"Don't deploy on Friday" is a public admittance that your company either has no CI/CD pipeline, or that all your devs are retarded rhesus monkeys who only wipe their ass if the product manager wrote it as a spec.

If the saying was: "Don't port your whole API to GraphQL on a Friday", or "Don't switch from MySQL to Postgres on a Friday", I would agree.

But you should be able to do simple deploys all the time.

I deployed on Christmas & New Year's eve. I've deployed code while high on LSD, drunk-peeing 2 liters of beer against a tree after a party. I've deployed code from the hospital while my foot was being stitched up. On average, we deploy our main codebase about 194 times a week.

If you can't trust your deploys, maybe instead of posting stupid memes about not deploying on Fridays, you should fix your testing & QA procedures.

My very first meeting with a new client:

Client: We need to launch in 6 weeks. Do you think you can hit that deadline?

Me: Do you have a spec for what needs to be done?

Client: No we don't.

Me:

!Rant
my dad message me 7 am, with spec on a raspberry he got and the question if python was similar to C (he programmed C, 20 years or so ago.)

my responde: "I will set up a git for you, and we can learn python together"
dad: "what is a git?"

p.s love my dad :D

Customer: "I want this."
Dev: "Cool! We can do that!"
*delivers product according to spec*
Customer: "Hmm, now that I see it, I want something else instead.."
Dev: "git reset --hard origin/ifreakingknewit"

"Hey nephew, why doesn't the FB app work. It shows blank white boxes?"
- It can't connect or something? (I stopped using the FB app since 2013.)

"What is this safe mode that appeared on my phone?!"
- I don't know. I don't hack my smartphone that much. Well, I actually do have a customised ROM. But stop! I'm pecking my keyboard most of the time.

"Which of my files should I delete?"
- Am I supposed to know?

"Where did my Microsoft Word Doc1.docx go?"
- It lets you choose the location before you hit save.

"What is 1MB?"
- Search these concepts on Google. (some of us did not have access to the Internet when we learned to do basic computer operations as curious kids.)

"What should I search?"
- ...

"My computer doesn't work.. My phone has a virus. Do you think this PC they are selling me has a good spec? Is this Video Card and RAM good?"
- I'm a programmer. I write code. I think algorithmically and solve programming problems efficiently. I analyse concepts such as abstraction, algorithms, data structures, encapsulation, resource management, security, software engineering, and web development. No, I will not fix your PC.

"We don't need to invest in security - noone is going to hack us anyway" == "We don't need a fire department in our city - fire is not going to start here anyway"

We don't need to invest in security - everything is public anyway" == "We don't need a fire department in our city - our buildings are made out of straws anyway"

-- my thoughts after seing a line in client's spec: "sensitive data is transferred via a secure tcp channel (https) and all the public data is transferred via an unencrypted tcp (http) channel"

When a recruiter puts Java in a job spec when they mean JavaScript

Having a server with a lower spec CPU and RAM than dev machines, to ensure that if it works on the dev machine it will always run perfectly on the server.

This means we can avoid any debugging tools or techniques (including console logs), because “it will be perfect and it’s not necessary”.

IBM

I have replied to them with scripts, curl commands, and Swagger docs (PROVIDED TO SUPPORT THEIR API), everything that could possibly indicate there's a bug. Regardless, they refuse to escalate me to level 1 support because "We cant reproduce the issue in a dev environment"

Well of course you can't reproduce it in a dev environment otherwise you'd have caught this in your unit tests. We have a genuine issue on our hands and you couldnt give less of a shit about it, or even understand less than half of it. I literally gave them a script to use and they replied back with this:

"I cannot replicate the error, but for a resource ID that doesnt exist it throws an HTTP 500 error"

YOUR APP... throws a 500... for a resource NOT FOUND?????????!!!!!!!!!! That is the exact OPPOSITE of spec, in fact some might call it a MISUSE OF RESTFUL APIs... maybe even HTTP PROTOCOL ITSELF.

I'm done with IBM, I'm done with their support, I'm done with their product, and I'm DONE playing TELEPHONE with FIRST TIER SUPPORT while we pay $250,000/year for SHITTY, UNRELENTING RAPE OF MY INTELLECT.

HR: Hi we got your application. We'd like to schedule a call. Can you fill this out to pick a time?

Me: Sure, sorry first I'd like to ask a question. You are based on the other side of the country and i'm not able to relocate. Are you open to remote workers? Your job spec didn't mention either way.

HR: GREAT question! At this moment no we are not. We need people here on site. If you'd like, we can have a call to discuss if you fill out the form.

Me: ..... take time out of my day so you can tell me "No" again? ..... i'm alright thanks

Root: Fleshes out missing data in some factories. Tests affected code and finds the change breaks some specs (but shouldn’t).

Root: Reaches out to spec author.

Root: Messages thundercunt (the ticket’s code reviewer) on slack about the specs and the reaching out. No response.

Root: Works on another ticket while blocked.

Root: Logs off.

Root: Talks with spec author chick in the morning. Decide to pair on specs later.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Gives update in standup. Mentions factories and broken specs. Mentions pairing with spec chick.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Pulled off tickets in favor of prod issue. Gets ignored by everyone else diagnosing prod issue. Investigates prod issue by herself. Discovers prod issue isn’t from bad code, but bad requirements — code works as requested. Communicates this with details. Gets ignored by people still diagnosing prod issue. Tries again. Gets ignored. Gives up. Works on non-blocked tickets instead.

TC: Still no slack response.

Hours later:

TC: Comments on PR telling me I broke specs (how did I not notice?), that I need to reach out to spec chick and work with her, and that I can’t resolve the ticket until it’s fixed and passes code review.

TC: Still no slack response. (21 hours later at this point)

TC: Logs off. Still no response (25 hours at this point)

———

Ignoring the prod issue for the moment…

I broke specs. No shit.
I need to talk with spec chick. No shit.
I can’t resolve the ticket. No shit!

Bitch, I told you all of this 21 fucking hours prior, and again 3 hours prior during standup. But no, I clearly “don’t communicate” and obviously have no bloody clue what I’m doing, either, so I need everything spelled out for me.

And no, I didn’t resolve the fucking ticket. Why the fuck would I if it still has pending changes? Do you even check? Ugh!

And what the fuck with that prod issue? I’m literally giving you the answer. fucking listen! Stupid cunts.

Why is it all of the women I work with are useless or freaking awful people? Don’t get me wrong, many of the men are, too, but I swear it’s every single one of the women. (Am I awful, too?)

Just. Ugh.
I can’t wait to leave this sewer of a company.

Oddly still a good day, though. Probably because I talked to recruiters and sent out my resume again.

Recruiter: hi, I have an iOS Developer role. Would you be interested?

Me: sure, send me on the spec.

Recruiter: ok great so for this Full stack app developer role we are looking for someone with:

- 5+ years embedded C/C++ experience
- 5+ years of working with Windows and Linux
- Native Android development
- As well as Native iOS experience

Interested?

Me: ......... ok buddy, you and me are going to have a little chat about what “iOS Developer” means

Yet another Windows rant but boi Redmond deserves it.
For our new office I took a leap of faith ordering 15 iMac 5k. (btw HP quoting us €10k each pc for same spec).

There are two young guys insist on Windows. Good for you so we ordered two top of line surface book. He religiously unwrapped and said “who want apple trash more than this beauty.”

It’s been 5 hours that shit spent on “Getting Ready Windows for you”, once done it prompted another updating at 4% until we all left work.

So this morning I’m ordering another two MBPs...

The last year my school installed MagicBoards (whiteboard with beamer that responses to touch) in every class room and called itself "ready for the future of media". What they also got is A FUCKING LOW SPEC SERVER RUNNING DEBIAN 6 W/O ANY UPDATES SINCE 2010 WHICH IS DYING CONSTANTLY.

As I'm a nice person I asked the 65 y/o technician (who is also my physics teacher) whether I could help updating this piece of shit.

Teacher: "Naahh, we don't have root access to the server and also we'll get a new company maintaining our servers in two years. And even if we would have the root access, we can't give that to a student."

My head: "Two. Years. TWO YEARS?! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME YOU RETARDED PIECE OF SHIT?! YOU'RE TELLING ME YOU DON'T HAVE TO INSTALL UPDATES EVEN THOUGH YOU CREATE AN SSH USER FOR EVERY FUCKING STUDENT SO THEY CAN LOGIN USING THEIR BIRTH DATE?! DID YOU EVER HEAR ABOUT SECURITY VULNERABILITIES IN YOUR LITTLE MISERABLE LIFE OR SOUNDS 'CVE-2016-5195' LIKE RANDOM LETTERS AND NUMBERS TO YOU?! BECAUSE - FUNFACT - THERE ARE TEN STUDENTS WHO ARE IN THE SUDO GROUP IF YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT IS!"

Me (because I want to keep my good grades): "Yes, that sounds alright."

yeeeah, seems legit xD

EDIT: programs like internet xD I'm dying

Ok you fucks that don't believe in documentation - me included.

Document your shit, because one day, one day some dumb fuck is going to have to recreate your over engineered bullshit of a system and scale it up.

What would fucking be useful right now is ANY god forsaken insight into what in the flying fuck your code is doing, or not doing, or why it makes queries to a database with no fucking records in it 🤦‍♂️ and then attempts to use that data... in case it did exist.

There's nothing like unpicking a mess of bullshit, and documenting it, and then have to remake it on a new platform.

Documention saves lives kids, maybe your own life one day😬

Manager: IT and I have decided that you will not be doing any rewriting of the legacy code. We paid a lot of money for it and throwing it away would be impossible. Instead you will create a “config file” that will customize the legacy code behaviour to whatever spec we need. IT said this would be possible and would be a very simple way of operating everything going forward. That way no future code needs to be written or maintained, it’s just a matter of changing this “config file” to match our needs.

Dev: Nobody in IT codes though.

Manager: Yes but they work with config files all the time. If you need to be shown how they work just ask them.

Dev: I know how they work it ju—

Manager: Good!! So that should speed things up quite a bit. See this is why developers need managers.

Boss and project manager calls me into a launch meeting for a new project. A stock management system for a small furniture company that will work over 11 stores, 4 warehouses and multiple suppliers which will also work as an ordering system. We went over the spec(112 pages) and I told him that it will be an on going project over a year with an initial dev time of 4-6 months. He just said that he's sold it to them to be delivered for testing in 2 weeks and completed in 4 weeks(they signed the contract) and that I'd best get started. I just closed my laptop and walked out.

Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical

Beware, it's a #longread

Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.

A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.

I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.

I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.

Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:

Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.

Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)

Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.

Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!

So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.

Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!

How I picture w3 meetings about the CSS color spec.

The result, we have both color: gray and color: grey in all their variations (light, dark, slate...)

Focus on algorithms first and syntax last. Solve problems, then code.
If it uses power, has an I/O interface, and stores code, you can do stuff.
Dont get caught up in the little shit like specific code formatting and who's right or wrong between tabs or spaces. (It should be TABS anyway.)
Don't take shit from anyone.
Be confident not cocky.
Learn GIT as much as you can.
Don't burn out.
Get up and stretch.
Don't argue with your Operating Systems professor about why you shouldn't have to learn Linux.
Don't fall into the "I want to be a game developer" trap. Make your own games on your own time. You won't learn shit at school about it.
9/10 of the real world workforce is who you know, so don't be a dick. Those people might be the difference between Ramen noodles and steak dinner for you.
Charge market competitive rates and set an hourly rate that defines the clientele you deal with.
Don't ever, EVER, do trade or spec work. Free work don't pay the bills. Always start the clock when you're not sleeping, eating, or shitting. If you're emailing, calling, texting, or otherwise interacting with or on behalf of a client, bill them. Don't be a bitch when they decide they don't want to pay you. Get yours. Watch "Fuck You. Pay Me." at least once a month on YouTube.

Eh ehe hehe he eh ehehe

On top of burnout, codebase issues, spec issues, burnout, the product butt that keeps on crapping, burnout, burnout, loathing for my employer... My local Apple SSL cert expired. I can’t finish this and push it anywhere for testing. I can’t even run my own specs anymore. And I don’t have permissions to make a new one. I can’t do anything at all.

Ehe he hehe

Deadline is in two days, and I’m just sitting here laughing quietly to myself. I might finally be going crazy

I found a loose bit of tangle, started to pull, and the world decided it was time to fall apart. Reality said it’s time to go. And I wasn’t even a good screwdriver dev. Byeee ~

I'm starting to fucking hate the word 'done'.

Scenario 1:

Boss: How's the spec coming along?
Manager: Oh, it's done.

Manager to me: Hey can you get it done?
Me: Why would you call it done? There's a days worth of work and it's only half done. Boss wasn't even rushing it yet.

Manager: Too late I've already committed it. I'm sure it's simple anyway. Just do it.

Scenario 2:

Manager: Hey is it done?
Noob dev: Yea it's done.

*Commits half assed incomplete sphagetti shit that breaks stuff*

Manager: Well done. Completed so quickly.

FUCK THIS SHIT.

expect([
row[‘blah’][0][1],
row[‘blah’][1][1],
row[’blah’][2][1],
row[‘blah’][3][1],
row[‘blah’][4][1],
]).to contain_exactly(
a.name(user), # “John doe”
c.name(user), # “John doe”
e.name(user), # “John doe”
b.name(user), # “John doe”
d.name(user), # “John doe”
)

(Note: The comments are mine.)

See the problem? No, not the ugly code (which is actually worse than what i posted here).

It’s using the same ridiculous getter (if you can call it that) that pulls a name out of the passed user object, and then expecting each row to have that name, in order. Not that order matters when they’re all the same.

Upon inspection, all objects created by the spec have the exact same name, so the above test passes (as long as there are 5 rows). It passes, but totally not because it should: those aren’t the objects that are actually in the table. All of the specs — all 22 of them — only check for that shared name on various rows, and no other data. And it’s not like this is the only issue, either.

Fuck me these are bad.

And this guy is a senior dev earning significantly more than me. Jesus what the fuck Christ.

tl;dr: Bossmang blaming my code for a database connection issue thrown from outside of my code. Bossmang doesn’t listen. Bossmang doesn’t want to believe it’s a connection issue.

———

Bossmang: The code you wrote is causing insane spec failures in the release branch! It’s hard to follow because it’s so insane, but the cause is your code not properly handling undefined settings! Look at this! <spec>

Me: Specs pass on my machine. I ran it with both a set and nil value. <screenshots>

Bossmang: It works when you set it to nil.

Me: But a setting that doesn’t exist returns nil? <screenshot>

Bossmang: Not seeming to.... So this is the spec failure from the release: “No connection pool with id primary found. <stacktrace that starts outside of my code>”

Me: ... That’s a DB connection error. It’s also being thrown outside of my code, and from a `super` call to Rails.

Bossmang: But <unrelated> and <unrelated> and <other spec> is failing, and if I set the version, it has <other failure> instead! That calls your code first.

Me: It’s a database error. Also: <explains probable, unrelated cause of other failures, like someone didn’t mock a fucking external api call>

Bossmang: But if I restore a DB backup, it fails again.

Me: Restoring uses a dB connection, which could be exhausting the pool depending on the daemons you have running.

Bossmang: perhaps.

...

Bossmang: I still think it’s related to spec ordering.

🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️
This is tiring.

So;dfjkhijasdfkjq;sdfhjkl;asdf

I copy a line from one spec (to create a user) and paste it in another spec. It works just dandy in the first, and throws MySQL missing column errors in the other.

Fucking what.

This codebase is full of shit like this. Things work in one place but not another, and it’s never obvious why. Tens of thousands of gotchas and quirks. The only way I can get an answer to things like these is to either beg my boss for an explanation, which I’m sure he’s long since tired of, or spend a full day (or more) wading through several rabbit holes filled with raw sewage.

I wasted two hours today trying to get a simple fucking factory to work. And you know what? I just gave up and used the existing admin user. Yeah it’s a bad idea, but it’s fucking good enough.

They can yell if they want.
I have no cares left.

last time I went into a "computer shop" one of the staff members was trying to sell this poor little old bloke a mid spec macbook pro just to Skype and email his son/grandkids who live in Australia, when he asked if there was a cheaper option as he didn't have much money they very rudely told him no and that they where the "experts", best bit is when I tried to point out how wrong this was and that he could do that on a cheap tablet (let alone a macbook) to a manager he tried to convince me that he needed the macbook.

are these people just stupid or really that shallow as to try and convince an elderly man to spend such an outrageous amount of money.

Root has standup.

Root: I had no ticket yesterday morning, so I followed up on <TicketA> with <PersonA> and updated it in Jira and linked its related tickets; talked with <PersonB> about <TicketB>, and reviewed code review comments on <TicketC>, and thought about those while looking into the CI spec failure on <TicketD>. I collapsed for 3 hours before fixing it. Halfway through the collapse, I talked with <PersonC> on <TicketC> CR comments and the spec issue in <TicketD>, then went to lay down again. Afterward, I solved the spec issue in <TicketD>, and started on the new ticket <TicketE> before calling it a day. Plans today are to <…>.

Manager, in private: I need you to proactively let me know if you’re taking long breaks and aren’t working as this impacts business flow.

—————

Yeah.

My update was four times longer than the others’ despite her not giving me a ticket to work on. I responded to slack while I was collapsed on the floor and discussed tickets. And, after I recovered, I went back to work to finish my 8h shift. But this isn’t good enough? And I need to let her know in advance when I’m going to collapse and be a bloody mental zombie for hours? It would be amazing if I knew. I barely have a few minutes notice, and that’s only if I’m really paying attention and looking for signs.

And (conjecture) she probably still thinks I’m not performing well enough. “Affecting our business flow” probably means she’s angry I didn’t talk to other people about low-priority <TicketE> yesterday while I was laying on the damned floor.

Goddamn I hate her.

Manager: Messages not visible! bug ticket!!!!

Dev: oh fuck, there's an issue with our chat system, not good! _inspects ticket_ oh, it's just a display issue that actually is according to the previous spec, yawn...

Dev: please describe the bug better next time, I though we had a major outage, this is simply a small design issue...

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

I think I'm quitting soon guys. I literally do not get paid enough to deal with these incompetent idiots each day.

Meanwhile:

Management: forget your shitty salary, take one for the team, you get 3% of the shares in the company!!!!

Dev: what fucking shares, you haven't even converted to a corporation yet, THERE ARE NO SHARES

Management: ...

Dev: ...

Oh yeah and they called me at 6:30 PM today: "so i guess you are winding down for the day"

fuck outta here i haven't been working since 5 you fucks

jesus i swear some people need to screw their fucking head on straight, so far gone into the hUsTlE CuLtUrE they don't even know what reality is anymore

!rant

We just did a massive update to our prod db environment that would implicate damn near all system in our servers....on a friday.

Luckily for us, our DB is a badass rockstar mfking hero that was planning this shit for a little over a year with the assistance of yours truly as backup following the man's lead...and even then I didn't do SHIT

My boy did great, tested everything and the switch was effortless, fast (considering that it went on during working hours) and painless.

I salute my mfking dude, if i make my own company I am stealing this mfker. Homie speaks in SQL, homie was prolly there when SQL was invented and was already speaking in sql before shit was even set in spec, homie can take a glance at a huge db and already cast his opinion before looking at the design and architecture, homie was Data Science before data science was a thing.

Homie is my man crush on the number one spot putting mfking henry cavill on second place.

Homie wakes up and pisses greatness.

Homie is the man. Hope yall have the same mfking homie as I do

This is probably gona make me sound arrogant, but fuck it, you don’t know who I am, and I need to RANT!

I hate it when B.A.’s who have never studied UI or UX rail-road over my design decisions, and I just gota go along with it cos they in charge.
Then, when I make the interface the way they want it, all sorts of problems arise… Mother fucker, I saw this shit coming, and that’s why I designed it the way that I did.
Now I gota tell them how to solve the problems by doing what I originally said, and when they finally see the light, I gota waste more time re-doing the interface.
I once went through 5 fucking iterations of “Let’s try it this way”, Just to end up back with my original design spec cos these fuckers can’t even imagine what shit would look like, and how it will interact.

Now you would think after this happens a few times they would learn to trust my design skills, but noooo, Mr B.A. has to piss all over my ideas every time.
And every FUCKING time, we end up going back to what I originally proposed…
Learn your fucking lesson dumb ass!!!

*drops mic & goes straight to the bar*

I tried to convince my boss that using 3d rendering to display information on webpage is unnecessary luxury.

The web browser would hang if the user is using an average pc and there is too much data to render.

This product is aimed for average joe, but he argues that computers in foreign countries are high end devices ONLY.

Such a bullshit.

I asked what if someone with low spec laptop tries to view the webpage.

He said, we will set a min spec requirements for using the website.

Are you fucking kidding me?! RAM and Graphics requirements for a webpage?!

My instinct says that the thing I'm working on would probably end up as waste of time.

But I'd probably learn cool tricks of threejs.

am I only one who thinks that ≥6GB RAM for phones is just too much as most of the time the unused RAM gets wasted for no goddamn reason but the only one being that the companies want their product(s) to look more compelling in `spec sheets` and it's a competitive market so it ok for them to do so...

Yesterday, after six months of work, a small side project ran to completion, a search engine written in django.

It's a thing of beauty, which took many trials, including discovering utf8 in mysql isn't the full utf8 spec, dealing with files that have wrong date metadata, or even none at all, a new it backup policy that stores backups along side real data.

Nevertheless, it is a pretty complete product. Beaming with pride I began to get myself a drink, and collapsed onto the floor, this caused me to accidentally hibernate my computer, which interrupted the network connection, which in turn caused an OSError exception in one of my threads, which caused a critical part of code not to run, which left a thread suspended, doing nothing.

From the floor I looked at my error and realised my hubris and meditated on my assumptions that in theory nothing should interrupt a specific block of code, but in reality something might, like someone falling over...

PO: Here's a small cool feature I thought of, should be easy enough *shows very basic draft spec*
Me: Cool, how does it work for logged out users? What about customers in Spain? Does it work with US sales tax? Do we need to update the privacy policy? Do we have translations? What's the fallback if it breaks? Who will be maintaining the content?
PO: ...
PO: I'll get back to you

*never hears about feature again*

Spec sheet vs implementation.

(lateral pull down machine at my school’s gym)

THREE FREAKING DAYS ON THIS SAME FREAKING SPEC AND I FINALLY GOT IT TO PASS!

That’s the most beautiful bit of green I’ve seen in months.

Reject original specs. Do the bare minimum MVP that works and solves problems people actually have, and not problems you think people have.
Improve it if needed.

In my experience, software projects don’t live long enough to outgrow the MVP. If they do, it happens way down the road. At that point, business will change, and the original spec will become irrelevant.

It’s a paradox: 90% of the spec was discarded, but the business is happier than if we followed the spec word by word.

Also, static typing and unit testing solve nothing. I’m sorry.

I forgot what it was like to have a productive day!

I’m rewriting the Apple wallet pass code to make it fully customizable instead of mostly static, and it’s beautiful.

The code was horrible tangled spaghetti before (and soo slow) but now it’s clean and fast and modular and absolute bliss to spec. Yay, dependency injection!

I actually had fun working today! 😊
It’s been the first time in months.

Testing demands a “bug” fixed. It isn’t a bug. It is a limit where as the amount of records updated in a single request overloads the RAM on the pod overloads and the request fails. I say, “That isn’t a bug, it fits within the engineering spec, is known and accepted by the PO, and the service sending requests never has a case for that scale. We can make an improvement ticket and let the PO prioritize the work.

Testing says, “IF IT BREAKS IT BUG. END STORY”

Your hubcaps stay on your car at 100km/h? Have you tried them at 500km/h? Did something else fail before you got to 500km/h? Operating specs are not bugs.

"exactly like Facebook, but..."

(customer "spec" for a new web)

What the fuck is wrong with the designers? We have had meetings with the client, a proposal drawn up, a project spec written, budget agreed, witeframes drawn up exactly to spec. Designer involved in all stages for input and ideas. Now the designers have the wireframes, they are supposed to create based on these. No they make up what goes on the pages that bare no resemblance to the wireframes in terms of requirements. I am fucking fuming. I have sent the designs back with a note. Please provide designs based on the wireframes.

Everytime 🙄
Client: it's not working.
Me: what isn't
Client: the app video and link thing locator
Me: device and spec ? Like I always need
Client:iPhone
Me: yes. What one and what version of iOS
Client: urm 6s iOS 10 something
Me: great 😏 not broken for me
Client: well everyone is complaining so we need it fixed.

What can i even do now 😐

I get handed an API spec that has no naming convention followed for any of the JSON properties. Different for both GET and POST. I request fixes and get a "no budget" answer.

I had to create a c++ dungeon 2d game as University project.
The spec said "a terminal game made with char"
I and my team made a real game with anemies boss, and balanced stat in 15 days with Qt (we asked if can use external libraries)
We got 6/8 point for the project cuz we forgot to put protected/private the attribute of the player...

Tired, sick, brain foggy, cold.

I’m trying to finish my last few specs and it totally isn’t going well.

My PM also promised me he would get the change requests for this ticket to me by today so I could work on them — as we’re moving this Friday. He did not. He made the same promise last week. Bloody useless.

Oh well.
I let him know that I wouldn’t be able to finish the feature in time if he didn’t get back to me, so... week off? :D

As if packing and moving and driving is downtime.

I do need to figure out this last spec, though. I rewrote the entire feature, and broke functionality specific to some client, and apparently it’s tricky and extremely fragile. I have no idea how it was working before, and the only person I have to ask is... grumpy and overly busy, and hasn’t looked at any of it in years. Yay!

I might just go to bed.

Who the fuck came up with the idea of using SharePoint? What it even is?! Is it a website, wiki, document repo...?

Our version seems to be a broken wiki with no info content, old links, illogical navigation. And somehow word documents are integrated into it. Sometimes you see some weird calendar and timelines (from old projects). You can navigate into a folder, but you cannot get back. There's no ".." button?? You can map it like OneDrive to yourself, but Windows doesn't support any document version control. Where's the check in/out option from explorer menu??? I sure as shit have those for SVN, GIT etc. Is there a new version created everytime I press ctrl-s or only when I close the document?

Well, I could open the document in "online" mode. Ok, the formatting goes weird and everything is super slow. But at least I can fuck up someone elses document by accidentaly copy/pasting stuff, deleting lines, hitting my face into keyboard etc. There's automatically new version added!

Somehow you can enable the forced check in/out for documents. Obviously only the library admin can do that. And since he's just a program manager, he has no clue what the fuck is version control or document management. So he has this thing on his "things to do" list. For him, document management means sending various spec versions as email attachments. And the developers can figure out together who has the most recent one.

How did M$ push shit piece of shit to corporations? They even use this crap for the intranet making it slower than creation of galaxies. Though it's ok, since you cannot find anything from the intranet. It's all just head honchos blogs, seasonal greetings and stock market statuses. Nowhere is seen the downstairs cafeteria menu for the day. Or where to report for broken toilet. You know, stuff that 99% of people would like to see.

I complained to M$ about the SharePoint, but apparently there's no problem. You can code it yourself? Yeiii! So, instead of just updating some line in design spec, I have to take a 3 month class and get a MS sertificate, code some class-based-web-shit for 6 months and maybe, maybe then I can make the page/document look normal?

I am thinking, that I will just start writing my specs on paper. I will put them on the shelf and if you want to read it, you will check it out manually. And if someone else tries to edit it while you are editing it, you just cover the paper with your hands. There might be a requirement to make the document look more like MS Word, but that's easy to do. Just go to WC with the paper and wipe with it a couple of times.

Ticket: This API param doesn’t work.
Ticket Size: 1 story point / extra small baby fries

Found the issue almost immediately: some fucked up date math. Or at least backwards as hell. I don’t know. I don’t care.

There’s no spec for it, and writing it is a bitch. None of the API test helpers are designed for end-to-end tests. Why? I don’t care. They’re stupid. They all just break. And the API does weird shit like fucking redirects to an HTML page. Which is… i don’t know. They mix up API and embedded sessions a bunch, so who knows if this is right or broken as fuck.

I can’t deal with this shit anymore.
It’s just mountains of fucking garbage. Every time I dig into anything, anywhere in this codebase, or, let’s be honest: the entire goddamn company, it’s just more fucking garbage. The code is garbage. The specs are garbage. The people are garbage. The woke crap they love so much is garbage. The industry is garbage. The macs we’re required to use are garbage. The strongly-encouraged editor is garbage. The new hires are garbage. The legendary devs are garbage. The VPN is garbage — still haven’t gotten it to fucking work outside of fucking Safari, which is also garbage. The meetings are garbage. The “culture” is garbage. The “raises” are garbage. The thirty-step dance ceremony for each ticket is garbage. The literal fucking garbage at the office is the best part of the entire goddamn landfill.

And yeah, over half of the code that’s been giving me problems on this ticket was written by the same dev: The legendary golden garbage boy himself.

Just.
Fucking hell.

I’m going back to looking for work again. I can’t do this anymore.

My CS teacher uses html 4 spec that has shit like <strong> and <font size=5> and all sorts of inline garbage. She writes the tags in ALL CAPS and it honestly looks like SQL had a baby with brainfuck. I can't handle this shit anymore. She feels like she's apparently very good at programming and has just been promoted to the School's CS HOD (Head of Department). I have no idea what to do I go to school everyday having to face her mutilating my interest in programming. My peers are all incompetent and don't care at all. Don't get me started on how she writes Python. What the fk man.

Recruiter: Hi practiseSafeHex, how are things? 😎

———————————————

Bitch we aren’t friends. Where’s the job spec?

Listen, I get you're a junior.

But please read the fucking spec I spent quite some time on writing for you before you ask me a bunch of irrelevant questions, which you know would be irrelevant IF YOU READ THE SPEC!

Trust me.

Read the spec.

It will be clear.

So I'm a backend engineer and my boss keeps telling me I over engineer stuff. I'm never given a technical spec or architectural spec, just told what to do so I build. But apparently I over engineer? Admittedly I do tend to but recently I cba and done the most basic thing. Apparently its over engineered.
Would you agree that to say something is over engineered a technical requirements document is required in order to specify over engineered said request needs to be?

Ps: my boss is an inappropriate cunt. Finally got that out.
Feel like hes just making arguments with me to get rid of me because I didnt want to cuddle in bed with him after he gave me an uncalled for back rub..

First proper software dev job, very naive, tasked to write a 'soft switch' for a well known companies set of production lines, depending on what product was being produced at a particular time. Wrote it weeks before the deadline, forgot about it, night before I had a quick review and realised I had missed half the spec aaaand it was going live the following day. Shitting myself I pulled an all nighter, drove to the office at 5am, managed to get it done with minutes to spare for 9am. To my knowledge it's still being used today. I left shortly after that.

Finished my project early today. I assumed it would take another day or two since it's primarily research and I had no idea how to progress, but I caught a break and finished it early. I also finished another surprise ticket! yay! I had the rest of the day to myself!

... had!

But then I noticed I had been working on the wrong branch. Fuck. Moving my work over was tedious, as was the cleanup. I kicked myself for good measure. Also, every time I switch branches, I need to run a bloody slow script that runs all the migrations, data tasks, backfills, etc. for the branch. It takes 12-18 minutes. There's a faster version, but it usually breaks things.

Turns out the branch I was supposed to be working on wasn't up to date with master. So I merged that in, leading to....

merge conflicts. Because of course there are conflicts. To make matters worse, I had (and have) no idea which changes were correct because idfk what those 248 new commits are doing. So I guessed at them, ran the script, and (after more waiting) ran a few related specs. Yet more waiting. Sense a pattern here? Eventually they finished, and all the specs passed. H'ray. So I committed the changes, and told Jenkins to kick off a full spec suite, which takes 45+ minutes.

La de da, I go back to cleaning up the previous ticket, pushing reversion commits, etc. Later, I notice the ticket number, look at the branch number I've been working on.... and. Fuuuck. I realize I had put everything on the wrong freaking branch AGAIN. I'm such an idiot. Cue more cleanup, more reversions, running the bloody script again and again. More wasted time, more kicking. ugh.

All of this took well over three hours. So instead of finishing at a leisurely 5:00 like a normal person, I finally stopped around 9pm. and I won't know the Jenkins spec results until morning.

A nice early day?
I should know better.

Long time ago, back in a day of Microsoft Office 95 and 97, I was contracted to integrate a simple API for a payment service provider.

They've sent me the spec, I read it, it was simple enough: 1. payment OK, 2. payment FAILED. Few hours later the test environment was up and happy crediting and debiting fake accounts. Then came the push to prod.

I worked with two other guys, we shut down the servers, made a backup, connected new provider. All looked perfectly fine. First customers were paying, first shops were sending their products... Until two days later it turned out the money isn't coming through even though all we are getting from the API is "1" after "1"! I shut it off. We had 7 conference calls, 2 meetings, 3 days of trying and failing. Finally, by a mere luck, I found out what's what.

You see, Microsoft, when you invent your own file format, it's really nice to make it consistent between versions... So that the punctuation made in Microsoft Word 97 that was supposed to start from "0" didn't start from "1" when you open the file in Microsoft Word 95.

Also, if you're a moron who edits documentation in Microsoft Word, at least export it to a fucking PDF before sending out. Please.

Week till deadline

PO: are we going to have feature xyz ?
Me: it wasn't in the original spec, we'll put it in the next spec.
PO: but we made a new spec for this fase yesterday and it is in that one.
Me: you can't do that you signed off the original spec before development started
Po: but we've signed this one off too
Me: ...

I have been developing something for 3 weeks now which has been sold to a customer for a lot of money last year, next to no specification on what it should do, got the spec 3 weeks ago, is being installed in a couple of weeks and I have no idea how to get it working!
I have tried about 5 different concepts now and they all start to look good until 1 of the many factors change then kaboom.

PM: We don't need a spec. We'll figure it out as we go.
Me: O_O.... So what do you need the system to do?.....
PM: ( gives vague requirements)

4 weeks later I still no clue what they need.

Don't you just hate where we're going forward with these different JS frameworks and packages? WebPack, Electron and all the other ways we try to use JS for desktop development and a simple build of a tiny project taking 10 mins on an average spec core i7 machine, then overdosing on npm install since every frikn thing is now so modular you donwload a gazillion packages just to set up user authentication with a simple route manager in your app.

JavaScript is fine really for certain purposes. It's these other frameworks that try to modularize every single aspect of it that sucks. If there's anything called too modular, JS has reached it now. over-modularizing, and over-complicating everyday trivial tasks just to introduce yet another frikn package or framework.

Really missing the good'ol monolithic days of programming. I mean, modular is fine bro, but for godsakes draw the line somewhere!
#NoMoreOneLineModules

I managed to get a new dell XPS 15 with uhd display, 16GB RAM and a nice i7 for work.

My boss previously asked for advice from me for which laptop to get, he ignored my advice which was for him to get a nice surface book pro for his excel activities

Instead he got a shitty Mac book air (who are these people who like the airs?). As his cto I was upset he didn’t trust his tech guy to choose him a powerful laptop that was useful.

Anyway, he saw my new laptop this week and a contractor was admiring it. My boss then said why didn’t you tell me to get this one? (The surface pro is the same spec but with tablet and pen ability).

What a dick. I’m still mad he didn’t listen to me. And now he is saying I never told him.

Macs are shit btw. This dell is great and I don’t know how we lived without uhd screens before.

So to start off this happened today while I was at school.

Each student gets a netbook for school and the amount of restrictions put in place are probably up to government spec. Well I brought in my personal netbook and a flash drive with a few distros of Linux on it on it to mess with during study hall(all on my own hardware).

I told my friend that about it and said I doubted it would boot because the bios is password protected and the IT guy probably removed external drives from the boot list but let him use it anyway.

5 minutes later he is showing me his screen with Ubuntu running on it, I was freaking out some and asked for it back and he gave it back to me.

About a minute later he shows me his screen. All black with white text shooting down it saying windows disk integrity check or something like that. All I see is "file xyz deleted" and was freaking out even more. I just sat there for the next 20 minutes thinking of how to explain this to the IT guy and hopefully get in less trouble.

Finally after the longest 20 minutes of my life as a student I see the windows 7 boot screen appear. Probably the one time I actually wanted to see it honestly but I was so happy to see the end of the situation.

Sorry this was so long but I hope it's fine for a first post here, I've been putting it off but after this decided to finally post.

TL;DR
This works: email+rant@domain.com

Spam filtering protip:

Did you know that the email spec allows you to use youremail+something@domain.com and the emails still come to you. This is especially useful when registering to a lot of places where you are not sure whether they will spam you or not. Filtering will be easy because you have a unique email address for each service. Also you can find out which service leaked your email address to spammers.

Additionally if you want to register to a service with two accounts but still want to use the same email, you can do this easily by adding +whatever in your email address.

Spent an hour and a half renaming a method everywhere in a project from `feature_name` to `feature_name!`. There are a lot of constants, symbols, and other methods that use "feature_name" as a prefix (plus comments and spec descriptions), so was a little more difficult than normal.

Should have taken like 5 minutes with a proper IDE refactor tool. but noo, it was too difficult for RubyMine. wah wah wah. Stupid thing. Not even the search tool was useful -- it's limited to 100 results, and there were around 250 for that substring.

I ended up having to run specs repeatedly to find all the remaining instances, which took freaking forever. blahhh

Me : so here is your quote for the app

Client : oh yer and it needs to work in both android and iOS, that's not a big deal right?

Me : of course not, however I am going to have to add a little something to your quote!

I don't get how when I ask a client if I got everything right so I can draft up a quote, they don't think to mention stuff like other features they had an idea for or cross platforms they wanted but didn't say in the original proposal -_-

MacRant: was waiting for a new macbook pro release for awhile to upgrade by old laptop (not mac). Watched the release, had very mixed feeling about it, but still ordered (clinching my teeth and saying sorry to my wallet). Next day looked into alternatives, cacelled the orded to have more time to think, now deciding... I mean cmon, no latest 7th gen processor, no 32gb memory option, 2gb video is ok for non gaming, the whole "big" thing is TouchBar that I DON'T F* NEED. They should drop the "Pro" and name it "Fancy Strip".

So I looked into alternatives, and Dell XPS 15 with maxed spect is twice as juicier, and has not a touch bar, but the whole touch freakin 4k screen, for the less price :/
Just wanted to rant about the new macbook's spec and price and see what you all think of macbook vs alternatives?

TLDR; Go to bottom of post.

Around this time two years ago was the start of my group project in University. The project was to write an app in android and have a web side to it too. The group was to be overseen by a member of staff. The first meeting was introductions and to look at the spec, during the second we were to decide a group leader (PM) and other positions.
A person I shall call BD and I volunteered for PM. I didn't have experience with leadership but wanted some, and was the only one with confidence in android, the biggest part of the system. I got four of the votes.
BD, with his scouts experience, not being afraid to breathe down people's necks and bash some heads together, and having been PM last year, with his group receiving 69% (he failed the year and was resitting), earned 5. One guy was missing.
When it came to sorting out roles and responsibilities, BD confessed to not being a strong coder but that he'd help here and there. His role was planning our deadlines, doing our Gantt chart for deliverables, and was supposed to write a really detailed spec. He didn't have it at the meeting of the next week, as it was still in the works, and never messaged anyone. Next week he turned up with a Gantt chart of 1A4 page that only included the deadlines and deliverables in the spec, with three colours. One for android team, one for DB guy, and one for web team.
The guy who didn't turn up for voting got a girlfriend, a job at mcdonalds and did barely a thing. One guy in the web team did everything, carrying his friend who wouldn't do work (and also got swept out to see in a rubber boat with one of his bros lol (he was rescued)), and even though I'd done android dev I wasn't as quick a learner as two others in the team. Out of 10 people, 6 did real work.
The web guys stopped coming to meetings as they were taken over by android talk, and as we were quite behind, BG tried yellow carding them. They turned around with the website pretty much done, this one guy doing more than the 4 of us on android had. Yellow card lifted. We'd already complained about BD and his lack of everything (except screen brightness as he sat at the front of the lecture theatres with his wide brimmed hat looking at 9gag and videos (remembering he said he was resitting that year)) but grew a stronger dislike. Found out that he spent most of his time with his gf at our secretary/fellow android dev's house. Come coding week, he disappears entirely, only to attend meetings. He gave us a shell of the android code used for his previous year's project (along with documentation, complete with names and dates of updates, most of them (including the planning ones BD was supposed to do) bearing either one of two names. It was behind where we were at the time and had a lot of differences to our spec, and if we had used it BD may have used that to pull us down with him if things went wrong. He resurfaced at the end with the final documentation of how we'd all done, including reports on how each member had performed, which we were supposed to have reviewed. Our main, most proficient dev he accused of being irritable and brash, and a bad communicator. He was Norwegian, his voice was just a bit gruff, and he was driven and didn't waste time. He bashed the web team for not turning up, and had already been rude and unhelpful to everyone who voted for him in the first place.
In our own reports we all devoted paragraphs to delicately describing his contributions, excluding his suggestion that we use the code he gave us. Before we had our results and our work was completed, he individually kicked us from our group's facebook group and unfriended us.
Our 43% mark at the end, coupled with his -40% penalty from the red card we had him on, felt good, but not as good as a better result would have, especially as the fool that was BD would be inflicted on a group a third time. He changed to some other course after that year finished, so he must have failed his resit of second year.
During third year, a friend of mine who was PM for a group that passed well passed other things with too slim a margin to be happy, so chose to resit the year. He didn't have to do the group project again, and had that time free. But BD had to resit. His group had 69%. A yellow card with a 20% deduction wouldn't do it, so he MUST have had a red card as PM his previous year. Well that didn't come up when he claimed credit for his team's 69% during elections... My housemate's compsci boyfriend 2 years up overheard me talking about him, he was in 1st year with BD. BD failed and resat 1st year too. 4 years and he couldn't make anything stick. I feel bad for him through understanding the pains lack of work and internet distraction bring, and unfortunately I can't wish bad things on him because he brings them on himself. I wish I never see his face again though.

TLDR; Guy in group project lies and is dishonest from start to finish, getting PM pos by 1 vote. Gets what he earns.

THIS FUCKING DEBUGGER IS IGNORING MY FUCKING BREAKPOINTS

GO TO HELL YOU PIECE OF SHIT

AND RSPEC: FUCK YOUR LIMITED METHOD HIT-COUNTING BULLSHIT! ONE HIT-COUNT PER METHOD FOR THE ENTIRE SPEC IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH!

FJA;KLGAKLGJFKSDHG

I’m tired of all these profane “frontend developers” who do nothing but get cheap internet points by shitting on web technologies.

Bitch, NPM is just a package manager. That’s what it is. Anyone who ever used a package manager already knows how to use NPM.

Here on devrant, there at your workplace, people hear nothing but bitching when you open your mouth. You always need a “solid task description” and “best practices”. You always need somebody else to do your job for you. Frontend is the area where you have to constantly switch between heavy, performance-oriented coding, UX and graphic design while remaining in a dynamic environment that is called “web”, no wonder why you can’t do that. Instead of bitching, you could just present your own solution you designed with just a little bit of product-oriented thinking. But noooo, you fucking bother designers whenever you’re not sure about “how many pixels is that padding”.

You can only be barely productive (and only with a frozen spec) but can never take the lead just once.

In the 80s your kind of approaches were doubted, by the 90s they were dead. In 2020s they’re straight up laughable.

And don’t get me started on CSS. You have to be an absolute buffoon of a developer to not know how to use a DECLARATIVE tool that don’t even require real structural thinking.

No wonder why you praise php. You throw shit all over the place and tell everybody that you’re a “sociopath” and you don’t need that “stupid frontend” and “stupid users”. But you know what? Any real backend or embedded dev would’ve laughed at your face.

Because backend developers are respected.

You’re not.

We worked with that freelancer some time ago. Most talented coder I've ever known. Coding for only 3 years, and only 1 technology, but technical thinking already up to par with my own 15+ years of experience. Very rude but to the point. We loved it - "one of us". We hired that asshole for different remote projects over 20 times in 3 years. We send spec, answer questions, collaborate on chat, review work on svn, add tickets, get solutions. After about a year working like that we had minor issue with finance that revealed our prized freelancer is a chick.

Changed nothing.

Fifteen minutes of coding
Fifteen minutes of specs

Five minutes of debugging
Two minutes of specs (just failures)

Thirty seconds of tweaking
Two minutes of specs

Ten seconds of tweaking
Two minutes of specs

Realize I made a typo due to RubyMine input lag
Two minutes of specs

Ten seconds of fixing and tweaking
Two minutes of specs

And so it goes.
All. day. long.

Sometimes it repeats.
That’s sort of nice.

Is it any wonder I can’t focus?

Fucking shit, this university's website is so damn slow! Basically Every Semester, every student need to enroll to certain classes in University Website.

But the Infrastructure is not enough to handle such a big amount of students, we have approx. 7000 students enrolling at the same fucking time.

And here i am can't enroll to any class at all this semester. Fuck such a waste of time. This always been a thing since they digitalize enrolling system.

I don't want this to happen again. The student always be a victim since they cannot handle the request. Now, as a dev, i want to propose something better to optimize the server, i have some connection to pass some bureaucracy. I am going to do some brainstorming and I will need some solution.

Here some data i gather when i am mad from my univ infrastructure division :
1. The Server is a simple Local Server Forwarded to the Internet.
2. The Server use Windows Server 2007.
4. Web Server Using Microsoft IIS
3. The Website built using ASP.NET
4. The connection is not SSL encrypted (yes its fucking use the http)
5. Hardware Spec (not confirmed officialy, i got this information from my professor) :
- Core i5 4460
- 4 GB Ram
- 1 Gbit NIC

I will summon some expert here and i hope want to help me(us all) out.

Spec'ing out a data analysis tool for several billion transactions and I got this when sending the final spec to the client.

Client: "I don't see why it takes so long, I downloaded this template from theme forest and edited it in dreamweaver, it only took 3 hours"

Client has an "urgent" release that needs to be launched immediately... So they keep changing the spec every few minutes with new changes, but are upset that the product isn't launched yet. Lol. Got to love clients.

Giant, month-and-a-half-long-ticket.
After learning six or so complicated areas of the system and updating them all to work with the new changes, make them all play nicely, etc. I finally got everything working. 95% spec coverage, though no ui tests because I haven't gotten selenium working. whatever, everything's done and works.

Second dev bases her ticket off of mine and continues working. Work elsewhere continues and there's an official release, so we both merge in master. I run tests, everything passes, and go back to working on other tickets.

She finishes her ticket.
We do end-to-end testing, and everything works perfectly. Time for a demo!

She merges in master again, and pushes her branch to two staging servers. (idk why two.)

Demo starts.
We connect to the staging servers, and... none of the UI changes exist; they aren't running the correct code!

So she runs it locally for a demo instead. Two features in my ticket no longer work. She throws me under the bus. She throws me under the bus again by criticising a rake task I scrapped because she wanted to do it. Then again because I didn't update my branch to master and push it before the demo, despite having no reason to. and despite the demo being of her branch.

Then she continues to show off and brag about how she's like the "legend" (senior dev) she envies. QAbuys it.

I'm having an emotion, and it's called anger.

Spent a lot of time designing a proper HTTP (dare I even say RESTful) API for our - what is until now a closed system, using a little-known/badly-supported message-over-websocket protocol to do RPC-style communications - supposedly enterprise-grade product.

I make the API spec go through several rounds of review with the rest of the dev team and customers/partners alike. After a few iterations, everybody agrees that the spec will meet the necessary requirements.

I start implementing according to spec. Because this is the first time we're actually building proper HTTP handling into the product, but we of course have to make it work at least somewhat with the RPC-style codebase, it's mostly foundational work. But still, I manage to get some initial endpoints fully implemented and working as per the spec we agreed. The first PR is created, reviews are positive, the direction is clear and what's there already works.

At this point in time, I leave on my honeymoon for two weeks. Naturally, I assume that the remaining endpoints will be completed following the outlines/example of the endpoints which I built. When I come back, the team mentions that the implementation is completed and I believe all is well.

The feature is deployed selectively to some alpha customers to start validation testing before the big rollout. It's been like that for a good month, until a few days ago when I get a question related to a PoC integration which they can't seem to get to work.

I start investigating and notice that the API hasn't been implemented according to the previously agreed upon spec at all. Not only did the team manage to implement the missing functionality in strange and some even broken ways, they also managed to refactor my previously working endpoints into being non-compliant.

Now, I'm a flexible guy. It's not because something isn't done exactly as I've imagined it that it's automatically bad. However, I know from experience that designing a good/clear/future-proof API is a tricky exercise. I've put a lot of time and effort into deliberate design decisions that made up the spec that we all reviewed repeatedly and agreed upon. The current implementation might also be fine, but I now have to go over each endpoint again and reason about whether the implementation still fulfills the requirements (both soft and hard) that we set out to meet.

I'm met with resistance, pushback and disbelief from product management and dev co-workers alike when I raise the concern that the API might actually not be production-ready (while I'm frantically rewriting my integration tests and figuring out how the actual implementation works in comparison to what was spec'ed).

Oh, and did I mention that product management wants to release this by end-of-week?!

Developing without a spec

Got yelled at because super important feature for a client was two days overdue.
The kicker is that they never even talked to IT about the feature let alone give us a decent spec/assignment.

So I guess my most unrealistic deadline was the day before yesterday...

A year ago I wrote a SDK on PS4 DevKit, and when I looked at the spec I was like "Wow 8GB RAM, that's a lot to play with".
But then the OS takes about 4GB, and we have some huge textures (0.5GB) , and pretty dense point clouds (some more RAM, ka-ching!), need to leave some memory for the application on top of the SDK...we ended up having about 0.5GB for ourselves.
I was really bummed out, and this feeling is pretty much identical to the one I have when I see my total income, and then what's actually left after taxes and all the other shit.

So... Heard back from a recruiter today. Lovely lass.

I’d passed over a submission for her tech demo.

The brief was basically just to create a small simple module that calculates shit, nae effort.

But, when the recruiter had me on the phone she said “I know it’s a silly small module but try and run it up like you would a production ready app”.

The job spec and recruiter were keen on me demonstrating TDD, not specific on js version, final runtime, etc. The job was a senior spec at a higher salary range. So it warranted some effort, and demonstrating more than a simple module.

“Okay, cool, nae bother, let’s crack on.”

The feedback in the response from the dev today:
“He’s over-engineered tests, build...”

SUCK MY LEFT TESTICLE YOU FUCKWIT.

Talk to your recruiters, not me.

The feedback included a phrase I never hope to hear from a developer I work with:
“Tests are good but...” 😞

It was a standard 98% test suite from an RGR cycle, no more or less than I’d expect in prod.

The rest of the feedback was misguided or plain wrong. It was useful to see because I know now when they say they have “high standards” they mean: we listen to the dude who put the factory pattern in a JS brief.

Oh shit also: “someone’s done chmod 777” was in there as a sarcastic comment in the feedback. It was his fucking unarchive tool 😞

My response was brief and polite: “cheers for the consideration, all the best, James”

It’s honestly not worth warning them. Or, asking why they’d criticise something they’d asked me to do.

If you want a shitty js module, ask for a shitty js module and no more.

We had a blind auction at work. Selling off 'redundant hardware'

Most of it was old crap but a bit a couple of bids in for shits and giggles. Also, I'm a desktop man but we have rolling blackouts so an older laptop for the simple sake of having something bigger than my phone to browse definitely has some appeal.

So there was an old HP Elitebook 8540W. A chonky boi if ever I did see one.

Spec sheet as listed
4GB DDR3
i7 M 640 @ 2.80 Ghz
128GB SSD
Win 10 Pro
"not booting up/ power button flashing"

So bid R100. Now for context, a petrol is R22 a liter. A Big Mac is R43, a Big Mac meal is R90

So basically I big so I could harvest the SSD. And I won.

Much to my surprise, I simply attached the correct charger and it boots fine. The drive was empty though but that's fine cause I was gonna chuck Ubuntu on it anyway. Also found it was in fact 8GB of RAM. It also has a blu ray drive

So in summary, for the price of 1.1 Big Macs I got:
Full 1080p 15.6"
128GB Samsung SSD
8GB ram
First gen i7
Blu ray player

I'm most not sad about the 900x that I bid on as well. It was a cute little thing, my plan was to steal the ram and ssd out of this thing and put it in that, then boom ultra portable little machine for R400. Oh I also got an old monitor with a feint line down the screen for a grand total of R1

Code freeze is today but what's this in my inbox an updated spec which needs me to redo everything from scratch again.

Kindly go fuck yourself.

I spent the entire freaking day on one spec — one! — and I still haven’t gotten it to pass. Or fail. It’s still just breaking. Even the simple crap is breaking, so getting the actual complicated things I need it to do working? Bloody pipe dream (whatever that means).

Just. Goddamn this system is complicated and poorly designed.

And no, before you ask, of course there is no documentation.

I want my day back. 😡

Oh, RSpec.

Adding recaptcha tests, I copy a passing login spec
and because I'm bored, I run it again just to check.
I paste in the passing mock
and run it in my new block
and oh no, why are you failing? What the heck!?

Sales person - I've got this bespoke job in, here's the spec *hands over a price of paper with a drawing* and I've charged 7 days of your time.

Me - thanks...

*dig deeper in to the job and it's at least a months worth of work*

Just got a new job at an old school hardware company. The codebase is giving me heart attack. They don't care about dev experience or code navigation at all. Every attempts to modernize the codebase is so half assed. All patches are so bloated that make the codebase even worse.

Frontend is migrated from prototype-oop-jquery cluster fuck to AngularJS, then finally angular. Holy moly, all business logics are baked into UI "classes" using prototype chain. When they migrated to AngularJS, someone simply added a wrapper to that jQuery cluster fuck class and overwrote all the prototype with a 10k +lines file. Since all the methods are hidden in either prototype, JS object, or callback function, it's impossible to trace the data pipeline using IDE when "go to definition" on update() method gives you all the update methods/string in all objects/classes. And they don't care about immutability. References are taken out, renamed, and mutated everywhere. Finding the source of a bug is fucking guessing game.

I don't know what trick they use that makes cLion static analyzer fail.

And there is no unit test or spec doc.

Fuck me dead

Meeting: Here is the brief. Its specific. Inplement it.

Me: It's done. Gone live.

Client: Can you just change the whole thing to be completely different to my original specific spec? It'll only take a minutes?

Me:

When you estimate development time for a feature and management asks: "But aren't there widgets or sth that you can... [you raise an eyebrow] like... drag and drop or something...?"

If hiring managers really want to hire based on skill, what they should be doing is testing for one thing:

The ability to take a specification, written in general language, notice deficiency, communicate with the 'client' (manager) to hash out what needs done, and the (explicit) ability to read documentation on libraries or tooling outside the dev's core skillset.

If a dev can read a spec, talk to a client to work out whats lacking, and then identify what they need to know and where to find it, thats 90% of the skills they need from what I can see.

tl;dr version of it, is they should be explicit about the requirements for reading/implementing specs and finding the correct documentation.
Something along the lines of
"can you form your letters? Are you able to follow instructions on the back of a cake box? Then there may be a position waiting for you!"

I’m all for writing boolean statements that are readable, quick to grasp the real life case they’re representing and align with the spec rather than being ultra-reduced, but sometimes the spec is written by someone who clearly can’t reduce logic. So when the spec says “if it’s not the case that any of them are false” and you write:
!(!a || !b || !c || !d)
then I think you should try harder. At least put a note against the spec to say “i.e. if they’re all true” and then write the sensible code. Just think of the poor developer that might have to augment your code at a later date and has to follow and intercept that shite.

So apparently they're thinking of adding a lightweight graphics library to the c++ spec - opinions?

Product manager calls me at 7 PM. "There's gonna be a slight change in the module. You can reuse lot of existing code and I'm sure it won't take much for you to finish. "

Me: Okay, let me take a look at it tomorrow morning.

The next day I saw the spec change.

One and half weeks later, I'm still doing the change.

#FML

When I hear someone say that "Minecraft is the most low-spec game out there"

Why do they ask for a ball park price based on a non existent spec and pathetic meeting ramblings. FUCK OFF.

Original spec of feature: 5 page document

Review of feature: 20 page document with surprise things never mentioned in original spec

"fullStackClown!?!?! how could you miss this?!?!"

🤡

I still can't get it why people looks at IT people as lowlife. If you need a new computer in your office I can get the right spec and help you to buy it. But moving the computer table is not my job 😠

Current barrier I'm facing... (Graduate next year and non stop looking for positions):

Position: Junior/Graduate Developer
Spec: Must have at least 1-2 years experience.

Fuck this.

my job is to build to spec and get things working

NOT to fuck around with git's exotic features so the fucking commit history "looks nice"

its called a version control system for a reason. SO YOU CAN CONTROL YOUR FUCKING VERSIONS

IF YOU WANT A NICE PLOT, GO READ A BOOK OR WATCH A DRAMA MOVIE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

NewLifeNewHope update No.2 / Day 5

My Server Is finally opened and i installed 2x8 TB WDC Harddrives and SATA 128 SSD. I know this server is freaking garbage, but i got this PC for free, and have somewhat good-ish upgrade path, so heres the spec :
-Gigabyte H110m-S2 LGA1151
-Intel i3-6300
-8GB DDR4 single channel RAM
-128 GB SSD
-2x8TB Harddrives
-TP-Link 1000mbps NIC

so the plan is to make this server as the Main Repository -- yes no offsite backup plan for now -- and also i want to make this server as an Email Server and for hosting my company's website. I've already asked for static IP from my ISP and will take effect tommorow.

I need help for choosing the Operating System (i like centOS) for my server. and to setting this Server to work like what i planned but i don't know where to start, Any help and/or References will be great !

No commits?!? Well, maybe you should fucking make up your mind about what the fuck you actually want! I don't give a flying fuck about your pathetic excuses. If you don't get me a final spec, then don't try to skin my back about not delivering updates and "not showing active progress"!!! FFS!

Me when after a client has signed a spec document and they still try to add more features. Cannot find words to explain how much I hate scope creep.

Spec meeting with my client: "Accessibility is very, very important to us. We want to be sure that we meet AA guidelines, at a minimum."

Client delivers front end mockups, can do nothing. Not one single element on it is compliant - have to send it back for revisions.

The fact that they were aware of the WCAG and the AA tier guidelines, and still handed me these shitty designs is pretty impressively stupid.

*cracks knuckles*

Boy was I happy to see this when I opened devRant up.

So for starters, more group projects are necessary. Many reasons why. To begin with, it allows for more complex programs than getting some input and printing some shit out. It also develops interpersonal skills (I hate people too, but when you go out to look for work you'll be with them, so better get used to it soon). If a platform like GitHub is used, it's easy to track who did what, and see what each person in the group did, so it should be fairly easy to discourage lazy asses.

Beyond that, stop giving us half completed assignments and asking us to fill in a function/method. Yes, it will take longer. But one doesn't learn to program by doing the minimum required work, you've got to crash and burn a lot in order to git gud. So ffs, let us do all the work. We're like AI, we learn through reinforcement learning.

Stop giving us a spec to follow. We'll do plenty of that in the future, right now we need to make mistakes, not be held by the hand all the way. Let us do dumb shit so you can fail us and tell us our code is repulsive, and this other way was better. Explain why. That's how people learn, not by telling us what each function should return, what can and can't be used, etc. And if you can't come up with a scenario in which what you're teaching is useful, then maybe you're not teaching us the right material.

I'll leave it at that for today... But I'll be back 😈

TIL if you know the password for a WIFi SSID, you can replicate it with your hardware. All devices that have credentials for that SSID will connect to yours if your signal is stronger. The encryption just needs to be the same (wpa2/wep) The underlying UUID doesn’t matter.

Not bad for a quick and dirty man-in-the-middle attack. The WiFi spec needs a bit more work.
TLS all the things!

know what is worst than fucking clients from hell?

fucking websites that need a mortherfucking good spec computer to run. i cannot even type properly. thought my keyboard had problem. no. I can fucking type fucking quick and well here now with no hiccup. i wish i can burn those all down.

no wonder we love devrant. even the website is fast and good.

Client: "We need a quote for a website build."
Me: "OK. What kind of website?"
Client: "We are working on a brief now, but we need a cost ASAP."

Me: "Alright. It should cost between $X and $Y. Dependent on the brief."
Client: "We can't go back with a range. We need a set price."
Me: "Well, give me a solid Functional Specification, and I'll give you a price based on that."

Client gave me a Func Spec. I gave them a price. Then they gave me change after change after change...

But they refused to pay more than the initial fixed price. By the end of it, I would have been better off working at McDonalds.

Why tf yall trashing w3schools and praising mdn? When I forget the syntax I just ignore the mdn and go straight to w3schools, the information there is more condensed, more like a cheatsheet. Also their online editor is far quicker than any codepen hipster garbage you endorse

If I need spec I visit the fucking spec, not mdn

I have spent 2 hours fighting with another dev once about mysqli vs pdo and how mysqli is probably worse than pdo, turns out the only difference is that pdo supports more databases, where as mysqli only supports mysql, else their spec is basically the same. 😰

PM said I modified code that change UI so user may not familiar with. So, how could I know what is user familiar with if PM doesn't include spec or user manual to me.

No one tell me how to solve the problem, since you just want problem to be solve I solved it my way. :)

When I can't decide which configuration to buy for my new PC

Fucking bitcoin miners are making graphics cards I have no intention of buying right now more expensive and it makes me mad.

How am I supposed to spec out a machine when the graphics card is $150 more than it usually is?

Okay so my ticket got rejected because the on screen texts are not in the correct case (upper/lower). Totally fair because nowhere in the spec are those texts defined. As a developer I am also responsible for what "makes sense" for the user.

I'm just gonna say this next time I ask for a raise.

Why do people who cannot write specs still write specs? There are guys who just cannot produce anything human readable.
- Don't list 50 things in the same sentence separated with semicolon. Don't you have list bullets in your Word?? Or table, anyone??
- Now that you managed to add a table, don't write a novel into the cells. Especially now that you have decided to use 30pt font size and 3cm wide columns.
- If it's not an equation, don't use parenthesis. Why? Since they (and this is just my opinion (someone else might think otherwise)) are a little bit (or a lot, depending on the reader(s)) annoying (or otherwise irritating) since they (the parenthesis) tend to make the text (of any kind) very difficult (hard) to read especially (there can be other reasons) when you (or someone else in the company) have decided to write reaaaally long and complex sentences which add no information but make the reader go back and forth of the text trying (and sometimes not succeeding) to make any sense out of it.
- Always remember to use cross-reference number like [1] but don't tell what it is referring to. Special bonus will be awarded, if the link is broken!
- Save space and time by not explaining things that you can just refer to. Just add vague "read from [1], [2] and [3] for info about this." And then expect the reader to go through thousands of pages of boring jargon.

And oh yeah, please ask comments in the review session and then ignore all of them, since "well technically all the information was in the spec". You just need to be Sherloc Holmes to connect the dots.

LinkedIn recruiter:
- messages me about a fantastic job opportunity
- waits exactly 3 days
- messages me asking about the cool company I work at and how I find the engineering department here
- again 3 days
- messages me saying that he has heard some amazing recent news (there were none) about the fast growing company I work at and asks how I feel about the changes caused by our headcount growth
- 3 more days go by
- today, I get a notification that this recruiter has given me random LinkedIn endorsements for some skills that I had put on my profile back in college and since then forgot about even the existence of the endorsements feature

My favorite part is that the job they had originally sent expects a few languages and other tech skills most of which I actually have listed on my profile, but naturally, he only endorsed me for skills not required for said job spec.

What kind of weird sorcery is this?

Send the dev a request for a design before they do a delicate process. They send back some mess done in MSPaint and a ton of select statements, with no context or explanation.

Send back an example of what they need to work through. Get back a response saying that the previous spec was just a draft, and once they complete development they’ll complete the design.

Why would I want a design once it was too late? What would be the point?

TL;DR
I signed in at a few sites like freelancer.com , you did it you understand this nightmarish post.

for every fucking job, there was a full team of fucking lowcostshitters that took it for 0,50 $ . When I say this number, I mean it literally.

Translations
Data Entry
Ios app
Android app
Java
Python
Websites
Games
Scripts
System Manager
DB creation
Porting
...

And if you think this was the only nightmarish thing, you have to check the jobs descriptions and their spec.

You'll loose your sleep for sure.

It is so comforting when senior senior senior engineers also tell you they have no idea why a fucking test spec occasionally fails. Literally, the spec is fine and all but sometimes, it just decides to say fuck off.

Holy fuck EA (yea I went there)

So here I am playing NFS Heat, and my laptop is hot enough to cook eggs on the keyboard, no joke, yet spec wise I should have 0 issues running this game.

I switch on the turbo cool (basically spin the internal fans at full speed... It's an MSI) and this usually covers any heating issues, nope... not this time.

this fucker of a fan can't keep up , so I've turned down the settings from ULTRA, that's depressing, to Medium... it feels like 2006 showed back up, but here's this laptop still burning a whole in my fingers.

My GPU (GTX1060 6GB) is running at 95'c on Medium graphics, and LOW looks like I fell into a 8bit world with slow ass rendering.

Guess I'm going to need to get some cooling assistance for this thing.

Thank you EA for turning my 2.5k laptop into a stove top, I appreciate it.

I guess the name checks out, "heat"

More adventures in fixing specs.

This particular failing spec is in an included spec helper; I cannot run the spec itself because rubymine is stupid and doesn't know how. Not kidding. I also don't know the codepath it's actually testing because it's fucking convoluted, so I need (rather: want) a debugger to progress. I put breakpoints everywhere I thought it could be, and... nothing.

The stacktrace shows the calling spec in the helper module, a generic `process` method that just calls `super` (from where? who knows!), and a `wrap_every_action` in the ApplicationController. in other words: absolutely nothing helpful. I stepped through the code for most of an hour and didn't get anywhere; just saw lots of rails internals.

ugh,

I'm going to keep bashing my head against this, but what the fuck, why can't you give me something goddamn useful!?

Coming to the end of a project and set up Wunderlist to do a snag list whilst testing, decided to involve my client, which worked out great initially but now they started adding features to it. Now in a situation of explaining that feature additions at this stage require a proper functional spec and costing as they may mean a rewrite of existing code and could derail the project. Are all clients dim or just mine?

Client: Can you lower that estimate?
Client: I know you’ve done, but can you make all this stuff behave this particular way on smaller screens, despite it not being in spec?

Me: *internal sigh* sure.

The perils of newly being a contractor and wanting to please.

At least I’m working from home and the money is good I suppose 😂

Don't you just love it when you get a project with no requirements doc, so you make your own spec and requirements, start to architect and develop the project correct way, the 2 weeks later your manager comes to you asking why wasn't features XYZ not included and how you should add functionalities for A B and C...

!rant

So I've been using Linux as my desktop and server environment for a solid month now, and I think the biggest benefit it's been for me is the digitial detoxification. I no longer worry about having the biggest/most high spec computer anymore and instead my OS is built around getting as much clutter and distractions out of the way so I can focus on programming as much as possible. It's very much akin to my mediatation sessions where you cut out everything around you to regain your focus.

It's the same feeling I got when I lost interest in video games. it was a huge time sink that was entertaining yes, but it no longer gives me the same feeling of accomplishment as getting over the mountain of a project goal and reaching the summit. Linux is a more challenging environment but with that challeng comes the excitement of learning something new, and your environment is in your own hands.

It's been a while but I should go back to my buddist meditation group again. I've been a workaholic for the past couple months and I need to afford myself time again to decompress.

Started my internship Monday. Got given a new top spec MacBook Pro. Yay. Except it has the German Keyboard layout. () require shift and yet {} and [] require alt. Whoever designed the layout clearly doesn't program.
Oh and the imposter syndrome is coming on strong.

Not adding input validation to that one page that time.

I knew my users were bad. I knew they'd fuck up. But I trusted the spec I trusted them.

Never again.

//First rant

So I've been working trying to get a file exporter for a binary file format mostly reverse engineered - 2001 Super Monkey Ball 2 (GameCube) if anyone's interested.

Everything works fine, goals show up in the right places, wormholes work as intended, etc. That is everything, except every single level you create will be invisible, or crash (Depending on which version of Dolphin emu you use).

This happens whenever trying to specify object names for 3D objects. I checked, all the many offsets seem correct, Object names are correct. Tried both null terminated strings and fixed 80 character strings - nothing.

Some other guy also made an exporter that works, however the code is an absolute mess - basically unreadable. It also lacks some newer parts of the file spec, which is the main reason as to why I'm rewriting it.

And as I'm working with an almost entirely unheard of file format, there are few people to go to for help. The 2 I know who are also familiar with the LZ file format have no idea either...

Sigh.

Can I have a spec?
Just do what you did before
Fuck off!

How do I make my manager understand that something isn’t doable no matter how much effort, time and perseverance are put into it?

———context———
I’ve been tasked in optimizing a process that goes through a list of sites using the api that manage said sites. The main bottle neck of the process are the requests made to the api. I went as far as making multiple accounts to have multiple tokens fetch the data, balance the loads on the different accounts, make requests in parallel, make dedicated sub processes for each chunks. All of this doesn’t even help that much considering we end up getting rate limited anyway. As for the maintainer of the API, it’s a straight no-can-do if we ask to decrease the rate limit for us.

Essentially I did everything you could possibly do to optimize the process and yet… That’s not enough, it doesn’t fit the 2 days max process time spec that was given to me. So I decided I would tell them that the specs wouldn’t match what’s possible but they insist on 2 days.

I’ve even proposed a valid alternative but they don’t like it either, admittedly it’s not the best as it’s marked as “depreciated” but it would allow us to process data in real time instead of iterating each site.

"Please move the logo left. The text goes a bit under."

Do you guys think people realize how unclear they are, and are just too fucking lazy to write the full spec? Or are they just so fucking stupid they don't realize I literally have no fucking clue what to do exactly with comments like these?

I guess Hanlon's razor applies here, but some days I just don't know...

Happy Friday! ☠️

To a fellow dev on my team; If you notice a difference between the spec and the database structure, just fucking talk to the BA! Don’t code something that fails and put it into QA.
And constantly saying “It’s not my job” is a severely career limiting move you dogmatic little shit.

The spec is wrong.

TL;DR: my boss is a dick and I don't know what to do.

Been working at the company for a month now, I enjoy the atmosphere and the culture (startup btw) but I really cannot stand my superior - there's only two of us in the team. Any screw up he blames it on me without a second thought. First week in he assigned their new website project to me and honestly they have quite unrealistic deadlines. I mean they didn't even have the infrastructure for it nor the manpower to build one yet it needs to be finished by the end of this month. On top of that the spec keeps changing literally every 2-3 hours.

Also since I've forgotten to mention the guy I'm working under is one of the founders so I can't really go and talk to someone about it. I feel pretty screwed over, anyone has any advice or been in a situation like this? Is it too early to quit?

To all people attending technical interviews.
If the job spec asks for a specific toolset (SQL server and ssis in this case), small hint.

Mention the fucking tools in your answers to questions!

Emailed my PM a new project spec, the next morning he emails me back saying, to stop wasting time and get back to "real" work.

A few days later we had a Skype meeting with senior management and the PM who rejected the spec to go over that same spec document among other projects, everyone agrees it's a good idea including the PM :D

FML.

Had harsh words to a recruitment agency a few days ago who have been emailing me completely irrelevant job specs for weeks. (Side note, I don't know these people or how I ended up on the list in the first place, i'm not looking).

Got an apology this morning from one of the agents, their manager also just sent me a mail to apologise, as she can see from the records i've received a lot of crap ... but she also took a moment to let me know she does have a role that might actually suit my skill set.

Are you fucking kidding me?

"Why doesn't anyone reply to my emails" - because you are the devil and can't be trusted.

A programme I have to maintain (and not allowed to optimise or change):

1) read input from serial connection
2) store data in MySQL database
3) every day convert to CSV
4) store on Windows file share
5) process CSV in access 2000
6) store in MsSQL database

When it was first developed, I said to te developer to store it straight from serial to MsSQL but out boss wanted it to follow the above spec.

He has now left and I have to maintain it

What is the best PC spec for development?

Things I mostly work on: Node frameworks, React Native and some Java and C++ (QT)

I know that even a dual core is enough for this but it takes a while even for a webpack build to complete in my current build.

Holy. Shit. Tests. I am testing. All week. Nothing but tests. I am one with the spec. You know what I realised today? Tests are a bit like life. Life is just one big spec suite that takes 75 years to run. Except there's no prod environment at the end of the DMT tunnel waiting for our green pass docket to say 'take me Lucifer, you absolute visionary: I'm ready'. We're all just a spec with no application. We're doomed. Nothing matters. I need to lie down

Building games for people to whom the expression "game design" evaluates to "game UI design", which a fancier way to say "a bunch of static slides with arbitrary screenshots"

Damn it!!! Fuck! That's 2 hours of my life I'm never getting back... FUCK!

{"op":"replace","path":"/spec/template/spec/containers/0/resources/limit/cpu","value":"4.0"}

We write our feature specifications in Gherkin, so it is clear to every member of the team (even nondevs GASP!) exactly what each feature should do.

SO WHY THE FUCK, AFTER BUILDING THE FEATURE, DO I GET REVIEWS FROM THE pRoDuCt MaNaGeRs, SHOWING ME THEY WANT SOMETHING DIFFERENT FOR THE FEATURE. YOU WROTE THE FUCKING FEATURE DID YOU HAVE A CHANGE OF HEART MID THOUGHT YOU IDIOT!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA I'M SO SICK OF IT I'M SICK OF WORKING 12 HOURS ON A FRIDAY FOR YOUR STUPID SHIT

Crazy deadlines> Director: "You need to design a new architecture that has failover, multi-AZ, automated deployments, CI/CD pipeline, automated builds/tests as well, for our new SaaS product. You have 3 days to complete it"

Me: "Ok cool. Do we have the new product developed? Can I have the spec docs of the new software, libs and packages required for the env?"

Product Lead: "No we dont have anything yet. The POC is on my local PC, but I dont know what packages are needed to run it"

Me: "So I cant design anything unless I have the minimum requirements to run the new software"

Director: "Just get it up and running in a live environment and we'll take it from there"

Me: *sigh*..this is going to be a big mistake

GTX 1070 Graphics card vs Dell 4K monitor?

This is more of a story than a rant, but it has some rant-ey elements, so whetever...

I work for a pretty big company. Several departments, teams, many different markets...so it's a big orchestration. The programming department (aprox. 5% of all employees) is the core of the whole company, because everybody else uses software we've written...(a bit off topic, the point is there are a lot of people)

So today, I got assigned with a side-project. The project spec arrives, and as I read through it, I start realizing that upper-management whats me to build an app to fire people instead for them. The app is supposed to track salary, connect with Trello (for departments that use it) to track finished tasks, track sick days, work attendence...a lot of stuff, and at the end, if the situation requires, spit out a person that is of least benefit to the company, to be fired...

Now from coding perspective, this will be very interesting and fun to build, but from a moral standpoint, I'm a bit woried...simply because, indirectly, I'm firing those people. Because, the way I tune the the app(specifically the algorithm that weighs the value of an employee to the company) will cause certain people to get fired...

So I'm woried I'm gonna have a small breakdown when the app goes live and I see someone saying goodbye to theie colegues of something similar...heck, the app might even spit out my name some day(I should probably add a tiny if statement somewhere in there :) )
What do you guys think about this, from a moral standpoint? Would you be okay with building something like this?

(Sorry for the long post :/ )

"Lets move away from winforms to something a bit more modern, let's get our ux up to speed"

The new spec ended up wanting exact replicas of our Winforms projects in wpf.

Fuck api docs which are blatantly wrong. Wasted several hours on building an API client with pagination according to the api docs.

Turns out the actual implementation did not follow its own spec / api doc and returns values without pagination. And some objects are not objects but arrays.

I mean, next time I build an API client, I'll just fire a dozen requests on the endpoint, see what it wants and see what I get and maybe guess right what it actually does.

Is it common to be handed a code base, be told "that's yours now", and not be told what needs to be done with it? Like not given a spec, not given a list of change/problem reports, just "have this, it's yours, go do stuff, don't break anything"? I am trying to determine if this is a blessing or a curse.

This is important.

I officially proclaim myself impressed with @K-ASS and their CSS skills. Those pure CSS spheres are amazing, and I regard their CSS skills as “very high”. Probably higher than most of the programmers out there, maybe just shy of spec-writing demigods out there in knowledge. Yet, not shy in creativity.

Congratulations!

Found these in the mail!
Many thanks from Paris!

Fuck oauth2. Is it a framework or a specification? It fails at both. If it's a framework I want implementations that I can use. If it's a spec I want clear documentation with examples. Fails at both.

I miss the days when Googling "JLS" always returned the Java language spec as the first result.

a project that has an ever changing spec. fuck.

Since Friday devRant posts where errors are introduced by very dumb things like commas have stood out to me.

Today's error fix. Line 1352. A string input defined in the spec file was set for 13 length. The body file had 12 dashes to represent this input.

Really, one dash, four days to solve.

Oh and Unix over Windows because my compiler on Windows didn't catch it but the Unix one sure did which is how I found it.

every time when i needed to attend user requirement spec meeting with client but i fucking don't know anything about the system

There was a big hairy ball of SW mud from another project that a poor coworker had to "reuse". Only that it was impossible because there was no documentation, shit was partly auto-generated with mysterious Excel tables, and the actual code was just as bad. No APIs and nothing, just hacking shit into globals, several nested state machines that were overriding each other's states, and with global side effects. WTF.

Two devs took a look at it - minimum 8 weeks. Schedule was some days, and PM insisted that it was "already working". But the worst thing was that the dev in charge had been looking for another job anyway and quit, so the whole clusterfuck suddenly was on my desk.

The code was so awful that I could only bear it with both eyes closed, so I instead read the spec of this project closely. Turned out that it didn't actually demand this feature, only a small subset of what the ball of mud was supposed to achieve - which I was able to implement from scratch within a day, plus another one for documentation. Phew.

So, even as a long-time Apple user, overall there really wasn't too much exciting in the announcement last week.

That said, seeing the Mini get a spec bump caused the ears to prick up a bit. My 2014 is running fine, so it'd be a bit capricious to upgrade, but it does have one very annoying limitation:

It *will* *not* allow me to run 3 monitors at once.

Found this out for certain when I first got it and plugged one into each Thunderbolt port, and then another into HDMI, producing a courteous notice that I needed to remove one of them due to GPU limitations.

Anyone who knows more about hardware than me able to speculate if the new one might be able to support said extra monitor?

What's your most trusted computer part manufacturer list? Personally, it goes something like this:

CPU: AMD. They're performing at or above Intel's spec, without the weekly IME holes. Sometimes cost a little more, but they last way longer.

GPU: AMD, ASUS, MSI. MSI is usually over-priced but performs a smidge better, ASUS is usually a good middle-ground. Anything with an AMD chipset's usually gonna hold together fairly well, though, and won't require massively-unstable closed-source drivers for decent Linux performance. "but muh cuda" doesn't fly when OpenCL is actually, well, open.

Storage: Seagate, obviously, and SanDisk for cheap SSDs. SanDisk SSDs, especially their cheapest ones, are durable as shit for price. As for the Seagate pick... is that not self-explanatory?

Mobo: ASUS, ASRock if you need garbage in a pinch. ASUS boards are usually fairly tough, and ASRock is cheap trash for that backup tower that's gone bad in the closet.

PSU: EVGA, accept no substitute. EVGA PSUs are durable as fuck and fairly cheap, compared to other "ultra-durable" brands.

Asked my UX guy a question, and he gives me a 45min rant on how I used the word "spec" incorrectly

Then proceeds to answer my question in one sentence

Oh how I love working with those visual people...

When offshore overwrites your (100% to spec) content and then logs a critical defect because the incorrect content is showing...

Manager changes major feature in spec 3 days from deployment. Says "this kind of thing happens, not my fault"

That doesn't fucking help.

I don't know if something changed on the go linters, the spec or whatever.

...... but I am so fucking glad that I don't get retarded "eXpoRteD FuNctioNs neeEd tO bE coMmenTed"

Fuck how I hate how these tools operate sometimes

The easiest way to fix a test is just don't having it

rm -rf spec/the_fucking_failing_spec.rb

the look and chat project managers give right before they tell you the specs changed.

pm: heyyy
dev: what is it?
pm: how are you?
dev :{realising the spec changed}

You know it's kinda your fault when your CSS works properly in Internet Explorer and Firefox, but doesn't in Chrome or (non-Chromium) Edge.

However:
Spec says text-align doesn't apply to inline elements, but both Internet Explorer and Firefox seem to disregard that spec and do it anyway. What the fuck?

"The API will be ready soon", but it comes in late and nothing like the agreed upon spec.

when the pm chooses a js library but says can you just change this... either accept the library as you chose it or give a proper spec to write it from scratch

Thanks Japan...

Guess there's another exception for my project...

I thought this morning as I thought about how I on my personal projects consistently leave filterless comments that I could make a site called goth coding. And write a language spec that is ridiculous and silly with comments like “and i labored away my last inkling of happiness bled away doing mandatory overtime to write this wretched fragment of code future generations will discover and ask what perhaps became of me”

Don't you just love it when there is no formal spec. you get a few mspaint slides and told a delivery date, scope and slides are changed by management weekly, not necessarily informing you of it. Then when your failing, deadlines pass you by you still have no clear spec 2 weeks before release, partial backend because core business devs are busy doing support on the legacy systems. No frontend cause it's been changed, redesigned and you've been forced to change frameworks and technology so many times due to corporate policy and legacy systems with another dev group holding your balls with what they allow you to do and use. Id complain but at least we've been told to be agile. This is my life now, we lost all hope and stopped caring. And management wonders why the deadlines and estimates are all off.

Wrote a detailed spec, costed and agreed. Meanwhile client and designer agree upon half baked designs that only vaguely resemble the spec. Don't worry though, I have balls. I'm not a yes man. Will put them both straight (again) on how the fuck we do things if it involves me, incompetent twats. Will soon be calling the shots again. Ha ha, it's either that or I fucking walk.

what is that annoying little bug in my brain that triggers those annoying Chemicals which makes sleeping at night even after being awake for 27 hours, so goddamn hard?

protocol nature's spec describe the natural and optimal daily rhytm as sleeping 8 hours each night, so why is obeying the defaults so goddamn troubling?!