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The inevitable happened, the user that I've answered tons of questions about freelancing deleted his account, thankfully I took backups and will recreate it [together with a killed joke] in the comments below (should've just webarchived it, meh)
I'll keep adding questions & answers I come across to make this a useful resource for people that want to get into freelancing, want to ask me something in the comments, you name it.
Might compile it into a better searchable resource eventually (some sort of blog with TOC), but right now neither do I have the time nor will to do that.
Wish I could have taken over the link that has been now posted a lot, but every post has an ID and I doubt it's possible, will tag dfox to clarify though and also floydian and devtea, that have been so nice to always post a link to that one rant.
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My Sunday Morning until afternoon. FML. So I was experiencing nightly reboots of my home server for three days now. Always at 3:12am strange thing. Sunday morning (10am ca) I thought I'd investigate because the reboots affected my backups as well. All the logs and the security mails said was that some processes received signal 11. Strange. Checked the periodics tasks and executed every task manually. Nothing special. Strange. Checked smart status for all disks. Two disks where having CRC errors. Not many but a couple. Oh well. Changing sata cables again 🙄. But those CRC errors cannot be the reason for the reboots at precisely the same time each night. I noticed that all my zpools got scrubbed except my root-pool which hasn't been scrubbed since the error first occured. Well, let's do it by hand: zpool scrub zroot....Freeze. dafuq. Walked over to the server and resetted. Waited 10 minutes. System not up yet. Fuuu...that was when I first guessed that Sunday won't be that sunny after all. Connected monitor. Reset. Black screen?!?! Disconnected all disks aso. Reset. Black screen. Oh c'moooon! CMOS reset. Black screen. Sigh. CMOS reset with a 5 minute battery removal. And new sata cable just in cable. Yes, boots again. Mood lightened... Now the system segfaults when importing zroot. Good damnit. Pulled out the FreeBSD bootstick. zpool import -R /tmp zroot...segfault. reboot. Read-only zroot import. Manually triggering checksum test with the zdb command. "Invalid blckptr type". Deep breath now. Destroyed pool, recreated it. Zfs send/recv from backup. Some more config. Reboot. Boots yeah ... Doesn't find files??? Reboot. Other error? Undefined symbols???? Now I need another coffee. Maybe I did something wrong during recovery? Not very likely but let's do it again...recover-recover. different but same horrible errors. What in the name...? Pulled out a really old disk. Put it in, boots fine. So it must be the disks. Walked around the house and searched for some new disks for a new 2 disk zfs root mirror to replace the obviously broken disks. Found some new ones even. Recovery boot, minimal FreeBSD Install for bootloader aso. Deleted and recreated zroot, zfs send/recv from backup. Set bootfs attribute, reboot........
It works again. Fuckit, now it is 6pm, I still haven't showered. Put both disks through extensive tests and checked every single block. These disks aren't faulty. But for some reason they froze my system in a way so that I had to reset my BIOS and they had really low level data errors....? I Wonder if those disks have a firmware problem? So that was most of my Sunday. Nice, isn't it? But hey: calm sea won't make a good sailor, right?3 -
Lessons I've learnt so far on programming
-- Your best written code today can be your worst tomorrow (Focus more on optimisation than style).
-- Having zero knowledge of a language then watching video tutorials is like purchasing an arsenal before knowing what a gun is (Read the docs instead).
-- It's works on my machine! Yes, because you built on Lenovo G-force but never considered the testers running on Intel Pentium 0.001 (Always consider low end devices).
-- "Programming" is you telling a story and without adding "comments" you just wrote a whole novel having no punctuation marks (Always add comments, you will thank yourself later for it I promise).
-- In programming there is nothing like "done"! You only have "in progress" or "abandoned" (Deploy progressively).
-- If at this point you still don't know how to make an asynchronous call in your favourite language, then you are still a rookie! take that from me. (Asynchronous operation is a key feature in programming that every coder should know).
-- If it's more than two conditions use "Switch... case" else stick with "If... else" (Readability should never be under-rated).
-- Code editors can MAKE YOU and BREAK YOU. They have great impact on your coding style and delivery time (Choose editors wisely).
-- Always resist the temptation of writing the whole project from scratch unless needs be (Favor patching to re-creation).
-- Helper methods reduces code redundancy by a large chunk (Always have a class in your project with helper methods).
-- There is something called git (Always make backups).
-- If you don't feel the soothing joy that comes in fixing a bug then "programming" is a no-no (Coding is fun only when it works).
-- Get angry with the bugs not the testers they're only noble messengers (Bugs are your true enemy).
-- You would learn more than a lot reading the codes of others and I mean a lot! (Code review promotes optimisation and let's you know when you are writing macaroni).
-- If you can do it without a framework you have yourself a big fat plus (Frameworks make you entirely dependent).
-- Treat your code like your pet, stop taking care of it and it dies! (Codes are fragile and needs regular updates to stay relevant).
Programming is nothing but fun and I've learnt that a long time ago.6 -
So, a few months back my mother had some issues with her windows 10 box not being able to do proper backups to a backup partition. At the same time I was pulling insane hours at work and writing on a eBook on commission for a guy, besides having small kids with on and off flu and shit.
Needless to say, I didn't have time to look at the backup issues. Well, even though my mom is one of those dogs you can't teach new tricks, she has always been resourceful enough to get help with things.
This time she picked up the phone and called Microsoft Support, got some guys to remote in and take a look. They messed around a bit and said they were done.
She phoned me up later that day to tell me how proud she was of herself for doing that. Of course, she skipped telling me the important bit about she actually calling them, rather describing it as "Microsoft was just on my computer and fixed it".
You can imagine my immediate reaction, cold sweat running down my back, adrenalin rushing in as I dug through the details of what had happened.
A few days later she calls me up again and tells me the problem is back, and we agree that even though the MS dudes was not able to fix it at first, she should try again, as she had a ticket to reference.
The next attempt by MS actually fried her partitions, and apparently they had f-ed up trying to delete and recreate the backup partition.
That's not the worst of it though. Since they fried her disk, her computer crashed and naturally the remoting won't work. In our country, they have no people on the ground to do hands on help, and they didn't have a partner near by. Her not having a win 10 usb stick, nor a spare computer to make one, she was in a surreal predicament.
She was also quite pissed, and pissed off mums are not to be messed with. She managed to get Microsoft to agree to cover the costs of a non-partner to visit her to fix the problems, and using her as the middle man, they made an agreement with the 3rd-party tech support company.
After the box was fixed though, some more issues arose... regarding billing. The 3rd-party tech support was unable to get in contact with the person at MS that was going to sign off on the bill, and again using my mom as the middle man, it was agreed that my mom, as the customer, was to be reimbursed for the bill to the 3rd-party.
Guess what... 3 months went by, with weekly follow-ups and nagging from my mom, and still no money...
At this time, I had time to help her, and after some digging and borderline stalking, we managed to get the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in my country, and she started calling them directly.
After talking to a couple who refused to help, she reached the Vice President of the country branch, and was finally able to talk to someone who gave a shit.
Still took over a month more to actually get the money, but now she had someone who actually gave her statuses, receipts and ETAs.
FUCK!2 -
Boss wanted me to make changes in company's website which was based on wordpres s.
I knew it could be done by tweaking some JS code, but I have very less experience with wordpress
But wordpress is easy man(Internet told me).
Give me 5 minutes, you will see the changes in production.
Being lazy af I directly logged in to ftp, checked out some files, updated some code, I was good to go.
Before pushing it, I opened the website and it was GONE ٩(๑´0`๑)۶
Now there was no public_html in the root.
I was fucked. I have accidentally deleted the website that had no backup.
And the best part I was on leave from
next day.
I was looking everywhere for backups, looked into google cache to get the contents. I have to recreate the complete site now.
Just when I was asking questions on choice of my profession and simultaneously looking here and there in FTP for backups,
I found the jewel "public_html".
It happens out that I have accidentally moved the folder to some other directory.
Phewww.
Moved it back to root. Site was up and running.
Reassured myself that I deserve to be a dev.
Backed up complete site, made the changes.
Uploaded it.
And the best part, amount of wordpress I learned in those three hours was way more than I could have learnt in many weeks.
Lessons Learnt :
A) ALWAYS keep backups.
B) You SHOULD NOT make changes on prod directly
C) You become superhuman when your brain know you are going to be fucked 😂3 -
The client doesn't want to give me her PIN code from GoDaddy but I need it to make changes for her.
She told me that GoDaddy's Customer Support told her she can't give her PIN to anyone. I understand that. I told her what to do but she still wants me to do it.
She came up with the idea of teleconference between me, her and GoDaddy (is that even possible?). We live in two different countries.
She could just do it by herself (as I told her what and how to do) or give me the PIN... Nope, she thinks that it's my business to make things up.
Boss wants me to carry on this because she's difficult and may make us bad PR even if she's not right. He doesn't want a shitstorm to handle.
We made few projects for her in the past, she gave us access to all her WordPresses, FTPs, backups, authinfo codes etc but still doesn't trust us. She always thinks dozen times before she gave us some data.
And she's not even a business client. She runs a few blogs about her hobbies. She doesn't make money from them. It's not a big deal but she treats it like a treasure.
It's not easy to be gentle and kind :)3 -
When you try and replace the hard drive in your dev machine because the replacement you bought for someone else doesn't work but works for you. You go to turn the computer back on but nothing comes on screen........
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Allrighty, so we have a huge migration upcoming. The planning started early this spring. We've split the whole process into separate tasks and estimated each of them. Also marked all the tasks client should take care of itself so save funds and time. All-in-all the whole thing estimated like 4 months if we did it [single dev, tremendous amounts of communication with various parties, buy and prepare the infra, adapt app to the changes, testing, monitoring, etc.] and like a month if client did the tasks we shouldn't be doing. The funding for migration is time-bound and can only be used before December. Cool! We got notified that by the end of April we should be good to go! Plenty of time to do things right!
April comes. Silence. Mid-april we resch out to the client. Since there's plenty of time left migration is getting lower priority to other tasks. Well allright, sort of makes sense. We should migrate mid-July. Cool!
July comes. Client replies that everyone's on vacation now. Gotta wait for August - will do the quicker version of migration to make it on time. Well allright....
August comes. Everyone's vusy with whatever they've postponed during summer. Hopefully we'll start migration in September. Mhm...
September comes. We're invited to a meeting by project funders to explain tasks' breakdown, justify the time needed to make the migration. We're being blamed for surreal estimations and poor organization of tasks as nothing's happened yet... [they were the ones who always were postponing things....]. Moreover, they can only spare 20% of infra resources required for data alone anf they want us to make that enough for all environments, all components, all backups, all databases,... You get the pic.
The leader of the meeting semi silently mumbled to other participants 'Well then I'm afrsid we can't make a full migration in time.. Only partial. That's very unfortunate, very. That's why we should not have incopetent vendors [*glancing at us*]'
somehow we agreed we'll get the resources mid-November and we should be thankful for him bcz he'll have to pull some strings for... us..
I left the meeting with my fists squeezed so hard! But it's okay, we got smth useful: resources and start date. Although it leaves us with less than a month to do smth requiring a month for a sunny-day scenario. Nvm, still doable.
Last week we get an email that resources will be available at the beginning of December [after deadline] and we should start a full migration no sooner than Nov 12. Which leaves us with 50% of our estimated fucking optimistic scenario time and not enough resources to even move a single db.
Fuck I hate politics in dev... Is it wrong for me to want to tie them to a pole, set them on a veeery slow fire and take a piss on them while they're screaming their shitty lungs out? I'd enjoy the view and the scream. I know I would. And while enjoying I might be tempted to take a burning 20cm diameter wooden stick and shove it up their assholes. Repeatedly. Round-robin. Promissing them I'll take it out in 5 seconds and pulling it out after 2 minutes.
Can I?8 -
If any of you have been following my last few rants, you'll know I've been working on a project with a particularly difficult client, trying to meet wholly unrealistic deadlines with only one other developer.
The situation has reached the climax. The client had a call with our project manager and boss on Monday to discuss things. Despite them still not having paid a single bill since October, they've demanded the release date be moved to the 6th April. Apparently we'd agreed to release on this date, despite making no such promises, the (optimistic) deadline we were working towards has always been, since it was set about 2 weeks ago, the 16th April.
Apparently AWS migration won't take as long as we think it will, because the designers that do the CSS for this project say so, despite knowing nothing about the architecture of the requirements of the system once live (like if backups are required and what of).
The bottom line is that client is ending development with us the day after the project goes live to give it to their own in-house team. If they want us to work more after the date, they have to buy blocks of days.
To make things better, a large part of new functionality relies on an external API we can't even begin to do learning tests with, let alone integrate due to back-office errors on their end. They've had since Friday to give us our token, yet here we are.
Something tells me my holidays booked for for the first week of April are going by the wayside.4 -
I was thinking about the problems one of our clients faced with the launch of their project the other day, because things were rushed, stuff was omitted and in the end they could not meet the launch date, and I started making a list of hard lessons I learned over the years that would have helped them avoid this situation.
Feel free to add yours in the comments.
- Never deploy on Friday
- Never make infrastructure changes right before a launch
- Always have backups. Always!
- Version control is never optional
- A missed deadline is better than a failed launch
- If everything is urgent, nothing is important
- Fast and cheap, cheap and quality, quality and fast. Only one pair at a time can be achieved
- Never rush the start or the end of a project
- Stability is always better that speed
- Make technical decisions based on the needs of the project two years from now
- Code like you will be the only maintainor of the project two years from now. You probably will...
- Always test before you deploy
- You can never have too many backups (see above)
- Code without documentation is a tool without instructions
- Free or famous does not necessarily mean useful or good
- If you need multiple sentences to explain a method, you should probably refactor
- If your logic is checked beforehand, writing the code becomes way easier
- Never assume you understand a request the first time around. Always follow up and confirm
There are many more that should be on this list, but this is what came to mind now.2 -
lol
found an old config file on my external drive for all my torrent files. awyisss. my SSD died out of nowhere last year and I thought I lost all my torrent configs! I had hundreds of TV series and stuff and I kept track which ones I watched and didn't in the client. so when the SSD died I lost all my knowledge of my progress. but I found this config file just now and imported it. omg booyah. I think I got one show since this backup. godsend
decided to export settings again and it said I can set it on a schedule. go to the scheduler tab in the settings and I have no clue what's going on. nothing about exporting settings, it just has schedule configurations that seem to conflict. then I realized. the main client maybe has a schedule tab icon. bam am right. so in settings I turn on scheduler and then the main app gives me access to the scheduler tab and if I go there I can click "add" and then I can schedule regular config backups
bruh this UI is so jank. but it actually is impressive. because. while I have experience in designing websites, when I played around with making a GUI in rust, which would be native, I have absolutely no clue how to make an app on this tech. now I'm looking at this complex torrent client with its bazillion features in absolute awe.
*takes notes*
I can only aspire to be so genius as to allow you to turn on and remove tabs in the settings menu. now it makes sense why all the windows always had awkwardly sized panels. this genius man.
however did he come up with that?! ALL THESE NEW STANDARDS
honestly somehow it never occurred to me that native apps and web apps would have totally different ergonomics. I feel like I've found some kind of lost art from the ancient world. aaaaaaa
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