Today I realized that a project that Ive worked on for years is now redundant and will probably be scrapped after my own new and more effective process hits production.
Im happy about that, no matter how good and hours spent. I made something better to replace it. This must be what finding a New gf after divorce feels like.

Just earlier today I was looking at the hosting packages for a local hosting provider in my country (who shall remain unnamed as I want to work there and criticizing them might not be a very good idea right now) and they start at €250/month apparently. I thought - that's fucking ridiculous!

Like for real, I could literally buy a server for.. I dunno, €600 from the likes of bargainhardware.co.uk with some pretty darn good specs, put it in my home, get a business contract with my ISP for say around €100/month (and use it for my own purposes as well instead of my consumer contract, win-win!), and the server would pay for itself in no more than half a year, probably even less! And you're even getting the actual hardware with it!! And that is for the price of that hosting provider's starting option!!!

Now I know what you're thinking, sure there's more to servers than just the server itself, like redundant power, generators, SLA, multiple routers and switches, and all sorts of failover measures. And you are absolutely right. But does that really justify a rental cost of a server of €250/month?

Not only that, even their shared hosting.. shared hosting, the dreaded, shitty shared hosting! solution is starting at around €10/month. I'm paying about €5/month for 3 light-duty servers and a domain for Christ's sake!

So.. is this hosting provider just expensive as fuck or is this really the industry standard, particularly for the dedicated hosting part? And maybe that's why some services like.. say devRant which apparently gets around €600/month from 299 supporters at the time of writing, yet still has @dfox and @trogus pay from their own wallets for it (if at all possible, please let me know if that's still the case).. I wonder if those costs are all really justifiable?

It just strikes me as odd.. you can get *a lot* of server for a couple hundred bucks if you do it well.. no?

When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.

Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.

When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.

Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!

Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?

When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:

1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.

Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).

Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.

When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:

(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".

Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.

There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".

It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?

I know this has probably been asked, but I completely missed any of it.

What the fuck's up with devRant and rubber ducks? Is there a backstory? If so, could you explain?

If these questions have been asked before (possibly multiple times), gimme links - I'll read those. I'm willing to bet that I'm not the first or last to have and subsequently ask these questions.

Even better, a TL;DR in the form of a comment is appreciated! 👍😜😂

Compromise.

I think that sums up development pretty much.

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

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

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

The principle of compromise applies to other things, too.

Take for example architecture design.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

....

Et cetera et cetera.