Ffs, spent all day fixing jests tests and couldn’t resolve an error. Hours of googling turns out it, I forgot to put event.preventDefault() on a blank href.

Mondays….

I leave my job on Friday and the laptop for my new job to turns up. Well hello there.

Finally handed in my resignation. It’s a lengthy one, so that’s going to sting on Monday haha.

However, I signed a new contract Friday, better pay, better benefits, pension etc.

Onwards and upwards, feels good.

I was going to write a rant but it would exceed the limit, soooo Christ today has been awful. The absolute disrespect I’ve been shown by management today is absolutely shocking.

So the saga continues…

If you’ve read my previous posts welcome if not please read for some context.

So I got into a call with my line manager today after the intro, without me even bringing it up he goes “so this snr position, we’re hiring this overseas…” - erm right so that’s been shot down, amazing call so far hopes of a promotion dashed with the first five minutes even though I’ve been noted as snr “material”.

Secondly onto the upgrade. I mention that I don’t see any of it listed in Aha! in 2022, so I ask why given that we all know it’s needed asap. My manager goes, “oh yeah that’s been pushed to 2023, we also looking to assemble a team together to do it” - first off why in the world was it pushed back so far and two I already got given the task to upgrade the system by my previous manager as he’ll know that it will get done right, and my new manager has said everything agreed before would stay.

So, why the hell are you looking to assemble a team when I was put in charge of the upgrade and two I was training people up while they helped work on it too.

This job. Honestly it’s turning into a nightmare.

To say I’m frustrated is an understatement.

Oh let the rant time begin…

So previous post I mentioned about this dev who has resigned and how I was going to see about a Snr. position.

Management is now scrambling to figure out what to do as this dev managed all the migration to AWS etc, I know servers but haven’t got too much familiarity with AWS.

Anyways so I finally get a 1:1 with my new line manager. I ask about the position and he says they don’t know what there going to do yet. Hire a new dev in India to offset and with the same knowledge even though the guy leaving is in the U.K. Bad idea as the servers are in the U.K. so if we get downtime or the server crashes we have no one in the U.K. to reset or access to the servers. India are very cagey who gets access which is annoying to say the least even though us (three devs) in the U.K. are the principal engineering team so there looking at all options.

Anyways we have a back and fourth, we discuss some of the plans for the app, some of which we are nowhere near ready to even conceptualise as the app in its current state sucks, (ruby 2.2.6 and rails 5 but not really). Needs major refactoring and rewrite, one thing they want to do is multi tendency which again given the state is laughable.

So, as my manager is speaking my head is screaming being like “this is just going to be a massive disaster”. Then we go onto that he’s seeing what everyone’s strengths are etc. And then we get onto the upgrade and that he wants me to work on it.

Yes.. the upgrade I’ve been trying to do for the past 4+ months but I keep getting told to stop and getting pushed backed.

I’ve been told we have devOps looking into restructuring the app, not possible as how the app is written, we have India trying to multi tenant again disaster incoming as they’ll end up rushing it. Legal are going to have a field day. Every time I say the issues are the fundamentals with the app, here’s how we can sort it. In one ear out the other basically there patching the ship even though it’s still leaking.

I have so many ideas, and things I can do to improve the app and get it back to not only working order, fix the performance issues, data issues and everything else. Brick wall.

So rants ensue where I basically say I would love to do the upgrade but management gives me no time in the roadmap (we have no say in planning). At this point I’m just speaking to a brick wall.

After the meeting I have a chat with the BAs, we all have the same issues so honestly it sucks we end up ranting to each other for an hour.

I’m being under-utilised, being told do this, do that even though I’ve had two stabs but told to stop and pushed back, I know what benefits I can bring to the app with a refactoring, ideas and how to properly lead the team because honestly we’re working on an old legacy app, and management are clueless and there priorities are all wrong, the company is getting frustrated and it’s a sinking ship. They would rather patch issues without solving them and everything I say goes in one ear and out the other.

Frustrating is not the word.

So, I guess this is some good news...

I'm currently on annual leave, speaking to few colleagues and one of them mentioned that the Snr. dev mentioned in my previous posts has handed in his notice.

We also have a new line manager, so hopefully I'll actually be able to sort out technical debt, implement the changes I want to implement without being blocked off or PRs closed without notice.

So I guess this is a win, also means a new Snr. dev position has opened up so you bet I'm gunning for it when I get back.

So, I’ve been given the task of sorting the security out in an application plugging the holes and whatnot as to be honest it’s shocking haha. It doesn’t help that we automate security audits but that’s a different rant for another day.

We’re using devise for authentication (rails standard, ♥️ devise), we have no password resets through the login page, it has to be manually reset by ringing support, why who knows, even though it’s built into the gem and we allow the user to login using an username instead of an email because for whatever reason someone thought it was a bright idea to not have the email field mandatory.

So I hop onto a call with the BAs, basically I go that we need to implement password resets into the login page so the user can do it themselves and also to cut down support calls a ticket is already in place for it. So I go through the standardised workflow for resetting a password. My manager goes.

“I don’t think this will be very secure”

Wait.. what. Have you never reset a password before? It’s following the same protocol as every other app.

We go back and fourth and I said I’ll get it checked with security just to keep him happy.

The issue mainly is well we can’t implement password resets due to 100s of users not having an email on there account.. 🙃 so before we push this change we need to try and notice all users to set a unique email.

Updated the tickets. All dandy.

Looking at the PRs to see what security things have been done if any and turns out one of the devs in India has just written a migration to add the same default email to every user that doesn’t have an email present and yep it got merged. So I go revert the change but talk about taking a “we don’t care about security approach”.

Eventually we want to have the user reset their passwords and login using their email and someone goes a head and does that. Not to mention the security risk.

Jesus Christ I wonder why I bother sometimes.

So I’m primarily RoR for work and stuff, however, tried Laravel today for the first time in a while and damn I forgot how it actually makes PHP pleasant haha with Laravel awesomeness.

Built a blog application with tailwindcss in a few hours no scaffolds. Pretty neat.

Really Glassdoor, you are locking off access just because I haven't reviewed anything for a while, what the hell haha.

Tried moving over to Fedora only to notice the goXLR audio interface doesn’t work on Linux tried some unofficial drivers but you need to run those in the vm or whatever to get it to work.

So question, does anyone know of any audio interfaces similar for Linux with some sound channel rockers potentially.

In the ever-growing saga of the upgrade, here is another one.

In the daily scrum meeting, I chat about the upgrade, standard stuff.

The other dev pipes up - "Oh we had a meeting about that this morning and were going with a different approach"

Me - "wait, we're doing what now? You do know I've spent a month so far just on this upgrade?*

*silence*

Anyways I continue working on the upgrade, few meetings while I try to find out what's going on.

Spoken to BA, my line manager and the other dev didn't get much basically saying yeah this is how we're handing it now.

Well it turns out after writing a big long message to the other dev, he decided *yesterday* in a manager meeting (he's kind of a manager but not really) to propose a new approach and they all just leapt at the chance even though it's going to take way longer (2 years estimate) to patch up the system version by version until we get to the latest release.

So at some point today he sends me a message to stop what I'm doing and go and help with a product release and that we *are* doing this new approach and that he made the decision yesterday. I'm sorry but since when did he become my manager micromanaging me haha

So as the only one doing the upgrade, I only got told of this change in passing, the other dev said that he decided yesterday and didn't bother to tell me as he had other stuff to work on and neither did my line manager.

Seriously what the hell.

So hopefully the things I've worked on and done might get used in a year or two haha

Another tale of the legacy app, so I'm redoing the user roles using the cancancan gem.

Hop into a meeting to go over why I'm re-doing the authorisation, currently, the app is using the rails-authorization-plugin, yes from Rails 2.0.

me: *explains why this is the way to do it*
other dev: "Can we just fix the custom code we have added in that plugin?"
me: "Well given that it's a massively out of date plugin and we have a ton of deprecations, probably not"
other dev: "so let's try and fix it"

Christ, why are we still clinging onto 10+-year-old plugins if were going to keep getting errors when we upgrade?

Had a call with my line manager today about extending a deadline to the end of the year. Given the work needed it’s a given as I’m having to pretty much refactor an entire app, plus I also suggested that I train the new guy to give him some experience as I have training and tutoring experience.

It’s the first time I’ve gone “Here’s what I want and here’s what I need for this to work” and it went smoothly.

Great day.

Working on codebase of a 20+ year old system that the company I work for bought five years ago and in that time there’s been no refactoring, no security updates, no attempt to create automated testing (there is none), new features have just been built on the codebase with no regard for quality and it’s just spun into the horror cesspool that it is today.

I joined one year ago and I’m slowly refactoring the codebase and updating it to get it to a more modern codebase, cleaner code, faster load times and creating a ton of dev documentation so the devs in India can start getting into best practices and start producing quality code.

Legacy code that has a really long and convoluted way of integrating Dropbox authorisation to save files etc.

This happened in a meeting discussing where I’m at with the upgrade.

Me: This upgrade is going to take a while because of how outdated the app is. Also for assets uploaded by the user why don’t we just use active storage for this now as we have rails 6 now. Plus it will reduce a lot of code.

Other Dev: why would we do that? It’s a big change and will need testing.

Me: A lot of stuff is broken after the upgrade anyway and if we have a more built in simple way to do it why wouldn’t we? Also simplifying the code base is always good. The PR is already 1000+ files and we’re going to have to retest the app anyways.

Other Dev: *crickets*

I’m trying to make the app more smooth and streamlined and overall a better codebase as currently it’s shocking there and security holes galore, its like they don’t trust me with changing anything big haha honestly I think I’m the only one who wants to actually improve the application.

So my last rant was regarding a piece of code I found while clearing up an app. Here's the newest edition... a recent migration I found... a class within a migration creating records, this is not what migrations are for haha you don't add data using migrations jeez help me.

Upgrading a legacy rails app for work to rails 6 (help my sanity), just came across this...

So working for a company and the dev team I’m apart of works on a legacy rails app. Technical debt is high, no automated tests, no proper routing and also running unsupported versions of the language.

I joined seven months ago and got the current team doing automated testing so that’s a plus, they bought this app four years ago and there’s been no language updates, testing, cleanup, security updates, nothing, just adding to bad code.

Now we’re looking to actually upgrade language versions, the language and the framework now this will cause a lot of stuff to break naturally due to how outdated it is.

So I started putting proper routes into place how things should of been when things were being built as we have some spare time I decided to go out of my way to clear up some of the technical debt to get ahead of the curb. Re-done an entire section of the app, massive speed improvements, better views, controller, model, comment clean up and everything exactly how it should be.

I push the PR,
*other dev* - “why are we doing all of these other changes”
*me* - “well to implement routes properly, we have to use the new routes I just did some extra cleanup along the way”
*today, me* - “can you lend me a hand with one of the routes the ID isn’t getting passed”
*today, other dev* - “this wouldn’t of happened if you didn’t redo all these files, let’s just scrap the changes”
…

Sooo, I’ve spend three weeks improving one section in the app, because I’m having issues with one route according to this dev I should scrap it? Wait come again, am I the only one in this team who cares about making this app better all round?

Frustrating…

Been away for a while. How are we all doing in these crazy times? Keeping sane I hope.

Happy 🎂 day to me 🎉

So I got a new remote dev position today yay after two interviews and three months of looking for one, however, they can't onboard me until the virus calms as I need to go into the office and pick up some equipment 😔

I'm sorry, but who thought eslint or any linters for that matter were a good idea.

Started a new vue project using the cli, installed tailwind... oh what's that you don't like the line length... get out of here. It's an SVG and using a class-based framework. The hell.

Any way of removing eslint? I just want to code and not get bs warnings because of an svg length or because I add one to many classes.

Which logo do you prefer? Testing font weights for the second logo.

Can gaming get better on Linux please? I know there are steps towards this but when I can move everything over to arch/Ubuntu etc would be awesome, including VR stuff.

Currently using VSCode... is PyCharm worth the price?

Been getting some fiverr requests recently. Had one to migrate two websites and email migration. Simple enough, accepted. Contract signed. Got sent the files and the SQL exports, the website is from the 90s. So I might as well ask if they need a website update after the migrations are done haha as the company is still pretty active.

Thoughts on pluralsight?

So I have a few projects that I've been planning out for a while. Looking to start one over Christmas, build it up and launch early-ish next year.

I would say I'm well versed in RoR. Not great at explaining things but in terms of writing code I got that. Just not that great of a speaker haha more of a doer.

I also use JS a lot and some Node.

But I think I want to challenge myself at least for one of the projects. I've jumped around languages and frameworks alot job wise as I've had too. Never had the opportunity there to focus and hone in on the one language or stack. Which I do want to try and try and focus on a stack or language in 2020 to hone it in, focus on only a few things.

So I was thinking of using TypeScript and Vue with firebase. But that seems close to what I've been doing already. If I was to build the first project with RoR I can get a production ready app within a few days maybe even less because how easy it is to use and previous experience of course.

The first project is just a simple jobs board similar to we work remotely.

I've also heard good things about go and rust, asp.net. I'm open to all ideas.

So I've been tackling the Multer package with express and react, Christ what a nightmare so far. I can't get anything to work.

- Images as array string in mongoDB check
- enctype on the form, check
- state for the field set to an array, check
- type file check
- express configuration based on the Multer docs check

Everything as far as I can tell is as it should be, yet nothing gets saved.

FFFFFF