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Yesterday: Senior dev messages out a screenshot of someone using an extension method I wrote (he didn’t know I wrote it)..
SeniorDev: “OMG…that has to be the stupidest thing I ever saw.”
Me: “Stupid? Why?”
SeniorDev: “Why are they having to check the value from the database to see if it’s DBNull and if it is, return null. The database value is already null. So stupid.”
Me: “DBNull is not null, it has a value. When you call the .ToString, it returns an empty string.”
SeniorDev: ”No it doesn’t, it returns null.”
<oh no he didn’t….the smack down begins>
Me: “Really? Are you sure?”
SeniorDev: “Yes! And if the developer bothered to write any unit tests, he would have known.”
Me: “Unit tests? Why do you assume there aren’t any unit tests? Did you look?”
<at this moment, couple other devs take off their head phones and turn around>
SeniorDev:”Well…uh…I just assumed there aren’t because this is an obvious use case. If there was a test, it would have failed.”
Me: “Well, let’s take a look..”
<open up the test project…navigate to the specific use case>
Me: “Yep, there it is. DBNull.Value.ToString does not return a Null value.”
SeniorDev: “Huh? Must be a new feature of C#. Anyway, if the developers wrote their code correctly, they wouldn’t have to use those extension methods. It’s a mess.”
<trying really hard not drop the F-Bomb or two>
Me: “Couple of years ago the DBAs changed the data access standard so any nullable values would always default to null. So no empty strings, zeros, negative values to indicate a non-value. Downside was now the developers couldn’t assume the value returned the expected data type. What they ended up writing was a lot of code to check the value if it was DBNull. Lots of variations of ‘if …’ , ternary operators, some creative lamda expressions, which led to unexpected behavior in the user interface. Developers blamed the DBAs, DBAs blamed the developers. Remember, Tom and DBA-Sam almost got into a fist fight over it.”
SeniorDev: “Oh…yea…but that’s a management problem, not a programming problem.”
Me: “Probably, but since the developers starting using the extension methods, bug tickets related to mis-matched data has nearly disappeared. When was the last time you saw DBA-Sam complain about the developers?”
SeniorDev: “I guess not for a while, but it’s still no excuse.”
Me: “Excuse? Excuse for what?”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence>
SeniorDev: “Hey, did you guys see the video of the guy punching the kangaroo? It’s hilarious…here, check this out.. ”
Pin shoulders the mat…1 2 3….I win.6 -
One of our web developers reported a bug with my image api that shrunk large images to a thumbnail size. Basically looked like this img = ResizeImage(largeImage, 50); // shrink the image by 50%
The 'bug' was when he was passed in the thumbnail image and requesting a 300% increase, and the image was too pixelated.
I tried to explain that if you need the larger image, use the image from disk (since the images were already sized optimally for display) and the api was just for resizing downward.
Thinking I was done, the next day I was called into a large conference room with the company vice-president, two of the web-dev managers, and several of the web developers.
VP: "I received an alarming email saying you refused to fix that bug in your code. Is that correct?"
Me: "Bug? No, there is no bug. The image api is executing just as it is supposed to."
MGR1: "Uh...no it isn't. Images using *your* code is pixelated and unfit for our site and our customers."
MGR2: "Yes, I looked at your code and don't understand what the big deal is. Looks like a simple fix."
<web developers nodding their heads>
Me: "OK, I'll bite. What is the simple fix?"
<MGR2 looks over at one of the devs>
Dev1: "Well, for example, if we request an image resize of 300, and the image is only 50x50, only increase the size by 10. Maybe 15."
Me: "Wow..OK. So what if the image is, for example, 640x480?"
MGR1: "75. Maybe 80 if it's a picture of boots."
VP: "Oh yes, boots. We need good pictures of boots."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how to break this to you, but my code doesn't do 'maybe'. I mean, you have the image from disk.
You obviously used the api to create the thumbnail, but are trying to use the thumbnail to go back to the regular size. Why not use the original image?"
<Web-Dev managers look awkwardly towards the web devs>
Dev3: "Yea, well uh...um...that would require us to create a variable or something to store the original image. The place in the code where we need the regular image, it's easier to call your method."
Me: "Um, not really. You still have to resolve the product name from the URL path. Deriving the original file name is what you are doing already. Just do the same thing in your part of the code."
Dev2: "But we'd have to change our code"
Mgr2: "I know..I know. How about if we, for example, send you 12345.jpg and request a resize greater than 100, you go to disk and look for that image?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily>
Me: "Um, no that won't work. All I see is the image stream. I have no idea what file is and the api shouldn't be guessing, going to disk or anything like that."
Dev1: "What if we pass you the file name?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily again>
Me: "No, that would break the API contract and ...uh..wait...I'm familiar with your code. How about I make the change? I'm pretty sure I'll only have to change one method"
VP: "What! No...it’s gotta be more than that. Our site is huge."
<Mgrs and devs grumble and shift around in their chairs>
Me: "I'm done talking about this. I can change your code for you or you can do it. There is no bug and I'm not changing the api because you can't use it correctly."
Later I discovered they stopped using the resize api and wrote dynamic html to 'resize' the images on the client (download the 5+ meg images, and use the length and width properties)23 -
Yesterday, in a meeting with project stakeholders and a dev was demoing his software when an un-handled exception occurred, causing the app to crash.
Dev: “Oh..that’s weird. Doesn’t do that on my machine. Better look at the log”
- Dev looks at the log and sees the exception was a divide by zero error.
Dev: “Ohhh…yea…the average price calculation, it’s a bug in the database.”
<I burst out laughing>
Me: “That’s funny.”
<Dev manager was not laughing>
DevMgr: “What’s funny about bugs in the database?”
Me: “Divide by zero exceptions are not an indication of a data error, it’s a bug in the code.”
Dev: “Uhh…how so? The price factor is zero, which comes from a table, so that’s a bug in the database”
Me: “Jim, will you have sales with a price factor of zero?”
StakeholderJim: “Yea, for add-on items that we’re not putting on sale. Hats, gloves, things like that.”
Dev: “Steve, did anyone tell you the factor could be zero?”
DBA-Steve: “Uh...no…just that the value couldn’t be null. You guys can put whatever you want.”
DevMgr: “So, how will you fix this bug?”
DBA-Steve: “Bug? …oh…um…I guess I could default the value to 1.”
Dev: “What if the user types in a zero? Can you switch it to a 1?”
Me: “Or you check the factor value before you try to divide. That will fix the exception and Steve won’t have to do anything.”
<awkward couple of seconds of silence>
DevMgr: “Lets wrap this up. Steve, go ahead and make the necessary database changes to make sure the factor is never zero.”
StakeholderJim: “That doesn’t sound right. Add-on items should never have a factor. A value of 1 could screw up the average.”
Dev: “Don’t worry, we’ll know the difference.”
<everyone seems happy and leaves the meeting>
I completely lost any sort of brain power to say anything after Dev said that. All the little voices kept saying were ‘WTF? WTF just happened? No really…W T F just happened!?’ over and over. I still have no idea on how to articulate to anyone with any sort of sense about what happened. Thanks DevRant for letting me rant.15 -
Worst dev I've interviewed?
"Archie" ran his own consulting business for almost 20 years. Prior to his interview, Archie sent HR (to send to us) his company's website, where he had samples of code for us to review (which was not bad, this guy did know his stuff).
What I found odd was Archie was the lone wolf at his company, but everything I found about him (the about page, his bio, etc), Archie was referred to as 'Mr. Archie Brown'.
Ex. 'Mr. Archie Brown began his humble career and 'Mr. Archie Brown is active in his church and volunteers his time in many charities ...'
Odd to refer to yourself in the third person on your own site, but OK, I like putting hot sauce on my mac & cheese (no judgement here).
Then the interview..standard stuff, then..
Me: "Given your experience, this is an entry level developer position. Do you feel the work would be challenging enough for you?"
Archie: "Yes, Mr. Archie Brown would have no problem starting at bottom. You see ..."
Almost any time he would reference himself, instead of 'me' or 'I', he would say 'Mr. Archie Brown'. As the interview continued, the ego and self-importance grew and grew.
My interview partner wanted to be done by using the escape clause, "PaperTrail, I'm good, do you have any questions?"
Yes, yes I do. I was having too much fun listening to this guy ramble on about himself. I made the interview go the full hour with the majority of time 'Archie' telling us how great he is.
The icing on the cake was my partner caught his gold cuff-links and tie-pin where his initials and how he kept raising his hands and playing with his tie to show us (which I totally missed, then was like "oh yea, that was weird")
After the interview, talking with HR:
HR-Jake: "How did it go?"
John: "Terrible. One of the worst. We would have been done in 10 minutes if PaperTrail didn't keep asking questions."
Me: "Are you kidding!? I had the best time ever. I wish I could have stayed longer."
HR-Jake: "Really? This guy was so full of himself I wasn't sure to even schedule with you guys. With his experience, I thought it deserved at least a round with you two. You think we should give him a chance?"
Me: "Hell no. Never in a million years, no. I never in my whole life met anyone with such a big ego. I mean, he kept referring to himself in the third person. Who does that?"
HR-Jake: "Whew!...yea, he did that in the phone interview too. It was a red flag for us as well."
Couple of weeks later I ran into HR-Jake in the break room.
HR-Jake: "Remember Mr. Archie Brown?"
Me: "To my dying day, I will never forget Mr. Archie Brown."
HR-Jake: "I called him later that day to tell him the good news and he accused me of being a racist. If we didn't give him the job, he was getting a lawyer and sue us for discrimination."
Me: "What the frack!"
HR-Jake: "Yep, and guess what? Got a letter from his lawyer today. I don't think a case will come in front of a judge, but if you have any notes from the interview, I'll need them."
Me: "What are we going to do?"
HR-Jake: "Play the waiting game between lawyers. We're pretty sure he'll run out of money before we do."
After about 6 months, and a theft conviction (that story made the local paper), Mr. Archie Brooks dropped his case (or his lawyers did).24 -
@dfox thank you for sponsoring our event with goodies. I think devrant gained a few Dutchies tonight. Ive also made sure @linuxxx could grab some (yea try to spot him on the picture!).
20 -
Sales Guy: Hey Man, you know what? you should go back to college and advance your knowledge in Software Engineering. This way you will be an expert in programming and handling the Servers.
Me: I started programming at the age of 17 and started handling servers by the age of 18. Can I ask you something if you don't mind?
Sale Guy: Yea sure I don't mind anything
Me: Get the fuck out of here8 -
My most awkward recruiter interaction?
Just graduated college and got 'suckered' by an programming position ad that turned out to be a recruiting company. It was fine since they charge the company for their services and not me.
After a couple of weeks of waiting (they initially promised I would/could have at least 3 interviews a week, which hadn't happened.) I decided to start looking again on my own, found a position, and I was hired.
About two months later I get a phone call:
<skipping the pleasantries>
R: "I see you are working for D, congratulations. I've started the paperwork for our reimbursement."
Me: "Reimburse for what? I found that job on my own."
R: "D is one of the companies we work with and when we submitted your resume, they told us you were already hired."
Me: "And?"
R: "And you signed a contract and now its time to pay. The fees only start at $500"
Me: "Not me. I have the contract, it states, in the second paragraph, I am not responsible for any hiring fees."
<couple of seconds of silence>
R: "Yes, but that is only if we negotiated the contact. Since you went behind our back, we couldn't start the process"
Me: "And?"
R: "And its a breach of contract."
Me: "I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand what you're saying. It says right here on the contract I signed, I don't pay any fees. No where does it say I'm not allowed to look for a job on my own. Right?"
R: "Um..yea..right..right...but you were hired by one of our contracted companies."
Me: "No way I would have known that. Maybe you should have set up an interview long before now."
<R is getting pretty angry at this point>
R: "I'm sure we gave you list of companies we work with. Contacting those companies is a breach of contract. Unless you want our lawyers to get involved, the fee is only $500. Failing to honor your side of the agreement and we'll be forced to contact your employer and begin garnishing your wage until the fee is paid. You don't want that, do you?"
Me: "There was no list and I am allowed to find a job on my own. Again, I'm not responsible for you not setting up an interview so do whatever you think you can do. Have a good night"
<I hang up>
About a week later..
Boss: "Got a phone call from XYZ Recruiting requesting a wage garnishment. Do you know anything about that?"
<I explain the situation>
Boss: "Oh good grief. We've worked with them a couple of times and we contact them on an individual basis for new hires. You're fine"
Me: "You're not going to garnish my paycheck?"
Boss: "No no no, that's not how this works. He was probably trying to scare you into paying their crazy fees."
Me: "What if they get their lawyers involved? I don't want to cause any trouble"
Boss: "Ha ha...XYZ Recruiting is a couple of guys in an office and we have lawyers on the 3rd floor who eat and breath this shit. They know that and you won't hearing from them again."5 -
Family reaction story to me being a dev?
- My dad still refers to my profession as 'something in computers'.
- My older sister goes to her weirdo friends for technical advice because she thinks all I do is fill paper in printers (that's a long TL;DR story about a phone upgrade)
- My brother, a car mechanical genius thinks what I do is near God-like. He also races cars and can blabber on about the physics, aero-dynamics, weight ratios, etc and says "Oh, no way. I'm too stupid to do what you do." Then I'm like, "Dude, shut up, I can barely change my oil and you could replace an engine blindfolded", then he just laughs "Yea, probably."
- Baby sister just wants me to fix her phone. "Can you make <insert some random app> do <insert a random behavior the app was never designed to do>?". I'm like "Uh no, I didn't write Instagram", then she's like "I thought you went to school for computers?".
- My mom passed way (long battle with cancer). I'm sure she'd be proud, but still asking me to how to switch the channel so she could watch a movie on the VCR.
I can clearly see having this conversation with my mom.
Me: "Mom, why are you still using a VCR? I bought you a subscription to Netflix"
Mom: "Net what? Do I turn the dial to channel 2 or 3?"
Me: "No, its the Netflix button on the remote."
Mom: "Can't you come over and do this? I just want to watch my shows. Didn't you go to school to learn these things?"
Me: "No mom, that's not...um...never mind. I'll be right over."17 -
In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”
Simplicity 1, complexity 0.16 -
Thursday
PM: Hey why is A delayed? It should be top priority.
me: I just completed B, and C which were also top priority but got scheduled earlier, so I thought they..
PM: Agh, yes. But can you then finish A by the end of week? it would be very important!
me: No, I unfortunately don't think I'd have enough time by the end of wee..
PM: Why? This should be *the* top priority task. You should not start other tickets before A is done.
me: Exactly. But I *just* started. And. I. don't. have. enough. free. hours. left. this. week.
PM: But why?!
me: So just on Friday I have these 5 meetings here..
*shows calendar*
PM: Ok... OK! Then don't attend those before you are done. This should be more important.
me: Ugh, oh-key...are you sure?
PM: Yea, just let who invited you know that you can't attend and feel free to cc me in, I'll explain A is most important atm.
me: Ok, thanks, but that won't be necessary.
PM: What? Why?
me: You invited me to the Friday meetings.
Obviously I had to attend all 5 meetings today and A is pushed back to next week. :)10 -
one of our computers at work suddenly shut down. our boss panicked like it was the end of the world cause he knew we couldnt buy a new one and we desperately need the computer. when i came in he started telling me he's gonna pay me extra if i fix the computer
me: *checks cpu and finds out it was unplugged* u sure bout that?
him: hell yea, id rather pay u that buy a new one
*30 mins later*
me: *plugs it back in and pushes power button* its done
>> guess who's got extra money without any extra efforts yay11 -
Story of my most useless meeting?
Too many to mention. Here's one. Years ago a new HR associate was specifically hired to better engage the workforce. About once a week, she conducted about an hour to two hour meetings which consisted of every 'touchy-feely' idea you could think of. I swear any day I was going to walk into a meeting and do the "fall back into your partner" trust exercises.
One particular meeting, 'Betty' engaged us with the topic of what keeps us motivated, and I was a little more annoyed than usual because I was behind on a system critical project and these meetings were mandatory.
User1: "Knowing I make customer satisfaction my number one priority."
User2: "The strong sense of accomplishment I feel by doing my best"
Me: "Money"
<you could almost hear Betty's gasp>
Betty: "Oh, no, money shouldn't be the motivator. Money is like icing on the cake. Tell us what keeps you happy and engaged."
<other users nod their heads in engagement>
Me: "Again, money."
User3: "I can't...ugh..I don't believe..oh..why would you say that? I think being part of such a great team is payment enough."
<more nodding of heads>
Me: "Do you work for free? I don't. None of us do. Would any of you keep doing your jobs here if you weren't getting paid?"
Betty: "That is really not the point of this meeting."
Me: "Sure it is. I'll bet if Order Taking starting providing bonuses for positive after-call surveys, employee satisfaction would go through the roof. Anyone else like that idea?"
Betty: "Your attitude isn't helping this discussion. Lets move on."
Me: "Lets not. In 20?? the Gartner group performed a study where they 'discovered' the primary motivator for employees was money. You want employees to perform better, you pay them. It is really that simple."
<I could see the looks of "Its OK to speak my mind?" and others wanting to speak up>
Betty: "Moving on. Lets go over the company core values again and discuss how they enrich our lives at work and at home."
I kept quiet for the rest of the meeting.
The poop hit the fan, and my boss pulls me into a conference room
Boss: "Betty is really pissed at you. She went directly to the VP of HR"
Me: "Good. Does this mean I don't have to attend the enrichment meetings?"
Boss: "Yea, that was her idea of punishment. Lucky bastard."8 -
Today my manager asked me about my research into using RabbitMQ as a backup in case Azure Service Bus ever goes down.
Me: "Good. The way we designed the framework, all we have to do is drop the DLLs into the directory, update the config, and the services will start using RabbitMQ."
Mgr: "Excellent. Probably should be looking into using RabbitMQ as a permanent replacement for Azure"
Me: "What? The whole reason we moved to Azure was to eliminate the problems with having an on prem service bus. Since we've switched, there has been zero downtime."
Mgr: "That's what VP-Joe is afraid of. If Azure ever goes down, he won't know how to explain Azure to the president as to why we're not taking orders or can't ship packages."
Me: "That makes no sense. What did VP-Joe tell the president when a database goes down or a server mis-configuration?"
Mgr: "President understands internal outages, its just the whole 'cloud' thing he doesn't understand."
Me: "Um..then VP-Joe needs to explain it to him?"
Mgr: "The decision has already been made. Are you on board? Lets look at this move as a cost savings."
Me: "You mean the $10 a month? How much hardware will we need to support RabbitMQ?"
Mgr: "Yea, nobody probably thought of that."
Me: "I'm on board with whatever decision, but I'd like a little more than VP-Joe being afraid of the president."
Mgr: "I'm sure its not being afraid."
Me: "..."
Mgr: "OK, lets wait and see if VP-Joe forgets about this and moves on to something new."4 -
Them: "Could you send the password in an encrypted mail?"
Me: "Yea sure, what's your GPG public key?"
Them: "What's that? Can't you just encrypt it?"
Me: "Nvm, do you have Signal?"6 -
Story time. My first story ever on devRant.
To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)
My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!
My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!
I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!
At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!
Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.
Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...
Thanks for reading ...12 -
Teacher: Computer settings are stored in the ROM on the motherboard.
Me: *internally* Uhm, yea, sure... and I am the pope
Me: Sorry to interrupt you but how come the BIOS settings get reset when the CMOS battery is pulled out or dies if they are stored in ROM?
Teacher: ....
Me: *internally* yea, that's what I thought, you have no clue what you are even saying - the BIOS is stored in ROM or flash memory while the settings are stored in NVRAM also called CMOS memory...10 -
So I had another seizure last night... (yea not fun), it's been awhile and yesterday's, I have no recollection of what happened.
But today, what do I do? Make sure I can still read and code :)
Honestly, if I forget how to code, not sure what I would do.....
Oh and I just wrote this and somewhat related:
https://medium.com/@allanx2000/...
21 -
For a week+ I've been listening to a senior dev ("Bob") continually make fun of another not-quite-a-senior dev ("Tom") over a performance bug in his code. "If he did it right the first time...", "Tom refuses to write tests...that's his problem", "I would have wrote the code correctly ..." all kinds of passive-aggressive put downs. Bob then brags how without him helping Tom, the application would have been a failure (really building himself up).
Bob is out of town and Tom asked me a question about logging performance data in his code. I look and see Bob has done nothing..nothing at all to help Tom. Tom wrote his own JSON and XML parser (data is coming from two different sources) and all kinds of IO stream plumbing code.
I use Visual Studio's feature create classes from JSON/XML, used the XML Serialzier and Newtonsoft.Json to handling the conversion plumbing.
With several hundred of lines gone (down to one line each for the XML/JSON-> object), I wrote unit tests around the business transaction, integration test for the service and database access. Maybe couple of hours worth of work.
I'm 100% sure Bob knew Tom was going in a bad direction (maybe even pushing him that direction), just to swoop in and "save the day" in front of Tom's manager at some future point in time.
This morning's standup ..
Boss: "You're helping Tom since Bob is on vacation? What are you helping with?"
Me: "I refactored the JSON and XML data access, wrote initial unit and integration tests. Tom will have to verify, but I believe any performance problem will now be isolated to the database integration. The problem Bob was talking about on Monday is gone. I thought spending time helping Tom was better than making fun of him."
<couple seconds of silence>
Boss:"Yea...want to let you know, I really, really appreciate that."
Bob, put people first, everyone wins.11 -
I'm not even that old and I've had it with young cocksure, full of them self language/environment evangelists.
- "C# is always better than Java, don't bother learning it"
- "Lol python is all you need"
- "Omg windows/linux/mac sucks use this instead"
The list goes on really, at some point you have got to realize that while specialization is great, you have to learn a little bit of everything. It broadens you horizon a lot.
Yea, C# does some nifty stuff, but Java does too, learn both. Yea I'm sure Linux is better for hosting docker containers, but your clients are on mac or windows, learn to at least navigate and operate all three etc. Embrace knowledge from all the different tech camps it can only do you good and you will be so much more flexible and employable than your close minded peers :)
Hell even PHP has a lot to teach us (Even more than just to be a bad example, har har)9 -
I'm starting to fucking hate the word 'done'.
Scenario 1:
Boss: How's the spec coming along?
Manager: Oh, it's done.
Manager to me: Hey can you get it done?
Me: Why would you call it done? There's a days worth of work and it's only half done. Boss wasn't even rushing it yet.
Manager: Too late I've already committed it. I'm sure it's simple anyway. Just do it.
Scenario 2:
Manager: Hey is it done?
Noob dev: Yea it's done.
*Commits half assed incomplete sphagetti shit that breaks stuff*
Manager: Well done. Completed so quickly.
FUCK THIS SHIT.2 -
"So, what do you do in life?"
Me : I work on enterprise level mobile, web and server applications. Basically programming and database stuff...
"Sweet! So you can fix my PC right? It's getting slow I don't know why..."
Me : mmm well, ugh... yea kinda, I guess... sure. I could take a look 😑2 -
Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”
4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”4 -
After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.10 -
Um.. yea I've published a GDPR contact email on our website, for issues about our privacy policy. Not sure if you Chinese marketing fucks behind the GFW know what this regulation is about though. I'm not interested in your stupid moulds.
Perhaps that firewall of China could use some further tightening... 😒
4 -
Useless feature I've built?
Too many to mention. Here's #25.
Modified an existing "Are you sure..?" dialog pop-up (Yes/No buttons) to Yes/No/Cancel. Why? Managers claimed users were "accidentally" clicking 'Yes' when they should have clicked 'No' and causing all kinds of chaos, costing the company money, etc. Managers believed giving the user two chances instead of one would make it easier to avoid the problems they caused.
The meeting:
Me: "Users can click 'No', hit the 'Esc' key, or click the close 'X' button on the window, how will an extra button make it more foolproof?"
Mgr1: "It just will. Andy accidentally deleted inventory and when I asked him if an extra button would have saved them a days worth of re-counts, he said yes."
Mgr2: "Barb accidentally credited a customer $1,500. She promised me she clicked 'No', but the system credited the account anyway. An extra button would have saved us thousands of dollars!"
Me: "Um...these sound like training issues, not an extra button issue."
MyMgr: "PaperTrail, how hard is it to add an extra button?"
Dev1: "Oh yea, adding buttons is easy."
Dev2: "I can do it 5 minutes"
Dev3: "We'll save the company thousands and thousands of dollars!"
<lots of head-knodding and smiles>
MyMgr: "That settles it. PaperTrail, add the extra button!"
Users still screwed things up, but at least they couldn't blame it on not having an extra button.24 -
A dev team has been spending the past couple of weeks working on a 'generic rule engine' to validate a marketing process. The “Buy 5, get 10% off” kind of promotions.
The UI has all the great bits, drop-downs, various data lookups, etc etc..
What the dev is storing the database is the actual string representation FieldA=“Buy 5, get 10% off” that is “built” from the UI.
Might be OK, but now they want to apply that string to an actual order. Extract ‘5’, the word ‘Buy’ to apply to the purchase quantity rule, ‘10%’ and the word ‘off’ to subtract from the total.
Dev asked me:
Dev: “How can I use reflection to parse the string and determine what are integers, decimals, and percents?”
Me: “That sounds complicated. Why would you do that?”
Dev: “It’s only a string. Parsing it was easy. First we need to know how to extract numbers and be able to compare them.”
Me: “I’ve seen the data structures, wouldn’t it be easier to serialize the objects to JSON and store the string in the database? When you deserialize, you won’t have to parse or do any kind of reflection. You should try to keep the rule behavior as simple as possible. Developing your own tokenizer that relies on reflection and hoping the UI doesn’t change isn’t going to be reliable.”
Dev: “Tokens!...yea…tokens…that’s what we want. I’ll come up with a tokenizing algorithm that can utilize recursion and reflection to extract all the comparable data structures.”
Me: “Wow…uh…no, don’t do that. The UI already has to map the data, just make it easy on yourself and serialize that object. It’s like one line of code to serialize and deserialize.”
Dev: “I don’t know…sounds like magic. Using tokens seems like the more straightforward O-O approach. Thanks anyway.”
I probably getting too old to keep up with these kids, I have no idea what the frack he was talking about. Not sure if they are too smart or I’m too stupid/lazy. Either way, I keeping my name as far away from that project as possible.4 -
In a morning 'stand up'.. (SM = Scrum Master, PO = Product Owner)
SM: "Sprint item 42399 ... Did you work with Ken on getting the price service ready for deployment?"
Me: "No, I worked with Dave on the service bus queue changes. Its there in the notes"
SM: "Ha ha...no...right there...it reads working with Ken."
Me: "Those are your notes. You re-assigned the ticket to yourself yesterday."
SM: "Oh...um...you told me you were working with Ken when I asked."
Me: "I'm really sorry, I don't remember you asking or me saying anything about changes to the price service. All the documentation I have is for the service bus."
PO: "I'm so confused, Ken was pulled off another project to work on the Price service for you guys."
Me: "I never talked to Ken, I have no idea whats going on. Did you tell Ken he had to make changes to the Price service?"
SM: "No..I never...um...well....yea...this card was blocked and the service needed to be approved and deployed."
Me: "Ken's changes were for the purchasing service two weeks ago and already deployed. The card is already marked as Done"
<PO rubs his face>
PO: "Good god...do I still need to be here?"
Me:"Um...no? Sorry?"
<PO walks out>
Me: "What changes did you tell Ken to make?"
SM: "Whatever the card says...see the price service."
Me: "Scroll down...see..price related to the service bus, not price service."
SM:"Work with Dave on getting this card closed, OK?"
Good fracking grief. Your ego is so brittle and so eager to look like a boss.
I did my job, you fracking kiss ass. I'm fracking sure when you re-assigned the ticket you told my boss you "had to" because I was falling behind in the sprint.3 -
Fuck you Australian Fucking Internet!!
Yea sure i have fucking hours to sit here and fucking upload a 4GB repo to gitlab at 5kb/s!!! - yes the slow ass KILOBYTES, you overly expensive piece of horse shit.
fuck it, connects to phone and bam 1MB/s uploads, well theres goes a chunk of this month data :(7 -
<just got out of this meeting>
Mgr: “Can we log the messages coming from the services?”
Me: “Absolutely, but it could be a lot of network traffic and create a lot of noise. I’m not sure if our current logging infrastructure is the right fit for this.”
Senior Dev: “We could use Log4Net. That will take care of the logging.”
Mgr: “Log4Net?…Yea…I’ve heard of it…Great, make it happen.”
Me: “Um…Log4Net is just the client library, I’m talking about the back-end, where the data is logged. For this issue, we want to make sure the data we’re logging is as concise as possible. We don’t want to cause a bottleneck inside the service logging informational messages.”
Mgr: “Oh, no, absolutely not, but I don’t know the right answer, which is why I’ll let you two figure it out.”
Senior Dev: “Log4Net will take care of any threading issues we have with logging. It’ll work.”
Me: “Um..I’m sure…but we need to figure out what we need to log before we decide how we’re logging it.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, but if we log to SQL database, it will scale just fine.”
Mgr: “A SQL database? For logging? That seems excessive.”
Senior Dev: “No, not really. Log4Net takes care of all the details.”
Me: “That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to set up an entire sql database infrastructure to log data.”
Senior Dev: “Yea…probably right. We could use ElasticSearch or even Redis. Those are lightweight.”
Mgr: “Oh..yea…I’ve heard good things about Redis.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, and it runs on Linux and Linux is free.”
Mgr: “I like free, but I’m late for another meeting…you guys figure it out and let me know.”
<mgr leaves>
Me: “So..Linux…um…know anything about administrating Redis on Linux?”
Senior Dev: ”Oh no…not a clue.”
It was all I could do from doing physical harm to another human being.
I really hate people playing buzzword bingo with projects I’m responsible for.
Only good piece is he’s not changing any of the code.3 -
SeniorDev: “OMFG..MalwareBytes is taking up almost 50% of my CPU!”
Me: “Didn’t you have a virus on your machine couple of days ago?”
SeniorDev: “Uh..yea..but it was cleaned up.”
Me: “Your OS might have been compromised. If your antivirus is still busy doing something, then it may be time to start over with a fresh re-install.”
SeniorDev: “No, that’s not it. This is just BS our Network admins don’t want to fix because I’m not a VP”
Me: “I’m pretty sure they don’t care.”
-in as much of a ‘I’m kidding’ tone as I could -
Me: “They would care more if you stopped going to inappropriate web sites on the company computer.”
SeniorDev: “I never go to those sites. It was a link to a charity web site my wife sent me. You know how those sites are. They are built by college kids, so they have no security and was hijacked. That’s how I got the virus.”
Me: “You actually said that to Jim and he believed it?”
SeniorDev: “Well ...yea because….oh …–bleep- you.”
"Jim" sits about 50 feet away, popped his head over the cube wall and smiled. It was awesome. -
Eclipse, you lousy shit bitch of an ass hole - yeah I went there.
So I spent several hours today trying to get eclipse to:
1) just fucking launch without erroring out and crashing
2) actually work with a reasonable dark theme. (Yea right)
But no you hunk of shit, both of these seems nearly impossible for you. And just when I get you to work, the stupid fucking lack of syntax highlighting is just dreadful as fuck. If I didn’t have to use it for Salesforce development I sure as hell wouldn’t. -
That moment when you are just testing a web framework, you type some random text, open in browser, and Google asks whether it could translate it. Yea sure... go ahead! 😛
5 -
So my teacher wanted to play a movie cos the class got good test results, and so she asked me how to play a movie on her laptop and get it on the TV and this is how it went down...
Teacher: Sukhi, do you think you could help me.
Me: Yea sure, what do you need help with
Teacher: So I want to play a movie tomorrow but I don't know how to get it up on the TV
Me: Oh its easy just get a HDMI cable and plug your laptop into it.
Teacher: Oh yea I have like 6 of those. Ok then see ya tomorrow.
*The next day*
Teacher: Hey Sukhi, heres the HDMI cable. *Pulls out a AUX cord*
Me: *laughing and crying at the same time*2 -
I think I might change my middle name to "I told you so"
Couple of weeks ago I proposed integrating a daily process job into an existing WPF application (details of what+why would be too long to explain) and the manager suggested I make the changes
Me: "I can do it, but Jay has the most experience with that application. I don't have his WPF skills"
Mgr: "How hard can WPF be? If it uses the MVVM pattern, it should be a snap."
Me: "Its nearly an 8 year old WPF project with several chefs in that kitchen. I pretty sure I could figure it out, but that is a difference between 2 weeks and 2 days. Integration is pretty straight forward, Jay could probably do it in a day."
DevA: "WPF is easy. MVVM makes it even easier. I worked on the shipping app."
Me: "That's was a brand new, single page app, but yea, it should be easy."
DevB: "WPF has been around a long time and the tools have really matured. I don't understand what is so difficult."
Me: "I didn't say anything would be difficult, I know with that application, there is going to be complexity we need to figure out."
DevB: "It uses the MVVM, so all we need is the user control, a view model, controller, and its done."
DevA: "Sounds easy to me."
Mgr: "If you need more time to work on the vendor project, I'll have DevB work on the integration."
<yesterday>
Me: "How is the integration going?"
DevB: "This app is a mess. I have no idea how they got the control collections to work. If I hard-code everything, I can get it to work. This dynamic stuff is so confusing. Then there is the styling. Its uses dark mode, but no matter what I do, my controls show up in light mode."
Me: "The app uses Prism, so the control configuration is in, or around, the startup code."
DevB: "That makes sense. Will it fix the styling too?"
Me: "I have no idea. When I looked at it, some controls loaded the styles from the main resource, other's have it hard-coded. Different chefs in the kitchen, I guess. How far have you got?"
DevB: "I've created invoice button. That is as far as I got"
Me: "I'm finished with the vendor project and I'll be wrapping up the documentation today. I can try to help next week."
DevB: "Thanks. I think we might have to get Jay to help if we can't figure this out."
Me: "Good idea"
Two weeks and only a button. A button? I miss Delphi.3 -
Working on a new project at work; all_of_a_sudden boss goes:
"A client needs the current software to do this thing, can u do it"
Me: "Yea, sure"
One week later: "Yea, Im not feeling this, can we change this, that, and--what the heck is that?"
Me: "😑 aaaaa the exact changes u wanted"
Boss:"Well, lets change (A list of stuff and new things added)
Me: Sigh....4 -
Wtf is the point of closing a project submission at a specific time. Yea sure let me know it’s late but if I want to post the file late let me. I was 8 seconds late to post a file for a project and it locked me out. Sure they say no late work but this is a stupid policy. Also, why is it due at 4am? No body is looking at these at 4am! Just make it due at 6 or 8am or something. Gaaa18
-
Another Developer: bro, shit hit the fan. The x web service is throwing some error. Can you take a look please. I want to go home. I'm tired.
Me: Yea sure bro no worries.
Another Developer: I go pee, after that I will delegate the ticket to you.
(Another Developer goes to the washroom)
Me: (04:59 PM) Oh time to pack-up and get the fuck out of here
Me: (05:08 PM) Receive a message on Viber from Another Developer. It reads "Fuck you, I'm going to rub my balls on your desk"3 -
Me: Why are we spending time building reports for Support? AFAIK they never read or use them.
Boss: Seems they expect you to do it.
Me: Then what exactly are they supposed to be doing? All the issues seem to just escalate back to us.... We should just make sure issues never get into PROD
Boss: I agree, they're always firefighting... we gave them more funding so eventually they should catch up **Me: I highly doubt it, you should just stop hiring monkeys** esp. if we prevent PROD issues.
Me: Yea... we should prevent production issues because someone always has to pay off the (technical) debt and interest rates in PROD are very high6 -
Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."
DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.2 -
Impossible deadline experience?
A few, but this one is more recent (and not mine, yet)
Company has plans to build a x hundred thousand square feet facility (x = 300, 500, 800 depending on the day and the VP telling the story)
1. Land is purchased, but no infrastructure exists (its in a somewhat rural area, no water or sewage capable of supporting such a large facility)
2. No direct architectural plans (just a few random ideas about layout, floor plans, parking etc)
3. Already having software dev meetings in attempt to 'fix' all the current logistical software issues we have in the current warehouse and not knowing any of the details of the new facility.
One morning in our stand-up, the mgr says
Mgr: "Plans for the new warehouse are moving along. We hope to be in the new building by September."
Me: "September of 2022?"
<very puzzled look>
Mgr: "Um, no. Next year, 2021"
Me: "That's not going to happen."
Mgr: "I was just in a meeting with VP-Jack yesterday. He said everything is on schedule."
Me: "On schedule for what?"
<I lay out some of the known roadblocks from above, and new ones like the political mess we will very likely get into when the local zoning big shots get involved>
Mgr: "Oh, yea, those could be problems."
Me: "Swiiiiishhhhh"
Mgr: "What's that?"
Me: "That's the sound of a September 2021 date flying by."
Mgr: "Funny. Guess what? We've been tasked with designing the security system. Overhead RFID readers, tracking, badge scans, etc. Normally Dan's team takes care of facility security, but they are going to be busy for a few weeks for an audit. Better start reaching out to RFID vendors for quotes. Have a proposal ready in a couple of weeks."
Me: "Sure, why not."1 -
Me: "can you please send my credentials for the database?"
Hosting provider: "Yea sure... We will set it up on our servers in no time"
*5 mins later: provider sends mail to me*
Me: *looks at mail*
Also me: *NOTHING TO DO HERE*
Congrats to jweiland.net for not being able to support their customers.
2 -
"We need to have a meeting to clarify your role"
My head: Just give me a raise and then leave me alone
My mouth: Yea, sure. When works for you
Context:
My job is a little confusing.
My title on paper is support technician and I'm on the DevOps team but I have my own project to automate health checks. So most the accurate title for me would actually be Automation Developer Attached To [department name] DevOps1 -
PM: "Can you take a look at this app and see if you can find why it's producing errors and fix it"
Me: "Yea sure, can I see the documentation so I might be able to understand the system and why it's doing that?"
PM: "There's no documentation" ... "Also it was cowboy coded by an intern" -
Friend: can you take a look at my code, there’s this bug that I’m having trouble with.
Me: yea sure.
Friend shows me IntelliJ with the default white theme...
Me: WTF man, my eyes are burning.
Never looking at his code again. At least until he changes to a dark theme.3 -
Hey devRant! It's been a long time, but I'm baaack! I know you missed me, but my life has been so eventful, and difficult, and so I am here for sympathy and recognition of my status among my fellow devRant community, because like, I'm basically a legend now, I'm sure you've all heard of me!
Did I mention I'm back!? I know right, it's mad, it's like the place hasn't been the same without me. What has changed? Man, I remember when devRant was a toddler colouring in my walls with crayon, man those were the days...
Oh, have any of you seen @OtherLongtimeUser about, are they still alive? Come on guy, we were like best buddies, and your existence validates my sense of self-worth in relation to my status on this here community. You about?
Anyway, life's been hard, I'm sure you're all desperate to hear about it... Looking forward to you asking me about it in the comments so that I can skirt around the answer for you whilst still trying to extract the maximum amount of sympathy. But yea, just tell me you've missed me, that'd be fantastic.
Also, I bet the banter on here isn't like it used to be. All you n00bs missed so much. But hey, did I mention, I'm baaaaack!? ✌4 -
I’m really struggling to see WHY IN THE HELL it was necessary to delete my FUCKING NETWORK PROFILES to update this FRUIT FUCKED ALUMINUM SHIT BOX!
How did they test this and be like, oh, yea, you can’t connect automatically to ANY of the WiFi networks you have saved, because we deleted all the network profiles. That is acceptable, it won’t cause anyone any real problems.
Sure you need to update some shit. But why are you even touching that part of the disk? Damn you filthy lying fruit fuckers! -
A Rant that took my attention on MacRhumors forum.
.
I pre-calculated projected actual overall cost of owning my i5/5/256 Haswell Air, which I got for $1500.
After calculations, this machine would cost me about $3000 for 3 years of use.
(Apple Care, MS Office Business, Parallels, Thunderbolt adapter to HDMI, Case... and so on).
Yea... A lot of people think it's all about the laptop with Apple. nah... not at all. There's a reason Apple is gradually dropping the price of their laptops.
They are slowly moving to a razor and blade business model... which basically is exactly what it sounds like - you buy the razor which isn't too expensive, but you've got no choice but to buy expensive additional blades.
I doubt Apple is making much money from laptop sales alone... well definitely not as much as they were making 5 years or so ago (remember the original air was about $1800 for base model, and if i remember correctly - $1000 additional dollars to upgrade to 64GB SSD from the base HDD.
Yes, ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR 64GB SSD!
Well, anyways, the point is that Apple no longer makes them BIG bucks from the laptop alone, but they still make good profits from upgrades. $300 to go to 512GB SSD from 256, $100 for 4GB extra ram, and $150 for a small bump in processor. They make good profits from these as well.
But that's not where they make mo money. It's once you buy the Macbook, they've got you trapped in their walled garden for life. Every single apple accessory is ridiculously overpriced (compared to market standards of similar-same products).
And Apple makes their own cables and ports. So you have to buy exclusively for Apple products. Every now and then they will change even their own ports and cables, so you have to buy more.
Software is exclusive. You have no choice but to buy what apple offers... or run windows/linux on your Mac.
This is a douche level move comparable to say Mircrosoft kept changing the usb port every 2-3 years, and have exclusive rights to sell the devices that plug in.
No, instead, Intel-Microsoft and them guys make ports and cables as universal as possible.
Can you imagine if USB3.0 was thinner and not backwards compatible with usb2.0 devices?
Well, if it belonged to Apple that's how it would be.
This is why I held out so long before buying an apple laptop. Sure, I had the ipod classic, ipod touch, and more recently iPad Retina... but never a laptop.
I was always against apple.
But I factored in the pros and cons, and I realized I needed to go OS X. I've been fudged by one virus or another during my years of Windows usage. Trojans, spywares. meh.
I needed a top-notch device that I can carry with me around the world and use for any task which is work related. I figured $3000 was a fair price to pay for it.
No, not $1500... but $3000. Also I 'm dead happy I don't have to worry about heat issues anymore. This is a masterpiece. $3000 for 3 years equals $1000 a year, fair price to pay for security, comfort, and most importantly - reliability. (of course awesome battery is superawesome).
Okay I'm going to stop ranting. I just wish people factored in additional costs from owning an a mac. Expenses don't end when you bring the machine home.
I'm not even going to mention how they utilize technology-push to get you to buy a Thunderbolt display, or now with the new Air - to get a time capsule (AC compatible).
It's all about the blades, with Apple. And once you go Mac, you likely won't go back... hence all the student discounts and benefits. They're baiting you to be a Mac user for life!
Apple Marketing is the ultimate.
source: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...3 -
During one of our 'pop-up' meetings last week.
Ralph: "The test code the developers are checking in is a mess. They don't know what they are doing."
ex.
var foo = SomeLibrary.GetFoo();
Assert.IsNotNull(foo);
Fred: "Ha ha..someone should talk to HR about our hiring practices. These people are literally driving the company backwards."
Me: "I think unit testing is complete waste of time."
- You could almost see the truck hit the wall and splatter watermelon everwhere..took Ralph and Fred a couple of seconds to respond
Fred: "Uh..unit testing is industry best practice. There is scientific evidence that prove testing reduces bugs and increases code quality"
Ralph: "Over 90% of our deployments are rolled back because of bugs. Unit testing will eliminate that."
Me: "Sorry, I disagree."
- Stepping on kittens wouldn't have gotten a worse look from Fred and Ralph
Fred: 'Pretty sure if you ask any professional developer, they'll tell you unit testing and code coverage reduces bugs.'
Me: "I'm not asking anyone else, I'm asking you. Find one failed deployment, just one, over the past 6 months that unit testing or code coverage would have prevented."
- good 3 seconds of awkward silence.
Ralph: "Well, those rollbacks are all mostly due to server mis-configurations. That's not a fair comparison."
Me: "I'm using your words. Unit tests reduces bugs and lack of good tests is the direct reason why we have so many failed deployments"
Boss: "Yea, Ralph...you and Fred kinda said that."
Fred: "No...we need to write good tests. Not this mess."
Me: "Like I said, show me one test you've written that would have prevented a rollback. Just one."
Ralph: "So, what? We do nothing?"
Me: "No, we have to stop worshiping this made up 80% code coverage idol. If not, developers are going to keep writing useless test code just to meet some percent. If we wrote device drivers or frameworks for other developers maybe, but we write CRUD apps. We execute a stored procedure or call a service. This 80% rule doesn't fit for code we write."
Fred: "If the developers took their head out of their ass.."
Me: "Hey!..uh..no, they are doing exactly what they are being told. Meet the 80% requirement, even if doesn't make sense."
Ralph: "Nobody told them to write *that* code."
Boss: "My gosh, what have you and Fred been complaining about for the past hour?"
- Ralph looks at his monitor and brilliantly changes the subject
Ralph: "Oh my f-king god...Trump said something stupid again ..."
At that point I put my headphones on went back to what I was doing. I'm pretty sure Fred and Ralph spent the rest of the day messaging back-n-forth, making fun of me or some random code I wrote 3 years ago (lots of typing and giggling). How can highly educated grown men (one has a masters in CS) get so petty and insecure?7 -
Notice how the Apple code samples have moved from the very well designed Objective C to a mature Swift... (sorry, typo, manure Swift) Swift 1.0, wait 2.0, no hold on 3.0, oh yea 4.0. It's a moving target for their developers with code samples all over the place...
Once Swift stabilizes, sure, ok, force everyone and everything to change (seriously?).
Apple, why the FUCK do you think we want to deal with your beta crap forced down our throat? Its bad enough the language is an inconsistent illogical mess but having to come along with you for the 'we-don't-have-a-clue-what-we-are-doing' ride is utter bullshit. Leave the GOD DAMN Objective C samples up for crying out loud.6 -
2 hour meeting to brainstorm ideas to improve our system health monitoring (logging, alerting, monitoring, and metrics)
Never got past the alerting part. Piss poor excuses for human being managers kept 'blaming' our logging infrastructure for allowing them to log exceptions as 'Warnings', purposely by-passing the alerting system.
Then the d-head tried to 'educate' everyone the difference between error and exception …frack-wad…the difference isn't philosophical…shut up.
The B manager kept referring to our old logging system (like we stopped using it 5 years ago) and if it were written correctly, the legacy code would be easier to migrate. Fracking lying B….shut the frack up.
The fracking idiots then wanted to add direct-bypass of the alerting system (I purposely made the code to bypass alerting painful to write)
Mgr1: "The only way this will work is if you, by default, allow errors to bypass the alerting system. When all of our code is migrated, we'll change a config or something to enable alerting. That shouldn't be too hard."
Me: "Not going to happen. I made by-passing the alert system painful on purpose. If I make it easy, you'll never go back and change code."
Mgr2: "Oh, yes we will. Just mark that method as obsolete. That way, it will force us to fix the code."
Me: "The by-pass method is already obsolete and the teams are already ignoring the build warnings."
Mgr1: "No, that is not correct. We have a process to fix all build warnings related to obsolete methods."
Mgr2: "Yes. It won't be like the old system. We just never had time to go back and fix that code."
Me: "The method has been obsolete for almost a year. If your teams haven't fixed their code by now, it's not going to be fixed."
Mgr1: "You're expecting everything to be changed in one day. Our code base is way too big and there are too many changes to make. All we are asking for is a simple change that will give us the time we need to make the system better. We all want to make the system better…right?"
Me: "We made the changes to the core system over two years ago, and we had this same conversation, remember? If your team hasn't made any changes by now, they aren't going to. The only way they will change code to the new standard is if we make the old way painful. Sorry, that's the truth."
Mgr2: "Why did we make changes to the logging system? Why weren't any of us involved? If there were going to be all these changes, our team should have been part of the process."
Me: "You were and declined every meeting and every attempt to include your area. Considering the massive amount of infrastructure changes there was zero code changes required by your team. The new system simply worked. You can't take advantage of the new features which is why we're here today. I'm here to offer my help in any way I can with the transition."
Mgr1: "The new logging doesn't support logging of the different web page areas. Until you can make that change, we can't begin changing our code."
Me: "Logging properties is just a name+value pair dictionary. All you need to do is standardize on a name and how you add it to the collection."
Mgr2: "So, it's not a standard field? How difficult would it be to change the core assembly? This has to be standard across all our areas and shouldn't be up to the developers to type in anything they want."
- Frack wads smile and nod to each other like fracking chickens in a feeding frenzy
Me: "It can, but what will you call this property? What controls its value?"
- The look I got from both the d-bags I could tell a blood vessel popped.
Mgr1: "Oh…um….I don't know…Area? Yea … Area."
Mgr2: "Um…that's not specific enough. How about Page?"
Mgr1: "Well, pages can cross different areas, and areas cross different pages…what do you think?"
Me: "Don't know, don't care. It's up to you. I just need a name."
Mgr2: "Modules! Our MVC framework is broken up in Modules."
DevMgr: "We already have a field for Module. It's how we're segmenting the different business processes"
Mgr1: "Doesn't matter, we'll come up with a name later. Until then, we won't make any changes until there is a name."
DevMgr: "So what did we accomplish?"
Me: "That we need to review the web's logging and alerting process and make sure we're capturing errors being hidden as warnings."
Mgr1: "Nooo….we didn't accomplish anything. This meeting had no agenda and no purpose. We should have been included in the logging process changes from day one."
Mgr2: "I agree, I'm not sure why we're here"
Me: "This was a brainstorming meeting as listed in the agenda. We've accomplished 2 of the 4 items. I think we've established your commitment to making the system better. Thank you all for coming."
- Mgr1 and 2 left without looking at me or saying a word.1 -
Yea sure, I'd like to refactor your fucking 1000 loc spagetti code "module" with no documentation at all...3
-
Developer just emailed our team a complaint that our logging assembly was resulting in their poor test coverage and they sent a change request to give them the ability to mock the underlying log provider (ex. from the event log to ‘something else’).
Looked at their tests, and they are testing whether or not the .Log was executed (on an exception, if the .Log method was not executed, the test failed), which seemed a bit worthless because we’ve already got coverage in our unit tests.
We had a meeting to discuss the issue.
Me: “I’m OK with changing the logging code if it’s necessary, but I want to understand why.”
DevA: “Logging errors is crucial to the database transaction. If someone removes the logging, the tests should fail.”
Me: “If someone removes the error logging on purpose, then they likely have an agenda and will remove the test validation too. It wouldn’t be an accident.”
DevA: “That’s not my problem. They will have to deal with HR.”
Me: “We purposely prevented someone from intercepting the logging just for that purpose. Your test code already covers the business rule, testing the logging seems out of place. That would like writing a test to make sure the System.IO.File.ReadAllText actually reads all the text from a file. You kinda assume a few smart Microsoft engineers already wrote tests for that.”
DevA: “Yea, I guess that would be silly.”
Got cc’ed an email a little bit ago from DevA to his boss..
“We’re not going to be able to change logging assembly. This may have some impact on our overall test coverage as those lines of code will not get testing coverage. You will have to let the DevMgr know we will not meet our test coverage goals.”
WTF!1 -
Me: *opens devTools*
Firefox: yea bro lemme just ..uh.. hmm yeah so this is the css for the element, see?
Me: Thanks.
Me:
Me: this makes no sense, why would I ever do that?
Firefox: also you can't have width on an anchor tag. I can't put that rule into effect
Me: I didn't put any width on your inline element, you sure about that?
Firefox: yea try using display: inline-block
Me: No. I'll just delete that. *checks file*
Me: Maybe that line is wrong because IT DOES NOT FUCKING EXIST!
What is this shit? I just restarted you! What else do you need, a reinstall? Drink too much over the holidays?
It's like the css editor has become a shallow tray with rules on it, and as soon as you bump it a little everything spills over and then Firefox just thinks oops, I've got this font-size: 200% lying around, lemme stick this into the hr tag which makes sense because THERE CAN'T BE ANY TEXT IN IT.
9 -
The mechanical team once told me, hey I want this feature on the software - sure it will take approx 1 week. Yea I know, but I want it without any bugs.
WTF?? They sure got some f words from me. 😅1 -
I got enough prior warning about windows updates from this lovely group. So I clicked on restart and update and left for work.
Came home after a few hours and logged in.
Windows: Restart and update (exclamation icon).
Me: Yea sure, gimme a sec. *Proceeds to download Linux* -
Some client coming back to me claiming some page "suddenly" changed style and fucked stuff up.
Yea, stuff like that totally happens. I'm like 90% sure someone messed with the styling... -
Ok, @jestdotty , today, i give up on china.
I've been messaging with a rep who is taking the time to keep editing a contract... Im pretty sure she was genuinely trying...
As typing this we finally got to a 'correct enough' contract... so I could click the damn pay button.
Over the past 7 hrs.. at 3 back and forth exchabges and modifications at each issue:
1. Used previous PI from the dude i gave up on... so had a qty at 12 when only 11 exist a colour wrong for a crate of items, and listed the dude i refused to sign a contract under listed as the rep.
2. Now the item subtotals were off... just a few pennies or so... assumed she left the usd prices but calculated with ¥... didn't want alibaba to reject in a day so i checked if it was noted anywhere... Oh boy was it... VERY clearly, all caps, bold in the body of the total row... that the total was, exactly, 11680 (spelled out ofc) RMB aka ¥ chinese yen. I told her this, she sends me a cropped shot of the $ numeric total field... so i sent her the giant all caps bolded line, the one thatd typically be considered final say in most international courts... no clue where that value came from, it had zero relation to any actual values... and i was as curious as when chatGPT creates totally new, unique, lyrics for satirical german songs... i really tried.
3. Wrong incoterms (trade terms... abbreviated to a few letters... had it that I'd be physically going to the tbd port to accept/clear customs... no)
4. Technically it was accurate (well a few strange subtotals since she used ¥ half the time... told her it was fine as long as it had the company name on the label (gave 3 full examples to use whichever)
I get the contract ...shipping...
"To: Sara"
Then the right address (seriously wtf)
5. I point this out and carefully explain in mostly just examples and "the us government doesn't like anything being sent to just a first name, there's no legal way to sign for acceptance"
6. She gets stressed enough to tell me she doesn't have time to keep editing (since this horrid pile of poor formatting was just thrown at her a day ago... i dont point out the ridiculous irony)
7. Imo, the highlight of my night/morning... in her stress she promises me it'll ship right... sooo many issues there...
Even if it was delivered/allowed a signature for "sara" for 7ish large boxes just off a sea freight from china to a residence in the middle of a corn field (which tbh would be hysterical)...the IRS would have a valid reason to audit me... theyve done it w/o valid reasons several times, since I was 18 doing international trade and a contractual employee of a large gambling company, quarterly reporting, and ofc declaring more than my taxes in donating melted glass and crane game prizes...yea, they hate me and always do all that work to find the same thing... i underdeclare charity by 10%.
The entire concept of getting USA mail, even when pristine and you know logistics agents in every major company and port or distribution center, to properly deliver anything... ROFLOL ... and im already on some 'open and check everything' list with customs for a hysterical misconception they made years ago... cant/shouldn't get into detail publicly... but it was caused because 2 packages from different cities in China were both going to my address/through customs at the same time... package 1, 75 of those cheap af ball-pit hollow plastic balls for a 2yr old's bday(very delayed) package 2. 75 rechargeable batteries (the kind in power banks) 9600mah.
8. Told her to change "sara" to company name... glad it's registered to this address still.
It took me under 5min to type this... had to get the WTF out.
Dear AliBaba, please give an option to allow buyers to create the supply side contract for review, not just req modification... please?2 -
everytime when i meet with my friends and they ask me if what course i'm currently taking and of course i'm gonna answer back "IT"
(~) what i say in my mind
statements that will suddenly pop into conversation
-"can you (reformat, fix, update, etc.) my pc/laptop"
~.......
-"wow smart"
~oh stahp it, youuu
-"don't forget to treat us when you graduate, i heard jobs in your field have great salaries"
~gezzus i'm still a student and i am struggling, then you want me to treat you.
-"hey man, can you build me a website (for free)"
~yea dude, let me ask genie to snap that wish of yours
-"oh so you must be good with computers?"
~yea i treat them well, i tell them bedtime stories and feed them with milk and cookies
-"nice....."
~the long silence makes this even more awkward
-"hey man, i code and design too, maybe we can work together"
~for sure
-"how many coffee?"
~i truly found my mate.
these are some of the statements i've encountered, what's yours? -
College has been rough, especially when I've been having my hand held through 12 years. More stuff to learn, to do; and my life hasn't been great.
It's official that I'm following Chemical Engineering, specifically Food Engineering major (or whatever the heck it's called). I still code but I'm not sure if I'm gonna get to the level of the properly-trained folks. Heck I don't even know DFS and BFS and they seem important.
So yea, I'm not dead, just on life support. What did I miss on dR since July guys?1 -
Sticking to the man... or facebook sorta.
Using Selenium so I can get all the group feeds in Chronological order rather than Recent Activity... Why the fuck is there still no way to set the default.
Now that I think about the better way is to create a Service app that checks for updates and loads them into a DB and the Client app that just reads from DB. So Updates come from Selenium/Chrome in the backgeround thread while UI doesnt need to lag/wait...
fck... all those Async code for nothing.... (yea i m thinking while i mwriting this... an epihpany moment...)
One thing and the original question is, is there an existing Facebook scraper. OpenGraph doesnt work for Group posts or public events which is what i want the feeds for....
The problem though the AJAX calls for more posts when you scroll down. I am not sure in Selenium how to make the Driver wait for new content in the DOM... rather than just sleeping the Thread for X seconds and checking after.4
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