Everyday i used to spend an hour in the morning reading emails.

Until i made a script that reads all mails, parses to urgent/priorities/meetings etc. Then shows me a dashboard of everything. 1 hr turned to 20mins max.

Then i made a chatbot out of it and now i just talk to it everytime and gives me the rundown.

Gave me so much time to code instead of reading fucking emails.

R: Random ass recruiter on LinkedIn
Me: me

R: Hey I was searching for X skill and your name popped up first. Would you like to work for our company? It's an urgent position with good pay and awesome latest tech

Me: I quit that very company 5 months ago, because the pay was low and the tech was from the 1990's.

R: :/

Me: :|

PS: I'm not 100% sure of this, but based off the tech stack, I'm pretty sure it was for the same fucking position I quit from.

Got an email from client with subject starting with "VERY URGENT", the email mentioned how urgent it is to fix this issue multiple times, it implied that they couldn't do anything else while this issue existed, but they were very light on details. So sparse on them that I couldn't reproduce the issue. 15 minutes after the original email I write a reply asking for some clarifications.

They proceed not to reply for 4 days. Fix took 5 minutes after they explained the problem better.

Apparently it wasn't so urgent after all.

> Receive sudden phone call in the middle of the night
> Check caller, unknown number
> "Either something bad happened or it's something urgent. I'd better answer."
> "Hello?"
> Friend of friend of friend says he updated his gpu drivers and now has some random fps drops.
> I was in a good mood so I agreed to help him over teamviewer, even though I don't know him.
> Downgrading to an older version of nvidia driver seemed to have fixed the drops.
> 5 minutes later, he calls again. His headset is not working properly.
> Helped him fix the issue over teamviever.
> This continued for at least 2 hours, calling me every 5 minutes to install just another driver or change some random win setting. Turned out he had some retard format his pc because he thought it'd "make it go faster".
> Calls me again, this time he's pc isn't booting up at all. After 20 minutes on the phone the fucktard admits he just tried to reformat his pc because "my pc automatically installed a bad windows update" ( no, I don't understand either) but he fucked it up.
> I begin explaining him how to make a bootable usb stick, how to change the boot order etc to reinstall windows. I even suggested that I'd help him setup win/drivers after windows's done installing.
> He lets me go for about an hour explaining.
> "So that's it. When the setup is over, call me again and I'll help you install the drivers."
> "Bro this sounds complicated, why don't you come over? This won't even take you 5 minutes"

YOU MOTHERFUCKING PIECE OF SHIT
YOU FUCKING TRASH
CALL ME AGAIN AND I'LL SHOVE YOUR GIGABYTE GEFORCE GTX1060 6GB UP YOUR ASS, PERPENDICULARLY

The motherfucker even called me "bro"

Client: Urgent! App is crashing!
Me inside: Wtf, Crashlytics didn’t send me anything, it betrayed me...
Me: What’s wrong?
Client: Some random user sent me email that app is crashing SOMEWHERE(!?)
Me: ................................... no problem, I’m working on it.

*Tomorrow*
Me: Fixed, everything works fine now (didn’t do anything actually)
Client: Great, nice work!

Client never mentioned that “problem “ anymore.
#likeaboss

Another story from that dev friend of mine:

So a client(small company) of theirs insisted on having their own local servers for their web hosting(no idea why). So my friend's company sets it up(after the website was done).(This was on Tuesday.)

The next weekend they(friend's company) gets an urgent support ticket saying the website is down.
(24/7 support is part of their contract/)
My friend gets tasked with that ticket.
And indeed it's down, ssh access to the server doesn't work either.
He calls up the client's CEO(again, small company, no other contact person) and asks him to restart the server. This guy then drives to their warehouse. As soon as he has restarted them(as instructed) the site works again.
My friend then tries to access the server logs(via sshfs) when his connection to the server drops and the website goes down again.
He calls the client again, asking what he's done, this is their conversation:

F(friend): What did you do?
C(client): Nothing, I just left the building.
F: Sure?
C: Yes, sure. I turned off the lights and left.
F(suspecting something, knowing that the client is an older person): How did you turn of the lights?
C: Like always, with the breaker by the door.
F: *Facepalm* You can't do that, the servers need electricity to work.
C: Oh.. *Akward silence* *Hangs up*
*5 min later the website's up again and the ticket is closed*

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

Manager: The thing you working on. We need this now! Like end of the week.

Me: Desirability is not do-ability.

Manager: く( ・◇・)ヾ？

Me: I am still in the middle of figuring out how to do things in the first place, so there are some technologies to research and some problems I yet need to solve. I am in no state to just write down my solution. I don't even have enough information to even estimate how long it is going to take. I am getting there. And yes, I can rush things, but need I remind you that you want solid data as a result that actually means something? As this is *why* this whole project was started. We have some old project doing the exact same thing, but whose output we don't trust. I wonder how that came to be. Additionally, this whole project was on hold for months until I took over. So I neither understand nor accept this sudden sense of urgency. And by the way, you recently added manpower to this project. And adding manpower almost always decreases the productivity in the beginning due to on-boarding and communication overhead. Last Monday, I didn't write a single line of code due to that. So no, this week will not do, as I am also on vacation starting on Thursday that was requested and was approved by you at the beginning of the year. See you in January.

Going on a vacation, so notify all clients that I won't be available during two weeks.

Client: well we have this huge presentation and here's a list of stuff we absolutely need for it
Me: sure I have a look.
Me: holy shit dude! That's gona take about 2-3 days. I'm leaving soon!
Client: it's realy critical to have them in a week as it's a very important presentation! Is there any way you can make it work? If we can do anything to help, just name it.
Me: well I'll do my best (planed 1 day for such rhings)
Me: *pulling a 15h day*
Me: here, all done budy! Did a 15h but now it's done, so do that presentation!
Client: oh, nice, but it wasn't that urgent
Me: ...

Next day:
Client ssh in to the server, fucks shit up
Client: well I did a thing and now stage and prod is fucked, can you do anything?
Me: (knowing it will take 30min to fix) well... I try my best. Btw. I'll leave in a few hours and won't take my computer, so try not to fuck every thing again, okay?

Boss: Come to my office right now! Its urgent
Me: *goes to his office*
Boss: Please install chrome for me
Me: *hands in resignation letter*

!rant

Boss: Something urgent has come up, can you take care of this.

Me: Okay.... But I am already working on X and it's a critical thing.

Boss: No, X is no longer of priority. You need to now pick up Y.

Me: But I was already........ Never mind. Yeah sure I will start working on Y.

Next day

Boss : What is the update on X?

Me: I was working on Y, also wasn't it de prioritized.

Boss : I think I was very clear when I communicated to you that X is very critical. Also you need to learn to manage your time.

Me: FUCK MY LIFE

So after I spent around 1 hour 35 minutes debugging a client's problem to end up with finding out he had no actual internet without him saying so I think I can finally catch a break and relax..

NOPE

I get an urgent call that a computer that needed tending to was down and needed to be up by tonight

I rush to the office of the said computer only to find the one of the worst things imaginable.

I can see the computer clearly shorted and lo and behold, the CD tray is out with a MUG.. yes you heard that right.. A MUG FULL OF TEA sitting on it..

I literally scream at the employee asking him what a mug was doing there and instead he calls ME DUMB saying that if it wasn't intended as a cup holder what was its use?

SERIOUSLY?! ITS 2017 HOW CAN PEOPLE NOT GRASP SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS THIS

One of our clients deploy their own server app. So this happened after a prod deployment. (4am)

*Cellphone rings while sleeping*

Client : we need you on the conference call now. URGENT!

*Gets on conference call*
*Client explain the problem*
*Explaining to the client that the problem is in their side (https connection not working, either network or certificate problem)*
*Client doesn't believe it and pushes me for a fix that I have no control on*
*4 hours later in a heated conversation*

Client : ok problem is on our side. We used our SSL certificate from staging with production and thought it would work.

Me :

Client: "I need you to implement a feature which does x"
Me: "We can it do like this, I can do it in Y hours."
Client: "Perfect do it"

Me: "Here you go have a look and if you give your ok I'll implement it on production."
Client:"That is not what I need. I need Z"
Me: "Well then you should have said Z and not x. But I can do Z if you want me to."
Client:"Do it it is urgent!!!!111"

Me: "All done here you go."
Client: "That works like what I said what I need, but I meant more like xZ."
Me: "Ok, you know I have to charge you for all this, do you?"
Client: "What why? It isn't the feature I wanted!!11 Do it right and I'll pay you for the right one!"

Me: "It might not be what you wanted but it is exactly what you specified to me. I'll send you the bill and will not continue working for you. Good luck finding someone who is willing to do unpaid work for you."

I am so done with that kind of client.

Boss: Where's that urgent hotfix that we needed last week???

*mutters to myself* Still in your inbox, seeking approval before I can put it into production

Client sends an email after 5 PM. We all left for home.

Client: blah blah blah...We urgently need this app to be done by COB on Monday. Our CEO is going to launching it on Tuesday to the board of Directors.

––Boss forwards me the email––

Boss: Can you get this done by this weekend.

––On Viber––
Boss: I have sent you an urgent email. Let me know.

––My Reply––
Me: This can't be done in a day or 2. Looking at the scope of work, I need at least 8 weeks.

––Boss Replies back––
Boss: You are not performing at the best of your ability. Come and see me on Monday, I need to talk to you about your performance on urgent projects.

"Can you work on this ticket? It's kind of urgent."

-- "OK"

"And could you please not refactor? Just get this done."

-- "Why? What's the issue?"

"The logic is complex. We should not break it."

-- "Erm, that's what the tests are for. So yes, if the need arises, I'll refactor. The tests are my guidelines if the logic breaks or not."

There's a reason we create tests. So let's not hinder code base improvements by some random fear that stuff might break.

If breaks due to refactoring, we'll fix it by adding a valid test case during and then fixing the bug.

If my refactoring does not break the tests, I'll assume the code base is stable.

If your code is untested, then we have a complete different problem.

Every deadline ever

“Our market leading software company has an urgent need on our agile team for a passionate self starter whom is able to work with minimal supervision in a fast-paced and dynamic environment on cutting edge technology. If you are a rockstar developer, let’s talk. “

All credit to ‎Chris Jones‎.

Being a programmer on a non-tech startup company is not too bad. That means aside from coding:

- You have to check if the office printer works
- You need to figure out why the phone lines aren't ringing
- You have to teach a stupid colleague on how to unzip a file
- When they give you a task, they'll say that it's "not urgent", but, they just "need it by tomorrow"
- You have to be a "mind-reader" because if something goes wrong, they don't know how to describe what's going on. Or probably, they're just too lazy being specific. They'll just say, "Hey, I have a problem.", and you will be like "What problem? Your dog is sick? You shit your pants? You lost your faith in God? Fuck what?"
- You don't have a time to "focus", because everyone interrupts you for just about anything related to "technology". Yeah, because you're the IT guy
- You always have learned and applied the latest practices/stacks, but no one gives a fuck
- You will start to re-think your life and devrants make you feel better

Dear Santa,

I know I'm 11 months early, but I have an urgent request. Please, never make me have to do web development again. It has been 24 hours and I've had enough.

Lots of love,
Me

Dev created a new service for our application that opened SQL connections. The catch? They never closed said connections. How this passed QA/review I've no idea, but after a few minutes on Staging the service would crash with "connection pool overflow".

I raised a urgent defect, and the devs "fix"? To up the maxConnectionPool to Int.Max!! Argh!

My day.

6 am: 2yo woke up
8:30 am: start work (from home)
11 am: go get breakfast/lunch
11:30 am: work call. while driving. Learn nothing new.
12:00 noon: infuriatingly slow errand
12:30 pm: work call. Learn nothing new.
1 pm: finally get to eat. It's cold. And terrible.
6 pm: 2yo finally goes to sleep (missed nap)
9:20 pm: 2yo wakes up screaming.
9:30 pm: find 3 or 4 tablespoons of leftover tuna in the fridge. No bread.
10:45 pm: I finally finish my work (super-urgent friday-morning release of a next-Wednesday-morning deadline... Yeah idfk.)
11:29 pm: 2yo stops yelling and screaming and goes back to sleep
11:39 pm: finish writing this while in bed.
11:40 pm: Sleep?

Already existing website, I was asked to do a few things to redo. Code is a mess, 0 comments, oldschool technology. Completely static html site of a small company, nothing extreme.

Client: okay, could you please add 2 more items to the navbar for the 2 new pages?
Me: yes, here they are. Since it was already full, font size had to shrink.
Client: it's okay

>> Fast forward 2 weeks, full of similarly easy modifications.

Client: could you make the font size of the navbar larger?
Me: not really, we will lose responsivity
Client: do it anyway!

>> Fast forward to next day
Client calls me that it is urgent to 'do something immediately' with the navbar because it is broken and I am a 'horrible webdesigner' for making a mess of her website. I was told that it is not her job to make it good look and that I should 'use my eyes better'.

After 2 minutes of a lecture on webdesign she let me tell her how a responsive website should look like and to achieve that we should better restart the whole website. At that point I was the idiot who just wants to get more money and that I won't be able to do that since I am already unable to finish these few tiny things she asked for.

how to make a feature request
1. dump Db table with 153 column to Excel
2. print!
3. circle column 47 on page 3, scribble feature description
4. scan! remember to use proprietary file format no one has
5. new e-mail, add "VERY URGENT!!!" to subject line
6. write "will call, discuss details monday"
6.a. attach proprietary-scanned-excel-dump-feature-description (optional)
7. postscript: deadline wednesday!!
8. wait for tuesday
9. send!
...

So my coworker got assigned a task. She copied some code from some crappy site, without even bothering of getting rid of "John Doe" in strings or getting rid of unused functions.

She hands it over me for review and I discover that the code doesn't even work! She didn't even bother running it! Anyways, I knew that the task was urgent, so instead of sending her a review, I trash her code and write everything from scratch.

This morning I woke up with an email from her to the team saying that *she* completed the task. Sorry babe, but I cannot let you take credit for my stuff.

Someone asked me for urgent help with their computer last suday evening by taking over their system online. I decided to help, because I like helping people, but my laptop would not be able to do that right now.
So I said: "Sorry, I can't take over your system, but I'll just very plainly explain everything you have to do and you just have to click on the right buttons"
To wich he guy had the nerve to tell me this: "I work all week, surely you do not expect me to spend my weekends by pressing buttons on the computer."
So according to him, I should spend my weekend fixing this guys computer, but he can't even be botherd to lift a finger to push a button. This is not for my job, he is nobody to me, just the husband of the person who actually asked for help. I still decided to do it because of his wife, but, damn, this is not something you say to someone who has just decided to sacrafice the remainder of her weekend and some sleep for you. When I complained about what he said I didn't even get an appology, just justifications along the lines of: "you have the knowledge, you can do it in so much less time then I, so I don't want to waste more time if you can do it in less", and stuff like "I'm really not a bad person"
When I was done they offered me money, I refused. To this the guy said: "you really shouldn't do that (help people for free) because life taught me that when you need help, people will not agree to give it".
Hello: I'm here, been helping for the last couple of hours because I was asked for help. Am I not a person then?
Well, then again, if he asks again, I won't.

TL;DR
Management eats shit for breakfast

Context:
I am the sole Dev on a project.

Stack: Postgresql, redis, nginx,Java with Spring Boot, Neo4j.

I am the only one nearly familiar with : Redis, Neo4j and anything Java.

I'm gonna be on vacation for the next 15 days since they have told me that we where gonna be on a "testing/feedback" period.

My vacation was approved.

Today's meeting: we have a URGENT deadline to meet some criteria that might be the difference between have further investment or not.

Urgent deadline: last day of my vacation.

My face: poker

My thoughts: attached image

Clients: have two-ish years to request their GDPR changes.

Me: receives 20 emails about GDPR changes that need to be made today. All marked as “URGENT”

Also me: lol that fucking sucks for you but I’m busy today

Client: WE NEED TO MAKE THESE CHANGES AS ITS NOW A LAW

me: that’s cool, still busy today

The way things are prioritized:

Emergency
Critical
ASAP
Do first
Top priority
Urgent
Urgent ASAP
Major urgent

Fuck sakes.. 😣

We received an urgent email from a client this morning that needed addressed immediately. We knew it was not going to be easy or fun so we did the sensible thing and began a rock paper scissors tournament to see who would work on it.

I lost... But then we see a follow up email from my boss saying he is handling it. Win!

Fast forward 6 hours, he comes out of his office and hands me a piece of paper and says he is too busy to work on it so I need to do it before going home. The paper is the email from 8am this morning... He did absolutely nothing with it for six hours except print it because a digital copy isn't good enough I guess.

I ended up working late, got yelled at by said client, and still haven't finished the fixes.

Worst of all is that I missed part of shark week because I stayed late.

Boy, this Monday mornig was crazy...
At 7 am, as I just left my flat, I received an ultra urgent email from the CEO of a company we exchanged the fileserver for, that the network shares are not available.

I instantly turned around, went back to my flat, fired up my HAL9000 supercomputer and connected remotely.
4 levels deep (PC => VPN => Remotedesktop => vSphere Client => VM) I felt like I was in the movie Inception and tried to figure out what happened.

I don't know why, but in the logs it said that the fileserver VM was down since 4am. Holy sithlord... why?

After restarting and the usual problems with Windows Network Names, everything was back online.

My special thanks go to Mr. Coffee, who is always a great companion during monday mornings, Mr. VPN, the great fellow who invented the VPN and last but not least "The Internet" for connecting me to a world of binary, where every idea finds a listener and where Ajit Pai can be memed without concequences.

FUCK YOU Ajit. Harlem Shake is so 2013.

Pm: '[...] So when will you set up the server its urgent'

Me: 'look buddy i applied here as a java dev, ended up doing fronted. Fine, i like js, i can do that. But then dont fucking ping me daily with server stuff what has been overcomplicated and i got no idea about, theres a backend team, ask them.'

Pm: 'you said you would do the frontend'

Me: 'yeah that doesnt contradict a word i said'

Pm: 'you took responsibility, fix it'

Me: '?????? THATS WHAT IM SAYING YOU FUCKFACE COCKSUCKER ASSHOLE THAT I DIDNT AND I WONT, FUCK A HORSE'

Received a urgent email from a business client saying that the application we support is completely broken. Their staff said they used the app to send several submissions that day but they did not come through. This is a major issue as these submissions need to occur daily.

I understand that this is a priority so I immediately check everything. I test the app, the server, check the database. Everything seems fine, but there's no record of these submissions. Maybe it's the specific device that was used. I reply saying that everything seems to be in order. Can I please be provided with more information about what occurred? What time were the submissions sent?

Client replies saying that the submissions were definitely sent and that the staff swear by it.

I now know something is up, so I remote into the the devices in question and check the logs. The app was not even used that day! I've got them! Those liars!

I am now quite pissed off, but remain professional and reply saying that we log all app events and that the logs show that the app had not been used at all that day. Now they have to own up to their lie. Right?

Wrong. Client replies with: The issue has been fixed. Thanks.

Can you believe the bloody nerve? The client doesn't even have the decency to apologise but rather insinuates that it was all our fault.

Well I'm not having that. I reply: It is great that the app is functioning correctly. However, I believe it is important to understand the cause of the issue as to prevent it from occuring again.

Client: No reply.

Well, if you want to waste other people's time, here's the fat bill.

Moral of the story. Don't trust anything that the client says and for any issue, debug the user before doing anything else.

I just had a rather stressful morning. I should've known something was up by the sounds of thunder as I walked into the office.

I sat down and checked my emails. There was an email from the boss who was away on a business trip. The subject read, "CRITICAL BUG" and my name was mentioned. "Great...No time for coffee", was my first thought.

I began searching commits to see when and how the bug came to be. "SHIT! It was my fault", I said aloud.

(A bit of backstory, I am Irish, working in Germany with a B2 level of the German language.)

I now had to communicate the problem quickly with a senior developer who is Russian. He can't speak English well and I would not expect him to speak it. We are in Germany after all. I tried my best to communicate the issue, but I found it so difficult to understand his German in a Russian accent. Normally, in the office I speak German except when it is urgent and I must explain a problem in greater detail through English. I got past that obstacle, however, the real challenge of fixing the bug awaited.

After 2 hours of coding, I had a solution and committed it to the master branch. All the while, I had been replying to the bosses emails with updates, probably with many grammer mistakes.

We have no dedicated testers here and the code is written in a way which makes it very difficult to test (i.e. it was written many years ago). When I had initially written the code, I tested rigorously and found no issues.

Just needed to rant. I need a coffee break now...

I'M FUCKING SICK OF HOLDING MY SELF TO DON'T MAKE OTHERS LOOK LIKE STUPID, I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ANYMORE ,NEXT YEAR IS MY TIME TO STAND AND LET PEOPLE KNOW WHO I AM. IF YOU FUCKERS CANT ACKNOWLEDGE THAT EVEN THOUGHT THIS COMPANY'S PRODUCT ISN'T SOFTWARE BUT YOU ARE FUCKING WASTING A GOLDEN RESOURCE ( DEV TEAM ) WITH FUCKING USELESS CRUDS AND USELESS SITES NO ONE FUCKING CARES ABOUT I'M GONNA LEAVE.

Email subject: Urgent need for developers!

Email body: We found you in our database, and think you're a match for this position! Requires 5+ years of C++ experience

Apparently C# == C++. Good luck finding an appropriate candidate, buddy. I was tempted to send them an email pointing out their error, but I'm not too good with "pointers"

"I strive for code quality and maintainability. I actually do. And i will not work for a company that does not care about it and just wants something done as fast as possible.
The only time i will do something quick and dirty is if it's actually urgent. And even then with one condition - my next task will be to fix it properly.

I do not care about your deadlines. I will do my best to meet them, but not at the expense of code quality. I've seen too many projects fall into technical debt, where productivity is so low, that the only way to move forward is hire more people and start working on a project 2.0

And please do not lie about how great your company is, if it's not. These kind of things surface very soon, and you will have wasted both of our time, because as i said - i will not work for a company that does not care about code quality."

you think i'll ever get a job again if i put this on my CV ? :D

I worked for over 13 hours yesterday on super-urgent projects. I got so much done it's insane.

Projects:
1) the printer auto-configuration script.
2) changing Stripe from test mode to live mode in production
3) website responsiveness

I finished two within five minutes and pushed to both QA and Production. actually urgent, actually necessary. Easy change.

The printer auto-configure script was honestly fun to write, if very involved. However, the APIs I needed to call to fetch data, create a printer client, etc... none of them were tested, and they were _all_ broken in at least two ways. The CTO (api guy in my previous rant) was slow at fixing them, so getting the APIs working took literally four hours. One of them (test print) still doesn't work.

Responsiveness... this was my first time making a website responsive. Ever. Also, one of the pages I needed to style was very complicated (nested fixed-aspect-ratio + flexbox); I ended up duplicating the markup and hacking the styling together just to make it work. The code is horrible. But! "Friday's the day! it's going live and we're pushing traffic to it!" So, I invested a lot of time and energy into making it ready and as pretty as I could, and finally got it working. That page alone took me two hours.

The site and the printer script (and obv the Stripe change as well) absolutely needed to be done by this morning. Super important.

well.

1) Auto-configure script. Ostensibly we would have an intern come in and configure the printers. However, we have no printers that need configuring, so she did marketing instead. :/ Also, the docs Epson sent us only work for the T88V printer (we have exactly one, which we happened to set up and connect to). They do not work for the T88VI printers, which is what we ordered. and all we'll ever be ordering. So. :/ I'll need to rewrite a large chunk of my code to make this work. Joy :/

2) Stripe Live mode. Nobody even seemed to notice that we were collecting info in Test mode, or that I fixed it. so. um. :/

3) Responsiveness.
Well. That deadline is actually next Wednesday. The marketing won't even start until then, and I haven't even been given the final changes yet (like come on). Also! I asked for a QA review last night before I'd push it to production. One person glanced at it. Nobody else cared. Nobody else cared enough to look in the morning, either, so it's still on QA. Super-important deadline indeed. :/

Honestly?

I feel like Alice (from Dilbert) after she worked frantically on urgent projects that ended up just being cancelled. (That one where Wally smells that lovely buttery-popcorn scent of unnecessary work.)

I worked 13 hours yesterday.
for nothing.

fucking. hell.

A colleague of mine from the administration department suddenly enters my room where my team and me are all busy and, without considering I'm talking with someone else, interrupts us.
he: "I needed to call you but your phone is in do-not-disturb mode"
me: "that's because I'm busy working on something urgent and I don't want to be disturbed"
he: "but I need your help!"
me: "we're working on a urgent thing, but, anyway, what's the problem"
he: "I need help with digital invoicing"
me: "I deal with programming, I don't think I can help..."
he (interrupting): "I created a digital invoice but I need to send a printable version to a customer"
me: "digital invoices should be XML files so you can't simply take the file's content and paste into Word and print..."
he: "in fact that's what I did and the result was horrible"
me: "I was saying just that. I'm sure, anyway, there should be some online tool for producing a well-formatted PDF from a digital invoice"
he doesn't say anything
me: "you can try with a search on Google..."
he: "but I'm not an IT guy, that's not my business"
me: "this has nothing to do with programming, you simply need to find a tool online for doing this"
he (disappointed): "ok, but this is computer stuff, I'll try..."

An urgent little patch in the code... 😌

!drunk (yet)

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

Why? Because rum is so much better. duh.

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

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

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

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

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

Why is it whenever something's incredibly urgent, everything goes wrong?

A few weeks ago I stepped onto the grounds of lovely Canada. Back then - coming from Europe - I was surprised. Free WiFi everywhere without all the bells and whistles of creating an account and such.

Well ... at least I thought so ...

Today I went to a location where they actually charge you for their wireless services - fair enough the coverage area is pretty huge - and provide you with an access coupon. All good my optimistic me told me but once the login page loaded...

There are a lot of things about UX I could rant about but let's put that aside. The coupon came from the office where they KNEW all your contact details but it required you to create an account with all of them again to redeem the coupon.

Not only that but it asked for things like the phone number - obviously asking for a Canadian landline number since hell who uses mobiles anyway with numbers longer than ten characters?! - and even though it had a nice country selection it kept the states field there even when selecting a country that doesn't have states ...
Oh, and on a regular phone screen (which would be the target user for WiFi on a campground I suppose) the input fields for state and zip were occluded by the margins of the input rendering the content invisible.

And if that weren't enough after creating your account they made you watch an ad as if the personal data and the 4$ you paid them wasn't enough for the lousy 400 KB/s you get for 24h ...

Gets better though! After creating the account they display your password to make sure you remembered it ... over a non-secured WiFi network ... and send you an email afterward ... password via unencrypted mail via an unencrypted WIRELESS connection ... not that it protects anything that would matter anyways you can just snoop the MAC of your neighbor and get in that way or for that sake get their password but oh well ...

Gosh, sometimes I just feel the urgent need to find the ones responsible and tell them to GTFO of the IT world ...

Is it just me feeling like this about crappy UI/UX design? Always wondering...

Urgent LinkedIn profile

I got a urgent call from a lead dev in another department. Needed data and services and her deadline was yesterday. I never heard of it, but worked late and got it done in 2 days. Delivery success, they had cake, speeches and praised my work apparently... I wasn't invited and didn't get any cake.

"There is a problem with A, could you check it out? It's urgent for the client"
Me: Okay, just open a ticket for it too.
*Working on A"

After about ten minutes:
"Hey, there is a small problem B and it's also urgent for the client, we need you to check it out"
Me: I'm working on A and you are yet to open a tick... (Interrupted)
"But it's urgent and it's a small fix, we can fix it and push it to prod, A can wait for a bit"
(Since when is it a "we"?)
Me: *sigh* fine, lets see what's B is all about...

*After going over problems C to Z*

"Why isn't A ready yet? The client's mad and it was to be ready as of today"
Me: Because you had problems from B to Z and they were all urgent according to you so after each request you asked of me I had to postpone A with you knowing about it.
"But A is for today!"

FUCK YOU, YOU WORTHLESS WASTE OF JIZZ! YOU RAN TO ME FOR EVERY GOD DAMN URGENT PROBLEM YOU HAD FROM OUR SHIT OF A CLIENT AND INSTEAD OF TELLING ME THE PRIORITY YOU JUST THROWN IT ALL IN A RANDOM ORDER!
FUCK YOU! I WISH YOUR FATHER WOULD'VE SHOT YOU OUT THE WINDOW INSTEAD OF INSIDE YOUR MOTHERS CUNT!

3:30 on a Friday, random PM: our Argentina devs just sent out a merge request. We need to release before the weekend.
me: We try not to release on Friday afternoon unless it's for a high priority bug fix.
PM: This is urgent
me: why?
PM: We're two weeks behind schedule and the dev for this it's going on vacation in an hour.
me: so, you want to release when there's no one around if something goes wrong and the person who knows anything about it isn't contactable?
PM: yes
me: no.

I didn't scream.. just told him to jump off of terrace..
What ticked me?! He was a support guy..slowest mofo ever..
I was in the middle of fixing major fuckup on prod, when our VPN to client disconnected. I rushed over to support to ask if it is 'just' an expired session (which he was in charge of renewing but constantly fucked up) or if there is some other problem, so I know how to proceed..do I need to contact our sysadmins, client's support guys etc..
He
started
to
slooooooooowly
explain
I
am
not
the
only
one
with
VPN
problems
...
Was that what I asked you?! // he had an annoying habit of slooooowly talking and explaining unrelated things & personal stuff that bothered him & most of the times he chose the most time sensitive period to drone off..
So I cut him of saying, that others were probably not 'tinkering' with production and that I need this back ASAP, so if he could tell me when the session will be renewed or if there is something else problematic..
He said he will check..I didn't move.. he looked at me insurprise, you want me to check *NOW*?! Yeah, it's urgent.. He proceeded very very veeeery slooooowly, taking the support phone../* he was even eating sandwich during that, so only one hand free, typing one letter at a min */
I was finaly notified that the session expired and that he will fix it soon (meaning in 15-20mins o.O which should not take him more than 5).. and was like 'can I do sth else for you'?! Yeah, do the backflip.. you know the rest..

Admit it, in some of your projects you must have hardcoded something for an urgent delivery or last minute change :D

Finally found a way to keep track of my ever expanding studies and how to prioritize them as relevant > how interested I'm > how urgent it is (as in it'd be a game changer if I had this skill right now).

It's called a ternary diagram (just in case you wondered)

Client: "Need to have an urgent meeting on some major changes" .
Me:"Travels half way across city"
Client : Explains how the heading of a page should be in blue as it would be more aesthetic.
FML.
How many meetings have you had that would have just sufficed with a simple email ?

Customer: (calls emergency hotline) We have a really bad bug!
Rep: What seams to be the issue?
Customer: I need to talk to Sam, he knows what to do, tell him it's urgent.
Rep: can I tell Sam what the issue is?
Customer: Well, Sam built a newsletter program but I don't have a way to import mass amounts of emails addresses.
Rep: That sounds like a feature, not a problem.
Customer: why wouldn't it do that? Would you build a car without a steering wheel?
Rep: I am not sure that's relevant to the problem.
Customer: what do you mean?
Rep: I would say it is more like, "would you build a car without a pair of jet skis attached to the back." And we would respond with, "we would be happy to add Jet Skis, but it's going to cost you additional money."
Customer: So, how are we going to fix this bug in YOUR software?
Rep: :/

I work at a place where security is really high when it comes to server access. Today I was in urgent need to get admin access to a server, this is a real pain. Luckily I found an xml in version control containing the credentials for the web application which happens to be an admin account! Lucky me, saved me at least two weeks of waiting to get admin access!

I brushed my teeth and went to bed at 10, opened up youtube and just chilled out,
boss calls me up at 11 I'm like, nah fam tomorrow...
Calls again and again and again, calling for the 6 time on 2 numbers!?
(M8 can't u see I'm out)
Then he texts me, bro, it's urgent!
I decide to call him up.
Boss: hey dude
Me: hey (trying to not get triggered)
Me: so what's so urgent?
Boss: OK so 2 things, I will email all of our job applicants on August 28, 2: are you available tomorrow?
Me: ( LITERALLY GOT TRIGGERED AS FUCK, THOUGHT WE HAD A DICK PICTURE ON OUR SITE OR HOSTINGER DECIDED TO BILL 2 TIMES)
ME: 👏Dude, this is so urgent? R u kidding me???? Am I available tomorrow and you will email are job applicants on August 28????

Ffs I swear

I was fixing a bug in Production and at the same time, the same client called me for the other project saying its too urgent.

I was like Oh god what now?

Guess what she wanted to change the color of Navbar.

* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Switches to working on it.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Switches team member to it.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Gets dev team to help with it.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Asks CEO to help on ticket.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Cries.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Prays to Mecca.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* ...

I then find out two more urgent support tickets are about to come in.

And then another one.

Help.

Embarrassing moment:

Needed to deliver apk urgent urgently​ for push notification testing. I was unable to receive push token. Code is right in every way. Couldn't figured out in 15min. Lead comes to my seat and asks what's issue. And hey suddenly I figured it out. It was my wifi closed.. Bullshit 😬😠

Don't you just love it when every client comes in with an "urgent request" at the same time and you, being the only person capable of doing it, has to do fucking everything because "the client is priority"?

Or how about when the guy who's supposed to be your PM doesn't actually know anything about development, doesn't listen to you and his management style is akin to forwarding emails and then replying with your response to them?

Oh, I almost forgot, that crazy important, difficult task you're ACTUALLY supposed to be doing? Yeah that still has to be done as well. Because time is a fucking sphere and you're a warlock so of course THE LAWS OF PHYSICS DON'T FUCKING MATTER DO THEY.

Fix a million things, including a project that is suddenly urgent, feels tired but satisfied, ready to go home...then it turns out there's still 4 hours of the day left...

> "I know you're off but when you get a minute can you look into this urgent issue?"

"Sure, got something important on at the minute though, I'll get back to you shortly"

I bought hosting and domain last year, I uploaded my site and left it for months. Last month I logged onto my webhost's user panel and the "login to cpanel" option of my hosting directed me to someone else's premium hosting, I realised it late and I had already deleted whole of the WP site as I presumed it was mine. I left the database intact, reached out to the domain owner getting the info via whois, surprisingly he is was all fine losing his merchant navy academy website.

However, I WAS NOT FINE because I am not fucking expecting my webhost to give someone access to my hosting, just like I got access to his.

Been two weeks and they are unable to fix it and I am pissed off. I had no urgent need but I WANT ACCESS WHEN I WANT.

They are not as big as GoDaddy but they are a reputed hosting provider in my country with nice and fancy WP domain etc management portal and everything. I never expected this from then. How the fuck would they let this happen.

Focusing. I'm part of two teams that use slack, office 365, email, jira, and Trello to communicate simultaneously. I'm expected to respond to urgent messages--so I'm in productivity-killing notification hell and it's really taking a toll. :(

So the CEO called me down about a super urgent bug that needs to be fixed or we will loose several hundred thousand pounds of business.

I rush down to his office and there he has a graph "look the values are barely moving i would expect the values to be more erratic this time of day"

*i look at the graph*

"Errrr your looking at 02:00 in the morning, it's 14:00"

Boss: ahh good spot *looks at 14:00* yea that looks good, great job.

BOSS/SUPPORT/CLIENT: IT’S URGENT!!!! IT’S URGENT!!!!

Me: if it was really urgent why are you asking me about it at 5’oclock on FRIDAY

Urgent email, there's a problem. Fix the problem instantly and email back. No fucking response.

I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).

summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations

summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!

Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy

Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.

Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.

Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.

Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?

Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.

But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.

Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.

Happens every day:
"could you please fix those bugs ASAP? Testers are waiting for it"
*resolve the issue and inform the requester*
(two weeks later)
"Thanks, I'll inform the testers they can begin their tests"

Ugh, how ASAP makes everything seem so urgent and important

Fucked!

I have got my cyber security exam tomorrow morning and i just got a call from a client to make some urgent changes to his site.

To add to it, i already wasted around half an hour becoz GoDaddy Plex somehow decided to block my own IP in the firewall.

And now I am on devRant.

Crap. I am fucked!

OMFG I don't even know where to start..
Probably should start with last week (as this is the first time I had to deal with this problem directly)..

Also please note that all packages, procedure/function names, tables etc have fictional names, so every similarity between this story and reality is just a coincidence!!

Here it goes..

Lat week we implemented a new feature for the customer on production, everything was working fine.. After a day or two, the customer notices the audit logs are not complete aka missing user_id or have the wrong user_id inserted.
Hm.. ok.. I check logs (disk + database).. WTF, parameters are being sent in as they should, meaning they are there, so no idea what is with the missing ids.

OK, logs look fine, but I notice user_id have some weird values (I already memorized most frequent users and their ids). So I go check what is happening in the code, as the procedures/functions are called ok.

Wow, boy was I surprised.. many many times..
In the code, we actually check for user in this apps db or in case of using SSO (which we were) in the main db schema..
The user gets returned & logged ok, but that is it. Used only for authentication. When sending stuff to the db to log, old user Id is used, meaning that ofc userid was missing or wrong.

Anyhow, I fix that crap, take care of some other audit logs, so that proper user id was sent in. Test locally, cool. Works. Update customer's test servers. Works. Cool..

I still notice something off.. even though I fixed the audit_dbtable_2, audit_dbtable_1 still doesn't show proper user ids.. This was last week. I left it as is, as I had more urgent tasks waiting for me..

Anyhow, now it came the time for this fuckup to be fixed. Ok, I think to myself I can do this with a bit more hacking, but it leaves the original database and all other apps as is, so they won't break.
I crate another pck for api alone copy the calls, add user_id as param and from that on, I call other standard functions like usual, just leave out the user_id I am now explicitly sending with every call.
Ok this might work.

I prepare package, add user_id param to the calls.. great, time to test this code and my knowledge..

I made changes for api to incude the current user id (+ log it in the disk logs + audit_dbtable_1), test it, and check db..
Disk logs fine, debugging fine (user_id has proper value) but audit_dbtable_1 still userid = 0.

WTF?! I go check the code, where I forgot to include user id.. noup, it's all there. OK, I go check the logging, maybe I fucked up some parameters on db level. Nope, user is there in the friggin description ON THE SAME FUCKING TABLE!!
Just not in the column user_id...

WTF..Ok, cig break to let me think..

I come back and check the original auditing procedure on the db.. It is usually used/called with null as the user id. OK, I have replaced those with actual user ids I sent in the procedures/functions. Recheck every call!! TWICE!! Great.. no fuckups. Let's test it again!
OFC nothing changes, value in the db is still 0. WTF?! HOW!?

So I open the auditing pck, to look the insides of that bloody procedure.. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Instead of logging the p_user_sth_sth that is sent to that procedure, it just inserts the variable declared in the main package..
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Did the 'new guy' made changes to this because he couldn't figure out what is wrong?! Nope, not him. I asked the CEO if he knows anything.. Noup.. I checked all customers dbs (different customers).. ALL HAD THIS HARDOCED IN!!! FORM THE FREAKING YEAR 2016!!! O.o

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

Looks like at the begining, someone tried to implement this, but gave up mid implementation.. Decided it is enough to log current user id into BLABLA variable on some pck..
Which might have been ok 10+ years ago, but not today, not when you use connection pooling.. FFS!!

So yeah, I found easter eggs from years ago.. Almost went crazy when trying to figure out where I fucked this up. It was such a plan, simple, straight-forward solution to auditing..

If only the original procedure was working as it should.. bloddy hell!!

This run up to Christmas is the shit. Everything is suddenly urgent. No time to do a proper job. If that isn't bad enough, you are also tasked with thinking up some ideas for family Christmas presents, as if i give a flying fuck. I dont mind the break for the holidays but i fucking hate Christmas but have to put a brave face on and celebrate (what exactly am i celebrating). And no scrooge comments please.

Client tests app 100000 times, app works fine
Client tests app once, app doesn't work
Client sends email to everyone,
"Hey, @CodesNotHot, this app is not working at all! Can you please look at it right now!! This is URGENT!"
I test the app, it's working fine.

I just want to high five someone with a machete on the face right now.

!Rant

Happy Friday. I wanted to make a quick post that is a bit less ranty and a bit more serious. Over the last 6mo or so I've been dealing with a high level of anxiety, something I've never experienced in my life until recently. It has been one of the most intense things I've ever dealt with. I used to think anxiety was just being really uneasy but as I've learned, especially last week, it can be so much more than that. I went from feeling overwhelmed to feeling like I was having a heart attack to the point that I brought myself to the urgent care (mostly because I knew it was anxiety and not the former).

I am not trying to make things super personal but I wanted to just reach out to anyone out there and say you're not alone if you suffer from anxiety. I found that the primary source of my anxiety comes from my habit of "locking myself up" and just focusing on coding nonstop. I went from being a fun loving outgoing and insanely social person to avoiding my own roommate, family and girlfriend.

If you ever feel like you're struggling with this I urge you to talk to someone (you'd be amazed at how well venting it can help) or just going outside and getting some sun and clearing your mind. I love my job, I have been writing code since I was 13yrs old in 1997 - it IS and has been my life for the majority of my existence. But that's not to say it can't take a toll on you.

Sorry for the random post on a Friday, but I wanted to reach out and say to anyone that is dealing with it that you are not alone and it is not easy. I am 2 days removed from my urgent care visit and I still have chest pain, sweaty palms, and an overwhelmingly active mind. But even so, I am doing so much better than before.

Remember, code is life, but it doesn't matter if you're miserable throughout it. Get some help even if it's just venting to someone and going on a walk. Thanks for listening!

Has anyone been in a situation where a sr dev, with 12 yrs of experience and paid more than you, can't fix something after trying for a week and now the boss comes to you and expects you (a lowly paid dev with only 5) to fix it in a day, now that it's super urgent?

That describes my day... FML... I have to do overtime tonight...

Feels nice to have some place to rant now though....

My current project:

The database is google sheets maintained by a "data team". Basically data entry people are our DBAs.
There are no services, just a link to download everything in those sheets. The applications (mobile, web and windows) have to download everything anytime any user changes anything.

The front-end does all the db work, since the backend is shit! The front-end has it's own db, which is a well structured local db that we create fr the crappy data inserted in the sheets. The front-end sync up their changes locally, with no help from servers. The servers are just storage.

The only db on the servers is ONE table. That inserts a huge json file, everytime a user uploads their changes, along with a createdAt.

I'm on the Android app development, and the code was copied, litterally, from iOS code, and translated to java... from another similar project, then tweaked to work. No pattern is used what so ever, UI code and Business code are in one file. Like 1000 lines of code UI file.

We all talked about it. We all whined about how shitty it is. And don't get it wrong, the management did approve of refactoring. Which is what we did to the Android project (50% right now cleaned up). But the backend team are fucking pussies!

Company agreed to re-assign me once I'm done with some urgent tasks :)

PM: stressed out and during the briefing, keep reminding us how urgent is this project:

"This project need to go live this Friday"
"We only have 5 days to complete this."
"Client need this campaign to go live as soon as possible"
"We need to have a quick catch up every morning to ensure we are on track"

I have been working in digital agency for 7 years. When you heard something like this, there's a high chance that the deadline is a FAKE deadline. Very likely it will be delayed for another few days.

At one of my former jobs, we devs had to do all sorts of non-dev work, such as writing quotes and even contracts!

The CEO of that company had this naughty habit to contact devs directly without delegating through the CIO. Sure, if it's really urgent like when some system is down because of a bug, go ahead and disturb a dev. But interrupting coders to write some freaking quote? Come on!...

Once, that CEO asked me to stop everything I was doing to write a quote to a customer ASAP, as this was really urgent.

I spent several hours writing that quote. It had to be done right as any specifications in our quotes were used in our agreeements and were referred to in the case of any dispute. So not only were we devs and salesmen in the same time; we also needed to be lawyers.

When I was done and delivered the quote to the CEO, he told me he had no intention to take on that customer in the first place. Instead, he wrote a polite we-are-not-interested e-mail to the customer and cc:d it to me just so that I could read for myself how very sleek a businessman he was.

Me: why did I have to write that quote when you knew all along that you were not going to use it anyway?
Him: It's for your own personal development.

Another naughty habit of that same CEO is that he made "jokes" and remarks that I found inappropriate, such as "You walk like a drunken sailor".

Later, he decided to discontinue our team/product because "it isn't proftable". Well, what do you expect when devs are forced to waste half day completing pointless tasks?!

It was for the better anyway, and I was actually relieved when I left the company. I'm still thinking though, that the real reason he sacked me is that I am too honest and not the docile kind of employee that would be ideal for him. I did question some of my tasks, and worst of all: I didn't laugh at his stupid jokes.

Helped out a junior today with a minor JS issue he had. Told him, "cool so that should fix it on this page but it may break things elsewhere. Make sure you check it otherwise the client will go into meltdown. "
30mins after they go home. Client emails (All Caps) "WEBSITE BROKEN, URGENT HELP REQUIRED"
😡 you didn't bloody check it did you!
Ffffffffuuuuuuuu

Having me delete something is not fucking urgent and is not a fucking reason to blow up my fucking phone after I'm off. Holy fucking shit.

If you mark an email as urgent, I'm less likely to respond. Because I hate talking with morons.

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

I'm a junior dev working with some very proprietary applications. The point is, I can't Google for code solutions at all.

The seniors are all very put upon and too busy to offer much actual help unless it's urgent.

I beg for assistance until I'm blue in the face and eventually stumble my way to something resembling the solution.

I get one of them to review my code, and while they do I point out all the places I STILL need help.

They don't answer any of those questions but damned if they don't have opinions on how my comments should be formatted.

Aaauuuuggghhhh

Client has an "urgent" release that needs to be launched immediately... So they keep changing the spec every few minutes with new changes, but are upset that the product isn't launched yet. Lol. Got to love clients.

At a networking event. Tired. Not a people person, especially when tired.

Found a secluded empty booth, pretending to do some urgent work. Hoping no-one notices I'm not socialising.

How long can I keep this up is the question! :D

Been told to fix a bunch of links as a urgent issue. So far i've spent 3 hours trying to find anyone who knows where the damned things should actually be i pointing.
The joy of Mondays.

Once again:

BOSS and Client IT’S URGENT IT’S CRITICAL

ME: IT’S 4:30pm on FRIDAY AND THIS IS THE FIRST I’VE HEARD OF IT IT IS NOT THAT HOT

It's rant time!

So, as a broke electrical engineering student, I got this job in a local company. They used JSF and my skills in java were, at the very least, small (former PHP developer). But as a self taught developer this didn't stopped me and I went full on java learning (very bad year for my EE studies).

I became the 'guy in charge' for several of their projects (yeah, they did exploited broke students, I realized this far too late). I was very proud of myself, I worked hard, showed my true value, and they became impressed.

One nice thursday night, my "handler" emailed me with a urgent request. They needed an entire jsf application done by monday and the requirements were fairly complex.

Oh boy, I had a total of 10h of sleep from thursday to monday. I didn't even slept before going to my monday class, but I delivered the system. Got an pat in the back... "you're awesome"... I was happy.

6 months later: I received an email asking to fix a bug in the system. No problem with that. Oddly, this bug was a MAJOR bug. There's no way the system worked properly for six months with it. I fixed it in no time and commited the changes.

Turns out that this was the first time the system was going to be deployed. They made me go in an insane weekend dev project, and didn't even used the system for SIX MONTHS!!! I started to work my way out the company after this, aiming to open my own software company.

I still remember some other rants from the time I worked there. But these are for later.

Nice week for you all, may the sprint go gently and the clients be kind.

So I decided to positively tackle the negative energy surrounding me these past few days. I tried to be productive. I went overboard, of course. Where is the fun in normal?

I wrote down all the urgent tasks I must die-die finish. Anyone closed with Asians will know the severity of the die-die and must combo. I started with tasks I have to finish in 3 days. Then in a week. Then in 2 weeks. I ended up creating more than 25 cards across my respective Trello boards.

The tasks that come to me always need minimum 3,4 working hours. Literally. The furthest deadline I see is Oct 15. The tasks I counted is more than 25. No appointments nor meetings were counted yet. It is not impossible. If I finish 2 tasks per day, 14 days is enough to complete all. I might have to continuously work 2 whole weeks of course. But it is still fine, right? Right, guys? Right? It's doable. Right?

I won't get any unskippable appointment within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't get new tasks to finish within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to guide other people how to do their tasks within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to work other people's tasks when they absent within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to entertain any annoying client because customer service team can't deal within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to do other personal tasks within this 2 weeks. Right? (Like helping with creating a wedding slideshow for a friend marrying on Oct 28)

My life is totally fine. Right?

when your colleague from India marks eveything as URGENT...

I have a customer who seriously calls me, very upset, very bossy, telling me to let go of whatever I'm doing and take a look at this super urgent master bug that we probably are responsible for.

Nowadays I just giggle for myself and telling him I will take a look at it.

90% of the time it's caused by themselves or someone else...

<< last week >>
boss: next meeting will be on monday at 8:00 am. Is an super important meeting.

<< today at 8:00 >>
me: Well, I'm alone here...

<< today at 8:20 >>
me: is today Monday?

<< today at 8:40 >>
me: boss, will you and the others come to the urgent and important meeting of today?
boss: what meeting?

:-/

Once we got an urgent requirement to add double hashing the password in a web application. It had to go to the production ASAP. The developer which was working on it, added 2 alerts in Javascript to display entered password and encrypted password. Finally change was ready to deploy but in hurry she forgot to remove the alerts. In rush and excitement, that change was shipped to the production. The alert says 'your password is 123', 'your password is xyz'.

After some time got phone calls from users and manager. Manager said, 'how the hell our application got HACKED? If anything happens to..........'. To cut it short, he was furious. We knew exact reason and solution. Didn't take couple of minutes to resolve this issue.

But it was funny mistake and that released that days pressure off.

So last week I ranted about the hours I was working, great start this week I'm up at 03:00 to go up north, not going to get back till 20:00 ish. Tomorrow I have to be in Wales for 09:00 so going to have to be up at 04:00 for a 5 hour travel time. Check my emails and my boss says after I get back from Wales tomorrow can we have a design and specification meeting about a "super urgent" product that we have to develop. Oh and Thursday I have to prep everything for going live with a new product Friday.

I was tricky this time and sent a separate email for the client and my boss about the new release.

Client response: "Its very good, runs flawlessly, could you check x if you have the time? It gives errors simetimes"

Boss response: "[...] urgent fix get working on it right now [...]"

Seems like my boss has been the fucking piece of shit all this time :)

Working on a less urgent project just to hide from the real one...

Don't you just love it when a customer reports a bug in their live system and it's really urgent to correct it; then you go out of your way to fix it ASAP and deploy it to the staging system for them to verify. Three weeks later the customer has still not tested the bugfix...

*flashback to days of windows xp*
Just finished formatting and installing xp on friend's trash pc cuz the os was compromised due to a shitload of viruses. Notice that other partitions might still be infected and i don't have an antivirus on me.
"Big boi Ill be back in an hour, just whatever you do, don't open ANY drives no matter how urgent it is. Just Don't do it or i won't be able to help you"

Come back and VIOLA this worthless trash avocado opened a drive to play a game and d pc was infected. Again. Back to square one. It almost broke my heart. Almost.

I remember that day well. I was 15yo and hopeful. That day marks d start of my hatred toward tech incompetent people.
SO FKIN
A N G E R Y

So today
College
My classmates stink of incompetence. I'm not that smart in fact i consider myself to be a noob among devs but seeing ppl that are several order of magnitudes trashier than me breaks my heart and makes me soo Fkin

A N G E R Y

Hey you cunt of a skunk, WHY can't you even compile a fkin cpp file without an IDE what the fuck is wrong with you? What do u mean ur program isn't compiling? Well it literally says there syntax error on line 15 congrats u moron u fkin spelled else as esle. Why shud I waste my time on stupid Shitty ppl like u huh?

And waddup mr shithead.No. Not gonna help you partition ur drives and install a fkin linux just cuz ur too lazy to google it urself.
And if i refuse to help cuz im working on my shit then I AM D BAD GUY? Stop bitching about me u lazy bastards get ur lazy arse off and read the fkin book. Watch a tutorial or sm shit why the fuck can't u understand YOU LITERALLY PAY TO COME HERE AND YOU AREN'T EVEN TRYING TO LEARN THE BASICS GOOD LUCK GETTING A JOB YOU WORTHLESS CUNTS.

Now now all the poison is out i can finally focus on improving myself and stop giving a fuck about them. Its hard to be calm and cool when ur surrounded by ppl like this all day. Even harder when there is almost noone that you can look upto. All this time, there's only one thing I've learnt- in a place like dis, being an asshole is better dan being polite.

I'm pretty sure my clients would fail the marshmallow test 9/10 times if not 10/10 times. We have a certain time period of the day set aside for me to look into new reported bugs but besides that I'm supposed to work on regular tasks. Of course, they ask me five hours after that time period is done, whether I can look into a new (non-urgent) bug. At the cost of the new thing they want to launch in 2 weeks. 🤔 I would love it if we actually had time to fix every single bug in the codebase but what typically happens is I get about 15 bug reports (most duplicates) and I'm expected to fix all of them in a span of 2 hours.

The site I work on is a market where you can buy magnets for dolors, insomniaque, bla bla bla (I don't believe a sec in this).
Just saying that to settle that 80% of our customers are +45 years old. They weren't born with a computer in their hands, and they sometimes manage to make a lot of mess in the site.
We are based in France, and we sell the most in France (no shit) and Switzerland. And this is the third time that a Swiss pass a command, puts all her address in Switzerland EXCEPT for the country (still on France) so she doesn't have to pay the shipping fee. I should do something about that, like a regex when verifying the zip code, but I have more urgent work to do, and the best has to come.
This smartass doesn't know she is the joke, because by saying she is in France, she has to pay the VAT that she wouldn't have if she said she was in Switzerland. She buys in general for around 350 €, so she has ~ 70€ (20%) in VAT, and she would only pay 14€ in shipping fee.
Maybe one day she'll see how dumb she is (my boss already mailed her so she pays attention to it, no change). But I think I would have set the regex by then.

Taken a day off due to sickness, boss calls and said “can you fix an error on xyz website? it's urgent.”
I said No, I'm in hospital I can't. Even though I was at home.
He said “please look once whenever you'll reach home.”
Me: “sure.”
Idiot got no chill.
GFY

note: it is already dec. 23 in here

testers and another integration team are working for an urgent deliverable.
they just called, asking if i can come to the office and complete my code so they can use it as a basis/reference to theirs.

wtf

Linux update! After spending the weekend installing and configuring Ubuntu, I decided I instead wanted ElementaryOS. I then proceeded to install that in an hour and 45 minutes. -_-

Anyway, I'm pleased with the result, and hopefully this will be good enough that I make the switch for real by buying a non-apple computer when I have the money--and urgent enough need--for an upgrade.

Ever had a day that felt like you're shoveling snow from the driveway? In a blizzard? With thunderstorms & falling unicorns? Like you shovel away one m² & turn around and no footprints visible anymore? And snow built up to your neck?

Today my work day was like that.. xcept shit..shit instead of pretty & puffy snow!!

Working on things a & b, trying to not mess either one up, then comes shit x, coworker was updating production.. ofc something went wrong.. again not testing after the update..then me 'to da rescue'.. :/ hardly patch things up, so it works..in a way.. feature c still missing due to needed workarounds.. going back to a and b.. got disrupted by the same coworker who is nver listening, but always asking too much..

And when I think I finally have the b thing figured out a f-ing blocker from one of our biggest clients.. The whole system is unresponsive.. Needles to say, same guy in support for two companies (their end), so they filed the jira blocker with the wrong customer that doesn't have a SLA so no urgent emails..and then the phone calls.. and then the hell broke loose.. checking what is happening.. After frantic calls from our dba to anyone who even knows that our customer exists if they were doing sth on the db.. noup, not a single one was fucking with the prod db.. The hell! Materialised view created 10 mins ago that blocked everything..set to recreate every 10 minutes..with a query that I am guessing couldn't even select all that data in under 15.. dafaaaq?! Then we kill it..and again it is there.. We found out that customers dbas were testing something on live environment, oblivious that they mamaged to block the entire db..
FML, I'm going pokemon hunting.. :/ codename for ingress n beer..

A newish client just sent a channel ticket marked as "urgent", which set off the alarm for everybody in the chain, with an amazon link to lingerie.

I seriously don't know how to react to this, since I really hope it was a mistake and not how he expects us at the next meeting lol

To send such a ticket you have to confirm your pin and confirm the urgency reason too by the way, so the only thing coming to my mind is, it was some sort of clipboard fail?

When you get called back into work at 5:30 in the morning for an urgent problem... Come to find out its because, "I forgot my internet access password, can you reset it...?" Are you shitting me? Fucking (L)user! In taking today off, fuck this.

Why have the majority of social networks decided that people using their service in the most basic way deserves a notification?

"Ooh, I have 3 notifications according to the app icon, they must be things that need my attention."
<opens app>
* In case you missed DickSlap's [tweet/post/other]
* RomanHelmet liked a [tweet/post/other] from SpaffMuncher
* MuffSnapper added a new photo

Why does that need a notification? That's just users using your app. That's what I expect when I open the app. I expect to see people posting things. This is going to make me start ignoring notifications in the same way I ignore emails marked as urgent.

Lays down to go to sleep.
*beep* new urgent help request.
Hmm, bet it's something silly, better check anyway......
Whole servers down....
How fun 😔

Turns out the super urgent issue that I was working on even on weekends is actually over a year old ... great!

Few days before vacations ...

PM : "Project must absolutly be finished before your 3 weeks vacations."

ME : "We have to clarify the technical solution with the architect and the analyst before I can write the code."

PM : "No. Just do it and make sure you transfer the knowledge, it's urgent for the business."

... 3 weeks later, back from my vacations ...

Total of 0 commit(s) to repo...

Client just asked why no progress has been made this week and refuses to accept it is a result of them not answering my emails or providing content. I made a DevRant while I wait for a response!
I guess it wasn't as URGENT as the subject line suggested...

Me busy coding, trying to hit the dateline.

PM stretches his arm and starts working after getting bored browsing facebook. *Time to get productive

10 mins later. comes to me with a list of changes. To a project I finished last week, saying it's urgent. Have to be done today. He promise the client to fix these Changes by the end of this week. *wow thanks for pilling me with this now

.... one week later. client emailed and question us. On a few of the (PM self initiated ) changes and want us (me) to revert. -.-

When you stay out late in the office to finish an urgent feature, but no one else there to review your code before you merge it to master

I was out sick the day an urgent ETL job I was building would be due, so it got reassigned. When I return, I find most of my code commented out and replaced.

The first step was rewritten, with a comment that reads "Made changes to run faster." What used to be a single execution lasting 30 seconds was now a 4 step process taking 5 minutes, and yielding identical results.

Being a one-time execution (not a recurring job), I'm left wondering why they thought execution speed was even an issue, let alone what about their redesign they felt was an improvement...

Urgent!
When down voting needs to be add a non dev related and add to the setting a option to hide all rants voted non dev related.
Basacly like repost but it says non dev related

So I am finally plunging into continuous integration. If I make one more deploy script mistake, I've lost enough time to merit having learned a better solution than bash scripting calling git and rhc and py files I wrote. I have failing tests that are failing because they weren't updated after the million and a half urgent changes in the past 2 months, so it's time to act like I am a TDD fanatic and write the tests correctly. So much work. All from me listening to the constant req changes, listening to the urgency, letting non-devs get under my skin if you will. I'm optimistic in all the wrong places - I think I can write that by end of day let's try it. I'm lazy in the wrong places - I think that I can write that test later, because all I changed was XYZ (which took all night but I said I'd get it as close as possible didn't I?). And I think these handful of bash scripts are good enough to make sure I run tests? But remember, I didn't write the tests or I didn't go back and update them. Or the tests that fail, I'm too lazy. And so much of the tests, I would need to use, idk selenium for, and damnit if I really don't want to dig for element IDs to wait for every time I need an AJAX call.

Okay wow, I really did rant here. And discredited myself a bit lol I need to ignore the wrong lazy and embrace the right lazy. Protect myself from myself and from contributors. It really is, up to me now, to rescue myself from my bad habits. Bad habits perpetuated by clients urgency every day, to change things, that should have been finalized in November if we wanted a stable flipping system in January. It feels like the blind (client) leading the blind (me, when I do dumb shit like rush features out the door half tested).

Anyway all this came out, because I have been reading about continuous integration and stumbled upon this quote. And thought someone might laugh at the anachronism like I did

Don't you just love it when you're in the middle of an agreed content freeze and a marketing drone demands an immediate content deployment to production because they made a blog post and it's "super urgent" that it goes live right now.

Best moment when u receive payment for the work and the amount is more than expected..
U start wondering:
1. Is it bymistake
2. Is he appreciating ur efforts
3. Is it because the payment was delayed last time..
Or maybe because he wants to give u much more work which is very urgent!!

how am i supposed to fix anything if they change the priorities on my tickets every 10 sec, like PM's change them, 2 min later MD over rules them and changes them again, so 5 min later PM's change them again because something urgent came up, but then another client starts ringing my MD so that client is suddenly priority

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARG

I give up

Arghhhhhhhh! What the hell is becoming of today's world?

So I have registration form that relates to parents signing up for a service and asking for ages of their children. Children are never older than 5 years old.

So, for each child the user specified the child's sex/gender (Boy or girl) and their age.

I'm still in disbelief over my client's request, that is marked "urgent".

I basically need to add to the list of options, as "boy" and "girl" are no enough and the question is now "too limiting".

I apparently need to add several more options including: "prefer not to specify", "geneder neutral", "bigender" and "genderfluid".

I mean how can a child aged 5 or less identify as "gender neutral" or "bigender" - how on earth are they able to decide.

Fine, if you're an adult and signing up to something like Facebook, have your 80 odd options. But for children under 5 how have no idea wtf any of this means, stuff like this really annoys me.

The moment when your teammate raises a 150+ file pull request on Friday evening and marks it as urgent.

If you ask me to run your reports, saying that it's urgent, then leave for a week's vacation, I will throttle your bandwidth to that of a 1200 baud modem for the next 3 months.

Sony.

I don’t *hate* them, but I had really high hopes for Xperia smartphones back then, five years ago.

So I saved up and bought one. That’s what I got:
1. It was getting slower and slower
2. Micro usb broke just months after I got the smartphone
3. Sticky fragile screen with absolutely no oleophobic coating
4. NO UPDATES TO KITKAT AND LOLLIPOP! They just left us behind!

5. The main reason.

I catch moments with my camera. For me, camera is a vital feature, the most significant factor.

I once needed it really urgent and it just said “Camera is unavailable”. And that’s all. Camera is gone forever, broken. Factory reset haven’t fixed it.

You, alongside with Meizu, turned me away from android irreversibly and forever. When I heard about no update, I literally felt abused. Just like a girl whom random fuckboy made a proposal to, fucked and then left just months later.

With that level of customer support, basic respect to me as a user and buyer and that level of quality control, fuck you and your sloppy bricks you call smartphones. Maybe things are changing now, but I don’t care anymore and hardly ever will.

P.S. it heats up as hell, fucking pocket stove

Working on a 92 hr estimated task for a client. Client adds 3 urgent tickets from another unrelated task and asks to finish those ASAP.
I do my best and it takes 3 full days to to complete the urgent tickets.
Today I receive a mail from the project manager stating how I'm behind the deadline on the original task and how I should complete it within the deadline date however possible.
Shaking my head.

Came to work this morning with a bunch of cards coloured red, marked "urgent"...

And it's Monday... the day after Sunday...

The blues day...

Blue's my favourite colour, but this blue (and reds) I do not like...

Ok snoozy mind of mine... wake up!!

That client for whom every bug/feature is urgent :@

Question: is it common to a developer to have lots of tasks to do at the same time, so you don't have sure what you need to do first, specially when you have 2 or more urgent projects?

That is one of the things I most hate on managing.

At work, do you ever start with a plan for your day, get dragged into some other 'urgent' task and then into another, and your plan becomes a sweet distant memory?

Don't freaking urgent request me! Your ass better be literally on fire, otherwise you are wasting my time!

👦🏻 : I Enter office.
🕵🏻 : 8 emails from client with subject line "Urgent Fire! Fix ASAP".
👦🏻 : Opens Application and everything seems normal.
-- Another email 5 mins later --
🕵🏻 : Oops sorry! It was my browser cache.
👦🏻 : 🙄

TLDR: coworkers are worst than clients on delivery

The endless script last part, or where I want to rip the vocal chords out of my coworker’s throat.

Delivered “quickly” last Friday night as he was stressing me, because it was urgent, because he started shit I had to refactor, because I have better shit to get done.
It’s also important to note that this “senior” sysadmin wrote requirements as follows : told me orally what he needed between a gasp and another and drew me something that looked like a diagram but without real sense. I told myself -Well, let’s get this pile of cow shit together.

Anyway, it required some amount of time to put his giant shit mix of powershell and batch together, also it was quickly but it was tested and it worked on different conditions that I specifically wrote out and designed to have menus where you can’t do shit (like putting a string on a number input).

Today he comes to me and asked if it was ready and I told him it was usable. He tries it, doesn’t know how to use it, abandons it. Then he tells me he doesn’t work how “required” and after 5 Minutes on telling Shit I tested on the exact same server, he said “well my version was ok but you know I could have been more precise”

YOU INORGANIC PILE OF PIGEON SHIT. THE FUCKING SCRIPT IS WORKING, IS REFACTORED AS IT SHOULD AND YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND A CRAP ABOUT THE FUCK YOU’RE EXECUTING.

Seriously, come tell me that you can’t see what happens. I did explicit every fucking command out for you, I even bothered to put fucking Write-Host everywhere with Colors just for your fucking sake taste.

Go fuck a pillow with your biker sunglasses.

And no, the way you cut your beard doesn’t make me think you’re 15 years younger, it makes me think you’re the kind of guy I would not accept candies outside a school.

P.s.: don’t accept candies even if the guy looks nice.

I work in a large organization that previously didn't have it's own development team. Therefore various business areas have built their own solutions to solve problems which mostly involve Access and Excel.

Many of these applications still exist and we are expected to resolve any issues with them and update them when necessary performing this support role while still expected to meet our (very tight) development timelines.

I can't tell you how much of a pain in the tits it is to be trying to power through a priority development only to be interrupted with an urgent instruction to fix a 17 year old Access database that's running slow.

Of course it's pissing running slow, it's 17 years old, has nearly a million records and you have multiple users accessing it across the country!! I think it's time to peacefully let it die.

Urgent: I got a coding camp JavaScript Instructor job very well paid expects answer tomorrow. I got another company wants me but they don't have offer as they must get permission from the CEO for a developer job. The developer job would pay less than instructor job

I don't know what the fuck to do. I would like the dev job for experience but I haven't worked for 3 fucking months.

Need urgent change for the site, it takes 5 minutes I guess, no more than an hour anyway.

Can you do it during your break? Thank you

[Working on some really "urgent" report for an about to publish project]
dev: client, can you explain what this value is? we can't figure it out and we though tha...
client: im gonna stop you right there, DO NOT Analyse! we dont have time for silly questions, if the design says there's a 10, just put that freaking 10 in that place...
dev: but sr, we need to...
Client: what did i say? just stop saying things and build it!

Client : i need to filter login by ip adresse

Me: ok its done put ip in CIDR block in admin panel and voila

Client: URGENT URGENT email ... Noting work on your shit ..=_=

Me (head) : what a fucking jerk i dont know how work CIDR IP block ...ans i demands it ...

One of the down sides to working from home: my dogs seem to have an uncanny ability to know when I'm about to join a conference call. It gives them an urgent need to be taken outside to pee.

Am going to boot into Windows after 2 months for an urgent work.

Oh god bless me

Let
y="coffee beans"

Then (for devs)
y'="coffee powder"
y''="cup of coffee"
y'''="code"
"bug in production which requires urgent fix"=y''''

Wouldn't say our teamwork failed we just sucked that day.

I had a ticket to fix a SQL sp and then correct some data afterwards. As this was the typical "urgent fix need now" we went through a different process for fixing it.

Me: Just sent you some scripts can you check them over before we apply it to uat?
Boss: let's go through it together.
5 mins later
Boss: looks fine I'll apply the scripts.
2 minutes later
Me: did you apply the scripts to uat?
Boss: No I applied them to live.
Me: oh ... oh no.

At this point I realized I was missing a critical where clause so yup my update was applied against all of the data.

Boss: oh
Yup he just spotted my error.

Helpdesk phones start ringing
Boss: you pick it up it's your code
Me: hey you applied its your problem now.

One db restore and several incident meetings later we fixed it. Twas a fun day.

Producer meets designer.

Monday, 10am email "new task added: implement this new feature. Priority: can wait forever"
Tuesday, 4pm email "change on task: implement this new feature. Priority: urgent, it's a must on wednesday's build"

OK I'll wait!

Like I don't have anything urgent to do. 🤔

First job and first days, boss comes to me with an urgent matter she nor other people were able to solve per her own words, it was something I hadn't even used before, a bug on a migration from versions between SSDTS projects, so she asks if I knew the technology, I answer no, but I'll try, so I started watching some tutorials and got hands on the project to know what it tried to accomplish, then in a couple of hours I found the bug in a connector it had with some other tech through a driver. Team went semi crazy like woah how you found that so quick, Bla blah... It felt good

Friday afternoon, the week's work is finished, and I'm ahead of schedule.
An email arrives for another project.. "URGENT yaddayadda". The dickheads where it came from have taken weeks to react, and now it's urgent. Yeah, fuck you assholes, ideally with a smoothing iron.
On the upside, I'm not addressed directly, and that project isn't my task. But boss could make it mine in no time, and I think he would.
I don't even open the email, nobody has seen it anyway yet, AND I GO HOME! :-)

Wow I'm first!! Uhm... 8... I forgot to take lunch break cuz I was really busy or the code was really interesting...

If within 24 hrs... Maybe 12... I had to login at night a few times to finish urgent work (bug fixes)

Friday 4 pm...

Manager to dev... Can you please fix this urgent issue and create the PR...

Here is a little story about why I do not like to have to purchase developer tools and libraries..

Long story short it has taken at least 10 people more than 3 months to purchase two licenses of this component library which we still do not yet have licenses for.

It all starts with this guy who works here and has the job title 'solution architect'. He saw an ad on a website about some html component library. Then he asks me and the other developer here to look at it. He is super excited saying things like if we save only x days of time the cost is nothing in comparison to developer time..

The other developer and I both spend a few days reading the docs and trying some sample code. It offers some things we can use but I suggest not bothering with it.

Despite my suggestion he goes to the technical manager and they write up a business case. After about a month our receptionist cc me on an email chain from the it commercial manager who is asking for the licensing information so they can add the component creator as a vendor in the purchasing system. I send them a link to the component website which lists all that.

Jump forward two more months to last week and I got a spam email from the component company saying they have some new version out. I am wondering what has happened so I ask our receptionist she says it is with accounts payable and waiting payment - but it is marked urgent and she will find out.

Today I am cc in an email saying they have paid for it two weeks ago. So where is the license info? Nobody knows.

Worst tech ever? I will say, but don't throw rocks before I explain. Xcode. Why? Try to use it on MacBook 2008. And after that, compare it to Android Studio on same machine. But at least, I can just say "Compiling" to PM and play games on phone. And even "I don't give a fuck about how urgent it is. IPA build takes 15 minutes."

I have a junior friend living in same building where I used to live. I used to help him in small doubts related to college and in some random stuff.

I once typed an application in a language which does not have its fonts in ms word by default. I used Google typing tools and Google docs to type and format it. I even taught him the process which is easy to understand.

Out of blue, after few years, this SOB pings me today and asks same thing to do again since it's urgent. I told him that I am middle of something and told him to use same tools as I used and give it a try. This fucker says he forgot how to do it. Well no problems, I told him how to do it and I will not be able to do it for him right now.
He said then try doing it after coming back to home.

Mind you that he is an engineering student.
You asshole, if it is so much urgent then use your brain and figure out this small thing yourself. If you can wait till I come back home then in which fucking way it's urgent? Go fuck yourself. I am done with your shitty attitude and on next offense you are going on my block list.

I've just received an urgent bug report email saying something like:

Stop sending [item] to destination. This should have been taken care of in the initial work, but we forgot to say so.

... The work they requested was that [item] gets sent to destination if the user checks a checkbox. If I wasn't supposed to build this, then what did they want me to build in the first place?!

You know what really boils my piss?
Clients who email in all caps.
"URGENT HELP, CAN'T RECEIVE EMAILS"
Followed by two lines of bitching about how this keeps happening and they'll move elsewhere if it's not fixed asap at 11pm.
WELL GUESS WHAT?
YOU MOVED YOUR EMAILS AWAY ALREADY!

So I got a job and on the first day I was giving a task to fix a bug which they said it was urgent that the software is been used by the financial department, so if I don't get it fixed soonest they would be loosing money.

I completely don't know how the software works, so I thought they would give me some time to get familiar with the code base but fu*k I gat to fix this if not they would See me as a person who does not know his stuff.

Some minute later, the CTO messaged me asking me how I introduced the bug in the first place, I was like I have not even cloned the repo, I have not pushed any code lol. At that point I know I'm gonna be so f**ked in this job .

So after sometime I fixed it but I had to get permission from the lady that manages the database because I was not given access and I need to update a field name in a table for everything to work well. I asked the lady to help update the field since she is the only one that has access to it and its urgent and every body is waiting for me. She told me to wait for 1hr and remind her that she's busy right now, after some hrs I reminded her but she kept telling me she will update it later.

Nobody wants to hear that I was not the one delaying the fix, so since I can push some code to the report and it's get deployed, I wrote a script to update the field and I removed the code later. With that done the fix was live and everybody was happy!

The next day, the lady came to me and was like I tried to update the field when I went home but it has already been update but I don't know why. I told her I don't know too :p😃

marquetting department: i need a new for on the website its urgent drop everithing else
dev: sure can you give me the text and the fields that should be on the form?
....1 week later
dev: do you havr the info
marketing: can you have ot online today
dev: yes just get me that content
1week later
.... you know where im going with this

House got flooded, need to fix an urgent bug, doesn't have enough sleep, toothache, heartache... Does God hate me?

After completing urgent projects that rewrite a lot of "overtime" or even personal projects that rewrite like a few weeks to complete.

Old web dev days pre-BS... All the CSS needed to and the cross browser compat. The divs don't align... Can't get elements to center... Or it does, just not in browser X...

I was thinking about the problems one of our clients faced with the launch of their project the other day, because things were rushed, stuff was omitted and in the end they could not meet the launch date, and I started making a list of hard lessons I learned over the years that would have helped them avoid this situation.

Feel free to add yours in the comments.

- Never deploy on Friday
- Never make infrastructure changes right before a launch
- Always have backups. Always!
- Version control is never optional
- A missed deadline is better than a failed launch
- If everything is urgent, nothing is important
- Fast and cheap, cheap and quality, quality and fast. Only one pair at a time can be achieved
- Never rush the start or the end of a project
- Stability is always better that speed
- Make technical decisions based on the needs of the project two years from now
- Code like you will be the only maintainor of the project two years from now. You probably will...
- Always test before you deploy
- You can never have too many backups (see above)
- Code without documentation is a tool without instructions
- Free or famous does not necessarily mean useful or good
- If you need multiple sentences to explain a method, you should probably refactor
- If your logic is checked beforehand, writing the code becomes way easier
- Never assume you understand a request the first time around. Always follow up and confirm

There are many more that should be on this list, but this is what came to mind now.

Today was a holiday and I wanted to make a mini project for practice purpose, the generic idea was to submit form details and view the details in another file and get the said details on e-mail too.

The main purpose of this exercise was to strengthen my OOP skill.

Not two minutes and 1 text box later I get a call to reset all passwords of "friend" because it was "urgent" somehow..

Reset passwords for fuck's sake...Now I am having this idea of automating reset password job..

PM: No, the daily stand-up meeting is more important than this urgent issue being solved

Having to join an emergency meeting to discuss progress of an urgent resolution the very attendance of which just delays the fix. Then repeating the meeting every 30 minutes.

Working on an app to sync data between our ticketing system and an API a vendor made for us to interact with their ticketing system. I put off working on it for months, mostly because I had mountains of other "urgent" things that jumped in my face, but also because I needed to design the whole thing, and I really have to get into the right frame of mind for that kind of creative organization.

Today I dove into it. I built the JSON to submit, given whatever variables are necessary, and figured out after a while that the smartest way to handle this is not to search for an existing internal ticket, but to have the creation of the internal ticket set a flag for an automated sync process to check when it runs.

It's going to be much easier when I get that built, but now, knowing that, I'm daunted enough that I'm procrastinating. Think of something, chart it out with notes in a text editor, procrastinate.That is probably like 95% of the time I spend in "development."

So our project decided to create a newsletter. For some reason, I was tasked with writing it, includig layout, recepient database etc.
It is the first newsletter, it is urgent and it is supposed to be send to all the people who so far participated. Means: there was never a "sign up here for a newsletter" thingy on the website. Hence, there is also no "unsubscribe" button.

One could kind of "hotfix" this by making a field, like "enter your email adress here to unsubscribe" and then I get a notification and remove the people from the list. Fine by me. Not so many ppl atm so we got time to set it up properly then.

My boss decides it is my job now to implement the stupid unsubscribe button... I am not the website admin. I have nothing to do with the goddamn website. We have ppl in another city, being paid to manage the goddamn website and it would take them just a few minutes to set the stupid button up, since they know what they are doing and I am not.
I told them from the start: I don't do websites. I have nothing to do with them, I don't want to have anything to do with them. We have people for this.
Why the F is it my job now to implement that stupid button?!
And even when I tried to look into how the other formulas which do similar things are set up: oh you don't have permissions to access that. Lovely!

FAK this shiet <.< It is not my fking job.

So last year I sent my PC to get a motherboard replacement, as I couldn't be arsed replacing it or even research what motherboard I should get(was dealing with more urgent personal matters).

Anyway, I get it back and everything works good but not the front USB port.. I always found it weird, but also didn't bother to open the case and double check, so I let it go and assumed, since the motherboard was fried, that the USB wires were faulty.

Time passes by and I decide to open the case for annual cleaning job... Turns out the motherfucker didn't connect the port, why?? Fucks knows why... Obviously the wires were "short" and he didn't even try to pull it out further!!! You little piece of shit,for a full year I've been living with a missing usb port, the fucking front facing mother fucking usb port. Fuck.

Moral of story? Don't be a lazy ass and fix your shit on your own!

Whoo, 4 days into my new project, and a lot of mess already happening all over the place, in short, everyone in here consisted of the human population that fill up the average (and below) margin on everything (especially their IQ, seriously, by the time I finished telling this story, you'll wonder how the hell are these guys able to finish uni, not to mention working in IT)

Okay so, backstory, I was cut off from my previous project (the product was finally launched, but only a handful developers are kept to maintain & do enhancements, why wasn't I included? That's a story for another time), and I was sent to a new (shitty) project, by the order of the (shitty) manager, in the same institute, but different division, whom tries to copy paste everything the golden child (my previous project) has been doing, technology, environment, work culture, etc

And I'm faced with another react native application (let's call it project N), in which the team leader was so proudly explained to me, that it got released way earlier than my previous project (let's refer to it project X) even though X started a long time before they have any plan for N, N was passed down from a vendor to the internal devs whom has very little knowledge of react native, and I was supposed to "help" them with it

Day one, I learned a new english term for this, sinecure, nothing done on the first day, just introductions, a long boring meeting and got assigned to the project N, I did skim through the source code for a while, at a glance it looks like a student's assignment done overnight, reminds me of the first website I made, and this is supposed to be an app that handles monetary transactions,

Day 2, still no task given, due to their "end of sprint" session, 4 days of not having anything to work on, I analyzed the code further, and yep, it's rubbish,

- first, the code convention is shit, based on the git log, only 2 guys were working on this and neither of them had any standards with their coding, spaces, semicolons, indentations, everything is a mess, folder & file names and their placement too, not to mention redundancy everywhere, nothing is reusable, this is the first time I saw a react application that keeps defining & creating new components on every pages, and no documentation at all

- second is, the warnings, I was in awe with the disappearance of yellow warnings in the app since I found a bunch of yellow box errors on the debugger console, then I checked the main app.js file and lo and behold

console.disableYellowBox = true

Whoooo, a new breakthrough in software debugging, you won't find any potential bugs if you hide the warnings altogether, fuck, not even any config to diferentiate debugging & release environments (my last project had one)

Well worse is that ALL of the components doesn't have any proptype checking (prop is something like an attribute that is inherited from parent component to child component, CMIIW), and this cause for some issues that already happened a bit later,

- third, but not last, the software is buggy as hell, not to mention the flow & logic is messy as fuck, who the hell put a splash screen as it's own navigation entity,

After opening the app, splash screen is showing, then redirect to login page, and if user pressed back button while on login page, they'll be stuck on the splash screen, unable to navigate anywhere

Then, later that evening, one of the PO suddenly came to me and said something about telling him if I had any issues/concerns, given the opportunity, I immediately pointed out the problems, only to add up to my dissapointment, the conversation went like this,

Me: I do have concerns, 3 of them at the moment (explained like above but with more polite words)

PO: really? Well, us from the product team doesn't really care for cleanliness as long as it works

Me: bla blah (explaining about current & potential bugs and maintainability)

PO: like I said it's not urgent, we have more important goals to achieve

Me: blah blah (up to you, but I insist that at least consider this matter)

PO: A foreigner made this you know?

*how the fuck is that information even relevant? Fucking victim mentality

Me: So? It's still rubbish (continue explaining the current bugs)

PO: do you know how much this project has cost?

*cool, now you want to justify this farce by overpricing it?

Me: nope

PO: this much (after googling, it's around 3 years worth of average salary for senior dev in US)

*well my previous project cost almost twenty times that

Me: o...kay?

PO: bla blah (saying something like, And don't go introducing changes and new stuff too much, since you're the new guy, unless you want to be seen as a show off, you gotta mingle with the devs first and once you got in a friendlier term, then you can give your opinion)

I just nods and didn't continue the convo after that, but suddenly the PO reaffirms

PO: OKAY? (in a tone like "capische?")

Okay, I'll consider that as a warning,

To be continued...

When I started with PHP I had to implement an administration system for a small organization.
They using the smallest and most cheap web hosting to host the system and also their websites.
They host three systems and websites on three different web spaces.
Some weeks ago I got a call from them, that the system doesn't work. After a short investigation, I discovered that their '"designer"/boyfriend-of-the-boss created a new Wordpress site and thought it would be a good idea to change the PHP system to 7.2. The system runs on an old CakePHP (don't kill me for that, I had no experience -.-') version, which does't work with PHP 7.2.
I told them what the issue was and that they shouldn't change the PHP version to 7.2 because the system won't run on this version.
Some a week later, the same call, another administration system, the same reason, the same warning from my site.
Today, the third system doesn't work. I told them this is probably the PHP 7.2 problem again and explained, how they could resolve it themselves.
Suddenly I got an email from the designer: no, this time it is another problem, he didn't change anything and it just doesn't work anymore. And it is very urgent.
Guess what was the problem...AGAIN!

How often have you seen a manager working as an individual contributor when things are urgent and the assigned engineer is sick!!!
Such type of managers are the rarest species that can be found on Earth.
I hope everyone gets such managers and then, all Devs gonna have a great time working in tons of interesting and feasible projects.

I've thought of the perfect analogy for people who constantly interrupt us while we are coding.

It's like you're a mechanic and you are working on a complex engine. You're focused on what you're doing, your hands are filthy, and you're just about to fit the part in that you've been trying to fit in for the past hour.

Someone comes along and asks you to help them open a pickle jar in the middle of your work. So you have to stop what you're doing, wash your hands, and then help them open the jar. By the time you're done your focus has completely shifted, you lost all momentum, and your progress comes to a complete halt.

This is what it's like for us when you come into our office or call us to ask us a question that isn't important or urgent whatsoever. It's especially frustrating when it's the same question that has already been asked 100 times.

!rant

I'm in big dilemma for a few days. About what to do to my HP stream. It was bought from overseas so it has licensed windows 10. It only has got 32GB for storage. And I only have like 1GB 2GB free space. I am using it for presentation, urgent quick code debug, watching movies and browsing internet.

So the dilemma is should I abandon the license windows 10 and install a lightweight Linux distro or not? 🤔

Gets told to do something by a certain date which was a pretty big task. I said it's fine I'll do it.
Then a lot of small tasks were pushed in between which were "urgent". Now when it comes to the deadline they want to know why the original task wasn't done in time

As a developer, the longest I've worked in a row was 15 hours, from 8am to 11pm. We had to migrate/onboard a project and after we thought everything is done, the client told us about some extra functionality which was "urgent" and he couldn't tell us the months we prepared the migration -.- But it wasn't that hard and our boss was really nice. He stayed with us, even he couldn't really help us, bought us some Pizza, paid for taxis back home and we could stay home or come late to work the next day. And fortunately, that doesn't occur regularly in my company.

To me, the single biggest coding distraction is other coding, i.e. When there are more things to work on than there are developers and priority changes on a whim. My runner's up would be people who come to you directly for non-urgent matters disregarding that you're busy. The third would be meetings, but I consider meetings to be a necessary evil. Almost nothing is worse than too little communication and the resulting mismatch in expectations.

me: next week i'll be on vacations
boss: cool, but i need few things for this week, ... are urgent!
me: ok, tell me, what do you need?
boss: a new web site, a new dashboard for data analysis and a new system for data mining for facebook+google analytics
my mind: f*ck u, i want my vacations!
me: ok, i'll talk with the designer about the new web site and the other things ...

:(