Why do people get an idea that Ctrl+Alt+[character] is a good combination for keyboard shortcuts? Just because your keyboard layout doesn't have a special character for Ctrl+Alt+Z, it doesn't mean other people don't! Did you ever stop to think that more than half buttons on your keyboard already have a Ctrl+Alt (~AltGr) binding, so maybe, just fucking maybe, other keyboard layouts could have that kind of bindings for other buttons as well? You've got 38 published works, you boast your years of experience, yet you can't fucking consider some basic real-world problems when working on a piece of software!

God I fucking hate people like these, with their PhDs and no actual hands-on experience, they're always so smug about their work and expect you to pay them millions, but fail to understand that details like those are why people pick you instead of some cheap student, and that's where their salary comes from.

User Ip Address is too long (maximum is 30 characters).

Okay, dear third-party API, I guess users with IPv6 don't deserve the service... And wtf is 30-char limit for an IP address, when IPv4 can be only 15 characters long, and IPv6 can be up to 39 characters? Did you calculate a weighted average of IP length to get that number?

Guess I'm doing lämp stack now 🤷‍♀️

Customer's idea of checking if hotel delivery is available:

IF ("Location name" CONTAINS "hotel delivery") THEN ...

Note it's a multilanguage site, so location name could be in either of about 30 languages...

A project I'm working on uses Elastic for internal monitoring and logs. The customer asked to access those logs - not something we'd normally do, but it's isolated from other things we use and there's no critical data there, so what the heck, let them have it.

Ever since, we're getting tons of questions like "There are tons of [insert random info message] all the time, do you have any plans to resolve them?" and it gets to the point where I'm just about ready to scream back "NO, SUZAN, BOOKING NOT COMPLETED MANS THE USER F###ING CANCELLED IT, IT'S NOT SOMETHING I CAN FIX IN THE CODE"

Edit: the customer's name isn't actually Suzan

Okay, so I'm developing a system for a global rent-a-car broker. Basically website + a bunch of third party APIs + analytics, it's been running in production for over 4 years now.

Anyway, we had to connect our system to an external rental insurance API, nothing too complicated, got it to production in a month and it seemed to work okay, except the insurance provider claimed they're not getting any analytics data, which was weird, because there were no errors with API calls, and customers had no problem with the insurance.

After going back and forth for a month, we finally figured what's going on: after each API request, the insurance provider expected us to send the exact same data to their analytics API, because for whatever dumb reason they were unable to internally log requests in their analytics database.

tl;dr: we're doing 2 API calls with the exact same data to different endpoints, because a large rent-a-car insurance provider can't log their own analytics data.

The way I learned new stuff

Customer: CSS is not loading on [specific phone model & browser], here's a screenshot

"Multiline strings can be used as block comments in Python." Except in some places, where your code will pretty much blow up without any errors, because instead of commenting out a portion of an array, you've just added one big string element. And there's no other way to make block comments. And after actually commenting out every single line, your version control won't know how to merge it anymore, because there are now 100 changed lines instead of 2.