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AboutI like to try things.
Joined devRant on 6/22/2020
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I'm working with this stupid ass framework that has a bunch of old style React class nonsense as examples (that's not actually that bad, but) ... AND worst of all every code example revolves around this convoluted thing where:
"How you do a thing."
"Make button, then you make a function that calls X, Y, Z and it opens the thing!"
But that's not the way you'd EVER do it because doing the thing inside the framework's components is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!
I get wanting to dumb down documentation but this is dumbed down to pointlessness! -
-fills out web form-
-company sends txt message-
Txt Message: "Thanks for contacting us about X, would you like to schedule <insert thing>?
Me Thinking: Oh awesome I can just schedule it via txt!
Me: "Yes, I would like to schedule time to get an estimate on <insert thing>."
Txt Message: "Please call us at..."
Me: "wtf... yeah I know your number."2 -
ME IRL:
-submits pull request-
-goes to close some windows .... er ... naw-
-creates new virtual desktop to work in and leaves the old desktop / code open in case there are some bugs that pop up in production...-2 -
I'm gonna find a folding chair to swing at the next asshole who says "it is just like" without fucking thinking about it for more than a second or two....7
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-click-
MySQL: 'the table does not exist'
I just fucking made the temp table dude, that's what you literally do in step 1 .... how could it not....
-click-
MySQL 'Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0'
Me: "Oh there we g---"
-click-
MySQL: 'the table does not exist'
Me: "Hey you just worked!"
-click-
MySQL: 'the table does not exist'
GOD DAMN IT
-click-
-click-
-click-
-click-
-click-
-click-
MySQL 'Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0'
Me: Uh you're working now?
-click-
MySQL 'Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0'
-click-
MySQL 'Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0'
-click-
MySQL 'Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0'
Guess that API just needed breaking in....3 -
Dear Everyone.
There are like 8 things named "widget" (not that but just using a placeholder here for the actual name).
STOP TALKING ABOUT REFERENCING BY WIDGET BECAUSE THERE'S LIKE A BAZILLION POSSIBILITIES IT DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING IF IT COULD MEAN ..... ANYTHING1 -
You know shit is getting real when you save and you watch your code formatted start rolling through your code like you're watching someone ... write code...
-indent here-
-pause-
-indent here-
Me: Oh man what have I done?!?!?!4 -
-Me late at night facing a deadline-
Git: Hey there's no upstream bran---
Me: WUT? I don't even know what ... sure whatever just do your thing git!!!!
Git: YOLO!1 -
Me: I think our customer should have to specify this thing.
Someone else: Let's do what we can to be really flexible for them.
Me Later: Yeah well our super flexibility now makes these queries they want impossible .....2 -
Ok in scenario A we do X, Y, Z, and in scenario B we'll do this other stuff mostly the same but a little different. That will <puts comments> go here ...
Ok let's make A work....
-time / days passes-
Ok we're done and it is ready to go.
-later-
Someone: "Why doesn't scenario B work?"
Me: LOL some idiot .... <copy paste, fiddle, copy paste, fiddle> there we go I fixed it!!! -
Docker is funny.
I'll try to fire up docker-compose and it will freak out.
Docker Error: "Oh man! Oh man! Something is wrong! It's probably not docker it's YOUR CONTAINER!!!! WTF DUDE!!!"
Me: "Uh docker ... your little systray icon indicates docker itself is broken right now...""
Docker: "No way man, i'm sure it's your fucked up container, must be something wrong with it!!!"
Me: "I'm just gonnna restart you."
Docker: "OK but I'm just say'n th----"
-restarts docker-
-restarts docker-compose-
Docker: "OMG It's up!!!!"6 -
Dear Customer,
I think you misunderstand the reason I sent you some documents for review.
I sent the examples to you so that you could see what your inputs produced.
I didn't send them to you so that you could fart out your mouth and about what you want like a little kid.
If there's shit on the page it is because you put that shit in the system ....
Please have someone else who is going to put a little bit of effort into this 'super important project' contact me.
Also bullet points don't work like this:
- Here I talk about a thing but
- and here I continue that thought with no context and incomplete sentences
- Also this is unrelated.
- But this is about the first bullet point again.
- Here I repeat another bullet point but I say it in a completely different way.5 -
Problem: Someone isn't receiving emails.
Me: Finds that someone else set up their account without an email address.
Me: Man what kinda person would let you turn on email alerts without a valid email address .....
-Checks-
Me: You know anyone could have made that mistake, I'll just fix it up right here .... -
I do not have patience for other people's stream of thought today....
Dear Fellow Human,
I get you're using the widget for the first time but just because you have access to me and have the option of not trying and just spouting off rather thank think this out... doesn't mean customer won't take .13 seconds more and see that the link is right there .... -
You win this round SQL.... but I'll be back... and when I do I'll get this stupid join and concat to work the way I want. YOU'LL SEE SQL!!!!
...If I ever buy an SQL book like I keep talking about...
-deploy not entirely janky but also not ideal solution- -
A customer has this project that smells ... like it could be not fun.
They're doing business with walmart (actually a walmart satellite company, even worse).... I've seen this story before. They're super excited, they're seeing $$$... seen it not work out so many times.
Anyway they're having us rush out these forms and documents and so on and I can see there's a lot of data that is going to be required missing.
My contact is super peppy and happy and so sunshiny that my concerns are going over her head... she just sends emails to people, like FW, RE RE ... this is gonna be a mess of last minute / 'where is this?!?!?!' kinda work...
Granted I work at a good place, this won't have any blowback on me... but god damn guies listen to coder guy that the data that will be needed isn't there and there is a SHIT ton that I'm pretty sure isn't ... anywhere. -
Paraphrased with imaginary ending:
Me: Ok so this X will never be more than Y items and not more than one pages?
Person: Yes. it won't be more than Y items and never more than one page.
Me: If this is always Y items or less and not more than one page, I can hammer this out quick then. If it is more than that it will take much longer to complete.
Person: Awesome!!!
-later-
Person: OK here's the template for Y x10 items and multiple pages.
Me: Oh I'm sorry, we're going to have to stop working on this. I thought you actually gave a fuck about this 'important' project and that you had deadlines you cared about, but apparently not enough to participate in this conversation with any level of intellectual honesty. Please fuck off now while I go work on more productive tasks....4 -
If I could I just wouldn't support email in any way shape anymore.
It's just too much hassle with all the spam filters and people just don't understand how email works.
Nobody fucking reads it anyway.... but everyone wants like a bazillion variations on stupid emails that go out that nobody will read.
They don't get that email is often instant ... but is actually async.
They don't understand that just because they got an email sent to their own distribution list ... and someone took them off the list... that doesn't mean that WE an outside group emailing that list stopped sending them messages.
Nobody actually looks at their spam filters until I tell them to do it for the 3rd time. And as if by magic folks at the same company don't 'have spam filter problems all the time'.
I had a company 'security' filter that straight up followed all the links in an email (that's fine ... we're good, I get that).... and then their stupid bot or whatever would actually click options on a form and fucking submit the fucking form!!!!!
I mean I get that maybe some sites have folks submit some shit and then deliver malware but that's gonna have consequences submitting shit none the less because I don't know it's just your fucking bot...
So they'd get various offers from our customers and bitch when they went to find it was already gone.5 -
"Customer's customer needs important thing ASAP!!!!"
"Ok wut"
"X, Y, Z!"
"Sounds good, we can do that, for what customer's customer!?!?"
"uhhhhhhh"
The volume of really important shit that we don't have details on is too damn high...1 -
Substantive post / question time!
So I'm working on this project that isn't a disaster but very much suffered from a lack of planning (both on my part and others).
This is a feature that involves all sorts of ways to view and manipulate some records and various records and so forth... I mean what isn't that really?
I think everyone tried but we didn't realize how many details there would be and how much we would need to (well I demand we do) share code across pieces and how that would slow us up when we realize feature A needs to do X, Y, Z and ... well obviously that means feature B has to also...
I'm not really upset about this, it's progressing and I'm learning. I'm writing it all now so it's under control, but...
I want to be able to display, visually where we are as far as each component of this project
- Component A
- Description:
- Component A does things you don't want to.
- Has features:
- Can blow up things in a good way.
- Produces flowers and honey on demand
- Missing features:
- Doesn't take out the trash.
And so on for component B, C, D, Z.
Right now I'm just using a plain old document file to write up a status / progress type thing now.
We use Teamwork to manage tasks, but I kinda hate it. It's similar to the above example in being able to bust out lists... but they're not connected in any way. All the details are lost on these bullet items as they're limited to one line when you look at everything ....
It's the classic case of a tool that shows lists ... but doesn't promote or allow for showing any connections between them...
And really the problem with this project is that we built little bits and features here, and little bits there from the outside in and ... really we should have built it from the top down where we had to face a lot of questions earlier.
Anyway does anyone know of anything that has project type management / status / progress stuff that is VISUALLY helpful .. not just a bunch of lists and progress bars?
I know I didn't word this well but I'm open to even wrong answers....2 -
A cracker just fell under my desk.
I cannot find it.
It's not possible that the cracker traveled farther than everywhere I looked.
But I still can't find it.23 -
My son is remote learning, 5th grade.
When the teacher calls on one of the student's named Alexa and asks a question... some kids with Alexa devices in their house get the answer for free....10 -
Storytime!
(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)
TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.
My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.
I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )
At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.
However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.
The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.
At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...
What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).
I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:
1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.
2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.
They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)
I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.
The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.
But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.
In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.
Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.
Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.5 -
A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:
"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"
The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.
The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.
By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....
Backstory:
The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.
The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.
In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.
They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.
When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:
They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.
Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.
It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.
At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.
So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.
From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.
We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).
The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.
So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.
Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.
Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."
The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.
A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...
Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.
Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.
HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.
The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...7 -
Customer: "Our people keep clicking the save button and it saves things and now we have lots of things."
Me: "Should we remove their option to save?"
Customer: "Oh no we want them to be able to save."
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Prepare for business rules hell where our protagonist has to account for other human's lack of self-control by applying business logic produced by middle managers who have no idea what anyone who works for a living actually does.4 -
SQL is amazing.
I'll toss out some bassakwards query and the optimizer will make sense of it and suddenly I'm searching a amazonillian records in no time.
Then rando one day (today) I fire up what I think is really not the most wonky query I've ever written and ... "Well shit this is surprisingly slow."
So then I go full n00b and add some fields to the query that I know would limit the number of possible records to way low thinking that might help and ... nope no faster...
Guess it's time to bust open some books about SQL....4