An open office wouldn't be so bad if the same 3 people would actually sit the fuck down once in a while and do some actual work. Distracting as hell. It's gotten so bad that I've started writing logs of how many times they get up during the day.

// the most egregious offender
// down: 9:00
// up: 9:05
// down: 9:15
// up: 9:20
// down: 9:23
// up: 9:32
// down: 9:45
// up: 9:58
// down: 10:05
// this pattern continues the entire day

And what are they doing during these exoduses?

- Answering their personal cell phone from stay at home spouses
- Throwing trash away even though they have trash bins right NEXT to their desks.
- Pacing back and forth
- Checking the thermostat
- Checking the contents of the fridge over and over
- Being an absolute asshole!

If the whole office has to listen to "gon put on mah iron shirt and chase the devil out dis earth" on max volume in between pandora commercial one more day, I'm going to hack the sound system and play Norwegian death metal. Jah!

When your boss yells at you for doing too good of a job.

// Pouring over idiot API developer's crappy documentation.

Example:
Goal Detail
* From Docs "table_breakdown key will return an array but will always only contain one json object.
json -> "table_breakdown" [
{
"field" : "value",
"etc" : "etc"
}
]

WHYYYY!!!!

More glorious gems from stupid hipster API dev:
HTTP GET api.redacted.com/referral/$id
{
"referral_id" : null // yes it was actually null
"referral_is_inactive": true,
"referral_deactivated": false,
}

Auth Endpoint:

user name and password correct:
- response 200: with session key and profile info
user name and password incorrect:
- response 200: blank

smh

// Stupid JSON
// Tale of back-end ember api from hell
// Background: I'm an android dev attempting to integrate // with an emberjs / rails back-end

slack conversation:
me 3:51pm: @backend-dev: Is there something of in the documentation for the update call on model x? I formed the payload per the docs like so
{
"valueA": true,
"valueB": false
}
and the call returns success 200 but the data isn't being updated when fetching again.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:00pm: the model doesn't look updated for the user are you sure you made the call?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:01pm: Pretty sure here's my payload and a screen grab of the successful request in postman <screenshot attached>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:05pm: well i just created a new user on the website and it worked perfectly your code must be wrong
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:07pm: i can test some more to see if i get any different responses
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:15pm: ahhhhhh... I think it's expecting the string "true", not true
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:16: but the fetch call returns the json value as a boolean true/false
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:18pm: thats a feature, the flexible type system allows us to handle all sorts of data transformations. android must be limited and wonky.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:19pm: java is a statically typed language....
// crickets for ten minutes
me 4:30pm: i'll just write a transform on the model when i send an update call to perform toString() on the boolean values
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:35: great! told you it wasn't my documentation!

// face palm forever

Working on an Android app for a client who has a dev team that is developing a web app in with ember js / rails. These folks are "in charge" of the endpoints our app needs to function. Now as a native developer, I'm not a hater of a web apps way of doing things but with this particular app their dev teams seems to think that all programming languages can parse json as dynamically as javascript...

Exhibit A:

- Sample Endpoint Documentation
* GetImportantInfo
* Params: $id // id of info to get details of
* Endpoint: get-info/$id
* Method: GET
* Entity Return {SampleInfoModel}

- Example API calls in desktop REST client
* get-info/1
- response
{
"a" : 0,
"b" : false,
"c" : null
}
* get-info/2
- response
{
"a" : [null, "random date stamp"],
"b" : 3.14,
"c" : {
"z" : false,
"y" : 0.5
}
}
* get-info/3
- response
{
"a" : "false" // yes as a string
"b" : "yellow"
"c" : 1.75
}

Look, I get that js and ruby have dynamic types and a string can become a float can become a Boolean can become a cat can become an anvil. But that mess is very difficult to parse and make sense of in a stack that relies on static types.

After writing a million switch statements with cases like "is Float" or "is String" from kotlin's Any type // alias for java.Object, I throw my hands in the air and tell my boss we need to get on the phone with these folks. He agrees and we schedules a day that their main developer can come to our shop to "show us the ropes".

So the day comes and this guy shows up with his mac book pro and skinny jeans. We begin showing him the different data types coming back and explain how its bad for performance and can lead to bugs in the future if the model structure changes between different call params. He matter of factually has an epiphany and exclaims "OHHHHHH! I got you covered dawg!" and begins click clacking on his laptop to make sense of it all. We decide not to disturb him any more so he can keep working.

3 hours goes by...

He burst out of our conference room shouting "I am the greatest coder in the world! There's no problem I can't solve! Test it now!"

Weary, we begin testing the endpoints in our REST clients....

His magic fix, every single response is a quoted string of json:

example:
- old response
{
"foo" : "bar"
}
- new "improved" response
"{ \"foo\" : \"bar\" }"

smh....