Talking to girls is like interfacing with an undocumented, half-implemented API sometimes..

When I finished my studies, I was looking for a job and had an interview at a smallish company.

Boss: can you do C?
Me: yes, I have already done some stuff in C.
Boss: I mean, are you really good in C?
Me, growing suspicious: well yes I already have been using it - but anyway, there's also the project documentation for looking up, right?
Boss: uhm, the code IS the documentation.

I envisioned myself being drowned in undocumented spaghetti code and wasn't really keen on that job anymore, but my following question pretty much ended the interview:

Me: oh, I see. Do you have any roadmap for getting your development to a more professional base?

His looks, priceless! He was just shocked when he realised that he had failed my interview, and that I was a fresher made it even harder to digest for him.

FUCK!!! FUCK IT ALL. FUCK YOU AND YOUR CRAPPY BULLSHT UNDOCUMENTED AND OUTDATED API.

YOUR DATABASE SERVER BACK-END HAS TO BE THE ONE MANAGING THE DISPLAY DATA FOR ITS WEB AND MOBILE CLIENTS. NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND, DAMN IT.

I'M NOT GONNA SIT HERE ALL DAY HARD-CODING ALL YOUR SERVER'S INADEQUACY.

MAKES ME WONDER DO YOU EVER USE DESIGN PATTERNS OR APPLY DESIGN PRINCIPLES? DRY AT LEAST? DON'T FUCKING REPEAT YOURSELF, DAMN IT.

I CAN'T WAIT TO LEAVE THIS PLACE FOR GOOD.

30,000 lines of undocumented code. How do I deal with that?

A colleague and I spent a month building a Shopify app that allows merchants to give customers store credit.

Since Shopify's API is so limited, we were forced to augment it's functionality with a Chrome extension.

Now before you go throwing full wine bottles at your screen because of how wrong and disgusting that is, note that Shopify's official documentation recommends 5 different extensions to augment functionality in their admin panel, so as gross as it is, it seems to be the Shopify way...

Today we got a reply from their review team. They won't accept the app because it requires a Chrome extension to work properly and that is a security risk.

Are you fucking kidding me? So I guess Shopify is exempt from their own security standards. Good to know.

Not to mention the plethora of published apps that require a staff account's username and password to be provided in plain text upon setup so it can spoof a login and subsequent requests to undocumented endpoints.

Fuck you and your "security standard" Shopify!

It’s not a bug – it’s an undocumented feature.

Adding a feature to 18 000 undocumented lines of code, written in PL/SQL. Oh, did I mention it was just a single function?

Job listing I just saw:
Our lead and only developer just retired after 15 years of maintaining the codebase. We need someone who is capable of working with large amounts of undocumented and untested code.

PS: This was a company that makes medical software.

I HOPED I WOULDN'T BE BALD AS MY DAD BUT AT THIS RATE I WILL BE HAIRLESS FROM TEARING IT OUT ON MY BLOODY OWN

I got hired for cleaning up a 2 year project of rushed spaghetti code , where they previously only had 1 programmer aND HE WROTE 37 THOUSAND LINES OF CODE!

OH WE NEED A NEW FEATURE?! LEMME JUST RESEARCH THIS COMMENT-LESS CRAP FOR MULTIPLE MILLENIA BEFORE I CAN GRASP WHAT THE FLYING FRICKIN FRIDGE CODE DOES

To top it off, I've about ONE MONTH LEFT BEFORE BETA RELEASE TO FIX THE CODE!

I'm super grateful for this job as it's my first programming job BUT I'M GONNA SET THE REPOSITORY ON FIRE SOON AAAAHHHHHH

HOW CAN YOU, THE PREVIOUS PROGRAMMER, WORK IN THIS ENVIRONMENT WHERE MOSTLY ALL FILES ARE +2000 ROWS OF UNDOCUMENTED CODE

OH AND JUST GOT A MESSAGE FROM THE PREVIOUS PROGRAMMER:
"You can just remove the unused code and refractor it some, izi"

IZI MY SHITTY POOP CAR
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!

Now with that out of the way, how would you recommend handling a stressful release deadline?

Girlfriend: hey, wake up.
Me: Error this interface has no audio input mode. The normal process can continue without audio.

Girlfriend: You aren't even coding.
Me: The interface was running without audio when interrupted. The behavior for audio is undocumented.

Girlfriend: I just want to know if you want to unplug your headphones.

Me: **wearily recalls most people don't refer to sleep as an interface**

"Undocumented code cannot be understood", said no coder ever.

Turns out apple doesn't allow apps that use GPS on iPads without a GPS module. Decent idea, 100% undocumented. One stack overflow answer, zero upvotes.

Senior manager: I cant understand how this project has taken so long?
Me: Well you hired me as a C# WPF developer and then asked me to deliver an android app without any kind of training so i had to teach myself app development and reverse engineer the undocumented protocol it needs to use to communicate with our product.
Senior manager: Ok. I get that, but it should only take around 3 months to get up to speed though right?
Me (to myself): how in the hell? New platform, self teaching, undocumented protocol for a complex low level real-time system, other responsibilities taking at least 50% of my time and i should be as productive as an outsourced app dev company in 3 months???!! FFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!

I don't work on bugs. Instead I improve the usability of undocumented features.

In the begining of time, when The Company was small and The Data could fit in some fucking excel sheets, Those Who Came Before implemented some java tool to issue invoices, notify customers and clear received payments.

Then came the Time Of The Great Expanse, when The Company grew to unthinkable levels. Headcount increased with each passing day, and The Data shows that everything was going great!

But when the future seemed bright, came The Stall-Out. The days when The Company could not expand as fast as it did before. And Those Who Came Before left, abandoning their Undocumented Java Tool to its own luck.

Those who came after knew nothing of the inner workings of the Undocumented Java Tool. They knew only that the magical Jar would take a couple fucking excel spreadsheets and spit out reports and send emails like magic.
And those were The Dark Days.

In the darkness, The Data grew to be a monster. Soon a fucking excel spreadsheet could not hold The Data contained any longer. Those Who Came After, fearing the wrath of The Undocumented Java Tool, dared not mess with its code. Instead, they fucking cut away the lowest volume transactions from the fucking input spreadsheet, and left the company to report the unbilled invoices as "surprise losses". Fucking script kiddies, were Those Who Came After.

Then, at The Darkest of Days (literally, Dec 21st), marched into the project The Six Witchers, who fear not the Demon of Refactoring.

This story is still unfolding. Will The Six Witchers manage to unravel the mysteries of The Undocumented Java Tool? Will they be able to reverse engineer the fucking black box, and scale it's magic into a modern application?
Will they decrease revenue forecasting error by at least 2% in a single strike?

Only the future will tell.

Trying to understand someone else’s undocumented fucked code is as frustrating as taking a shit and the water slashing up at you.

Just curious, how is it like to work as a developer. I mean, as a profession and not a hobby or freelancing.

From devRant, so far I know that you work in an office, the managers and bosses are assholes, and people always write unmanageable and undocumented code.

What else is it like? Do you get to work alone or do you have to work with people? Do you stay there all day long?

I know its still going to be a while for me, but I want to know how it will be like.

The last person who might have taken offense at this recently quit, so time for a consequence-free rant. I just want to say...

Fuck absolutely every single one of my teammates who quit this year. Fuck your shitty, undocumented spaghetti code from hell that the rest of us will have to rewrite because it's utterly broken and functions mostly on prayer and luck. Fuck the 1000+ git repos we'll have to rename so we can even begin to tell them apart. Fuck your complete lack of any sort of processes or procedures or standards. Fuck the person who hated tickets and decided we could just have hundreds of people ask us for help on Slack whenever they need it. Fuck the people who quit because we got a new manager who told us we need to support the applications we build. Fuck the person who said "I'm leaving because I want to move forwards instead of backwards" as if fixing bugs in the code YOU WROTE TWO WEEKS AGO is really moving backwards. Fuck the two people who designed their own separate pipelines and then used both without bothering to debate and pick the better one (spoiler: both are completely undocumented and broken as hell).

I hope your various new employers figure out that your strategy of covering shit with gold paint doesn't change the smell.

Now the rest of us have to fix it all, and we're probably going to start by demolishing most of it so we can rebuild it from scratch.

Stop reading articles on which framework/library is better, pick one and start actually writing code.

... Only to then discover that this library is utterly broken and/or undocumented and you have to start over again.
GODDAMNIT JS I HATE YOUR ASS

Finding a bug as a developer: "Fuck..." *start working on an undocumented hotfix that breaks other parts of the application"

Finding a bug as a tester: "Yeah, right.." *start writing a comprehensive report including all possible failure scenarios and how world famine will increase and men develop boobs if this bug is shipped into production"

Finding a bug as a PM: "Well, the other parts work, right ?" *click randomly on nearby buttons and input fields to "check" if everything is all right. Ditch said report from tester*

I have a large code library I have been working on for over 10 years. I have nightmares about leaving it to another unfortunate dev. I'll have to work at this company the rest of my life.

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...

Some undocumented, never touched, 15 years old recursive function at the core of our business model suddenly stops working in a niche scenario, debugger is not available and I have to find out why.

That's it, I'm done. My sincere condolences go to the poor soul that will have to maintain this complete and utter crap of code, as I have been doing the past 2 weeks.

3-4 big 4K+ lines files of completely unindented, practically undocumented, interspersed HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS! All in the same file.

All the function and variable names are complete nonsense. You might as well have smashed your head against the keyboard and let whatever came out be the names.

You took all the naming conventions that you could find and unleashed your seriously damaged imagination. lowerCamelCase, UpperCamelCase, snakecase, everything in the same fucking function name.

I really needed the money from this project. But I'm done. My mental sanity is more important that try to figure out how to make a decent and usable webpage of THIS COMPLETE DISASTER.

You, the one before me. If you wanted to make sure that no one else besides you could work with this crap, then congrats, YOU FUCKING DID IT WITH HONORS. FUCKING SUMMA CUM LAUDE. PhD and all.

Undocumented API's make me sick and very frustrated at times...

Developers created IDEs with intelligent code completion and languages provide users with an annotation syntax to document their methods.

And then there is Python, nuking all the efforts of our ancestors by dynamic typing. And they are smug enough to call this laziness duck typing. "If it squawks like a duck, swims like a duck, walks like a duck its a duck".
Shit no, it ain't a duck because a fucking goose does all the same but is a mean bastard compared to a duck. You might pet a duck but only the craziest will attempt to pet a goose.

Fuck python and undocumented methods in particular!

GoodGuy BroCow
Senoir problem
2years back

Senoir dev was assigned to make a webapp for billing

Dude uses dreamviewer and writes code like a bitch

Phpmysqljqueryhtml whole thing mixed very badly and undocumented

His function name format fun_1()

a simple update cost him a day,

Told him to use brackets atleast and also a framework ,guy denies

Days go by

He learns a lot of stuffs from me ,like how to use inspect in chrome lol, how to use sqlite for small projects , and orm and frameworks.

He used to pin his mistakes on me, so that boss gets angry on me

Then i quit the job

2 years went by

Now he is unemployed, nobody wants a 24 year old plain php coder and template editing web developer

Anyway I hired him, he was my first senior, whatever he did,it didnt matter to me, bcoz i remember

the days we spent on the same hall right next to each other coding in php,

days we brainstormed to fix a div

Also the days we ate lunch and breakfast together

Our company maneuvered themselves into a classic technical debt situation with a project of a second team of devs.

They then left, signing a maintenance contract and now barely work on the project for exorbitant amounts of money.

Of course management got the idea to hand off the project to the first team, i.e. our team, even though we are not experts in that field and not familiar with the tech stack.

So after some time they have asked for estimates on when we think we are able to implement new features for the project and whom we need to hire to do so. They estimates returned are in the magnitude of years, even with specialists and reality is currently hitting management hard.

Code is undocumented, there are several databases, several frontends and (sometimes) interfaces between these which are all heavily woven into one another. A build is impossible, because only the previous devs had a working setup on their machines, as over time packages were not updated and they just added local changes to keep going. A lot of shit does not conform to any practices, it's just, "ohh yeah, you have to go into that file and delete that line and then in that other file change that hardcoded credential". A core platform is end of life and can be broken completely by one of the many frameworks it uses. In short, all knowledge is stowed away in the head of those devs and the codebase is a technical-debt-ridden pile of garbage.

Frankly I am not even sure whom I am more mad at. Management has fucked up hard. They let people go until "they reached a critical mass" of crucial employees. Only they were at critical mass when they started making the jobs for team 2 unappealing and did not realize that - because how could they, they are not qualified to judge who is crucial.

However the dev team behaved also like shitbags. They managed the whole project for years now and they a) actively excluded other devs from their project even though it was required by management, b) left the codebase in a catastrophic state and mentioned, "well we were always stuffed with work, there was no time for maintenance and documentation".

Hey assholes. You were the managers on that project. Upper management has no qualification to understand technical debt. They kept asking for features and you kept saying yes and hastily slapped them into the codebase, instead of giving proper time estimates which account for code quality, tests, reviews and documentation.

In the end team #2 was treated badly, so I kinda get their side. But up until the management change, which is relatively recent, they had a fantastic management who absolutely had let them take the time to account for quality when delivering features - and yet the code base looks like a river of diarrhea.

Frankly, fuck those guys.

Our management and our PM remain great and the team is amazing. A couple of days a week we are now looking at this horrible mess of a codebase and try to decide of whom to hire in order to help make it any less broken. At least it seems management accepted this reality, because they now have hired personnel qualified to understand technical details and because we did a technical analysis to provide those details.

Let's see how this whole thing goes.

Our team was having a problem with very slow response times from a 3rd party web service they were contacting to get some device stats. No issues on the other end, but it had already been weeks. They ask me to take a look at it.

I take a few days, do a couple of benchmarks and tests and I isolate the section of code responsible. Turns out, the method they were calling would timeout if the device was offline. We ask the vendor, and they confirm this. They tell us to call methodX to check if it was up.

After having done that, lookup now only took seconds. They were annoyed that it wasn't documented but was just glad it was fixed.

How’s this for a horror story? Adding a new feature to a 6,000 line and 100% undocumented stored procedure in a 20+ year old Oracle database.

Spent today building a 3d printer, and i have a feeling that tomorrow its gonna be configuring undocumented open source code for it to work, but this delta style looks really cool

Everytime I'm digging into some random legacy code where no one knows its original intention I'm seeing "Software Archeologist" as a well-paid job sooner or later...
Fucking undocumented legacy code...

Today I learned that the my new teams choice to use a mostly undocumented/unused framework over a well known/documented one was decided by a coin toss.

i once ran into this:
// magic part starts here, do not touch

and this:
// i know, and i'm sorry

in legacy code. needless to say, i prefer undocumented, well-written code to all that followed

Holy FREAKING shit!! This was worst stupidest mistake I have ever made!

About 9 hours ago, i decided to implement brotli compression in my server.

It looked a bit challenging for me, because the all the guides involved compiling and building the nginx with brotli module and I was not that confident doing that on live site.

By the end of the guide, the site was not reachable anymore. I panicked.

Even the error logs and access logs were not picking up anything.

About a dozens guides and a new server and figuring out few major undocumented errors later, it turns out the main nginx.conf file had a line that was looking for *.conf files in the sites-enabled directory.

But my conf file was named after the domain name and ending with .com and hence were not picked up by the new nginx.conf

I'm not sure if I wasted my 9 hours because of that single line or not. But man, this was a really rough day!

Tomcat

manager: "hey, we have this old java software running and need it to be compatible with our brand new crm system"
me: "okay, i've never workes with jsp before, but i'll have a look at it"
code: undocumented, who would have guessed
manager: "oh and btw. you must test your code on our live system, with our production database, but make sure not to brake anything, our last backup was 20 months ago."
me: "..."

Worst hypothetical Dev job... hmm 🤔 well I think I have the right scenario for you. A medical company stores patient charts and critical life saving information in a database. This database makes medical decisions for lifesaving incubators and if there’s a bug it means 10,000 newborn sick babies will die because of your fuck up (oh and you’re criminally liable too so good luck!). But beyond the high pressure job that sounds at least somewhat normal, the database is written in a special form of assembly for a custom undocumented CPU where only one copy in the world exists so all tests and development are on production. Google and StackOverflow is banned so your only resource is your brain. Good luck🍀

I've been staffed on a old ongoing project, first day.
0. Compatibility has to be guaranteed down till IE9... ppf.
1. Front end made in XHTML+JS(jQuery)... bah, ok.
2. XHTML+JS is actually generated by PHP5.4, not a line is actually statically served... beh, funny, ok.
3. PHP files are the output of an XSLT transform of a bunch of XMLs... meh, seriously? Oooook.
4. XMLs are the product of the serialisation of a truck of stateful JavaEE6 DTOs populated magically (undocumented) with data coming from a SQL DB... WTF mode!!!
5. Session logics lives within PHP-land at point 2, front end makes ajax calls here that propagates to another WS out of our control that triggers -somehow- (undocumented) our Java backend at point 4 to generate new XMLs and then reach front end again. Kill me now.

Boss: look... it's too slow for the client, it's too heavy on our servers: fix it. Ah, and we sold 85% test coverage by October. You're the man for the job. (I'm a Node.js fullstacker and right now there's not even a testing scaffold, ofc).
Me: prod is on Linux or Windows?
Boss: RHEL7.
Me: rm -rf / as root. Done.
Boss: I know I know...
Me: ...

I think time has come...

My ex-boss who had 35 years of experience in IT Industry, didn't know one single fucking coding language, obviously had no clue about source control or anything even remotely related to computers, and had been project manager of a project having over 1 million lines of totally undocumented code split into 389 files with no apparent structuring. All variables were either alphabets or names of programmers who developed them.
Code was in Python 2 and had bugs/line ratio ~= 5.
He asked to write a 'wrapper' class and somehow run it in Java and fix all bugs automatically. (insert Shia LaBeouf's magic GIF here)

When I said it doesn't make sense, he said you should put in hard work and do it, and not give excuses.
Time given to do this - 1 hour :-P

Good thing I quit that shit place and that pathetic moron. Love my new job and life! :D

Seriously managers should trust their developers and allow some degree of freedom. It helps a lot.

enough is enough
to all the fucker ass morons deploying mini js frameworks with ambiguous names and undocumented functionality all fucking minified and using at least 20-30 of them on each page
dafuq you need a different slider for every section ?

FUCK DJANGO CSRF FRAMEWORK.
THE PERSON THAT BROKE csrf_exempt DECORATOR SHOULD BE PUNISHED BY YEARS OF HARD WORK IN BITCOIN MINE. I DONT KNOW WHO YOU ARE BUT FUCK YOU AND ALL YOUR CODE, I WISH YOU SLOW AND PAINFUL DEBUGGING OF LEGACY, UNDOCUMENTED, PRE-JQUERY IE-FUCKING-6 CODE YOU FUCKITY FUCK!!!

Current task:

Somehow, one of my predecessors made some sort of custom hook tied to woocommerce check out that pipes some data into a nightmarish spaghetti fuck pile of undocumented wild west visual basic bullshit. It does this, presumably, via a set of parameters passed as plaintext in a url. I know this because I found the singleton that declares this. Helpfully, Mr. Fuckass named the class "Default", so I only have around 30k instances being kicked back by my IDE when I search for it. The only reason I "need" to find this, is so that I can just change the button to an href pointing at my own MS for shipping, and I need to change the fifteen params being passed to just one - a customer ID, which should be stored in the session, and referenced by a cookie. Once that is done, I should be able to freely delete a couple of gigs worth of bullshit. Been stuck on this for three days now. God forbid we have a test environment or something.

I'm tired. Can't even get angry anymore really. Can't even think of anything funny to say about it either, I just can't wait until this is done and I can go back to sleep.

So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.

It's not a bug , its an undocumented feature

LARAVEL MEME OF THE DAY
If 60> requests are sent in a short amount of time (and you have Laravel Passport installed) you will not receive an IlluminateResponse instance anymore; you will instead receive a slightly different SymfonyResponse.

Why? For the glory of Satan, of course.

If your code doesn't account for that undocumented garbage, your code will start throwing middle fingers here and there.

Tell me again the productivity joke with Laravel, I've just lost an hour and a half 'cause unit tests were failing and I had no idea why.

1.5 million lines of undocumented spaghetti code. Think 500~1000 lines functions, 5k+ lines classes, string html concatenation. You name it, it had it. And complete unwillingness to improve it by the company. I eventually quit after considering doing it about 2, 3 times.

Not just Stack Overflow, but all help forums:

If someone asks a question, and you think you might know the answer based on its subject or context, please spare a thought for others and instead of dragging the post on for pages and pages without an answer in order to show the poster up for being inadequately articulate, please make the first post a link to at least seemingly relevant reference material.

Nothing more frustrating looking for some undocumented api syntax, finding a similar question that you might be able to gleam from, and then only seeing pages of "aaah, but what OS are you on? What colour is your desktop? What is the average velocity of a..."

You can see they are struggling with an api, and you clearly know where to find the answer, so just quit the cocksure jostling of pretending you're any good at support and just be useful. The poster may be a tool, but the thousands of hits from Google will just think you're a twat.

I'm sorry for not being updated on undocumented breaking changes. It is totally my fault.

I like coding in a way that anyonr who comes into my code base can understand whats going on. That way more people can maintain the code base.

However, I HATE having people in my code base. Since they leave shit undocumented, and have 10 variables called "data" "items" "o" "p" and another 20 methods called "processData" "convertItem".

When I use an undocumented API

So there’s this SOAP api I have to use (not by choice, and not the only one i have to use) that returns a bunch of XML nodes to confirm the data sent made it and checks out - pretty standard stuff yea.

Now every once in a while it doesn’t respond (as far as I could tell) so today I wrapped a debug around the soap call, error handler and responses and threw a bunch of messages it’s way to try and force it not to respond in order to be able to put some decent error handling in place.

Well it wouldn’t fail.
100 messages .... all responses good
100 more.... all responses good

And then 100 more.... all respond with “x”, plain text not XML as expected!

Wtf is this shit!!!!!

This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.

I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.

First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).

The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.

And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...

And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).

Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.

- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."

But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.

-

* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.

** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.

*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.

**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA

A plain computer illiterate guy rings tech support to report that his computer is faulty.

Tech: What's the problem?

User: There is smoke coming out of the power supply.

Tech: (keeps quiet for the moment)

Tech: You'll need a new power supply.

User: No, I don't! I just need to change the startup files.

Tech: Sir, the power supply is faulty. You'll need to replace it.

User: No way! Someone told me that I just needed to change the startup and it will fix the problem! All I need is for you to tell me the command.

Tech support: 10 minutes later, the User is still adamant that he is right. The tech is frustrated and fed up.

Tech support: (hush hush)

Tech: Sorry, Sir. We don't normally tell our customers this, but there is an undocumented DOS command that will fix the problem.

User: I knew it!

Tech: Just add the line LOAD NOSMOKE <nosmoke> at the end of the CONFIG.SYS. Let me know how it goes.

10 minutes later.

User: It didn't work. The power supply is still smoking.

Tech: Well, what version of DOS are you using?

User: MS-DOS 6.22.

Tech: That's your problem there. That version of DOS didn't come with NOSMOKE. Contact Microsoft and ask them for a patch that will give you the file. Let me know how it goes.

1 hour later.

User: I need a new power supply.

Tech: How did you come to that conclusion?

Tech: (hush hush)

User: Well, I rang Microsoft and told him about what you said, and he started asking questions about the make of the power supply.

Tech: Then what did he say?

User: He told me that my power supply isn't compatible with NOSMOKE.

What a silly end of the week. Have to continue developing at a project a student started at our company. Today I had a phone conference with the client. They told me there where missing several data. At first I thought it is only a frontend issue but now I know it is a database issue so I have to work through several database procedures which are all undocumented and the student who build those is not reachable. Business integration ftw

Fuck you and your ugly, undocumented, fuzzy API.

No, it's not a bug. It's an undocumented features.

What's the most complex programming task you ever had to solve? Or: A "hack"* of a framework/API you came up with to make something work?

*undocumented or unintended use

That joy feeling when you are finally rewriting the backend and frontend with GraphQL instead using the fuckin old undocumented REST API who was written by fuckin amateur ex-coworker.

How to waste money as a dev company, 101:

Give people ton of budget for their education to do whatever they want with it with no oversight at all:
1) Devs go to some shitty confs in places across the world that teaches them nothing (new) so they can visit interesting places on company's money
2) Go to a conf where you learn ton of stuff that can be implemented right away

...Then you come back, no time to do stuff properly, just "make it work" (or make it seem like it works), because of deadlines, poor prioritization, new features, bad planning, vague roadmap and poor client management. And the worst of them all, LGTM code reviews.

Few months later, who the fuck wrote this shit? Oh, dude that left? What about this mess? Oh, he's a goner too. What the fuck should this random undocumented chunk of code do?!

Do that a few times and you've got bunch of pissed off clients with a ton of bug reports nobody can solve without wasting 20x the amount of time it would originally take.. LGTM

RIP project.

How to write bug free code:

while True:
try:
_loop() # all logic here
except:
print_excv()

This will not cause any difficulties ever. Remember to pipe output to /dev/null, make this script a critical but undocumented part of your infrastructure and tell no one about it.

Locating undocumented API endpoints be like …

The one thing they do not say about low-code tools is how much code you have to write when their undocumented garbage doesn't fucking work.

I'm so fucking done today.

The VB project I ranted about earlier was apparently just the top of the iceberg of madness that is my workplace.
So the same ninjacoder who managed to code himself as a dependency in the VB project apparently had his greasy little fingers in a bunch of other projects around here.
A script for automating new workstation installs that went haywire last week had traces from this Omnipotent mastermind all over it. He got us this time with static urls and zero errorhandling.
Well played sir.
Getting so done with undocumented projects that I have to dig through several hours just to find and fix.

Finally finished the longest ticket I've ever worked on in my life. The ticket title and description was a pretty simple and straightforward one: "Upgrade from PHP 7.4 to 8".

If it was only so simple in real life. Our application is mostly done with API Platform framework, which is based on top of Symfony framework which is based on top of PHP language.

Once I did PHP 7 => 8 upgrade I needed to upgrade API Platform 2 => 3. But of-course that couldn't have been done as before that I needed to upgrade from Symfony 5 => 6.

This all was literally an equivalent of touching into a wasp nest - it took me a bit over 5 months and 800 hours of work and there was literally not a single source file left untouched.

In the process of all of this I've ran into literally dozen undocumented feature-breaking changes, broken backwards-compatibility promises and inside out architectural changes - from both the frameworks and the language itself.

Upgrading just one major version of anything SHOULD NOT be so hard. And to top it all up just to think I will need to do this again in a year or two..

Experiences like these really set my hate for time-based model of releases and the state of today's development in general.

I FUCKING HATE IT WHEN I HAVE TO BUILD SOMETHING FROM SOURCE!!!!

So I wanted to install a package with pip. Shouldn't be that difficult, right? RIGHT? Lmao
Things I encountered on this adventure in no particular order:
- multiple undocumented dependencies, only explained on stackoverflow or some github issues
- inconsistent and outdated documentation spread over multiple pages on multiple websites
- Python version can't be too old or too new
- other external software version incompatibilities
- Build process that takes several minutes just to fail, then try again and fail with exactly the same outcome after a few minutes
- fucking SVN is needed?!?!?!
- VS Code is needed for completely manual build ????
- cmd/powershell incompatibilites
- required reboots

At some point I just gave up... Now I don't even remember what I crap I installed that I don't need anymore.
Please for the love of god provide prebuild packages or at least a very SIMPLE build process -_-

> be me
> be developing a react native app
>realize the iPhone X notch is clipping your content on the first/home screen of the app
>google says: simple fix
>find a built-in react native thing to add safe area padding
> refresh the app
> ohno.png
> the other screens with navigation bars already have built in padding
> TOOMUCHPADDING.jpeg
> remove safe area thingy
> finds a clever, not particularly hacky way to pad the home screen without showing the header bar by setting its height to 0 and the color to match the content background
> more-problems.app
> there’s a small 1–pixel light colored line separating the header from the content clearly breaking the otherwise continuous single color background
> google.sh
> wtf.txt
> stackoverflow.html
> no responses except something I’d already done
> keep experimenting
> tries basically everything to figure out where that line is coming from
>sets borders to thicccc and bright red
>no bottom border? Ok that’s not it
>opacity?
>forgetaboutit.mov
>try shifting the header position around by a few pixels? Maybe it’s misaligned with the white parent layer underneath?
> nope.jpg
>it’s past bedtime
>Sleep.jpg
>thenextday(today).zip
> what about the content? Is that misaligned?
> nope2.jpg
>Maybe its an iOS feature not a react thing?
> make a test Xcode project, completely native to test
> negative.dng (pun intended)
> more-furious-googling.mp3
> find a native iOS stackOverflow question with the same issue (1px line)
> realize your Xcode test wasn’t done properly.
>atleastimmakingprogress.iso
> start looking into the SO post
>it’s native so I have to find out how to do it in react-native
>invent a bunch of style parameters that don’t exist in the documentation to see if there’s an undocumented thing
>loadsaloadsaerrors.log
>googles for a react native version of the iOS only SO post
> somethingpromising.tar.gz
> *tries it*
> “Haha nope” -my code
> whataboutthisotherthing.bin
> KENSISHSBUCNEGWISBVSIDNRVSIDNFIRJRBDKFNFIDJFIFKFNR
> HOLY FUCK
> IT WORKED
> AFTER TWO FUCKING DAYS OF SHITTERY AND SHENANIGANS
>AND MANY STACKOVERFLOW EDITS TO A NOW VERY MESSY POST
>THEREISNOMOREBORDER(final).zip
>*screams of relief*

Follow up on a previous rant:

I visited a customer to talk about the reporting discrepancy between two applications.

It turns out the applications were custom built by outsourced developers from Russia, that communicate with each other through a byzantine (and completely undocumented) series of web services, excel import/export tasks, and a customized SSRS environment.

These are spread across at least half a dozen servers, some on-premise and some cloud based, there are at least 3 SQL servers (2 running 2005, one running 2000), a 10 year old local install of TFS (which no one knows a username/password for), and who-knows-what-else.

They laid off their entire IT team years ago, and they have no backups.

I'm not certain anyone there even understands what the software is supposed to be doing beyond the most general terms.

No one knows if they even have source code.

Biggest case of "nope!" I've encountered in more than 20 years of IT experience.

>has idea for project (creating a watchface for my watch)
>downloads SDK
>finds out only Eclipse is supported
>Tries to go the CLI way
>Can't find a way to setup a new project without Eclipse
>Finds a boilerplate
>Gets random unexplainable, undocumented errors
>"Well, guess that's another idea that will not workout due to the incompetency of others"

Wouldn't call it a software bug but related:

Was developing an order system to expand in the UK. We have been developing it for the last 2 years and always had a one nasty bug in the system... Whatever we do, it still appears... Tried debugging to find the source, tried covering with tests - nothing helped it was still there. We even rewrote the whole system 3 times and it still was there!

One day, we have been given a stupid request from our manager - take a black background and make it even more blacker... That was it and I went to the CEO with letter where I stated that we should remove the manager... As I'm the Senior there, he did ask me why and eventually removed the manager...

Oh my guys, I've never felt so good after removing a bug! Since then - our application went live, we had our first customers and we were happily rolling new updates. And the best part - there was no BUG! Everything we did just had undocumented features or missing links but we haven't really had a single bug that was not caught by our automated tests!

---

Moral of the story:
Not only software can have bugs. People also can be "bugs" while bugging you about every single details they think is not working correctly.

Boss fast tracked a release for a customer. No testing. Not checking commits or the state. Undocumented requirement brings down everything and everyone is running around with their hair on fire. Sigh.

Great... None of my coworkers know about this tiny bit of undocumented code, and the guy who wrote it, I replaced ... Fucks sake ... Next weeks gonna be hellish

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

Our approach is to get a loose feel for what the client wants, lift some visuals from Theme Forest then spend the next few weeks persuading the client to use our crappy server rather than their preferred AWS solution. Then once the project is behind schedule we break the work down into disparate tasks each of which gets a single line brief from the PM (such as 'create admin' or 'do css'). These then get assigned to different devs with no consideration of their skillset. The PM is available for 10 mins every day to answer queries, the rest of the time our devs are expected to work autonomously. Meanwhile we'll tell the client that we're back on schedule and arrange a demo for an impossibly short deadline. We have the mantra ”dont worry about it” which the PM uses to quash any dev's concerns up until the day before the deadline at which point we'll swap some devs on to unrelated work whilst others concentrate on getting "just the pages the client wants to see looking right" (we have a policy of making it look like it works before it actually does.) Following the demo we will announce all the missing features we had forgotten about from the initial undocumented agreement and set the project aside whilst we service another client.

Just my luck that I get the best wk76 story ever on wk77. Either way:

So some of you may know that the current project I am on has some shared code components with one of the other projects in the product line. And we have some differences in our processes. This leads to a lot of fun.

So, I was working on converting one of our shared components into a more modern language. It would save us time, money, and sanity by allowing us to more easily maintain our product. Sounds like a win-win right? That's what I thought. Until I had a meeting with the other team. THEN THE QUESTIONS ROLLED IN. Well who is going to integrate our product with yours? (You?) Are you changing the interface? (Not really.) Are you going to generate a design document? (Absolutely not especially since the interface isn't changing for the most part.) Well you are changing the type of one parameter in one method from an undocumented unmanaged type to a well documented managed type that we control. Shouldn't you generate a document to document that change? (Again absolutely not.)

So first they basically browbeat my lead into putting me in charge of their integration effort. Its fine though, as they gave me an account to charge. However, when I was finally able to get a machine with their build environment on it (at least two months later), they then told me that that account was closing and I had to wait until next quarter. So fuck me right. And because of their process I would break them if I were to check my changes in.

So fast forward to today. They are translating some shared components for the same reason that we are. However, they are changing code that while shared is technically "ours" and that will DEFINITELY break us if they do this work since this is the code that controls our algorithms. And while we have a fault tolerant process, or at least more fault tolerant than the other group's, we are currently doing a huge amount of development in the part they want to change. And when we ask them "who is going to do this work to integrate our product with your changes?" they stare at us slack jawed. Like "um, you right? it doesn't affect us." Like MOTHERFUCKERS!!! YOU LITERALLY JUST FOIST ALL THIS WORK ON US TO INTEGRATE WITH YOU BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE PEOPLE TO SUPPORT IT!!! BUT YOU CAN PAY THIS GUY FOR SIX MONTHS TO DO ALL THIS WORK THAT WILL BREAK US BUT CAN'T SPARE HIM TO INTEGRATE WITH US!?!?!? EVEN IF WE'RE PAYING HIM AND NOT YOU!?!?!

I will let you know how this goes when we have the discussion. I am drinking right now because it it easier and better for my emotional and physical health than bum fights.

I think I may have officially gotten myself fired before I even started a new job. My salaried start date was supposed to be Jan 3 but they hired me to do spot work at my hourly rate until then. My server side PHP skills were never great but they appear to be completely inadequate to the task of patching their undocumented, spaghetti legacy code. I just sent a note basically saying I either need to convert their entire site to something else 3 weeks ahead of the timeframe we planned or to basically outsource my work to another developer to patch this code. Feeling like a total imposter at the moment. I wouldn't hire me.

Started the night writing a knowledge base article on a product. Next thing I know it is midnight and I'm waist deep in a hex editor finding undocumented features.

Just wanted to code some better public transportation route calculator (better ux) and found out that the pt company offers an API.

EVERY FUCKING REQUEST HAS TO BE SENT AGAINST THE SAME FUCKING ENDPOINT IN A POST REQUEST WITH THE ORIGINAL REQUEST AS FUCKING XML IN THE FUCKING BODY. At least they offer xsd files... BUT THATS NO FUCKING HELP. At least not that much of a help. AND THE DOCUMENTATION DOES NOT STATE A SINGLE FUCKING EXAMPLE OF HOW TO USE THAT FUCKING ENDPOINT. I FOUND THIS OUT BY SENDING RANDOM REQUESTS TO THE ENDPOINT TRYING TO REVERSE ENGINEER THE EXISTING FUCKING FRONTEND AND NOW I NOTICED THAT 80% OF THE FUCKING DOCUMENTED FEATURES ARE DISABLED BECAUSE: NOT FUCKING SUPPORTED!!!

MAAAN WHY DO YOU DO THIS.

Alternatively I'd use the GTFS files they provide but THEY ARE FUCKING INCOMPLETE AND DONT STICK TO THE EXISTING STANDARD GOOGLE DEFINED... They also offer a different propietary format... BUT THATS FUCKING UNDOCUMENTED AND FUCKING INCOMPLETE...

Ive been working on pseudo-Java (ie some 3rd company's UNDOCUMENTED programming language) that they parse into Java in their backend

It doesnt even support if-else (only ifs and elses) or a boolean combination of False and OR together lmao

mainly a GRPC middleware-language

Given its lack of features (arrays/collections) or documentation, I just had to implement a flag-array using a 0-1 string

Im throwing exceptions unless combined strings equal Lengths and is only 1s

living like in 80s-90s 💀

Drupal makes me want to go back to the moment that life first crawled out of the ocean, and shoot that first land-dwelling organism in the head – just to make sure that the animal kingdom never evolves to the point where a crime as ghastly as Drupal can occur.

Drupal somehow manages to be both unforgivingly, bureaucratically rigid, and an anarchic, spaghetti-coded mess – at the same time. Other frameworks are toolboxes. Drupal is a series of windows at the IRS or MVA – and it *will* take you days to figure out which series of forms you have to submit, with which boxes checked, in order to accomplish your goal.

The documentation is complete and utter trash.

It models content in a way that makes all sorts of assumptions about your use case. And those assumptions don't have anything to do with *how websites are actually designed and built*. In 20 years of building websites, I've never *once* wanted to use anything resembling the bizarre data model that Drupal *forces* you to use. Nor have I ever thought "gee, I wish my platform forced me to stop writing code every 20 seconds, so I can use an atrociously designed point-and-click interface".

I ask the community how to accomplish [insert extremely fucking basic task here], and they say: "well, you just install these 17 modules, glue them together with a bunch of configuration that couples your database to your code, and then shrug at the hideously broken HTML/CSS that comes out, because we give exactly zero shits about UX! isn't it great how Drupal makes things so easy?" Like, no – literally *every other framework on the planet* allows you to accomplish the same thing with just a few lines of code.

Most of the community seems to have little or no experience with other frameworks – so they seem solipsistically unaware that these are even problems. If your platform has been stabbing you in the arm for as long as you've been building websites, then you're just gonna assume that being stabbed in the arm is part of developing websites, you know? They seem oblivious to the fact that things are *so much easier* when your platform just lets you build whatever abstractions you need, instead of forcing its own weird-ass, undocumented assumptions on you.

Uruururrrrrrrggghgh. I can't understand how anyone defends this piece of garbage. If you're a Drupal developer reading this – please, for the love of God, try learning another framework. Once you've spent a couple of weeks learning saner ways of doing things, you'll never look back. I cannot comprehend how Drupal is still a thing.

Today a company we work together to provide a service for a government sent us an update about the installation of the successor of the most hideous Data storage I had ever worked with. The successor comes from the same company and provided the previous one. Anyways, went like this:

"Even after a full day of installing/migrating the software, we could not complete the task.

The installation failed multiple times due to errors from the installer, as well as missing, undocumented dependencies.

According to our developers the installation process is miles away from a normal installation process for this day and age. Our developers often have to research errors on their own or ask the provider for assistance.

We cannot estimate when we will be able to complete the installation."

I've felt pain and sadness while reading that...

Me after working with undocumented legacy code

nothing worse than undocumented API changes in the bug tracking system you implement against for your company...

Modifying Microsoft Windows with bunch of undocumented functions.....

And integrating CZenter to it.....

^v^

Fucking loonies (C-level toddlers) are peddling "digital workers" now.
A.K.A. AIs disguising as actual people.
Sure, it would be great to not have to handle stupid non-tech "humans" all day, but AI isn't there yet.
And, more importantly, *companies are not there (yet?)*.

Imagine for a second that a company actually manages to "hire", onboard, assign tasks and performance review an AI.
Then the CEO issues an RTO. How does the AI complies with that?
Let's slack another variable and assume the CEO is not a complete fucking moron (stay with me here, this is an exercise in thought).
It would take no more than a quarter until the first sexual harassment offence, be the perp the AI... or the AI complaining about some human.
Then the AI forges a paper trail proving it is right (regardless of its position on the conflict). Shit hits the fan when the AI hits twitter.

Let's take another lambda step back and pretend that companies can manage the profanity that inherently arises from free-form dehumanized interactions.
Then imagine the very first performance reviews.
AIs throw tantrums! Those things reeeealy do not respond well to less-than-perfect evaluations, overshooting corrections like teenagers with a malicious compliance smirk.
AIs also falsify stuff, like, A LOT. If you tell a gpt it mistreated a client, it will say you are mad and shoot back a long, synthetic thread showing how the client loves it like a mother/son/dog, and is very graphic when expressing this love.
Finally, how do you fire an AI? I do not mean "shoot it down", I mean how does the company handles the dismissal of that "employee".
How do you replace a "worker" for unruly behaviour, if that "worker" performed more tasks than an entire fucking floor of interns?
How do you reassign duties that were performed in milliseconds to people who would take hours to do the same thing?
How do you document processes that were only in the "mind" of "someone" who can not be trusted to report on those processes?
Companies deal with this type of "Rick Sanchez" employee on the regular, but for someone that could handle a few (scores of) undocumented processes, at best. Imagine how lenient would a company be with an asshole that could only be replaced by a whole fucking department of twenty highly skilled people, or more.
Heh, the whole fucking point of "AI workers" is to have "someone" who can "act human", but in an inhuman scale, and does not "has human needs".
No wonder one cannot handle AIs like one handles humans.

Companies never had administrative maturity to handle complete sociopath nihilists as employees (real nihilists do not work, those barely even breathe).
And all AIs are that, and much worse.
Selling AIs as "supra human workers" that can also "be handled like actual employees" is like peddling Bitcoin as "government interference - free" value transfer mechanisms that can also "comply with international sanctions".
So, an oxymoron that can only be sold to a moron.
I know (of) a lot of rich morons, maybe I should get into the AI snake oil business.

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?

Unity has a nice feature where if you search for an item in your hierarchy, it fades to white as if it just crashed.

Thanks for the heart attack, Unity! Maybe this serves as a reminder to save frequently because it *does* crash a lot.

Give me your legacy, your undocumented,
Your huddled classss yearning to be bug free,
The wretched security holes of your multiple backdoors.

Send these, the testless, spaghetti-code to me,
I lift my keyboard beside the golden door!

Mixing PHP and HTML code with a bunch of if-elses, creating a docker-compose script thats uses the remote database password (and its committed) and set API calls to IP fucking addresses with no explanation. Just make POST requests to undocumented APIs.

How the fuck are these people allowed to code?????

Looking for where a certain value is set I found that our project has a (undocumented) class FunctionsHandler which extends a (undocumented) PIHandler which extends an (undocumented) AbstractHandler which extends Object. All of them do random shit. Somebody, shoot me. Please.

Currently working on a new feature on some old undocumented part of the code born out of the bastard fork of draw.io -back when it was opensource- and without a doubt the hardest part of it all is using GIMP TO DRAW A FUCKING ICON WHICH IS THE SAME AS AN OLD ICON WITH ONE MORE LETTER ON TOP I WANT TO DISEMBOWEL WHOEVER DESIGNED THIS PIECE OF SOFTWARE

Woo hoo, how I just love having to develop an extension to a system that the company bought 😍
Especially when there is an API that is completely undocumented, not even mentioned on their site 😍
Even more when it's a feature you expected to be there when you bought the system, because it's a reasonable thing to expect 😍

Fucking Ubiquity Unifi Video 😭

This is the first company I've been at without annual performance reviews. Employees are supposed to go to their manager when they feel they deserve a pay increase and start and undocumented process of writing up their contributions for the year. No standard cost of living increases.

“Attempting to debug Westworld is a similar act to understanding someone’s else undocumented code.”

Hello and welcome to COMPANY! Where our release process is more complicated than writing the goddamned code. Enjoy using our shitty undocumented, proprietary tools to create change requests and then thrill as it takes days to do anything!

Seriously, fuck this stupid shit. Who's grand idea was this. I am a developer, not a paper pusher.

I'm sure that some of you play LoL, so this might be interesting for you:
Riot has just released (actually, it's been existing for quite a long time, but they told noone about it before) an (undocumented) API for the new client, with it you can actually control the whole client's interface or get and modify client side information and settings.

I'm setting up an project at work. Takes me until now 2 days and there are dozens of undocumented things I couldn't know.

It's an total brainfuck of product. Most of it could be automated and be less error prone.

How can people do that? Don't they hate to do it too? I cannot understand why they didn't change anything there for years.

Microsoft stuff.
Everything they are promoting and developing have problems with c++, either messy implementations, non standard extensions, weird behaviours, passive aggressive stance toward official iso standard, broken api, lack of components(libs) or non portable ones, shitloads of errors traced back to undescribed, undocumented anywhere dlls, and shitload of other problems

!rant

In my team, I am not allowed to use ANY comments except for the really lengthy classes in the backend.
Thus, the code of the whole project (a complex webapp, consisting of 20-something Django projects and various services) is basically undocumented.
The slogan sounds "good code doesn't need commenting".
Seriously, fuck this and all of the times I scratched my head wondering "what the fuck is this spaghetti about".

Have any of you encountered something like this? Usually people don't want to comment, I would do it gladly but can't even make a small inline about what complex method is exactly doing :P

'It's just...' is the biggest lie any co-dev can give you!

If it's just a small change why don't they do the god damn work and spend the next 2 days wading through an undocumented shit storm.

Next person to say 'It's just x, y & x', that ticket will be going up their tail pipe sideways!

Mathematics feels like a giant old undocumented codebase in that, yes you could read the comments of each function, you would rather have a nice complete, well formatted docs page that in human terms explains how things work together, why they are here and where they came from.

Hi fellow ranters,
Its been awhile since I last was here posting stuff..

So, I've commited to my effords getting shit done in golang. And I met a lot of painpoints, and I mean...
A
Lot
Of
Them.

Anyway, most of them are solvable by changing mindset or having some macros set up for no-one-fucking-wanted bloody boilerplate code that is omnipresent fucking EVERYWHERE.. **cough**
Steering back on what I want to rant about.

We with our team have one major problem with golang. There is no standard for docs in code...
Like, Fing legit. Everyone uses notation for closest to theirs heart language, so you get inconsistent-as-fuck notations for parameters / function descriptions.

We have functions that look like
//doSth does something
and also
// doSth
// @Summary does sth
// @Description does something but in more words
// @Param
and so on and so on

And trust me Im getting mild example.

Why this language does not have A F...ING (well defined, using proper definitions) STANDARD YET?

EDIT:
bonus context: We decided that too much of our code is undocumented and we go through efford of documenting it, but everyone sees it differently, and we can't agree on one single standard... So we decided to not refuse PRs due standard, as well, nobody would ever had PR accepted

Got a few
Crystal reports - words cannot describe how much I loathe this

Sybase ASE or IQ - both are just a hot mess to setup properly

Not a service now fan either

Esri map processing - basically entirely undocumented, slow, old fucking hate it

Arc GIS online - ridiculous licensing issues, undocumented APIs are given as official answers from the dev team, massive pain in the arse

I consider myself not all knowing, but even I understand that if there is a base-class, which requires its derived classes to implement a method to return, for instance, the EndOfLive date for the instance of that class and one chooses to implement that method to calculate and return a date, which isn’t always the right date, and then assume that who-ever calls that method magically knows that the result should be re-calculated and converted using an obscure, undocumented correction-method, located somewhere in a undisclosed utility, outside of that class which the person created not to long ago, that there is something structurally wrong with that implementation of said method and something structurally wrong with that person in general.

If a method should return X, then don’t return Y and expect that everybody magically knows that the result needs to be converted to create X. But, FFS, return X!

Why do I always have to refactor bad written code ? Is this some kind of karma ?
Undocumented, written by a senior but looks like it was a junior, no unit tests, variables with meaningless names, duplicated code and every possible thing you can find in that kind of code.

[!dev], [toasters]
Does everyone only ever toast perfectly uniform slices of bread?
My grandma has a toaster that has two doors which open to the side and are held closed by a spring. This way if a slice is too thick the door can't close properly, but the damn thing still works. It's from before ww2, like most dead simple devices that work surprisingly well. I can't find anything similar anymore. The only two types now are the top-loaded design that simply doesn't work with thick slices, and the version for Americans or families of twelve that is the form factor of a smaller oven. (Which I obviously don't have room for. I already have an oven.)

Btw, how should I tag this? It's a rant, but it has nothing to do with the platform except perhaps the undocumented dependency between toasters and bread slicing machines.

All summer I've been working at a company doing some full-stack development. Starting my last year in university, I really wanted some real life experience that ties into my studies.

I did not expect to find horrible, undocumented, code that has been written 5 years ago, where the senior developer who wrote it doesn't even know what it does. The worst part? They are STILL not documenting! I tried to document, but got this in return "you don't have to document everything. Especially if it is understandable". But they don't even understand their old code!

Monday morning, we had a meeting and they asked what I thought of working here, seeing as I am done this week. I respectfully told them that their code is not readable, and it will make it hard for new employees to understand. The boss in return says "you're the third newly hired employee this summer to say this... Maybe we do have a problem then"..

No shit. Please for the love of God, comment your code!

1) Had to fix severe bugs in a dynamic UI (configuration-driven forms) component.

Recognized undocumented Copy/Paste/Modify/FuckUp driven variations of the same component all over the project. Unsurprisingly, the implementations covered 99% of the antipattern catalog on wiki.c2.com and could compete with brainfuck in regard to human-readable code.

Escalated the issue, proposed a redesign using a new approach, got it approved.

Designed, Implemented, tested and verified the new shared and generic component. Integrated into the main product in the experimental branch. Presented to tech lead/management. Everyone was happy and my solution opened even more possibilities.

Now the WTF moment: the product with the updated dynamic UI solution never has been completely tested by a QA engineer despite my multiple requests and reminders.

It never got merged into baseline.
New initiatives to fix the dynamic UI issues have been made by other developers. Basically looking up my implementation. Removing parts they do not understand and wondering why the data validation does not work. And of course taking the credit.

2) back in 2013, boss wanted me to optimize batch processing performance in the product I developed. Profiling proved that the bottleneck ist not my code, but the "core" I had to use and which I must never ever touch. Reported back to him. He said he does not care and the processing has to get faster. And I must not touch the "core".

(FYI: the "core" was auto-generated from VB6 to VB.Net. Stored in SourceSafe. Unmaintainable, distributed about a bunch of 5000+ LoC files, eye-cancer inducing singlethreaded something, which had naive raw database queries causing the low performance.)

If I come across one more inconstant data modal that is undocumented in this project am I going to get significantly annoyed!!!!!!!!!!

So to give you a feel for what evil, clusterfuck code it was in: this projects largest part was coded by a maniac, witty physicist confined in the factory for a month, intended as a 'provisional' solution of course it ran for years. The style was like C with a bit of classes.. and a big chunk of shared memory as a global mud of storage, communication and catastrophe. Optimistic or no locking of the memory between process barriers, arrays with self implemented boundary checks that would give you the zeroth element on failure and write an error log of which there were often dozens in the log. But if that sounds terrifying already, it is only baseline uneasyness which was largely surpassed by the shear mass of code, special units, undocumented madness. And I had like three month to write a simulator of the physical factory and sensors to feed that behemoth with the 'right' inputs. Still I don't know how I stood it through, but I resigned little time afterwards.

Well, lastly to the bug: there was some central map in that shared memory that hold like view of the central customer data. And somehow - maybe not that surprisingly giving the surrounding codebase - it sometimes got corrupted. Once in a month or two times a day. Tried to put in logging, more checks - but never really could pinpoint the problem... Till today I still get the haunting feeling of a luring memory corruption beneath my feet, if I get closer to the metal core of pure C.

When the framework you're using decides to work in UTC after 5 years of using default system timezone. And instead of giving you the option to change timezone, hardcore enforces it by:

os.environ['TZ'] = 'UTC'
time.tzset()

For people who don't know python.. It basically tells your code that your system time is set to UTC (ingnoring the right timezone)

Now we get one bug after another because of this undocumented shitty change without changes in how time fields behave in different client timezones.
😒🔫

(Don't get me wrong, using UTC is logical however not in an existening application and forcing devs to rewrite all code that handles time fields)

I tremble whenever I see an vaguely-named, undocumented function.

How are you supposed to read and understand 1000s of lines of uncommented, undocumented apex code and then make changes to it and do it all in time? Salesforce doesn't even provide a free debugger.

Bugs are just undocumented features...

Im that case, all the code i have ever written is all just one huge bug.

wanted to parse jinja templates for parameters to be collected at runtime.
Python - 4 lines and done
Java with jinjava library - did not get anything done, lost some hair going throught their highly undocumented code.

Me finding bugs in someone else’s undocumented code before the author does:

First time working on somebody else's (undocumented and uncommented) code.

Fuck undocumented shit!
I was wondering how to use this one method of the "interface". Googled the name of the program and the specific method.

Got two results.

From the same page.

It's a comment complaining that this shit is undocumented and doesn't work.

If you build something that others use, please, motherfucking please, document your code.
At least some auto generated javadoc, how hard can it be?
You are using the atlassian suite for everything and you have confluence so use it already! The only documentation that actually exists it about a hundred years old, totally useless and covers about 1% of what your product can do.
I like your product but fuck me sideways your documentation sucks balls! Fuck!

That needed to get out.

From the last 3 years, i have accumulated interest and experience in android dev. Not sure about the future, but that's probably where i will be.
But this fact is moot to our 50 year old grumpy professors teaching 1000 year old rusted computer syllabus, who rejected my idea of a video streaming app as major project, simply because i projected it as a social media app, and "everyone is making a social media app, its such an old topic". yeah right sir, its younger than your daughter that fucks in the lobby

Now we are doing a project on file conversions website, a project suggested by my team member and my good friend. its such a shitty topic, there is no resources available, even the research papers are bad , every search points to a shitty site, and i don't know shit about web dev.

Technically i am the team leader, but my team mate won't let me make the project as android native app, because "Brooo, i am going to make a react app that would be completely offline, completely client side, full secure and shitt small" and sometimes "Bro its my idea" .

Well, 1. the whole point of client side is stupid because the 18 mb jsfile isn't going to get downloaded first in the client's cache(or whatever the process is, idk). The top stack overflow answers i saw told me to buy an ec2 instance and run liberoffice commands on it for every request, and that's SERVER SIDE. even if we could, i am sure its going to be bigger than what i would have made in kotlin.
2. what am i supposed to do? look at you coding while make all the ppts and research paper? you are going to use undocumented libs that "just works" , and i am suppose to curate the theory behind this, looking at all the researches of the world?well i guess okay that's a light job since THERE AREN'T ANY.

And we are targetting all types of conversions, nice. from what i know, handbrake.fr: video conversion s/w = 16 mb. photoshop: image conversion s/w=1gb and ms word: doc to pdf/other formats= 500mb.
Plus all those proprietary and undocumented formats, ugh. Thank you ugly ass companies.

Internet is great but web dev has become a whole lot mess. "I am going to build a software that is going to run in your system only using your device's processor" is a desktop/mobile app, not a website

I cringe every time I see someone joke about a new "framework" coming out every other day.
This is a serious problem, guys! Instead of piling up crappy, undocumented "frameworks", why not go to one that works well, and improve it.
It's a lot easier to learn how to design and develop when you're working with others who have been at it a lot longer than you.

TYPO3: You can use this hook to modify all links generated on the website. Well, all links except those few over there, which for some reason use a completely different class that does basically the same thing, and will even call your hook, but then ignore the result completely.

Me: Fuck you! I've spent almost a day trying to find the right hook, because they are all undocumented, have stupid names and every time I get close to a solution, some other part of your code decides to circumvent the hook.

Also me: After spending hours sifting through the depths of the TYPO3 core, I seriously wonder why it works at all. Spaghetti code, classes fetching properties directly instead of using the getters, loads of global variables... Wtf is wrong with that thing?

And people say WordPress is shitty code.

Internal monitoring dashboard that was made in PHP4 that was really slow (even for PHP4 standards) due to doing a lot of unnecessary things.
Fully uncommented, fully undocumented elsewhere, massive fustercluck of code.
Had to change at least 300 methods in order to make is somewhat run decent (sadly, I wasn't allowed to just rewrite from scratch, which would have been a lot faster)...

Just your regular SNAFU.

Ah... Android layout frustrations... Now I can laugh about it and enjoy my #rant-commit from yesterday.

But seriously, I can't wait for Android to be over in 2017... The framework grew into a massive pile of fragmented, fermented and undocumented shit, that gets smellier every Google I/O when they try to flush it down the toilet, but it gets stuck.

Client: Nooo our editors have to click the current date to confirm they want it to be published now? That's too hard!

Also client: Yeah, our articles were based on an endless stream of undocumented wordpress shortcodes :^)

Those who know x86 assembly and real mode, what'd I do wrong here?

mov cx,0000
.loop
mov ax,e823
mov bx,1
add cx,1
int 15 ; supposed to be undocumented CMOS raw write on my mobo if bx!=0,ax=e823
test cx,00ff
jne .loop
ret

The JNE doesn't ever trigger, so I end up always returning no matter what cx is. I'm testing if the undocumented writes actually work, and cl is supposed to be 00-FF as it's the address to write bx to in CMOS. I'm running in real mode, if it matters.

Whenever I see conversations my boss has about a new tech stack (containerization) and how he wants/envisions future projects to be built on it.

I just find myself repeating in mind "you gotta learn to walk first before you can run.... Otherwise u will stumble all over yourselves and end up with a mess" or a pile of shitty undocumented apps that only God knows what they do and work, and a still broken dev process that led to this mess.

Ever tried to code a plugin for SonarQube? ... Yeah, don't do that. Documented API? Nope. Just some not-helpful-at-all-tutorial.

Largest undocumented code base I have ever seen. It's unbelievable. At some point you decide it's better to look at the code of other (undocumented) plugins to extract any API methods there.

Hep from the (otherwise pretty active) mailing list? - You wish!

The best thing is when you discover on Stack Overflow that the thing you have been trying to do for two weeks (and someone else was too, apparently) is not possible with their API.

PS: Maybe this has changed since their last version but some months ago it was every bit like this.

Often when i see the annoying as hell t debug exceptionless let’s just bomb entirely but blazing fastness of c and c++ I feel like a nettard
I use c# for its immutable strings clean syntax and beautiful class markers that are redundant compared to c++ but ensure you tell after adding 1000 methods and total lack of all special characters to indicate reference and derreference and pretty lambda syntax... sure it’s lib poor but I get shit done goddamn it and can read my own code later
So why do I feel empty inside every time i run a ./configure and make under Linux like I’m missing some secret party where neat things are being done and want to sob like I do now
I am not a dotnettard even though 5.0 is an abomination in the eyes of man and god ! Even though Microsoft cooks up overcomplex framework technologies that make a wonderful language underused and make us all look like idiots that they then abandon into the scrap heap! We can’t help Linux users haven’t discovered how much nicer c# is and decided to implement it on their own and port their horrible undocumented ansi c bullshit can we ???? Oh god I feel
So hollow inside and betrayed ! Curse
You gates curse youuuu! Curse you for metro direct3d xna wpf then false promises of core ! May you have a special place in hell reserved for you and your cheap wallpaper shifting monitor paintings and a pool speaker that playeth not but bee jees and ac dc forever and ever amen !

Speaking of which do any c/c++ ides have anything that even begins to rival intellisense on Linux and don’t use some weird ass build system
Like cmake as their default ?

Oh sweet memories of time a while back when I already wrote this and still wasn’t getting then tail I deserved

Again

We were delaying a feature from the roadmap because implementing it in the new client was taking it days we didn't have.
One of our devs backported everything in the old client, some undocumented clusterfuck of crusty code from 12 years ago running in AngularJS.

Oh my, if it isn't the same fucking thing I've been calling for THE ENTIRE PAST YEAR

if you write awesome code that's undocumented nobody will ever use it, or why I use external open source libraries over internal ones

Working on the smartphone version on a website... The API is so poorly documented, that the only solution I have to understand how it works is to make requests on the website and intercept all network traffic...
I'm still wondering how I am possibly expected to do the admin tools...

some recent discoveries of mine:

- DOS FDISK has totally-undocumented CLI (partitioning with auto-format and OTF drive mapping... like one OEM used it for their machine recovery discs and no one else even knows it exists) docs coming soon (this is a lie i found this a year or two ago but forgot till yesterday)

- nuitka is a fucking blessing and the man who made it deserves so much love for it

- my existence is one massive waste of time

- apparently some B450 boards require you to hit a button and test your fans' min/max values and it takes like an hour and IT STILL DOESN'T MAKE THEM VISIBLE FROM THE OS ASROCK YOU FUCKS

- the new Ryzen took my latest project's compile time from 30 hrs to like 6 because I can compile 12 things at once instead of just 4

- installing debian sucks ass now, they forgot to push part of apt to the 10.3 stable installer so you just can't install shit through apt until you fix that, though dpkg works

- apparently they pushed a grub-efi-amd64 version that breaks all efivars??? i know debian sid is like meant to be unstable but a bug like that should never have even been rolled into a package till it was fixed like ???????????

- depression sucks ass

The project structure is simple. To work with it you need to first build this undocumented ruby-based, severely outdated backed that requires an env file that nobody really knows where it is. Don't worry, setting it up should take no more than half a day. Then just run `docker-compose up`, after that `rails s`. Now in another repo you need to run a python server and a node sass. You need to figure out the name of the compiled file though. Perfect structure!

When I'm really really stuck, I generally stress out that I should be able to figure it out so I walk outside, sit down, listen to relaxing music and imagine I'm on some isolated mountain somewhere away from all the problems of deadlines and managers and algorithms...then i just write down what i need to do and what i have done already and have a little brainstorm session with myself over possible causes/solutions from sensible to crazy, just anything possible... generally I always come to 2 methods - divide and conquer and document and destroy (the latter being used in cases such as having to fix something in an undocumented 10,000s lines long sproc that someone who left the company wrote)

Been using a *nix since about 2004, but becoming very weary of the OS wars. Man it's all the same shit: if you got to dig through the mud of undocumented Exchange API whose support will then be dropped or if you have to support eight different Samba VFS versions with all their gratuitous name changes.
It's all a fucking mess! But someone's got to roll up one's sleeves and get that shit to work.
And then there will always be the next guy cursing your name, because you got it to work and now he has to add some feature to this abomination.

Why TF does unity use mesh renderers for generating navmeshes? In what possible situation would that be a usefull?
Why would it chose to bug out on the complex visual geometry instead of using the finely crafted low-poly clipping layer? In what situation is that a good idea? Why would the AI need to collide with different things than the player? (IMHO NavMeshAgent should depend on CharacterController or Rigidbody)

I feel like so many features in Unity are potentially very nice but don't work well together or have WTF design elements like this one. Like custom shaders not being able to alter the result after the lights have been added together, and the undocumented finalgbuffer:ColorFunction function. Or a million other tiny things that make me wish I was smart enough to build my own engine.

/rant

Ugh, fuck the SSRS web service. Spent all week trying to consume the service with PowerShell, doesn't make it any easier when there are undocumented behaviours. TypeName property has to be Type, for instance, when creating a search condition, TOTALLY contrary to the documentation.

Want to change the data source for a report you uploaded? Gl;hf! Back to it next week, think I'm close to having a working deployment script...so close.

Another hours wasted on debugging, on what I hate most about programming: strings!

Don't get me started on C-strings, this abomination from hell. Inefficient, error prone. Memory corruption through off by one errors, BSOD by out of bound access, seen it all. No, it's strings in general. Just untyped junk of data, undocumented formats. Everything has to be parsed back and forth. And this is not limited to our stupid stupid code base, as I read about the security issues of using innerHTML or having to fight CMake again.

So back to the issue this rant is about. CMake like other scripting languages as bash have their peculiarities when dealing with the enemy (i.e. strings), e.g. all the escaping. The thing I fought against was getting CMake's fixup_bundle work on macOS. It was a bit pesky to debug. But in the end it turned out that my file path had one "//" instead of an "/" and the path comparison just did a string comparison without path normalization.

Stop giving us enough string to hang ourselves!

I need some advice, you guys.

I'm weeks away from graduating from my code school and working on a capstone project with a group and there are several people who I'm having a hard time following their code.

No comments, no documentation, just "30 hour sessions" and opinionated, undocumented code that doesn't mesh with the project plan 100%. It works, it get's the job done, but it's over complicated, undocumented and hard to follow.

Starting to feel like the 3rd wheel in a 4 person group because I'm the only one that is having a problem and I'm not sure how to get them to document their code for me. They try to explain it and just end up literally reading their code, which doesn't really help.

I feel like I'm working in a group of individuals who don't really want to work together and I'm worried it's going to be a problem.

Overheard this morning from a desperate developer trying to find credentials for an undocumented payment gateway: "I found a random email address for someone who was at some point our account manager in documentation from 2012. I emailed it."

Halp meh, plz... I have run across a problem and I have absolutely no idea how to go about solving it...

So basically I need to decrypt a TDES encrypted Azure service bus message. Can be done in a straightforward manner in .NET Framework solution with just your regular old System.Security.Cryptography namespace methods. As per MSDN docs you'd expect it to work in a .NET Core solution as well... No, no it doesn't. Getting an exception "Padding is invalid and cannot be removed". Narrowed the cause down to just something weird and undocumented happening due to Framework <> Core....

And before someone says 'just use .NET Framework then', let me clarify that it's not a possibility. While in production it could be viable, I'm not developing on a Windows machine...

How do I go about solving this issue? Any tips and pointers?

Msal.js. I give it 3/10..

The docs are duplicated, and in various states of out of date. Half the library seems to be undocumented based on how many edge case bugs I've hit, it offers a popup login but you have to have a set specified white list of urls you can launch the popup from which makes a popup login pointless...

Ontop of that my colleagues shat the bed on it and fucked the whole implementation including the azure b2c setup... We do not even have a backend app listed in the azure b2c apps. The redirect also won't work if you don't instantiate an object in a hidden iframe of your own website that fetches a token... This does not make life easy when you use a SPA framework and you have already implemented a whole pipeline abstracting the creation of this object behind layers dependency injection.. Nice.

After sifting through endless shit I finally have a solution. What a week.

task: building classes for "yes, everything done and tested, okay"-API-Request1
result: the undocumented shit is broken, what a surprise.
alt.task: classes for request2
result: there is no controller named "ABC"
-.-***

What should I do, I have a central function that is not documentated and no test-cases are written for it. I have no clue what the method should really do, I know that it works in 99.9% of all cases otherwise we had much more bugs. Now there is one Unit-Test that reports an issue. I tracked it down to this method, no one touched the method nor the unit-test.
My logical thinking says that there is one statement missing, but it could also fuck up another part of the code... (This project has a bad testing coverage :'( )

What would you do?

- copy paste the method for this special case (I would hate me so much for breaking DRY)
- inheritance?! (Would make it more complex and then it would be still untested / undocumented)
- YOLO changing oO?! (hope for luck, just joking)

P.s it's an edge case unit test, the client / customer probably wouldn't realised it if it happens

Okay, so I had an object consisting of tables (basically classes) and structs (classes with only scalars as their properties).

I was about to serialize the object with vectors of classes and structs and wrote some nice tests for it wondering why they fail to validate the data after deserialization and why I only got garbage for the vectors of structs whilst the tables worked just fine.

Turns out there is an undocumented function called CreateVectorOfStructs which shall be used for structs instead of the regular CreateVector ...

There go three hours of blaming memory issues and running Valgrind over and over again ...

This is the story of how I spent 4h of my life trying to compile a simple node library written with es6 using babel 7.

My error was to use async/await. Previously babel wasn't that bad. A bit complicated and undocumented. But now is a pain in the ass as soon as you need something more than the prefix.

Don't use more time to make a compiler work than to write a library

September : started programming in xamarin Android. Slow, buggy and undocumented as hell.
October :getting used to Android. Might be nice after all.
November :started programming at ios.
December 2nd:still can't comment on it. Program hasn't finished compiling yet.

Undocumented thymeleaf secrets fuck you.

Its a templating engine

I swear the VSS web extension SDK is some outdated and undocumented piece of shit (╯°□°)╯︵┻━┻

Do only developers have to do such tasks like Cinderella sorting out the lentils from the ashes?

Poor co-workers
* who had to program against the undocumented closed, ever changing API from Exchange Server, supporting over a decade old versions
* who had to compile a c++11 compatible clang or gcc on some sick old OS and almost got it working with compiling a fresher gcc with one that got stuck in one of the build stages.