Is it just me?

Feels like when you’re working in an agency, all that is heard is “this person doesn’t know what they’re doing” if you bring up problems and issues, especially proactively.

How is it, that features goes thru the entire mill of dev, staging, preview.
Then when deployed to production, things blow up..
Turns out, columns are nullable only in production DB and of course, those happen to be null in there.

If I had a dime for every time I’ve seen shit like this…

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Anybody else that low-key hates step debugging async code in nodejs ?

Miss the simplicity of synchronously execution flow… Like debugging php with xdebug ☺️

Is there anything nicer than having home office Friday and meeting up Monday only to discover that you were excluded from a meeting that Friday and they decided on a bunch of things that invalidates a lot of your past weeks work, making it top priority to resolve and now exceeding deadlines…

I have a ton.
This one is more about my own foolhardiness, but I also learned a ton and came out stronger & wiser.

when I started out as a dev (my very first job!) and had not learned to say no.
I was a novice way out of my playground.

Like lifting a full booking platform from legacy php to Laravel & launching it like yesterday because it’s high season.
Didn’t know the full domain, so I just built something quite different in a week and shafted the existing db into it.

Obviously wasn’t feature complete or anything, so it resulted in maintaining legacy while building the new one and because it was already live and on different domains, we didn’t fully know which ppl went to, I had to every day painstakingly back port data from both platforms.
What I initially thought would take a few weeks that was launched in 3 days, spanned across 2 years plus one year refining and cleaning up my mess.

Today i fucked up trying to generate stats from sales and forgetting to check if sale state was completed or cleared.

Causing sales and revenue on the report l to be inflated by sales that’s failed 3DS checks, bails, bank rejects and other failure states.

Go on have a cheap laugh at my silly incompetence 😂

Built a whole test suite around our Laravel app which has been pointed out to exec as slowing down CI and yielding no value to the user.

Arguing it’s ensuring something our users is using doesn’t accidentally break just gets brushed off as incompetence.

Oh well, I’ll just skip tests in CI and continue writing and running tests on my own as I don’t feel confident just cowboy fixing things.

Friday, forced deploy day for last & current months work. Been stockpiled due to holiday.

Yesterday boss demoed the product to clients so they expect to test today.

Early o'fuck this morning, a coworker managed to drop all secrets and env vars from CI pipelines and trigger a deploy leaving production broken...

It's gonna be a long and busy Friday...

Narrow my skillset down to a few masteries.
Gotta stop being jack of all techs 🤣

Be less harsh and judgemental towards myself.

Guest user by having all non authenticated sessions automatically assigned to user ID 0.

Let's just say.. it's not fun having all guests be able to view each others purchases and invoices.

So we ended up just always returning empty everywhere for user 0

Really just an average week.
Just feel I need a bit of venting. (:

@meet: (monday)
- mgr: we need video transcoding and VOD ASAP.
- dev: on what server? It's expensive, especially without a GPU.
- mgr: prod is beefy. Put it there.
- dev: everything else is gonna crawl then.
- mgr: you have till the end of this week.

@demo (Friday)
- dev: k, it's ready.
- mgr: Why is everything slow??!
- dev: transcoding. Expensive.
- mgr: Why do we transcode? Never said I wanted transcode!
Can't we upload to YT?
- dev: ...yes. But will then each customer that wants VOD will need to setup YT studio and provide an endpoint and stream key.
- mgr: OK. But we're now behind schedule because of this and the customers will not be pleased.
- dev: oh, didn't know we're into gaming.
- mgr: ???
- dev: nvm, see you Monday.

...
Later Friday evening
...
*ding* mgr has added 5 new tasks to your list.
*ding* mgr subtracted 30 points from you.
reason: deadline over due.

Ya ya, the usual shenanigans.
Time to mute for the weekend.

Just needing to vent a bit...

We start off with classic asp.net & Xamarin. K.

Then we run into the shitshow that's lackluster documentation and heavy push for asp.net core.
Whatever, will just handroll things.

K. Azure is quickly turning expensive..
Well let's find alternatives.

Yeah, no Linux ain't gonna work.
Wanna shell out for a windows server? Nah.
K. Well, let's rewrite in asp.net core then.
Nginx proxy passthrough to kestrel. Ez.

Now.. wtf is the deal with mssql behaving like a turd on Linux?
Oh now some security jibber about telemetry and adding Microsoft keys to root.

Whatever. I can do PHP & MariaDB then.

1001 things wrong about Xamarin now.
Mostly performance related.
Especially cuz custom renderers for everything.
& Abused onPropertyChanged.

Uh la la, look at that sexy thing called react native.
Hippytyhop new tool for the job.

Ugh wee, what's this ? Customer impatient & deadline for months worth in Xamarin => 1 week.

Whelp I be fudge..

Here's something not quite a rant, but relatable. And an issue. For me at least.

------

You get really proficient with a set of tools.
- Can solve things in an efficient & elegant manor.
But it's now boring.

You find some new exciting stack, research like a madman. Possessed.
Your perfectionist self, seldom doesn't want to settle.
You burn out from pressure & deadlines.
You feel inadequate, imposter syndrome settles in.

You reminisce of the easy days when you (thought) knew everything.

Decide to rebuild using that past stack.

Gets bored.

You notice something new & exciting.. loop iterates to next repetition.

Always liked to tinker with software.
And build stuff.

The latter started out the opposite, used to be a bonafide skid.
Until I learned that the most efficient way to break in, is to know how it's built.

My specialty? Mmh probably Laravel, MySQL, Vue & NuXT JS.
& React native.

Built quite a few things with those tools.

.net, asp, sqlsrv, Xamarin & uwp is in my toolbelt too tho.

Whichever tool is the better fit 😁

When you're on GitHub *Free* and your account gets disabled cuz they're unable to charge your card..

Well. I've postponed switching to GitLab long enough.

c'est la vie.. i guess.

Sometimes I wonder if it's the norm, that the frontend reassemble almost nothing on the backend...

Even worse when a solution is agreed and sold one way, but implemented another.
Usually eliminating the opportunity to properly expand on, without hacky work-arounds.. further driving the technical debt..

Thank you for FlexGate, Apple.
And by extension, Louis Rossmann.
For ranting about it.

My GFs MacBook Air suffers from it and the support program doesn't want to cover it.
That has made her open to try new options.

I'm pretty sure she's now hooked on Elementary OS. 🎉
The real test comes when she brings it to school tho. :)

Worst of 2020?

Well, I've learnt never to do free / voluntary work.

Been spending many weekends helping out a former friend, mostlyby creating APIs, sites, managing servers & scripting.

Now that I have a girlfriend, my weekends are spent mostly with her.

He got really mad, said he doesn't want to waste time.

Then went to *pay* someone else to continue what I've been doing...

How do you feel about devs that love closures & overloads to an almost abusive extent?

I feel like a lot of devs, last years self included.

Need to realize, a great Dev is not necessarily one that Ace in code.

But rather one that can convey and understand the problems they're to solve and more importantly the perspective of the end user.

Wk88 i basically see "I'm a beta that belittles myself, because everybody else seems to be so much better than me.."

While I certainly know how it feels, that mantra & mindset will lead to void or null.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy and life's a bitch that'll keep ya down if you let it.

It's gonna be rough, but ye gotta stop calling yourself inadequate and start working on honing your skills.

No great feat happens over night, it takes practice and dedication.

A present from the boss, isn't she adorable

A present from the office, a "magic" mug..

How sweet.

Same as every year, attempt to take over the world!

Honestly tho, I don't put goals for myself as I never reach em.

Just going with the flow, not giving too much a damn about anything and seeing what comes ;)

Brining the funny by letting my selfie speak by itself. :)

Happy holidays.

https://eelo.io looks very interesting, especially for the privacy aware.. :)

On a nostalgia note; Behind the company, it's said to be the creator of Mandrake.

One thing that slightly triggers me..

When people start a sentence with question and/or exclamation mark..

"!? Are you fucking kidding me??"

Having a tendency to interpret it as a statement rarely works out well...

One of my hardest hurdles, is to write something that's just good enough.

And not waste hours making it an inch closer to perfect..

Writing half baked but functional solutions haunts me...

What's some valuable things you've learned this year?

I'll start.
Always ask myself, if I can elaborate on any given statement, otherwise just keep shut.

Always ask yourself before writing any code, if it's gonna be easy to modify later on, if not, take a step back and evaluate the bigger picture.

Don't bother with writing things clean in the first go.
It'll be much easier to refactor later on and take less total time.

Working out regularly.

It's a nice break and it wakens my mind and body.

And it eliminate tension headaches