I ran a big long-running terraform apply and somehow thought it would still work if I locked my laptop.
When I went back the next day (I know lol) terraform was hanging, had to force stop which screwed up the remote tfstate.
Had to spend a whole day manually deleting about 70 AWS resources that terraform created but had no knowledge of because of the corrupted state.

This is just.... wow

Blog: Never ever try to turn a rushed demo build into a live product.

https://likelikeatemyshield.com/pos...

Decided to start a software engineering blog after several years of procrastinating.
likelikeatemyshield.com
Just published my first post. Feedback is welcome :)

Sometimes Mockito feels like the final boss of testing rather than a tool to help me

How to get ANYONE to leave you alone, make swan-like hissing noises at them

Me: *Writes a nice little AWS Lambda service using Java 12*

Reviewing Dev: Lambda only supports JDK 8

Me: *Dies inside and cries as I replace every occurence of var*

Dear Amazon,
DocDB only allows one automatic backup per day.

Why?

That is all.

It’s 2019, why is Maven still a thing?

Uncle Bob, Martin Fowler, Kevlin Henney, Doc Norton, Allen Holub.

They have all taught me great things about software development, whether through books or superb conference talks.

My last post was over a month ago about updating my CV to escape this place.
Pleased to report I got the job 😎

Today, during an update from senior management, I was casually sitting in the corner filling in my CV to get out of here lol.

Metroid meets Calvin & Hobbes.
Do I really need to explain why?

Well yesterday I had the absolute joy of marrying @GIS-Jedi.
I think I have gotten more Facebook notifications today than I did in all of 2018

If you are a mobile game developer and you make those stupid interactive ads that pop up in the middle of another game and try to make me play it. I dont like you and would sooner leave a bad review on your game for having the audacity to invade my other games. Stop it. It is the most annoying type of ad I have ever seen and actively discourages me from downloading your game. Mobile games are already basically a cancer without that horrendous experience.

When your fiancée gets you enough ++ for a little penguin buddy ❤️🐧

//TODO: temporary until re-written in new webapp

A commit from almost exactly 2 years ago 😬

A quick rant about dependency injection.

I see far too often in projects, a huge over-reliance on dependency injection / IOC frameworks which permeate throughout the entire codebase.

I cringe every time I see a constructor annotated with @Inject and 10 params.

The benefit of these frameworks is how easy they make it to manage many dependencies. What I dislike about them, is exactly that. I feel that they make it TOO easy to manage many dependencies.

How trivial is it to simply add another constructor param? exactly. And people then wonder why their dependency tree looks insane.

I am a strong believer in injecting dependencies the traditional way, via the constructor with no fancy framework. The reason being that it forces you to think more about the dependencies you are adding to your classes, and consider if they are really all needed.

The other problem I have with it, is it basically encourages you to inject everything because its so easy. The purpose of dependency injection is inversion of control and allowing classes to depend on abstraction rather than concrete implementation. All that goes out the window when you @Inject 6 different concrete classes.

Use dependency injection for its intended purpose, not as an excuse to be lazy and avoid thinking about dependencies.

An iOS app which was basically a wrapper for a giant jQuery eForm.
~5000 lines of custom JS and it broke ALL THE DAMN TIME. A team of us worked on it for about a year and all we ever did was fix bugs. But the bug count never went down. The bugs just got replaced with more bugs.
Thankfully its not live anymore.
After the global thermonuclear war, all that will remain is cockroaches and jQuery.

YAGFI
You aren’t gonna finish it

Heres a rant you dont see everyday, the lazy gits in my office who dont clean up after themselves. Go to the kitchen to make coffee only to be confronted by a mountain of dishes, the peak of which may have been level with High Hrothgar. Had to dry them and put them away before I could really even move. Like just wash something after you use it, then take the extra 20 seconds to dry it and put it away, dont just rinse it and then leave it sitting there. AAARRRGGGHHHH

Don't forget to give the developers the opportunity to innovate. Nobody wants to sit and type out the same structures day after day. That's not why we got into this job. We like solving problems. In my current team we set aside some time every sprint to spend on individual innovation. Super useful as it gives us the chance to break out from the standard chugging of the backlog and spend some time trying to solve some of the trickier problems and bringing improvements back to the product that we discovered by messing around with stuff. If you are reading this and you are in charge of a development team, try this out for a sprint or 2.

Probably either writing the occasional lazy commit message, or skipping a few testing scenarios when testing dev work locally. Although to be honest, its rarely out of laziness that I do these things. Its often trying to urgently finish something for a weekend release/hotfix.

This one from Silicon Valley:
“Tell me this isnt Zune bad”
“I’m sorry Gavin, it’s Apple Maps bad”
Or perhaps:
“Hey Danesh, nice chain...” 😂

Spent most of this week busting my ass working on a hotfix that came out of nowhere with mega high priority. This annoys me greatly because the hotfix wasn't even fixing a bug, it was adding new functionality because certain customers were being blocked from testing without this specific feature. In my humble opinion, given that we release every weekend, hotfixes should be reserved for actual critical bugs. But anyway, as I probably could have predicted, the code got to QA and exploded. Literally nothing works.
This is what happens when you try to rush out features to satisfy customers. If you try to rush something that is late, you WILL make it later.
Meanwhile there's an issue I'm supposed to be fixing for our next release which goes out this weekend and I've had no time to even look because of this hotfix. And now it's the end of the day and I just feel worn out from stress, tomorrow will no doubt be similar.

Definitely my current manager. He is very supportive of our career goals and has us choose both goals related to team performance and personal progression. He supports us having time at the end of the sprint to innovate and research things to bring back into the product. He gives constructive feedback and doesnt breathe down peoples necks.

The number of people who responded to this with bile such as “yeah but how well” or “i bet she can only write hello world”.
Its sad that this attitude still exists in our industry. If you havent seen the story she responded by clarifying that she is on the iOS tutorial team for Raywenderlich, and has a bachelors degree with a double major in Computer Science. But she shouldnt have to explain that just because shes a woman. Are people that insecure about their knowledge that they need to resort to demeaning other peoples? for shame.

about 12 hours, from 8am - 8pm
We were working on an iOS build for a demo and were told that day was the deadline for having code merged. I got kinda shafted cos I needed someone elses code merged before I could finish mine. It got merged at like 5pm and then everyone went home leaving me with a ton of merge conflicts to deal with. I gave up at 8pm and went home. Found out the next day that the deadline was horse crap anyway....

Im gonna turn this topic on its head a little and mention the MOST NECESSARY feature that was never implemented in one of my projects.
It was an iOS client for a medical records system. Since it contained actual confidential medical information, some patient records could be “restricted”. Thos meant if you tried to open them you would be prompted for a reason, and this would be audited.
We already had 2 different iOS apps with this feature in place matching the web app. But for some reason with the 3rd app they just decided not to bother. I discovered that it was because the PO in charge of that project didnt consider it important enough for the demo. So we have one app where you can just bypass the whole auditing process and open restricted patient records freely.

Probably the autosave feature in our medical eForm application. You might think that doesnt sound unnecessary, but it was built to solve a problem that shouldnt have existed in the first place.
Autosave was put in place to rescue as much data as possible in the event that the app randomly crashed while a paramedic was filling in a form.
So in one sense it was a necessary feature because the app was so unstable. But on the other hand, if the app was built properly it would never have been needed.