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As a long-time iPhone user, I am really sorry to say it but I think Apple has completed their transition to being a company that is incompetent when it comes to software development and software development processes.
I’ve grown tired of hearing some developers tell me about Apple’s scale and how software development is hard and how bugs should be expected. All of those are true, but like most rules of law, incompetence and gross negligence trumps all of that.
I’m writing this because of the telugu “bug”/massive, massive security issue in iOS 11.2.5. I personally think it’s one of the worst security issues in the history of modern devices/software in terms of its ease of exploitation, vast reach, and devastating impact if used strategically. But, as a software developer, I would have been able to see past all of that, but Apple has shown their true incompetence on this issue and this isn’t about a bug.
It’s about a company that has a catastrophic bug in their desktop and mobile platforms and haven’t been able to, or cared to, patch it in the 3 or so days it’s been known about. It’s about a company, who as of a view days ago, hasn’t followed the basic software development process of removing an update (11.2.5) that was found to be flawed and broken. Bugs happen, but that kind of incompetence is cultural and isn’t a mistake and it certainly isn’t something that people should try to justify.
This has also shown Apple’s gross incompetence in terms of software QA. This isn’t the first time a non-standard character has crashed iOS. Why would a competent software company implement a step in their QA, after the previous incident(s), to specifically test for issues like this? While Android has its issues too and I know some here don’t like Google, no one can deny that Google at least has a solid and far superior QA process compared to Apple.
Why am I writing this? Because I’m fed up. Apple has completely lost its way. devRant was inaccessible to iOS users a couple of times because of this bug and I know many, many other apps and websites that feature user-generated content experienced the same thing. It’s catastrophic. Many times we get sidetracked and really into security issues, like meltdown/spectre that are exponentially harder to take advantage of than this one. This issue can be exploited by a 3 year old. I bet no one can produce a case where a security issue was this exploitable yet this ignored on a whole.
Alas, here we are, days later, and the incompetent leadership at Apple has still not patched one of the worst security bugs the world has ever seen.
82 -
I'm really down.
I spent 10 years building on an application worth 800K$ revenue per year.
I tried to build a technical team. All left, because of fights with stupid account managers, CEO, business managers.
I was left alone for almost one year alone, working like 60-70 hours per week to keep the things going and adapt to more customers.
And looking for potential partners to outsource things.
Now out of the blue, 3 weeks before my summer holiday, investors introduce me to a "partner" that will rent to us a "developer" for 2 months. from tomorrow.
What the fuck I'm gonna do with him in 2 weeks I don't know.
Actually I understand that this "partner" will take over the whole project.
They used the word "to help me", but actually during the meeting they said to fix things that are not working, and to develop new features because the project is blocked.
Of course there are bugs, I have no developers with me and hundred of features and integrations to maintain. And of course everything is blocked because I have to think hard about priorities.
I feel humiliated in the worst way.
I don't know what will be my future position.
I wasted time contacting potential partners and the answer was always "there are no money".
The business strategist, entered one year ago and said "no more IT investment".
Basically as cofounder and cto (of myself), they will not fire me, if I stay silent. If I accept to be a puppet. And eat, eat eat a lot of shit. I'll grow fat from the shit I'll eat.
I feel I've lost all my hard work, and I'm alone.40 -
The worst kind of bugs are logical ones, they go undetected, no error, no alert, and when you notice them, it's too late.3
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This Part 3 and finale of the tale of Mr DDTW, or the worst coworker I've ever had to deal with. I suggest you start from the beginning if you don't have the context, it's been a trip.
Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605
Part 2: https://devrant.com/rants/4220715
The problem with this man threatening to snitch on me to the professor if I didn't revert my commit was that he backed me into a corner. Letting him go at his pace with his quality standards would have ruined the project for the rest of us, and I'm not going to let three other people's grades suffer because one was lazy. I'm the PM, team lead, the guy who will ultimately be held responsible for this project succeeding or failing and the mediator of problems.
So I snitched first.
The professor knew us. He had an idea of how we worked as a team, who was enthusiastic about this subject, who was diligent, and who wasn't. It'd been half a semester and he wasn't stupid. I'd also taken the not-so-minor task of testing our software and handling all the little integration problems between components and between the professor's server. This had resulted in several calls between me and him because he'd been flying by the seat of his pants with some of the upgrades he'd been doing to the server code and as the fastest group we were the ones running into all the bugs on his end. And he'd also noted our prior complaint and seen the discrepancy in commits, author tags and hours logged. Mr DDTW had been graded significantly worse than the rest of us. So when I sent him a goddamn novel about our team's internal problems, the bomb was set. And so we get to the conference call, with everybody panicking and with no clue what any of this is about. Except me.
Dear god. That call was pure catharsis. Never have I seen a man get demolished so hard. Mr DDTW got a 45 minute LECTURE, a goddamn SMACKDOWN, about how he needs to take some responsibility for this team effort and that in the real world he'd have been fired. And the professor was so incredibly serene throughout! He could've blasted him with the rage of a thousand suns but he said it in such a way that Mr DDTW's only real responses were "yes", "I understand" and "I'm sorry". An entire semester of this useless fucking bitch being nothing but a leech on our team in three separate projects and he was finally getting SCHOOLED. And then, it gets even better. The professor asked how we could solve this problem, as Mr DDTW needs to do work to be graded but he can't hold us back.
I dropped a suggestion: As I had implemented the module in a way that worked, we could carry on using my version while Mr DDTW could work on a separate branch. Everything else was working reasonably well for an MVP, we just needed to improve and test now, so if Mr DDTW got it working we could merge it back into the main branch. This solved the team's problem of not being able to progress, it solved Mr DDTWs problem of not wanting to fail the course, and it solved my problem of not having to work with this shit-for-brains for the forseeable future. A weight was lifted off my shoulders. No more Mr DDTW. No more bitching and no more shitcode. A grating arsehole that had been bugging everyone all sememster put in his place and out of my hair.
On the way home from uni that day, I rang a friend and told him the entire story as I needed to get it off my chest. Every time I brought up a problem, an issue, a setback, an argument, he made a remark.
"Damn, if only he just... did the work."
Every time he said it it was in a slightly different way, but every time it made me laugh harder as he just didn't stop interrupting me with the same comment. If only he did the work. But the funniest part of all was how right he was. Mr DDTW had so many opportunities to just sit down, shut up, and do the work like the rest of us, but instead he decided to do fuck-all until he got flak for it and proceeded to dig his own grave. What sort of delusional entitlement, sheer incompetence or other dumbfuckery was he suffering from to make such terrible decisions? It's his last year of university and he still hadn't learned to just do the goddamn work (I would later find out that his friend had covered his shortcomings a lot and was apparently the reason why he hadn't flunked out of uni yet).
And so ends the story of Mr Didn't Do The Work the worst person I have ever had the displeasure of working with. We never did merge his branch as we ran out of time during testing. The professor passed him, possibly out of pity or just so that he wouldn't have to resit the course and burden some other poor sods. We weren't the top scorers this time, partially because of my shortcomings as PM but mostly because of the huge delays and manpower deficit, but we did well enough to pass the course with some very high grades. With one exception of course.5 -
Every year, my company organizes an internal seminar week for its engineers and developers. I helped plan it this year and, since I also ran a few sessions, was absolutely exhausted by the end of the week.
On Friday of that conference week (after I'd spent four hours in our engineering building), I come back to my desk to discover that a coworker managed to, single handedly, get our boss to agree to shortening our release cycle to one that, without dramatic infrastructure changes, would require about 8x the developer overhead than today's. ...The test cycle I am supposed to pick up in a month.
When asked about it, he said he was so full of energy, why wait for automaton? What better way to inspire us to improve than to switch right now? The worst that can happen is just a few bugs.
I love my job, but I can't stand this guy. 😒4 -
Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.
I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.
Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.
Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.
Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.
Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.
Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.
If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:
if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.
That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!
Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.
The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.
The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!
It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.
But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.
I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.
The whole thing is a fail.8 -
(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)
Dear Current Workplace,
Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.
Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".
Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.
Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.
Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.
Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.
Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.
Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.
Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.
Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.
Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.
Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.
Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.
Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.
Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.
Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.
Fuck you for your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.
Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".
Fuck your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?
Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.
Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.6 -
Staring at cursed blinking cursors.
Repairing work of worst thinking workers
Reverse merges or it'll murder the servers, it nurtures despair
Amateur managers, dimwitted savages interrupt all of us janitors
Cleaning up damages, spills and experiments using skills in embarrassment
Explicit foulness, in a minute it's straight to the bowels with weapons of limitless vowels
A bittersweet hateful machete, eviscerates stateful spaghetti
The slow disease flowing from keys knowing it's going to please
The growing unease, no one agrees, there's no guarantees with your useless degrees
Need more drugs, keyboard's crawling with bugs, falling as I chug
A bottle of cognac gotta love all the hacks, no poise for code that lacks
All the noise, gotta relax, before I destroy the syntax.
Excuse me for not making sense.
Too gloomy, aching and tense.10 -
I HATE SVN! >:v v:< >:v v:< :@
I used to use git for my personal code repositories and for my work. In the office I moved on, they use Subversion. I’ve been using it for months, but it’s a pain in the ass :/
We use TortoiseSVN to pull code repositories, and the AnhkSVN for Visual Studio Plugin. It works fine until two or more of us have to work at the same code project at the same time.
Last week we had a very VERY urgent code to release. We had 4 days to finish it (from thursday to sunday, tests included). We had few changes to do, but the problem was that, when one dev commited something, my changes disappeared, and viceversa. The worst part was that my partners and I had to re-work a lot of bugs that we had already fixed! >:v
This is not the first time this happens :/
The worst thing is that we cannot change our repository system because we don’t have time :(
Is there any advice you, SVN users, can give us?
9 -
dear api author at my company pt. 2:
If you're gonna create an api method that takes some arguments.
And one of those arguments is an array.
THEN MAKE THE FUCKING ARGUMENT'S NAME PLURAL YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT.
REPEAT WITH ME, MOTHERFUCKER.
ARRAY, PLURAL, NON-ARRAY, SINGULAR.
I need to pass a shitload of filters for the data for this table, and for every suckin fuckin filter I need to singularize this shit. Thank god for es6.
I know this sounds like nitpick, but I swear to fucking alpha omega this guy is inconsistent as fuck.
Every time it feels like he makes up a new rule.
Sometimes I need to send arrays of ids, other times arrays of objects with an id property on each.
He uses synonyms too, sometimes it's remove, other times erase.
PICK ONE MOTHERFUCKER.
If you can't do the basic things well, then what is to expect of more advanced stuff?
Naming conventions you fucking idiot, follow them. It's programming 101.
You're already sending them as plural in the fucking response. Why change them for the request?
And that's just style, conventions.
This idiot asshole also RARELY DOES ANY FUCKING CHECK ON THE ARGUMENTS.
"Oh, you sent a required argument as null? 500"
We get exceptions on sentry UP THE ASS thanks to this useless bone container.
YOU'RE SEEING THE EXCEPTIONS TOO!!!!! 500'S ARE BUGS YOU NEED TO FIX, YOU CUMCHUGGER
And sometimes he does send 400, you know what the messages usually are?
"Validation failed".
WHYYYYYY YOU GODDAMN APATHETIC TASTELESS FUCK???
WHAT EXACTLY CAUSED THE FUCKING VALIDATION TO FAIL????
EXCEPTIONS HAPPEN AND THANKS TO YOU I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.
The worst of all... the worst of fucking all is that everytime I make a suggestion to change shit, every time, you act like you care.
You act like the api is the way it is because you designed it in a calculated manner.
MOTHERFUCKER. IF A USER HAS ONLY PRODUCT A, THEN HE SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO ACCESS DATA FOR PRODUCT B. IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO JUST RESTRICT SHIT WITH ADMIN ROLES. IDIOT!!!!!
This is the work of someone who has no passion for programming.10 -
Worst advice about programming...
My discussion with my company sistem admin :
Me : you must always think that users are dumb and will make mistakes (like putting letters when db saves as number)
He : users must learn, if they make such mistakes its their fault.
My claim: I learned early in school to always assume that users are stupid and will always find bugs and exploits by coincidence. So protect your code from bad imput8 -
Worst collaboration experience story?
I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.
The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.
Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"
Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).
Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".
Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.
In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.
With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).
Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.
By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.5 -
My worst Technology I've worked with is deffinatly the Facebook Graph API.
THIS AIDS INVESTED PIECE OF CUNTFLAPS IS FULL OF BUGS THAT THEY REFUSE TO SOLVE.
How such a multi-billion dollar business can produce such a retardedly incestious sucky fuck dick ass cunt broken API is beyond me.
FUCK!!!5 -
What's the worst lie you've ever told a client?
That year, I told mine that we have to pay $100 for a GitHub repository to store the code and keep it safe from bugs...
I am still laughing at myself 😂😂.11 -
Maybe not worst, but most frustrating. One of the systems I helped maintain at my first job had a few different bugs that caused bad data in the database. The "solution" to the problem was to write SQL queries to directly fix the production data. This would take one member of our team (it rotated weekly) about an hour every day to fix because there were literally dozens of these errors.
All the devs knew that we could identify the root cause and fix it in, probably, 3-4 days tops. Management would never approve the time because it would take longer to fix the root cause than it took to fix the data.
I worked at that company for 7 years. The bug was there when I came on, and it was there when I left.2 -
There are so many weird hacks in the quite legacy app I work with I could write a book about all them hacks…
But I must admit, the worst of them all is internal time. Yes, so some blockhead thought it’s a good idea to represent time in a manner completely removed from Datetime objects or timestamps or even string representations. Instead we deal with them as intervals represented by integers - and because this is not fucked up enough by itself, the internal time doesn’t start at midnight, yet the integer representations do. It’s a bloody mess. No wonder most of the bugs we face have to do with dates and time…5 -
Lessons I've learnt so far on programming
-- Your best written code today can be your worst tomorrow (Focus more on optimisation than style).
-- Having zero knowledge of a language then watching video tutorials is like purchasing an arsenal before knowing what a gun is (Read the docs instead).
-- It's works on my machine! Yes, because you built on Lenovo G-force but never considered the testers running on Intel Pentium 0.001 (Always consider low end devices).
-- "Programming" is you telling a story and without adding "comments" you just wrote a whole novel having no punctuation marks (Always add comments, you will thank yourself later for it I promise).
-- In programming there is nothing like "done"! You only have "in progress" or "abandoned" (Deploy progressively).
-- If at this point you still don't know how to make an asynchronous call in your favourite language, then you are still a rookie! take that from me. (Asynchronous operation is a key feature in programming that every coder should know).
-- If it's more than two conditions use "Switch... case" else stick with "If... else" (Readability should never be under-rated).
-- Code editors can MAKE YOU and BREAK YOU. They have great impact on your coding style and delivery time (Choose editors wisely).
-- Always resist the temptation of writing the whole project from scratch unless needs be (Favor patching to re-creation).
-- Helper methods reduces code redundancy by a large chunk (Always have a class in your project with helper methods).
-- There is something called git (Always make backups).
-- If you don't feel the soothing joy that comes in fixing a bug then "programming" is a no-no (Coding is fun only when it works).
-- Get angry with the bugs not the testers they're only noble messengers (Bugs are your true enemy).
-- You would learn more than a lot reading the codes of others and I mean a lot! (Code review promotes optimisation and let's you know when you are writing macaroni).
-- If you can do it without a framework you have yourself a big fat plus (Frameworks make you entirely dependent).
-- Treat your code like your pet, stop taking care of it and it dies! (Codes are fragile and needs regular updates to stay relevant).
Programming is nothing but fun and I've learnt that a long time ago.6 -
1- Copy/Paste (code)
1- Googling before trying to fix a bugs by myself first.
1- Never finish my side projects.
2- (Worst) Still doing all the above.3 -
I think that two criterias are important:
- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind
1) Some simple anti examples:
- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-
2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.
E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.
Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.
When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.
It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo
Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.
Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.
My worst enemies....
Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(
Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.
I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.
Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?
XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????4 -
Worst code I ever had to touch: a React application, createClass era, before redux was a thing, that had everything in one fucking component.
Every fucking thing.
This was a simple video chat application, but still. The component's code included:
- Views (contact list and video call screen) and logic to switch between them;
- All application state;
- API calls;
- Websocket message handling;
- WebRTC logic (getUserMedia and p2p streaming).
This app was built by one person in one month for a demo. That person left the company after the demo and I had to maintain that mess without zero React knowledge (I was doing angular at that time). On his last day he gave me a crash course and an overview of how the app worked.
Around that time I attended a few meetups and a conference with talks about React. That, my curiosity and ability to learn by refactoring helped me a lot when I had to add new features and fix bugs in that app.5 -
Sorry, long since my last post...
I have quit my job recently at DERP & CO.. The level of anxiety was already somewhat of medical severity.
For months I had been in a project that not only did not progress, but that it was getting worst day by day.
A bit of Context
November: "Dev, junior anon needs you to help him on the SHIT project because they are running out of time, it is mainly doing unit tests."
Well, the code was a mess, there was a LOT of copy paste and it was all bad quality (we talk about methods with complexities between 80 and 120 according to SONAR QUBE).
Dev: "Anon, you know this is wrong, right?"
Anon: "Why? it works"
Dev: after long explanation.
Anon: "Oh well, yes, from now on I will take it into account." And he did it / try his best.
Dev does the unit tests and do extra work outside of the reach of the sprint (y than i mean work after hours, classic) and alerts the boss of the mess.
December: After a project of approximately 6 or 8 months of development, the boss discovers that the junior anon have been doing everything wrong and/or with poor quality (indicating that throughout the whole development the quality of the code was NEVER checked nor the functionality).
Boss: "This is a shit. Dev, you have to correct all the errors and warnings marked on sonar", which are around 1200 between smelling code, high risk errors, etc.
Dev fixes something like 900 bugs... lots of hours...
Boss: "This still is all wrong, we have to redo it. We will correct the errors leaving something stable and we will make a new repository with everything programmed as it should be, with quality and all"
- 900 corrections later, now are irrelevant -
Boss: "Dev, you will start to redo it, anon is out on other project. First you must leave the existing one working properly"
Dev: "ok ..."
January: How can I correct the mess if the client asks for more things. I am just fixing the mess, doing new functionalities, and when I have free time (outside the work) I try to advance the new repository, poorly I must say because burntout.
Boss: "Everything should be arranged at the end of January, so that you can redo everything well in February."
I can't handle everything, it starts to fall further behind. Junior Anon quits the job.
February: Big Bad Bugs in the code appear and practically monopolize the month (the code is very coupled with itself and touching in one place sometimes meant breaking other stuff).
Boss: "It can't be, you've been with this since January and you haven't even started correcting this mess in the new repo"
Dev: "It is that between the new things that are requested and the bugs I cannot put myself with that"
Boss: "Do not worry, you will be helped by random dev if you needed. SPOILER ALERT: random dev is allways bussy. Not made up bussy, He had a lot of work by itself, but it can't help me the way I need it.
High anxiety levels, using free time to try to reduce the work left and gradually losing the taste for develop.
March: So far, not only do they add new things day and day, but now they want to modify things that were already "ok", add new ones and refactor everything in a new repo. I just did not see an end of this nonsense.
Dev breaks, the doctor says it's anxiety, so I just know what I have to do.
Dev: "I quit my job"
Cool Manager: "Damn, why?"
Explain everithig
Cool Manager: "Do you want to try if I can change you to other project or anotjer scope on the same project?"
Dev: "Thanks, but no Thanks. I need to stop for a while".
End. sry for long sad post and maybe poor use of English (?) Not my native language.10 -
A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.
Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.
After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.
Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.
We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.
We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.
All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster
Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.
I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.
There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...
Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)4 -
Creator of the react router:
If you ever see this, you created one of the greatest library with one of the worst documentation ever.
And don't get me started with versions. In every single versions, you break everything so badly and nothing works anymore.
Everytime I need to do something related to react router, I just fucking roll on the floor and cry. Documentation is fucked up.
It's totally fucked up. In the github there's one documentation, in the website there's a different. At the end, nothing works.
Please, if you want to create a nice library like this, maintain it. If you can't maintain it, mark it as deprecated and someone will take over.
But keeping something like this and making it absolutely inconsistent doesn't help. I am really tired of debugging bugs related to react-router2 -
Fuck Unity.
Every single time I try to use Unity to develop my well-along-in-development video game, it finds some way of fucking itself up.
Be it from somehow failing to compile a DLL - which is something completely out of my control, the inspector failing to update itself when I select a new object every five minutes, to the engine managing to fail to load its UI layout because it somehow managed to lose a file responsible for containing the layout, the Inspector forgetting to include a scrollbar and as such trying to cram a bunch of components into one area, crashing in a certain area because I tried using reflections, crashing because I tried running the game in a place that always works, all the way to the whole thing closing instantaneously when I try selecting a new layout.
My experience with using this god-forsaken configuration of code and imagery has been one of endless torment; I've spent hours lamenting about the pain this piece of utter horseshit has caused me to those who'd listen.
I don't know what I did to this thing to deserve to be shown the absolute worst of this engine for the year I've been working on my game for. I can't even take a look at its source code to see if I can piece together things I'll pick up from alien code to fix obnoxious bugs myself because you cunts have it under lock-and-key for some dumbass reason.
Even updating my install of this engine is a gamble; I remember clear-as-day updating my project from 2019.3.14 to whichever one was most recent at the time, and everything breaking. This time, I got lucky and managed to update to 2020.1.4 with no issue on the surface, except I inadvertently let in a host of other issues that somehow made the editor worse than the older one.
There's little point in even bothering to report a bug because this shit happens so randomly that I could be just working on auto-pilot and the next thing I know Unity's stupid "crash handler" rears its ugly head yet again, or you people are probably too busy adding support for platforms no sane person uses like fucking Chromebooks.
There've been times where it's crashed upwards of three times in the span of 40 minutes of light use.
How is one expected to cough up hundreds of dollars a year to use a "pro" version of this horrid editor when every session of use yields a 50/50 chance that it'll either work like it's supposed to, or break in one way or another?
It's a miracle I even managed to type all of this out in one go, I expected the website to just stop responding entirely once I got past four lines.
Do what you will with my post, I don't care.6 -
The best/worst code comments you have ever seen?
Mine:
//Upload didn't work, have to react:
system.println('no result');
//$Message gives out a message in the compiler log.
{$Message Hint 'Feed the cat'}
//Not really needed
//Closed source - Why even comments?
//Looks like bullshit, but it has to be done this way.
//This one's really fucked up.
//If it crashes, click again.
asm JMP START end; //because no goto XP
catch {
//shit happens
}
//OMG!!! And this works???
asm
...
mov [0], 0 //uh, maybe there is a better way of throw an exception
...
mov [0], 0 //still a strange way to notify of an error
// this makes it exiting -- in other words: unstable !!!!!
//Paranoic - can't happen, but I trust no one.
else {
//please no -.-
sleep(0);
}
//wuppdi
for (int i = random(500); i < 1000 + random(500 + random(250)); i++)
{
// Do crap, so its harder to decompile
}
//This job would be great if it wasn't for the f**king customers.
//TODO: place this peace of code somewhere else...
// Beware of bugs in the code above; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
{$IFDEF VER93}
//Good luck
{$DEFINE VER9x}
{$ENDIF}
//THIS SHIT IS LEAKING! SOMEONE FIX IT! :)
/* no comment */5 -
Well... I can think of several bugs that I found on a previous project, but one of the worst (if not the worst, because the damage scope) it's one bug that only appears for a couple of days at the end of every month.
What happens is the following: this bug occurs in a submodule designed (heh) to control the monthly production according the client requirements (client says "I want 1000 thoot picks", that submodule calculates the daily production requirements in order to full fill the order).
Ideally, that programming need to be done once a week (for the current month), because the quantities are updated by client on the same schedule, and one of the edge cases is that when the current date is >= 16th of the month, the user can start programming the production of the following month.
So, according to this specific case, there's an unidentified, elusive, and nasty bug that only shows up on the two last days of every month, when it doesn't allow to modify/create anything for the following month. I mean, normally, whenever you try to edit/create new data, the application shows either an estimated of the quantities to produce, or the previous saved data. But on those specific days it doesn't show any information at all, disregarding of there's something saved or not.
The worst thing is that such process involves both a very overcomplicated stored procedure, and an overcomplicated functionality on the client side (did I mentioned that it dynamically generates a pseudo-spreadsheet with the procedure dataset? Cell by cell), that absolutely no one really fully understands, and the dude that made those artifacts is no longer available (and by now, I'm not so sure that he even remember what he done there).
One of the worst thing is that at this point, it's easier to handle with that error rather to redesign all of that (not because technical limitations, but for bureaucratic and management issues).
The another worst thing (the most important none) is that this specific bug can create a HUGE mess as it prevents the programming of the production to be done the next day (you know, people tends to procrastinate and start doing things at the very end of the day/week/month)... And considering that the company could lose a huge amount of money by every minute without production, you can guess the damage scope of this single bug.
Anyway, this bug has existed since, I don't know, 2015 (Q4?) and we have tried so many things trying to solve it, but that spaghettis refuse to be understood (specially the stored procedure, as it has dynamically generated queries). During my tenure (that ended last year) I spent a good amount of time (considering what I mentioned on the last rant, about the toxic environment) trying to solve that, just giving up after the first couple of weeks.
Anyway... I'm guessing that this particular bug will survive another 4-ish years, or even outlive the current full development team... But, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ? -
The best?
I managed to release the new version of the best selling main product of my company.
The worst?
At the release it had critical bugs I didn’t find during the tests. -
I was just wondering why the flying fuck OxyPlot was rendering an unknown node on my chart for monday when I only queued my sql db for a single Tuesday.
Noticed it was an auto generated node, which had the right time, status, everything.
I looked up my code and found out that the date somehow bugged out, and if c# isn't sure what to do with an empty date it initializes a date on 1.1.0001
And what do you know. Appearantly thats a Monday.
I broke my head way harder over this than I should have, assuming the worst possible bugs in the render engine. fml -
Snapchat is by far the worst app ever developed. I like the concept but the actual development of the app is fucking garbage. It hurts my head that they haven't given a fuck about usability, optimisation or anything for that matter considering its one of the top social media platforms. It disgusts me, though Instagram has completely ripped off Snapchat in so many ways; they've done a hell of a better job at it and if people weren't so tired to SC I'm sure it would be dead by now.
Slow UI, slow gestures, probably the highest amount of bugs and crashes, shit camera because it thinks it can do a better job than the native API at rendering, painfully slow upload, stupid "featured" stories that you cannot get rid off and slow the fuck out of the app, battery drain even worse than FB, oh and not to forget that once you accidentally enable your location it's impossible to switch it off, the best you can do is hide it from everyone. I can probably go on and on with the endless issues this shit has.5 -
Just got to test the app from the frontend team... Oh God why!!
5 minutes, found 5 bugs (c'mon testers!!)
Worst (and now it's a rant) why do designers insist on working with big screens and don't test it on a standard screen? You know? Those typical screens your users are using?
So, it looks great in a 24" screen but the focus is terrible in a 15.6" screen... No time to fix it... What should I tell the users? Works better at 85% zoom out? -_-
You just fucked up the main feature of the app! Congrats!!! The rest looks okay I guess3 -
So I know i did a best and worst case already for 2017
But apparently it's not finished yet!
This will probably a short one:
Best thing to happen to me this year: I applied for a VR game and despite at this very moment i'm in thr trial period (to see if I can do work) i've succesfully landed a job.
I've spent months rewriting and rewriting my CV applying for standard software dev jobs, either being turned down for not enough experience for Junior roles, where they want someone out of university, where I have 1 year of both iOS and android experience, that is still not good enough for their shitty little app.
After all of that effort I turned to just borrowing my head and developing my game, to the point i have bits of the game practically done (bare bones crafting and building works 100% just has bugs in some specific cases). A friend of mine got a game dev job and he helped me out by showing me what his CV and cover letter looked like, i mimiced the style (in a sense) and added my own specific additions for VR. At the exact same time i got an invite from unity connect (which i had totally forgotten about) which i then scowered through jobs until I found something awesone "a job for a unity VR developer".
After contacting the guy about the job, we ended up having a voice chat over discord and he seems pleased with the fact I tome on my hands! Sadly the job is not some hourly paid job, however from what i've seen from youtube gameplay footage it looks very well done, and that leads me to getting revenue share.
Anyways i'm just so happy that with a couple days to spare in the year LOL i got a job! Sure i won't get paid yet but I got a flipping job, it is what i wanted for christmas!!
It is a gamble being revenue share and all but i'm willing to risk it! -
Worst: Realizing there were crippling and horrible bugs in software that got shipped to customers. Also realizing that we truly don't know the amount of technical debt that contributed to these bugs. My most terrifying comment from a colleague: That software was written on a weekend and the dev was getting 3 hours a sleep a night. One of the bugs I found I was fighting for almost a year to even find what was causing the bug.
Best: Finding those bugs and eradicating them. Having confidence that the bugs we know about are truly dead and gone. Til we meet again...next...3 -
I cant keep this inside anymore I have to rant!
I have a colleague that is an horrendous loose bug-cannon. Every peer-review is like a fight for the products life.
Now I understand - everyone makes bugs me included and it is a huge relief when someone finds them during peer-review. But these aren't the simple kind of bugs. The ones easily made when writing large pieces of code quickly. Typing = instead of == or a misshandling of a terminating character causing weird behaviour. These kinds of bugs rarely pass by a peer-review or are quickly found when a bug report is recieved from testers.
No the bugs my colleague makes are the bugs that completly destroy the logic flow of a whole module. The things that worst case cause crashes. Or are complete disasters trying to figure out what causes them if they are discovered first when the product reaches production!
Ironically he is amazing a peer reviewing other peoples code.
But do you know what the worst thing of all is! Most of the bugs he causes are because he has to "tidy up" and "refactor" every piece of code he touches. The actual bugfix might be a one liner but in the same commit he can still manage to conjure up 3 new bugs. He's like a bug wizard!
*frustrated Aruughhhh noises*9 -
I hate Intellij so much ...
* it has the weirdest bugs
* like window focus not working properly,
weird comment/uncomment short (jumps one line down wtf)
* It is slow as hell
* doesn't compile properly (or doesn't give a shit telling me about its actual status).
* Not even the build log is working properly. Why can I hide WARNs but no INFOs?? WTF
* Panels are all over the place and keep coming back, regardless how often I close them ....
ARG ARG ARG, *smashing face on the keyboard*
and the worst ... even though I have the F***ING ULTIMATE version, it constantly nags me about BUYING THE F***NG ULTIMATE VERSION AAAAAARG12 -
They say nightmares are bad, but have you ever solved a bug that was bothering you for a long time in your dream, only to wake up and realize it wasn't real? Worst feeling ever. And this happened three nights in a row. For three different bugs. You would think that after the first two nights I would know better, but yet again I was fooled.3
-
Happy New year
May you have a year that is filled with love and bugs, laughter and debugging , brightness and dark theme , hope and distro hopping and little less windows vs linux shit 😂 please arch guys you too 🙄😝
Wish you all a great year 😅😛
I rarely post anything but I'm pretty active reading every shit post here. we fucking have a great community here. Few people are going through some real shit , hey you, things will get better don't lose hope but don't just wait on it , things don't ever get better by just wishing. Do what has to be done no matter how hard that decision can be.
Cut all those toxic people from your life doesn't matter who they're. You all deserve better
Believe in yourself. Everyone is going through some real shit. Keep fighting. Live for yourself.
You got only one life live upto your fill potential.
Regret is the worst thing so do whatever the fuck you want to do.
Never give up doesn't matter what you're going through.
And in the end may you "live" all the days of your life. -
So i'm visiting the JavaScript bubble every now and then when i'm writing on the userscript i develop to fix bugs in our ticketing system or fix some clients website they negelected. Every time i'm searching for answers to the weird problems that inevitably turn up i have to filter out all the threads that derail with the classic 'google jQuery basic arithmetic plugin' craziness to find an actual vanilla solution to my problem.
All the time i wonder why on earth people put up with this framework hell. This is part serious question and part rant but seriously, how did we come to this? With all that jQuery, React, Node, whatever stuff i'm kinda losing the overview over what's even todays standard. I always try to keep my code as vanilla as possible without using external libraries. But it seems the entire web development industry is heading the completly other way. I tried to look into a few frameworks but i never really see the appeal. Just now i looked up react native because the last 20 rants talked about it and immediately noped out because they fucking create a DOM in js, why the fuck would you do this?!
Worst thing about this framework shithole is that some frameworks are beeing pulled into the mix for very weird and unnecessary reasons. Best example is a charts library i recently used to visualize a database of temperatures that was completely written in native js but pulled jQuery in for the equivalent of window.addEventListener('load',function(stuff)) and i was furious. I rewrote the code and could throw out the jQuery dependency with no problem. What the fuck is wrong with people?
Alright since you made it here: I'm not trying to throw any of you under the bus for using frameworks. I just fail to understand why you would use these. To each their own and unless your site has the performance of the ticketing system i use at work that takes like 15 seconds to load one fucking page i won't complain at all. But pull in a framework just to do a task you can easily do in native js in remotely the same timeframe you are on my list.2 -
Today is one of those magnificent days for my code. One of those days where I stumble up on the weirdest bugs and pull a fix out of my hat barely looking at any doc. One of those days where I find out there is a very tricky flaw in our project design and yet I end up finding an elegant solution to circumvent future problems. One of those days where I find the informations I want even though the documentation is the worst I've ever seen.
I love that productive feeling. -
I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.
I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.
All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.
The story goes like this:
I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.
The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.
I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.
Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.
We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.
We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!
Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.
I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.
Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.
I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.3 -
... worst drunk coding experience?
none. or to be more precise, all of the three of them I had. I can't code drunk, i hate doing it, i hatw even thinking about doing it when drunk.
so after those initial three attempts i don't try to do it again, ever.
BUT, best coding experience while high?
ALL OF THEM.
some of the best pieces of code I wrote i did when I was high. my mind goes into overdrive at those times, and my thinking is not lines/threads of thought, but TREES of thought, branching and branching, all nodes of each layer of the tree coming to me AT ONCE, one packet == whole layer across all of the branches.
and the best was when one day, in about 14 hour marathon of coding while high, i wrote from scratch a whole vertical slice of my AI system that i've been toying around in my head for several years prior, and I had all of the high-level concepts ALMOST down, but could never specify them into concrete implementations.
and I do mean MY ai system, my own design, from the ground up, mixing principles of neural networks and neuropsychology/human brain that I still haven't seen even mentioned anywhere.
autonomous game ai which percieves and explores its environment and tools within it via code reflection, remembers and learns, uses tools, makes decisions for itself for its own well-being.
in the end, i had a testbed with person, zombie and shotgun.
all they had pre-defined in their brains were concepts of hunger and health. nothing more.
upon launching it, zombie realized it wants to feed, approached oblivious person, and started eating it.
at which point, purely out of how the system worked, person realized: "this hurts, the hurt is caused by zombie, therefore i hate zombie, therefore i want to hurt it", then looked around, saw the shotgun, inspected its class by reflection, realized "this can hurt stuff", picked the shotgun up, and shot the zombie.
remembered all of that, and upon seeing another zombie, shot it immediately.
it was a complete system, all it needed to become full-fledged thing was adding more concepts and usable objects, and it would automatically be able to create complex multi-stage, multi-element plans to achieve its goals/needs/wants and execute them. and the system was designed in such a way that by just adding a dictionary of natural language words for the concept objects on top of it, it should have been able to generate (crude but functional) english sentences to "talk" about its memories, explain what happened when, how it reacted, what it did and why, just by exploring the memory graph the same way as when it was doing its decision process... and by reversing the function, it should have been able to recieve (crude) english sentences that would make it learn what happened somewhere else in the gameworld to someone else, how to use stuff and tell it what to do, as in, actually transfer actual actionable usable knowledge to it...
it felt amazing to code for 14 hours straight, with no testruns during that, run it for the first time after those 14 hours, and see that happen.
and it did, i swear! while i was coding, i was routinely just realizing typos and mistakes i did 5-20 minutes ago, 4 files/classes ago! the kind you (and i) usually notice only when you try to run the thing and it bugs out.
it was a transcendental experience.
and then, two days later, i don't remember anymore what happened, but i lost all of that code.
and since then, i never mustered enough strength and resolve to try and write the whole thing again.
... that was like 4 years ago.
i hope that miracle will happen again one day...3 -
Without a doubt it has to be the internal company search engine/file finding tool @thewamz and I wrote.
The company has a wide UNC network with files scattered all over the place and they need a way to keep track of where the files get moved to (they can and do get moved). The original tool was written in Java/Tomcat and didn't use any frameworks or utilities beyond custom written ones, no orms, and the SQL was just raw strings. The program didn't take into account that files might be moved or deleted so it never removed anything from the database, it just kept adding files and never removing them.
It however never stores files itself, just links to files elsewhere on the UNC network.
It took six months to get it into what might be a stable beta or release candidate state. The user interface is good, very simple and intuitive, the whole thing was rewritten in python/django, there were issues with utf 8 (and mysql not fully supporting utf 8 in its own utf 8 mode), we added a regex search mode (which was sorely lacking), the search used to take up to fifteen minutes however we sped it up to less than a minute (worst case when a user simply puts "^$" as the regex search). It has a multi threaded design which does some checks to ensure it doesn't spawn too many threads and get stuck in constant Gil switching. Still some bugs to fix, like moving the processing of results returned by the server in a web worker so that the content widget doesn't lock up processing millions of search results and moving the back end to use asynchronous python might gain a performance boost. But on the whole I think the system is ready to replace the older system that all the users are frustrated with and constantly complain about.
However the annoying bit is... How to actually get the new system online, while I am responsible for the development of tools and their maintenance, I am not responsible for their initial deployment and that means I have no idea when (or even if) my new tool will even ever be released :/ -
Best:
Seeing ALL the members of my team finally coming into their own. One person tackled our entire not-at-all-simple CI/CD setup from scratch knowing nothing about any of it and, while not without bumps in the road, did an excellent job overall (and then did the same for some other projects since he found himself being the SME). Two of my more junior people took on some difficult tasks that required them to design and build some tricky features from the ground-up, rather than me giving them a ton of guidance, design and even a start on the basic code early on (I just gave them some general descriptions of what I was looking for and then let them run with it). Again, not without some hiccups, but they ultimately delivered and learned a lot in the process and, I think, gained a new sense of self-confidence, which to me is the real win. And my other person handled some tricky high-level stuff that got him deep in the weeds of all the corporate procedures I'd normally shield them all from and did very well with it (and like the other person, wound up being an SME and doing it for some other projects after that). It took a while to get here, but I finally feel like I don't need to do all the really difficult stuff myself, I can count on them now, and they, I think, no longer feel like they're in over their heads if I throw something difficult at them.
Worst:
A few critical bugs slipped into production this year, with a few requiring some after-hours heroics to deal with (and, unfortunately, due to the timing, it all fell on me). Of course, that just tells us that next year we really need to focus on more robust automated testing (though, in reality, at least one of the issues almost certainly would not - COULD NOT - have been caught before-hand anyway, and that's probably true for more than just one of them). We had avoided major issues the previous three years we've been live, so this was unusual. Then again, it's in a way a symptom of success because with more users and more usage, both of which exploded this year, typically does come more issues discovered, so I guess it tempers the bad just a little bit.2 -
I hate it when my bosses approve of a design and then after some time ask me to make some annoying changes. I love programming, but I don't like being bothered by boring tasks.. and the worst part is that my bosses expect me to take care of building the backend, front-end, complete the design of the screens available, make up designs for the screens that are not, test the Web app, solve the bugs created the people who also worked on the project, solve the bugs created by me, and if something is not clear, to ask the client directly, like dude.. I'm just an intern here... and the most annoying of all this is when they take a screenshot of something they don't like and simply write: "change this".... CHANGE IT TO WHAT? if I knew what you would like I would have already done it!!!
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Someone else updated a firmware and noticed that its worse than the older? The worst ia when you try to fix it and it broke another thing.
Too many bugs in a release (yes, a "verified" release)3 -
I'll go with IDEs (and multiple answers) for this.
In my *opinion*, the best IDEs are:
- IntelliJ and the other JetBrains products for almost any serious work. It's just too good (even though there are some bugs every now and there)
- VS Code for quick coding, hacking
- micro, if only a shell is available
Worst IDEs:
- Qt Creator: I just hate it, it's hard to configure, hard to use, big nope for me.
- Some IDE for the Clean functional programming language, which I've only used once and I don't know its name, but it was a painful thing to try to use back then (~3 years ago)2 -
I recommend this to 'myself later'
#MISSING_OLD_RANTS #MY_OLD_RANT
you are in the flow maaan... you fucking rock it... i swear, to GOD!
I'm in the most mindblowing.. thinking out-of-the-box... thinking about the system... everything that just can help recover a little piece of your soul... and resolving the worst bugs you've ever had... and you are just fucking ROCK IT! And you are on the highway to finish it all, but then suddenly a thought kicks in, and won't let you "do ya' thing".
That little piece of shit is now not a man, not a thing, nor anything... just some old tune from your dreams... and NOW! You! You are in the flow... and suddenly know what is your youtube's playlist name... from your saved 170+ playlists...most of them with 30+ saved videos... and you fucking see through that madness now, and THAT contains that tune!!!
You dropp EVERYTHING! YOU ARE IN THE FLOW! And you just solved a "bug" inside you, 'cause if you listen that song, than finally will Soothe Your Pain (haha... https://youtu.be/MJpQx57uoRc )... And you know it... you are in a hurry, and you will forget the name again... so you just go to youtube... and try to search it... "piano"
you are always in a hurry... so -> hotkey Ctrl + T... (y -> auto youtube search) "y_piano" -> result is "personalized"...
yeah, innnntresting...
a lot of really irrelevant youtube videos...
Ok... scroll down...
loading more...
BOOM Dr. Dre ft. Snoop Dogg between Mozart and Chopin...
"ok so personalized..." but not my playlist...
You check your youtube account... playlists... ALL PLAYLIST -> "Ahh finally, maybe a new search implementation!"...
Naaah... just shitty 170+ videos...
"thanks youtube..." No filter, no search... NOTHING...
"Fuck..." ok. fuck... go to old youtube page, you saved just for these situations... (remember... you are clever! and thank me later: https://youtube.com/view_all_playli... )
And it is not looking like it looked back in the day... and a little piece of it warns me that it will be removed soon... :'(
You lost the flow... you desperatly breaks down... What?!?!! that is the worst thing could happen to me... this is the only search option which works atleast a little bit... and it don't bothers anyone... and it will be abandoned, and shut down soon... :'(
So you sadly search that playlist... listen to that tune... turns up the volume... so that I can cry calmly in the corner, and no one can hear it...
And you know, everything you done, is fucked up, you don't even remember where this half sandwich came, in front of you?! nor what is the time?! anything...
You just wasted half an our, from your best fuckig time you can have right now... you could done all your tasks, all your bugs inside you... but you fucking wasted 30+ minutes (btw which is the most valuable thing in this fucking miserable life... and you wasted it to "search the youtube's UI where could you finally SEARCH WITH GOOGLE/YOUTUBE"!!!
And even that song is ruined for you now, 'cause this will be even worst in the future...2 -
Scope creep is the worst, and it's always last minute which causes bugs, which causes unhappy scope creeping clients.. :-/
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I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks? -
Don't you just love those people who sell projects which require months and months of hard work with a due date of two whole fucking months?! And worst of all, they act all fucking surprised when the project is not finished on time and it contains loads of bugs because of lack of testing time. Drives me insane..
-
I knew concurrency is *bad*, but *that* bad‽, just shocked: https://blog.bugsnag.com/bug-day-ra...2
-
Coming back from a break and I'm fixing some minor bugs in an app I'm developing.
The simulator runs the app perfectly.
Builds to android and iOS;
Shows splash screen then nothing...
No error messages...
The worst part is I didn't change any of the code in the files that are meant to be running at this point.
I'm very confused rn!6 -
Inhuman deadlines imposed by non-programmers... don't know what feels worst: the shame of my own present code, or the fear of my own future bugs.
-
The bugs that make you think are the best/worst.
Had a ghost foreign key constraint from a dropped table. Cant drop it from a non existant table.
Turns out the dev copied a file for the new table and since you can technically name those foreign keys anything you want, there were no errors when he ran it.
Also sloppy/overworked dev teammates are the worst...
Also I'm pretty sure rule 2 of programming is "Never Copy and Paste" -
The one thing I really don't like is when they give me buggy code to work on. I spend more time debugging than actually writing new stuff. Sometimes the bugs are hard to find to like someone writing a 500 line function that could have been separated into other tasks. This is what sucks about being a student, other students are simply unaware of their horrible code and yet they ask "Why'd I get a C in the final?"
The worst part is being assigned a random partner for a project and the person is absolutely clueless about the class.
Just things I've had to deal with and I'm sure most of us have as well1 -
!rant
Site has been in staging for 2 weeks and very few bugs and changes have been submited... Day before luanch don't even know where to start with so many change requests!!!
Every freaking time...
Worst part is that the live date cannot shift.1 -
I guess i have to be thankful for not knowing whomever wrote this fucking piece of shit of a PHP app that i have to fix stupid bugs in a daily basis.
Cause if i did know the bastard.. i'm pretty sure i would fucking bash his useless head in with anything i had in my hands at the moment... FUCK!.
The level of ignorance and stupidity.. i can't even begin to comprehend.
The worst is that we can't even rewrite this fucking piece of buggy shit cause the bosses are so fucking proud of their deformed creation and wont pay us decently to even to that in the first place.2 -
Just what is life
1st I love developing Web Apps
2nd I hate when it has bugs (Always does Everyone does)
3rd More hate for Security related bugs
So I started bug hunting so that even I can make developers hurt I thought I might find peace here
But here we fucking have SQL Injections which are not really that bad easy peasy
But we also have special kind of SQL Injections the Boolean Based ones (Medium Level Demons) and also The Time Based SQL Injections (Medium Level Demon with lots of health consumes too much time has a repetitive process and we have to wait a lot also if you have network lag you are doomed)
No its nice story till here but here it fucking ends the happiness I mean my luck is worst kind of fucking thing anybody ever can have.
I got a mix of both Demons;_;
A Time-Based Boolean SQL Injections yess fuckety amounts of fucking time wasted and redundant fucking process also to make matters worst the fucking famous tool #SQLMAP doesn't work in my case -
Pushing an update with bugs is the worst thing yo happen yo a dev on Thursday, because you know yout Friday is messed up
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So for the current project, they want to start testing the application from Monday next week and the development part section still has a few bugs that need to be handled. But that isn't the worst part. The worst part I just heard is that the designs themselves haven't even been signed off. How the fuck did we get to the point where the designs haven't been signed off where the development has been going underway for the past 2.5 months? I swear I'm working with the fucking worst project manager!
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I'm not experienced in VB Forms. So can someone who is, tell me if I'm just too inexperienced or if Im right about this?
Im tasked with fixing some bugs in a VB Forms project that a privious employee wrote some years ago. When I opened the project and checked it out, there was over 5600 lines of code in the codebehind for the form.
I feel like this is somewhat bad practice, no comments, no documentation... Nothing. And to top it off, among the worst naming of Subs and variables ever. Stuff like: "Run", "Stop", "Feeder", "When Load".
Oh, and the best part? The guy forgot some test code in the software, so when he left, the software stoped functioning. For real, he coded in a dependency to his own account in The AD.1
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