When you get told by the company that they don't feel like running your product anymore even though it is profitable and so they are fitting you in the middle of a pandemic.

Well finished work yesterday at the company where I would be grilled over whether it was safe to run an SQL script on the server using the command line but they thought nothing of everyone having to log in to the server as root!

So glad to be staying a new job next week. Today a junior colleague asked me what the best way to test something would be as it won't work locally. Knowing this has a good chance of taking down the server, I suggest he sounds up a server on his AWS account. My manager comes in, oh no I don't want him doing it on AWS use the production server instead. By the time stuff States hitting the fan I will be gone.

Had an interview a couple of days back, and trying to sell how good the company is, the owner proudly declares, all their code is procedural.

So a server goes down and being the only person who can recover it, I get started, whilst doing this the boys sits right next to me (6 inches) and starts asking what caused the problem instead of letting me get on and fix it, then complains the outage was too long.

So we have a web page which is really poorly written and times out after 100 seconds, so I suggest this is costing us money and is a really poor user experience. It needs some refactoring.

Manager: No just increase the timeout, it will be fine.

Boss: so let's get AWS in to ask their advise on the new architecture, but let's not bother involving the systems architect who actually knows what is going on.

A few years ago a client who sold printer ink on eBay and Amazon wanted to branch out to another store, so I grudgingly began to implement the new API, I followed all the API docs but no matter what, I couldn’t get it to work, eventually I contacted their support and was told it should work. Turns out the test API was faulty and that they had no interest in fixing it instead suggested we tried test data on their live account. I refused and for once the PM agreed with me and went back to the client saying the problem was the retailer.

After designing the new server architecture for our software and the security to go with it, the boss decides we should ask our provider’s solutions architects to see if it is okay, they came back and said it all looks good apart from one part which my manager did and I always said was bad practice.

A while back I was looking for a new job and was given an interview by one company who shall remain nameless. Before the interview, they asked me look through their current site, nothing unusual there, so I started browsing. Then I received an email with all the details I needed to access their production server. Apparently they wanted me to look through the code, unusual but I did so.

First thing all the passwords, including those belonging to members of the public were stored in plain text and many were still the default passwords which were based on the Id so were sequential.

I highlighted these issues at the interview and they then asked me to do a test, not the usual test though, they asked me to add some charts to their prod site. Needless to say that didn’t happen and I got another job elsewhere.

My boss just came to me and demanded that we drop the first layer of security from our new servers so that the snake oil salesmen he used can open test it. I did try to explain that you don't remove security to test security.

So we are migrating between different hosts so I write a nice script to move two pieces of encrypted data between the two, one over ssh, the other over https to two separate end points. One boss says can’t do that as it is insecure because they come from the same script!

Another boss objected that I wrote a script to dump databases in bash rather than like his in PHP even all his PHP does is run the same bash commands, I just took out the middleman and made it faster.

#baddayintheoffice #anyonelookingforaseniordev

can you fix my iPhone? Why not? Because it is in Japanese! wk9

That personal Arduino project I made for my own use, is now going to the Paralympics in Rio with a potential medal winner.