At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

When you're at the white house and you're wearing a Trump campaign badge -

You're a Trump supporter

When you're at the white house and you're wearing a Hillary Clinton campaign shirt -

You're a traitor

When you're at the white house and you're caught coding scratch games -

You're a Russian Hacker
-----------------------------------------------------------
America declares a state of emergency

Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."

DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.

So our country has fallen into a state of emergency. Access to most popular social networks and messaging apps have been blocked or restricted.

> Snow expected tomorrow
> Railservices declare a state of emergency

PSA for all dutchies here, check the reisplanner app

!tech !dev

9 months in 2023 and its getting worse everyday.
This year is not my year. its just a bad dream which i want it to end so much :(

lets go from latest to last

sept 8(today) : was moonlighting with a good friend , who said he will be giving me work for 6 months. he fired me after just 1 month. reason : "we won't be needing your services bro" . actual reason: I made a logical argument over a small thing that triggered his OCD and hurt his ego

sept( few days ago) : the only other group of 4 friends that i had got angry at me because i refused to tell them why i was hurt with 1 of them and called him irresponsible . yes, this is as stupid as it sounds.

Sept (few days ago) : mom was driving our new car and got it bumped by another car on red light. she is a newbie , wasn't able to peddle on time (or idk what happened), but another guy bumped into our car. She got scared and ran away !?! again as stupid as it sounds.
fortunately, it costed us not much as it was on the fibre body, but mom's confidence got broken and i might have been very harsh at some discussions.

August 5-31 : Whole month went into going to the hospitals , and coughing/fever/blisters

August 4 : One stupid friend made a trip plan. 3 other friends rejected it . i could not come up with a reason, so he forced me into going. on trip day i got fever but he still forced me to come. during trip my health got worse and the friend was busy enjoying his trip. i had to come home by taking an emergency cab and that drained my whole month's saving. plus i got sick even more

july18- aug3 : this month again went into coughing and recovery as on july 18 i went to my cousin's engagement in another state and their food didn't agree with me

may-june-july : these months went into distress and anger as we bought our first new car and our neighbours were making car parking a nightmare for us. we involved police and this asshole lawyer friend of mine, but no significant action is taken as of this writing

april : the only happy month for me : I went to a solo trip all by myself , and had a great time. the people i met there were nice

march : switched job . went from WFH to hybrid WFO . can't say if this was a great or a stupid decision.

feb : went into coughing and recovery

jan24-28 : took a trip with mom to different state because company wanted me to switch states in order to continue working. it turned out to be a worst trip as mom got all vicious and angry on that state and decided that we won't be working from that city and i should resign. i also caught some cough that later turned into full blown sickness

jan3-jan 24 : again went into coughing and recovery

dec 27 2022 - jan 3 2022 : religious trip to a different state. was a very nice and happy trip till the very end , where our flight got cancelled and we were stuck in a stranger city. mom panicked but i handled the situation somewhat. at the end of it i caught some cough that turned into full sickness and mom had the worst trip of her life