We need more JS devs for our frontend.
After half a year of PM complaining that he doesn’t find devs, he finally came back to us:
„Sorry guys, I found two devs, but they are not Java developers, they only do JavaScript“
Me:
Team:
*both speechless*
TeamLead: „... wait, you searched for Java devs half a year?“

My team handles infrastructure deployment and automation in the cloud for our company, so we don't exactly develop applications ourselves, but we're responsible for building deployment pipelines, provisioning cloud resources, automating their deployments, etc.

I've ranted about this before, but it fits the weekly rant so I'll do it again.

Someone deployed an autoscaling application into our production AWS account, but they set the maximum instance count to 300. The account limit was less than that. So, of course, their application gets stuck and starts scaling out infinitely. Two hundred new servers spun up in an hour before hitting the limit and then throwing errors all over the place. They send me a ticket and I login to AWS to investigate. Not only have they broken their own application, but they've also made it impossible to deploy anything else into prod. Every other autoscaling group is now unable to scale out at all. We had to submit an emergency limit increase request to AWS, spent thousands of dollars on those stupidly-large instances, and yelled at the dev team responsible. Two weeks later, THEY INCREASED THE MAX COUNT TO 500 AND IT HAPPENED AGAIN!

And the whole thing happened because a database filled up the hard drive, so it would spin up a new server, whose hard drive would be full already and thus spin up a new server, and so on into infinity.

Thats probably the only WTF moment that resulted in me actually saying "WTF?!" out loud to the person responsible, but I've had others. One dev team had their code logging to a location they couldn't access, so we got daily requests for two weeks to download and email log files to them. Another dev team refused to believe their server was crashing due to their bad code even after we showed them the logs that demonstrated their application had a massive memory leak. Another team arbitrarily decided that they were going to deploy their code at 4 AM on a Saturday and they wanted a member of my team to be available in case something went wrong. We aren't 24/7 support. We aren't even weekend support. Or any support, technically. Another team told us we had one day to do three weeks' worth of work to deploy their application because they had set a hard deadline and then didn't tell us about it until the day before. We gave them a flat "No" for that request.

I could probably keep going, but you get the gist of it.

My code broke for no reason.
I added a log statement to see why.
*tests code*
It worked....
What the 何?!

Worst WTF dev experience? The login process from hell to a well-fortified dev environment at a client's site.
I assume a noob admin found a list of security tips and just went like "all of the above!".

You boot a Linux VM, necessary to connect to their VPN. Why necessary? Because 1) their VPN is so restrictive it has no internet access 2) the VPN connection prevents *your local PC* from accessing the internet as well. Coworkers have been seen bringing in their private laptops just to be able to google stuff.
So you connect via Cisco AnyConnect proprietary bullshit. A standard VPN client won't work. Their system sends you a one-time key via SMS as your password.

Once on their VPN, you start a remote desktop session to their internal "hopping server", which is a Windows server. After logging in with your Windows user credentials, you start a Windows Remote Desktop session *on that hopping server* to *another* Windows server, where you login with yet another set of Windows user credentials. For all these logins you have 30 seconds, otherwise back to step 1.
On that server you open a browser to access their JIRA, GitLab, etc or SSH into the actual dev machines - which AGAIN need yet another set of credentials.

So in total: VM -> VPN + RDP inside VM -> RDP #2 -> Browser/SSH/... -> Final system to work on
Input lag of one to multiple seconds. It was fucking unusable.

Now, the servers were very disconnect-happy to prevent anything "fishy" going on. Sitting at my desk at my company, connected to my company's wifi, was apparently fishy enough to kick me out every 5 to 20 minutes. And that meant starting from step 1 inside the VM again. So, never forget to plugin your network cable.

There's a special place in hell for this admin. And if there isn't, I'll PERSONALLY make the devil create one. Even now that I'm not even working on this any more.

Previous developers read entire result of a SELECT into array of arrays.

Then used that later on in the following fashion.

print "name: " + result[row][17]
print "address: " + result[row][23]
...
without any description whatsoever what the numbers mean.

And it's here "result" and "row", in the actual code it was "arr" and "ii".

And these arrays were "public static" used everywhere, but initialized only at few places, so if you went onto wrong screen or if there was a phone call that kicked the app out it crashed.

But real fun began when people started changing queries and altering tables...

I seriously thought I was being pranked as a new hire.

Everytime I encounter cpanel or plesk

fuck that shit, I dont need that aids-software on any machine

No code review for hundreds of thousand $ app with oldest stack pile of shit

Back in my sysadmin days we had an IT zoo to look after. And I mean it... Linux side was allright, but unix.... Most unices were no longer supported. Some of their vendors' companies were already long gone.

There was a distant corner in our estate known to like 2 people only, both have left the company long ago. And one server in that corner went down. It took 2 days to find any info about the device. And connecting to it looked like:

1 ssh to a jumpbox #1
2 ssh to a jumpbox #2
3 ssh to a dmz jumpbox
4 ssh to an aix workload
5 fire up a vnc server
6 open up a vnc client on my workstation, connect to than vnc server [forgot to mention, all ssh connections had to forward a vnc port to my pc]
7 in vnc viewer, open up a terminal
8 ssh to hp-uxes' jumpbox
9 ssh to the problematic hp-ux

.....

At a previous company, a new IT director decided we should outsource the development of a webapi to another company, but this outside company would not be allowed access to the database, so we had to develop a webapi to provide data to the outside company's system, so we could call their webapi and get the same data back.

Actually the worst fucking developer experience is meeting those all knowing people who think they know everything but actually they even don’t know how the fucking tools they’re using every day are written and how they work.

Those people that think when they installed library it should do everything how they imagined to and don’t fucking bother to debug problems and create pull requests if it’s fucking buggy.

Those fucking ranters who moan about something they don’t understand.

Those fuckers who think if they understood what A*, Dijkstra, graph algorithm is they’re smarter then others.

No you fuckers you’re dumb as fuck cause instead of explaining it to someone you just blame people for not knowing “obvious shit”.

All those fucking ignorants I am fucking writing about you.
You either start support each other or fuck you people.

!Dev but still a work related wtf moment.

A company has lunchtime sessions where people could present their hobbies or interests. All went well until one guy presented about his and his wife's interest in BDSM, complete with props and photos. The sessions were quietly abandoned after that.

Me: I deprecate a react component, because it's bloated and no longer makes sense, and I let everyone on the team know that we're working to get rid of that component

Other Dev: Hmm, if I copy this component for every time that it is used, rename all of my copy's and delete the original, I got rid of the deprecated component...

Me: After hearing that deprecated component was removed... "Good job other Dev"

Me: A couple of weeks later after dev leaves company and I start adding some new features to the app "WTF"

We were running an obfuscator as part of our build pipeline, but also were not. I discovered we had disabled every rule, and after asking around it turns out that the obfuscator broke the app (because of reflection and things I won't go into).

So I turned it off.

An hour later the CTO came to me and said to put it back. "We have to obfuscate, put it back."

"But... it wasn't doing anything, other than slowing the build down."

"I don't care, we HAVE to run obfuscation. It's in our contract with the client."

...

So I've had a shoulder surgery to fix my problem always losing my left arm, I'm on a medical leave, so no work but i get payed, nice and dandy ... Yesterday my old colleague/friend calls me that he arranged an interview for me for a project ... Excuse me but wtf, I'm happy getting payed and not working 🤔

I vent to the interview, and all they want is to add Romanian and Hungarian translations to a site and mobile app they have, technically they don't even have access to the server or files to add the other languages.

Now explain that to a non tech guy.

We agreed that they get my answer when they have approval and access to the needed stuff 🤣

Edit: this also fits this weeks question

Why cant I name a folder 'con' on Windows?!

My manager's boss just commited on a delivery date a month from now. We dont know what is to be delivered, nor does the client. We are supposed to work on a platform that we know nothing about. And of course the catchphrase is : yeah just use big data and spark. I'm dying...

When I saw my company’s oh so lovely codebase.

How does one hack a 2fa authentication?

Just found out that in Python, bools are ints.

WTF

Anything in work that is related to "Wordpress".

One of my worst WFT moments was just over 2 years ago.

A former colleague had been tasked with “upgrading” our solution for handling customer specific CSS on our platform for building newsletter emails.

He had been with us for about 5 years and ported most of the front end gui over that time from classic asp to .net and C#.

This work started in November and with a pause over dec-mid jan for high season and Christmas leave he continued.

In the beginning if mars we had the first of multiple WTF on that when I realized that his solution required a lot of special CSS or rather LESS, more than the a actual HTML for the template, and all was custom less rules that was very hard to understand.

We found that he actually never really understood how LESS worked and had tried to do things in a very backward way. Another colleague jumped in and manage to clean it up a bit so it got down to manageable levels.

Then in the end of Mars came the next bigger WTF. This is a newsletter building application. Turns out the new LESS based solution was entirely dependent on the js version of LESS and only worked when running in the browser. Guess what, the email send engine is not a browser and css classes and rules generally does not work in emails.

The new solution was impossible to integrate with the part that built and sent the emails without some very heavy rework.

Oh, and it was also completely incompatible with 12 years of old newsletters and customer templates that just did not work.

And of cause, he had not shown any of this in code reviews but rather just merged it part by part to the new version branch interleaving it with 5 months of other work.

He left the company short after.

When they want to take a business critical app that is using Enterprise Oracle running on Exadata, and move it to community Postgres running on Amazon RDS, because "it will be in the Cloud, and it will save us money..." No, no it won't.

every time I need to deploy an iPhone app on the fucking AppleStore: WTF

Be me
Work at software contracting company
Get a new client, iOS objective-c app with ~40000 lines of code
Previous Dev didn't leave a single comment, and he didn't use a database, he used 'NSUserDefaults'

Jajaja a friend of mine told me that he was going to pay me if I helped his father with a small system. He told me he was going to pay me %20 and I only had to do the design... Then almost finishing I figured that he was going to receive the %20 from the total payment and I was going to receive the %20 from his part 😓😓 obviously I didn't finish my part and I didn't give them

I was using Delphi 7 to develop a desktop application in Windows 2000. Every time my application opened the standard Windows open file dialog, I'd get a BSOD but only if I was running the application with debugger attached. Never found out WTF was wrong... Just changed my code not to show the open dialog if IsDebuggerPresent() was True.

None of my localhost calls were getting through, either through postman or through app. I wasted nearly an hour and then realised my NO_PROXY was configured with ; instead of , I wanna kill myself right now 😫

During my first project in one of the SQLite statements I didn’t realize that it needed single quotes since I was new to it. So I brushed that off but when working on the next function for the program 8 hours were dedicated to debugging to only realize that the error was caused because I forgot the fucking single quotes. FUCK

It was in old days when I was working in java and windows systems.

Java and different log4j versions across dependencies caused system not working only on production server.

Turned out some of libraries got log4j embedded and conflicted with other log4j.

It worked in all computers except production one.

Actually that was my main reason to switch my career to python after that dependency hell.

Another one was windows server 2008 tcp connection limit set to 200 or something.
We needed to change registry to get our servers working. After this case we finally managed to convince people to switch to linux.

Anyway any non standard error when you got multiple layers communicate with each other is hard, practice make it easier to solve those problems as your success moment comes faster.

Oh, my worst dev experience.

First of all everyone know it, people who ask you to repair there computer 🤦‍♂️
Or people who say: "Hey Windows Media player is not working now. Fix it"

But the best moment and worst too is a moment where I present my new website and a friend start to refresh the site with F5 on his browser. I ask him why he do it and he answere "Yeah, you will be rich when I do it"

I don't get it. Why rich? So I ask him and he answere that websites are paid by web request an "clicks" "views" counter.

That was the stupidest thing I ever hear. Okay when I would show ads than maybe it's "true" but without them🤦‍♂️

But that's not the end after I explained him that it's not so he fucked me up that I would be very stupid because I don't register on a service which pay you for it. I explained him that the only service could be an ad service but no he don't understand it and try to discuss with me that a service like this exist. I ask for a link to the service and he could not answer.

For me it was the worst experience because for me it was the most stupidest thing ever and he try to discuss with me and really we discuss 1 hour about it🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

This weeks question fits me well, as I am still unsure about the full details of how the fuck this all came together and was about to just rant about it anyway.

Ever since this companies network equipment and cabling has been updated, a lot of vital tools went down and bug out every now and then, at seemingly random times.

The codebase is a horrible mess to begin with and random things execute at random times and at random places spread all over different resources that get random hooks from random physical values etc.

Turns out (or at least what it so far seems like) all of them somehow sync their clock and other variables based on how many (valid-?) requests it gets per measured time and similar oddities, so when the network equipment got updated, that meant that multiple processes now could reach each other much faster and therefore threw off thousands of values and internal clocks.

There's a total of like 600 systems that are all "separate" from each other but all need to communicate in-sync for the production chain to properly work. Thankfully I didn't sign anything yet, so might actually just redirect them to somebody else, I am not ready to age 20 years, even for the amount that would pay.

This condition over here which is never supposed to be true sometimes becomes true, no one know how or why, just change it manually in prod whenever that happens...

Integrating some SAP service in our otherwise perfectly ok application and having a glimpse of the SAP way -.-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I started at a new job and couldn't find the CMDB. I asked one of the so-called experts if it was true that we didn't have one, and he confirmed. "We don't need one," he said. "We have puppet!"

Thousands of servers. Hundreds in our own little silo. No CMDB at all. What the fuck?

short: The admin with enough xp is ill, there is no one with xp with varnish is and after 1 restart varnish outputs only 503.
long: there original admin is ill but he gave me an project to migrate an typo3 installation to a new server. Thats ok.
Plan: I move 150 GB of data with rsync to the new server, let specialists do something and switch ips between the new and old and clear varnish with a restart.
Reality: +2 hours to migrate the data, because of false infos from the admin, 7 hours preparing the switch, 5 minutes switch, 3 hours to find out the F*****G varnish is the single point of failure. I and the t3 guys agree to see the next day what went wrong.

ALL HAPPENED TODAY!

Plan for tomorrow: speak with the boss to account the extra hours to that day so i dont get over 10 hours and debug that fucking varnish and delete some servers from another project from the backupsystem and monitoring.

Not really dev, but any time I have to use Matlab or R is a WTF experience.

All those mine WTF moments are somehow related with caching which i keep on forgetting... the most fresh one was last week, i had some GIGANTIC mySQL query, and for the sake of response time I immediately made a cache function that kept Redis cache for a day or so... so last week i had to change something (good ol' client and his visions for app). So there i was with the query that returned same god damned results every time, i copy the query in some mySQL manager and it goes fine, but in the app it doesn't... what the actual FUCK!!! i was questioning my career until i figured it out, i was planning to buy some sheeps and a fife and to hell with this, a loud facepalm was echoed through the office that day...

When QA says sometimes this bus is reproducing °°

for all who ranted in wk137

how do you find your progress??
me is -1%

Watching my first demo of Outsystems low code bullshit. What self respecting dev would WANT this as their environment?? How the complete fuck is this a thing??? Buncha lazy shits...

my recents WTFs
1. Typo3 in general 2. Outlook ignoring „margin“ with a lower m ... capital M works fine.