1 million dollar was on stake.

Aftermath of this incident

My Mistake:

I should have taken those queries on mail. Or, there should have been mail communication regarding this.
Never ever do anything over oral communication. Senior employee who did this denied and said he provided correct query, and I had no proof of communication.
I told them, it was me who executed that query on production. Since I was fresher, and took my responsibility of that incident. My team lead rescued me from that situation.
Lesson Learned:

Always test your query and code multiple times before you execute or Go live it on production.
Always have email communication for every action you take on production.
Power comes with responsibility. If you have admin credentials of production never use it for update/delete/drop until you are sure.
Don’t take your job lightly.
I was not fired from that Job, but I have learnt my lesson very well.

TLDR;

When governments started printing money to cure new pandemic and crash current market with great inflation I took all my savings, got a loan and bought biggest property I could afford. Every major news station was talking about end of world, but this was not I was scared of. I was scared of the helicopter money that would wipe my 5 years old savings.

When I was about to sign loan papers to buy my first apartment I got an email that my contract will end in 3 months. I said ok, the contractor company will find me something else.

I asked and they assured me they will do it. After my contract end just before summer holidays there was silence from contracting company and then after 5 years of me earning them piles of money, after finished project and congratulations from customer they offered me most shitty job they had where people resign after a week. I said I don’t want to land in another shit hole bring it back to life for another 2-5 years and kill myself when they offer me same shit afterwards so I resigned.

It was so fucked up that even the boss from the client I was contracting asked me if I lost my job cause I finished all that they wanted. I said it’s not your fault man. I will be ok, but I wasn’t.

I had apartment I couldn’t move in cause I needed to renovate. Loan I needed to pay. Rented apartment, accountant and business that was loosing money cause I was without contract, the world was locked down and everyone was depressed.

I said ok, I still have some savings left so I I started looking for something new but market was dead. Everyone was gone for holidays after winter lockdown. I was burning money and trying to figure out what to do.

After 2 months of nothing, when I started thinking about finding some temporary job to not loose everything I worked for, things moved. I started attending hiring meetings and solving tests everyday, also from big four gang but I didn’t passed trough hr due to how they say I’m to independent and I need to look for consulting business or do something on my own.

People asked why I don’t do something on my own and I politely answered that I want to work there.

I was about to run out of money when I got a call that company is looking for me cause I was doing similar things they want to do. During interviews it was pleasant small talk about what id did over those years and what they want to do, 2 days later I joined small team. I barely managed to survive a month for a first paycheck.

Since then we created new product for a company. Now the person who hired me is leaving and I think I should also leave the ship and find other things to do.

!rant

TL;DR one year on as a react dev, I want to go at it self employed, humbly seeking advice as this community seems to have its fair share of knowledgeable freelancers.

I have 1 year professional experience now as a Meteor, React and Apollo developer

The dream is to become self employed. I figure a good market would be small businesses that want a website that are more featureful than a diy wix site.

Only I am more of a developer than a designer, so rely heavily on things like Bootstrap or Material ui. So I wonder if Upwork, Fiverr or simply my own freelance website would be better.

As you guessed javascript is my biggest strength, not sure if nodejs is the best backend for small businesses as hosting prices are more than eqv php stack.

Also want to build own projects on the side to monetize. Bigger dream would be to be client-less and develop and sell personal projects.

Seeking advice from those who are self employed. Am I dreaming too big?

Shall I keep the office job for a bit longer then take the plunge? Or do you think I can just go for it. Are there lucrative areas I am missing?

Thanks in advanced

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!

Frustration at its peak !!

So the CTO of the company I recently joined, whom I considered to be cool personality of all the open culture in the office and open communication, seems to be all wrong.

Few days back he suddenly dropped a mail to all the tech team members mentioning that we need more streamlined process in the company and many more blah blah stuffs... to which all of us agreed.

But. But. But. The last line(small font size) mentioning that from now onwards we need to come on Saturdays too until further notice. I mean WTF !!? Seriously.

But today in stand-up when one of the guy asked the agenda, he just tossed the question saying that we need to be more active attending "client tickets". Goddammit. We are devs, not tech support.
To this one of the other dev, said the exact same thing that was going in everyone's mind. Call the team that are required on Saturdays. To which his reply was, " Come on Saturday, we will speak then".

I was like 👏👏👏

P.S. Not that we are not ready to come on Saturdays, but at least take consent of all the members in the team, if you all babble so much about open culture and shit. We have friends and family too to have fun with, and need to take little rest on weekends.
And most importantly, tell us some firm reasons to be there on weekends, not just "You have to come, because we said so!"
Period.

!!!rant

Most exited I've been about some code? Probably for some random "build a twitter clone with Rails" tutorial I found online.

I've been working on my CS degree for a while (theoretical CS) but I really wanted to mess with something a bit more practical. I had almost none web dev experience, since I've been programming mostly OS-related stuff till then (C). I started looking around, trying to find a stack that's easy to learn since my time was limited- I still had to finish with my degree.

I played around with many languages and frameworks for a week or two. Decided to go with Ruby/Rails and built a small twitter clone blindly following a tutorial I found online and WAS I FUCKING EXITED for my small but handmade twitter clone had come to life. Coming from a C background, Ruby was weird and felt like a toy language but I fell in love.

My excitement didn't fade. I bought some books, studied hard for about a month, learned Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, SQL (w/ pg) and some HTML/CSS. Only playing with todo apps wasn't fun. I had a project idea I believed might be somewhat successful so I started working on it.

The next few months were spent studying and working on my project. It was hard. I had no experience on any web dev technology so I had learn so many new things all at once. Picked up React, ditched it and rewrote the front end with Vue. Read about TDD, worked with PostgreSQL, Redis and a dozen third party APIs, bought a vps and deployed everything from scratch. Played it with node and some machine learning with python.

Long story short, one year and about 30 books later, my project is up and running, has about 4k active monthly users, is making a profit and is steadily growing. If everything goes well, next week I'll close a deal with a pretty big client and I CANT BE FKING HAPPIER AND MORE EXCITED :D Towards the end of the month I'll also be interviewed for a web dev position.

That stupid twitter clone tutorial made me excited enough to start messing with web technologies. Thank you stupid twitter clone tutorial, a part of my heart will be yours forever.

Why the heck does every big "giant" wants to promote their own framework? It almost feels like politics of the tech industry. It's not about using the "best", but using "our own". Everyone wants to claim their territory however ridiculously small and unimportant it is. So, I'll have to replace Bootstrap with some framework client designated after completing the project, and see what will be broken.
The good thing about working in an agency is you get to work on such a variety of projects, which can also be the fucking damn thing. Heck I'm not looking to work in an agency for my next job.

have been working on a small project in the last couple of months. a few client meetings we are discussing a timeline feature for orders and assignments. the calendars (yeah a few on one screen cuz ... yeah) the client keeps complaining that they should look differently and in the same time says "Design is not important *designer-guy-he-works-with* can change it once we are done"
me - :/

side note: the calendars are tightly coupled with the js code powering them, so yeah ... looking forward to it
..

I find it funny that, one of the most expected features on Windows, is not even a Windows feature. The teams at Microsoft must be feeling the same way we feel when, after a huge project, the client gets super excited when we implement or change something really, really small, that we did in a couple hours, just for fun.

Old story, happened some way back. I worked part-time for a small web development company that did between other things something called SharePoint development, basically .net webforms with shit glitter on top of it.

The most weird part of it, was the fact that we were working on vms that hosted the app, it was our dev, test and staging environment, as well as were we showed the client the polished turd.

Did I say that it was on a vm? Well it was on a remote vm, that each of use had access to it, through our domain accounts, and they couldn't configure the windows server to accept more than two or three users at once to be connected.

That was our test enviroment and dev enviroment, sooo showing the app to the client meant for the rest of us to not write any code because it might crash or get stuck.

The app was accessible and discoverable by url and through google search from outside, I dont think that should have been allowed.

The most disastrous part was that we had NO source versioning whatsoever, just plain old copy and paste in different folders.
Deploying to client meant remoting to the clients host or whatever it was, and manually copying the source files

If someone wanted to debug the application you had to shout, and you also could hear it, in the office: "I'm debugging!" or "I'm deploying!". Because we were on the same machine, there was only one process with the server and it meant that if you debug or deployed it would block it for the others.

Should I talk about code quality? Maybe not.

We released a website for a client 10 days ago. The site was up and running and everything seemed fine.

But it turns out that the site used 15GB of bandwidth in 5 days ( WTF???).

So now I need to go and examine my code to make sure I didn't forget something and implement a new caching methods to try and reduce the amount of bandwidth being used.

But I still don't understand how a small "newspaper" website with a max upload size of 5MB could of used so much in so little time.

I also added a screenshot showing the number of visits from an addthis dashboard

Have you ever declined a job offer?

I had an interview a couple weeks ago, got an offer, but I had to decline because the salary was too low.
It would have been my first full time job (after several internships).

I'm not completely sure if I made the right choice. The team was really small, and it felt like I would have had to handle too much other than the responsibilities of my role.

And I have another interview tomorrow. I hope it goes well.

Meanwhile, I'm working as a developer consultant for a client. I'm learning a lot doing that, so that's going well. :)

So one day I got an email from a client just before I'm about to go home saying she wanted to update some images on the homepage slider. "No big deal" I thought. So she sends me the images and two of them are squares and the other is a portrait. All of which have phone camera quality and are way too small for the desktop version of the slider. I trim and rearrange the two squares so that fit but the other one was hopeless. I cropped it poorly and hoped she didn't care about it too much.

Of course it was the most important picture she wanted.

I ask the client to send me a higher quality picture which would fit in the slider and she sends me a picture which is even taller and less wide.

"Great," obviously at this point I figure she must be checking on just her cell phone and that's why a tall picture makes more sense to her.

And of course now she needs this before tomorrow morning so now I'm staying late to edit images.

Since she's obviously only looking on her cell phone and she's made me stay so late to do this I just take the tall image and mirror it so that it looks like there are two products side by side and it fits well on mobile screens.

Ugh.

Made a comparison of a rather large codebase that I did for a client before in flask to perl dancer2 and ror. Obviously the rails codebase is larger. The flask version remains as minimal as it once did, even considering blueprints and the dancer version is small but really expandable and powerfull. It has some great things, it was inspired by sinatra so it has that magical approach to doing things but the code is solid and easy to understand imho. They really make it towards perl code is not the unreadable codebase as it once was and the syntax just clicks. Even for its api capabilities it works amazing with the front end (Vue.js) and I can honestly say that I really enjoy it.

I work in a small scale company based on Kolkata, India. It's my first job and I have been working here for last 6 and half years. Now I am the technical lead there.

I love my job. I love taking new challenges which I need to solve on my own (most of the times). My working hours are 9am to 6pm. Hardly I have to stay late at office. Even if I have any client meeting after 6, I do it from home. I am never tired on Mondays, I love to join my office. I can do my personal projects after reaching home, sometimes even in the office. All these goods come with a small price, I get less salary than my friends who are working on the MNCs (e.g. IBM, TCS, HP etc). They are frustrated though, with their jobs, with their bosses, with the long working hours. I am not. Sometimes I feel bad that I earn less. But that feeling doesn't stay much longer. It goes away whenever I join the office and get a new thing to do.

I have rejected offers from many companies. That includes all the major MNCs working in India. I feel bad about that sometimes, just like currently I am feeling. One my friend (a really bad developer) is roaming in the New York city, he is there for an onsite project. I know I can't go their, at least now. And that feels bad.

What should I do? Does it make me an idiot to stay in a company for more than 6 years? Should I switch and join an MNC like everyone does? I am confused. Pretty confused.

Client wants something that makes no sense in UX land. We tell them that it makes no sense. Client doesn't listen, tells us to do it anyway.

We do it anyway. Client has doubts about a small detail of the implementation. And asks us what our advice would be.

My advice would be that you start listening to the professionals. How am I supposed to give "advice" on a detail of something I disagree with in general?

Her: "I'm going to cut off one of my hands."

Me: "I recommend you do not do that."

Her? "Would you cut off the left or the right hand? I can't decide."

Me, saying: "I have no preference in this."

Me, thinking: "You should cut off your fucking ears, you're obviously not using them."

My love for you I can't describe it,
so I dont't even try and hide it.
Dev. you are my one true passion
you are always there to teach me a new lesson.
Some missing semicolon;
I have searched for you soo long.
Or was it a wrong indent,
ah f**k it was the missing increment.
Thinking through endless loops
in while, for and even do form,
just that my programs do a little better perform.
You give me the possibility to express myself as who I am and who I want to be,
in so many languages, from java, JS, GO, python and even C.
You give me bugs and issues that I track,
from motivation for you I never lack.
There are projects out there, where I contribute to
oh what a beauty are you.
And now you even bring fun into my life
with devrant, I now know how to survive.
How to survive client meetings and non devs around me,
oh how much stupidity I there see.
Let's exit this small programm of mine, this so called rime,
where I an immutable statement define:

I think about you even when we are not together,
My dearest DEV I will love you forever.

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'm in a team of 3 in a small to medium sized company (over 50 engineers). We all work as full stack engineers.. but I think the definition of full stack here is getting super bloated. Let me give u an example. My team hold a few production apps, and we just launched a new one. The whole team (the 3 of us) are fully responsible on it from planning, design, database model, api, frontend (a react page spa), an extra client. Ok, so all this seems normal to a full stack dev.

Now, we also handle provisioning infra in aws using terraform, doing deployments, building a CI/CD pipeline using jenkins, monitoring, writing tests, building an analytics dashboard.

Recently our tech writer also left, so now we are also handling writing feature releases.

Few days ago, we also had a meeting where they sort of discussed that the maintenance of the engineering shared services, e.g. jenkins servers, (and about 2-3 other services) will now be split between teams in a shared board, previously this was handled only be team leads, but now they want to delegate it down.

And ofcourse not to mention supporting the app itself and updating bug tickets with findings.

I feel like my daily responsiblities are becoming the job responsibilities of at least 3 jobs.

Is this what full stack engineering looks like in your company? Do u handle everything from app design, building, cloud, ops, analytics etc..

Trying to use authenticate a JWT token from an Azure service, which apparently needs to use Azure AD Identity services (Microsoft Entra ID, Azure AD B2C, pick your poison). I sent a request to our Azure admin. Two days later, I follow up, "Sorry, I forgot...here you go..."
Sends me a (small) screenshot of the some of the properties+GUIDs I need, hoping I don't mess up, still missing a few values.
Me: "I need the instance url, domain, and client secret."
<hour later>
T: "Sorry, I don't understand what those are."
Me: "The login URL. I assume it's the default, but I can't see what you see. Any shot you can give me at least read permissions so I can see the various properties without having to bother you?"
T: "I don't see any URLs, I'll send you the config json, the values you need should be in there."
<10 minutes later, I get a json file, nothing I needed>
<find screenshots of what I'm looking for, send em to T>
Me: "The Endpoints, what URLs do you see when you click Endpoints?"
<20 minutes later, sends me the list of endpoints, exactly what I'm looking for, but still not authenticating the JWT>
Me: "Still not working. Not getting an error, just that the authentication is failing. Don't know if it's the JWT, am I missing a slash, or what. Any way I can get at least read permissions so I don't have to keep bugging you to see certain values?"
T: "What do you need, exactly?"
Me: "I don't know. I don't know if I'm using the right secret key, I can't verify if I'm using the right client id. I feel like I'm guessing trying to make this work."
T: "What exactly are you trying to get working?"
<explain, again, what I'm trying to do>
T: "That's probably not going to work. We don't allow AD authentication from the outside world."
Me: "Yes we do. Microsoft Teams, Outlook, the remote access services. I can log into those services from home using my AD credentials."
T: "Oh yea, I guess we do. I meant what you are trying to do. Azure doesn't allow outside services to authenticate using a JWT. Sorry."

FRACK FRACK FRACK!!

Whew! Putting the flamethrower away.

Thanks devrant for letting me rant.

Hate it when client demands a small specific change and doing what requires a lot of modifications in the code.

Background: I am currently working with a DB that has websocket functionality ("notify a client on insert/etc."). However, you do have to whitelist tables in order to use them with sockets.

I wanted to optimize my code and didn't want to mess with my coworkers dev-data, therefore I duplicated the table. After improving some small things I noticed that the interface does not change with new socket data. I have spent the last hour or so trying to figure out where I broke it.

I just realized that I forgot to whitelist that duplicated table 😐 Most relieving moment today 😅

Bonus side effect: The code is much cleaner now since I refactored a lot of the realtime-logic in order to understand it/fix the bug.

I am a fresher in web development. I have already learnt to use nodejs, react, angular, vanilla js and made many projects. Majority of the work I feel is just CRUD based, sure there are some exciting things but they are only of a small percentage.

All that innovation HAPPENING is just glorified way of making a CRUD APP ONLY.
Oh mvc worked great on server side let's bring it to client side
OH mvc is such a mess, who thought about doing this.
Oh react redux is so revolutionary let's remake our app using it,,
Oh es6 fuck yeah, Babel, webpack sure, now my crud app is super performant.
Oh graphql, motherfucking cutting edge CRUD APP......

I need to know what's next, is there any breaking of this cycle

So I make websites on the side for small time clients for some additional income. And without fail every time I sit down to work on this one site something goes wrong. First there were problems with the hosting, and now the template that the client chose is no longer for sale. I hope I'm not going to lose them over this :( I've sent them a list of alternative templates and contacted the company behind the original template to ask what is up. Real shame because they picked what I considered the favourite too and now I regret waiting to fork over the money to make the purchase.

I started a company a while back that builds really simple wordpress sites and design for small businesses. I took a client on that needed things that were well above my skill level as a "programmer" and it's been equally frustrating and satisfying to consistently have the shit kicked out of me while spending hours trying to solve problem after problem. I've never worked for a company as a coder and one of the things I'm starting to wonder about is whether or not I'm "cut out" to be a programmer. I like doing it, but from a business owner perspective I don't know that I would actually want myself as an employee. My question is: does everyone feel like a ducking retard everyday they go at it with their job as a programmer?

Robbery of nearby future :
A broke dev decided to do a robbery by stealing the whole DAVE -2 system from the Tesla S3 model
While asking why he chose a drastic path as this, he said "My client wanted the training to be ready within 2 days and I couldn't arrange that much GPU in such small notice, so decided to do what I did.*ignored(But I reinstalled it back in the car)*
As you can see, client's have turned into money hungry, cock sucking, fist fucking, and God-knows-what-fetish wanting prices of shit"
Over to you, Clara

Guys ! Need some help !

I am a final year CS undergraduate;will graduate in 2017 . I have been working with a team of freelancers developing websites and apps for the past couple of years. The thing is our client base is very small and the income is unstable because of our poor marketing and lack of good developers. Our team lead only doesn't maintain any version control,no code comments,sub standard code, and spends all the savings(we keep some money aside for expenses like meetings,traveling as a team etc) on movies,hangouts etc . I cannot tell it to his face but I have been looking to move out for sometime.

Should I continue freelancing by myself or apply in jobs ? And if I apply in jobs, do I apply as a fresher or a someone with a couple of years of experience ?

And if I continue as a freelancer,where do I start ? I checked upwork and freelancer.com but they have some cut-throat competition out there .

Managing a small team - poorly.
I was in charge of testing a legacy calculations engine together with two scientists, for whom I set up a python and interop environment so they could test the engine easily.

The two were very excited at the thought of validating the calculations and in fact found many bugs.

I was very supportive, told them to fix the bugs and gave them a pet on the back.

All three of us were happy the legacy engine is shaping up, that's until my boss heard of it, and boy did he grill me hard for it.

Turns out our efforts were highly unappreciated by the client, whose only request was that we test the engine and report the bugs. Not to fix them. My goodwill cost the company a lot of money, since the client paid by the hour, and was now due a refund. Crap.

It took me a year to finally understood the moral of the story. Which is to always respect the client's wishes and convey maximum transparency to him.

Working for unappreciative fucktard clients who believe they know more about dev than a seasoned professional and try to give me advise on how to approach my work and or solve programming issues. FUCK Sake if you know it then don't hire me you fucktard client.

My best experience is working for a small company and bridging their disconnected systems together using an array of programming languages such as Go, PHP, VB, Batch Script, Javascript and C

Hey everyone,

When I was in college, I used to wish to do some freelancing work to earn some amount.
But I never did it due to lack of experience and knowledge.

Now, I've been working in a Small IT company for one year and I'm confident enough that I can do it.

I'm interested in making APIs as a freelancer.
I've few doubts here,
Once the API is developed is it a freelancer's job to deploy it in some cloud instance or they just need to share the code?
If the client wants the freelancer to deploy it on their behalf then do the freelancer have to create his account for example in AWS for deployment?

Also, Do freelancers have to set up and maintain all the DB for the APIs?

Finally found a use for my rpi 2 after more than a year xD
Small testing env for client server scripts and OS portability, later project buy a rpi zero W and try to use it as something probably illegal :/
Feelsgood

Finished building an app for a client and sent it to them. Messaged them every week for a month asking if things were OK and if they needed any assistance (no invoice sent either). 6 weeks later I wake up to a stream of emails and missed calls about a small bug that they demand being fixed immediately because of an urgent business need. Fixed the bug. Sent invoice. It's been nearly 2 months and still waiting for payment. FML.

Ugh. Sending data to a 3rd Party API and for a small subsection of these requests getting error response "A system error occurred". PM: "Who's fault is it? Ours or them?" ... Agh come on, fault is something you can make up, they can make up and entirely irrelevant and unhelpful to anybody. Client: "Why is broken, ideally it would never fail" ... everyone is in goo goo gaa gaa land

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??

TD;DR: I have school instead of vacation but 5 hours of spare time. I got my laptop with me and I'll work in school.

I didn't want to take part of the course-trip with the 12th graders (my course sucks, there are too many assholes for the neutral people to compensate). After speaking with the director, and the only condition was to tell the course why. I did deliver them a nicely put "fuck you, you bullied my only friend out of this school" and now is the time where I visit the 11-graders while the other 12-ers are on "school vacation".

I got a "new" plan for the courses I should visit. Today, Wednesday, I have 5 FUCKING FREE HOURS IN A ROW. Oh yes, baby, the teacher generating the plan hates me as well. (He really does but it's probably just unlucky not his fault).

So today, I decided, I would take my heavy-ass laptop with me, in a laptop bag, which doesn't fit into the school bag I have and my laptop doesn't fully fit in the laptop bag as well (sticks out), that's the perks of having a laptop!!
— so I can work on my (I wanna say this once in my life without being a professional) "CLIENTS PROJECT" - the funny thing is that the client is a (really fucking good but small) advertising agency and too lazy to design their own website. Since I had my internship, they know how hard I *can* work even without being payed. Now they do wanna pay me but that's another story.

I'm on the bus and I have this monster of a bag which isn't lighter than a freaking huge bag of rice and I'm so fucking excited for this day. The library is my best friend. Hopyfully I'm going to find a socket for power..

Sorry for so many commas, I'm german. :D

When client says "i think its sth small" does not mean he knows what he's talking about. It means "i'm not gonna fucking pay for the extra work"

The fog of war over all that happened with my change of team is starting to dissipate.
3 people were involved and there were 4 different versions of the whole situtations, but from what I've been able to collect it looks like the company is expanding and one of the mail KPI for the current team leaders is how good they are at creating a NEW generation of team leaders, to take care of the new entries.
My previous team leader told me about all these new growth perspectives and the junior entries I could manage, knowing very well of the desire I have previously expressed of being a senior dev with my small group of juniors to teach.

I declined the offer, stating that this whole year has been exhausting. Every single time I've tried anything (using modules for new components on our old web client, tsdoc to document our types, suggesting technologies like ANYTHING BUT ANGULAR AND MONGO, telling how removing down migrations was a retarded move) my suggestions were either shrugged off or flat out refused. Let alone how every time I was proven right, except for angular but give it time and that will bite their tail as well.
Don't get me wrong: they are well withing their right when they take all those decisions, and more. But I DO NOT PLAN on selling a plethora of bad decisions to a new stack of devs as if they were the gold standard.
"I understand your reasons; you, as a company, need a well coordinated team all running towards a goal; loose cannons are harmful.
But now I need you to understand me: I do not agree with your technical direction. I never lied before and I will not start now. Promotions don't matter nearly as much as my integrity, and integrity in my world means speaking up about problems. Your position is perfectly valid, but mine is as well and they can't be reconciled. If I were you I'd make myself a favor and make sure IHateForALiving doesn't become a team leader; given your direction, I'm not the man you want right now".

As mentioned, one of the KPI for team leaders is how succesfull they are in finding new team leaders, and trying to turn me into one didn't end well; I love sharing knowledge, but being honest to myself is far more important to me. So this meant my previous team leader failed in a very big task, and thus was demoted? At the same time, I've been there for 2 years now so they're not really eager to replace me, but I'm under strict examination too as of now.

So I am a Software Engineer at a small scale company.
I need to coordinate with customers, understand the requirements and design and develope the solutions.
These sometimes include changing the current product a bit and customize it to fit the client needs or maybe creating a plug-in that could work with the current product and get the job done.

I love the research, design and planning part of the job, I would be super focused and will find solutions for complex stuff. Plan it all to the smallest things.
I know the solution so I can think of what code would be there what would be needede whats already there etc.

But when it comes to coding the solution my laziness kicks in.
My mind is like you already know the solution why you need to code it to.

Then I start procrastinating and end up putting myself under a pile of stuff when the deadline approaches.

FML

You know what I'm CONSTANTLY trying to improve on? Time. With my career out ahead of me, I feel like I gotta get a stopwatch going for myself on my personal projects. It took me hours throughout the weekend to get a stupid table UI and JSON serialization system working on a small project. Meanwhile I remember two guys created a Pokémon Go client in a couple days (back when I had a Windows Phone that didn't have one). Like, how important is time in the industry? A lot according to the memes.

Tomorrow our small company moves to another small office. I don't believe that Internet connection or our ip addresses works correctly. it should work and I need those ips for connection to client servers.

Looking back on 2020: I only did one small contracting job.

The client wasn’t putting their trust in us. I fired them. They went with another company. Almost a whole year - and the old flash site is still up there! Kinda a waste of time / but got paid for our work - and it feels great to just let shit go.

Besides that, I didn’t do any official dev work all year! I just continued working on our school curriculum and teaching. 2020 has been an R&D dream, really. I feel a bit spoiled! As I sit here in my Christmas pajamas!

Excited for 2021.

Is there an open source Slack-like client/server? I want to have a small server just for our global team maybe 20 ppl to be able to have long living conversations in threads.

I am starting my web development business and i intend to focus on building mainly custom ecommerce solutions to small and medium businesses or large ones too. I am just about to launch my first project and my client has been great.
Any advice from the pros in the house who have been there done that will be worth more than diamond right now to me.
I like advice mainly on how to find new clients.

This is a part rant-part question.
So a little backstory first:
I work in a small company (5 including me) which is mostly into consultation (we have many tech partners where we either resell their products or if there is a requirement from one of our clients, we get our partners to develop it for them and fulfill the client requirements) so as you can see there is a lot of external dependencies. I act as a one-hat-fits-all tech guy, handling the company websites, social media channels, technical documentation, tech support, quicks POCs (so anything to do with anything technical, I handle them). I am a bit fed up now, since the CEO expects me to do some absurd shit (and sometimes micro manages me, like WTF I am the only one who works there with 100% commitment) and expects me to deliver them by yesterday.

So anyway long story short, our CEO finally had the brains to understand that we should start having our own product (which i had been subtly suggesting him to do for a while now!).

Now he came up with a fairly workable concept that would have good market reach (i atleast give him credits for that) and he wanted me to suggest the best way to move forward (from a both business and technical point of view). The concept is to have an auction-based platform for users to buy everyday products.

I suggested we build a web app as opposed to a mobile one (which is obvious, since i didnt want to develop a seperate website and a mobile app, and anyway just because we can doesnt mean we have to make a mobile app for everything), and recommended the Node/react based JS tech stack to build it.

At first he wanted me to single handedly build the whole platform within a month, I almost flipped (but me being me) then somehow calmed down and finally was able to explain him how complicated it was to single-handedly build a platform of such complexity (especially given my limited experience; did I mention that this is my first job and I am still in college, yeah!!) and convinced him to get an experienced back-end dev and another dev to help me with it.

Now comes the problem, I was to prepare a scope document outlining all the business and technical requirements of the project along with a tentative cost, which was fairly straightforward. I am currently stuck at deciding the server requirements and the system architecture for the proposed solution (I am thinking of either going with AWS - which looks a bit complicated to setup - or go with either Digital Ocean or Heroku):

I have assumed that at peak times we would have around 500-1000 users concurrently

And a daily userbase of 1000 users (atleast for the first few months of the platform running)

What would be the best way forward guys?

I did some extensive (i mean i read through some medium blogs! and aws documentation) research and put together the following specs (if we are going through AWS):

One AWS t3.medium ec2 instance for the node server (two if we want High Availability by coupling with the AWS load balancer and Elastic Beanstalk)

The db.t3.small postgres database

The S3 Storage bucket (100gb) for the React Front end hosting

AWS SNS for email/sms OTP and notification

And AWS CloudMonitor for logging amd monitoring.

Am I speculating the requirements properly, where have I missed??

Can u guys suggest what is the best specification for such a requirement (how do you guys decide what plan to go with)?

Any suggestions, corrections, advices are welcome

Let me run something by all of you. Let's say you once started freelancing as a "Plan B" in case your full-time gig dropped you. Over 12 years you've managed to build a long-standing personal brand around that occasional freelancing. You have several clients who adore you and the work you do and they tell you they would be lost without your talent and have nowhere else to go and nobody else they trust. You know, because in the past you tried to send them elsewhere (for various reasons) and they just kept coming back.

You get laid off from the full-time gig and ACME Company calls and interviews you as a top candidate they're really interested in for that same type of work for a full-time job they're offering.

Here's the catch...if hired, you have two months to basically erase your personal brand and agree never to do any freelancing work as before, even on your own time on evenings and weekends. ACME wants your full focus and attention. Additionally, you find out that the person you'd be replacing is being let go because they weren't sufficiently tech-skilled for the job. And, with a little digging, you find out that person _also_ had several freelancing gigs going on the side. Probably for the same "Plan B" reason. Which is probably why ACME is demanding exclusivity.

Your client base is small. ACME says "we don't care". The work you do is 90% automated and easily achievable in just minutes a day on a weekend or evening. ACME says "doesn't matter". You already had full-time work to begin with so you weren't doing a ton on the side. ACME couldn't be less interested in this "excuse". And you're not keen on the idea of burning down your brand, especially with no guarantees of any kind in the present IT industry hiring/firing/layoffs climate. ACME says this issue is make or break for them.

If you get to the offer stage do you:
a) Flip the bird to your brand and clients you've built up for over a decade and memory-hole it?
b) Negotiate a non-compete clause with ACME, agreeing not to take on any new clients while working full time for them?
c) Flip the bird to ACME and look for something else?

Asking for a friend. ;)

Our owner's other company sells products online (or has the ability to anyways). Their current site is 7+ years old WordPress/Woocommerce and is seriously outdated because the site breaks if you update anything so we've been told to make a new site (finally). They also said they were going to release a whole new line up of products. So the first thing I tried to do was get them to nail down their product line and how shipping was going to be configured. I was told to just use the shipping from the previous site.

Turns out those shipping rates don't use any sort of math or automation at all, there is literally a manually set shipping value for every single product for every single shipping location (30*60) and even values for different quantities. And there's no way to export these rates into a readable table because the plugins they use shove all the data into the postmeta table, I'm forced to go through and put the data into a spreadsheet so that I can attempt to organize it and hopefully find someone way to automate it. Owner claims at one point that he has a similar spreadsheet that's more up to date but for some reason refuses to send it over or put me in touch with the right people in the shipping department.

I've gone through the shipping rates with the old products and the new products and organized them as best I can and each time I've gotten done and shown them the spreadsheet with their products and shipping, they add or change something which requires me to basically wipe the slate clean and start over eating another 50 or so hours of my time, which with everything else really means another month+ to find time to work on it between other projects.

After about a year they finished their products and I finally finished the planning and got approval to build it out for the site. Small victory!!

After about 60 hours plugging these values into the database (only about 1/3 done) I get an email from their head of shipping who tells me the values in my spreadsheet are "terribly inaccurate, in some areas by $100+" and that the data should not be used anywhere.

So after something like a year and a half and 200+ hours of work, the data I've been using to plan all this isn't even accurate. I'm trying not to go crazy here but this kind of shit is unacceptable. When we're done with this I'm going to send the owner an invoice to show him how much money he wasted on this because nothing was planned and he just wanted it built. There's a fucking process for a reason, when you don't follow the process you fuck everything up. If a client had pulled this shit and turned their simple site into this much work they would have been dropped. I get constant emails asking when the new site will be done and every time my answer is "I'm still waiting for x items that I asked for last time you asked where we were." He gets a couple things on the list and sends them back and then goes unresponsive for weeks at a time.

Management has been telling me that I seem more stressed lately but only one of them understands what's going on here when I explain it. The rest say stupid shit like "why don't you automate it" or "make an intern do it." You won't let me hire an intern and even if I did, I'm not sure I could explain how the shipping works now to even trust someone else to do it. I'm hoping when the shipping guy gives me the new sheet that maybe there's some easier solution here because I'm ready to start shooting people.

So, I recently started a new job as a "general" IT tech for someone my dad knows. He does insurance billing and everything is done manually (manually copying from pdfs to excel sheets, etc). A couple of weeks ago, I started developing a custom suite of software for automation of some parts of the processes + integration with the task management software we use. At this point, I feel like my boss is turning into a client. Is this a common occurrence? BTW, it's a small company (5 employees including him) and I'm the only person who does tech around here.

Client website, causing no problems, online for a few years, nothing changing, traffic relatively small, rolling along nicely, nothing out of the ordinary.......

!rant

So got into a small debate (actually a civil one, surprise surprise) about the final project for a class. Basically the final project involves a team of 3-4 coders making a website for an actual client that either they find or provided by the professor.
The exact point of conflict was that the work is pro bono. The student argued that the work should be paid since after all, real work, real client. My argument is that because the clients don’t exactly choose the designers (or have little to no knowledge of most of their work) there will be high variance in quality and contract work would cause more conflict if done in class.

So just wondering, what do people think about this? Logistical issues aside (earning money for technically school property/ownership and money for learning essentially)

In highschool I made simple static webpages for small businesses. No div tags, this was all <tr><td> all the way down.

One client was upset that the website was too 'liney' and wanted more 'pop' with a content management system and push updates for the same price.

This has been bothering me for a while. I have an old freelance client of mine I’ve created an web site for (his company) it was small one so I took the complete payment before deployment and I needed no contract. I deployed the complete version of the site on my server, bought the domain for his company under my name and it has been running for a year now.
Lately he had asked me to give admin privileges to his son (cs student 1y) to upload some photos of their new building. I noticed he ruined several functions on the site in doing so, but I was never paid to support that just the hosting for a year.
When I was making the design I made a simple but pretty logo as a placeholder for the site which went in production since they never gave me company logo. All good, no contract small cash all delivered, everyone happy.
Up until few days when I saw my f**king logo cut out from the site as 250px jpeg and made as a huge banner on the company building..
From my pov I would’ve never given permission to use that since its not something i’m proud of and would suggest to make a better one for a fee. I see this as stolen/unauthorized use of intellectual property. But the laws are super shitty in our country so at this point I am stuck at taking their site, domain a hostage until they pay for the logo they used or take it down or taking legal actions.. we never signed anything about that logo.

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

I work at a small company (4 devs, CTO, a senior, me: mid level, and a new junior dev). Junior and I handle the client projects and the Senior and CTO handle the overall platform and server deployments and such. Our senior dev just gave his 2 weeks notice. I was told they are not replacing him and now ALL of his tasks have been pushed onto me on top of all my already full plate. My issue is, although I am excited to learn about the upper management and deployment stuff, they (CTO and CEO) just dumped all these tasks onto me without even asking if I wanted the added responsibility and also told me there is no monetary bonus for taking it all on. Am I right in being a little mad that I was not even asked if I wanted it and it was just assumed I would handle it all without any bonus or monetary promotion?

This is the situation:

I worked on a small project on freelance.mx: The project name is: "A Grid System with Bootstrap and Hover.css | Fontawesome Combination"

By the time I finished it, the client changed almost half of the requirements and told me that I didn't complete the work as It was supposed to and asked me to change it. He wanted that grid system to work as a sidebar as well...

He asked me then to make some modifications and adapt the code to fit the new requirements. I said: "I would do that but I would need to charge you more for that since a grid system and a sidebar are two distinct things and also these are new requirements"

Today is 7 days since I haven't heard anything from him and I sent him a message. He said that I didn't finish the work properly and marked the work on the platform as "Incomplete".

What should I do? This is unfair... Is there any way I can get the payment from this guy?

This is the first job I have on freelance.mx and it will make me have bad reputation.

Any advice?

>finally gets around to installing vsftpd on home server RPi
>doesn't work
hmm.mp2
>configurating
>confusing as fuck template documentation
>man page isn't much better
>gets it working
>goes to log in
User: pi
Password: a
(What? It's a home file/command server isolated from the Internet. Sue me.)
nope.avi
>why
>tries again
nope.svg
>FUCK
>sees small raw-command log in bottom-right of phone FTP client
hmm.flac
>tries again, watches log
PASS *****
>the fuck
>goes to change user pass over SSH
# passwd
"Current password?"
about half a second later
"passwd: auth token manipulation denied"
>the delay tho
>WAIT A SECOND
one time i got past some parental software bullshit on a tablet by abusing the delay between opening a banned app and the redirect to the normal software at like age 7. (Doing so let me enable remote wipe through Google. bye bye software!)
>*inner 7 year old has autistic screech*
# nano temp
a
abcdefghi
abcdefghi
^O Y ^X
# passwd < temp
>fucking works
>logs in to FTP server successfully
>does the one file download that was needed

why and how did that fucking work

This happened towards the end of a data archival project I was involved in.

It was the last day of the project and we were in the process of handing over the system to the client. As it so happened, the client, while doing a sanity check, found out that some unwanted data had not been deleted from the database.

On project manager said to us, "Let's delete the unwanted records manually."

The only problem. There were three of us and over 150000 entries to delete (the system had around ten years of data).

In the end, we came up with a logic to identity the unwanted records, and I created a small program to delete the entries using this logic.

To this day it is still not clear as to what inspired the PM to come up with such a suggestion.

Okay why in the world is Console.Readline() in C# such a bitch? So I was working on this small simple chat application using C# and I had a super-freaked-out-ugly-code-vending team mate who volunteered to build the server side code. After trudging through his elaborate and highly complicated plan of working for the server, I decided to make the client accordingly and for close to an hour I had no clue why the program was sending an empty password field. A few debug messages later I realised that a line of code was getting skipped. The compiler was happily ignoring the Console.ReadLine that asked for the password from the user. I swear I felt like one of those parents in the shopping mall with their really disobedient kids.
Btw, I still haven't figured out how to fix the bloody thing.

PS: First rant post woohooo!

Oddly enough, i have simultaneously been less busy and more productive since working 66% remotely.

I find myself with more time that feels "wasted" or not busy, but my metrics show that I have more production, better results, and far nicer documentation. A bunch of us also sat down and did a bunch of coursework on really putting together a domain script library for one click onboarding of new servers or new client setups. We spun up a bunch of new virtual environments that literally solved headaches that had existed for years that never got dealt with because of too many other tickets.

Some of our web clients freaked out at us because the business is moving away from doing maintenance of legacy web work (small to midsize businesses). But it didn't matter. Rather than respond with a "make them happy," the response was "well, we will get rid of them as clients. We need to focus our energy on the essential service sectors we support."

Hell, we even got an automated test that has been broken apparently since 2018 to work again.

Granted, the incoming workload has slowed down. But it's still interesting to me to see that despite the slowdown, there isn't any concern; its still paying the bills and we are getting rid of technical debt everywhere. Tbh, this has really been a good reality check.