I just "had to" send a tutorial on semantic versioning to my boss the other day. he was like, wait, i thought we were further along than 1.1.1, didn't we release 1.0.11 before?

idiot.

My org (of which i'm basically CTO) has this administrative tool that a team uses to combat spam and scams, which is quite the problem for us.. the tool was written like 9 years ago, by my predecessor, very quick & dirty and unaesthetic and without input from those who would use it as far as interface or UX... it got modded a little a few years later by a kind of amateur coder who was at the time on the spam control team, and now there's this new maybe slightly less amateur coder guy on the team who has written this amateur tool that scrapes data off our site and massages it and stores it on his own server and then provides a better interface, or so they say.... this is all because for a couple of years people didnt want to "bother me" with a request to improve our internal tool, they thought I was "too busy" doing other things... so instead this outsider has built this stupid thing that lives on his own personal server and so now we have these problems to do with performance, security, privacy for user info, etc etc... someone please shoot me....

fuck zsh. what was wrong with bash, Apple?

The downside of writing reusable, abstracted, DRY code for multiple applications to use: you have to remember to test changes in all the contexts... my org has to hire contractors project by project as we dont have the budget to have more devs than just 1 (me) on permanently. the contractors tho often don't know about all the places our code gets used. And sometimes I even forget - last week in the rush to finish some project, we forgot to think about how a library change made for benefit of a new project a few weeks ago might effect an older (in production) project. Until shit started breaking. Annoying. very annoying. luckily i fixed it (rolled back) before the weekend, but thursday and friday were quite stressful... now tomorrow, a bunch of sleuthing time to figure out exactly what recent change caused it... argh....

Firefox

what the fuck is up with devs who always send screenshots of code and/or log files? In Slack, which has great functionality for formatting text snippets in a variety of languages and data types?! screenshots of code are really a pet peeve lately. You can't copy the text or click on any urls or do *anything* with a fucking screenshot. so dumb.

I'm happy to be getting a raise, but why do I have to have lunch with the boss to get it? I don't want to hang out with him.

"SEP" is something I hear a lot from people that work under me. Sadly, for me it's never someone else's problem. It's always mine.

well shit. i get back from vacation to find out that facebook disabled our fb app for some violation i forgot to fix before leaving. fuckfuckfuck.

usually the worst drunk coding problem i have is leaving nasty comments in the code about the previous maintainers. Or ranting more vehemently on here than is really warranted... ;)

In other words it doesnt affect my coding, it just affects my social skills.... lol...

Boss needs certain stats pulled from database once a year for board meeting. This time I delegate it to a junior dba/sysadmin. He looks at my 3-year-old docs that I hastily jotted down and pasted and included my rambling notes with results from way back then. Mostly they were just to jog my own memory, not to be a really neat, clean instruction guide. He does the queries correctly, but in ticket for boss he pastes also all my notes from the docs. boss gets confused, "what is this other number, I don't get it?!" We have to have a meeting of the 3 of us and waste an hour or so just to figure out what went wrong, finally I realize what junior guy accidentally did. Moral of story: to avoid baffling the nontechs, always simplify, simplify, simplify. Alternate moral of story: before delegating a task that seems old hat to you, always review your notes/docs and make sure they're ready for someone else to use them.

Lost my temper at one of our volunteer moderators the other day. We had to do a test using live data, our sysadmin warned him, but not far enough in advance and not really by the right channels. So that was on us. sorry not sorry. But so then he didn't believe us. He must be a geek too cuz he responded with some stupid math problem for me to solve, as if that would prove we work here and aren't hackers or scammers. I replied "how about if i just kick you out of your own group and delete your account, would that convince you?" And so I did. Asshole. Of course I had to apologize later and get a lecture from the boss, but it was kinda worth it.

QA/stakeholder person: can you add the following links to the footer?
devs: sure. easy.
devs: oh wait, 3 of those links are 404. Are you planning to create those pages? or were those urls just a suggestion?
<crickets>
devs: ok well for now we'll leave those out.
stakeholder (a day later): hey these 3 links are still not in the footer!
devs: yeah we asked about that yesterday.
boss: the links are there now
devs (quietly): fuck you.

A lot of people on here seem really really REALLY angry. I guess that's the idea.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." – Arthur C. Clarke

(especially to non-tech people)

Part of a little lecture I gave my boss this week: "... you really should stop taking things so casually and so for granted. ALL of this stuff is not just something you can summarize in a single vague word or phrase like "stuck" or "kick the tires" or whatnot. there's no "magic" to any of this. there's no buttons or knobs you just touch with one finger and stuff magically works. it's all way more complicated than you probably think, ALL the time. And making assumptions will always get us in trouble." (To a tech-illiterate boss who always uses vague verbage like "stick this on the server" and has no idea how anything works.)

I f*cking hate "ticket creep". I feel like half my worktime (as a tech lead) is spent just to contain what people ask for or report in a ticket. "No, you fool, this ticket isn't about that, file a different one!" is what i'm most likely to be thinking during any work day.

A few Challenges at my job:
- a CEO with zero tech skills and zero memory.
- a sysadmin with literal brain damage and epilepsy (but he's great, we just have had to learn how to deal with it)
- another (volunteer) sysadmin who we call @God on Slack and who usually only shows up in extreme crises.
- the budget of a tiny organization, the web traffic of a huge site.
- incoherent business logic subject to the whims of volunteers and the loudest users
- a main revenue stream that contradicts our main mission.

it's fun! woot.

One of our servers had a disk fail this week. Luckily it's 1 of 3 in a RAID5 array. And, luckily, it was our mostly-dev box and didn't have any production stuff on it, except for some support things. We scheduled a disk replacement with the hosting company, took everything down, waited. Somebody at the hosting company apparently didn't know we'd scheduled the replacement, saw the machine was down, and brought it up again. Sigh. Finally they did the replacement, got it back up, but now we're seeing an ethernet port flapping, suggested they have someone go in and make sure all the jacks are fully seated, maybe one got loose when they were doing the disk switch. Bureacracy reared up again and we got the boilerplate "if there's a hardware issue suspected please boot into rescue mode and run the tests"... sigh...

#facepalm

as my first rant here I thought i'd start with one of my favorite relevant quotes:
"If only it weren't for the people, the goddamned people, always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren't for them, earth would be an engineer's paradise."
-Kurt Vonnegut, "Player Piano"