!!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.

I'm trying to sign up for insurance benefits at work.

Step 1: Trying to find the website link -- it's non-existent. I don't know where I found it, but I saved it in keepassxc so I wouldn't have to search again. Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 2: Trying to log in. Ostensibly, this uses my work account. It does not. Time wasted: 10 minutes.

Step 3: Creating an account. Username and Password requirements are stupid, and the page doesn't show all of them. The username must be /[A-Za-z0-9]{8,60}/. The maximum password length is VARCHAR(20), and must include upper/lower case, number, special symbol, etc. and cannot include "password", repeated charcters, your username, etc. There is also a (required!) hint with /[A-Za-z0-9 ]{8,60}/ validation. Want to type a sentence? better not use any punctuation!

I find it hilarious that both my username and password hint can be three times longer than my actual password -- and can contain the password. Such brilliant security.

My typical username is less than 8 characters. All of my typical password formats are >25 characters. Trying to figure out memorable credentials and figuring out the hidden complexity/validation requirements for all of these and the hint... Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 4: Post-login. The website, post-login, does not work in firefox. I assumed it was one of my many ad/tracker/header/etc. blockers, and systematically disabled every one of them. After enabling ad and tracker networks, more and more of the site loaded, but it always failed. After disabling bloody everything, the site still refused to work. Why? It was fetching deeply-nested markup, plus styling and javascript, encoded in xml, via api. And that xml wasn't valid xml (missing root element). The failure wasn't due to blocking a vitally-important ad or tracker (as apparently they're all vital and the site chain-loads them off one another before loading content), it's due to shoddy development and lack of testing. Matches the rest of the site perfectly. Anyway, I eventually managed to get the site to load in Safari, of all browsers, on a different computer. Time wasted: 40 minutes.

Step 5: Contact info. After getting the site to work, I clicked the [Enroll] button. "Please allow about 10 minutes to enroll," it says. I'm up to an hour and 50 minutes by now. The first thing it asks for is contact info, such as email, phone, address, etc. It gives me a warning next to phone, saying I'm not set up for notifications yet. I think that's great. I select "change" next to the email, and try to give it my work email. There are two "preferred" radio buttons, one next to "Work email," one next to "Personal email" -- but there is only one textbox. Fine, I select the "Work" preferred button, sign up for a faux-personal tutanota email for work, and type it in. The site complains that I selected "Work" but only entered a personal email. Seriously serious. Out of curiosity, I select the "change" next to the phone number, and see that it gives me four options (home, work, cell, personal?), but only one set of inputs -- next to personal. Yep. That's amazing. Time spent: 10 minutes.

Step 6: Ranting. I started going through the benefits, realized it would take an hour+ to add dependents, research the various options, pick which benefits I want, etc. I'm already up to two hours by now, so instead I decided to stop and rant about how ridiculous this entire thing is. While typing this up, the site (unsurprisingly) automatically logged me out. Fine, I'll just log in again... and get an error saying my credentials are invalid. Okay... I very carefully type them in again. error: invalid credentials. sajfkasdjf.

Step 7 is going to be: Try to figure out how to log in again. Ugh.

"Please allow about 10 minutes" it said. Where's that facepalm emoji?

But like, seriously. How does someone even build a website THIS bad?

I never had problems with punctuation marks during coding, especially the notorious semicolons because I've always used an IDE, ain't gotta time to waste on compiler errors.

But today I meet my nemesis, a fucking comma wasted an hour of my precious time, causing my unit tests to fail in Python, my unit tests where expecting a list and the actual value is a tuple, it turned out that there was this trailing comma - which I don't know where the hell it came from - at the end of a function call that returns a list.

I only noticed this freaking comma after Pycharm indicated a conflict between the returned type and the expected type and underlined the culprit, that small invisible fucker 😬.

Thank you Pycharm and type hints in Python 3.

this is why, my fellow devs, you have to use an IDE.

PS: For those of you who aren't familiar with python, a trailing comma at end of a variable turns it into a one element tuple.

1, = (1,)

So I've taken the first steps into mobile development this past week, I attached two joysticks to a basic unity app to check if touch input was working and I guess I never got around to uninstalling it. so I go to school and finish some class work early and decide, why not check and see what it would take to get my current main Alpha project working. I open my unity folder and see Joystick_Test and someone walking by asks "what's that?" To which I reply tapping on the app "it's a touch screen test, to see if the phone can detect me touching the screen and dragging my fingers. I hand him the phone and he asks why nothing is happening which I respond with "it's just an input test, it's not ment to be anything fancy I just need to program the joysticks and the scripts are still in development" and he hands the phone back and says "your lazy as shit. I can make the controls work in under a minute" and he walks away. It's lunch now and I manage to catch him in the library. I open Unity, and Mono-develop and call him over. I get out of my seat and say "program the left joystick to move around. I'll give you a hint, vector3". He sits in the chair and stares at the screen for a solid minute until I see him type
Console.writeline("hello world");
And he said it would work and just walked away.

THE TYPESCRIPT DEFINITIONS SAGA CONTINUES

> IHateForALiving: so, I don't really know which field we're supposed to use here, but that's your entity I'm working on, so...
> TeamLeader2: wait, what is this? Why does your code have autocomplete?
> IHateForALiving: Every time I worked on some parts of the code I've been writing some type definitions along the way, and it's adding autocomplete if you type hint your code... but I've been told not to write them anymore, so I stopped
> TeamLeader2: But why tho? It's so fucking handy
> IHateForALiving:

What the hell has happened to Hewlett Packard?
They used to make the best notebooks around. 10-15 Years ago, basically all notebooks my family bought were from HP. These devices lasted for at least 6-8 years each.
Now I have a fucking expensive OMEN series notebook failing after 2 years with the most embarrasing hardware problems: Once a shielded piece of plastic from the bottom broke off and made a short on the mainboard, next time the way too thin power line that goes from the power plug to the PCB was placed alongside a sharp metal piece that damaged the isolation and again produced a short. When the display is moved, the webcam disconnects, which is also a hint at the production quality.
From my daughter's HP notebook the Display just broke off after like 18 months of use. When we brought it to service I asked the guy whether this happens a lot, he was like "I have 6 other notebooks of that type with the same problem in repair right now". After a repair that took forever because they couldn't get the proper replacement parts, the integrated webcam has died.
Never ever going to buy anything from this shitbrand again.

Python 3.9:
Cool New Features for You to Try
String Prefix and Suffix.
Type Hint Lists and Dictionaries Directly.
Topological Sort.
Greatest Common Divisor (GCD) and Least Common Multiple (LCM)
New HTTP Status Codes.
Removal of Deprecated Compatibility Code.

Before I came along, my company was processing orders of type X by hand, taking many hours and being at greater risk of human error. So as a temporary solution, I crafted a console app to do the processing. Then, this app is needed to be accessed remotely. Because adding a newer .NET to a handful of servers was just too much to handle emotionally for management, the console app was revamped to a web app. During this revamping process, I was having my client send me an email so that I could initiate the processing myself until a friendlier UI was available. Well, I finished last night. I sent them an email explaining that it was live, gave them the address, and gave myself a high-five. A moment ago, I get an email from the client insisting that I process those orders quickly so that I don't cause a delay in shipping. FML!! Did they even READ the email I sent them?? They've been suckling at the teat for too long. Adding insult to injury, since the revamping project began, the client would CC my boss every time they emailed to have an order processed as if to hint at their frustration that the project wasn't done yet. Grr....

I am the responsible for the atlassian Suite at work, as I maintain the systems, set them up, and stuff.

One day, our crowd (the authentication and authorization application) just went crazy. At like lunch time it could not connect to the AD anymore. No reasons. Throwing XSRF errors (cross site scripting), because http would connect to https. "won't do it, fuck you" it told me. Out of the blue. Noone changed anything. And yea, seriously. Noone did.
It just refused to connect (as connecting to AD is connecting yourself with you own api. And refusing yourself talking to yourself). It runs behind a proxy. Therefore http/https. Well, this worked for years. But out of sudden not anymore.

Yea. Fuck you.

It was reported some hours later, at like 3pm, as people could not login to the applications using crowd as authentication and authorization server.

Tried to debug the system, where nothing was did, to make it work. At best time to fail.

First workaround: if you are logged into one of the other applications of atlassian, just refresh the site, so your SSO token gets a refresh and you are signed on again.

Then I searched more and more. And more.
But nothing worked, nothing helped.

So I addressed an emergency maintenance, take down the whole Suite, restart crowd, to apply some changes to it's settings, not knowing what happening then, because all connections of SSO will then be released. Sent out the mail like 30 minutes beforehands.

While waiting for the window, I just typed my credentials... And redid, and redid, so to type and being bored.
Three minutes before the window...

It just worked again.

Well. Wtf. Serioudl
Just came back.

No Intrusion, no changes at all. Just came back, as nothing has happened.

Kind of best part of this story... A headhunter messaged me on my way home to offer me a job as an Atlassian Suite SysAdmin for a company, at kinda the double of my salary.

At first I was thinking to go there, and when someone then asked me sth about Atlassian just start to laugh and then leave still laughing...

But then I very nicely respond that I dont want to cry at work. And wished him best luck.

I am doing some bad upgrades now on our Suite. Very painful.
And I looked into the start scripts. Some Look like the untalented intern tells another one to write scripts. Seriously wtf.

Today I followed the guide to Update a confluence and change database to Postgres. Didnt work, Postgres error.
Try it again, jquery won't load. Next try, tomcat not starting anymore. Did same thing. Every fucking time.

Yea. Maintenance window to get a nice new export soon. Will only take an hour.

To switch database in confluence, you need to set it up very fresh. And then Import your export.
Export takes an hour at our system.
Importing maybe the same time. Hope it will work (hint: Nope).

Oh, can be nice also. Just tell the Bitbucket to migrate databases, there is a fucking setting for it. Enter new database, ready, go, finished.

At least they don't raise costs very much every kinda year.
Oh sorry, yes, they do.