Every time I have to use CloudWatch, I feel like I'd be more productive if I shoved glass shards in my eyes.

Every query/filter either returns nothing or errors out because too much is returned.

I'm in the 7th circle of hell. Building out an authentication system using a 3rd party vendor into our company's application.
Developing in PHP, running inside a docker container, using a Windows PC. Absolutely everything has gone wrong that could go wrong but PHPCS whining about a missing space between the "!" and variable name was the last straw.

It's 2018 and folks are still stuck "collaborating" on documents by sharing them back and forth over email.

MS Word Doc created in Office 2016 will not open in Office 365.

THIS IS WHY GOOGLE IS WINNING!

Windows 10 as a development environment... Oh freakin' goody.
📍Multi-montor is finicky
📍Text scaling is still horribly broken
📍It takes longer to resume from standby than my old laptop takes to boot up from a cold start
📍Color matching LCD monitors is pants-on-head retarded
📍32GB of RAM isn't going to be enough...

This is going to be a long summer in corporate land.

Moving from a G-Suite company to one that uses Exchange 2016 is like stepping into a shiny time machine with only one working gear... reverse.

Spam filtering is as primitive as classified ads in print newspapers.
Outlook Web is as primitive as using a printed phone book.

I haven't seen this crap since 2004 and it appears NOTHING has changed since then.

I once had to fix a webservice endpoint another developer added that accepted any file from the public internet and loaded it directly onto an NFS file mount with the rest of the site's image assets and then inserted a record of the file into SQL via a hand-stitched query with parameters from the endpoint.

I was working for a large enterprise company at the time... I was very disappoint.

Check out this holiday rant/poem from a Front-end developer and colleague:

“Twas a Dev’s Christmas: A Holiday Ode to the Open Source Community” by @warlyware https://levelup.gitconnected.com/tw...

It's not every day that the solution to a long-standing mild frustration with a server is to blacklist the kernel module for video drivers.

5 years of never having an accessible console on that box was not the "headless" I had in mind all this time. I was finally able to solve the black screen by forcefully ignoring Intel's broken video drivers. Thanks Intel.

I notice that a necessary fix means adding a single isolated library to composer.json for a large legacy application...

Me: 😬
Me: 🙏
Me: <composer update>

composer.lock: +789/-435 lines changed. 😵

Yep, everything is broken. There goes my week.

load average: 348.58, 293.64, 179.93

Um, wat?
1) What are you doing little server?!
2) How could you possibly find the time to tell me that?!

Won an Amazon Echo Show in a Hackathon where we spent most of the time integrating with Google Home.

I don't know what to do with the thing. 🤔

The best way to describe what I had to do today is I "Channeled Macgyver"... now production is working.

⚪Data wasn't flowing as expected.
⚪Component written by our team was blamed.
⚪Boss asked me to bypass the component so data can flow.

Sure, I can fix that... Give me a car battery, a roll of duck tape and a butter knife. Data will be flowing in production shortly.

RavenDB was by far the worst document storage "solution" I have ever had the displeasure of working with.
- Loading data crashed the service.
- Queries crashed the service.
- Monitoring applications crashed the service.
- It didn't support clustering or HA of any kind.
- Sometimes it just worked for no good reason.
- Often it broke for completely random reasons.

Trying to develop Java applications in Windows...

sed s/Java applications/anything/g

'sed' is not recognized as internal or external command, operable program or batch file

*sigh*

Fought with the Windows Disk Manager for way too long this morning trying to shrink a partition with plenty of space so that I could setup a native dual boot...

Screw that tool, I resized the partition to nothing by formatting it.

Call comes down from the CEO and through his "Yes Man" that some investors are coming by to visit and he want to show off the data center and test servers. There are four full racks of storage servers filled with HDDs and each server has 4 to 16 HDDs a piece.
I got told to "make all of the lights blink", which can be epic seeing it in action but my test cycles rarely aligned that way.

All morning I was striping RAID arrays and building short mixed I/O tests to maximize "LED blinking" for the boss's henchman.

Investors apparently live/die by blinking light progress and it was all on me to get everything working.

I once posted a snarky rant about the inadequacies of our vendor's​ product on their own social media page... It appeared during a live demo about "Managing Reputation on Social Media" with several marketing dept. executives and ruffled some feathers.

Bright side: It had the desired effect and a half-baked product launch that was doomed to fail got delayed almost a month until the issue I griped about was fixed.

Microsoft makes the Disk Cleanup tool an optional install for Servers as part of "Desktop Experience" but crams that gawd-awful MetroUI at you by default... 😒 😡

Sitting in the room with the hiring manager and the previous employee:

Manager: "Do you know your stuff?"
Me: "Yes"
Manager: "Do you know your stuff as well as him? (pointing at previous employee)"
Me: "I taught him."
Manager: "Okay, when can you start?"

My best teacher was with me for C++ in high school and in college. He had the most relaxed, laid back style while managing to both make the lessons fun.

Perhaps my favorite lesson was around C++ and Pointers. Lessons generally we mixed with long ramblings about the military and live coding examples. He was talking about object references and Navy ships when he told a student to "give me the USS Wisconsin". Perplexed, my classmate said he wasn't sure he could do that without a lot of help. So this teacher drew an arrow on a piece of paper, showed it to the class and then found the general direction he wanted it to aim for and taped it to a pole next to the stage. He called that a Pointer to a USS Wisconsin and then asked the student to give him the USS Wisconsin again.

I understand pointers today because of that lesson.

Brought my old "gaming/music/media" PC out of storage because of a video on Youtube thinking I could relive some glory days. 18 years old and she still purrs.

I do not miss this old "3D accelerator" card though... The only "Rage" in the Rage2 chipset was mine at not being able to play most games because ATI didn't think standards were important.

I'm torn on dev bootcamps.

On one hand, I learn the most in hands-on direct tinkering and bootcamps tend to exude this with well-trained instructors following best practices.

On the other hand, the short timeline means corners are cut and an overwhelming amount of material is dropped all at once leading to a leaky retention vessel at the end.

I prefer ramping up learning over a period of time to gain experience than a fire hose approach.

Serves me right for developing in production...

Move the process to dev, works fine.

Code and process were fine all along; turns out a firewall issue was blocking the connection for the final step.

My Dev Focus: Improving TDD $F00 and adding tests to previously released production code.

My wife's phone started having power button issues. Then it broke completely with spastic random presses, causing the phone to boot loop. It's a 3 year old Nexus 5 so I was mostly concerned with backing things up, not rescuing it.

Cleaning didn't work, tapping the switch didn't work. This hack worked.

Backup complete.

After building some automated regression tests to verify parts of the company website were working, it was discovered that a test case was missing.
Instead of a constructive meeting about fixing the issue and adding a test, I was reamed and my manager was reamed that we "missed this case".
Nevermind that the automation caught several issues before release in nearly every other aspect of coverage.
Nevermind that the missing test case was a useless feature added after the automation was completed.
Nevermind that automation was meant to be the last stop in the gate, not the first...

I was so livid after that meeting I nearly resigned on the spot. My manager was so livid over being told to write me up he was ready to resign.

Read, think about the problem, ponder some more and procrastinate.
Deadlines are my best productivity hack.

Worst Hackathon experience:
Taking an API built by a junior dev team with minimal specs and "hacking for two pointless days" to make it work in production...

The whole Hackathon idea was an experiment to see if they could make the dev team stay late if they bought pizza and said "have fun".

We all spent 2 days cursing at the shoddy tools and lamenting that you can't run a Hackathon with a single directive and "production ready goal" yet remove any choice the developers have to actually contribute.

We planted a blanket, pillow and full sized ambulatory mannequin to sleep under the desk of our software director. It was a deep desk with no visible parts showing unless you happened to look down.

After a meeting, he went into his office and sat down. About a minute later there was a very high pitched squeal and he came running out of his office to the amusement of several developers and managers outside. 😈

Today we'll refactor the API.
Tomorrow we'll celebrate.

My Future Self need never know how bad it once was.