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New for avatars - emotions! You can now change your facial expression on your avatar to better capture your dev mood! Getting expressions working right turned out to be quite the undertaking due to the ripple effect of the various layers that each expression touched so our total layers just for men ballooned out from 300 layers to 1100. And @dfox re-architecting how layers work to handle the interconnectedness of expression meant tying together facial expression, skin tone, facial hair, and hair color to make sure everything stays in sync. It’s a fun new addition, I hope everyone enjoys!
I also want to apologize for the delay in getting this out, I meant to have this done ages ago but I got thrown a curveball at work and was laid off back in April and have been super stressed running around trying to find a new job for the past 3 months. I figured I’d have more free time to work on devRant, but hunting for work is so exhausting, it’s really taken its toll emotionally and financially (no unemployment benefits because according to my state even though we lose money every month “you’re still a corporate officer”). Things are finally looking promising on the job search front, and I expect once things get back to normal @dfox and I can get our release velocity back up, but until then, please bear with me.
P.S. If you have the resources, we certainly do appreciate your support with devRant++ Your monthly contributions really do make a difference! Thanks all!
44 -
Sales employee Bob wants a clickable blue button.
Bob tells product owner Karen about his unstoppable desire for clickable blue buttons.
Karen assigns points for potential and impact (how much does a blue button improve Bob's life, how many people like Bob desire blue buttons)
Karen asks the button team how hard it is to build a button. The button team compares the request to a reference button they've built before, and gives an ease score, with higher score being easier (inverse of scrum points).
These three scores are combined to give a priority score. The global buttonbacklog is sorted by priority.
Once every two weeks (a "sprint") the button team convenes, uses the ease scores to assign scrum points. Difficult tasks are broken up into smaller tasks, because there is a scrum point upper limit. They use the average of the last 5 sprints to calculate each developer's "velocity".
The sprint is filled with tasks, from the top of the global button backlog, up to the team's capacity as determined by velocity. Approximate due dates are assigned, Bob is a happy Bob.
What if boss Peter runs into the office screaming "OUR IMPORTANT CLIENT WANTS A FUCKING PINK BUTTON WHICH MAKES HEARTS APPEAR"?
Devs tell boss to shut the fuck up and talk to Karen. Karen has a carefully curated list of button building tasks sorted by priority, can sedate boss with valium so he calms the fuck down until he can make a case for the impact and potential of his pink button.
Karen might agree that Peter's pink button gets a higher priority than Bob's blue button.
But devs are nocturnal creatures, easily disturbed when approached by humans, their natural rhythms thrown out of balance.
So the sprint is "locked", and Peter's pink button appears at the top of the global backlog, from where it flows into the next sprint.
On rare occasions a sprint is broken open, for example when Karen realizes that all of the end users will commit suicide if they don't have a pink heart-spawning button.
In such an event, Peter must make Bob happy (because Bob is crying that his blue button is delayed). And Peter must make the button team of devs happy.
This usually leads to a ritual involving chocolate or even hardware gift certificates to restore balance to the dev ecosystem.23 -
The story of the $500,000,000 error.
In 1996, an unmanned Ariane 5 model rocket was launched by the European Space Agency.
Onboard was software written to analyze the horizontal velocity of the spacecraft. A conversion between a 64-bit floating point value and a 16-bit signed integer within this software ultimately caused an overflow error just forty seconds after launch, leading to a catastrophic failure of the spacecraft.
That day, $7 billion of development met it's match: a data type conversion.12 -
I want Gordon Ramsey to start a IT program in the same fashion as Hotel Hell and Kitchen Nightmares
He'll sit at a desk with a laptop, examining code as if he's eating food, venting frustrations and screaming insults out loud
Then he'll have a talk with the team and see how they work on a day
After that he'll go into the freezer (server room) and scream at mold and cockroaches
Then comes the intervention where we discover that the PM is still grieving about the death of his original programming language and the team loves him but thinks he should move on
The next day the development studio is modernised and has a candy bar, tennis table and everyone is forced to use linux on their new macbooks
Then we experience a good day where everything is great and velocity is through the roof
Then Gordon leaves and everything is shit again17 -
Biggest scaling challenge I've faced?
Around 2006~2007 the business was in double-digit growth thanks to the eCommerce boom and we were struggling to keep up with the demand.
Upper IT management being more hardware focused and always threw more hardware at the problem. At its worst, we had over 25 web servers (back then, those physical tall-rectangle boxes..no rack system yet) and corresponding SQL server for each (replicated from our main sql server)
Then business boomed again and projected the need for 40 servers (20 web servers, 20 sql servers) over the next 5 years. Hardware+software costs (they were going to have to tear down a wall in order to expand the server room) were going to be in the $$ millions.
Even though we were making money, the folks spending it didn't seem to care, but I knew this trajectory was not sustainable, so I started utilizing (this was 2007) WCF services and Microsoft's caching framework Velocity. Started out small, product lookup data (description, price, the simple stuff) and within a month, I was able to demonstrate the web site could scale with less than half of our current hardware infrastructure.
After many political battles (I've ranted about a few of those), the $$ won and even with the current load, we were able to scale back to 5 web servers and 2 sql servers. When the business increased in the double-digits again, and again...we were still the same hardware for almost 5 years. We only had to add another service server when the international side of the business started taking off.
Challenge wasn't the scaling issue, the challenge was dealing with individuals who resisted change.3 -
Worst dev team failure I've experienced?
One of several.
Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.
I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.
The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.
3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.
3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.
4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).
About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.
3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.
About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.
Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.
A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.
Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."11 -
Oh man. Mine are the REASON why people dislike PHP.
Biggest Concern: Intranet application for 3 staff members that allows them to set the admin data for an application that our userbase utilizes. Everything was fucking horrible, 300+ php files of spaghetti that did not escape user input, did not handle proper redirects, bad algo big O shit and then some. My pain point? I was testing some functionality when upon clicking 3 random check boxes you would get an error message that reads something like this "hi <SENSITIVE USERNAME DATA> you are attempting to use <SERVER IP ADDRESS> using <PASSWORD> but something went wrong! Call <OLD DEVELOPER's PHONE NUMBER> to provide him this <ERROR CODE>"
I panicked, closed that shit and rewrote it in an afternoon, that fucking retard had a tendency to use over 400 files of php for the simplest of fucking things.
Another one, that still baffles me and the other dev (an employee that has been there since the dawn of time) we have this massive application that we just can't rewrite due to time constraints. there is one file with (shit you not) a php include function that when you reach the file it is including it is just......a php closing tag. Removing it breaks down the application. This one is over 6000 files (I know) and we cannot understand what in the love of Lerdorf and baby Torvalds is happening.
From a previous job we had this massive in-house Javascript "framework" for ajax shit that for whatever reason unknown to me had a bunch of function and object names prefixed with "hotDog<rest of the function name>", this was used by two applications. One still in classic ASP and the other in php version 4.something
Legacy apps written in Apache Velocity, which in itself is not that bad, but I, even as a PHP developer, do not EVER mix views with logic. I like my shit separated AF thank you very much.
A large mobile application that interfaced with fucking everything via webviews. Shit was absolutley fucking disgusting, and I felt we were cheating our users.
A rails app with 1000 controller methods.
An express app with 1000 router methods with callbacks instead of async await even though async await was already a thing.
ultraFuckingLarge Delphi project with really no consideration for best practices. I, to this day enjoy Object Pascal, but the way in which people do delphi can scare me.
ASP.NET Application in wich there seemed to be a large portion of bolted in self made ioc framework from the lead dev, absolute shitfest, homie refused to use an actual ioc framework for it, they did pay the price after I left.
My own projects when I have to maintain them.9 -
Today on forgotten games – Ballance.
The game is absolutely outstanding. Graphics is absolutely amazing even though the game was developed in 2004. The sound effects are perfect, I can literally feel the wooden ball rolling on steel rails. The background music is also amazing, we're talking Alexander Brandon level here.
The game is about rolling the ball through the levels trying not to fall off. There are three balls: the stone one, the wooden one and the paper one, different in weight, velocity and momentum.
I admire the clever level design. It uses in-game map features in multi-purpose way, for example some levels use ball transformers (the things that transform the ball from one kind to another) as a trap for your ball to lose momentum. It even seems like that levels were designed by some crazy modders for advanced players, but they weren't, and traveling through them feels like you're a pro gamer playing custom levels.
Even though levels seem simple at first glance, they allow non-linear gameplay and different gaming styles.
The gameplay itself is pure meditation. But even though the concept seem straightforward – just follow the level and don't fall – it's not. You have to use all three ball types: there are air vents to fly above upon, which only paper ball can do, there are obstacles to push, which only stone ball can do, and so on.
For additional sonic satisfaction the levels even feature some metal domes that serve no purpose but to be bumped into just for making amazing gong sound.
I like it that when you get cocky and think like that's easy, I got this, the game quickly puts you into place. It basically says nigga you ain't shit, you got nothing on me.
Overall it's basically a mesmerizing travel through cleverly designed levels surrounded by relaxing music and outstanding graphics.
Definitely a must-have for mechanical keyboard gamers, it's a pure satisfaction playing this game with a great level of precision and control mechanical keyboard allows.
Search for "ballance widescreen fix" for modern displays support.
10 -
'Sup mates.
First rant...
So Here's a story of how I severely messed up my mental health trying to fit in university.
But the bonus: Found my passion.
Her we go,
Went to university thinking it'll be awesome to learn new stuff.
1st sem was pure shock - Programming was taught at the speed of V2 rockets.
Everything was centred around marks.
Wanted to get a good run in 2nd sem, started to learn Vector design, but RIP- Hospitalized for Staph infection, missed the whole sem and was in recovery for 3 months.
So asked uni for financial assistance as I had to re-register the courses the next semester. They flat out refused, not even in this serious of a case.
So, time to register courses for third semester, turns out most of the 2nd year courses are full, I had to take 3rd year courses like:
Social and Informational Networks
Human Computer Interaction
Image processing
And
Parallel and Distributed Computing (They had no prerequisites listed, for the cucks they are: BIG MISTAKE)
Turns out the first day of classes that I attend, the Image proc. teacher tells me that it's gonna be difficult for 2nd years so I drop it, as the PDC prof. also seconds that advice.
Time travel 2 months in: The PDC prof is a bitch, doesn't upload any notes at all and teaches like she's on Velocity-9 while treating this subject like a competition on who learns the most rather than helping everyone understand.
Doesn't let students talk to each other in lab even if one wants to clear their friend's doubt, "Do it on your own!" What the actual fuck?
Time for term end exams and project submission: Me and 3 seniors implement a Distributed File System in python and show it to her, she looks satisfied.
Project Results: Everyone else got 95/100
I got 76.
She's so prejudiced that she thinks that 2nd years must have been freeloaders while I put my ass on turbo for the whole sem, learning to code while tackling advanced concepts to the point that I hated to code.
I passed the course with a D grade.
People with zero consideration for others get absolutely zero respect from me.
Well it's safe to say that I went Nuclear(heh.. pun..) at this point, Mentally I was in such a bad place that I broke down.... Went into depression but didn't realise it.
But,
I met a senior in my HCI class that I did a project with, after which I discovered we had lots of similar interests.
We became good friends and started collaborating on design projects and video game prototyping.
Enter the 4th sem and holy mother of God did I got some bad bad profs....
Then it hit me
I have been here for two years, put myself through the meat grinder and tore my soul into shreds.
This Is Not Me
This Wont Be The End Of Me
I called up my sister in London and just vented all my emotions in front of her.
Relief.
Been a long time since I felt that.
I decided to go for what I truly feel passionate about: Game Design
So I am now trying to apply for Universities which have specialised courses for game design.
I've got my groove again, learnt to live again.
Learning C# now.
:)
It's been a long hello, and If you've reached till here somehow, then damn, you the MVP.
Peace.9 -
Hi, I'm new to devRant. That's perfect because I love to rant about everything.
So, let this be my first rant:
Apache Velocity + last minute rush + heatwave - climatisation = Hello Migraine my old friend...10 -
Best code performance incr. I made?
Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)
Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.
Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.
Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.
With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.
Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."
After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.
At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.
VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>
A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"9 -
Not just Stack Overflow, but all help forums:
If someone asks a question, and you think you might know the answer based on its subject or context, please spare a thought for others and instead of dragging the post on for pages and pages without an answer in order to show the poster up for being inadequately articulate, please make the first post a link to at least seemingly relevant reference material.
Nothing more frustrating looking for some undocumented api syntax, finding a similar question that you might be able to gleam from, and then only seeing pages of "aaah, but what OS are you on? What colour is your desktop? What is the average velocity of a..."
You can see they are struggling with an api, and you clearly know where to find the answer, so just quit the cocksure jostling of pretending you're any good at support and just be useful. The poster may be a tool, but the thousands of hits from Google will just think you're a twat.8 -
Program manager who handles scrum of scrums asked our scrum master to slow down. Our velocity and quality is making other teams look bad...
The problem is, no one from other team wants to learn anything from us on automation/cicd. They are good even though manual.
Not sure what to do. Biz is happy with us...6 -
!rant
I am on vacation from my full time job this week. I wanted to use this week to write a PoC for a potential customer of my side business. really interesting project for me.
potential customer is a window and door manufacturer and needs an application to manage their racks.
their ERP system already has a simple rack management but it is only useable in house.
they want the drivers to be able to scan racks they deliver to a customer with a native app and they want to have a webapp for the customers to see racks that are assigned to them as well as reporting a rack ready for collection. And that all needs to be in sync with their local ERP system.
as i am a .net guy i decided to go with the abp framework (because it got recommended to me) and xamarin for the native app part (because i have experience in this).
i have now spent 4 days implementing this and it has been so rewarding. the framework is so powerful and it's template saved me endless hours.
i even wrote a very basic connector service which synchronizes data between my app and the clients ERP system. Just one way until now because of time issue, but i learned to scaffold an ef core with db first. It is noticable that the ERP system is 2-tiered - meaning the clients directly talk to the db.
Tomorrow i will implement the xamarin client.
4 days just coding what i want to. choosi g my own velocity and making my own priorities without any interruptions or discussions and a bunch of new things to learn.
Probably wasted half a day because of stupidy (implemented some bugs) but fixing and learning is part of the journey and i lime that part, too.
i am so relaxed right now 😁 just wanted to share this without a real reason :P3 -
Broken teams,
define Agile principles in 2 lines :
Take 2X to your velocity,
and work 80hours a week ;)3 -
I ain't that picky, but the image I am including here makes me feel uncomfortable.
Is it horrible? Nah, shit like this happens all the time. I just feel weird about it due to my manager's constant pixel perfect implementation requirements.
I have been having a crazy week. And I am thankful that at one point during my period of Javadiction(the great Javadiction of 2015 as I called it because I did nothing but Java) I landed on the Velocity template lang.
I quite like templating engines. Always made me think that if I wanted to start with lang design I might start there. Anyways, Velocity is pretty cool and I quite like using it at work.
It makes everyone think that I am the Alpha coder since around these parts it ain't known at all.
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Oh, gather 'round fellow wizards of the code realm! 🧙✨ Let me regale you with the epic tale of software sorcery and the comical misadventures that come with it! 🤪🎉
So there we are, facing the dreaded Internet Explorer dragon 🐉 - an ancient, stubborn beast from the era of dial-up connections and clipart-laden websites. It breathes fire on our carefully crafted layouts, turning them into a pixelated disaster! 🔥😱
And then, the grand quest of cross-browser testing begins! 🚀🌍 One moment, your website is a shining knight in Chrome's armor, and the next, it's a jester in Safari's court. A circus of compatibility struggles! 🎪🤹
CSS, the arcane art of cascading style sheets, is our magic wand. But oh, the incantations can be treacherous! A slight misstep and your buttons start disco dancing, and your text transforms into a microscopic mystery! 🕺👀
But fear not, brave developers! We wield the enchanted sword of Stack Overflow and the shield of Git version control. We shall slay bugs and refactor with valor! ⚔️🐞
In this enchanted land, documentation is the mystical parchment, often written in the cryptic dialect of ancient monks. "This function doeth stuff, thou knoweth what I meaneth." 📜😅
And meetings, oh the meetings! 🗣️🤯 It's like a conference of babbling brooks in the forest of Jargon. "Let us discuss the velocity of the backlog!" 🌿🐇
But amidst the chaos, we code on! Armed with our emojis and a bubbling cauldron of coffee, we persist. For we are the wizards and witches of the digital age, conjuring spells in Python and brewing potions in Java. 🐍☕
Onward, magical beings of code! 🚀 May your bugs be few, and your merges conflict-free! 🙌🎩3 -
Been on a fairly large project for the past two months. Been getting more and more productive and confident with each sprint! Always informed that I’m doing fine. Left a four hour task in progress for a day or so while tending to a PR which had been pending for a week and a half and was currently under review. Removed from the project due to issues with velocity.1
-
I can now leave freely without any regrets!
The slight misgivings I had about leaving this place over the toys they provide, is now gone because I re-realized that while this place adopts new tech, it doesn't adapt to it. So they have shiny tools but the people and processes won't change.
It seems to me that due to pressure to deliver, there is little thought/analysis behind any tech change.
They don't plan to change their wretched delivery pipelines. Everything will be same but on git. So no velocity gains, and same bureaucratic review request process. Such a waste. This attitude applies to their other tools too. They are using a unit test library to write tests that don't use mock. They are using modern languages but without modern idioms. It's like writing C code in C++. And of course theoretically we are agile but actually we're just a waterfall team with managers on our ass everyday and tighter release schedules.
Reminds me of @boombodies recent posts and discussion about business spaghetti reflecting in code.
There are possibly multiple reasons for these problems but I think a large part of it is a lack of empathy/mutual respect. Everyone's too insecure, noone cares for anyone but themselves and people just try to outwit each other. -
I am witnessing Einsteins theory of relativity first hand, I’m amazed. The closer I get to Microsoft products, the slower my velocity becomes. At 9 PM, I have tried to connect a MS SQL Server to an ERP System for 30 minutes. After this piece of shit robbed me of all my energy, I look at the clock and it’s midnight. Go die in a dumpster fire Microsoft4
-
So my team got this new clueless "Delivery manager" who doesn't know ANYTHING ABOUT AGILE!
Her favourite timepass ? To eat development team's time asking stupid questions just to make her presence felt. And she does that by visiting each developer personally. MULTIPLE TIMES A DAY !
Why can't you leave the team and let them do some actual work??😑
She would join our scrum meetings to ask questions like "what are story points again?", "How do we calculate team velocity?"
Dear miss Clueless: It's not cool to be dumb! It's cool to take up an online agile crash course if you insist to contribute.
The other day, she suggested a QA guy to "test properly" with a smirk!
I mean seriously ? Was that actually necessary to tell them? This team was working just perfect without you. How about you look before you leap?
I try being nice to her but at times it's just too much to take. -
It feels like half of what I do is just tell people that their code sucks and it needs to be replaced, then I drag them through the 5 stages of grieving the loss of an application that has them trapped in an abusive relationship.
1. Denial:
The unique and complicated needs of our business lead to this unique and complicated architecture. This is all here for a reason, and it's all needed.
2. Anger:
What do you mean it's going to take 6 months to rebuild this? We made MVP in 3 months!
3. Bargaining:
Surely we don't need to throw it all away! There must be something worth salvaging!
4. Depression:
Stake holders and going to think we're not getting anything done! This is a nightmare 😭
Six months later...
6. Acceptance:
Holy shit thank god we got away from that glass tower before it shattered and cut us all to pieces! Side note: development velocity is on fleek. #profit3 -
So today we had a pre-sprint-planning meeting where the POs told us about the stories currently in the backlog. They went ahead and "roughly prioritised" some of them. Their priorities were:
- normal (but asap please)
- has to be done this sprint, because the feature has to be in the next release (code freeze after this sprint)
- top priority, because this has to be in the previous release (which was released last friday)
The non-normal stories alone are about twice our normal velocity. Good job guys. Good job. -
!programming related
The karman line is bullshit.
If you aren't at escape velocity for your local planet's gravity well, then you aren't in fucking space.
Blue origin is a lie.9 -
Dev: [does some weird code to make test pass]
Me: this won't work. Literally the documentation says what you did won't work once we move towards our end goal architecture.
Dev: [shows middle finger and requests merge and somehow managed to get code merged]
.... One Sprint later nothing works...
Dev: [does some weird code to make test pass]
Me: no. You need to solve underlying problem.
Dev: [shows middle finger and requests merge and somehow managed to get code merged]
.... One Sprint later nothing works...
Me: please stahp
Dev: [shows middle finger and requests merge and somehow managed to get code merged]
Me: WTF man do your fucking job
Scrum Master: stahp lowering our velocity
Me: wut? 😒2 -
Bought an Arduino and is finally able to learn how to make my software interact with custom hardware projects. Just wiring up a led and controlling it with software is amazing fun! Really looking forward to learning servos, motors etc.
Planning to make velocity sensitive midi drums with piezos in the future.4 -
Help. We're starting to feel the effects of unnecessary micromanagement.
We're a small startup. The kind with less than 10 devs spread across different domains. We've been fine with a Kanban approach as the velocity/flow of deliverables don't necessarily warrant a Scrum approach yet.
Our boss has been wanting to adopt Scrum-style sprints, even shoved and assumed that were doing these sprints and demanding Scrum-style reports (and meetings!!!) when they are, in reality,
1) unnecessary
2) a waste of time
Absolutely none of the team members want this. But our boss insists on having it. We like our boss, but lately things are getting out of control
What can we do to mitigate and prevent this?3 -
I was writing a simple algorithm to simulate gravity. But when I tested it it produced wildly wrong results. I looked over my whole algorithm trying to find the error, but thought that the last bit, the final position update, must be fine.
I was wrong, some misplaced brackets were accidentally multiplying the position + 0.5 by the sum of the old & new velocity instead of adding the position to 0.5 those velocities.
I noticed that and fixed it, and now it runs pretty well. -
Velocity? You want to talk about velocity while it is you steerig us towards full speed reverse over and over again?
What's faster, armageddon or the apocalypse?
NOBODY FUCKING CARES MATE 🤦♂️3 -
I seriously don't get what's with everybody trying to copy each other now so much and release something under a different name or description (e.g. chats were yesterday, we do high velocity communcation now) and or adding almost no features, doist (company behind todoist) released "twist", which is literally just slack or a forum, just worse...?
https://blog.todoist.com/2017/06/...
edit: they even show slack as the go to tool in the past, but didn't discover actual channels..? I am missing the point here completely
2 -
I like the people I work with although they are very shit, I get paid a lot and I mostly enjoy the company but..
Our scrum implementation is incredibly fucked so much so that it is not even close to scrum but our scrum master doesn't know scrum and no one else cares so we do everything fucked.
Our prs are roughly 60 file hangers at a time, we only complete 50% of our work each sprint because the stories are so fucked up, we have no testers at all, team lead insists on creating sql table designs but doesn't understand normalisation so our tables often hold 3 or 4 sets of data types just jammed in.
Our software sits broken for months on end until someone notices (pre release), our architecture is garbage or practically non existent. Our front end apps that only I know the technology have approaches dictated by team lead that has no clue of the language or framework.
Our front end app is now about 50% tech debt because project management is so ineffectual and approaches are constantly changing. For instance we used to use view models for domain transfer objects... Now we use database entities, so there is no commonality between models but the system used to have shared features relying on that..sour roles and permissions are fucked since a role is a page regardless of the pages functionality so there is no ability to toggle features, but even though I know the design is fucked I still had to implement after hours of trying to convince team lead of it. Fast forward a few months and it's a huge cluster fuck to enforce.
We have no automated testing of any sort or manual testing in place.
I know of a few security vulnerabilities I can nuke our databases with but it got ignored.
Pr reviews are obviously a nightmare since they're so big.
I just tried to talk to scrum master again about story creation since any story involving front end ui as an aspect of it is crammed in under one pointed story as sub tasks, essentially throwing away any ability to calculate velocity. Been here a year now and the scrum master doesn't know what I mean by velocity... Her entire job is scrum master.
So anyway I am thinking about leaving because I like being a developer and it is slowly making me give up on doing things to a high standard and I have no chance of improving things, but at the same time the pay is great and I like the people. -
Fucking stupid sons of motherless goats!!!
Some stupid shit made a cluster fuck about our response time and web app velocity because: each call needed more than 3s to show... While the motherfucker was using 3G!!!!!!!!!
The application is an analytics dashboard...1 -
Debugging a Velocity template issue the other day where I was presenting a firm to the user to fill in some data. Whenever the user had entered in one or more lines, a 'true' kept showing up cryptically before the form. Drove me fucking nuts because there was nowhere in the template code that was printing before the form input.
Turns out it was the output of a $list.add(...) being rendered to the screen.
Spent 40 mins on that shit.
😐🔫 -
unigine sim engine has the worst documentation i've ever seen. it was written in bad english, occasionally did not follow a word convention (i.e. functions doing analogous work used different keywords), most items were just reiterations of function names (made up example for clarification: getAngularVelocity(): gets angular velocity...). i had to use it for my first ever job, and had to learn in from scratch, mostly by trial and error. it's been months since i switched jobs, and they were rolling a version 2 when i left, i hope they improved on their docs.
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First dev job was not really a job but rather an internship... I was completely new to Spring and Jersey Java and i was given a 5 points story "which turned out to be 8 later on" to consume a RESTfrl webservice... Manipulate the response and create an Excel sheet at the end... But the Excel columns n rows had some complicated logic to determine colour, font, borders, alignment and a lot of other props..
Got it done "code was a bit ugly" and dev lead was satisfied and told me I actually knocked out an 8 points story on my own... Team velocity was 5 points story per Dev.
Now im a full time Developer therr -
Whenever I see the name @CoffeeBoy come up I think to myself:
-Umm hey I think we just ran out of coffee,
-Aw shit and we are working overtime till we finish.
-Are you thinking what I'm thinking ?
-Are you thinking about how good it would be to be a cat.
-Uuh no why do you want to be a cat ?
-Well duuh cat's sleep all day. It's great !
-They also live for only 15 years so I would think in total you will sleep more than cats do.
-You like to ruin things for me don't you.
-I call it productive refactoring. But getting back on topic. I hear we have a new intern ?
-Yeah, that's Jim over there.
-Well lets tell him to get us coffee.
-Oh yeah that's a good idea, because interns already have the bare minimum of expectations from their life anyways !
-Hey Jim, yeah you Jimmie buddy can you get us a few cups of coffee we really need those to stay functioning right now.
-Yeah sure, what do you need.
-George drinks cappuccino, you can get me whatever. Thanks man here is the money. Buy yourself a cup too it's on me.
-Oh thanks.
*Jim walks out of the room*
30 minutes has passed...
-Dude where is Jim at ? It shouldn't be that hard to get 3 cups of coffee from just a few blocks away.
-I hope he didn't get robbed or something he has MY money on him.
*22 minutes ago, jim walks out of the coffee shop carrying the 3 cups securely held under his arm *
-I thought he was just gonna use me as an errand boy or a coffee boy to be exact in this case. But it's nice of him to also pay for my cup. Maybe they are not such bad--
His sentence got cut off by the sudden impact with a metal surface at high velocity. He got hit by a car while he was crossing the street, too deep in thought to notice the speeding car in time.
After hitting Jim the car suddenly come to a halt with a screech noise from it's tires.
But it was too late the impact shattered his lower spine. Leaving a blodied body on the ground. Coffee from the smashed cups merged with his blood. Little did anyone know that day would be the birth of a new hero.
He,he,he he is the COFFEE BOY,
Fighting the evil villain Sleep Deprivation day and night, but mostly night. And his sidekick Mugatron always covering for Coffee Boy !!! -
That feeling when you're working on a server plugin that uses Velocity and a simple typo in your generated Javascript forces you to wait a literal minute for a recompile...
1 -
Whenever I go out for a walk now, I get a monologue in my head about everything wrong with my team... But using managerial terms like man-month, velocity, chaotic, context switching costs, lack of processes and standards, need for more slack, too much low value busy work, technical debt, scope creep, (violation of) the two-pizza rule... by a lot7
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How do i tell my boss all these sudden requests for new features I've been getting that seem unimportant but time consuming are huge distractions/velocity-killers from a project I've been working on with the business for the last month and should be released this weekend?
And well I may be out in for awhile soon for health reasons. So at this point I'm just thinking "you know what take your pick". I can work on your new requests now but for this other project... I'll give you the basics you can have someone figure out all the rest from the code. Good luck.
Code isn't too bad imo but the project is massive, spans multiple projects that integrate with each other.
And well I'm the only dev since boss never bothered to assign anyone else to help...3 -
You know, that small program, Mouse without boarders is so niffty and good. But what makes me trip is how theses screen sharing programs all make the slightest pixel off monitor jump to the next monitor
If you gonna make a teleporter, at least make one one with a damn escape velocity
I hope screen share devs are listening2
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