Long time no rant.

Spent the last two days trying to figure out why a legacy app that I adopted (was a surprise considering I'm a database developer not c#).

Long story short horrendous view causing issues retrieving data in an app that is slow enough as it is.

I may have suggested starting a proper product roadmap and using sprint's etc for managing development of said app. And the boss agreed, currently the process is someone asks for a feature and we drop everything and develop it so things get forgotten/pushed to the back of the queue.

So to cut to the chase, can anyone suggest any places I can read up about managing this properly?

Why dont people trust you?

I was hired to be an SQL developer, I don't actually get to do much development, normally doing something involving copying and pasting in Excel.

Some of our databases were running slow and we noticed some (a few hundred) indexes were in shit state.

I knocked up a couple of scripts, one to reorganise indexes that were up to a certain amount of fragmentation and one to rebuild the indexes

My boss wants them tested (they were several times in dev) we've had these for over 3 weeks, but she doesn't want to run them.

Instead of fixing hundred of indexes she decided I should contrate on fixing some historic data issues that are preventing 10 indexes from being rebuilt.

Now there are serious issues and the CTO is asking why the indexes haven't been fixed.

I could have done this nearly a month ago, but now it's turned into a huge fucki g deal, and no doubt they'll try and push it back on me

Another rant got me thinking about this.

There must be plenty of us on here who have worked as part of or with a customer support department at some point in our careers.

What is the stupidest idea you've ever heard with regards to support?

To start things off my last place had problems with support, over worked, under staffed and expected to support 12+ versions of the same software, some clients were running installations over 15 years old without ever having applied an upgrade.

The management decided that they would get rid of the conventional triage system for tickets, you know the sort priority 1 would be system down etc.

Instead we had to log tickets at whatever priority the client said it was. Customer report written by the client has a spelling mistake? Yep that's a P1.

Client wants to change the colour of their menu? Yep P1

As you can imagine that went down like a shit sandwich

Ive been looking at starting a degree through the Open University for a while, but the prices of the courses are pretty steep (cheaper than a conventional uni) when I've got a kid on the way in a couple of months, and not wanting to take out loans etc.

The other half mentioned that some of her colleagues had paid for their uni courses with help from the Army (she is a paramedic).

I looked into it, and despite leaving the Army in 2014 I am still entitled to two claims 80% of a course upto £2000

That coupled with an unexpected bonus means I should be able to partially fund the first 2 years of the course.

I need to phone the OU to discuss how to apply etc, but I'm feeling pretty good.

I've been thinking about ways to improve my workflow for my personal projects.

I'm getting to grips with continuous integration and deployment etc, but I want to also automate, or at least semi automate my changeling generation.

I don't like using any sort of gitlog shenanigans, and I quite like the girls way of doing it.

I.e you run a script which generates a yaml file with your changeling info in, and then all the files are written into the changelog.md file.

How do you guys handle the generation of your changelings?

Had an interview at 0730 this morning, also had a surprise aptitude test, which was nice

Now we play the waiting game

Ubuntu always pulls me back in.

Fucking Debian can kiss my sweaty balls

Has anyone ever had the joy of dragging their employer kicking and screaming into the 20th century?

I've been here a little over a year, and slowly but surely I'm moving us forward.

We implemented git via GitLab (our it department already had an on premise installation), I've got us up and running with basic pipelines, I'm pushing TDD, im leading the move towards APIs for new development, and I'm implementing new projects to streamline our work, mainly by automating tasks which currently can take hours with hundreds of manual changes.

It's slow going, and there's lots of legacy business critical apps which we won't be able to change, but we're getting there.

If things keep going smoothly then I might even ask for a ride to reflect my benefit to the business, and extra responsibilities I've taken on which are far beyond my official job as an SQL Developer

Upgraded my phone at the weekend. New phone turned up a day early, and Vodafone also sent me a surprise Google Home Hub

This week has been a good week, work wise at least.

My projects are coming along, I’m getting a CI-CD server spun up so we can start making use of Gitlab runners for builds and testing (deployment is next on my list)

The boss gave good feed back in the gitlab issues I raised after a demo yesterday (new features, nothing major but it’s nice to have positive feed back)

My focus has very much been on the technical side of things, testing and de-bugging web services,

The boss is very keen for me to start implementing apis, starting with one of the apps I’m working on, so we can start writing apis for other systems which integrate with third parties.

I’m actually excited about my work again, and I think it shows, which is why they’re steering me this way.

I’m going to give it 6 months and then ask for a pay review, as I think my responsibilities have increased enough to warrant at least asking about a pay rise

Some people may remember me posting about our rabbits a while ago.

Sadly they both passed away a few weeks back.

They were both a little over a year old and died within 4 days of each other, one on Wednesday morning and then one on the Saturday morning.

After about 1200 in emergency vets fees and another 500 for a post mortem on Spencer (who died on Saturday) we found out the vets had fucked up their vaccinations.

In the U.K. it is recommended that rabbits are vaccinated against 3 viruses Myxomatosis (Myxo), Rabbit Haemorrhagic Disease Variant 1 (RHD1), and Rabbit Haemorrhagic Disease Variant 2 (RHD2).

They got their vaccinations for Myxo and RHD1 in January, and went back two weeks later for their RHD2 vaccination.

Now it turns out, when they went back for the second vaccination they were incorrectly given the Myxo and RHD1 vaccinations again.

The lab results showed Spencer had RHD, but not which variant and it is safe to assume Frank also has RHD.

The vets were going to get another lab to test for the variant but decided not too (funny that they don’t want to confirm whether it was their fuck up that killed two otherwise perfectly healthy rabbits).

The wife and I are considering getting legal advise.

What fucks me off so much is that it wasn’t a situation where there were two possible courses of treatment, or they didn’t respond to treatment, it was just a human fucking up.

The practice manager also like to keep mentioning that vaccines aren’t 100% effective, and because they won’t test for the variant of RHD we will never know 100% whether their fuck up killed our rabbits.

I’m contemplating trying to get in touch with the lab and paying for the extra tests myself.

Due to the nature of the virus it also means we can’t get anymore rabbits for 3-4 months.

So, my job title is sql Developer, but recently I’ve been balls deep in A .Net application, not an issue, but there is a huge learning curve.

Anyway, earlier in the year I spent about 2-3 months manually entering price list and exchange rates into our ERP system. I proposed an app to help make this process easier, boss was happy so I knocked up a 20+ page software design document, covered everything, and laid out a road map I.e v1 would just be MVP, and additional nice to have features would be added incrementally.

Boss didn’t read the document, and didn’t mention it again.

5 months later I get an invite to a meeting to discuss my progress, which is this afternoon.

It was always going to be something I worked on in my spare time, so I currently have 5 models to show her.

Why not mention something for months and then ask for a progress update out of the blue?

My boss isn’t a dev so will just bury them in technical details which she doesn’t really need to know

Does anyone know of any apps/companies that are using .Net core in production?

I’ve started a project at work which consists of a webapi written in dotnet core, a react spa for the front end and xunit for testing.

I’m just curious as there are loss of sites about things written in Rails, or django, but almost nothing about dotnet core.

Rabbits, who’d have em?

Came home and the wife told me one of the rabbits (Spencer) had been grumpy and unsociable.

Checked on him and he wasn’t being himself, not eating, not moving, repeatedly stretching his back legs etc.

Rabbits are very delicate and not eating is very serious, decided to bite the bullet and we took him to the out of hours vets.

He has high blood sugar, low temperature, and a distended tummy.

They’re keeping him in over night and estimated 7-800 for 12 hours in.

So, after crashing and burning during my last interview I’ve applied for another job, this time as a Technical Support Engineer.

Bringing my aspirations down slightly to spend a bit more time building up my experience.

But, the job is for a good company, and I can work from home.

So, to improve my programming I’m going to work or implementing some algorithms in several languages.

For example, Luhns algorithm in c, c++, and c#.

Can anyone suggest a good place to read up on some common algorithms etc that I can try out?

So, I decided last week to give VIM and Emacs a try, for no other reason than I can.

I found emacs a bit clunky, but VIM is actually starting to grow on me.

Can anyone recommend some good sites where I can learn about configuring vim, nothing major, but setting different indents for different languages would be handy.

Had a phone interview sat in my car.

Don’t think it went well, could be wrong, but felt like i waffles too much

Oh well, nothing ventured nothing gained.

After growing problems at work with basically being nothing more than an office junior who gets used to manually input data, with the occasional bits of development.

I sent my CV to a company one of my friends works for applying for a role as a full stack graduate developer.

I have a telephone interview tomorrow, little bit nervous

Is it worth having a personal site/portfolio if you aren’t a freelancer?

I asked on LinkedIn and the response was that personal websites are a bit 90s.

I am, slowly, making a github pages site, and I know no one is really going to be interested in my thoughts on certain topics etc, but I felt it would be a bit more attractive than just a link to my github account.

Do employers care about portfolios/github accounts etc? Or are the only interested in CVs and certificates?

If it’s the latter how do you demonstrate your skills, especially if all of your work is proprietary?

What is up with red indicators?

In America at the moment, and while they’re probably used in many countries this is the first time I’ve come across them.

Having indicators that are the same colour as your brake lights is super dumb

Why do bosses have to be such absolute bellends?

I have depression and ptsd after my time in the Army, which I was open with my boss about when I started.

It is more or less under control, but over the last month or so I’ve been going through a bit of a bad patch, and had a telling off at work about being late and using my phone too much. I’ve been doing everything that has been asked of me, but I hold my hands up and admit that I shouldn’t be using my phone (I have trouble concentrating at the moment so have a tendency to switch between things a lot like Work, emails, phone, emails, work etc. While at home I’ll have the tv on my computer and my phone switching. Between the 3)

So after my telling off and I’d calmed down a bit I sent my boss an email apology, saying I was going through a rough patch but that it isn’t an excuse and I will try harder to stop it from affecting my work etc.

She comes back with an email about she’s done this for me and that for me but she needs to see some output and wants to own some issues and see them to completion.

Now, I admit my output has been down a bit but I’ve spent the last two weeks working on some custom software that’s full of spaghetti code so it also requires time for me to get my head around it to understand what’s going on, and the guy who wrote it and is the one who knows exactly what it is that needs to be done only works 3 days a week and is only in the office for two of those, so makes it a bit difficult.

Anyway, I assume that she for got I am the person running the project (I use running in its loosest possible terms) to migrate us from SourceSafe to GitLab and if she’d bothered to look she would have seen every single piece of work that I’d committed over the last 2/3 weeks.

Luckily for me I know have to re-write all of the work I did in the last 2/3 weeks in one night.

Also because I, quite correctly, got told off I know feel like an absolute cunt, I’m getting marri d in 3 weeks and now I seriously feel like saying fuck it all and leaving everything and moving away

How do you deal with working on something that you have absolutely no interest in?

I’m working on financial software, at the moment stuff hay handles invoices etc, and even talking about for more than 2 minutes has be yawning and struggling to keep my eyes open.

Did some distro hopping at the weekend and ended up back in Ubuntu.

And for the most part everything is running like a dream, except MY motherfucking SQL.

Installation appears to be ok, but doesn’t let me set a root password, and throws errors like it’s cool when I try and change the root password.

Same goes for MariaDB.

All of my googling for a solution has so far failed me

Fucking illnesses suck ass.

On Thursday afternoon I started get a feeling of “fullness” in my left ear, nothing major, thought it was just my hay fever.

Got progressively worse and ended going to the local walk in center (out of hours drs) and got prescribed a course of anti biotics.

I know they take time to kick in and I won’t feel any effects for a day or two, but fuck me I feel rougher than a badgers arse.

I assume I have ruptured my ear drum as my ear is leaking, but the swelling means I can’t close my mouth properly, the pressure makes it feel like my head is going to burst.

So I’m setting up my personal site using GitHub pages with a custom url.

Aside from obvious stuff like a portfolio etc what should I be including?

A full cv/resume or something less formal. It’s also going to have a bit of a blog type thing going on

Decided to try something new, so enrolled in a karate class where my fiancé does her kick boxing after watching her get her black belt last weekend.

Have my first “proper” session tonight after having a free taster session on Tuesday.

Anyone else got hobbies, or recently started one which doesn’t involve computers?

So, I’ve been thinking, and I’d appreciate your opinions:

When I work through long tutorials/books where you work towards a large scale app, I.e. through a book you build I fully functioning twitter clone with private messages, secure login etc etc I always create a GitHub repo, but then I break the chapters/modules of the book into milestones, and then create issues for each task within the chapter and assign them to myself.

I also write full on “proper” commit messages.

A part of me feels like I’m a bit weird for treating these sorts of thing like a “real” project, but at the same time, it feels like a good idea to always do things properly so good practices, like quality commit messages, become second nature

Why can’t motherfuckers look where they’re going?

Went to the petrol station to put some more air in my tyres.

Some old dude was reversing out of a parking spot and had turned left so was now reversing along th back of the other parked cars.

I pulled into the car park, saw Home reversing and stopped, he was well clear of other cars, but he kept going back, I gave a little toot toot of the horn, but he decided to keep going and hit me.

It’s not the end of the world, and his insurance will cover it, but it will knack my no claims bonus.

Fucking Sunday’s, I shit ‘em

Another bout of distro hopping, this time back to Debian.

Just need to remember to keep my laptop and pc more or less in sync in terms of software and versions etc