My "dev specialty" when I first started was Flash and ActionScript. I just wanted to make funny games and shitpost animations on Newgrounds.

Eventually I got steered into building basic websites. Those were the Dreamweaver MX days. JavaScript + jQuery were all the rage.

Then I got a job building SharePoint modules, got exposed to legitimate programming languages like C# and learned more about enterprise software architecture, design patterns, yadda yadda. I started hanging out more with the front-end guys, who taught me SASS and SMACSS and all that jazz.

Eventual jobs kept leaning me towards front-end, so I guess that's the hole I find myself in lately. Sometimes I get a sprinkle of devops, some infrastructure stuff, maybe a little solution design here and there.

Now I maintain shitpost enterprise applications built by other devs who like spaghetti and meatballs. At least I put in funny ASCII art for strings in my unit tests.

Job BS that made me consider quitting?

Huh. so timely.

With my previous employer, it was the whole "we're doing Agile and sprints and all the things" with "finish the project in six weeks plus here are some more requirements" garbage. Plus my tech lead always let the business roll over her and add unplanned requirements during a sprint without adjusting the deadlines set by the project managers. In summary: a fuck-all combination of Waterfall deadlines, Kanban tickets and Scrum timeboxes.

At my current employer, it's our business partners who're a bunch of douchebags that don't plan for anything except making sure their bonuses stay intact. Recently they terminated support for a third-party product that literally drives 99% of their web application then says to us "Hey, we need to build our own replacement for the vendor product using an entirely new stack. You have 3 months or our clients will get pissed." Oh, and these business partners keep raising new issues without any documentary basis except "this doesn't feel right" when they test our in-progress work. So helpful <sarcasm />

On the bright side, I'm getting paid whether or not this project fails, so... meh.

!rant(maybe)

So after taking a long weekend and applying to some different companies, doing some cultural fit and technical interviews, I thought to sit down and take a different look at my situation (with the help of my partner, of course, bless her patient soul).

* My work output isn't bad; all things considered, it's the people I work for who are doing a shitty job. If my project fails, I have to remind myself it's not my fault or my team's because we're doing all we can to the best of our abilities. I mean, it's not our fault we're being mismanaged.
* The best way I can effect change is if I am in a position to do so. Instead of looking outside, I should be challenging my way up - and if no opportunities are there, then I have to make them myself.
* This is still a year of uncertainty - starting fresh isn't going to be easy. In contrast, I've already built a rep in my current company - why throw it away because I work for sucky people?

Looking at my previous rants, they were definitely coming from a place of frustration; but as the saying goes, if I'm not part of the solution then I'm part of the problem. I'm gonna see how I can fix that then without clamboring for an escape hatch.

Yes, it was a very insightful Valentine's dinner conversation.

If this unit test were a real person, I'dsmack it across the face with a steel pipe and shatter its spine with a spiked mace coated in acid. Then I'd toss the fucker into a pit full of a hundred angry, rabid weasels and snarling, hungry raccoons, sprinkle some ground chestnuts and cocaine and tell bastard to run until I see some goddamn green.

Slowly I'm learning not to give a shit anymore. This project I'm on can burn. I'll make progress and help out my fellow devs, but if it takes me longer than estimated to complete my tasks because of the unforeseen technical debt arising from this piss-poor excuse of an application design (plus we're 13 devs working on like 5 different feature branches - God help us with our merge conflicts) then so be it. If my tech lead complains, he can find someone else to take the wheel.

I get back from Christmas vacation. I read all the unread emails and team chats, then go to work on my assigned tickets. As far as I can tell, those tickets are all I need to work on.

Then my boss snaps at me during our team catchup that I'm supposed to be working on a different set of tickets. Which were not visible on the board. Which were not assigned to me. Which nobody on the fucking team bothered to update me on. Of course if I point those out it'll just be a pain to deal with (especially since my boss doesn't seem to have my back, unless he needs something).

I thought my vacation would help me re-energize and get motivated again for this job, but coming back I'm reminded how unhappy I am now here. I've started applying elsewhere, but I don't know if I can continue to put up with this bullshit until I find a new employer.

Any tips or advice from folks who've felt unhappy in their job in the last year?

I'm considering leaving my current job, but am afraid that I might have a hard time transitioning into a new employer given the pandemic and all.

Has anyone switched jobs during this time and have any advice for someone looking to do the same? Or should I really wait until the next year or so when it's "safer" to go outside?

I have a client who wants his website to look like a goddamn PDF. I'm really considering making his site in a Word document, exporting it as a huge image and just slapping it in the HTML.

Fucking motherfucker. I should charge more for dealing with this bullshit.

It seems that my barometer for whether I would stay long in a company is roughly 1.5 years. Because apparently that's how long it takes to gauge if:

(a) The work I'm doing is fulfilling or self-satisfying
(b) My colleagues make work a fun and challenging experience
(c) My bosses are people I can be proud to work for.

Right now, the tally thus far:

(a) The work is half crap, supporting old code (fuck Swig and Architect, by the way) or fixing bugs on old projects. New projects are always mismanaged, and I mean ALWAYS (let's do Agile and create tickets but hey the requirements are still in progress so do start anyway and we'll file everything as bug tickets until they're done)

(b) I'm sure it's an effect of going remote working for the last few months, but I'm feeling detached from my team. It's fine I guess.

(c) My manager is okay, he's a good guy who listens and is also technical so we get along. But his boss (who oversees several teams. including ours) is a total prick who loves to insult people at their expense as a joke. He knows nobody's gonna talk smack back so he just does it without repercussions.

I'll probably see if I can move around internally to a different division since the pandemic makes it difficult to find work externally. I'm grateful I have a job, but I shouldn't have to feel like I owe the company for that at the cost of my personal happiness.

Just gotta #survive2020 I suppose.

It really irks me when I see 'web developers' and 'front-end developers' write CSS like a bunch of first-timers. Not considering hierarchy, specificity or even following a proper naming convention (who the fuck mixes camel case AND lowercase for class names?!) It's worse when you already have Sass or SCSS and they still write their style rules WITHOUT PROPER NESTING or keep using !important like it was a goddamn semicolon.

This is fucking basic shit for a web or front-end developer, and God help you if I ever conduct your technical interview and decide to ask you on a whim to write an Angular app WITHOUT USING BULLSHIT SYSTEMS LIKE CLARITY, ANGULAR MATERIAL OR BOOTSTRAP for your UI. But if you can explain to me the pros and cons between using CSS grid and flex, I'll be fucking impressed.

I wish these 'UI experts' I keep encountering would learn to build an optimal static site without a fucking framework or build manager before doing advanced shit, for the love of Jeebus.

First project at new company ended up shit as clients kept using the backlog to define and refine their business requirements. Did not go to production.

Second project at same company ended up the same way, except it had more infrastructure issues than technical debt (and an asshole for a project manager).

Basically I'm scoring 2 for 2, and totally expecting my next project to be doomed too for a 3 score. Maybe I'll build up enough rep as that guy who dooms projects to just sit on my ass and collect my paycheck while I work on my personal stuff.

A little background on project fubar:

Project fubar was started a couple of years ago, by an entirely different set of devs, against an entirely different set of requirements which were never made transparent to this day, on a new platform and framework.

That means it had APIs either outdated or deprecated, front-end logic that did things it wasn't supposed to be doing and lots of scope creep and technical debt.

I had to support and fix fubar for the last few months to prime it for UAT. It was the equivalent of plugging leaks which created more leaks.

Finally, I couldn't take it and asked for a week off. I timed it so it would be right after what would have been the final UAT deployment and I'd be back after they completed their test rounds, so I could fix any new or returning defects.

Today I just found out that fubar got put on hold, that UAT was a failure and all fubar-related work had to stop. I have some mixed feelings on this: I worked hard to get fubar working as business wanted, and I was proud of that. But I also didn't like that fubar was constantly changing in scope and function.

I wonder if anyone else has ever felt the same thing?

Why include a linter if you're just going to ignore it!

I just "inherited" an angular app from a year ago for a project that was put on hold, and after opening it in VS Code practically every TS file went red. Almost every rule in the config was not followed. Might as well have just disabled the darn thing?

The original developer is MIA so I can't contact him and ask him why either.

Most frustrating? Anything involving IE, but that's a safe answer. No, my most frustrating experience (to this day) is getting tables to behave responsively on mobile screens. Not easy when the tables in questions contain dozens of columns with hundreds of rows and mostly rely on fixed widths to render the text the way the client wants. So if you have a client who doesn't understand how hyphenation and word break work, I know how you feel.

!rant

It's been months since I last posted in here, but I finally get to share good news for once!

I quit my current job and took an offer at a much better company in a senior developer role.

I no longer have to put up with an idiot tech lead who cannot either prioritize tasks or follow simple processes, a self-absorbed senior developer who keeps deleting my code for his because he prefers tables over divs for layouts, and an incompetent HR manager who is more concerned about his image than the welfare of us employees.

I felt pure bliss when I handed in my resignation. I feel focused and ready to tackle my next challenges at my new job in January. I can't wait.

My personal learning here is that while good things come to those who wait, it still needs you to take that first step yourself and without hesitation.

Sooooo our department boss (the CTO) just announced his resignation, handing over his responsibilities to the lapdog of the CEO (who is very fickle on process micromanagement). Seeing as our offshore team was the CTO's idea, we're kinda expecting retrenchment to hit us in a few months once said lapdog starts throwing out our (soon-to-be-former) CTO's initiatives and projects for her own...

Quite frankly, I wish we'd get redundated now instead of later. I'm starting to hate my job (an increase from before, when I simply began to dislike it) because of my team lead's incompetence (she can't even attend a meeting without hijacking it for some other unrelated topic/issue) and lack of transparency (she never shares everything, keeps a lot of critical knowledge to herself). You can smell her lack of trust from miles away.

Anyways, yeah, I'd like to get retrenched/redundated please. I could use the money, honestly.

You know something's truly off when you're being challenged for all the wrong reasons. When all it seems you ever do is apply a band-aid every time instead of making the time to fix it properly and for good. Or when the people who should be making your work easier to do instead suggest new tools and features to integrate into your workflow or project because they plug the holes in their management process and can ignore the leaks for the time being.

I need to push myself out of this place and ramp up my skills and update my personal projects so I can prove myself capable and move on to a better employer. Because I'm starting to hate the stopgap short-term approach that keeps getting shoehorned into our work, and only proceeds to make us look bad even if it's the whims of our bosses causing it in the first place.

Thanks for reading.

To the people who keep overwriting our meeting room bookings in Outlook, fuck you and I hope you all die in a fire.

Got a few Jira tickets reassigned to me because the dev who was supposed to work on them got stuck on another project. It's fine, that happens.

I open the tickets. No descriptions for all of them. No screenshots for those reported as bugs, nor any replication steps. No attached test cases or, well, ANY useful information.

I talk to our BA, he says that all information I need are in OTHER tickets on ANOTHER BOARD that business manages but I DON'T HAVE ACCESS TO. Honestly, these shitfucks could've just done simple copy/paste. But nooooo...

So I reassign all the tickets back to their original reporters (business testers) with comments requesting more information.

It's been a week. Now I have no idea what to put in my time sheet.

Who the hell hardcodes their localhost ports in a web.config without updating the release config to the correct production URLs? And why doesn't our ops team pick up on this shit before clicking their fancy deploy button? And why in holy heaven do we even have a pre-production server if it isn't an exact mirror of production?

God help me, I need a drink.

!rant

Upper management finally caved in to the endless change requests from business and explicitly made the following statement:

"We won't overpromise and under-deliver. With that, we are reducing the committed scope of development work per sprint, but will continue to deliver the same final deliverables by the delivery dates"

So all our compressed project timetables just got uncompressed, and we finally have the breathing room we've been begging for since 2017. Any change requests from business will be (finally) backlogged.

On the other hand, the number of projects have increased to fill out the new extra dev time, but at least we're now less stressed at work. Priorities!

DOS and Wordstar, I was one of the few kids who submitted assignments on printouts from a dot matrix printer while everyone else was using typewriters. But what really got me hooked on computers? SimEarth and SimCity.

Sooooo I came in to work yesterday and the first thing I see is that our client can't log on to the cms I set up for her a month ago. I go log in with my admin credentials and check the audit logs.

It says the last person to access it was me, the date and time exactly when we first deployed it to production.

One month ago.

I fired a calm email to our project managers (who've yet to even read the client complaint!) to check with ops if the cms production database had been touched by the ops team responsible for the sql servers. Because it was definitely not a code issue, and the audit logs never lie.

Later in the day, the audit log updated itself with additional entries - apparently someone in ops had the foresight to back up the database - but it was still missing a good couple weeks of content, meaning the backup db was not recent.

Fucking idiots.

Thought I'd post this for my friend in QA, because she's been having a horrible week at work.

So we were supposed to have production deployments last night (Tuesday) and tonight (Wednesday). We were told these dates a week ago, which is fine. The QA support cleared their after-office schedules on those dates to accommodate, since the deployments would be happening at 10pm.

Last Monday they moved the deployments to Thursday and Friday, because our "project managers" want to cram as many fixes and resolutions as possible. So of course, we devs are being rushed to speed these additional tasks through to being included (bypassing a LOT of quality checks).

Of course, the QA team finds defects (we devs were expecting that, so no big) and the PMs start blaming them for the delays. Which is just stupid. And my QA friend? They're trying to make her a scapegoat by throwing her under the bus with business.

Fortunately, she's a smart cookie and not only has all communications with the PMs documented, she also has the other QAs backing her up by running the same tests.

tldr; Fuck those project managers who suck up to business and don't give a shit about the people who do the actual work. May they burn in hell and their souls rot in a cesspool of acidic farts for all eternity.

Reading. And not just a couple of genres, I mean as much as possible on as many topics as you can deem interesting. Classical literature, epics, poetry, contemporary criticism, post-modernism, every pretentious piece of work you can get your hands on.

Because the greater your vocabulary and the wider your understanding, the more efficient and proficient you become in learning new things.

Also, it makes you a better writer when you finally find yourself needing to put together some technical documentation for that content management system you whipped together in a fortnight.

So that coworker of mine who got promoted to manager keeps continuing on abusing her new power. She convinced upper management to implement a new policy where you would be disqualified from your monthly performance incentives if you take 2 total sick days a month. She says this is to reduce the number of sick days people take, which of course upper management loved hearing.

By the way, since she's a manager now, this particular policy doesn't affect her - it only applies to us in the trenches. She can still take as many sick days as she wants, since being a manager she can work from home.

Needless to say, save for a couple of suck-ups, she's lost a lot of friends and made a number of enemies in our department, particularly on our dev team.

Good recruiters do not ask who are the other companies or recruiters who contacted you.

Good recruiters understand that potential applicants have greater needs than purely monetary compensation in their offers.

Good recruiters do not threaten you with a hard deadline to decide whether or not you'll accept their offer.

Good recruiters do not ask for referrals if you turn them down.

I've yet to meet a good recruiter.

No, you cannot ask us to move our tech meeting elsewhere because we're being "loud", for the same reason we don't ask you to leave the area because your non-work-related chatter is distracting us from our said meeting. It's the only video conferencing system in the joint, and it's not our fault you and your people sit nearby. How dare you go past us and complain to our boss as if we're nothing to you - just because you were recently promoted, don't act like you were never in the trenches with the rest of us. It's like you have no respect for us now that you've gone a step up the ladder. The next time you or your team members try to fuck with us like that over petty shit like this, we're going to bring the hammer down on your asses and burn every last vestige of self-worth you have by making sure you never get a moment's peace. It's bad enough you and your team suck each other off during our bi-weekly department meeting by patting yourselves on the back for doing what's supposed to be your fucking jobs - don't you dare try to drag us down to make yourselves look like fucking saints. That is where I cross the goddamn line.

Can anyone recommend cheap Windows-based hosting, ideally to run a couple of Umbraco instances for personal projects? I'm currently looking at the Cloud One Tier of asphostportal.com which has some good reviews, but if anyone knows of a better/cheaper hosting provider that'd be super helpful 😁

"Can you put my site as the first result on google?"

I can add SEO to your site, just give me your preferred keywords, a description, and let's make sure we follow white hat best practices etc.

"No call someone at google and ask how much to go to the top of the list"

So you want to pay for ads or..?

"No get a figure I can pay to get to first page"
"Or can you just edit the google"

... And so I never renewed that contract ever again, the end.