All hail database backups.

Today my worst development related nightmare happened, I managed to screw a production database at work.

Thankfully we had a backup from 2 hours ago, I’ve never been so thankful to scheduled backups.

Take it from me, do backup your databases even if it’s annoying to do.

Piece and merry Christmas ✌️

Deadlines tomorrow and as per company policies admin rights on our PCs are getting reset every now and then. Today is the third time I ask the IT support for a new admin password, and it’s the third time in a row they give me the wrong password. I cannot debug the apps I’m working on without admin rights.

Getting a little tense over here...

I know this is needed for extra quality but god do I hate having to validate everything I do by so many coworkers before actually being able to do something else. It would be fine if I could get another task while waiting for that validation but nooo, I have to wait until they’re done “validating” to actually move on.

It really feels like I’m losing so much time waiting for people...

So I've created this account specifically for this rant. I usually just browse anonymously.

I've recently been hired in a big company that is one of the biggest Microsoft users in the world and my essentially revolves on making it easier for our collaborators to work with SharePoint (and other ms software)

Never in my life have I hit that much of a roadblock. So for the past week I've been trying to integrate what Ms calls webparts. And to modify the default webparts Ms provides you need to their properties (or Metadata). Except here's the big problem these are NOT documented anywhere (unless I failed to find it, if you do know where it is documented please HMU), so I've found myself trying to reverse engineer the js scripts that are served with SharePoint to figure out what the webpart properties are called and what type of data they are! I've been going through endless github repos using the CSOM nuget package (it's the library everyone uses to interact with SharePoint) and I finally found out about this other library called PnP which is a wrapper around CSOM that makes it easier to use. That wrapper has a way for me to load existing page and look at the properties of existing webparts. So here I thought it was the end of my suffering and I could finally get an idea of what it should be. Turns out this method doesn't work because one of the dependencies it has has had breaking changes and they still updated it even though it breaks their code! So for the past two days I've been trying random combinations of key values with different data types and json serialization methods.

Oh and yeah I've also looked at all the http calls via the chrome network tab, the metadata is not served as an individual file but is computed by Ms servers when they're serving you their html files.

So uh yeah run from CSOM if you can..