Can I only pick one?

I don't hate a lack of skill by itself. Incompetence, in my book, refers to a lack of skill combined with being in a position of responsibility.

The junior/intern in my team writes pretty bad code, but that is OK. He asks questions, I give pointers and bounce back his PRs ten times in a row, and he keeps fixing things without complaints.

My boss however... still writes PHP as if he's living in the 90s. He doesn't visit scrum meetings because he "isn't a developer". He thinks of a new feature while pooping, writes it without telling anyone, and throws it into production without making a PR.

Root: Fleshes out missing data in some factories. Tests affected code and finds the change breaks some specs (but shouldn’t).

Root: Reaches out to spec author.

Root: Messages thundercunt (the ticket’s code reviewer) on slack about the specs and the reaching out. No response.

Root: Works on another ticket while blocked.

Root: Logs off.

Root: Talks with spec author chick in the morning. Decide to pair on specs later.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Gives update in standup. Mentions factories and broken specs. Mentions pairing with spec chick.

TC: Still no slack response.

Root: Pulled off tickets in favor of prod issue. Gets ignored by everyone else diagnosing prod issue. Investigates prod issue by herself. Discovers prod issue isn’t from bad code, but bad requirements — code works as requested. Communicates this with details. Gets ignored by people still diagnosing prod issue. Tries again. Gets ignored. Gives up. Works on non-blocked tickets instead.

TC: Still no slack response.

Hours later:

TC: Comments on PR telling me I broke specs (how did I not notice?), that I need to reach out to spec chick and work with her, and that I can’t resolve the ticket until it’s fixed and passes code review.

TC: Still no slack response. (21 hours later at this point)

TC: Logs off. Still no response (25 hours at this point)

———

Ignoring the prod issue for the moment…

I broke specs. No shit.
I need to talk with spec chick. No shit.
I can’t resolve the ticket. No shit!

Bitch, I told you all of this 21 fucking hours prior, and again 3 hours prior during standup. But no, I clearly “don’t communicate” and obviously have no bloody clue what I’m doing, either, so I need everything spelled out for me.

And no, I didn’t resolve the fucking ticket. Why the fuck would I if it still has pending changes? Do you even check? Ugh!

And what the fuck with that prod issue? I’m literally giving you the answer. fucking listen! Stupid cunts.

Why is it all of the women I work with are useless or freaking awful people? Don’t get me wrong, many of the men are, too, but I swear it’s every single one of the women. (Am I awful, too?)

Just. Ugh.
I can’t wait to leave this sewer of a company.

Oddly still a good day, though. Probably because I talked to recruiters and sent out my resume again.

I send a PR to your GitHub repo.
You close it without a word.

I tell you that your lib crashes because you're trying to parse JavaScript with a (bad) regex, but you keep insisting that no, there exist no problem, and even if you barely know what "parsing" means, you keep denying in front of the evidence.

Well fuck you and your shitty project. I'll keep using my fucking fork.

And if you're reading this, well, fuck you twice. Moron.

TFW your client's git policies are so draconian that the dev teams use "develop" as trunk, and completely ignore the release process.

I wrote up 50 pages of git standards, documentation and procedure for a client. Bad indian director 9000 decides the admin (also Indian) who specializes in Clearcase and has no git or development experience is more qualified to decide and let's him set the policy.

FF to today:

- documentation, mostly contradictory, is copy pasted from the atlassian wiki
- source tree is the standard
- no force pushing of any branches, including work branches
- no ff-merge
- no rebasing allowed
- no ssh, because he couldn't figure it out...errr it's "insecure"
- all repos have random abbreviated names that are unintelligible
- gitflow, but with pull requests and no trust
- only project managers can delete a branch
- long lived feature branches
- only projects managers can conduct code reviews
- hotfixes must be based off develop
- hotfixes must go in the normal release cycle
- releases involve creating a ticket to have an admin create a release branch from your branch, creating a second ticket to stage the PR, a third ticket to review the PR (because only admins can approve release PRs), and a fourth ticket to merge it in
- rollbacks require director signoff
- at the end of each project the repo must be handed to the admin on a burned CD for "archiving"

And so no one actually uses the official release process, and just does releases out of dev. If you're wondering if IBM sucks, the answer is more than you can possibly imagine.

First I wanna say how grateful I am that devRant exists, because my friends either don’t understand this vocab or don’t care lol.

Last week I worked on a pretty large ticket, opened a PR with 54 file changes. Just to follow standards I set the PR milestone to a future release version, but the truth is I didn’t care which version this work ended up in— I just needed it to go into the develop branch asap.

Since it was a large PR there was some expected discussion that prolonged its merging, but in the meantime I started a second branch that depended on some of the work from this branch. I set the new branch’s upstream to develop, fully expecting my PR to merge into develop, since that’s what I set the PR base to.

I completed all the work I could in the new branch, and got two colleagues to approve the initial PR so it would be merged into develop, I could add the finishing touch and get this work done seamlessly before the week was over. They approved, it got merged, I pulled develop, and… my work wasn’t there. I went to look at my PR and someone had changed the base branch to a release branch. It was my boss, who thought he was helping. (Our bosses don’t actually work on the same team as us, so he didn’t know. it’s weird. We have leads that keep track of our work instead.)

I messaged him and told him I really needed this in develop, knowing our release branch won’t be in develop for probably another week. I was very annoyed but didn’t wanna make him feel too bad so I said I’d just merge the release branch into my new branch. So many conflicts I couldn’t see straight. His response was “yeah and you’ll probably have a bunch of package manager conflicts too because that’s in that release.” He was right— I have so many package manager conflicts that I can’t even see how many compiler conflicts there are. I considered cherry picking my changes, but the whole reason I set develop as my upstream was to avoid having any conflicts since I’m working in the same functions, and this would create more.

So I could spend the next (?) days making educated guesses on possibly a thousand conflict resolutions, or I can revert my release branch merge and quietly step back and wait for the release branch to be merged into develop.

I’m sure cherry picking is the best option here but I’m genuinely too annoyed lol, and fortunately my team does not care to notice if I step back and work on something else to kill time until it’s fixed automatically. But I’m still in dire need of a rant because my entire plan was ruined by a well-meaning person who messed with my PR without asking, so here is that rant and I thank you for your time.

They've literally left me with nothing to do. I'm doing nothing. I can't be happy doing nothing.

To illustrate the chaos: Everyone on the team was trying to figure out some defect. No one knows what is going on in the code. It's unlike anything I've ever seen.

I found an API call with a misspelled endpoint. It was wrong since the code was written two months before. There's no way it ever worked. Obviously no one tested the code because they would have immediately seen that the call returned a 404 every time.

I fixed it. That was my only PR in about a month. It was literally one character.

The next week that PR got reverted. Apparently the app works better if the API call fails. No one said what goes wrong if the request is made, just that it "causes problems."

That's how bad it is. No one knows why anything does or doesn't work. People write code that doesn't work, never test it, and the application works better in some unspecified way if that code never gets executed.

The last straw for me was when an architect told us that if we want to improve our skills we need to learn how to read and debug stuff like this.

1) Not to be immodest, but I'm good at figuring out bad code.
2) Just because I can doesn't mean I want to do it all day instead of actually developing software
3) He trivialized the really important skill, not making a mess like this in the first place. If his idea of skill is to sling crap without tests at the wall and then debug it, how is he an architect?

I tried really hard but I can't keep a good attitude. I don't want to become toxic, but why would I consider working that way? I try my best to be good at this. Writing decent code means a lot to me. It should mean a lot to them. Their code is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe millions.

I can't write good code and add value if all I do is debug bad code.

So I'm out. I'm going to another project. Have a nice life.

Another case of "devs too stupid to poop" TM.

We had a funny discussion today.

Topic came up that a project using Lucene was incredibly slow.

Then came the yadda yadda of Java bad, Java sucks, Java bla Java blub in the gossip mill.

Both things irritated me, last thing was just the usual "I want to use new stuff cause I wanna be a cool jackass" trouble.

So. Today meeting. We did quick analysis by pair programming.

If I tell you that a whole team managed to review an PR, give it green light...

Despite the PR using the thread safe Lucene IndexWriter in a non-parallel fashion for large bulk inserts?

The whole problem screamed parallelization.

Yeah. If you ignore that scream and implement it in a sequential fashion, it is slow.

Congrats Jimmy, your retard level is off the charts.

Spent a lot of time designing a proper HTTP (dare I even say RESTful) API for our - what is until now a closed system, using a little-known/badly-supported message-over-websocket protocol to do RPC-style communications - supposedly enterprise-grade product.

I make the API spec go through several rounds of review with the rest of the dev team and customers/partners alike. After a few iterations, everybody agrees that the spec will meet the necessary requirements.

I start implementing according to spec. Because this is the first time we're actually building proper HTTP handling into the product, but we of course have to make it work at least somewhat with the RPC-style codebase, it's mostly foundational work. But still, I manage to get some initial endpoints fully implemented and working as per the spec we agreed. The first PR is created, reviews are positive, the direction is clear and what's there already works.

At this point in time, I leave on my honeymoon for two weeks. Naturally, I assume that the remaining endpoints will be completed following the outlines/example of the endpoints which I built. When I come back, the team mentions that the implementation is completed and I believe all is well.

The feature is deployed selectively to some alpha customers to start validation testing before the big rollout. It's been like that for a good month, until a few days ago when I get a question related to a PoC integration which they can't seem to get to work.

I start investigating and notice that the API hasn't been implemented according to the previously agreed upon spec at all. Not only did the team manage to implement the missing functionality in strange and some even broken ways, they also managed to refactor my previously working endpoints into being non-compliant.

Now, I'm a flexible guy. It's not because something isn't done exactly as I've imagined it that it's automatically bad. However, I know from experience that designing a good/clear/future-proof API is a tricky exercise. I've put a lot of time and effort into deliberate design decisions that made up the spec that we all reviewed repeatedly and agreed upon. The current implementation might also be fine, but I now have to go over each endpoint again and reason about whether the implementation still fulfills the requirements (both soft and hard) that we set out to meet.

I'm met with resistance, pushback and disbelief from product management and dev co-workers alike when I raise the concern that the API might actually not be production-ready (while I'm frantically rewriting my integration tests and figuring out how the actual implementation works in comparison to what was spec'ed).

Oh, and did I mention that product management wants to release this by end-of-week?!

So recently my open source project took off and got trending on GitHub (680 starts and 225 forks). This was the first time a project of mine really gained some traction and invested more of my time and weekends to maintain this project - I wrote comprehensive docs, contributing guidelines and reviewed PRs and made sure I commented on every single one of them. Sure, it isn't easy to review 50 PRs a day after coming home from work but the excitement of seeing this project becoming trending fueled me.

First 2 weeks it was good. I would come home from work and have dinner and sit down to maintain the project. Whenever contributors would be stuck, I would help them and write comments on each PR.

But the problem started since last week. People just really want to see their contribution activity graph get populated and hence they would make stupid PRs and literally no one followed contributing guidelines - I mentioned in that that the code should adhere to Pep8 styling but no one gave a shit. Each day I would spend reviewing PR with crappy formatted code and no sign of Pep8, and even some will just file PR and add a fucking docstring to every function or add paragraph of comments. Also, the PR quality was bad with unsquashed commits amounting to 10 or 20 or even sometimes 50.

I wrote the contributing guidelines doc and in that I mentioned every source that contributors could find helpful like how to squash commits, how to file a PR and Pep8 and not to write useless comments. Seriously people, grow up!

My day:

9 am: crack knuckles, ready to start day

9:01 am: oh, that PR I sent last week hasn't been reviewed yet and I need it in mainline. Better merge latest and get someone to look over it.

9:02 am: now the test suite is broken, better fix that up before getting it reviewed.

1 pm: phew, that was a slog. Now to get on with today actual programming

1:01 pm: "hey buddy, you coming to that tech leads strategy meeting?"

5 pm: Jesus what a meeting. Now maybe I can get a little code written. I'll just fast-forward to latest...

5:01 pm: WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERES A BAD MIGRATION AND EVERYONE SHOULD AVOID USING THE LATEST VERSION WHY DIDN'T YOU REVERT THAT SHIT DO I NEED TO COME OVER THERE AND RESTRICT YOUR STUPID WINDPIPE UNTIL YOU UNDERSTAND GIT *RAGE TABLEFLIP*

Github 101 (many of these things pertain to other places, but Github is what I'll focus on)

- Even the best still get their shit closed - PRs, issues, whatever. It's a part of the process; learn from it and move on.

- Not every maintainer is nice. Not every maintainer wants X feature. Not every maintainer will give you the time of day. You will never change this, so don't take it personally.

- Asking questions is okay. The trackers aren't just for bug reports/feature requests/PRs. Some maintainers will point you toward StackOverflow but that's usually code for "I don't have time to help you", not "you did something wrong".

- If you open an issue (or ask a question) and it receives a response and then it's closed, don't be upset - that's just how that works. An open issue means something actionable can still happen. If your question has been answered or issue has been resolved, the issue being closed helps maintainers keep things un-cluttered. It's not a middle finger to the face.

- Further, on especially noisy or popular repositories, locking the issue might happen when it's closed. Again, while it might feel like it, it's not a middle finger. It just prevents certain types of wrongdoing from the less... courteous or common-sense-having users.

- Never assume anything about who you're talking to, ever. Even recently, I made this mistake when correcting someone about calling what I thought was "powerpc" just "power". I told them "hey, it's called powerpc by the way" and they (kindly) let me know it's "power" and why, and also that they're on the Power team. Needless to say, they had the authority in that situation. Some people aren't as nice, but the best way to avoid heated discussion is....

- ... don't assume malice. Often I've come across what I perceived to be a rude or pushy comment. Sometimes, it feels as though the person is demanding something. As a native English speaker, I naturally tried to read between the lines as English speakers love to tuck away hidden meanings and emotions into finely crafted sentences. However, in many cases, it turns out that the other person didn't speak English well enough at all and that the easiest and most accurate way for them to convey something was bluntly and directly in English (since, of course, that's the easiest way). Cultures differ, priorities differ, patience tolerances differ. We're all people after all - so don't assume someone is being mean or is trying to start a fight. Insinuating such might actually make things worse.

- Please, PLEASE, search issues first before you open a new one. Explaining why one of my packages will not be re-written as an ESM module is almost muscle memory at this point.

- If you put in the effort, so will I (as a maintainer). Oftentimes, when you're opening an issue on a repository, the owner hasn't looked at the code in a while. If you give them a lot of hints as to how to solve a problem or answer your question, you're going to make them super, duper happy. Provide stack traces, reproduction cases, links to the source code - even open a PR if you can. I can respond to issues and approve PRs from anywhere, but can't always investigate an issue on a computer as readily. This is especially true when filing bugs - if you don't help me solve it, it simply won't be solved.

- [warning: controversial] Emojis dillute your content. It's not often I see it, but sometimes I see someone use emojis every few words to "accent" the word before it. It's annoying, counterproductive, and makes you look like an idiot. It also makes me want to help you way less.

- Github's code search is awful. If you're really looking for something, clone (--depth=1) the repository into /tmp or something and [rip]grep it yourself. Believe me, it will save you time looking for things that clearly exist but don't show up in the search results (or is buried behind an ocean of test files).

- Thanking a maintainer goes a very long way in making connections, especially when you're interacting somewhat heavily with a repository. It almost never happens and having talked with several very famous OSSers about this in the past it really makes our week when it happens. If you ever feel as though you're being noisy or anxious about interacting with a repository, remember that ending your comment with a quick "btw thanks for a cool repo, it's really helpful" always sets things off on a Good Note.

- If you open an issue or a PR, don't close it if it doesn't receive attention. It's really annoying, causes ambiguity in licensing, and doesn't solve anything. It also makes you look overdramatic. OSS is by and large supported by peoples' free time. Life gets in the way a LOT, especially right now, so it's not unusual for an issue (or even a PR) to go untouched for a few weeks, months, or (in some cases) a year or so. If it's urgent, fork :)

I'll leave it at that. I hear about a lot of people too anxious to contribute or interact on Github, but it really isn't so bad!

That moment when code reuse makes you reuse reused code and you actually reuse a BUG.

You decide to go for code reusing when your boss asks: "Can you add an edit popup besides that 'add customer' popup button?". You do some little tweaks to the "new customer" code and it allows that to save over an existing entry, cool.

However, after a lot of time spent on reviewing the resulting PR, turns out there was a dormant bug on the code you reused, and it woke up with its new use.

That code was a bad copy-pasta from another, bigger form, which included a whole bunch of optional fields. As it was only used to save new entries, those now missing fields were simply being saved as empty. But as you reused that to save existing entries, you were now cleaning up all those optional fields without noticing.

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 :)

Security! I wish clients would listen to me regarding security...

The client has started to ask me to give them access to all the logins I have for the email, domain, server etc.
I created them a new account and gave them admin access.

Now they’re asking for password for all the email accounts (I don’t even store them). So I asked why, she wanted to have them in case some of the employees forgot their password.

I explained to her, deeply and many times, WHY THIS IS A BAD FUCKING IDEA. I also discovered she’s keeping it in a document, clear text.

Why do they pay me for support, when they want to have access to everything...

I’m wondering if they’re planning to find someone else to do their support, or do it themselves.

I didn’t even think 25€ pr month is that expensive for support

I am a bad developer. I know nothing. I had a very simple requirement just to change the strings.
I couldn't collect all the requirements. I connected with PM offline, slow replies and miscommunications. Ahh!! How will I be shipping bigger projects? I have 3 years of development, in my last company we worked totally different though.
So, at the time when I thought I will be raising a PR I am stuck on the requirements.
I am a dumb shit. I can't do anything right. A simple requirement I am not able to deliver. I am so embarassed. :(

A bug is born
... and it's sneaky and slimy. Mr. Senior-been-doing-it-for-ears commits some half-assed shitty code, blames failed tests on availability of CI licenses. I decided to check what's causing this shit nevertheless, turns out he forgot to flag parts of the code consistently using his new compiler defines, and some parts would get compiled while others needed wouldn't .. Not a big deal, we all make mistakes, but he rushes to Teams chat directing a message to me (after some earlier non-sensible argument about merits of cherry picking vs re-base):
Now all tests pass, except ones that need CI license. The PR is done, you can use your preferred way to take my changes.

So after I spot those missing checks causing the tests to fail, as well as another bug in yet another test case, and yet another disastrous memory related bug, which weren't detected by the tests of course .. I ponder my options .. especially based on our history .. if I say anything he will get offended, or at best the PR will get delayed while he is in denial arguing back even longer and dependent tasks will get delayed and the rest of the team will be forced to watch this show in agony, he also just created a bottleneck putting so many things at stake in one PR ..

I am in a pickle here .. should I just put review comments and risk opening a can of worms, or should I just mention the very obvious bugs, or even should I do nothing .. I end up reaching for the PM and explained the situation. In complete denial, he still believes it's a license problem and goes on ranting about how another project suffering the same fate .. bla bla bla chipset ... bla bla bla project .. bla bla bla back in whatever team .. then only when I started telling him:
These issues are even spotted by "Bob" earlier, since for some reason you just dismissed whatever I just said ..
("Bob" is another more sane senior developer in the team, and speaks the same language as the PM)
Only now I get his attention! He then starts going through the issues with me (for some reason he thinks he is technical enough to get them) .. He now to some extent believes the first few obvious bugs .. now the more disastrous bug he is having really hard time wrapping his head around it .. Then the desperate I became, I suggest let's just get this PR merged for the sake of the other tasks after may be fixing the obvious issues and meanwhile we create another task to fix the bug later .. here he chips in:
You know what, that memory bug seems like a corner case, if it won't cause issues down the road after merging let's see if we need even to open an internal fix or defect for it later. Only customers can report bugs.

I am in awe how low the bar can get, I try again and suggest let's at least leave a comment for the next poor soul running into that bug so they won't be banging their heads in the wall 2hrs straight trying to figure out why store X isn't there unless you call something last or never call it or shit like that (the sneaky slimy nature of that memory bug) .. He even dismissed that and rather went on saying (almost literally again): It is just that Mr. Senior had to rush things and communication can be problematic sometimes .. (bla bla bla) back in "Sunken Ship Co." days, we had a team from open source community .. then he makes a very weird statement:
Stuff like what Richard Stallman writes in Linux kernel code reviews can offend people ..

Feeling too grossed and having weird taste in my mouth I only get in a bad hangover day, all sorts of swear words and profanity running in my head like a wild hungry squirrel on hot asphalt chasing a leaky chestnut transport ... I tell him whatever floats your boat but I just feel really sorry for whoever might have to deal with this bug in the future ..

I just witnessed the team giving birth to a sneaky slimy bug .. heard it screaming and saw it kicking .. and I might live enough to see it a grown up having a feast with other bug buddies in this stinky swamp of Uruk-hai piss and Orcs feces.

Code review day 1:

Me: Where are these three templates being used? I don't see any class that uses them.

Him: Oh, yeah. My bad. I'll remove them.

(Time passes)

Him: I don't know what's going on with my branch. Please ignore the PR for now.

(Time passes)

Him: Is there any way for me to get the files from staging. I don't know what I did to my branch.

Me: Hang on. I'll push a copy of the one I have in a new branch.

He declines his PR and stops by to say he's going home but he'll open a new PR tomorrow and remove the unused files.

Code review day 2:

Him: Hey, do you know what happened to my PR? It looks like it disappeared.

Me: You declined it yesterday. Said you'd make a new one today without those extra files.

Him: Ooooh!

Please tell me this isn't real

"Web design has a bad reputation for being stylistically trendy and same-looking. Some guy does a parallax scrolling site, and now your boss wants you to add that to your corporate PR website for some reason. Glossy buttons, Gaussian Noise, linen texture, new things that look fake-old, then back to minimalism and flat colors as a reaction to the glossy noisy textured fake-old stuff." - Jonas Downey

PR by my team leader:
"OH NO! This method is not inline. This will slow our program by 1 ns!!! Fix that immediately!!"
FYI
Our program computes stuff for dozen of minutes, because of his short sight and bad design from day 1...

Things I love today.

Totally love. Like kick in the balls with testicle torsion love. Picking my eyeballs out with a spoon... I think you got the idea.

Getting updates of other managers, as I'm busy with other stuff.

More or less goes like this:

Flaky tests. Since weeks...
Ain't nobody got time for that.
🤬

I don't wanna upgrade that version to the next major version, cause then I'd have to do tests... And the tests are flaky.

🤬🤬

I wanna have shiny new thing XY, but NOONE wants to upgrade to next major version so we cannot have that

🤬🤬🤬

Oh we just crushed the live cluster cause there's this PR everyone constantly ignores cause the tests are flaky....

🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Good thing I'm busy and just getting all the updates via the gossip mill...

I'm just prolonging my current tasks as I really don't wanna have to fix that mess.

My fix would be probably eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

...

Problem is.... I'm slowly getting into trouble because some of these fixes would be much needed for my task...

Why do I have always to be the bad cop in the company -.

I think I'm gonna ask HR what applying electro shocks would cost me, cause I think that would solve a lot of problems.

10 kV for every stupid answer.

Smells like bacon!

Till now, hacktoberfest has been really bad more me.
Why so?
I got 4 PRs for my project, out which 3 were identical.
I reviewed them and commented to fix the bugs. The Unit Tests are failing and they don't bother to send out a correct PR. And they don't even bother to fix them and respond. They just want to make 4 PRs to get the free T-Shirt.
Just finish the PR and make it pushed to the mainline.

What to do when for a single issue, multiple contributors send out different PRs doing the same stuff?
I feel bad to close a PR without merging when they have spent there time in it.
I never expected that my repo will ever attain such dilemma for PRs.

So working for a company and the dev team I’m apart of works on a legacy rails app. Technical debt is high, no automated tests, no proper routing and also running unsupported versions of the language.

I joined seven months ago and got the current team doing automated testing so that’s a plus, they bought this app four years ago and there’s been no language updates, testing, cleanup, security updates, nothing, just adding to bad code.

Now we’re looking to actually upgrade language versions, the language and the framework now this will cause a lot of stuff to break naturally due to how outdated it is.

So I started putting proper routes into place how things should of been when things were being built as we have some spare time I decided to go out of my way to clear up some of the technical debt to get ahead of the curb. Re-done an entire section of the app, massive speed improvements, better views, controller, model, comment clean up and everything exactly how it should be.

I push the PR,
*other dev* - “why are we doing all of these other changes”
*me* - “well to implement routes properly, we have to use the new routes I just did some extra cleanup along the way”
*today, me* - “can you lend me a hand with one of the routes the ID isn’t getting passed”
*today, other dev* - “this wouldn’t of happened if you didn’t redo all these files, let’s just scrap the changes”
…

Sooo, I’ve spend three weeks improving one section in the app, because I’m having issues with one route according to this dev I should scrap it? Wait come again, am I the only one in this team who cares about making this app better all round?

Frustrating…

When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.

Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.

When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.

Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!

Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?

When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:

1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.

Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).

Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.

When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:

(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".

Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.

There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".

It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?

The code in that last PR was so bad it crashed my browser...

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

when people attribute you as the author of bad code you didn't write, as you receive PR feedback to update it

when you are updating something different in the same area

:D

This one is funny for me because my current team lead and I have a really comical dynamic regarding reviews.

I can't say I've ever really had a bad experience but I brought up one stand up about how he had rejected my PR and that he was probably just going to reject the next one. So now it's this joke if I get a PR through in one review (which is usually).

One time he spiked a ping pong ball towards me in a match and I replied, "Hey whoa man, this isn't a code review calm down!". 😂

This morning I found out that the code I wrote to convert json data to a new format in our DB was giving errors and a bunch of questions got saved with the wrong property. It was assumed when it was triaged with my boss that we would only see one key property so the code written by me so the code was aimed at that. Well some questions have multiple keys for no reason. They are mostly floating data that hasn't been wiped clean because the develop who wrote this use json data in psql with no validation or data cleaning. This edge case was also never caught on PR reviews and we got a pretty heavy review process. I'm not being blamed for it. Most of it I think all the devs feel bad we didn't catch this because it affected us greatly. I've been working all morning trying to resolve it with my boss and just now in the evening we stopped. I just feel like I'm not a good dev at all and just want advice on how to deal with situations like this. I'm a new dev and this is my first job I have held for almost a year

Just after feature launch, major bug on production and now I am getting yelled at by my lead as the issue happens to be with the PR i was responsible for reviewing yesterday. Somehow a logic error got past my review. But considering how large the project is it wasn't possible for me to test out every possible scenario myself. They should have had QA handle that. Also, that was my first code review. I can't understand why my boss has such unrealistic expectations. Bugs are expected at this stage. I feel like he just puts too much pressure on me for no other ther reason other than to just trigger my imposter syndrome. That way, I feel like a bad developer even though I am working my ass off. And he gets to avoid giving me a raise. Cant believe I rejected multiple offers to stay at this company. I don't even know why am I still working for this company anymore.

I committed a pr which got accepted to a big open source project… and that’s good! I should feel better about my skills!

(Imagine the following as the Simpsons meme where they go: and that’s good, and that’s bad)

But it was just documentation… and that’s bad… maybe I should not feel better about my skills…

But it may save two or plus hours to the next dev who doesn’t understand what’s going wrong! And that’s good! So I should feel better about my skills cause I spent time debugging and going into details and understanding what was happening just to produce a better documentation!

But I have lack of certain vitamins and a bit of depression.
“And… is that good?”
“No, it’s bad, you should feel ashamed of your skills and about the way you answered someone twenty years ago!”

I've adopted this per task desktop management think. Anyone else do this?

I make a new desktop, for a given task, support ticket, or whatever. And when I'm 'done'. I keep everything (ticket, whatever I was working on in vs code, related emails) open but minimize it all except the pull request waiting to happen.

If I get some feedback on the PR / changes I just fly through my virtual desktops and there it is and I'm ready to work.

Then after the PR goes through ... I keep it open for a bit anyway to be sure nothing bad happens.

Then after a while I shut it all down assuming that it is working well.

All this so I don't have to fire everything up again for a rando request or dork up or whatever.

Dev1: Something is not adding up
Dev2: Yea I saw it too,
Dev1: We can come up with an algo to show more controversial content vs really bad content
Dev2: They already LOATHE the algorithm, and make videos about it,
Dev1: If we remove the dislike count,
Dev2: ... sync count will not be centralized
Dev1: ... because only the creator will see the dislikes
Dev2: ... view count v dislikes will be totally blurred now
Dev1: ... coz the dislike code depends on the "has the user viewed it" algo
Dev2: meaning people will have to watch is more than the threshhold!!!
Dev1: but people are not gonna be happy
Dev2: we didnt get negative feedback on the small experiment
Dev1: Fck it, PR will handle it

How I think it really happend, because I cant wrap my head around this shit

ADVICE: I’ve been assigned someone I was told was mid weight developer for a ‘fast paced project.’ I’ve quickly discovered he doesn’t understand core concepts and is likely very junior; this means I am picking up all the slack to cover for him.

We’ve had to ditch every PR he’s made so far and I’ve had to pair up with him to explain each one, from scratch, step by step.

Not sure what to do, he’s a nice guy, but I’m going to burn myself out if I have to do everything, it’s not acceptable and there is enough pressure on me already.

Do I request for him to be moved off the project, talk with him about my frustrations or raise my concern with the product owner with some evidence?

I get that no one comes to work to do a bad job, but I have my own shit to work on, and don’t fancy doing late night catch ups before every demo tbh

How does your organisation and team balance PR comments demanding changes and dev time?

Here, while fixing PR comments we sometimes end up wasting as much time as we took in actually developing the feature... As a result, almost every major user story overshoots the estimation and almost every sprint gets delayed.

Yes, to each his own; but talking in general, why do you think this time wasting happens?
Do you think that happens because some of us are not as experienced as the others, the existing code not being up to the mark giving a bad example, or just a skewed review process?