!rant

This was over a year ago now, but my first PR at my current job was +6,249/-1,545,334 loc. Here is how that happened... When I joined the company and saw the code I was supposed to work on I kind of freaked out. The project was set up in the most ass-backward way with some sort of bootstrap boilerplate sample app thing with its own build process inside a subfolder of the main angular project. The angular app used all the CSS, fonts, icons, etc. from the boilerplate app and referenced the assets directly. If you needed to make changes to the CSS, fonts, icons, etc you would need to cd into the boilerplate app directory, make the changes, run a Gulp build that compiled things there, then cd back to the main directory and run Grunt build (thats right, both grunt and gulp) that then built the angular app and referenced the compiled assets inside the boilerplate directory. One simple CSS change would take 2 minutes to test at minimum.

I told them I needed at least a week to overhaul the app before I felt like I could do any real work. Here were the horrors I found along the way.

- All compiled (unminified) assets (both CSS and JS) were committed to git, including vendor code such as jQuery and Bootstrap.
- All bower components were committed to git (ALL their source code, documentation, etc, not just the one dist/minified JS file we referenced).
- The Grunt build was set up by someone who had no idea what they were doing. Every SINGLE file or dependency that needed to be copied to the build folder was listed one by one in a HUGE config.json file instead of using pattern matching like `assets/images/*`.
- All the example code from the boilerplate and multiple jQuery spaghetti sample apps from the boilerplate were committed to git, as well as ALL the documentation too. There was literally a `git clone` of the boilerplate repo inside a folder in the app.
- There were two separate copies of Bootstrap 3 being compiled from source. One inside the boilerplate folder and one at the angular app level. They were both included on the page, so literally every single CSS rule was overridden by the second copy of bootstrap. Oh, and because bootstrap source was included and commited and built from source, the actual bootstrap source files had been edited by developers to change styles (instead of overriding them) so there was no replacing it with an OOTB minified version.
- It is an angular app but there were multiple jQuery libraries included and relied upon and used for actual in-app functionality behavior. And, beyond that, even though angular includes many native ways to do XHR requests (using $resource or $http), there were numerous places in the app where there were `XMLHttpRequest`s intermixed with angular code.
- There was no live reloading for local development, meaning if I wanted to make one CSS change I had to stop my server, run a build, start again (about 2 minutes total). They seemed to think this was fine.
- All this monstrosity was handled by a single massive Gruntfile that was over 2000loc. When all my hacking and slashing was done, I reduced this to ~140loc.
- There were developer's (I use that term loosely) *PERSONAL AWS ACCESS KEYS* hardcoded into the source code (remember, this is a web end app, so this was in every user's browser) in order to do file uploads. Of course when I checked in AWS, those keys had full admin access to absolutely everything in AWS.
- The entire unminified AWS Javascript SDK was included on the page and not used or referenced (~1.5mb)
- There was no error handling or reporting. An API error would just result in nothing happening on the front end, so the user would usually just click and click again, re-triggering the same error. There was also no error reporting software installed (NewRelic, Rollbar, etc) so we had no idea when our users encountered errors on the front end. The previous developers would literally guide users who were experiencing issues through opening their console in dev tools and have them screenshot the error and send it to them.
- I could go on and on...

This is why you hire a real front-end engineer to build your web app instead of the cheapest contractors you can find from Ukraine.

*casually clicking through aws services*

*discoveres ses (email service)*

*tries it out as email driver in laravel project*

*discoveres you are in sandbox by default, means you can only send emails to yourself*

*reads documentation, says to get out of sandbox request a limit increase with default values*

// 200 per day, max 1 per second

*request what is mentioned*

*while waiting, find threads of people with the most well documented use case requests getting denied*

*pretty sure i will be denied to, thinking of starting to look elsewhere*

// next morning

*opens mail*

# your application is now out of sandbox and can now send 50k emails a day with a max of 14 per second.

Every step of this project has added another six hurdles. I thought it would be easy, and estimated it at two days to give myself a day off. But instead it's ridiculous. I'm also feeling burned out, depressed (work stress, etc.), and exhausted since I'm taking care of a 3 week old. It has not been fun. :<

I've been trying to get the Google Sheets API working (in Ruby). It's for a shared sales/tracking spreadsheet between two companies.

The documentation for it is almost entirely for Python and Java. The Ruby "quickstart" sample code works, but it's only for 3-legged auth (meaning user auth), but I need it for 2-legged auth (server auth with non-expiring credentials). Took awhile to figure out that variant even existed.

After a bit of digging, I discovered I needed to create a service account. This isn't the most straightforward thing, and setting it up honestly reminds me of setting up AWS, just with less risk of suddenly and surprisingly becoming a broke hobo by selecting confusing option #27 instead of #88.

I set up a new google project, tied it to my company's account (I think?), and then set up a service account for it, with probably the right permissions.

After downloading its creds, figuring out how to actually use them took another few hours. Did I mention there's no Ruby documentation for this? There's plenty of Python and Java example code, but since they use very different implementations, it's almost pointless to read them. At best they give me a vague idea of what my next step might be.

I ended up reading through the code of google's auth gem instead because I couldn't find anything useful online. Maybe it's actually there and the past several days have been one of those weeks where nothing ever works? idk :/

But anyway. I read through their code, and while it's actually not awful, it has some odd organization and a few very peculiar param names. Figuring out what data to pass, and how said data gets used requires some file-hopping. e.g. `json_data_io` wants a file handle, not the data itself. This is going to cause me headaches later since the data will be in the database, not the filesystem. I guess I can write a monkeypatch? or fork their gem? :/

But I digress. I finally manged to set everything up, fix the bugs with my code, and I'm ready to see what `service.create_spreadsheet()` returns. (now that it has positively valid and correctly-implemented authentication! Finally! Woo!)

I open the console... set up the auth... and give it a try.

... six seconds pass ...

... another two seconds pass ...

... annnd I get a lovely "unauthorized" response.

asjdlkagjdsk.

> Pic related.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

Fuuuuck you AWS!!!
If you have a feature called “termination protection” perhaps it should actually prevent an instance from being terminated!

But nooo, you add *one line* of text on a documentation unrelated to ec2 terminations saying that in this particular scenario, it will terminate your instance.

Eat a dick. Eat a bag of dicks. Eat all of the dicks you fucking turd munchers.
Now I have to manually enter a month of invoices from the order emails that were created. 😡

I'm never going back to Google Cloud, AWS is the shit.

I'm fucking orgasming with how organized everything is, decent documentation, level of configurability, the integration of one service with another.

Just wow

AWS I love your stuff! But please for the love of god please invest in writing better documentation!

AWS. Mostly, because of the documentation.

fuck u aws

all that money and u can't read idiot proof documentation for me to have SQS connect to a VPC endpoint to read a message

also fuck u search algorithms for not handing me an easy bake solution to what is a not a novel situation

also fuck me for being unable to git gud

So I was setting up ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) all in one EC2 on AWS today for demo purposes. I had everything prepared. Elastic IP, correct security group rules, etc.

I figured I would just do quick test before writing filters and templates if I can access Kibana. So I started service for it and tried to open it with Chrome.

Timeout.

Checked config file. Compared it to documentation. Seemed good but changed some things just for sake of change. Restarted service.

Timeout.

Reverted changes I've made in config. Restarted service. Curl on localhost. It work... OK. 😐

It took me half an hour but finally I figured it out after I took my phone and opened it from there. It was working from the beginning. Stupid company network was for some reason blocking this connection. Fuck! 😡And I was restarting that poor service like crazy trying to fix something that wasn't broken.

AAAH, fucking aws. Why the fuck do you make documentation if it doesnt even make sense. I struggeled for hours to let your cock sucking Cognito work and I'm still fucking stuck. Why is there no proper documentation or tutorial available for nodejs. This pisses me the fuck off. I hate this piece of shit.

Ah... I feel better now.

Fucking hell the AWS IAM documentation is confusing as fuck. Trying to set up a fucking role is harder than cutting a rock with a fucking spoon.

And who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to allow a CLI user to run any command he's allowed to without any form of authentication??
Oh, set up MFA for the CLI you say? Good fucking luck with that, if you ever manage to figure out how to set that shit up!
Fuck this shit!

When some gotchas aren’t documented so you need to trial and error the api

Do you think AWS will still be THE thing within 5 years? Trying to learn REST/cloud/database stuff as a junior dev, but I'm having trouble with the pile of shit documentation.

Why the fuck open source solutions need to be such a load of bullcrap? I've spent a week trying to set up every single self-hosted video conference software, and the only thing I've got is a shorter lifespan.

How the fuck does your (judging by GitHub, well maintained) software only support Ubuntu 16.04? And I mean ONLY, there's no support for docker, or any other distro either, and we're only weeks from getting the second LTS since 16.04. And why the fuck does documentation tell me to manually go through 20 different config files just to enable SSL?

Why the fuck doesn't your official AWS cloudformation template include VPC or other required parameters? I've had to rewrite the whole thing just to get a valid stack you dipshit!

And how fucking hard is to make your software look decent, I can't expect clients to chat with me using something that looks like an incest child of 2003 MSN and eDonkey?

Oh, and it'd be fucking dandy if your documentation wouldn't return 404, maybe I'd be even able to test what your product has to offer?

I guess after everything I've tried I'll go with Jitsi; it seems the most decent, although it lacks some pretty basic features like limiting chat features for guests.

I really don't like this trend of building command line applications for controlling some <buzzword> cloud app or <buzzword> framework.

Why should I need or want to learn the exact wording of your gcloud command, or the path to your Ng cli, or some ass-backwards AWS search syntax when I can get the same functionality from your web app, where I can use my FUCKING EYES to work out where the "Create Instance" button is and how to click it!!!??

Stop pushing your shitty python monolith of a client where possibilities for the above task range from:
- google-cloud instances --add "subfjfechye thiq"
To
- gcloud /create /type=INSTANCE "rogdhyuffhue"

"BuT iT mAkEs iT MoRe aUtomaTaBLe"
I DON'T CARE. What is the point when I can use a proper programming language instead of bash, with actual code-completion and syntax rather than the horrendous excuse for a suggestion system that is the Tab key where it probably doesn't even work in the first place and I have to copy and paste some mysterious dbus command buried in an old documentation page on the Wayback Machine using a utility I don't have installed and a broken URL?

Go away.

This is a part rant-part question.
So a little backstory first:
I work in a small company (5 including me) which is mostly into consultation (we have many tech partners where we either resell their products or if there is a requirement from one of our clients, we get our partners to develop it for them and fulfill the client requirements) so as you can see there is a lot of external dependencies. I act as a one-hat-fits-all tech guy, handling the company websites, social media channels, technical documentation, tech support, quicks POCs (so anything to do with anything technical, I handle them). I am a bit fed up now, since the CEO expects me to do some absurd shit (and sometimes micro manages me, like WTF I am the only one who works there with 100% commitment) and expects me to deliver them by yesterday.

So anyway long story short, our CEO finally had the brains to understand that we should start having our own product (which i had been subtly suggesting him to do for a while now!).

Now he came up with a fairly workable concept that would have good market reach (i atleast give him credits for that) and he wanted me to suggest the best way to move forward (from a both business and technical point of view). The concept is to have an auction-based platform for users to buy everyday products.

I suggested we build a web app as opposed to a mobile one (which is obvious, since i didnt want to develop a seperate website and a mobile app, and anyway just because we can doesnt mean we have to make a mobile app for everything), and recommended the Node/react based JS tech stack to build it.

At first he wanted me to single handedly build the whole platform within a month, I almost flipped (but me being me) then somehow calmed down and finally was able to explain him how complicated it was to single-handedly build a platform of such complexity (especially given my limited experience; did I mention that this is my first job and I am still in college, yeah!!) and convinced him to get an experienced back-end dev and another dev to help me with it.

Now comes the problem, I was to prepare a scope document outlining all the business and technical requirements of the project along with a tentative cost, which was fairly straightforward. I am currently stuck at deciding the server requirements and the system architecture for the proposed solution (I am thinking of either going with AWS - which looks a bit complicated to setup - or go with either Digital Ocean or Heroku):

I have assumed that at peak times we would have around 500-1000 users concurrently

And a daily userbase of 1000 users (atleast for the first few months of the platform running)

What would be the best way forward guys?

I did some extensive (i mean i read through some medium blogs! and aws documentation) research and put together the following specs (if we are going through AWS):

One AWS t3.medium ec2 instance for the node server (two if we want High Availability by coupling with the AWS load balancer and Elastic Beanstalk)

The db.t3.small postgres database

The S3 Storage bucket (100gb) for the React Front end hosting

AWS SNS for email/sms OTP and notification

And AWS CloudMonitor for logging amd monitoring.

Am I speculating the requirements properly, where have I missed??

Can u guys suggest what is the best specification for such a requirement (how do you guys decide what plan to go with)?

Any suggestions, corrections, advices are welcome

AWS IAM permissions: a love-hate relationship! 😫🔐 On one hand, they promise control, but on the other, they're a labyrinth of confusion. Navigating JSON policies, deciphering documentation, and debugging 'Access Denied' errors. Oh, the joys of IAM! 😅

How stupid am i?

1. I tried to learn programming language.
- It just so freaking hard for me to understand. Failed at logic.

2. Tried to learn aws.
- Technically know how it works but often forgot the services name. (Was thinking to get aws cert).

3. Tried to learn OpenSource DB.
- Can do up to db setup only. Else i didnt understand sh*t.

4. Tried to learn cybersecurity.
- Ended up bunch of unwanted process in my vm.

I was envy that some of my friend only read documentation once & he is like know what to do.

Guys, any pro tips for poor man here?
I want to code, but somehow i stuck.

I feel dumb...

AWS documentation and their paid tech support sucks so fucking much. Jesus fucking balls

P.S. Can any of you explain to me how to generate pre-signed url for GET request for CCP transcriptions?

My colleagues who work with AWS got trainings and I was supposed to pick out training that roughly corresponds to the content of the AWS training just in Azure. I did that. And as an answer I get a link to the Microsoft Virtual Training Days, where I can do the Fundamentals course and then take the AZ900 exam for free. Cool! Why should you spend money. It's all in the Microsoft documentation.

I work at a corporation with dozens of different products and different legal units and teams working with different products. As many of the products are business acquisitions and not internally developed, they've retained whatever (cloud) architecture they had to begin with... some hosted on AWS, others on Azure and yet others on GCP.... Yet the core products are all on the same provider's platform, so all the documentation for some unexplainable reason assumes every other product is on that platform, too, and does not take into account interprovider communication problems, so integration becomes a major pain in the arse when the product you're working on (like mine) is not hosted on that one cloud provider's platform... Whole week I've felt like banging my head repeatedly to the wall.

I just got hired at a small MSP and I’m just utterly fucking frustrated by the shitty tools and complete lack of client documentation. I want to implement tons of FOSS tools for these newbhats but they seem to like spending money on tools that only work half-assedly at best... looking at you LogMeIn!

I’ve setup Apache Guacamole a few times before and want to get each client a guac-srv setup for client’s server mgmt. or PowerShell Web Access for clients.

I want to build AWS infrastructure for clients cause we can use cloudformation or terraform to build infrastructure. But these skunk-taint licking dipsticks would rather support physical 2003 servers. If I didn’t need this job to pay my bills right now I’d be fucking gone.

But... they are very nice people.

Just technologically speaking, they eat lead paint chips for breakfast and like to piss on electric fences for the funsies.

What the hell am I!? I wonder if you guys can help me...

I've been programming most of my life but I've never actually been a developer by title or job role. I thought maybe if I list what I do and have done someone here could help? I'm sure there are more of you in a similar boat.

- C# and VB dev for some quick DBMS projects to help me understand and mine databases and create a nice simple view for project teams to show findings from the data to help make certain decisions.
- Automating a lot of my colleagues work with Python and if very restricted then just VBA macros in Excel and MSP. This did also include creating tools to gather data during workshops and converting the data for input into other systems.
- Brought Linux to the office with most team members now moving over to Linux with the peace of mind to know that though they do need to try solve their own problems, I can help if need be.
- Had to learn AWS and then implement an autoscaling and load balanced data center installation of a few Atlassian toolsets.
- Creating the architecture diagrams documentation needed for things like the above point.
- Having said that, also have ended up setting up all the Jira/Confluence etc. servers we use and have implemented so far whether cloud (Azure/AWS) or on prem and set up scripts to automate where possible.
- Implemented an automated workflow view in SharePoint based on SP list data and though in an ASPX page, primarily built in JS.
- Building test systems in PHP/JS with Laravel and Angular to help manage integration between systems. Having quite a time right looking into how to build middleware to connect between SOAP and REST API's, the trouble caused more by the systems and their reliance on frameworks we're trying to cut out of the picture.
- Working on BI and MI and training a team to help on the report creation so that I can do the fun creative stuff and then set them to work on the detail :)

Actually it seems safe to say that it seems that though I've finally moved into a dev office (beforehand being the only developer around) I seem to be the one they go to when a strategic solution is needed ASAP and the normal processes can't be followed (fun for someone with a CompSci degree and a number of project management courses under the belt... though I honestly do enjoy the challenges)

But I always end up Jack of all but master of, well hopefully some at least. let's not even get started on the tech related hobbies from circuit design and IoT to Andoid / iOS and game dev and enjoying a bit of pen testing to make sure we're all safe at work and at home.

As much as I don't like boxes, I'm interested to know if there is in fact a box for me? By the way, the above is just a snapshot of my last two years minus the project management work...

First time using AWS.....
I can't to deploy a laravel app .... I saw the documentation but
there are too many links ... the google chrome is starting to make my laptop unusable😭😭😭

Hey errrbody!!!

I'm banging out a couple "showcase" mobile apps for practice, portfolio, and/or as potential templating tools.

I have no issue writing the code, I just wanted to see if I could get a couple pointers as far as user databases go. I'd like to have some "user profile" features generated from a FB...vlike profile images, name, address, contact, yadda yadda yadda. I usually use Firebase, but I am still having a little trouble with the more advanced stuff when it comes to integrating users profile data. I can get values from Google and whatnot, but I'd like to see what my other options are on the smaller scale.

I am currently writing code in Flutter/Dart, ReactJS( not native!), Vanilla Js, Python, and CPP.

I know there's options for client side storage like Shared Prefs, Sqflite, etc, as well as server/DB side stuff like Firebase, Aws, Mongo, Node, SQL, etc- you get the idea.
I just want something with decent documentation that's reliable, not a massive undertaking (at least not for all this little stuff, anyways) and could potentially be a go-to platform configuration in the future. It'd be cool to wire in my Flutter and js shit of possible, bit honestly I'm cool with having separate setups for the time being. Any extra input regarding the use of python and/or cpp as well (either separately or with mobile) would be rad as fuck!!!
I do realize it's a pretty vast area to cover, but I figured it couldn't hurt to see what everyone likes to use for full-stack setups.
Thanks!!!!

Weekend 3 trying to configure user pool authentication with aws lambda/API gateway with SAM/cloudformation. What a disaster documentation is around this.

Whenever I post a question on stack overflow I get the views with 0 responses. Does anyone even use this garbage?

Seriously wth aws.

I got sucked into a rabbit hole with this.

Is there such a site that makes documentation useable through 3rd party documentation?

I'm looking at you aws docs.

Stackoverflow had a great idea when they started making stackoverflow documentation, too bad they sunset the project :(

which is the best cloud provider for a complete beginner (user/dev) in terms of community support, employer preference and user-friendliness?

i know that understanding the tech and concepts behind it matters more than getting familiarized with a specific platform, but i'm looking to build a more diverse profile and have noticed many positions asking for AWS/Azure experience.

since i'll be starting from scratch, any provider with easy-to-follow documentation, online help and certifications that don't leave you broke (would have to pay myself, earn very less as a student from a third-world country, parents/current employer can't support) would work.