As a long-time iPhone user, I am really sorry to say it but I think Apple has completed their transition to being a company that is incompetent when it comes to software development and software development processes.

I’ve grown tired of hearing some developers tell me about Apple’s scale and how software development is hard and how bugs should be expected. All of those are true, but like most rules of law, incompetence and gross negligence trumps all of that.

I’m writing this because of the telugu “bug”/massive, massive security issue in iOS 11.2.5. I personally think it’s one of the worst security issues in the history of modern devices/software in terms of its ease of exploitation, vast reach, and devastating impact if used strategically. But, as a software developer, I would have been able to see past all of that, but Apple has shown their true incompetence on this issue and this isn’t about a bug.

It’s about a company that has a catastrophic bug in their desktop and mobile platforms and haven’t been able to, or cared to, patch it in the 3 or so days it’s been known about. It’s about a company, who as of a view days ago, hasn’t followed the basic software development process of removing an update (11.2.5) that was found to be flawed and broken. Bugs happen, but that kind of incompetence is cultural and isn’t a mistake and it certainly isn’t something that people should try to justify.

This has also shown Apple’s gross incompetence in terms of software QA. This isn’t the first time a non-standard character has crashed iOS. Why would a competent software company implement a step in their QA, after the previous incident(s), to specifically test for issues like this? While Android has its issues too and I know some here don’t like Google, no one can deny that Google at least has a solid and far superior QA process compared to Apple.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m fed up. Apple has completely lost its way. devRant was inaccessible to iOS users a couple of times because of this bug and I know many, many other apps and websites that feature user-generated content experienced the same thing. It’s catastrophic. Many times we get sidetracked and really into security issues, like meltdown/spectre that are exponentially harder to take advantage of than this one. This issue can be exploited by a 3 year old. I bet no one can produce a case where a security issue was this exploitable yet this ignored on a whole.

Alas, here we are, days later, and the incompetent leadership at Apple has still not patched one of the worst security bugs the world has ever seen.

Biggest hurdle? Probably other people telling me no.

- My parents wouldn't let me go to college to study CS because 'this computer thing is just a fad and you won't be able to make a living off it'. Instead they pulled me out of school early and made me go study automotive so I could be a mechanic like my dad.

- At 22, my boss at my first tech company job heard I was taking Java classes in the evenings. Told me to stop wasting my money because I'd never be a programmer.

- Got a job at a game development company as a document writer. I could code by then. When I was done with my work I'd look for bugs and send the solutions to the programmers so they could submit them. Tech lead found out and flipped out. Said I wasn't allowed to look at the code because I 'hadn't been hired as a programmer'.

Today I'm a senior developer and pretty happy with my career.

When people tell you that you can't do something, that should be all the motivation you need to work your ass off to prove them wrong.

Similarities between this spider and me:
- We both are web developers
- We both live in same room
- We both try to find bugs everyday

Boss: make this thing
Me: yeah no worries. Where is the spec?
Boss: We don't have enough one but we outsourced the design so call him

Designer: haven't started yet
Me: excellent

Boss: I'm going on holiday. I'll leave this to you.
Me: erm ok. I'm having a few problems getting stuff out of the designer though.

*2 weeks later and still no designs*

Boss: I'm back. Where is the progress?!
Me: indeed.

*1 week later i get half designs that sort of make sense*

Boss: hurry up!

*1 week later*

Me: designer you're busting my balls here
Designer: yeah lol

Me to boss: still having problems. No idea what I'm doing.
Boss: deal with it

*2 days later*
PM: we are demoing it to clients tomorrow
Me: brilliant. I'll become a magician then.

* Meeting goes well and no one notices the thing is a bit buggy*

*2 days later*
Me to boss and pm: you already know whats going on but I'll keep trying.
Boss: ok it's just a proof of concept anyway.
Designer: yeah here's the rest of the designs lol

*1 week later, the designs made no sense, no idea what they wanted but hey it's a proof of concept so I'll just do my best...*

*suddenly again, hey you have 1 week before we sell it. Lol. smashes a product together as fast as humanly possible, due to half designs and no time to do it right even html classes and CSS aren't right - didn't know things would be repeated at the time. No time to fix entire thing. Luckily just a proof of concept*

New senior developer: hey boss just said this is being sold tomorrow.
Me: wtf..It's a proof of concept and i was given longer...
New senior developer: no
Me: :(

Senior developer and all colleagues: it's full of bugs and doesn't work
Me: yes that will happen without specs, random tight deadlines, no designs that made sense and a total of about a week and a half to make an entire system for multiple user types to make applications, send messages, post jobs, handle all paperwork and move paperwork among different user types as they go through applications. I told everyone what was going on but i get no support...

*Silence*

Boss: wtf i gave you so long! All i know is my entire staff is working on a product that should be done ages ago
Me: ok, however i have said almost every day i need-
Boss: I'm not interested

*I finish my placement year and never get any promised work or the job offer*

Seems legit?

Client: “Hey this thing isn’t working correctly.”
Me: “Hmm, looks like there was a bug in the last update. The team and I are going to work on a fix. In the meantime here’s a tool to help you get what you need.”
Client:”Yay!”

*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey this thing isn’t working.”
Me:”Hey, yeah, it’s the same thing. That bug I told you about? Yeah, we’re still working on it. We’ll let you know when it’s finished I promise but we’re trying to fix it without introducing more bugs.”
Client:”Ok sounds good.”

*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey this thing isn’t working.”
Me:”Bro...we just went over this...”

*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey seems like there’s a bug in our system that was found by -insert random coworker’s name here-. Are we looking into to this?”
Me:”Wtf dude.”

*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey this thing isn’t working.”
Me: -smashes my face against keyboard-

Does anyone else have that one guy or gal you work with that's ALWAYS the one to find the weirdest, inexplicable bugs possible? Yup. That's me. Here's some fun examples.

*Unplugs monitor from laptop, causing kernel panic*
*Mouse moves in reverse when inside canvas*
*Program fails to compile, yet compiler blames a syntax error that doesn't exist*
*malloc on the first line of a program causes a segfault*

And for how the conversation usually goes

Me: "[coworker], mind taking a look at this?"
Coworker: "Sure.This better not be another one of 'your bugs'. ... ... ... Well, if you need me I'll be at my desk."
Me: "So you know what's causing it?"
Coworker: "Nope. I've accepted that you're cursed and you should do the same."

Software engineering is doomed.

The next generation of developers is going to suck as fuck

I've come across a lot of situation that made me think this way.

The most notable examples are right here on devrant.

I've seen a shit ton of rants blaming languages for "bugs" when in fact those "bugs" wouldn't have happened if those fuckers would have read the specifications of said languages.

This new generation doesn't read, when they've got a problem they just fucking go to Google for answers, they don't bother reading specifications, language books, rfc, etc, they don't bother reading where the true source of information are. The documentation ? What's that ? Let's go to stackoverflow first, let's think second.

Same back in school I've seen people in the highest grades that couldn't fucking decompress a tar archive.

In the coming decades we will loose the high skilled people, the people that made the software world as it is today we will be left with fuckers only able to blame things for stuff they don't understand.

This is my first true rant. This is me being pissed off.

Interviewer: For this next code challenge you will not be allowed to use the internet, or an IDE.

Dev: …

Interviewer: OR a keyboard OR a mouse. I will be verbalizing the code to you and you need to memorize it and tell me where the bugs are.

Dev: …

Interviewer: We must do this exercise to know how you are as a dev without any performance enhancing “aid”. This way we can understand where you are truly at skill-wise, and what you are truly worth from a compensation perspective.

Dev: …

Dev: If I get a job with you will I be allowed to use the internet and an IDE and a keyboard/mouse?

Interview: Of course you would! Getting anything done without those is just about impossible. We just need to evaluate you without them to see how good you REALLY are.

Dev: …

Dev manager: great news guys. We’ve built a new tool to do automated testing on apps. We’ve gotten rid of the old Appium solution we were using and built this new one.

Me: why not just use the inbuilt native stuff? Click to record works really well.

Manager: nah we thought it would be more flexible to build it ourself.

Me: ... ok ... moving on ... how does it work?

Manager: well this new .jar, you download it, pass in a config file, setup up your simulator and appium and the jar will do everything for you.

Me: ... wait you said you hate Appium? Now you’ve built a wrapper around it? And it doesn’t even set everything up, you’ve to do it all by hand?

Manager: oh we had too, would be too much effort to replace it. Don’t worry we can now write all our tests in .yaml config files instead of using Appium.

Me: so we’ve lost the ability of auto-complete and type ahead, everyone has to upskill on a new tool, it offers no new features over what’s available out of the box and we’ll have to deal with new bugs and maintenance and stuff our self ... because we need more flexibility?

Manager: oh don’t worry. The guy who built it is staying here. He’s going to deal with bug fixes and add features. He’s only one guy, but he’s really sharp, it’ll be great for us and the team.

Me: ... ... ...

*audible noise of soul breaking*

Me: ... ok thank you. I’ll look into this new tool

My boss asked in a meeting if it is possible to make an algorithm/software without generating bugs.. After that my colleague send me this pic 😂

!!fml

"Root, go fix this bug. It'll take you two days."

The "bug" is a feature that was never implemented for one particular payment type.

The code in question is two years old, full of typos, smells, junior-isms, and is convoluted AF. The feature's commit touched 190 files and implemented many other features as well. Thus far, I have been unable to narrow down where this particular feature's code lives for the other payment types, nor which code or payment paths lead to it. Burned out, I can barely focus on the screen, let alone follow its many twisting and dynamically-inferred paths. I hint as to the ticket's scavenger hunt nature during standup.

"But I wrote comments on the ticket telling you exactly where to look to fix it," Thundercunt admonishes in front of the team.

"Sure, you did," Root replies. "You reworded what the original dev had said in the comments 20 minutes prior, and agreed with him. His comments were helpful, but it doesn't tell me how any of it works," she continues.

TC scoffs and closes the meeting.

Root stares blankly, seeing neither code nor screen, questions her life decisions, and recalls the previous tickets she has worked on: nearly every one of them busywork, fixing other people's bugs. Bugs she never could have gotten away with if she tried.

"Why do I put up with this?" She asks. "They don't care, and it's killing me."

But the bills remain, and so must she.

"Fuck my life" she finally decides.

Me: Boss, your new project is ready, we've tested the technical aspect but we're waiting on your approval before deploying, will you test it?
Boss: yeah sure, I'll test it in 5

*2 weeks later*

Boss: why isn't that project deployed yet?
Me: you haven't tested it, and we haven't gotten approval
Boss: oh right, I'll go test it right now!

*2 weeks later*

Boss: I NEED that project to go live RIGHT THIS MOMENT!!!
Me: sure, have you tested it yet?
Boss: nope, but I need it
Me: well, I'll put it live, but me and my colleagues are shifting responsibility to you, since you haven't tested it. Are you sure?
Boss: yeah, yeah whatever...

*put product online*

*2 days later*

Angry call from boss, bugs have been found, tell him that he approved the state of the product and that the bugs will go on the to-do list...

Boss is extremely pissed, but recognized his mistake...

Now, the boss actually tests everything thoroughly at the moment we tell him to! No more bugs, complaints, and I got a raise!

Designer: Need to file a bug, I'm not getting an option to login with FaceID

Me: Oh weird bug. Is it setup on the phone you are testing with?

Designer: yes, use it in all other apps

Me: Did you get an error during onboarding on the FaceID screen?

Designer: nope no error

Me: ..... hhhmm, can you show me your settings?

Me: ... eh, says you have FaceID disabled for this app ... did you click "No" to FaceID during onboarding?

Designer: Yes, to test edge cases

Me: ................ ok ........ if you setup the app and told it to not allow FaceID to login ......... you won't get the ability to use FaceID to login .......... like .... by design .... on purpose ...... cause .... you told it to do that

Designer: No no, it needs to have a setting on the login screen to allow me to turn that back on incase I forget my passcode

Me: the fuck it does. Yeah we can't have anything on the login page that says, without authorization, change my settings

*Deep breath*

Me: Remember we had this conversation previously, where you didn't want the user to create a passcode during onboarding as it was too much friction, and wanted to do FaceID only. With your backup plan being to allow the user to create a NEW passcode on the login screen if FaceID failed .... remember that discussion we had about security? ... and how its important? ... and that we like having any? Ok so its the same reason as that, just with a different setting this time

Designer: ... hhmm i'm not sure I like this

Me: ... tough luck then, not happening

Me: oh and btw, remember we had that other talk about reproduction steps for bugs? Like when the app crashed and you told me it was because its in light mode, and nothing else at all? So disabling FaceID, is very relevant info to the problem of "I can't login with FaceID", please tell me these things first

Dear children let's talk about how to ask a f***ing question.

You don't just go "I need help. I can't figure it out." We had trainings on this, I sat through 3 hours holding your hand to help you try and understand things.

And yet now we have scheduled another 3 hours to help you figure this out because you said you were having difficulty with it because you couldn't figure it out. How about instead of just saying you "Need help", you start by
1. Explaining what you are trying to accomplish
2. What specific issue are you facing? Is there an error message or something?
3. What have you already tried thus far that didn't work?

Instead of "I NEED HELP I CAN'T FIGURE IT OUT!" that is the sign of a lazy f****ing engineer, someone who doesn't want to think, who doesn't want to learn something new who wants to just coast by. Especially when this is going to become an increasingly important part of your job.

And of course you currently are still a whole job level above me because sitting around and keeping a chair warm for 10 years means you are a valuable contributor, instead of what you can actually DO!

This bugs me so much. So remember kids, when you need help, or need to ask a question, ASK IT THE RIGHT F****ING WAY!

My morning (RO = remote office):

Me: Your xxx implementation is very strange.
RO: Yes we are following a new example from experts in this field. See this link.

Me: Paragraph 1, use xxx class in these situations. Were not doing that.
RO: Yes we had problems with that, we decided to skip that.

Me: Paragraph 2, always use xxx when accessing data. Were not doing that.
RO: Yes that create many bugs, we skipped that.

Me: This section on debugging says to enable this flag while in development to allow the IDE to alert you to issues.
RO: Yes this causes the app to crash constantly. So we took it out.
Me: ... because its finding issues ... and telling you where the problem is, with an error message.

... your not following the experts at all.

RO: We are!, please read the link we provided.

... this will be discussed on my exit interview

Here's a true story about a "fight" between me and my project manager...

I've been working as a Frontend developer for nearly two years, managed to acquire a decent amount of knowledge, in some cases well above the rest of my coworkers, and one day I got into a bit of a disagreement with my project manager.

Basically he wanted me to copy/paste some feature from another project (needless to say, that... "thing" has more bugs than an ant farm), and against his orders I started doing that feature from scratch, to build a solid foundation from the very start.
I had a lengthy deadline to deliver that feature, they were expecting me to take some time to fix some of the bugs as well, but my idea was to make it bug-free from the moment the feature was released. Both my method and the one I should be copying worked the exact same, but mine was superior in every way, had no bugs, was scalable and upgradeable with little effort, there was no reason not to accept it.

We use scrum as our work methodology, so we have daily meetings. In one of those, the project manager asked me how was the progress on that new feature, and I told him I was just polishing up the code and integrating it with the rest of the project, to make sure everything was working properly. I still had a full day left before the deadline set for that feature, and I was expecting to take about half an hour to finish up a couple lines of code and test everything, no issues so far...

But then he exploded, and demanded to know why wasn't I copying the code from the other project, to which I answered "because this way things will work better".
Right after he said that the feature was working on the other project, copying and pasting it should take a few minutes to do and maybe a couple of extra hours to fix any issues that might have appeared...
The problem here is, the other project was made by trainees, I honestly can't navigate through 3 pages without bumping into an average of 2 errors per page, I was placed into this new project because they know I do quality code, and they wanted this project to be properly made, unlike the previous one, so I was baffled when he said that he preferred me to copy code instead of doing "good" code...
My next reply was "just because something has been made and is working that doesn't mean that it has been properly made nor will work as it should, I could save a few hours copying code (except I wouldn't save any, it would take me more time to adapt the code than to do it from scratch) but then I'll be wasting weeks of work because of new bugs that will be reported over time, because trust me, they will appear... "

I told him this in a very calm manner, but everybody in the meeting room paused and started staring at me, not many dare challenge that specific project manager, and I had just done that...
After a few seconds of silence the PM finally said... "look, if you manage to finish your task inside the set deadline I'll forget we ever had this conversation, but I'll leave a note on my book, just in case..."

I finished that task in about 30 mins, as expected, still had 7 hours till deadline, and I completely forgot about that feature until now because it has never given any issues whatsoever, and is now being used for other projects as well.

It was one of my proudest/rage inducing moments in this project, and honestly, I think I have hit my PM with a very big white glove because some weeks after this event the CEO himself came to the whole team to congratulate us on the outstanding work being made so far, in a project that acted against the PM's orders 90% of the time.

My code review nightmare part 3

Performed a review on/against a workplace 'nemesis'. I didn't follow the department standards document (cause I could care less about spacing, sorted usings, etc) and identified over 80 bugs, logic errors, n+1 patterns, memory leaks (yes, even in .net devs can cause em'), and general bad behavior (ex.'eating' exceptions that should be handled or at least logged)

Because 'Jeff' was considered a golden child (that's another long TL;DR), his boss and others took a major offense and demanded I justify my review, item by item.

About 2 hours into the meeting, our department mgr realized embarrassing Jeff any further wasn't doing anyone any good and decided to take matters into his own hands. Thinking 'well, its about time he did his job', I go back to my desk. About an hour later..
Mgr: "I need you in the conference room, RIGHT NOW!"
<oh crap>
Mgr: "I spoke to Jeff and I think I know what the problem is. Did you ever train him on any of the problems you identified in the review?"
Me: "Um, no. Why would I?"
Mgr: "Ha!..I was right. So lets agree the problems are partially your fault, OK?"
Me: "Finding the bugs in his code is somehow my fault?"
Mgr: "Yes! For example, the n+1 problem in using the WCF service, you never trained him on how to use the service. You wrote the service, correct?"
Me: "Yes, but it's not my job to teach him how to write C#. I documented the process and have examples in the document to avoid n+1. All he had to do was copy/paste."
Mgr: "But you never sat with Jeff and talked to him like a human being? You sit over there in your silo and are oblivious to the problems you cause. This ends today!"
Me: "What the...I have no idea what you are talking about. What in the world did Jeff tell you?"
Mgr: "He told me enough and I'm putting an end to it. I want a compressive training class developed on how to use your service. I'll give you a month to get your act together and properly train these developers."

3 days later, I submit the power-point presentation and accompanying docs. It was only one WCF with a handful of methods. Mgr approved the training, etc..etc. execute the 'training', and Jeff submits a code review a couple of weeks later. From over 80 issues to around 50. The poop hits the fan again.

Mgr: "What's your problem? When are you going to take your responsibility seriously?"
Me: "Its pretty clear I don't have the problem. All the review items were also verified by other devs. Its not me trying to be an asshole."
Mgr: "Enough with the excuses. If you think you can do a better job *you* make the code changes and submit them for Jeff for review. No More Excuses!"

Couple of days later, I make the changes, submit them for review, and Jeff really couldn't say too much other than "I don't see this as an improvement"

TL;DR, I had been tracking the errors generated by the site due to the bugs prior to my changes. After deployment, # of errors went from thousands per hour to maybe hundreds per day (that's another story) and the site saw significant performance increases, fewer customer complaints, etc..etc.

At a company event, the department VP hands out special recognition awards:

VP: "This award is especially well earned. Not only does this individual exemplify the company's focus on teamwork, he also went above and beyond the call of duty to serve our customers. Jeff, come on up and get this well deserved award."

8:50am aight alarm clock, give me 5 more minutes

8:55am ok lets round it to 9, wake me up then

9:00am aight enough. lets just sleep for 1 more minute since 9:00 is too round

9:43am fuck

9:44am ok its time to finally study for the upcoming college exam

9:45am nothing but a fresh day to start studying for college

9:46am eh i dont have a lot to study so I'll do it in 2pm, I'll code my project instead

2pm hold on 5 more minutes until i finish coding this feature and then I'll study

5pm where the fuck is this bug coming from

5:504pm goddamn i found it

6:36pm holy shit its already over 6pm, I'll study at night

7:42pm ok its night now, time to study but I'll do it when i fix all bugs

8:14pm ok bugs fixed, commit. lets study

8:15pm you know what, im way too tired and exhausted from this coding, I'll take a short 30 minute break and then I'll study

10:15pm ok im feeling fresh bois lets study now theres not too much

1:31am damn this movie was good

1:32am fuck i forgot to study, I'll do it tomorrow

2:10am *posts this rant*

Always the same story:

Marketing: hey I'm gonna do a demo to a customer. They were asking for feature XYZ. That's ready on thr staging server right? Do you think I could use the staging server for the demo?

Devs: well feature XYZ is not 100% done. Basically just feature X is done, and it still has a few bugs. The deadline ain't for another month, since we gotta finish ABC first. I guess you could use the staging, but it has a lot of bugs.

Marketing: perfect!

*after presentation*

Marketing: the staging had so many bugs! Why didn't you tell me?! It was so embarrassing showing it to new customers! Anyway, they loved the new feature. We need it to be ready ASAP.

Devs: What?! That's gonna mess up with our schedule. You know what? Fine, but feature ABC will have to wait another month.

Marketing: Well, it'd be ideal if we could do both...

Devs: Pay for more devs or dor extra hours.

Marketing: Just do XYZ. It's a pity that you'll have to push back ABC but it's fine, XYZ is more important.

(I might ask, if it was so important, why didn't you notice so in the meeting where we had decided that ABC would be prioritized?)

*tons of working hours later*

Devs: There, we finished XYZ.

Marketing: Yay! Wow, this month we'll have two major features done: ABC and XYZ!

Devs: No, ABC is not done yet.

Marketing: What? But the deadline was this week.

Devs: It was, but then you decided to prioritize XYZ and we said we had to push back ABC to get XYZ ready, and you agreed.

Marketing: Did we? Fine. But do it quick.

Marketing and their mood swings.

OMFG!! I just discover a fucking bug in a library used by thousand of people in scientific community!! 🤩🎉

Started when my program outputting strange result. I was in a huge fight with my supervisor about one of the function from the library. My hunch was telling me that this function is the source of the problem, but he insisted that no such bugs could exist in the library that has been used by thousands of people.

I couldn't reproduce the bug so I just stayed silent at that time,
But now, I finally got the bug showing. Yeah I am gonna shove it to his face next week.✊
I will also let the people who maintain the library know.
Feels so good being able to be a contributor PR to this famous library 😎

The downside is now I can't use this function, I have to implement by own function.

Today I found the reason for one of the stupidest bugs I had in like.. ever!

Me and a fellow student are currently porting the infoscreen of our university to HTML.
One of the functions of this screen is showing payed advertising and I was working on loading and displaying the images of our advertisment partners.

I had the whole system in place, and the images loaded.. but they wouldn't show. Upon inspection I saw they were displayed but with a size of 0x0 px.

I spend hours searching the web for javascript bugs, double checking my css file and everything you could imagine. I even asked my CS professor for help and he didn't find the cause for this strange issue I had.

..and then I saw it. A little note in Chromes inspector saying the image style would be set by my user-agent. Despite not trusting that information, I closely inspected my browser.

And then it dawned on me.. I would turn my adblocker off and lo and behold.. it worked!

I then, after celebrating my triumph, changed the tag of the img element from 'advert' to something else…

It's more than a story bear with me.
Open source world is big enough to scare a beginner like me, which happened when I started with my first contribution in the year 2015. So many platforms, lot of organisations, freaking images of coding languages, pull request, issues and bugs- these all were enough to freak me out.

The only thing which motivated me to stay and know about the open source technology was to develop my first program using python. I was in great difficulty as when I started writing my program I was stuck after almost every two to three stages of compilation, so I needed guidance. I started my search on Github by creating my repository, pushing my code and following developers. I was amazed to see such a good response from people around me, not only they helped me to debug and fix the issue but they also helped me to understand and build my program from a new perspective. Daily discussions and communication, new issue build up and solving them by the traditional way of GUI further motivated me to learn the Git using the command line tool.

I still remember the year I worked on a repo using the command line tool, it was amazing. Within months or few, the fear of open source tools, community, interaction all just flew away. With this rant I will like to suggest all the beginners and open source enthusiast to just step a foot ahead and ask openly to the world- "I need help" and believe me you will be showered with information and help from all the world.

Happy contribution.

We had a client visit our PH office to "hang out" and see the progress in this educational type game we were building for their private school (apparently, it's the one that Obama's kids went to).

Manager oversold the progress and actually guaranteed some features that we were still working on and estimated to finish in the next 3 sprints (2 week intervals).

Client was due to be in the office in 2 days.

PM pushes back and says we need to manage client expectations properly.

CEO got wind and sat the dev team down. Dev lead, two seniors, and junior me. He sat us down and asked us what we think.

Lead says we can do it.

Now to be fair, I know this guy to be very competent and an INCREDIBLE programmer. He is the person I consider to be the first real mentor I ever had but I really thought we were fucked here.

Next day and half was hell--for me, at least and I really couldn't see how this was all possible.

But then the fucker came through. This beautiful, majestic meganerd and the two other guys shat out 6 weeks of code in ~30 hours.

And the crazy part was it was all working. Bugs were caught in the next few days for sure, but the demo went flawlessly.

I never doubted this guy again.

Years later, I'd meet up with him and would talk fondly about those days and all he could say was "I don't really remember". He remembers the project and that we had a demo but he couldn't remember anything around those days.

Two of the most stressful days of my life and to him it was a fucking Wednesday. What a fucking champ.

In my current work, I have two systems to work on (let's name em Systems A and B). Both basically do the same thing; both allow users to book facilities available to them.

System A is already in production. My job is to fix any bugs that come up on said system. System B is an improved version that they wanted me to develop. This would follow a different framework etc. I am already halfway through this system.

Now, here's the fucked up part. The code for system A is a massive clusterfuck. It has unused commented code dated back to ancient times where men had the brain of an ape.

And don't get me started on the fucking logic. One part of the code was to retrieve and display the timeslots available for a chosen facility. The code to do that alone takes up 500++ fucking lines, filled with ajax commands, html manipulation and commented, unused codes..AND THAT'S JUST THE FRONTEND!

The fucking backend was not a problem of smelly code anymore. Nope. It was like a programmer had code diarrhea and shat his backend code all over the project. If I had a pin board, I would have made a crazy wall just to understand what some fucknut was trying to achieve.

Anyway, my supervisor told me to fix some bugs on System A. Knowing how the code was, I told her that I could refactor the code. Since I've already achieved that function on System B, with a shorter and cleaner code, I could just copy that and use on System A. But nope. She SPECIFICALLY told me to just "do whatever to fix the bugs. I don't want to waste time on System A." Okay. Makes sense to me. Whatever. I didn't wanna fuck my head up looking through that mess of a cesspool. So, I came up with a few hacks, not thinking of clean code and fixed whatever bugs there was. I then just pushed to the repo (after testing of course).

This bloody morning, supervisor came in and gave me more bugs to fix. When I thought she was done, she said "Hey. I saw the fix you made to the system. The bugs are fixed but the retrieval of the timeslots is now pretty slow. Could you see what is the problem?"

Slow.. She said that it was slow. And asked if I could fix it. I already told her what the problem was and she did not want me to waste time on it. But she wants me to fix it. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG IN HER BLOODY HEAD! I SWEAR TO GOD... UGHHHHH I swear I was already waterboarding her in my head. YOU WANT FAST?? How bout fucking allowing me to refactor the code?? Fucking shit head. I think I should take up yoga.

Security rant ahead - you have been warned.
It never fails to amuse and irritate me that, despite being in the 2019 supposed information age, people still don't understand or care about their security.
I've travelled to a lot of ports and a lot of countries, but, at EVERY port, without fail, there will be at least one wifi that:
- Has default name/password that has been cracked already (Thomson/SpeedTouch/Netfaster etc)
- Has a phone number as password (reduces crack time to 15-30 mins)
- Someone, to this day, has plain old WEP
I am not talking about cafeteria/store wifi but home networks. WTF people?! I can check my email (through VPN, of course) but it still bugs me. I have relented to try and snoop around the network - I can get carried away, which is bad. Still...
The speed is great though :P

Just solved two huge bugs in a private project without using Stack Overflow... Since when am I even able to do this? What happened to me?

!drunk (yet)

It's whiskey and code tonight!
(Whiskey because I couldn't get to my rum. annoyed face.)

Why? Because rum is so much better. duh.

More seriously: My boss has thrown me every single one his current tasks and is refusing to answer simple questions about them, such as "oh, so you already know about this bug; what's the cause?" or "how do i test this once i've fixed it?" or "where the fuck are you?"

and I'm also getting lots of bugs from other people. They're all basically categorized "urgent, please fix immediately" but should instead be categorized "super-boring and not-at-all-important, and should get fixed on the off chance you happen to remember it next year". That's the best category of bug.

I just gave up on fixing a Rails pluralize bug which fits into the aforementioned category quite nicely. It's returning "2x round of golves" -- which is hilarious and I might leave it in just for the amusement. But now it's back to fighting with ActionCable! Everything has been getting in the way of me finishing that. I'm about to start biting.

Speaking of ActionCable, it turns out my code wasn't wrong after all (have I said that yet?). Since the official documentation and examples suck, I've been digging through the (generated) javascript source and working my way backwards to learn how to use it. I cleaned up my code a little, but it was still correct. The reason nothing is working correctly is that API Guy gave me broken code. ...Again! Go figure. So I'll be rewriting that today. or tomorrow. (Whiskey, remember?)

I also have some lovely netcode to debug and fix. So totally not looking forward to that. The responses are less bloody reliable than my boss's code ffs. *grumble grumble*

Allright, I'm pissed.

Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.

Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *

-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.

> Shit, Regret

Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.

> Big shit

Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"

Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.

> Fuck

* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *

* Feels save *

Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *

> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)

> Nope

* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"

> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"

* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)

My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...

Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).

Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.

* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *

For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed

> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)

"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app

> FML

* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *

> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)

UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());

C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.

Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe

I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!

Wish me luck for today!

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

My code review nightmare part 2

Team responsible for code 'quality' dictated in their 18+ page coding standard document that all the references in the 'using' block be sorted alphabetically. Easy enough in Visual Studio with the right-click -> 'Remove and Sort Usings', so I thought.

Called into a conference room with other devs and the area manager (because 'Toby' needed an audience) focusing on my lack of code quality and not adhering to the coding standard.

The numerous files in question were unit tests files

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
<the rest of the usings>

T: "As you can see, none of these files' usings are in alphabetical order"
Me: "Um, I think they are. M comes before S"
T: "The standards clearly dictate system level references are to be sorted first."
Mgr: "Yes, why didn't you sort before checking this code in? T couldn't have made the standards any easier to follow. All you had to do is right-click and sort."
Me: "I did. M comes before S."
T: "No You Didn't! That is not a system reference!"
Me: "I disagree. MSTest references are considered a system level reference, but whatever, I'll move that one line if it upsets you that much."
Mgr: "OK smartass, that's enough disrespect. Just follow the fucking standard."
T: "And learn to sort. It's easy. You should have learned that in college"
<Mgr and T have a laugh>
Me: "Are all your unit tests up to standard? I mean, are the usings sorted correctly?"
T:"Um..well..of course they are!"
Me: "Lets take a look."

I had no idea, a sorted usings seems like a detail no one cares about that much and something people do when bored. I navigate to project I knew T was working on and found nearly all the file's usings weren't sorted. I pick on one..

using NUnit;
using Microsoft.Something.Other;
using System;
<the rest of the usings>

Me: "These aren't sorted..."
T: "Uh..um...hey...this file is sorted. N comes before M!"
Me: "Say that again. A little louder please."
Mgr: "NUnit is a system level nuget package. It's fine. We're not wasting time fixing some bug in how Visual Studio sorts"
Me: "Bug? What?..wait...and having me update 10 or so files isn't a waste of time?"
Mgr: "No! Coding standards are never a waste of time! We're done here. This meeting is to review your code and not T's. Fix your bugs and re-submit the code for review..today!"

So a good friend of mine calls me up on Friday night, and he tells me about his close friend abroad who messed up and, without going into details, needs me to do his C# project for a course. The deadline was on Monday. I said I couldn't promise anything, but send me the requirments and I'll look into it.

Now, the pay was good and I felt that the guy's reasons were valid (and that the prof was being a dick), also the project was doable in a day and a half, so I said ok. I spent my entire Saturday working on it till I had most of it done: I just needed to refine the code and do the report.

I sent the app to him so that he can check it out, to which he responds by freaking out and explaining that he has missed most of the classes and has a barely passing average (huh maybe the prof isn't so much of a dick). If I get him a high grade, the gig will be up and his prof will fail him. He wants a 60-70/100, no more.

Feeling obliged by our agreement, I spent my Sunday complicating trivial code, breaking standards, and adding minor bugs. Had I know this was what it was going to lead to, I would have never accepted.

It's just so much harder to break good code than to write it.

This bugs me every time! WTF is widows???

If I died, I would have one regret.

I once worked in a code base whose messiness would make an oil spill in the fucking pacific ocean look like spilled milk on the floor in comparison.

Naturally, it had bugs. Oh BOY did it have bugs. Most of them were taken care of well enough. Or about as well as anyone insane enough to work in that code could.

There was just this one bug, which I still (un)fondly call "my bug of 2 years". It. Just. Didn't. Make. Sense.

It was written in JavaScript. Naturally. Which by itself, is the metaphorical programming language equivalent of a pile of horse manure. But this bug. It was the guano icing on top of the horse manure cake which is JavaScript.

I LITERALLY spent 2 years trying to find a solution. I woke up at night, thinking of explanations. I had dreams about fixing the damn thing. And I never did.

On the day I left the job, I had to pass it on to a friend (who hasn't solved the fucker yet either).

I hated that bug with all my heart. But..

Now that I think back, all the books I read, all the docs that I scoured, every non working fix I coded and every failed efforts I made on it, eventually made me a better programmer.

So cherish your bugs and issues. Sometimes, they come, not to hurt you, but to help you grow (unless you use JS, those bugs just wanna fuck you).

PM: Ok Android, i've reviewed the latest build, you are good to release. Waiting on iOS's build to test.

Me: ... are we not holding all builds until we hear back from backend about that bug?, as we likely have to change something on our side?

PM: Which bug?

Me: ... the only one we discussed yesterday in the team meeting.

PM: How many customers is it affecting?

Me: that we know of, one ... the CEO of our company

PM: oh that one, yeah were not doing that anymore.

Me: WHAT? i've been waiting all day / night to hear back. Why are we not doing this?

PM: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... Everything is too messy at the minute anyway, the release plan is changing every day. Need to keep it back in line.

Me: ... the plan has changed exactly once. We had a plan at the start of last week for the last release, we changed it YESTERDAY to include 2 critical bug fixes. The only issue with the plan changing is nobody telling us these aren't bugs anymore

PM: We can discuss tomorrow in the team meeting.

CEO: oh hey guys, yeah we pulled that bug fix. Its not really a bug, more like a missing feature. No way it will get done before xmas. Going to live with the way it works for now and fix it properly next year.

Me: Ok, fair enough, but we really need to be told these decisions.

CEO: sure, sorry, didn't think anyone was blocked by this. What was the blocker?

Me: ..... you asked me yesterday to get this bug fix in the build ... you asked for the final build to be made today so we can go through the app store review. As we all discussed yesterday, today is kind of the last day we can really do this.

CEO: ok, its late, we can discuss this tomorrow in the team meeting.

Me: ..... ..... ..... ..... sure

Old boss story. This guy was nice but a terrible boss. Also relevant, he has a background in IT so should know better.

Him: So when you wanna check a password is correct you just unhash it in the database?
Me: *facepalm*

Me: Hey we should be doing unit and integration testing at a minimum to lower bugs.
Him: We don't need those, we're not a bank. If a problem comes up we just fix it and push to production.
(A while later)
Him(in email): Why do we keep getting bugs reported. Don't you devs test your code.

I was mildly annoyed at that one.

Him: We're always over budget on projects, how can we fix this.
Me: What if we increase our quotes.(technically there are other ways as well but not really possible at that time)
Him: We can't do that, clients won't want to pay.

Me: *finishing off my handover as I'm leaving for a new job*
Him: Wow you do a lot of work

Me: Requirements changed a lot since we first started. If we re-write a few sections of the app we can drastically reduce bugs, crashes, improve debug-ability etc.

PM: sure let me push back this unnecessary feature and you can do that next.

*woke up*

*cried at the thought of how amazing life would be*

>me on first day as temporary scrum master
>gets invited to 'optional' scrum master meeting
>meeting is with all SMs globally
>at 6PM local time
>POs also joining because why
>first topic is discussing a defect
>a PO has stroke of genoius
>"Our code base would be much easier to maintain if it didn't have bugs!"
>this gonna be a long meeting

Me at midnight: let's release a demo build

Me at 1 am: why are there so many bugs? Why won't it compile.

Me at 2 am: omg finally compiled. Runs it, buttons don't work. Closes it, reopens it. Buttons work.

Me at 3 am: let's write apologetic posts for the bugs, but post the version anyway

Me at 4 am: why do I advertise in so many places

Me at 5 am: let's update the patreon reward tiers

Me at 5:30 am: nah fuck this, going to bed.

Mom at 9 am: wake the hell up we need you to dig out a hill and build a stone wall around one side of the house.

Me: omg wtf why.

Me at 2:30 pm: why the hell are we doing this, I have so many bugs to patch and everyone knows they are there because I told them all!

Recruiter:

... the bank purchased a 3rd party tool and hired a 3rd party development team to add some features to the tool. That external team hired their own 3rd party team, and now there are 400+ bugs in the system. Would you like to work as a test-automation lead on this project?

Me: Fuuuucck no.

After completing my sprint and some lingering stuff in the backlog

Me: Hey, there's this tiny feature people have really requested, I'll go build it since I got nothing else to do at the moment. It'll only take like 1h

PO: Hmm ok. Don't work on that yet, we need to check with business people and agree on the user stories and bla bla bla

Me: Ok, well there's these bugs I can take care of then, I'll get them fixed, won't be long.

PO: Hmmm, we need to measure the impact first. Let me get back to you on that a bit later

Me: Meh, oh. I'll refactor this bad component meanwhile then.

PO: Have you created a story for that in JIRA? Create the story first and then we'll groom it and take it in when we've time

Me in my head: Dafuq! Im trying to work on your fucking project but you keep throwing all that business bueraucracy shit at me. What am I supposed to do then? Sip coffee in the kitchen and talk about the other fucking billion failed "new business opportunities" with my peers? Fuck this circle jerk of a billion management people all trying to make themselves important. Nothing. Ever. Gets. Fucking. Done!!!

Me: Ah right, I'll do that *proceeds to the water cooler*

N: Me
M: Mother

M: Can you help me? I can't update pages.

N: Sure *Checks problem* it looks like you installed it with the old apple account, you just need to reinstall it using your new one.

M: What about all my pages documents on icloud?

N: *Compares documents on mac to her other Apple devices that never had the old account* See? The documents would have to be on the new account.

M: Are you sure? I don't want to lose any documents.

N: I know, don't worry their on your new iCloud.

M: *Calls apple support*

N: *Talks to apple support who after an hour of chatting to her through me because I translate customer support to mother confirms what I was telling her*

N: Reinstalls pages and everything is fine.

I was originally going to make a post talking a bit about how people love to second guess anything I say but thought this story provides a decent example. When it's something of a personal nature or someone is asking for my opinion in genral then it's perfectly reasonable to ask multiple people. It doesn't bother me when someone asks for my help, it bugs the shit out of me when someone asks for my help and then doubts everything I say in this case even after providing some evidence to back up my claim and wasting a solid hour. If you ask for my help your trusting that I have the knowledge necessary to assist, if I don't know for certain I'll try googling the problem but even in that case calling support doesn't bother me because I clearly don't know how to help.

P.S. This was my first story, how did I do?

*In the final weeks of development with a project on a short timeline because the client "needs it".*

Client: "We've hired a consultant we want you to work with."

Me: "Okay, can we push this to after the delivery?"

Client: "Of course"

Wake up to an email from the consultant with a list of scripts he just ran on the production database server for the currently live app.

Get follow-up emails about bugs and app crashes from the client.

My rage is so hot it can keep warm an Eskimo tribe over the winter season.

Okay so this happened ages ago (nearly five years) but this suddenly came to my mind again.

It was in the first year of my study (currently in my 5th and last year).

I was experimenting around with php and mysql during some free hours. All the insert,delete and so on statements worked perfectly find except for one update statement. Started to debug of course and after a little while of no results I was like "oh yeah right, something like logs exists of course". Looked in the logs but nothing. No matter how I altered my code (rewrote it numerous times for some 'clean starts') it just would not run the update statement.

Alright, time for some class mate help. After multiple hours of debugging with a few classmates, there was still no result at all.

Time to bring in one or more teachers. After hours of debugging, still no result even with the help of a few good teachers.

Decided to give it a rest for that day.

Two weeks later it still was not updating anything/working and I finally gave up.

Till today, I still have no clue what went wrong and it still bugs me from time to time :/

Last week, the team lead told me that he can't merge because my code has code smells and going forward, can't have that. We use Sonar and well the way to "fix it" according to him is to mark the line using //NOSONAR.

Most of the issues are minor like Unused imports and for me incomplete TODOs.

And before the "verbal" rule was only need to fix Major + issues. And well the reason I use TODOs is to mark code that probably needs changing in the future. I know there's going to be some feature that these lines have to be changed. But the requirements are fully defined yet from business.

But I sort of blew up on him. YOU WANT TO ENFORCE ZERO CODE SMELLS NOW?!?!?! AND THESE MINOR ISSUES? MARK THEM WITH NOSONAR?

HERE'S WHAT I THINK FOR THE LAST X YEARS... THE CODE DESIGN IS SHIT, MINOR CODE SMELLS AND MANUALLY MARKING THE ONES U NEED TO KEEP... ARE THE LEAST OF OUR PROBLEMS...

THE OTHER PROBLEMS I'VE MENTIONED BEFORE EVER. MOS YEAR BUT YOU DIMWITS NEVER LISTEN.

YOU THINK MY TODOS ARE BAD... 90% OF THE CODE AND FEATURES (THE ONES NOT DONE BY ME) LOOK AND SMELL LIKE MONKEY SHIT. UNDOCUMENTED, MESSY, FULL OF BUGS.

AND GUESS WHAT? NEW FEATURE, SOME DEV FORGETS TO CHANGE SOME COMPONENT THAT DEPENDS ON IT. WOULDN'T IT BE GREATE IF THERE WERE BOOKMARKS... O WAIT...

i just was catching up on comics again and saw this one... with triggered my memory and this rant... My first thought was to forward it to him...

Me: * Browses devRant for about 10 minutes *

Phone: 0 notifications

Me: * Puts phone in pocket *

Phone: * seizures in pocket *

Phone: 3 new Jira issues, 9 Sentry warnings about critical bugs, 2 emails from my boss, roughly 60 Whatsapp messages and 3 new notifs on Slack

Why does this happen so often :/

So I've got this raspberry pi 3 and no inspiration what to use it for.. and it bugs me, just sitting there taunting me: -"you aren't very creative are you?" So.. ideas and suggestions?

I was pressued to shift the blame.

We received an angry email from a customer that some of their data had disappeared. The boss assigns me to this task. This feature is relatively new and we've found some bugs in the past in here. I go through request logs, search the database, run some diagnostics, etc. for about 5 hours and I cannot find the problem. I focus on the bugs that we've had before but they don't seem to be the problem.

I tell the boss "sorry but I checked XYZ and I can't find the problem. I'm out of ideas." But the boss wanted answers by the end of the day. They did not want to admit to the client that we couldn't figure out what's wrong.

By now I was more pressured to find an answer, find something or someone to blame it on, not exactly to find the real solution. So I made up some BS:

"Sometimes, in HTML forms, the number inputs allow you to change the number by scrolling. We have some long forms where the user has to scroll. Perhaps the focus remained on the number input, so when they scrolled down they accidentally changed the number they meant to input."

The boss was happy with that. We explained this to the customer, and there's now a ticket to change type="number" to type="text" in our HTML forms and to validate it in th backend.

A week later another customer shows us a different error. This one is more clear because it had a stack trace, but I realise that this error is what caused our last error. It was pretty obscure, mind you, the unit tests didn't detect it.

I didn't tell the boss that they were connected tho.

With two angry clients in two weeks, I finally convinced the boss to give us more time to write more unit tests with full coverage.

On reccomendation of @chabad360 I made this its own rant.

I switched from marketing to CS (complete with a three year degree, no Bootcamp). I still went to interviews as you'd expect a marketing man to go; in a suit. Commence the weirdest interview.

$I: interviewer
$M: Me

I: "You're not the typical engineer. Can you talk to real engineers?"

M: "could you elaborate"

I:"you're dressed in a suit. That leads me to think you're a MS user. Do you think you could talk to real, ie. Linux using engineers?"

M: " well, I haven't used windows in about a year soo..

I: "Mac isn't Linux."

M: "I'm aware. I've switched to Ubuntu so I could use KVM-QEMU android emulator with GPU pass through to train Deep Convolution Networks on mobile devices. Also had to compile Google's internal build tool because it had bugs I had to fix so I could compile the APK."

I: "ah, Ubuntu eh? **Insert Smirk** How about a follow-up?"

M: "no, I'm switching to Gentoo this week and would like to talk to real engineers about that."

I thanked him for the coffee and left.

So we ordered a piece of software from external software house becouse I was low on time and we needed it asap.

So. Long story short, their software was bugged as hell, they deny all the bugs and they have their BDD that they done and anything we say about it like "feature XYZ is broken on firefox" they will deny it "becouse it wasn't on BDD" or "let's get on call" (in which +- 6-7 people participate from their side and we of course have to pay them for this...)

So they fixed like 20% of bugs (mostly trivials/minors) Application is fairly small scope. You have integration with like 3 endpoints on arbitary API, user registration/login, few things to do in database (mainly math running from cron).

They done it in ASP so I don't know the language and enviroment so can't just fix it myself.

2 days ago (monday) they annoyed me to point where I just started to break things. For starters I found that every numeric input is vunrable to integer overflow (which is blocker). I figured most of fields are purefect opportunity to XSS (but I didn't bother to do JS... anything but not JS...). I figured I can embed into my name/surname/phone (none validated) anything in HTML...

So for now we have around 25 bugs, around 15 of them are blockers.

They figured it's somehow our fault that it's bugged and decided to do demo with us to show off how perfectly it works. I'm happy to break their demos. I figured I will register bunch users that have name - image with fixed/absolute position top:0;left:0 width/height 100% - this will effectively brick admin panel

Also I figured I can do some addotional sounds in background becouse why not. And I just dont know what to put in. It links to my server for now so I can freely change content of bricked admin panel.

I have curl's ready to execute in case they reset database.

I can put in GIFs or heck, even videos, dosen't really matter. Framework escapes some things for them so at least that. But audio/image/video works.

Now I have 2 questions:
- what image + audio combo will work the best (of course we need to keep it civil). Im thinking finding some meme with bugs or maybe nuclear logo image with some siren sound
- am I evil person?

Edit:

I havent stated this clearly:

"There is no BDD that describes that if user inserts malicious input server should deny it" - that's almost literally what we get from them....

So I dont know if this has been brought here already but I was busy lately with an oncoming amount of users of my site... and they found a few bugs, anyway me sucking aside:
To my fellow American DevRant users, how do you guys feel when you are about to get fucked by the posibility of get Net Neutrality in your country? Man what is going there sure is a tragicomedy, uh?

Finally after one year I understood how to carry out my job. I should do exactly NOTHING. I stopped completely organizing the team, solving bugs, helping the team developing and solving problems, explore and try stupid things said by CEO, PM and consultants.
I stopped for 2 months now and nothing happened.
I work remotely, nobody knows if I'm working or not, because nobody cares really about priorities, bugs, customers or products development.

I gain 10K$ (ten thousand) per month.

I attend skype meeting once per week or less. I say yes to everything, nobody gives a shit to what I say, even if they consider me the technical director. Actually in the meetings I only take care of being considered the technical director.
I achieved the mythical 4 hours working week.

I keep skype open in all my devices in order to answer promptly in case of problem, wherever I'm am, that's the most important thing right now.

I attended some meeting from the toilet or from the bedroom.

It was hard. To understand that the board is only after the next funding and not looking to develop a real product. It's hard to pretend helping people while thinking inside you "fuck you".
You have to let go the "guilt": if you can't login, I KNOW that is my fault, that there is a bug, that is possible to solve it, that resources and planning are needed etc. That's guilt. Just let go and say "next release" and never include it in the next release.
In this way I discovered that some users are paying the application even if they can't login.

The company is not going to disappear in the next 5 years. On the contrary, it's going to receive more money.

So the only "bad" thing is, what will I write in my CV in 5 years?

I finaly managed to make a dark mode on slack desktop app! Still has some bugs (like scrollbar being white) but works well enough for me. If anyone is interested tell me in the comments 🙂

How i did it (Linux paths but should be the same process for Windows):

You can execute scripts in /usr/lib/slack/resources/app.asar.unpacked/src/static/index.js

Using that i figgured out that slack desktop is basically an actual webview to their website and some os hooks.

To edit the contents of the webview you can call `document.getElementsByClassName('WebViewContext')[0].executeJavaScript("alert(1)")`

Then i just simply packaged up some custom css to be loaded with JS.

Quite simple actually.

Using this method you can create all kinds of plugins for slack, so go wild!

boss: we should map all the possible ways to do things in the system so we can test them and make sure we fix the bugs.

Me: yeah, well, that is exactly what automated tests are for, every time we find a non-mapped way that breaks this we make a test out of it and fix, this ways we end up mapping the majority of ways.

Boss: yeah,yeah ... Let's sit down latter and map everything on a document.

I bet my ass we are never gonna have tests as a part of our workflow.

I just remember this short story:

When I was about 7 or 8 (around 1994), my dad had a computer at his office with MSDOS.

There I'd type "carmen.exe" and it would start "Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?" or "pool.exe" would run a 2D Pool game I don't remember the exact name.

And yet, there was a "dolphin.exe" that I always thought it was a game but I never got it running. Obviously I don't remember what was the exact issue but to this day, 20+ years later it still bugs me to know what was this "dolphin.exe" program.

Why management has such orgasmic attachment to numbers?

Example 1.
Mngr: split this into tasks
Me: done
Mngr: now estimate these tasks
Me: can't. Team is new and codebase is unknown. Any estimations would be subjected to huge error and I will not commit to anything if I'm not at least partially sure.
Mngr: but we need some timeline
Me: so give it yourself. I'm not doing it

Example 2.
Mngr: we need to measure how your knowledge sharing sessions impacts our organisation
Me: how?
Mngr: e.g. amount of bugs lessen in next quarter
Me: bugs can go up and down because of hundred other reasons. Also, knowledge sharing is just to inspire people, it's up to them if they keep educating and growing. Me sharing knowledge 1h per week, I can't guarantee they will understand and apply this new knowledge.
Mngr: but we need to measure it somehow, otherwise it is useless.
Me: <speechless facepalm frustrated>

@Apple iPadOS an iOS teams: you puZies.

You release one buggy iOS / iPadOS after another, each piling on features and bugs, without fixing crowd documented long standing defects.

But what really pisses me off is when you don't have the balls to own up to your mistakes. This is at least the 3rd time you have re-released an iOS / iPadOS update under the same version number. This time it is 14.5.1

I have iPadOS 14.5.1 installed and the iPad is now telling me I need to update to 14.5.1. Just own up to it, you released buggy shit and you need to release another bug fix days after... call it 14.5.2. Call it like it is and we respect you. Try to hide it and you lose our respect, you pussies.

If Microsoft did one thing right, they defined the release sequencing:
X.Y.Z

Changing X means rewrite the manual it is so new and improved (🖕🏻 you Adobe and FileMaker)

Changing Y means it is an update with more features than bug fixes but not a generational change that constitutes a rewrite of anything (🖕🏻 you macOS team for bastardizing with 10.X.Y)

Changing Z means you fixed your stuff, we respect you for owning up to your mistakes.

Man-up Apple, grow some balls and stop confusing people with trying to cover up your screw ups. It's all about the Z.

I spent the last 3 months trying to hire new developers for my team. I found someone experienced who is great and a graduate, who is, well, a graduate.

For some reason he thinks he knows everything about our framework he has never used and seems to think he knows how everything works in our codebase which he has never seen.

That’s fine. I’ve had my share of cocky developers.

But what confuses me is that when I ask him what critical bugs are left, he reels off two significant ones. I ask what it will take to fix it. Of course he says he knows how to fix it. So I say great. Then fix it and let’s move on to a more fun part of our project.

Suddenly he didn’t know where he problem was and so I told him he had to investigate and come back with something concrete.

It’s just frustrating managing this developer who is deceitful.

Happened at work a few months ago (I'm new to devRant, that's why I post this now):
"I have bugs!" - "Then fix them..." - "No, come here and have a look, I have bugs!"
He literally had a bunch of very small insects inside of his monitor, don't ask me how they got there.

> be me
> work on a nice project with friends: A, B and C
> joined in a bit later, but before any real progress was made + we scrap the existing code, because it was Python2 or something
> decide on a framework
> A wants to create one himself, instead of using an existing one
> we fight for a little, but let A do his thing
> 2 months later
> been waiting the whole time
> +1000 lines on github, but still not finished
> "Wouldn't it be better if we would use the normal framework?"
> "No, mine is hand-crafted for that task"
> "But it is full of bugs"
> "If you find one major bug, we'll ditch my framework"
> finds major bug
> "That's fixed, just give me a min-"
> finds another bug
> "Thats just because you don't know how to use the framework"

- Documentation inside ONE gigantic README
- Library is missing the core features we needed/those which are implemented don't work
- Both B and C were on my side from the beginning (in that we should use "Already Existing Fully Documented Popular And tested Framework Which Does Everything We Need")
> "But i dont understand this framework so explain it to me"
> send him a few code examples + a tutorial??? (dont remember if i actually sent im the tutorial before i left)
> "explain it to me, i can't understand it"
> I CANT UNDERSTAND YOUR FUCKING FRAMEWORK DUMBASS
> ragequitted the server+project

To this day i still don't know, which framework they are using..
Also that Python 2 code in the beginning was because A didnt know the difference and copied (yes by hand) the code from atom to github without testing anything.

My family is very supportive. My 2 aunts are working in technical fields, and at least 2 of my cousins are working in IT and one cousin is studying CS too. My dad works in IT and since I started my studies he always talks to me about his work, when he finds errors and bugs and rants about his colleagues :D He also helped me debug some code. My mom is supportive too, but sometimes when I mention to her that this and that is hard she goes: "Oh, what did you choose?" (Rhetorical question)
But all in all I'm happy. Reactions of "outsiders" are those which bother me sometimes. But that's a different story.

This new junior dev was going pretty well, learning pretty fast and working pretty fast from when I talked to them, but I wasn't seeing his changes up on GitHub.

Me: Hey have you finished *feature X*

Junior: Oh yeah a few days ago.

Me: Why aren't your changes up on GitHub?

Junior: Sorry, my bad, im not used to pushing stuff during the development since i was used to do all of my stuff on my own
(No kidding!)

Me: ok then push them

Junior: Emmm... I don't think I should... I kinda already started working on *feature Y* so it's full of bugs...

I don't wanna be mad at them they're pretty good at their stuff, and he's got some good comments on the performance of the program. But UUGGHH 😠
Rookie mistakes I guess

A discussion about writing tests for frontend applications.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

my boss asked me to join a xamarin project, there are 45 bugs on current sprint. the first thing i saw is this code, no wonder there are so many bugs 😭

A woman has bugs in her home, she wants to find a bug hunter to get rid of them. She calls a man who does bug hunting, he comes to her house and says: "I am a bug hunter, you called me. Where's your laptop?"
Woman confused as she is asks the man: "Why do you need a laptop to hunt and get rid of the bugs?"

"Well how else am I going to debug those bloody programs you wrote?"

Note: I promise I made this up, if anyone else already posted this, I wasn't aware.

LPT: NEVER accept a freelance job without looking at the project's source first

Client: I have a project made by a company that is now abandoning it, I want you to fix some bugs

Me: Okay, can you:
1) Give me a build to test the current state of the game
2) Tell me what the bugs are
3) Show me the source
4) Tell me your budget

Client: *sends a list of 10 bugs* Here's the APK and to give you the project I'll need you to sign an NDA

Me: Sure...

*tests build*
*sees at least 20 bugs*
*still downloading source*
*bugs look quite easy to fix should be done under an hour*

Me: Okay, so, I can fix each bug for $10 and I can do 2 today

Client: Okay can you fix 8 bugs today for $40??

*sigh*

Me: No I cannot.

Client: okay then 2 today for $20 is fine, I want a refund if you can't fix them today

*sigh*

Me: Look dude, this isn't the first time I am doing this, aight? I'll fix the bugs today you can pay me after check they are done, savvy?

Client: okay

*source is downloaded*
*literal apes wrote the scripts, commented out code EVERYWHERE
Debug logs after every line printing every frame causing FPS drops, empty objects in the scene
multiple unused UI objects
everything is spaghetti*

*give up, after 2 hours of hell*
*tfw averted an order cancellation by not taking the order and telling client that they can pay me after I am done*

Attached is an image of a level object pool
It's an array with each element representing a level.
The numbers and "Final" are ids for objects in an object pool
The whole string is .Split(',') into an array (RIP MEMORY BTW) and then a loop goes through each element in the split array and instantiates the object from an object pool

This junior dev is killing me with all of the bugs in the code ... like did you even test it to see if it works fml

A coworker and me did together a "hackathon by choice" this week to finish a project. We did it only because we thought it would be cool and be able to finish the thing. Well it was surprisingly fun to stay awake 36 hours, coding all through, having a good flow. After that, our boss came and was very proud of our work and he was able to send it for inspection to the client. I stayed a bit longer to fix a few minor bugs, but after 42h I was finally in bed. 😁
Our boss gives us the following Monday off.
But I think on other projects, often deadlines take the fun out of it, if they are not estimated well... I mean you do great, high-professional work but in the end you feel bad, useless, slow and incompetent because of the pressure.

PM: You can cut corners it it's necessary.
Me: Thanks for giving me permission to move faster.
*But as you know, I wouldn't be in this position if you hadn't made us agree to such an unrealistic deadline.*
..
...
*after completion*
.
.
PM: There are bugs in the code.
ME: There are bugs, because you asked me to cut corners. *fu#k you* *wtf moment*

I work for a bank and every production release date it's a chaos... Like, for real, devs running to get their stories approved by the testing team and last minute scope changes that, if not made, would make the whole app fail (real shitty management as you can see).

Longstoryshort, a dev didn't finished one of his stories and create 7 major bugs with another... Today that was my breakfast, took me 4 hours and get it all done and approved... We didn't make the release tho, but I scored some major points with this.

Funny thing, tomorrow I'm telling my PM I'll leave the company for a better job, so that will be their breakfast.

So, I'm the only iOS developer in the company working on this stupid app which is never going to succeed because the client idea is just plain stupid. Anyway, 6 months developing this crap, countless iterations, trillions of so-called retard "features", and now that we are almost there to go into production my PM decides it's a great moment to document every aspect of what was done and asks me to do it. Now I have 3 documents to write and around 80 bugs to review before Friday. Stupid me for thinking he didn't waste 6 months doing absolutely nothing while I was working 12 hrs a day to meet deadlines.

Question everything!

Comments lie.. sometimes code does too.. Customers..they lie the most..and are sloppy..

Don't be like customers, don't be sloppy. If you were sloppy own it & don't lie about it!

Pick your fights (trying to fix vs rewrite the shit out of it)..you will know what to do more with experience..

RTFM & docs.. If things still unclear, ask before your dick gets stuck in a toaster!

Ask away, learn about the customers & how they use your product.. you'll be surprised how something intuitive to you might be a rocket science for them..meaning more room to fuck things up when using it..more ways you can adapt & prevent things..

Most of all, don't fuckin lie.. ever!!
If you lie on you're CV, we will find out.. If you fuck up something & lie about it, we will find out.. but it will cost us precious time when solving it from scratch.. People fuck up..that's a fact..how you go about it is what makes/breaks it for me. So don't ever fuckin lie to me!!

And don't be arogant.. if you complain about fixing bugs, this is not a job for you.. if you can't even fix the obvious ones you've put there in the first place..twice as bad..

So think before you code..what do you want to do, how you want to accomplish this, is it reusable, can it be extended, does it introduce new technology into the project, will it fuck up current setup.. once you have this shit figured out, code will write itself..

Did I mention already you're not to lie to me, ever?!

And don't try talking about me behind my back either..I've seen it backfire before, results were not good..

Monday morning: The last straw.

After talking about in a previous rant about how my client wants to fix bugs that keeps popping out after bug fix.

Today I discovered, that all C-levels, worked all Saturday to "fix my code" because it "didn't work" and we "needed bug fixes not pretty things".

The app version I was working on for the last week is gone. Without mentioning that their "CTO" wrote a fucking crappy code to disable features that I added, breaking the build step.

This shit is enough for me, I'm done!

So Microsoft, you tell me that there is a known bug, if you have Windows 10 with the newest update installed on a SSD and Apps running on another hard drive?! And this bugs causes random freezes of the whole PC from time to time?

WHAT THE FUCK?!

It is a common setup nowadays to have a SSD with windows 10 and software on other hard drives and you didn't care to check it before releasing the update? Which I HAVE to download and install?

FUCK YOU MICROSOFT!

Let me get this straight. I don't have a paid Apple Developer account so I can't report iOS 10 bugs?

Anybody want to report a bug for me that double clicking the home button no longer launches Apple Pay from the lock screen?

My worst Technology I've worked with is deffinatly the Facebook Graph API.

THIS AIDS INVESTED PIECE OF CUNTFLAPS IS FULL OF BUGS THAT THEY REFUSE TO SOLVE.

How such a multi-billion dollar business can produce such a retardedly incestious sucky fuck dick ass cunt broken API is beyond me.

FUCK!!!

These fucking imbecile devs left me a bunch of bugs in a 150k LOC legacy hell...
Too bad it took some 8 months for them to finally surface in prod. God damned...
Technically, this whole codebase is one giant abyss filled to the brim with bugs.

Is it just the novice in me that finds the Haskell community's misguided obsession over character count really annoying? Learn You a Haskell For Greater Good states

> Shorter code means less bugs

A lot of people and resources seem to share this opinion, but it's obviously false. Simpler code means less bugs, but look at this function which just means "apply this applicative to each element of a list"

> sequence :: (Applicative f) => [f a] -> f [a]
> sequence = foldr (liftA2 (:)) (pure [])

This isn't "less buggy", it's fucking madness. The same in JS, the king of unreadable languages, would be:

function sequence(seq, val, apply = (f, x) => f(x)) {
seq.map(f => apply(f, val))
}

Seriously, how can you design a strictly typed language that gets beaten by JS in readability?

Some years ago i attended to a summer school abroad. I instantly built a connecection with this one girl, we spend the whole week together, talking, sharing humor, deep conversations etc. We also won the prize for the best project together. I guess it looked like the beginning of a love story for the rest of the course. For me it didn't exactly, actually I didn't had much romantic feelings for her; she was the arrogant, manipulative type I thought I could handle a friend but never as girl friend. We shared some darkness so to say. But I really hoped for a new close friendship. Since she had a boyfriend back home i thought she most likely wanted just the same. Anyway I was a bit worried she might want more because she made me quite a lot of compliments and told me how she liked me.
And yes, she wanted more: Whenever we talked on the phone after the summer school or met (she lived in a city not far away from mine by coincidence) she begged me for help with coding. She had a well paid as extremely interesting PHD position with a topic between political science and computer science. Besides classical humanities methods her topic would require a lot of coding though. But she had zero, absolutely zero clue of programming, and, as it turned out, zero interesst. I told her from the beginning she would have to learn quite a lot or pay someone to code for her. It was far too much to do as a favour by a friends or such. And, since it was part of her fucking PHD it would have been cheating somehow of she didn't do it herself. But instead, she kept texting me if I could 'help to fix some bugs', sending me unrelated code fragments she copied from SO and not even tried to understand. So I told her to fuck off at one point. After all it was not that we have been friends for decades; we only knew each other for a couple of months an spent only one week together. So thats it.
But I still think of it from time to time and it makes me angry because it feels like she was only nice to me because she thought i am this nerd guy who falls instantly in love to a charming good looking girl and does everything for her. I did neither at all but indeed wanted to be friends with her, thats bad enough. It even makes me more more angry that she actually has this awesome PHD project about politics in the fucking digital world and think of programmers like this. And that she will succeed without understanding anything bacause in the end there would have been a dude who did all the work for her I bet.

Me: Ah, just have to finish this one small feature today and this whole massive update is done. Everyone will be off my back, things will calm down. Gonna be great.

Life: hey man, you know what I was thinking? It’s been a really long time since you had one of those vomiting bugs ... you know the gut wrenching, massive headache, can’t do anything but stare at the walls kind of flu’s?

Me: ...... eh I’m ok thanks.

Life: oh buddy you don’t understand ...... RUN!!!

Client : We want to develop this particular software. While developing it, we will be following Agile methodology.

Developers: Sure.

After developer achieves few features and decides to give 1st Demo of the software to the client.

Client : Wtf is this? This is an incomplete software, there are bugs in it.

Developer : Yes, you point that out to me and I will solve them.

Client: What do you mean point them out for you l, couldn't you do it yourself?

Developer: As a standard method, we often do unit tests, but we are not testers and with a strict deadline to match, we are more on the core implementation then checking again and again for minor bugs.

Client : I thought it would be a full proof software without any bugs in the 1st demo.

Developer : Software development is a process. It's not straightforward, hence you only mentioned at the initial, it's agile.

Client : If that's so, let's make it not agile and make you rot in hell for the next few fays. Now you next time show me a demo with no bugs, great complicated features and we will not mention you our expectations, predict them by yourselves, and most importantly, here's an impractical strict deadline.

Why are people complaining about debugging?
Oooh it’s so hard.
It’s so boring.
Can someone do this for me?

I honestly enjoy debugging and you should too..
if it’s not your code, you’ll get to understand the code better than the actual author. You’ll notice design improvements and that some of the code is not even needed. YOU LEARN!

If it’s your own code (I especially enjoy debugging my own code): it forces you to look at the problem from a different perspective. It makes you aware of potential other bugs your current solution might cause. Again, it makes you aware of flaws in the design. YOU LEARN!

And in either case, if it’s a tricky case, you’ll most likely stop debugging at some point, refactor the shit out of some 50-100 line methods and modulize it because the original code was undebuggable (<- made up a new word there) and continue debugging after that.

So many things I know, I know only because I spend days, sometimes even weeks debugging a piece code to find the fucking problem.

My main language is java and i wouldn’t have believed anyone who told me there’s a memory leak in my code. I mean, it’s java, right? We refactored the code and everything worked fine again. But I debugged the old version anyway and found bugs in Java (java 6.xx I believe?) which made me aware of the fact that languages have flaws as well.. GC has its flaws as well. So does docker and any other software..

Stop complaining, get on your ass and debug the shit out of your bugs instead of just writing it in a different way and being glad that it fixed the issue..

My opinion.

Management Double standards...
At a previous employer, the manager had me doing some QA testing for a updated version of some customer facing UIs. I spent 3 days constantly testing, except for my lunch break.
Every bug that I found I sent to a Sr dev.
Now this Sr dev was a coding savant. I mean awesome coder, but he had the personality of a rat and snake combined. If he wasn't coding he was brown-nosing the manager, talking about how he was doing all the work, or trying to rat on us other devs.
Anyway this dev has spent the 3 days of bug fixing alternating between watching videos and fixing bugs. Don't know what the videos were, don't realy care. I do know that he did not like to be disturbed while watching them...
On the third day, on my lunch break, I decided to watch two fifiteen minute videos on VSTS feeds and linking node packages.
As soon as I started Sr dev came over and asked me if I was focused on the teams priorities. I told him that it was my lunch break and since this was related to an upcoming sprint I thought it was worth it.
This S.O.B. goes full out hissy fit. He was flat out throwing a tantrum like my small daughter would. He made such a noise that my manager walked over and asked what was going on.
This shitbag Sr dev smirked at me and asked to speak to the manager in his office. When the manager called me over I knew what was up. I was lectured on not focusing on the teams priorities. I tried to explain that the videos were relevant to an upcoming sprint but was shot down. When I brought up the fact that the Sr dev was watching videos, the manager told me flat out that he didn't care. I was mad and told the manager that this was bullshit. All the manager cared about was keeping the Sr dev happy. I was told to "treat <shithead sr dev> with respect or else".
It was at that time I decided to look for another job. Less than a month later I left, for a much better paying job with awesome benefits. Sr dev acted like he was hurt I was leaving. Manager couldn't have cared less.
When some others on the team heard what he did, they started looking for work elsewhere too.
A month after I left another Sr dev on the same project left. At the same time a BA and QA tester demanded to be put on another team or else they would leave.
Manager started out with a team of 6 was left with only two people.
When the last one left, manager had the nerve to ask me why I didn't let him know anyone was unhappy. I told him if he cared so little for me, why would I think he care about them.
Ultimately, leaving was one of the best things I could have done.

The first things a person tells me when I come over to help them:
10%: I don't understand what to do
15%: Why is there an error? (mostly typos)
15%: I don't understand this error. (debugging required)
60%: Wtf, why is it working now?

I feel like my sole presence makes bugs disappear 😎

So I’ve been working for this company for +4 years. When I started we were 6 dev. Now we are 1. It’s just me. Thankfully I’m leaving next week to start at another company. But right now I’m kinda loosing my mind. I have a deadline tomorrow and I’m super stressed because I’m not done. I have bugs to fix, documentation to write and all that stuff. I’m pissed off because people don’t understand what I do, why it takes time, why I want to be alone at home just coding instead of sitting at the office being interrupted with stupid ass questions about html or upcoming project. I don’t give a fuck about their clients or upcoming projects. I’m only working for them 7 more days and then they have 0 dev left. Fuck them. Fuck the CEO, fucking piece of shit. Can’t wait to flip them off leaving next week.

After many years... I truly believe that non IT people belive that this is how programmers work:

- Goodmorning computer. How are you? Can you make me a program? I want the program to include an userfriendly userinterface, database, optimized code, documentation and dont forget that i dont want any bugs! Thanks computer. I'll get back to you when my coffee is ready.

I hate it when I pick a library that seems popular, has a ton of stars on GitHub, a ton of downloads, used seemingly everywhere, only to find out months later that it's SHIT. I found bugs that made me doubt anyone is actually using this fucking thing. Your GitHub stars mean nothing.

So now it's either rewriting the entire codebase to a different library, or fixing it. Serves me right for not checking the unresolved issues first.

tl;dr - My company makes me pass around code over email. Is this normal?

How we fix bugs at my company.
1. Simulate bug in dev env (ok, cool)
2. Get the required code from svn and make changes locally (so far, so good)
3. Deploy changes in dev env and test (yeah!)
4. Take screenshots of fix in action along with the files you've changed and mail it to the respective leads (really? send code via mail?)
5. Keep changing your fix based on feedback and keep repeating above steps (what!)
6. Once approval mail comes, check-in your code in the svn branch for deployment and testing in the test env (QA team)

My question to you fine folks is, is this normal? Is this how most companies work? Passing around code over e-mail? Where the different versions of your fix are just attachments in emails. Or have I committed a sin by being a part of this heinous act?

So I’m working on a project right and I don’t run it after writing 104 lines of untested code and it doesn’t work.

Which is expected but then I do some stuff and fix that, I get a new error which is great cause I’m getting closer.

Cut to tonight. I’m trying to hunt and kill this bug. And after doing nothing but copying the code to another text file so I can upload that copy and get help.

I decide to run it with a little just print statement in it to make sure it’s definitely broken and I’m not asking online for no reason.

And.. it works.. WHAT???

I uncomment the rest of the function and get rid of the print statement and scream because ITS WORKING!!

I MEAN IT HAS BUGS BUT THEYRE BUGS I CAN FIX AND FOCUS ON AFTER I FREAK OUT ABOUT IT WORKING AFTER ME CHANGING FUCKING NOTHING.

Day x stand up meeting scheduled for late evening:
Manager: so, what's up?
me: fixed two bugs, analysis going on for another, having a couple of blockers, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Day x + 1 stand up scheduled for morning:
manager: what's up?
me: *repeats pretty much the same stuff, with some updates on the analysis
manager: but this is what you told me yesterday.
me: but there haven't been any working hours between our two conversations.
manager: your efficiency is questionable.

me: *thinking about my happy place with a clenched jaw

Saw the following meme text on fb group.

"It took me 30 minutes to write the code. And 2 hours to fix the bugs."

But I thought it is not quite complete without this ending.

"And a single minute for client to totally dismiss everything."

Maybe in special dedication to @kiki.

I cut the unit tests down in LOC size by roughly 50 - 60 % in most projects.

It's really easy once one sees unit tests not as a dunking pile of copy pasta wild west, but rather as a code base that needs architecture and design.

Some extensions, some annotations, some good old helper classes.

Pooooof.

Why I did this? ...

Because it's fucking annoying when you read a PR with tests and need a fucking diff tool to spot the difference between two tests cause they're 80 % the same.

Yeah. Thx for giving me brain cramps, motherducker.

I'm not an expert in unit tests, but if all test codebases look like the "usual stuff" in our projects...

It's no wonder bugs exist...

An uncle of mine, owns an NFT/Betting startup (early 30s, so no veteran and no doesn't know much coding).
Got 3-4m USD as investments.

It's an utter garbage "app" that he knows will die in an year, and he's drawing big salary and buying properties from the funding until he has the "runway" of funds remaining while app/company works in the background

What bugs me isn't that he's feasting on some random investors' petty change, but that such "ideas" get money thrown at them while ive seen 100s of more fun ideas/apps back in uni-days that died in obscurity when people graduated and retired them as projects, being talked about in 1 liner in their CVs.

This world ain't right :v

Does most memorable in a bad way count? 🤔

He left almost 2 years ago..or even more.. left a bunch of bugs and logical fuckups for me to fix.. some already fixed, some still lingering there..

I want to not blame him for everything, since we lack proper code review protocols and all.. but I've asked on several occasions if he understands the problem and what must be done..and the answer was always yes..results, after I got time to check up on him, the code he wrote was most probably copy pasted from stack overflow or somewhere else.. butchered in any and every way possible..

And of course already checked in to TFS.. along with bunch of files that were not even changed (he didn't bother to check that and exclude them) + a bunch of files from other projects... Told him to not do that on several occasions too, but he still managed to fuck things up this way.. leaving all the uncommented debugger; crap and alerts in the js files..

On one occasion I was working on new GUI..api part I already finished..got the order from above to delegate this to him as it is not much he can fuck up so I could focus on more important & complex stuff..
Maybe additional 4h of work + testing for everything..
I show him the prepared files, one controller, one view..explained what parts of code goes where etc.. a little short of writing everything myself.. Ask if he understands what needs to be done & how and told him if he has any problems/questions to ask me asap..
Said he understood what needs to be done.. after a day or two he asks me why something is not workig as expected.. I check the files, correct initialization was commented out and all the code was stuffed in the view file.. Took him another day to move the code to proper files.. Not sure about the possible bugs left there as the client later decided that they will not be using this..

I later found out that years of C# experience on his CV was actually a school course.. he didn't even know why the changes on api are not showing up..because he didn't know that he has to build the code..

I mean, if he was honest when asked about experience with .net, we would've taken a month or two to just explain everything from the start..

But as he didn't and based on his CV (much more experience with .net than me) and 'I understand everything' attitude from the start I assumed he knows WTF was he doing..

Boy was I wrong..

He was also more interested in how much I get payed and if I have a company phone etc..than actually doing his job.. I fucking hate chit chat, and this..well.. he didn't get the hints that this is in no way appropriate to ask.. I've told him that if he has problems with his pay and bonuses that he should talk to the management and not me about this..and that I'm only interested in his actual work and progress..

So yeah, I'll definitely be remembering this guy till the day I die..

Employer uses IBM Software, which forces me to use Eclipse. I hate eclipse. Hate is a hard word. I'd never say, I really 'hate' a person. But eclipse, eclipse is what I hate. I can look at my smartwatch and see my heartrate rising, just thinking of how the fuck any developer on this crappy planet would ship that bullshit IDE. That saying, I'm totally fine with some bugs, using windows and so on, but eclipse... Is this a get-more-contributors strategy? Holy moly it really kills me. Hey, let's just open that maven Proj.. Oh, crash. Hey, let's install that "bug-free" version of the maven-integratio... Oh, crash. Let's do a global search over my worksp.. Oh, freezed. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! How can this be legal? I mean, seriously, most junoir devs I know, just use Eclipse, because they don't know of any other "better" IDE (VIM would be better, even notepad). Is there anyone sucking professors cocks / vaginas to get them introduce that crap IDE to students?

Another day, another shitty set of JIRA tickets.

In this week's edition, we run into an issue you'd think is a meme, something you couldn't even make up: three tickets with IDENTICAL titles, but miraculously, they actually refer to three DIFFERENT tasks! (Also comical, they're not bugs, they're tasks, but mouth breathers don't really know the difference, and at this point I just don't have the energy to attempt to explain what could be explained to elementary school children.)

I present a rare look into our national archives!

This document features two exhibits:

Exhibit A: product owner's original ticket titles

Exhibit B: translated-into-competency-because-i'm-not-mentally-deficient ticket titles

Just more proof that 'product owners' don't own shit, the devs are the real ones who actually know what is going on.

I mean just LOOK at Exhibit A's titles. As a big smart manager, do you write those tickets, smile, and say to yourself "Ah, yep, that's very clear, I'll definitely remember what each of these mean literally 5 seconds from now!"

Is asking for literally 30 seconds more of thought too much to ask for? Apparently.

Just kill me

Happy friday ☠️

Worst code I ever had to touch: a React application, createClass era, before redux was a thing, that had everything in one fucking component.

Every fucking thing.

This was a simple video chat application, but still. The component's code included:

- Views (contact list and video call screen) and logic to switch between them;
- All application state;
- API calls;
- Websocket message handling;
- WebRTC logic (getUserMedia and p2p streaming).

This app was built by one person in one month for a demo. That person left the company after the demo and I had to maintain that mess without zero React knowledge (I was doing angular at that time). On his last day he gave me a crash course and an overview of how the app worked.

Around that time I attended a few meetups and a conference with talks about React. That, my curiosity and ability to learn by refactoring helped me a lot when I had to add new features and fix bugs in that app.

Rant much...
I just started working on project after a group of students.
The project has various of bugs (ofcourse) and not catched exceptions.
I found variables like 'abcd' or shorts of classes like 'rrms'.
I would be fine with all of that but there is one thing is just making me crazy:
THERE IS NO SINGLE FUCKING COMMENT IN WHOLE SOLUTION (three projects and about few hundred files with javascript and cs).

Imagine freaking pure react (no jsx) full of null arguments and multiple custom control written like 'var gl= GreenLabelled(null,null,text,5)' (a button ) with again, NO FUNCKING SINGLE COMMENT.

I just cannot stand it. Just spent 3hrs to wrapp my head around events in this react classes...

I know I can't be the only one thinking safari is the new IE, like "it has to work on safari" makes me way more sad than "it has to work on edge"

IE is default unsupported in my company

This time around I figured out that fucking safari can't work properly with dates!

Like:
new Date("2019-05-16 11:00") // won't work
new Date("2019/05/06 11:00") // will work
new Date("16/05/2019 11:00") // won't work
new Date("11/05/2019 11:00") // will work, but it's November the 5th

Ok, the last 2 bugs are due to English&American who can't understand how dates work, but still... WHY IS SAFARI THE ONLY DIFFERENT ONE?

I am just sick of the things that's been going on.

Joined a mid level startup as full Stack developer working on angular and node js . Code base is too shit and application is full of bugs(100+ tickets are being raised for bugs)

Since the product owner(PO) wants to demo the application he is pushing for bug fixes.

UI code:
1. Application is not handled for responsiveness all these years, it is now being trying to address. Code base is very huge to address though .
2. The common reusable components of UI has business logic inside. Any small change in business logic we are forced to handle in common components which might break up on another components.
3. Styling in 40+ components are made global. Small css change in component A is breaking up in component B due to this
4. No time to refactor.
5. Application not at all tested properly all these years. PO wants a stable build.
6. More importantly most of developers have already left the company and we are left with 2 developers including me.

I am not in a position to switch due to other commitments adds up a lot to frustration

Client: Hey new iOS 11 is coming soon, is out app compatible?
Me: Not sure, let me shift the development to new Xcode 9 and test it out.
Client: So, how was it?
Me: pretty straight forward. all seems fine a couple of bugs.

But then when trying to fold a big function to make things easier to read, you discover that Xcode 9 beta 1,2,3 & 4 DOESN'T FUCKING SUPPORT THAT YET. How on earth is this not yet implemented?

Rewrite of the sync api to REST.

Coworker: “hey, I know you’ve written and maintained our sync module for the past 4 years. Something I need to know? Some hints or knowledge you can share?”
Me: only thing you should not do is x and y. Otherwise you will face problems a and b.”
Coworker: “great, thanks a lot!”

2 months later...

Customer call: “da fuck are you doing? When I do stupid stuff then I face problem z and problem a!!!”

*me checking new code*

*me calling coworker*

Me: “WTF did you do? You asked for my advice and then did exactly what I told you NOT to do.”

Coworker: “oh, let me check the code..”

*coworker calls boss*

Coworker: “Boss, I can’t work with this guy, he starts fights all the time..”

*boss comes to my desk*

Boss: “I don’t want you to work on this anymore, people are complaining.”

Me: “what the fuck, I just asked him a question..”

~ 1 month later

coworker quits because he can’t handle all the bugs he caused and I have to maintain this piece of fucking retard code..

!isNotRant(this);

I'm an avid user of Snapchat and have used it for quite a while, but there's always been something that pisses me off.

When an app gets an update, I'm quick to check the changelog and see what's now and what's been fixed. That's my little snippet of information I like to know on a release. And then there's Snapchat.

They put fuck all in their changelogs. By fuck all I don't mean a little bit of information, I mean they don't list anything. They, instead, lost features from their last major release which could've been 10 or so releases back. Even Twitter's "Fixed some bugs" is more informative than their bs.

So I ended up writing a well worded and surprisingly clean message in their feedback section about this, but I'm not expecting much. In short I said "You changelogs are crap, you need to put more into them to show a bit more respect, showing stuff from a few releases ago isn't helpful" and my favourite "if you can't do it in the team that releases, get the primary devs to write the changelogs for you".

I'm saying this here to see if anyone agrees with my opinion. If you're going to release an update, you really need to tell us what's updated.

Thoughts?

I don't know if I should cry or laugh...

Our CMS is a CMS as a Service. So, our providers, for me they all suck, everytime they make a development, everything breaks.

Today's flash news?

Well, basically any page containing some user-made dynamic objects are **empty**

But not only on our site, on their whole network of clients that use their CMS. Everything is broken.

They release new features (I should call them bugs rather) every week, and yesterday's update concerned these pages.

And for the record, they don't test. They wait that we come back and complain to see if their shitty development worked or did not.

This CMS is even worse than your first project in HTML - I mean, your first word document on your mama's computer when you were 3.

Seriously. What kind of non-quality is this?

As a dev, I never want to personally talk to Clients anymore.

I had this Client for whom I developed a website for a tool he was making. I did the front-end work, did the backend, added the shop and everything he asked for. I showed him everything so he could see for himself what was done and how it all works. He went ahead and tested the finished product to see if there were any bugs.
He came back to me and wanted a call on skype and I joined the call. He shared his screen to show me that when he resizes the browser, the content of it gets bigger and smaller according to scale. I worked so hard to get it responsive and whatnot, and he tells me that it is doing what it is supposed to do. I die inside every time I think about it

The project which I took over from the previous team had exactly 1576 usages of an operator which I've never seen before after 10+ years of working in PHP.

Curiosity lead me to the php.net site to see what kind of advanced magic this operator does - only to discover that it's an error suppressing operator (@). They've simply used it as a default method for solving bugs and removing errors from the logs.

Hello DevRant community! It’s been a while, almost 5 years to be exact. The last time I posted here, I was a newbie, grappling with the challenges of a new job in a completely new country. Oh, how time flies!

Fast forward to today, and it’s been quite the journey. The codebase that once seemed like an indecipherable maze is now my playground. The bugs that used to keep me up at night are now my morning coffee puzzles. And the team, oh the team! We’ve moved from awkward nods to inside jokes and shared victories.

But let’s talk about the real hero here - the coffee machine. The unsung hero that has fueled late-night coding sessions and early morning stand-ups. It’s seen more heated debates than the PR comments section. If only it could talk, it would probably write its own rant about the indecisiveness of developers choosing between cappuccino and latte.

And then there are the unforgettable ‘learning opportunities’ - moments like accidentally shutting down the production server or dropping the customer database. Yes, they were panic-inducing crises of apocalyptic proportions at that time, but in hindsight, they were valuable lessons. Lessons about the importance of thorough testing, proper version control, reliable backup systems, and most importantly, owning up to our mistakes.

So here’s to the victories and failures, the bugs and fixes, the refactorings and 'wontfix’s. Here’s to the incredible journey of growth and learning. And most importantly, here’s to this amazing community that’s always been there with advice, sympathy, humor, and support.

Can’t wait to see what the next 5 years bring! 🥂

Dear previous dev on this project,

I know that everyone loved you and still admires you for being so nice and having such a great knowledge. Please teach me your ways of achieving this level of popularity while writing big bowls of fucking flying spaghetti monster code with a bunch of hidden bugs and thousands of lines of unit tests that clearly never been used since it is literally impossible to run them thanks to missing mocks and overall bad design.

Teach me so I can become this person who shits big reeking piles in the office in front of everyone and even after leaving people still praise them for being exceptionally clean and sophisticated.

This night I dreamt that I could build indexes (yeah, boo me on the plural) for relalife things..trees, buildings, birds.. Everything gets an index, Oprah style!!!! And once last month I also dreamt I could debug real life things.. Look at the person and see what's wrong with them.. All their stats, bugs, everythiiiiing!! So disappointend when I woke up :(

!rant
I am on vacation from my full time job this week. I wanted to use this week to write a PoC for a potential customer of my side business. really interesting project for me.

potential customer is a window and door manufacturer and needs an application to manage their racks.

their ERP system already has a simple rack management but it is only useable in house.

they want the drivers to be able to scan racks they deliver to a customer with a native app and they want to have a webapp for the customers to see racks that are assigned to them as well as reporting a rack ready for collection. And that all needs to be in sync with their local ERP system.

as i am a .net guy i decided to go with the abp framework (because it got recommended to me) and xamarin for the native app part (because i have experience in this).

i have now spent 4 days implementing this and it has been so rewarding. the framework is so powerful and it's template saved me endless hours.

i even wrote a very basic connector service which synchronizes data between my app and the clients ERP system. Just one way until now because of time issue, but i learned to scaffold an ef core with db first. It is noticable that the ERP system is 2-tiered - meaning the clients directly talk to the db.

Tomorrow i will implement the xamarin client.

4 days just coding what i want to. choosi g my own velocity and making my own priorities without any interruptions or discussions and a bunch of new things to learn.

Probably wasted half a day because of stupidy (implemented some bugs) but fixing and learning is part of the journey and i lime that part, too.

i am so relaxed right now 😁 just wanted to share this without a real reason :P

When bugs are seen by the client and boss therefore asks me "did you know about this bug?", what I'd really like to answer is:
"well shit, no! I would have solved that or at least told you about it, don't you think? what kind of fucking question is that?"

But then I just answer "no, lemme check"

* Teams meeting, doing some early testing with the client *

Dev Team: This is an early build, so please be aware that bugs can occur at this stage. (That's why we didn't want to show it but you insisted)

Client: Sure, don't worry.

* 15 minutes later, first bug happens because some state management at the front end was not tunned yet *

Client: Can you solve this bug?

Dev Team: Sure, just let us replicate it and we come back to you as soon as...

Client: Can you solve it now?

Dev Team: ... Okay, let us ser whats happening and we will come ba...

Client: You don't need to hang up, just solve it.

*Dev Team internal chat*

Me: Fuck
Other dev: Fuck
My leader at the time: Fuuuuuck

PS: This happened in two separate occasions. I hated that project.

Most web developers have to use CSS every now and then. I don't really mind using CSS every know and then, but one thing really bugs me. As a developer, I read ! as "not". In CSS !important becomes "not" important. However, when I read CSS I still read "not" important, when I know this really worked the other way around.

BTW, when I first came across !important many years ago, I really thought it meant a rule was not important, really confusing!

!rant

Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.

Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.

My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):

- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.

- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.

- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.

- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.

- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.

- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.

- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.

- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.

I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

Conversation yesterday (senior dev and the mgr)..

SeniorDev: "Yea, I told Ken when using the service, pass the JSON string and serialize to their object. JSON eliminates the data contract mismatch errors they keep running into."
Mgr: "That sounds really familiar. Didn't we do this before?"
SeniorDev: "Hmmm...no. I doubt anyone has done this before."
Me: "Yea, our business tier processor handled transactions via XML. It allowed the client and server to process business objects regardless of platform. Partners using Perl,
clients using Delphi, website using .aspx, and our SQLServer broker even used it."
Mgr: "Oh yea...why did we stop using it?"
Me: "WCF. Remember, the new dev manager at the time and his team broke up the business processor into individual WCF services."
Mgr: "Boy, that was a crap fest. We're still fighting bugs from the mobile devices. Can't wait until we migrate everything to REST."
SeniorDev: "Yea, that was such a -bleep-ing joke."
Me: "You were on Jake's team at the time. You were the primary developer in the re-write process saying passing strings around wasn't the way true object-oriented developers write code.
So it's OK now because the string is in JSON format or because using a JSON string your idea?"

SeniorDev turns around in his desk and puts his headphones back on.

That's right you lying SOB...I remember exactly the level of personal attacks you spewed on me and other developers behind our backs for using XML as the message format.

Keep your fat ass in your seat and shut the hell up.

I have only been working with this open-source tool for 2 weeks, but already found 2 bugs. The maintainer is also nice enough answering questions quickly in the forum and submitting the issues for me.

It's nice to be able to contribute something to the open-source community. Yay for me! 💯

Too bad that next week, I will transfer to another project and stop working with this tool.

You know how my 'about' here says I create features from bugs?!? Well if you didn't before, now you do.. :P

Anyhow, today the most bizzare thing happened.. Customer played 'reverse uno card' on me..

Meaning?!

They reported a feature missing on uat env, when in fact I fixed a bug they have on prod..

Not sure how I should feel about this, but it sure made my day! (: I just hope they will not open a bug report for this missing bug..

Well, no rubber duck for me but this guy is my partner since many years ago (since I've started my carrer).
Not even those prehistoric bugs last forever!

This senior dev of mine is so good that he always reminds me to finish the bugs and yeah, fixed it, and sent the codes to him. The hell's wrong with him is that he hasn't upload the codes i sent to him.

This log says way too much about me as a person.

Happy new year devRant! May the bugs be few and the clients plenty

A friend has a small business and asked me if I could make him a small program. So why not, experience for me and I can help a friend out. (This started in ~mid 2016)

Started out as a WPF desktop application with many weird bugs and slow interface, into crashing the database on AWS (could not connect, could not get a backup). It was just hell and I kind of gave up on fixing it.

I always talked to him and said "yeah, I will do something better soon", but I was procrastinating and kept pushing it away from me. Then one day I said "f*ck it - lets go" and started coding on 2.0:

- WebApp with a complete new architecture (which I learned in the past few months)
- User authentication (JWT)
- ASP.NET Core Backend for web api
- Angular 4 Frontend w/ bootstrap
- Coded in like a week with 3-5 hours each day

Deployed around 6 months ago and he never had a complain. When I visited him I asked "how is your application doing?" - "great. it just works!".

My once most hated project turned into the most successful project in just a few months.

Creator of the react router:

If you ever see this, you created one of the greatest library with one of the worst documentation ever.

And don't get me started with versions. In every single versions, you break everything so badly and nothing works anymore.

Everytime I need to do something related to react router, I just fucking roll on the floor and cry. Documentation is fucked up.

It's totally fucked up. In the github there's one documentation, in the website there's a different. At the end, nothing works.

Please, if you want to create a nice library like this, maintain it. If you can't maintain it, mark it as deprecated and someone will take over.

But keeping something like this and making it absolutely inconsistent doesn't help. I am really tired of debugging bugs related to react-router

Feeling sad and disappointed during a really intense sprint. Have been working for the past year on a web app made with fucking jQuery. I fixed a lot of bugs, and caused quite a few of my own.
And all this happened because I was desperate when looking for a job. I was too afraid to take my time and find something better. I just took the first offer I got.
I'm thinking of quitting, but why should I do them a favor? I'll stay and keep getting paid until they kick me out.

Just need to vent, so here goes:

Fuck doing cutting edge projects for great glory, low budgets and tight deadlines. I'm tired, burnt out and just don't give a shit anymore.

I got promoted to lead dev and thought my fortune was made but what it really meant was just: Here solve all these bullshit bugs that the rest of the team can't figure out and oh we are also taking this single app you guys made and scaling it globally. You have half a year to figure that out. You handle the devops.... sigh

Fuck that noise.

Honestly i just feel like quitting and finding a nice specialist place, with a cap of at max Senõr developer, no more being the one making the big decisions for me, rather just diving into certain areas and coding the fuck out of that. Maybe some teaching too, i like that.

Anyway, won't happen right now, i need the salary. My wife just graduated and can't find a job what with a certain flu fucking over the economy, so I am stuck here for now.

This is the most wtf thing that happened me with Javascript, I had a regular expression and it caused bugs only with 4 digits long words, then I just noticed this:

/^.{3}$/.test(null) // false
/^.{4}$/.test(null) // true

What the fuck, I can't believe that who designed the .test method didn't think to avoid null coercion

When the legacy code has a misspelled CSS class selector but it'd break more than it'd fix... And forced to use the mispelled word. Omfg people.

Project manager : At 9:30 am these all are the tasks you have to complete today.
Me: OK ,sure.
Project manager: At 10:30 have you completed any thing.
Me:no not yet we can meet at 11:30.
Project manager: At 11:30 have you completed the tasks.
Me: no it's takes more time post lunch.
Project manager: post lunch have you completed the tasks.
Me : give me 5 mins ( integrating the code).
Project manager: 5 mins over.
Me : showing the application with out testing.
Project manager : This not working.......!
Me:(I know that )then I have to check .
Project manager : OK go and come in 10 mins
Me:(in 10 mins I have to test and fix the bugs you non technical brute) sure .

Just before the holidays started I was given a task by my manager, $M.

$M: "Kyntak, while I'm away I want you to look into this new way of starting $important_service"

$me: "Okay $M, is there a bug for this that explains what is needed?"

$M: "Yes, you should be able to find it"

Goes looking, finds someone else working on something connected but not the same, finds the code change that makes this available... It doesn't explain how to use it, when the async events fire or (well, to a junior engineer like me) really anything.

Message the other (very experienced) eng.
$me: "Hey I've been asked to make $important_service use the new starting API, can you tell me about?"

$eng: "Yup, here's a bug for that and I'm happy to answer any questions you have" *goes offline*

I read the bug. It doesn't mention the original problem I was trying to solve, it doesn't even mention $important_service. There's no design doc mentioned. The bug has a higher priority assigned than any of my other work. It has an expected completion date only days after I get back from holidays (which $M told me to take).

I try to contact $M and $eng. They've already left for holidays.

"Hmm"

Implements as much of the fairly inevitable boilerplate that I can infer from the bugs and surrounding code.

"Hmm"

So, I'm into my second week of holiday and am starting to think about the potential shit storm I may return to.

I hope the bug's priority was wrong.

Don't understand what the hype about Elementary OS was. Used for ca. half a year, do not see any benefit.

If this is supposed to provide "usability" on a Linux kernel, then I am sorry, but in this regard it is a tremendous failure.

All tasks take long, there are all sorts of bugs, today I needed a multi-monitor setup for a presentation "real quick", dear lord was that a shitshow.

Nah, this thing is not for me.

FUCK SPOTIFY
This bloated buggy piece of shit
This fucking piece of bull dick that runs efficiently as much as a legless cockroach this motherfucker thinks its offline even though its in the motherfucking browse screen and I have a 4.5g connection (this retarded cunt) fills space faster than a hot gas released in a vacuum chamber just to fix its goddamn internet bug I have to reboot my damn phone. I see so many damn bugs in this shitty app that I think they rolled back to the alpha versions sometimes if I had any other god damn alternatives (google music is not available where Im from fuck you too google) the only thing I would give them would be my middle fingers. It just fucking froze on me while I'm just trying to listen to my Retrowave playlist while I fucking get ready for bed FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU YOU RETARDED INFECTION FILLED CUNT I WOULD PUT A BIKE CHAIN ON MY DICK AND RAM YOU WHILE WE ARE TIED TO A CAR THAT DRIVES OFF OF A CLIFF IF YOU WEREN'T AN INCOMPETENTLY PUT TOGETHER 1S AND 0S

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

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

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

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

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

Because
The
Client
Is
Angry.

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

Few months ago I was working on something rhat wasn't mission critical for the current sprint. Near the end of the month I was asked to help the BD team (which usually do the testing) with testing the webapp as well as the mobile versions. First day of me testing ever, found more bugs by myself than the 5 BD people did in the entire week. Really felt like a boss. Next month they asked me to help again. And again. And again.
This is how my desk looks nowdays (the 3 phones are behind the laptop charging)

Ladies and gents, it was a 🍺 day, today.

I spent more hours than I care to say today tracking down an issue in our web workflow, even looping in our only web dev to help me debug it from his side. There ended up being multiple bugs found, but the most annoying of them was that the json data being pulled back was truncated because a certain someone, in their migration script, set their varchar variable to a size of 1000 and then proceeded to store a json string that was 2800+ characters in length.

C'mon man!

I got nothing productive done today. Hate, hate, hate days like this!

Beer me.

I have to make a big decision about my future as a developer...
(Long rant)

I am currently in an apprenticeship as a dev.
The thing is i was forced to do testautomatization.

I was there for half a year and had a good time.
But now my trainer (the guy who assigned me all the work and showed me all the stuff I learned) has been fired.

And now it sucks... they don't teach me new things anymore and don't give me time to catch up with the new technologies.
(This was different in the past!)

I was forced to do manual testing for the past few week.
Therefor i am working with a friend and his trainer.

One day i was talking to my friend about how things have changed in the testing-team.

His trainer was listening (we did not know) and sayed: If you want i can ask my boss if it is possible that i can teach you as well.

Now the point is i woud love to work with him. I love the work they do!! (Java; don't hate me)

But it will make the testing guys mad and I dont know how HR will react.

I am pretty sure it will reduce my chances of getting a job (at this company) if I change the team...

Should I talk to HR or not? What do you think?

Thanks for reading and sorry for my english bugs.

1. Nothing lasts forever and you always need to be prepared for change.

That might be technology acquired by other company and dropped completely by all of people or new technology take over the market for a year and is gone after that and no one remember about it.

2. If you go opposite way then all of people around you that might be actually the best way.

That learned me to always look around for new stuff cause this small stuff that people make today can be big company next day just cause they got annoyed by things and start something new.

3. Trust nothing that you see.

Bugs are everywhere

4. Quality and speed doesn’t matter when you start doing something but consistency matters a lot.

When you start doing something you suck and you need to be ok with fact that you’re going to make lots of stupid mistakes and learn from them.
When you start new prototype you don’t need dozen tools to finish it, you don’t need performance or perfection, you need consistency to finish it.

Good luck

-- What if JavaScript never existed?
-- What if HTML was a programming language?
-- What if our data online isn't abstract but physical?
-- What if geeks have their own country?
-- What if humans exist and we are the aliens?
-- What if the internet is state-owned?
-- What if we could download food just like every other downloadables?
-- What if my VSCode won't kill me when switched to light theme?
-- What if there was no gender and the word "female" is just an alias for "male"?
-- What if bugs could find and fix themselves?
-- What if there's no need for an account password?
-- What if Linux was owned by Microsoft?
-- **What if I could tell my boss that I'm tired of his fucking job without actually telling my boss? This is the actual what if.**

So here's a rant I never thought I'd write.

I'm pretty happy with my current job. I'm working for a small non-tech business where I'm making a complete solution by myself. It's pretty chill just coding away all day and being my own project owner and manager.

The iffiest aspect is that my boss(es) don't know what (or if) I'm working on when I'm implementing a vital logging system, fixing bugs that cropped up due to implementing necessary, baseline security, and so on. They see a login page and figure the entire project is shippable, and when the login breaks because I'm configuring the wsgi for https the reaction is "it worked, why mess with it; just put it how it was". But I digress.

Today I got a job offer with a pay increase that made me exclaim "are you fucking serious" irl, in a business with a more professional environment consisting of senior devs, and with benefits I had never heard of.

I can't not accept, but that means just legacying the entire project I'm working on here. They'd basically be left with nothing after shelling out wages for me for these few months. Keep in mind this is a fairly small business who debated if they could afford this to begin with.

Disregarding whether they are willing/able to make it hard for me to leave, it stabs me in my scrubby dev soul to up and leave on a personal level.

They had a 3d printer at the other place though.

Welp, this made my night and sorta ruined my night at the same time.

He decided to work on a new gaming community but has limited programming knowledge, but has enough to patch and repair minor issues. He's waiting for an old friend of his to come back to start helping him again, so this leads to me. He needed a custom backend made for his server, which required pulling data from an SQL/API and syncing with the server, and he was falling behind pace and asked for my help. He's a good friend that I've known for a while, and I knew it wouldn't take to long to create this, so I decided to help him. Which lead to an interesting find, and sorta made my night.

It wasn't really difficult, got it done within an hour, took some time to test and fix any bugs with his SQL database. But this is where it get's interesting, at least for me. He had roughly a few hundred people that did beta testing of the server, anyways, once the new backend was hooked in and working, I realized that the other developer he works with had created a 'custom' script to make sure there are no leaks of the database. Well, that 'custom' script actually begins wiping rows/tables (Depends on the sub-table, some get wiped row by row, some just get completely dropped), I just couldn't comprehend what had happened, as rows/tables just slowly started disappearing. It took me a while of checking, before checking his SQL query logs (At least the custom script did that properly and logged every query), to realize it just basically wiped the database.

Welp, after that, it began to restrict the API I was using, and due to this it identified the server as foreign access (Since it wasn't using the same key as his plugin, even though I had an API key created just so it could only access ranks and such, to prevent abuse) and begin responding not with denied, but with a lovely "Fuck you hacker!" This really made my night, I don't know why, but I was genuinely laughing pretty hard at this response.

God, I love his developer. Luckily, I had created a backup earlier, so I patched it and just worked around the plugin/API to get it working. (Hopefully, it's not a clusterfuck to read, writing this at 2 am with less than an hour of sleep, bedtime! Goodnight everyone.)

A couple of years ago I was working on a fairly large system with a complex (by necessity) access control architecture.

As is usually the case with those projects, it's awkward for developers to repro bugs that have to do with a user's accesses in production when we are not allowed to replicate production data in test, let alone locally.

We had a bug where I ended up making myself a new row in the production database for a thing I could have access to without affecting real data to repro it safely. I identified the bug so I could repro it in dev/test and removed the row and ensured everything worked normally, whew scary.

Have you ever walked into the office one day, and everyone is hunched over in a semicircle around one person's workstation, before one turns around to look at you and says - after a pause - "... ltlian?.."

Turns out I had basically "poisoned the well" with my dummy entity in a way where production now threw 500 for everyone BUT me who had transitive access to this post-non-entity. Due to the scope of the system, it had taken about a day for this to gradually propagate in terms of caching and eventual consistencies; new entities coming in was expected, but not that they disappear.

Luckily I had a decent track record for this to be a one-off. I sometimes think about how I would explain testing in prod and making it faceplant before going home for the day, other than "I assumed it would be fine". I would fire me.

Oh, gather 'round fellow wizards of the code realm! 🧙✨ Let me regale you with the epic tale of software sorcery and the comical misadventures that come with it! 🤪🎉

So there we are, facing the dreaded Internet Explorer dragon 🐉 - an ancient, stubborn beast from the era of dial-up connections and clipart-laden websites. It breathes fire on our carefully crafted layouts, turning them into a pixelated disaster! 🔥😱

And then, the grand quest of cross-browser testing begins! 🚀🌍 One moment, your website is a shining knight in Chrome's armor, and the next, it's a jester in Safari's court. A circus of compatibility struggles! 🎪🤹

CSS, the arcane art of cascading style sheets, is our magic wand. But oh, the incantations can be treacherous! A slight misstep and your buttons start disco dancing, and your text transforms into a microscopic mystery! 🕺👀

But fear not, brave developers! We wield the enchanted sword of Stack Overflow and the shield of Git version control. We shall slay bugs and refactor with valor! ⚔️🐞

In this enchanted land, documentation is the mystical parchment, often written in the cryptic dialect of ancient monks. "This function doeth stuff, thou knoweth what I meaneth." 📜😅

And meetings, oh the meetings! 🗣️🤯 It's like a conference of babbling brooks in the forest of Jargon. "Let us discuss the velocity of the backlog!" 🌿🐇

But amidst the chaos, we code on! Armed with our emojis and a bubbling cauldron of coffee, we persist. For we are the wizards and witches of the digital age, conjuring spells in Python and brewing potions in Java. 🐍☕

Onward, magical beings of code! 🚀 May your bugs be few, and your merges conflict-free! 🙌🎩

I've been offline from devrant for a while now but damn, I need to vent this shit

One of my colleagues can't describe tickets well enough, so I often have to speak to my colleague about it what he/she ments with their description (usually the ticket description is one line… that's all)

But yesterday the ticket was quite ok, I got were he/she was going for

Conveniently my colleague walked by at the end of yesterday and asked me how it was going

I responded quite energetic 'quite well, ticket is almost done'

And when I showed my colleague the result he/she said, well I got some feedback this morning, and we need to move X to Y with Z data

But you don't get the full story, this project exists of a very old abandoned framework (2013). Hacked together to work for more than one customer (but still copied over to run standalone) with the last year of development being focused on fast results (no time given to workout bugs or refactoring for cleaner/readable code)

So now I have to (on a feature that already took me 3 days to build) remove roughly 25% of the code and hacks, and hack a solution together..

This shit is demotivating as fuck...