I just watched https://youtube.com/watch/... - towards the (very) end he's talking about how software developers rule the world... and I just realized something.

A while back, I was working on an accounting sub system for a SaaS product. We managed some of the revenue of our customers and had the accounting for that part as well. Revenue + Payments (with all the VAT / sales tax / ... that you need to have). BUT no expenses.

One day, the head accountant of a customer, angrily demanded that we immediately implement a new payment method, called commission.

You don't need to be an accounting expert for knowing, that a commission is an expense you have because somebody else marketed / sold your product / service for you. Making it a payment method is probably wrong. With a bit more knowledge you'd know that the taxes which are around expenses are completely different to revenue or payments. (btw payments didn't even have any taxes in those countries that we covered at that time at least).

So there I was standing, a software developer, trying to explain the product manager and the head accountant of our customer, that the idea is beyond stupid, and the fact that it comes from an accountant is super scary to me. (he was usually extremely picky about everything we did.)

Luckily, it was easy to convince the manager. He tried to explain it to the accountant but that person just didn't get it.

as if designing resilient distributed systems, which have 99,99% up time weren't hard enough, we also need to be experts in every domain that we have to deal with? And if there is a tiny bug and one out of 10s of thousands of transactions is screwed up, people start panicking and "loose trust in the product"? - what the hell is wrong with them?

Luckily it's a minority of customers only, but each of them is such a pain. Do you also have customers like that? who should know better, but somehow you are the expert in their domain?

I had a colleague, who built a bunch of smaller systems for the company I'm working in. He didn't want to waste his time building a "perfect" system (which I generally agree with, the question is just where to draw the line).

But because it took him so long to build the prototype, usually it went into production without being hardened (like basic input validations were missing. It wouldn't allow anything malicious, but instead of a validatiom error it'd just 500).

When he left, literally less then a week later, one of his systems, which was a prototype and nobody except him could maintain, because it was done in a fancy new technology, which wasn't even v1 at that time and their documentation said, it's production ready when we release v1. Anyway, that one system started crashing just few days after him leaving. Another Dev and me tried to fix it, but every time we touched it, it just got worse.

At some point, we gave up and just configured a cron job to reboot it every 12h. He could have probably fixed it, but to us it was just black magic.

Anyhow, this rent isn't about him, AFAIK all the systems still working, as long as you provide the correct input. Nor is it about the management decisions, which lead to this Frankenstein service on live support, which we had to increase, to be restarted every 8 hours, 6h, 4h, 3h, .....

It's about the service itself, which I'm looking forward to every day, when the rewrite will be done and I can nuke the whole git repository.

I was even thinking about moving all the related files onto a USB stick and putting that on 🔥, once we're done rewriting it....

Maybe next month or in 2. Hopefully before we'll have to configure the cron job to restart the service every couple minutes....

switched from windows 10 to kubuntu 18.10 (yes it's not arch or gentoo) last week, after the previous system crashed and burned

I had no idea, my laptop can be so fast and work almost entirely without a fan. Live is beautiful again!

rent / question (there is a question at the end and I'd appreciate your opinion)

8 months ago, I agreed to help a not too distant relative of mine to do his master thesis at the company where I work. He was supposed to build something really MVP, but useful for us and I'd help him get some scientific questions out of it, and provide him with (computing) resources to test his theories / implementations under simulated and much heavier load.

Since then, he didn't get done anything even remotely useful, always just stuck on very rudimentary issues, claimed things are almost ready, I wrote a quick smoke test to prove that the whole application blows up when you touch it, in short - a disaster and went over to radio silence.

In the meanwhile, we didn't need it anymore, so 1.5 months ago, I got in touch with him again, with an even more technical proposal, something, at least I'd think, that's even cooler to do. He asked me some question about hypothetical load, the system should be able to handle eventually, to come up with alternative implementations to compare them against each other. He said that his exam period is going to be over soon and he'll get back to me with some initial version.

2 weeks ago, I got back in touch with him, trying to urge him, to get finally started and get something done. If he'd actually sit down and do it during the holidays as a "full time job", he'd be probably done in 2 weeks. Last week, he came back to me and said he has an initial PR ready to review.

I was excited about it, but basically froze when I realized what he did. He deleted all his previous work - some infrastructure stuff which took us basically 3 months of back and forth to get running - and as far as I could see, all the new code were only auto generated clients based on a swagger specification. In short - I could do it in less then an hour. If you really have no idea what you're doing, it might take you half a day, but definitely nowhere near to a week.

His brother, which a good friend of mine, thinks I'm being too hard on him. His argument was, that it's too hard, and he has to do it in C#, but he only knows Java (I gave him access to some of our repositories to copy paste code together, he didn't need to invent anything. I also prefer C# but wrote my master thesis in Java) Personally, I'm just pissed because he promises stuff that he never does. I totally understand him - I was like that as a student as well, I guess karma is a ... but still, he's wasting my time.

Right now I'm thinking how to get out of this, without having even more time wasted. I doubt he'd ever deliver anything useful. He got plenty of input from me about what he could consider for his scientific question, how to measure performance, ... He can keep his credentials to access our test environment with the test data, but I won't give him access to any additional computing resources, to compare how his solutions might scale on our company's cost. (mainly it's not the money, but I'd have to provide that stuff, and probably help him set it up)

does it sound like a fair deal (saying, I'm done with you. You can finish your topic on your own, but don't expect any help from me)? or am I being a dick about it and too demanding?

Just came across a function with a typo (this is in TypeScript) - let's call the function slightlyComplicaedName - see the typo? t is missing. Wanted to refactor the function name to fix the typo. Next thing I know, the project doesn't compile anymore. There was already a function called slightlyComplicatedName in that file and it was doing something completely different.

I get that naming is hard, but using typos to differentiate between functions seems too much :)

How to tell this person nicely, to provide meaningful commit messages?

I know it took me probably for ever to learn it myself, and not all of them are meaningful, but come on ...