The last 7 years of my life

> worst coding procrastination story

worst and best at the same time:

If you wait long enough things might resolve themselves.

My team inherited an ancient site. Hosted on an old host that the org wanted to kill, using an old log service the org wanted to kill.

A ticket was written in 2021 to migrate that site's hosting and logging to the new services our org started using.

My team kept avoiding it since it was a cheap unimportant site.

in 2023 we were about to finally take action - then we hear "Turns out the new hosting platform and logging platform are way too expensive - I know all of you have migrated to these new services but you gotta revert and go back the old ones til we figure this out"

We didn't have to do squat.

Problem solved by procrastinating ✅

Years ago, we were setting up an architecture where we fetch certain data as-is and throw it in CosmosDb. Then we run a daily background job to aggregate and store it as structured data.
The problem is the volume. The calculation step is so intense that it will bring down the host machine, and the insert step will bring down the database in a manner where it takes 30 min or more to become accessible again.

Accommodating for this would need a fundamental change in our setup. Maybe rewriting the queries, data structure, containerizing it for auto scaling, whatever. Back then, this wasn't on the table due to time constraints and, nobody wanted to be the person to open that Pandora's box of turning things upside down when it "basically works".

So the hotfix was to do a 1 second threadsleep for every iteration where needed. It makes the job take upwards of 12 hours where - if the system could endure it - it would normally take a couple minutes.

The solution has grown around this behavior ever since, making it even harder to properly fix now. Whenever there is a new team member there is this ritual of explaining this behavior to them, then discussing solutions until they realize how big of a change it would be, and concluding that it needs to be done, but...

not right now.

Anything to do with front end development.
It gets worse everytime

My life.

I think the worst time was when I worked on a work project through the night. It was at my previous employer, I was forced to work on legacy php projects I knew nothing about. Nobody could help me and I was always doing days over tickets which were just a pain in the ass in an old magic framework and a custom build cms :c.

I couldn't motivate myself for days and eventually when the deadline came I worked through the night and committed in the morning, then I jumped into bed. I realized that this was a big sign that I really had to quit, and switched companies several months later.

Worst coding procrastination story?

Not necessarily coding, but anything that has to do with writing support reports for an application/feature. Good news is we have a dedicated dept for maintaining reports now, but there was a time developers were required to write and maintain reports (Crystal Reports). Starts out as data in grid, but de-evolves into ..
U: "This value here...can you make that red if its a Thursday before a promotion release on Friday and I forget to update the promotional percent?"
<month later>
U: "Why is this value red?"
<explain why it's red>
U: "That is so stupid, I wouldn't ask for such as feature. I never forget."
<month later>
U: "OMG! I FORGOT TO UPDATE THE PERCENT AND WE LOST OVER $100,000!! THE REPORT WAS SUPPOSED TO FLAG THOSE VALUES IN RED!!! I HAVE THE REQUIREMENT DOCUMENT!! ITS ALL YOUR FAULT!!!"

Not to mention the hours...HOURS worth of meetings filled with "Can you move the value a little to the left, a little more..NO! Too far! Now, make it bold...bolder..uggh...I said bolder, I thought you guys knew a lot about computers."

I eventually ignored the report feature with "I'll work on it later". 'Later' never showed up. Users eventually exported the data to Excel to write their own reports and now exporting data to Excel is a standard feature of our apps.

Terrible project with unclear requirement, lots of legacy and a client that doesn't know what he wants. Quite a bit of procrastination because of this situation, then crunch day & night to hold the deadline.

Then the project was scrapped.

I always procrastinate a lot, but often it's more like taking a creative break so in fact it can make me more productive once I get back to my desk and start "doing actual work" typing code into my keyboard again.

Procrastination becomes unproductive when I have reasons not to do the work, like it's an rude customer, uncooperative team leader, a useless requirement or involves inappropriate or terrible tech stack and legacy code.

Sometimes all of that comes together, but I found even in that situation when procrastinating on devRant and swearing every other minute, I seemed to be above average compared to my team mates who probably felt the same.

Most of us quit the company at some point of that ongoing project.