I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.

Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.

So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.

How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.

Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.

Fuck everything about Microsoft Dynamics. I'm supposed to use the REST API to make a web front-end. I notice all of the data comes back codified.

null == 0.
boolean true == 100000000
boolean false == 100000001

except sometimes when

boolean false == 100000000
boolean true == 100000001

or other times

string "Yes" == 100000000
string "No" == 100000001
string "Maybe" == 100000003

Hang on. Is the system representing a 1 bit value with base 10 numbers? Did the client set this up like this? Holy crap every number corresponds to a unique record in a table somewhere. That means it only returns numeric values instead of strings and I have to figure out what the number means in the context of the table.

A "key" is user typed? So every time someone starts to make a new record it saves a new "key" without a record? So I can pull a bunch of "0" records if I pull sequentially? So basically I need to see all of the data in Dynamics to have any context at all for what is returned from the Dynamics API? Fuuuuuuuuuu

I hate buying new laptops. HATE IT. The manufacturers are always trying to do something that makes it more complicated to buy a laptop confidently.

Why not name all of the laptops with numbers? Make them really hard to differentiate. Then offer the same model number across multiple years so it is difficult to determine which year the laptop is from.

Oh. And let’s make sure every laptop has a major flaw in the form factor.

Let’a add a numpad that squishes the keyboard to the left in a weird way. Lets do something to the trackpad to make it awkward to use. Maybe the keyboard should have a weird configuration. Maybe we can put 4 spare characters of various colours on the symbol key caps. How about a battery only lasts a few hours. May we add specialized hardware so you are stuck with windows. Maybe we can make it super thick and heavy. Lets have a screen with terrible viewing angles. Since this laptop has no major flaws we should overprice it. No repairs or upgrades on this one because we filled the computer with glue. Lets double the amount of useless media keys.

It is like manufacturers are trying to design laptops like RPG game character classes. The fighter has no magic or stealth. The magician is weak and gets fatigued. The rogue is very stealthy but has poor defence and attack. The cleric can use magic but only to heal so it is useless in battle. The ranger is good at distance but has poor defence and no magic.

The only notebooks sold that are trying to make balanced character classes are MacBooks. Those cost a premium and aren’t reparable.

It’s bring your dog to work day today. Um okay.

Phase one of the project we assembled a team for rapid development. The client was enthusiastic about the progress that the team made in a short time. They specifically requested the same team for phase two of the project. Executives replaced everyone on the team except me.

I looked at the new team and basically everyone on it is less technical.

The documentation/website I was reading uses a time-delay animation. Just when I am back into working in the code on my main monitor the animation pops up and distracts me from the code I was writing.

We are all @Irene on this blessed day.

Account manager: "We somehow managed to take unmaintainable spaghetti code for money again. This is a great opportunity for you."

DOCKER ON WINDOWS</rant>

I can’t say I understand the humour here yet but I’m lucky to have found a whole rant based community for people named Devin.

Does anyone enjoy their Windows development laptop? I fight with it so much. I would be happy to smack it hard with a hammer for all of the embarrassing things it has done in front of customers.

They are trusting me to build a multi million dollar system yet for some reason I can't join a Skype meeting, or my mic doesn't work, or the scaling on screen makes everything look oversized.

What am I supposed to say? "Trust me to build your system. I swear I'm not as retarded as I appear."

Customer: “How many concurrent users can use this app?”
Me: “web tech is stateless. (Insert explanation) So concurrency is meaningless.”
Customer: “yeah but how many concurrent users?”
Me: “infinite as long as they aren’t interacting with the server.”
Customer: “but how many?”
Me: “400”

Last day of agile project i get asked for confirmation that the alpha system can handle 100000 records. We have had no load testing requests only feature pushes every sprint.

I see the back-end guys have used EF in a search function that eager joins a bunch of tables. Then the results get sorted and filtered in application code. It works fine for a few hundred records but the customer will do about 100k new records a year.

Yeah this won’t meet requirements. I wish they asked for some load testing before the last day. They aren’t going to like that one person can do a search every 15 seconds by the end of the year when I tell them. FML