Developer (master's degree, -bleeping- smart guy, no kidding) was bragging on how he made a piece of code 3x faster (with the usual pinch that the original dev was incompetent) and spent nearly 6 weeks working on it (wrote his own parallel-foreach library because Microsoft's parallel library was "too slow").
I was the original dev and he didn't know I had my own performance counters where I broke down each stack (database access, network I/O, and the code logic).
Average time was around 5ms (yes milliseconds) and worst case was around 10 seconds. His '3x improvement' was based on the worst test case, which improved by about a second. Showed our boss my graph (laughed out loud, said 'WTF', other curse words) and the dev hasn't spoken to me in weeks (I say 'hi' in the hall and he keeps walking)
Take that master's degree and high IQ and shove it.

Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

I'm not an iOS expert, I just wanted to get Google ads on my iOS app so that I could make a few petty dollars at the expense of my users. Is that too much to ask?

I started by following Google's instructions: install cocoapods, copy and paste some swift code... Compile failed, app broke. Carefully retrace my steps. Nothing.

Stackoverflow (praise be with them) suggests upgrading Xcode. Go to app store and click to upgrade Xcode. No progress bar, no status updates, just that pissy little spinner for several minutes. I become impatient try a few more times. It ain't happening.

Stackoverflow (holy of holies, defender of the weak) points me to an alternate source for Xcode, on the app store dev console. 4GB and some time later, an attempt to unzip gives "unknown error". Genocide of sorts.

Stackoverflow (all that is pure, all that is kind, all... I think you get it) says upgrade your OS. I tried months ago but I had issues with that pissy little spinner. Persist. 5GB and a "heavy-year" of time later (sorry), it installs. Then Xcode installs. Then bar a few errors, the app compiles.

So after almost 24 hours, life resumes. The lesson.. respond to all obscure iOS errors by upgrading. If fully upgraded, calmly acquire a baseball bat and destroy your machine. Make sure you have a good book nearby in case of either event.

Thank you for reading my rant. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to pay Apple
$150 so that I may list my app in the app store.

My !dev boyfriend just broke up with me because "I spend too much on the computer".

My friend silently quited his job. He simply stopped coming to work and that is OK, because his contract expired last Monday. He worked for very bad company, where everyone was braging about how awesome dev they are and know everything better than him. Since company forgot to talk with him about contract renewal or to find a replacement, they are now in big troubles because braggers broke production and none know how to fix it :)

Just broke up with my ex-girlfriend after 2 years of relationship. This might sound strange but scrolling after scrolling on dev rant is actually helping me getting through this situation!

This happened when I was on third semester of the career at university. I had my first boyfriend, the "Python" guy. He has that nickname because he used Python as his main programming language and nobody on the classroom used it.

In a few words, he was a... horrible human being. He talked down to me almost all the time, saying to me that my country was sh*t (he is from United States, and for a reason he never wanted to told me, he cannot go back to his country), that my university was sh*t and he said "you're will be lucky if you rot programming in a chair".

As you might wondering, yes, unfortunately it was a toxic relationship. Once he said he wanted to kill the teacher because he though that he hacked his laptop D:

He claimed that he was going to teach me python and security stuff, bla bla bla, but nothing. I learned python by my own.

I almost lost my faith in dev future because I though that the only ones that could have a real future in programming where people without ethics and only if they have a friend or a relative on a company.

The saddest part was that I dated him because I love smart boys, but he was just an idiot that, furthermore, wanted to change me (he pressured me to have tattoos, dye my hair and have sex, things that, of course, I didn't do).

I found courage to break up with him. I waited until the semester ends (in order not to lose my programming final projects) and, the day after the last day of class, I broke up with him.

I recovered my faith on programming when, next semester, one of the teachers invited me to give a python programming workshop :D and I gave two python workshops, and two of mobile development.

Now I'm working as a junior .NET developer. Thank God I broke up with him before the relationship became even worse. "Python" wanted to marry me after a year! O_O

TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN

I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳

We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;

JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).

HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).

There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.

No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.

You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.

Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!

Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!

Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.

...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!

Discussion between me and my N+1
(Note : I'm in the company for 3 months)

Me : As the tech leader, shouldn't you review my code ?
N+1 : I'm not the tech leader.
Me : Wait what ?
N+1 : I wrote the app from A to Z, hence I'm the architect.
Me : That's what I mean. Being the most knowledgable dev in the company makes you de facto tech leader.
N+1 : No, I'm not the tech leader. The CEO is.
Me : But he didn't even know the tech we are using !
N+1 : .... Anyway, I won't do code reviews. I don't like that.

(2 hours later)

N+1 : You made a mistake in the code. You broke a hidden functionality. You should be more careful, or ask me if you have doubts.

This guy is collector.

"Arch Linux is actually not that difficult".

I ssh'ed into my home server yesterday.

I was greeted by a message from an ext3 disk about needing fsck. Fine, "I haven't been in here for a while, might as well do some maintenance". fsck /dev/sda6, let's go!

This nicely "repaired" the sshd service (i.e. cleared the sectors), I cursed at myself for pressing enter at "repair (y)" right before the connection broke.

So I connected a display and keyboard... ok so let's just pacman -Sy sshd or whatever. We can do this! Just check the wiki, shouldn't be that hard!

Wait... pacman has not run since 2010? WAIT IT'S ACTUAL UPTIME IS 9 YEARS??? I guess we know why I'm a DB admin and not devops...

Hmm all the mirrors give timeouts? Oh. The i686 processor architecture isn't even supported anymore...?

4 hours, 11 glasses of cognac, 73 Arch32 wiki/forum pages, 2 attempts at compiling glibc, and 4 kernel panics later: "I think I'll buy a new server".

Today I felt sorry for my boss.

Story behind it:
My boss always encourages me to do the right thing. One of those right things is to enforce quality gates in our build pipelines which, as many of you know, means that the build fails if certain quality parameters are not met. Now an external vendor team merged the code this past thursday for a large feature that they had been working on and our build failed majestically throwing out the statistics and the offending files and lines of code.

All hell broke loose and there were escalations and what not and people working extra hours and over the weekend to try and get it right. So, I get a call from my boss earlier today to explain to me how important it is to release the feature and how it's going to be very bad if we don't. He was trying to justify his ask which was to lower the quality criteria and let the build pass for this week. Of course the dev in me was furious but then I realized it's not him but the corporate culture. Why would he or anyone would risk losing their jobs over the quality of code?

If you work at a place where IT is a support function of the company's primary business, I understand the moral compromises you guys have to make sometimes to keep the ball rolling. Thank you for your effort to make the world a better place.
So, thank you boss for all your support. I know it's not always up to you to decide on things but keep up the good work.

Ranting time;

Yeah so OK this ancient legacy clusterfuck we've been maintaining and keeping alive finally broke. And even though I'm very pleased with both being right, and the well deserved right to say I TOLD YOU SO, SO MANY MANY FUCKING TIMES to all in management, it's the definition of hate to work 18 hours a day to fix the shit someone else built, that they refused us to refactor. Ah, but wait; there's more! Everyone thinks it's our fault (R&D), because historically it was our department that built the system. Ten years ago. So sales and support are now all over us, those responsible for us being in this mess are either gone or so high up in management that they refuse to take part.

Taking the fall and blame and workload, for something we warned repeatedly about, but were refused to do something with, because shiny features and new apps is what is important!

I'd understand it if the numbers were red, but they arent!! We are growing so fast it was inevitable!

I fucking hate companies who dont listen to their devs..... also companies who places ops on dev shoulders.

Yaaaargh! Also; two developers means twice as fast? No? Fuuuuuck!!!

Dev: Hey I found a bug in your PR

Manager: YOU BROKE IT ON PURPOSE!

Dev: … yes?

Never have I been so furious whilst at work as yesterday, I am still super pissed about going back today but knowing it's only for another few weeks makes it baerable.

I have been the lead developer on a project for the last 3~ months and our CTO is the product owner. So every now and then he decides to just work on a feature he is interested in- fair enough I guess. But everything I have to go and clean up his horrendous code. Everything he writes is an absolute joke, it's like he is constantly in Hackathon mode "let's just copy and paste some code here, hardcoded shit there and forgot about separation of code- it all goes in 1 file".

So yesterday he added a application to the project and instead of reusing a shared data access layer he added an entirely new ORM, which is near identical to the existing ORM in use, for this one application.

Being anal about these things, the first thing I did was delete his shit and simply reference the shared library then refactor a little code to make it compatible.

WELL!! I certainly hit a nerve, he went crazy spamming messages on Slack demanding I revert as it broke ONE SINGLE QUERY that he hadn't checked in (he does 1 huge commit for 10 of everyone else's). I stuck to my principals and explained both ORM's are similar and that we only needed one, the second would cause a fragmented codebase for no benefit whatsoever.

The lead Dev was then forced to come and convince me to revert, again I refused and called out the shit quality of their code. The battle raged on via the public slack group and I could hear colleagues enjoying the heated debate, new users even started joining the group just to get in on mine and the cto's difference of opinion.

I even offered to fix his code for him if he were to commit it, obviously that was not taken well ;).

Once I finally got a luck at the cluster fuck of shit he had written it took me around 5 minutes to fix and I ever improved performance. Regardless he was having none of it. Still the demands to revert continued.

I left the office steaming after long discussions with the lead Dev caught in the middle.

Fortunately my day was salvages with a positive technical discussion that evening at a company with whome I had a job offer from.

I really hate burning bridges and have never left a company under bad terms but this dictator is making me look forward to breaking the news today I will be gone in 4 weeks.

I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.

A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.

Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."

A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.

Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.

KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."

KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.

It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.

I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.

Oh crap.

It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.

I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.

L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."

*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.

Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.

Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)

First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:

Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).

We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".

1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.

1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"

Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.

CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.

When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!

So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.

I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.

Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.

Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.

Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.

So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off

I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine

.... happy job hunting everyone!

I was once working for a company as a part time dev in the centrum of my city.

After working there for almost 1 year I noticed that I didn't get paid the last 2 months. I think it was about 500 euro's. (1 day per week).

So I went on my bike to the company to see whatsup. I came into the store and told my boss I hadn't been paid for 2 months. Even tho I did work.

He then got so angry! Just started yelling "YEAH BECAUSE THE PROJECT ISNT NEAR COMPLETE, NOTHING IS WORKING" I explained him the panel still had to be configured and that everything he asked me to do had been programmed and he then fucking told me he wanted it a different way even tho we clearly discussed it WEEKS AGO and he clearly said what he wanted. so he wanted dont revisions. I told him that this is not possible at this moment because holidays are around the corner and I want to go om vacation. (and he too!!!)

He then got so fucking angry he said "come with me for a second" we walk to the door of the building and then he just pushed me out of there and kicked me in my back.

I got so fucking pissed, I opened the door and asked him if je thinks this is a normal way to discuss. He closed the store door again, and I couldnt hold back anymore. I threw my full can of Red Bull against the glass door. The can exploded, and his whole fucking window had energy drink on it. He took some fucking steal pipe, so I walked back. But while trying to get away I jumped on his store sign. Which broke into pieces (they are quite expanasive). He came outside with his fucking pipe and he was trying to hit me. We had a crowd and people started yelling at him. I walked away but the asshole took my bike and put it inside his store. So that I couldnt leave.

So than I called the cops and reported him. For minor assault and some other things. Shortly after I deleted the entire project from his stupid server.

I really dont know this kinda shit happends, he probably felt like I didn't deserve that money even tho I did everything he asked for within deadline. Trying to solve it after vacation was also not an option. I signed him up for a few news letters after that.

Riskiest Dev choice...

Leaving a previous job, moving 1000KM (620 Miles) away with no job prospects and going absolutely broke.

This was all in the name of “I need a better job”, so what better way to force yourself to get one.

I’m currently in my second job since then and now make just over double what I was earning before.

Sometimes it takes a high risk to get out ahead.

This codebase reminds me of a large, rotting, barely-alive dromedary. Parts of it function quite well, but large swaths of it are necrotic, foul-smelling, and even rotted away. Were it healthy, it would still exude a terrible stench, and its temperament would easily match: If you managed to get near enough, it would spit and try to bite you.

Swaths of code are commented out -- entire classes simply don't exist anymore, and the ghosts of several-year-old methods still linger. Despite this, large and deprecated (yet uncommented) sections of the application depend on those undefined classes/methods. Navigating the codebase is akin to walking through a minefield: if you reference the wrong method on the wrong object... fatal exception. And being very new to this project, I have no idea what's live and what isn't.

The naming scheme doesn't help, either: it's impossible to know what's still functional without asking because nothing's marked. Instead, I've been working backwards from multiple points to try to find code paths between objects/events. I'm rarely successful.

Not only can I not tell what's live code and what's interactive death, the code itself is messy and awful. Don't get me wrong: it's solid. There's virtually no way to break it. But trying to understand it ... I feel like I'm looking at a huge, sprawling MC Escher landscape through a microscope. (No exaggeration: a magnifying glass would show a larger view that included paradoxes / dubious structures, and these are not readily apparent to me.)

It's also rife with bad practices. Terrible naming choices consisting of arbitrarily-placed acronyms, bad word choices, and simply inconsistent naming (hash vs hsh vs hs vs h). The indentation is a mix of spaces and tabs. There's magic numbers galore, and variable re-use -- not just local scope, but public methods on objects as well. I've also seen countless assignments within conditionals, and these are apparently intentional! The reasoning: to ensure the code only runs with non-falsey values. While that would indeed work, an early return/next is much clearer, and reduces indentation. It's just. reading through this makes me cringe or literally throw my hands up in frustration and exasperation.

Honestly though, I know why the code is so terrible, and I understand:

The architect/sole dev was new to coding -- I have 5-7 times his current experience -- and the project scope expanded significantly and extremely quickly, and also broke all of its foundation rules. Non-developers also dictated architecture, creating further mess. It's the stuff of nightmares. Looking at what he was able to accomplish, though, I'm impressed. Horrified at the details, but impressed with the whole.

This project is the epitome of "I wrote it quickly and just made it work."

Fortunately, he and I both agree that a rewrite is in order. but at 76k lines (without styling or configuration), it's quite the undertaking.

------

Amusing: after running the codebase through `wc`, it apparently sums to half the word count of "War and Peace"

PM (on slack): "we’re about to deploy to production".
Me: "ok"
… I keep on working on a task / remain available for any post deployment issues …
PM (5 minutes later on slack): "deployment broke production! We need to handle this NOW!"

My dev colleague has already called it a day, but I’m still online

Me: "ok I don’t have access to prod, can you describe what’s going on? I can’t reproduce on any other environment"

PM: …

10 minutes go by

Me: "anybody there?"

PM: …

45 minutes later, I realize PM is offline

The following day:
PM: "ok we got prod running again" (turns out it was client’s fault for not updating a config we as devs can’t access)
PM: "but we’re REALLY UPSET! You guys need to be available to intervene for any issues following deployment to production! At least one of you should be available!"

Me: "but, but…" 🫠

Dev checked in code (I suspect purposely not inviting me on the code review invite) saying he "fixed" the authentication bug in the web service.

Um no, like I told you last week, the authentication error is because the load balancer wasn't passing the user's authentication to IIS.

If I didn't overhear him telling a user "Still getting the error? I don't know, we might have to re-write that service", he might have gotten away with it.

Me: "Wait, that doesn't sound right. If I hit the server directly, authentication works. Its an issue with the load balancer, not the service"
Dev: "Admin said the load balancer is fine and it has to be the service."
Me: "I don't buy it. IIS is returning the authentication error, not the service."
Dev: "I added exception handling and nothing is being logged. Must be something in the service configuration."
Me: "No, IIS performs the authentication, not the service. I explained that last week, remember?"
Dev: "Oh yea. What changes do we need to make to the service?"
<my blood pressure starts to spike>
Me: "None. Give me a sec.."
<we have other apps on the same server farm that work just fine, so I re-configure the service pool settings to match theirs>
Me: "See, now going through the load balancer, the service works fine. For some reason, the admin had our service set up differently."
Dev: "OK, I'll let the users know the service is fixed."
Me: "Service was never broke and I'm not leaving it in its current state. In the morning I'll talk to the admin and see what he can do to fix."

i was asked to start a new project, and another dev was brought onto the team shortly after. as soon as he joined, straight away he started an entirely new project and worked on it through the whole weekend, then came back on monday and just sort of pasted his files into/over the code i had already started and was working on, with no regard for folder structure or naming conventions or anything. his work was even split between 2 almost identically named namespaces (both of which were completely different to the existing project namespace) and his shit broke everything i did in the first place. the cherry on top is that none of his work was even functional, it was purely dummy/mockup web pages that weren't linked to any sort of backend.

when i asked him wtf he thought he was doing, he kept saying "i didnt touch your code" and refused to acknowledge that pasting a project over a different project can break stuff, then said it "wasn't his fault that i'm slow and not keeping up". and just kept saying vague bullshit about how i have to do it his way because he "has more experience"

he had no idea what my previous experience was, he had never asked and i had never told him, he just decided that he had more experience than me.

i dug through the shit and found out that he didn't just break my work, he had actually purposely deleted it when he realised it was getting in the way of his spaghetti. i showed him the commit and confronted him with it and all the cunt said was "well the good news is, you know the fix" and kept trying to dismiss me in the most disrespectful ways he could think of. i eventually snapped at him (long overdue at this point) and told him that any experienced developer would not commit code that didn't even fucking compile, especially when they're the one who broke it, and that he needs to grow up. of course he then complained that i was being unprofessional.

our manager decided we should go with fuckfaces """code""" without even looking at the work either of us had done, purely because fuckface is older than me and that's how the world works.

in the end i just told my manager that i refuse to work with the guy and he could either take him or me off the project (guess who he picked) or i quit.

after a few months of the guy failing to deliver any of even the basic functionality that was asked for, the entire project got scrapped, and the dude just quit once everyone realised he was literally just larping as an experienced dev but couldn't accomplish simple tasks.

i never received an apology from anybody involved.

Today was a good day. The toilet door was stuck for two hours because the lock broke. After the locksmith came and tried his best, we had to kick the door in. Fun fact: a fellow dev was stuck on the inside...

Please. Hear me out.

I've been doing frontend for six years already. I've been a junior dev, then in was all up to the CTO. I've worked for very small companies. Also, for the very large ones. Then, for huge enterprises. And also for startups. I've been developing for IE5.5, just for fun. I've done all kinds of stuff — accessibility, responsive design (with or without breakpoints), web components, workers, PWA, I've used frameworks from Backbone to React. My favourite language is CSS, and you probably know it. The bottom line is, you name it — I did it.

And, I want to say that Safari is a very good browser.

It's very fast. Especially on M1 Macs. Yes, it lacks customization and flexibility of Firefox, but general people, not developers, like to use it. Also, Safari is very important — Apple is a huge opposing force to Google when it comes to web standards. When Google pushes their BS like banning ad blockers, Apple never moves an inch. If we lose Safari, you'll notice.

As for the Safari-specific bugs situation, well… To me, Safari serves as a very good indicator: if your website breaks in Safari, chances are you used some hacks that are no good. Safari is a good litmus test I use to find the parts of my code that could've been better.

The only Safari-specific BUG I encountered was a blurry black segment in linear gradients that go from opaque to transparent. So, instead of linear-gradient(#f00, transparent), just do linear-gradient(#f00f, #f000).

This is the ONLY bug I encountered. Every single time my website broke in Safari other than that, was for some ugly hack I used.

You don't have to love it. I don't even use it, my browser of choice is Firefox. But, I'm grateful to Safari, just because it exists. Why? Well, if Safari ceases to exist, Google will just leave both W3C and WhatWG, and declare they'll be doing things their way from now on. Obey or die.

Firefox alone is just not big enough. But, together with Safari, they oppose Google's tyranny in web standards game.

Google will declare the victory and will turn the web into an authoritarian dictatorship. No ad blockers will be allowed. You won't be able to block Google's trackers. Google already owns the internet, well, almost, and this will be their final, devastating victory.

But Safari is the atlas that keeps the web from destruction.

Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.

The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.

1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).

Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).

I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).

What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.

My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.

Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.

End of second week at a new job. Found what I thought was a bug and wanting to impress I fixed it. The dev reviewing my code had just started a week before me so he also had no idea what was going on. It went live Friday afternoon.

Come back Monday morning and turns out I completely broke everything and nobody could use the site all weekend. I thought I was done for sure. Was shitting myself all day waiting for the call.

TURNS OUT NOBODY EVEN NOTICED

Be me, new dev on a team. Taking a look through source code to get up to speed.

Dev: **thinking to self** why is there no package lock.. let me bring this up to boss man

Dev: hey boss man, you’ve got no package lock, did we forget to commit it?

Manager: no I don’t like package locks.

Dev: ...why?

Manager: they fuck up computer. The project never ran with a package lock.

Dev: ..how will you make sure that every dev has the same packages while developing?

Manager: don’t worry, I’ve done this before, we haven’t had any issues.

**couple weeks goes by**

Dev: pushes code

Manager: hey your feature is not working on my machine

Dev: it’s working on mine, and the dev servers. Let’s take a look and see

**finds out he deletes his package lock every time he does npm install, so therefore he literally has the latest of like a 50 packages with no testing**

Dev: well you see you have some packages here that updates, and have broken some of the features.

Manager: >=|, fix it.

Dev: commit a working package lock so we’re all on the same.

Manager: just set the package version to whatever works.

Dev: okay

**more weeks go by**

Manager: why are we having so many issues between devs, why are things working on some computers and not others??? We can’t be having this it’s wasting time.

Dev: **takes a look at everyone’s packages** we all have different packages.

Manager: that’s it, no one can use Mac computers. You must use these windows computers, and you must install npm v6.0 and node v15.11. Everyone must have the same system and software install to guarantee we’re all on the same page

Dev: so can we also commit package lock so we’re all having the same packages as well?

Manager: No, package locks don’t work.

**few days go by**

Manager: GUYS WHY IS THE CODE DEPLOYING TO PRODUCTION NOT WORKING. IT WAS WORKING IN DEV

DEV: **looks at packages**, when the project was built on dev on 9/1 package x was on version 1.1, when it was approved and moved to prod on 9/3 package x was now on version 1.2 which was a change that broke our code.

Manager: CHANGE THE DEPLOYMENT SCRIPTS THEN. MAKE PROD RSYNC NODE_MODULES WITH DEV

Dev: okay

Manager: just trust me, I’ve been doing this for years

Who the fuck put this man in charge.

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

!dev

So the ceiling in our (upstairs) laundry room started leaking. After some troubleshooting, we determined it was the A/C, and not the water pipes. (The house is cheap as hell and fucking stupid.) We did some troubleshooting and research, and tried fixing it ourselves; no luck. Cleaning the pipes from outside: no joy. Cleaning the pipes from inside: no access. The attic is ... small. Maybe half a small closet? and doesn’t give access to fucking anything. The builders must have installed everything before putting up the walls and ceilings, sealing everything off, because there is no access. It’s fucking stupid. Also, the usual maintenance openings aren’t even there either because why the fuck would they be?

But fucking whatever.

We called an a/c repair guy, who never showed. We assumed he was busy (it’s fucking hot), so we called him again the next day; two days later he showed.

Busy. Whatever.

Guy didn’t bring a ladder. Whatever, we have one right there in the hallway because we’ve been trying in vain to fix it.

Guy didn’t bring a wrench of any kind. Guy didn’t bring a screwdriver. Guy didn’t bring a bucket. Guy didn’t bring any pipe. Or any pipe sealant. Or fucking anything but his sagging fucking pants, fat belly, and fat stench. We had to supply everything, which fortunately we had on hand as we were already trying to fix it. Hoorah for being proactive.

Guy said he drained both primary and secondary pans. Somehow. Without access. I’m not even convinced it HAS a secondary pan. Guy said he cleaned out the pipes, too. From inside the house. Without access. Somehow. Maybe he did that from outside, without tools, while I was chasing the brats and someone else was watching the fat bastard. Who knows; I wasn’t with him most of the time.

When he was done, the guy said “pay whatever you think it’s worth” (or whatever). Fine, if he actually cleaned the pipes out and it isn’t leaking anymore, that’s great.

Guy leaves.

We go up to check. AND THE FUCKING A/C IS STILL LEAKING. BUT NOW IT’S FROM BEFORE THE PIPES, TOO. AND HALF AN HOUR LATER, THE LAUDRY ROOM CEILING IS ALSO LEAKING, WHICH MEANS THE PIPES ARE STILL LEAKING.

It turns out the asshole broke the pan.

We call him back, he goes blah blah blah, we send him a video. Drip, drip, drip.

His response?
“The pan must be rusted.” IT’S FUCKING PLASTIC.

“Oh, in that case, it’s probably a rusted coil that’s leaking.”

a) HOW DID YOU NOT KNOW IT WAS FUCKING PLASTIC IF YOU DRAINED IT?

b) THE COILS CARRY FREON, NOT WATER, AND THE A/C IS STILL WORKING. IF THERE WAS A LEAK, SHIT WOULD BE HOT. AND RANK. FREON SMELLS NASTY AND DOESN’T CAUSE IT TO RAIN IN THE FUCKING HOUSE.

REPLACING A COIL IS ALSO A $2000 FUCKING REPAIR.

THE FAT BASTARD PROBABLY BROKE THE PAN INTENTIONALLY JUST TO UPSELL. I WANT TO FUCKING MURDER HIS LYING FUCKING FACE OFF.

It’s possible he didn’t break the pan intentionally, so I’ll tentatively remove that from his charges. BUT TO FUCKING LIE?

LIE AND DIE, FUCKER.

I was on vacation when my employer’s new fiscal year started. My manager let me take vacation because it’s not like anything critical was going to happen. Well, joke was on us because we didn’t foresee the stupidity of others…

I had to update a few product codes in the website’s web config and deploy those changes. I was only going to be logged in for 30 minutes to complete that.

I get messaged by one of our database admins. He was doing testing and was unable to complete a payment on the website. That was strange. There was a change pushed by our offsite dev agency, but that was all frontend changes (just updating text) and wouldn’t affect payments.

We don’t want to enlist the dev agency for debugging work, especially when it’s not likely that it’s a code issue. But I was on vacation and I couldn’t stay online past the time I had budgeted for. So my employer enlists the dev agency for help. It’s going to be costly because the agency is in Lithuania, it was past their business hours, and it was emergency support.

Dev agency looks at error logs. There are Apple Pay errors, but that doesn’t explain why non Apple Pay transactions aren’t going through. They roll back my deployment and theirs, but no change. They tell my employer to contact our payment processor.

My manager and the Product Manager contact Payroll, who is the stakeholder for our payment gateways. Payroll contacts our payment gateway and finds out a service called Decision Manager was recently configured for our account. Decision Manager was declining all payments. Payroll was not the person who had Decision Manager installed and our account using this service was news to her.

Payroll works with our payment processor to get payments working again. The damage is pretty severe. Online payments were down for at least 12 hours. Our call center had logged reports from customers the night before.

At our post mortem, we had to find out who ok’d Decision Manager without telling anyone. Luckily, it was quick work. The first stakeholder up was for the Fundraising Dept. She said it wasn’t her or anyone on her team. Our VP of Analytics broke it to her that our payment processor gave us the name of the person who ok’d Decision Manager and it was someone on the Fundraising team. Fundraising then starts backtracking and says that oh yes she knew about it but transactions were still working after the Decision Manager had been configured. WTAF.

Everyone is dumbfounded by this. How could you make a big change to our payment processor and not tell anyone? How did our payment processor allow you to make this change when you’re not the account admin (you’re just a user)?

Our company head had to give an awkward speech about communication and how it’s important. The web team can’t figure out issues if you don’t tell us what you did. The company head was pissed because it was a shitty way to start off the new fiscal year. Our bill for the dev agency must have been over $1000 for debugging work that wasn’t helpful.

Amazingly, no one was fired.

Third call of the morning. No one I need is answering. Boss fell asleep (but went on mute, thankfully) and deputy director is on the line listening in.

I'm hungry. Cranky. And feeling ignored.

To all my dev friends here: please answer your phones of you're needed to give information about your code. These are code specific issues (ie- application/program specific) that require knowing the code to know what broke so we know how to fix it.

Last week my company thought it would be a great idea to introduce a new sh*tty internal web portal that gives federated access to aws (instead of using our own accounts to assume dev roles like we used to do).

This broke a lot of sh*t that simply used to ask for an MFA token and used our practically permissionless accounts to assume a proper dev role. An MFA token that we'd enter directly into the terminal/tool. It was very seamless. But nooooooo we now have to go a webpage, login with sso (which also requires mfa), click "generate credentials," copy-paste those into terminal/creds file and _then_ continue our aws cli call. Every. Single. Day.

BUT TODAY I HAD ENOUGH.

I spent the entire day rewriting the auth part of our tools so they would basically read the cookie that's set by the web portal, and use it to call the internal api that generates the credentials, and just automatically save those. Now all we need to do is log into the portal, then return to the tool and voilà, the tool's also got access! Sure, it's not as passive as just entering an MFA token directly, but it's as passive as it gets. Still annoyed by this sh*tty and unnecessary portal, but I learned a thing or two about cookies.

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

I would have answered 'girlfriend' but she broke up with me a couple hours ago. I guess now the tough dev days should get me through the emotionally fucked up phase.

Me: We really need to improve our unit test coverage.
Team/Boss: <sarcasm> Haha yeah.
Production Bug: I'm doing something nasty to a client, because a dev broke something but no test coverage.
Boss: How could we have prevented this?!

I've been writing a complex mutation engine that dynamically modifies compiled C++ code. Now there's alot of assembly involved, but I got it to work. I finished off writing the last unit test before it was time to port it all to windows. I switched into a release build, ready to bask in the glory of it all. FUCKING GCC OPTIMIZATIONS BROKE EVERYTHING. I had been doing all my dev in debug mode and now some obscure optimization GCC does in release mode is causing a segfault...somewhere. Just when I thought I was done 😅

!dev (when do I ever post a dev related story? I only post about my personal life really)

For about 2 years I had a very good friend, and I had a huge crush on her for most of those 2 years. All of my junior year of high school, she dated my best friend, then they broke up the summer after because he'd cheated on her around the time they got together and she had found out. I was there for both of them during the breakup (it was fucking exhausting). The thing is, I was there for the girl more because I had a crush on her, and I started to consider her my best friend rather than her ex.

She knew I had a crush on her for a long time. But she still spent about a year going to parties every weekend, getting fucking hammered, and hooking up with random guys, then proceeded to tell me about it after. I can't count how many times she had to cancel plans because she got hammered the night before.

But I had a huge crush on her, so I essentially put her up on a pedestal, thinking she could do no wrong. Then we hit a point where we didn't talk for a couple months because I hit a low point and she was uncomfortable with me because of it. Around April we started talking again, immediately back to being best friends but my feelings for her came and went for a while. She had a huge crush on our other friend that had a girlfriend at the time. Life went on, she actually ended up being my first kiss while she was drunk one night (I was sober cause I was driving), but I started talking to a different girl a few days before then, so I was very conflicted about everything there.

Then a few weeks ago came. A different friend got a Radeon 5700 XT and I went over to his house to check it out and everything. We ended up talking for a while, and the conversation turned to my whole friend group that I hung out with all the time (the girl being the center of the group). That friend was never very fond of her, and he always made that very clear. Basically he made me realize that she's not perfect, and that I'd been seeing her through rose-colored glasses.

I spent a week or so rethinking our whole friendship, and I realized that she is nowhere near fucking perfect. For example, she ALWAYS has to be the center of attention. If our friend group is focusing on someone else for whatever reason, she essentially throws a fit then gets really quiet to get attention. Also she can't take criticism at all, she always acts like a victim if you try to criticize her in any way. I also feel like every time I tried to better myself in some way, she ended up bringing me down and making me feel like my problems aren't important. She uses her kindness as a weapon, such as "How could you say that about me? I've been nothing but kind to you!" And the list just goes on.

So, about a week ago, I told her that I feel like she's a toxic person, and she does nothing but bring people down over time, because that's truly how I feel. And of course, she couldn't take the criticism, and said "I don't even know why you feel that, I've been nothing but nice to you".

I haven't talked to anyone in that friend group in one week now. And I feel a lot better mentally. Being friends with her felt like a chore. Only one person in that friend group has tried to talk to me, and that was today. Nobody else has texted me or anything since last Monday. And I honestly couldn't care less. I feel like a huge chapter of my life is over, like the depressing chapter in a book.

I don't know how to end this. I'm doing fairly well now, been hanging out with coworkers a bunch lately. Life's actually kinda good for once.

When the department’s large plotter printer broke down, the users demanded they still be able to execute their large reports. The area manager understood reality, if we are waiting on parts, not a lot we can do, but one developer decided to re-write the report/application as a web/.asp application. Mind you, he wasn’t a web developer, mostly VB experience, so the ‘report’ executed the same queries and filled up simple html tables. Did it work? Sort of. The output had none of the specialized formatting like headers, grouping, summary calculations, etc. Since the users could see the data in the web browser and scroll left/right, they were OK with the temporary fix. When I heard this:
Me: “You do know the application could output the report in HTML exactly the way it prints to the printer. All we would have to do enable that feature in the application.”
Dev: “Yea, but I thought it would be cool to do it as a web app.”
Me: “OK, but we should just update the app.”
Dev: “Um...that is going to be difficult, the boss liked my idea so much, he wanted the report replaced with my asp application. I deleted the application from source control and from the network. Sorry.”
Me: “OMFG!…tell me you make a backup!”
Dev: “Ha!...no…boss said you would fight innovation. Web is the future.”
Me: ”What is going to happen when the printer is fixed!? Users are going to flip”
Dev: “Oh, we didn’t think of that. Oh well, that’s your problem now.”
Me: “WTF? My problem?”
Dev: “Yea, you are moving to the team responsible for those legacy applications, since innovation really isn’t your thing. I just got promoted to senior developer.”

Do you have a dev (or informatic in general) nickname?

Oh, I love stories XD

When I was at university, my first boyfriend (now ex-boyfriend) was the only one who knows Python (teachers used to teach Java and C#). He was pretty old, like 4 years older than all of us, and when the teacher introduced himself to the group the first day of the semester, "Python" asked

- "Teacher, do you use Python platform?"

I don't know why, but the rest of my classroom mates laughed. And from that day, my friends called him "Python".

The funny thing is that two weeks later he became my boyfriend ^_^ a friend of mine said "he wants to show you his python :o"

A semester after our broke-up, I was invited to teach Python at the university. I accepted. Now some teachers remember me as "Python girl".

Working for this startup as a remote dev for last 6 months.

This month they delayed my payment by saying that they are still waiting for crowdfunding payment to be processed.

After 3 days my teamlead who recruited me quitted with 2 more people saying that its 'personal issues'

1 week later (today) I received a letter of termination saying that my contract ceases its effect after 30 days and I will receive my payment after 45 days as all service providers.

I reminded those fuckers that in contract there is a clause saying that they are supposed to pay me within 24 hours of invoice receipt (because this is not my first time with startups). Then fuckers responded that I will get paid as soon as they receive the money.

Contacted CTO today and he told me the truth. Turns out that venture capital that supposedly raised funding of around 10 million usd last year actually didnt raise shit. In the end startup did not receive this funding because VC convinced investors that this project is shit and not worth investing.

VC's plan is to starve out the startup by giving it bridge payment injections. At some point they want to buy out the startup and resell it for profit.

And here I am fucked in the ass. But for some reason im not mad at that VC because shit happens. Im mad ar startup managers who kept us in the dark for 2 weeks and dropped us like shit :)

I am really tired of broke startups and their bullshittery.

Not about favorite language but about why PHP is not my favorite language.

I recently launched a web shop built on Prestashop. I found that some product pages are so god damn slow, like taking 50 fuckin' seconds to load. So I started investigating and analyzing the problem. Turns out that for some products we have so many different combinations that it results in a cartesian product totalling about 75K of unique combinations.

Prestashop did a real bad job coding the product controller because for every combination they fetch additional data. So that results in 75K queries being executed for just 1 product detail page. Crazy, even more when you know that the query that loads all these combinations, before iterating through them, takes 7 fuckin' seconds to execute on my dev machine which is a very very fast high end machine.

That said I analyzed the query and now I broke the query down into 3 smaller queries that execute in a much faster 400 ms (in total!) fetching the exact same data.

So what does this have to do with PHP? As PHP is also OO why the fuck would you always put stuff in these god damn associative arrays, that in turn contain associative arrays that contain more arrays containing even more arrays of arrays.

Yes I could do the same in C# and other languages as well but I have never ever encountered that in other languages but always seem to find this in PHP. That's why I hate PHP. Not because of the language but all those fucking retarded assholes putting everything in arrays. Nothing OO about that.

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

Hey DevRant fam! Hope you are all doing very well wherever you may be. This is not a dev related post but just something i wanted to get off my chest , 20 minutes ago I watched the movie “night school” along side my brother. I was sat down along side two girls on my left and i thought “hey they seem nice” in my mind.

Well i was wrong - throughout parts of the movie she would randomly turn to give me a weird look, as if i was something else? Unfortunately i suffer from eczema and really cant help it and have to undergo treatment monthly and with that comes bullying and judgement from randoms.

What really broke me was that she had the nerves to comment loudly to her friend right next to her about me, say things like “ damn is he ugly “ and many things along those lines, and also about how i ate my pringles? Like hey i love my pringle chips!.

At the end, movie done, my brother is happy I’m happy(not really) we both got up the two random girls walked in front and just gave me this weird stare and had to judge me by the way i walked, thats a whole other issue but i just wish they would have the thought- how would you feel if you put yourself in my position and have to go through my emotions you put me through because you wouldn’t think before you speak ? :-( well thats not everything but some of what i have to deal with unfortunately - sorry this is so long.

Hope all is good for everyone- thank you ☺️

Milo

Yay, I have to rewrite + design a 15-20 year old website 🎉

Originally written in, God knows what version of php, HTML and JS by a Java dev, and patched every other year when something broke or a new feature was needed, every time by someone new...
Some years ago the system was moved from a Windows host to Ubuntu and that was a nightmare in its own, because of all the hard-coded paths...

Welp, at least some fucker found another fucker who is willing to create a new design for the site, so that's off my plate...

!dev

In the name of my partner: GO FUCK YOURSELF YOU FILTHY MUSHROOM ADDICT SLAVER! DAMN SUN OF A BITCH!

My partner does her obligatory internship for university. Guess what, the place where she is working offers no payment, 40h a week and even work unrealted to her studies!

She went there with pure enthusiasm and power and this whole non-sense facility of fucktards broke her. She lost her bliss and is really depressed now - mainly because of this fucktard, cock-sucking boss that has no fucking fire anymore and is abusing everyone there mantaly. If not for me she'd get not a songle positive feedback from this whole piece of junk which really, REALLY PISSES ME OF. FUUUCK. How can someone be such a joy sucking prick?

And the university?! They just don't give a fuck because they don't have enough employees to tackle all problems while at the same time their whole organization is the biggest pile if stinky, sleazy shit you have ever seen!! Omg.

Just had to get that out. Fuck.

Kinda all other devs translate incompetent with a lack of knowledge

i would go with not able to recognize his lack of knowledge

Story 1:
once we had a developer, whom was given the task to try out a REST/Json API using Java

after a week he presented his solution,
2 Classes with actual code and a micro-framework for parsing and generating JSON

so i asked him, why he didn't use a framework like jackson or gson, while this presentation he felt pretty offended by this question

a couple of weeks later i met him and he was full of thanks for me, because i showed him, that there are frameworks like that, and even said sorry for feeling offended

- no incompentence here -

Story 2:
once i had a lead dev, who was so self-confident, he refactored (for no reason but refactoring itself) half the app and commited without trying to compile/run test

but not only once, but on a regular basis

as you may imagine, he broke the application multiple times and blamed the other devs

- incompentence warning-

Story 3:

once i had a dev, which wanted to stay up with the latest versions of his libraries

npm update && commit without trying to compile/testing multiple times

- incompentence warning-

Story 4:

once i had a cto

* thought email-marketing is cutting edge
* removed test-systems completely to reduce costs
* liked wordpress
* sets vm to sleep without letting anyone know

- i guess incompetent alert -

It's rant time!

So, as a broke electrical engineering student, I got this job in a local company. They used JSF and my skills in java were, at the very least, small (former PHP developer). But as a self taught developer this didn't stopped me and I went full on java learning (very bad year for my EE studies).

I became the 'guy in charge' for several of their projects (yeah, they did exploited broke students, I realized this far too late). I was very proud of myself, I worked hard, showed my true value, and they became impressed.

One nice thursday night, my "handler" emailed me with a urgent request. They needed an entire jsf application done by monday and the requirements were fairly complex.

Oh boy, I had a total of 10h of sleep from thursday to monday. I didn't even slept before going to my monday class, but I delivered the system. Got an pat in the back... "you're awesome"... I was happy.

6 months later: I received an email asking to fix a bug in the system. No problem with that. Oddly, this bug was a MAJOR bug. There's no way the system worked properly for six months with it. I fixed it in no time and commited the changes.

Turns out that this was the first time the system was going to be deployed. They made me go in an insane weekend dev project, and didn't even used the system for SIX MONTHS!!! I started to work my way out the company after this, aiming to open my own software company.

I still remember some other rants from the time I worked there. But these are for later.

Nice week for you all, may the sprint go gently and the clients be kind.

Context:
Me, Front-end Developer, Javascript stuff
---

Junior Dev: Hey xxzer0, could you help me with this? I spent the entire day on it and at this point, I think I just broke Chrome.

xxzer0: *---* Okay, let me see.

Junior Dev: Do you see it? I am updating the Javascript code but it's not working at all. The browser is not even loading it... Literally, the code I just wrote is not there.

**
Now be me, be the fucking idiot I was and I have been my whole life, I already knew what was going on because I lost a fucking day on it as this guy.
**

xxzer0: Well, let me see just one thing...

'Open Chrome Dev Tools' -> 'Network' -> 'Disable Cache'.

xxzer0: Now try again...

Junior Dev: What are you..doi........ IT'S WORKING! O.O

Chrome, I love you but sometimes I wish you could make this more "accessible" to newcomers.

This is my first post. I felt like if I'm wrote this I'll just be a big fat crybaby, but i need to release this pressure from me.

I've been pretty burnt out past 6 month.

So a little bit backstory here, I've come from broken family, and currently on my 7th semester of college. But I've been part of small startup as mobile apps developer for a year and a half now.

6 month ago, it just a year of recovery from a toxic relationship that basically ruins my college life. I have really bad GPA (bad score for being absent from classes), basically no friends, and a barely passable (or even bad) skill in Android Dev. Then I got new girlfriend that really supportive for me. But after 2 months, her parents ask me if I would marry her or not. because if not, I have to broke up with her (We're in Indonesia and both of us is Muslim, so outside marriage relationship is kinda in "grey area" depend on who you ask). So I have to choose to marry her or not, and I choose the marriage. I think I have enough saving and just enough income to support both of us.

Then it's been a downward spiral from there.

The startup that I've been working on were in a pretty bad shape. I've been underpaid since the beginning (and that's not really a problem for me at that time, that's my choice and I blame no one) but abysmal growth and some miss management force us to scale back and makes me basically in a non-paying jobs.

So I take college break for a semester and been trying to find projects here and there for marriage savings, but because the weak employee protection here, lots of the projects I have completed have yet to pay the fee (even until today). And even if they paid me, most of it were really low paying jobs (we're talking $200 per 3 weeks project here, to be fair, for our average GDP, it's not bottom-low).

And the deadline is approaching, our marriage date is settled in (very) early January 2019, and i've been in this "not yet graduated but needs job" limbo. Most of employer here still has the old "Degree Based" Job specs, and not "Skill Based" one. so because de-jure I've still a "College Student" no Job listing is willing to take me in. I've apply to almost 30 Job Listing and just get interview once, and still failed because I can't move to the company area, too far and have too expensive living cost vs the salary ($300 living cost vs $450 salary, while i need to give money to my girlfriend back home for a living).

So I switch my direction to Competitions with Extra Job offering as a Bonus, and I've been pretty close to winning one, held by CIMB Bank, but still failed. It's little bit better now because CIMB came interested with me but there is red flag which I need to graduate with decent GPA before July 2019, and in current GPA? it's practically impossible.

Can it getting worse? oh it can. Remember I come from broken home family? it's inherently hard to keeps communication with both of my parents that to this day still despise each other. And while my mother is still supportive to my marriage, my father isn't. He even basically disowned me last week because my one-sided decision to marry my girlfriend, and blame my mother for being the "bad influence" for me.

And now, today, December 16th, and I'm still in this weird Limbo and have nowhere to go. with $0 in my pocket (have spent all of my savings for marriage preparation) And our marriage is approaching. I almost given up.

!rant !notrant !confession_maybe? Bit of a read.

Last year, around September (around 8 months into my first job in the industry), I started loosing motivation to be a developer. By then I had consistently dropped out of 3 or 4 courses for my degree (no penalties as it was pretty much within the starting weeks of the each course). I was think that I do not want to do this. It got so bad that I was looking for other jobs and even trade apprenticeships (I am old-ish so chances of that are so bloody low).
I had my mind set. Including not wanting to finish the degree I had started, which only had 1 year as full time to complete.

My missus supported me in my decision making, but she insisted that I finish the degree as the years I spent on it would have been a waste if I don't. So I agreed, with the idea that I will do this part time when I find another job.

Fast forward to New Years and a very spontaneous decisions was made. I resigned from my dev job and we ended up moving away to another city, two weeks later. By this point on I was so certain that I did not want to be in the IT industry. I had not done any dev work (personal projects or learning new technology etc) outside of the job for months. It had been months since I've visited devrant (to be honest it was not even installed on my phone, mainly because I broke my phone and after having it replaced I had not reinstalled a large portion of the apps I used). I had sold my custom built pc thinking that we do not need two PC's (we kind of don't, she's fine with her laptop) which meant no more dev stuff as none of this stuff was set up on my missus pc. I was looking for all kinds of jobs outside of the IT industry, anything really.

But then something happened. And this is that something. I mean this, deverant. I was flicking through the apps list on google play store, and I saw devrant, and I choose to reinstall it. I began reading rants and comments and I am certain that this made me realise why I want to be a developer. Within about 2 weeks of redownloading deverant I was enrolled full time as a uni student fully motivated to earn my degree.

There are bits and pieces left out of the story. I don't regret leaving my first ever dev job and moving away, it does seem drastic but it changed me for the better I believe. I have the experience from that role and I new fresh start so to speak. I think my missus new this was just a phase, although it felt so certain about it.

I am more of a lurker than a ranter or a commenter on this social platform but I felt that I need to share this. Thanks for reading this. Not really sure what to tag this. Has anyone else experienced this before?

Looks like most of the devs are broke due to their irregular spending habits.

as a C# dev every time i have to code something in JS i'm just ranting because

- no types
- no fucking errors

i tried to move a Oval in an HTML5 canvas via Drag and Drop and after one hour I gave up...

such a fucking creepy broke language..
as a proof, if js wouldnt be that fucked up why is there typeScript, CoffeeScript, Brython, ... ?

Cant wait to finally use WebAssember...(really)

!dev

Got one of these today, pretty cool in my experience. I do not have any experience at all with sdr's.

I taught I broke it for a good 30 min thinking 350 € down the drain, turns out i accidentally set the antenna gain to 0 (damn ui designer)

The story of how I got my new job (I will start in december) even though it is not a dev related one:

I was about to reduce my work hours, because my wife was getting a really good job. We couldn't both work full-time, because our son is in kindergarten. Then she broke her ankle and the job was gone. Right at this point I was offered a job at a friends company. I knew him by being an intern in his company.

Things always go well in the end.

I really felt like a badass one time when I managed to recover all projects on our dev server after a full meltdown of the HDD.

We had no recent backups, because our backup server was down for a few months, and our (at the time small) company was in a tight spot on finances, and couldn't get a replacement.

The problem was that the HDD on the backup server failed, but we were storing all projects also on the dev server, along with our local git repos (no GitHub at the time for us), but then the dev server HDD also broke, and I used every piece of data recovery software I found trying to recover the data, until one actually managed to read the raw data from the HDD and store it as a virtual drive, that I then used to try and build another partition index and it actually worked!

Lost about 10% of the data, but that was enough, as i managed to recover all the git repos and databases...

I don't even remember the tools that got the job done in the end, but that was one hell of a week, and at the end I felt like a true IT God!

True story!

PS: 2 weeks later we had a new backup server, another offsite backup solution and a GitHub account for the company. Was delayed on salary in order to manage it (me and the CEO both agreed to give our pay for one month to get them), but worth it!

Broke down and asked the junior dev to help me hash out an issue. He's also struggling with it.

I'm not a retard after all... unless were both retards.

I loved my previous job. It paid shit but I learned so much. Starting from prototyping to production. DevOps, Development etc. I started a new job 1 year ago. It pays great but man, I only do “if-else” nothing else.

My old boss contacted me for some contract job because the dev that he hired after me, not only he didn’t do anything, but broke production and all other systems on a Friday before going on vacation. So the company went old school with excel spreadsheet to keep track of orders.

I accepted the contract job and man. I’ve learned so much these past 2 weeks, working only ~ 10 hrs / week.

Working with a new team and I don't understand how this is normal or ok.

Me: Does anyone need help troubleshooting the broken build or can I revert this change that broke it so I can push my change out?

Dev: Stop build shaming me, I wouldn't leave the build in a failing state.

Me: Well, I wasn't sure how long to wait, before asking.... it's been broken for 4 hours.

Dev: It's the development environment, you should expect development to be going on.

Me: Yes and appears that this project architecture doesn't support any sort of isolation for development. So nobody can deploy anything except through the development branch.

Dev: That's what development is for IMO, so it doesn't bother me.

Conversation yesterday (senior dev and the mgr)..

SeniorDev: "Yea, I told Ken when using the service, pass the JSON string and serialize to their object. JSON eliminates the data contract mismatch errors they keep running into."
Mgr: "That sounds really familiar. Didn't we do this before?"
SeniorDev: "Hmmm...no. I doubt anyone has done this before."
Me: "Yea, our business tier processor handled transactions via XML. It allowed the client and server to process business objects regardless of platform. Partners using Perl,
clients using Delphi, website using .aspx, and our SQLServer broker even used it."
Mgr: "Oh yea...why did we stop using it?"
Me: "WCF. Remember, the new dev manager at the time and his team broke up the business processor into individual WCF services."
Mgr: "Boy, that was a crap fest. We're still fighting bugs from the mobile devices. Can't wait until we migrate everything to REST."
SeniorDev: "Yea, that was such a -bleep-ing joke."
Me: "You were on Jake's team at the time. You were the primary developer in the re-write process saying passing strings around wasn't the way true object-oriented developers write code.
So it's OK now because the string is in JSON format or because using a JSON string your idea?"

SeniorDev turns around in his desk and puts his headphones back on.

That's right you lying SOB...I remember exactly the level of personal attacks you spewed on me and other developers behind our backs for using XML as the message format.

Keep your fat ass in your seat and shut the hell up.

!dev

Fucking money problems..
Had 20k on the side before relocating..
Old country wanted 10k taxes, 10k left..

Flight, hotel etc 2k..

8k left..

Bought a cheap car, 5.5k left..

After the rental cars, 3k left..

Bank blocks card because of potential fraud, so I can’t pay the insurance and have to take another rental car..
2.5k left.
2.4k deposit so I can’t pay the insurance for 2k..

At least 0.4k left and first salary comes in, but since I’m new, I’m on emergency tax so I only got about 1.5k.. will get the taxes back later but for February I’m so fucking broke..

At least everything is paid now so I can start to safe from 0 again...

Fuuuccckkkk..

Totally worth it though..

#lifeIsSoMuchBetterOverHere,ImNeverGoingBack..

#iDontThinkCommasInHashtagsAreAllowedButIDontGiveAFuck!

300 global variables.. THREE HUNDRED FUCKING GLOBAL VARIABLES?
Are you for real?

Now let me check the line numbers again..

hmm.. line 97 to .. yep line 410, just a few new lines to seperate some of them or.. group? Idk, I've given up on trying to understand those.

Now you may ask "But ThatPerlDeb, where did you see this and what was the intention?"
Low and behold, take a chair and I may explain this to you.

First of all: Fuck the dev that wrote this!
Second: Fuck all the devs that kept up with this practice or whatever you want to fucking call this!

Now, the application is our POS system that our customers can use for a monthly fee (That this piece of garbage even requires payment is disgusting) but anyway..
The global variables sometimes are declared for labels, sometimes for some frames, sometimes just for random values to be there.

We're using Perl for the POS system and Perl ain't the best at OOP, so in the dev's defense I can understand why you'd use a few global variables, but not fucking 300!! FUCK OFF WITH THIS BULLSHIT!!

So now I'm going through this torture slowly but surely deleting globals and putting them into some sort of scope and always MANUALLY test if something broke. Again, this company sucks ass and there's nothing that could even be considered a "unit test" or something like that, so fuck that, too.

After two hours I've brought down the count of global variables to about 260, so there's progress being made..

But then, there comes more!

"But how???" you may ask, and you're right, I've asked that myself.

Now to resolve the global stuff in each file some of the initial globals are used, we got about 20-30 files which do different stuff, all fair and square, at least there was an attempt at seperating functions but god this mess is so fucking fucked up. So in order to "safely" delete a global variable I have to check if any of the variables are used in another file, and if so, in which scope and how they are used.

Spaghetti would be a compliment for this fucking disgusting piece of utter bullshit.

Let alone the code quality of this "code"
Indendation? Dafuq is dat?
Scope? Nah, we got everything global anyway
Function size? Well, some are 5 lines, some are 900 lines, who cares anyways, right?

I'm so fucking glad once I leave this shithole, for real.

Beware: Here lies a cautionary tale about shared hosting, backups, and -goes without saying- WordPress.

1. Got a call from a client saying their site presented an issue with a third-party add-on. The vendor asked us to grant him access to our staging copy.

2. Their staging copy, apparently, never got duplicated correctly because, for security reasons, their in-house dev changed the name of the wp-content folder. That broke their staging algo. So no staging site.

3. In order to recreate the staging site, we had to reset everything back to WP defaults. Including, for some reason, absolute paths inside the database. A huge fucking database. Because WordPress.

4. Made the changes directly in a downloaded sql file. Shared hosting, obviously, had an upload limit smaller to the actual database.

5. Spent half an hour trying to upload table by table to no avail.

6. In-house uploads a new, fixed database with the help of the shared hosting provider.

7. Database has the wrong path. Again.

8. In-house performs massive Find and Replace through phpMyAdmin on the production server.

9. Obviously, MySQL crashes instantly and the site gets blocked for over 3 hours for exceeding shared hosting limits.

10. Hosting provider refuses to accept this was caused by such a stupid act and says site needs to be checked because queries are too slow.

11. We are gouging our eyeballs as we see an in-house vs. hosting fight unfold. So we decide to watch a whole Netflix documentary in between.

12. Finally, the hosting folds and enables access to the site, which is obvi not working because, you know, wrong paths.

13. Documentary finishes. We log in again, click restore from backup. Go to bed. Client phones to bless us. Client’s in-house dev probably looking for a cardboard box to pack his stuff first thing in the morning. \_(ツ)_/¯

What the fuck this fucking shit of an app supposedly went through five rounds of QA and I broke it in 5 minutes? Holy fucking shit How this is the main point of your job. You shitty shits take forever getting this PR to me and now it’s buggier than a haunted house on Halloween?

After this is after wanting to cuss Apple for making me update the os then then xcode then iTunes just to recognize the goddamn development phone. It’s an app built off Cordova it works for like 14 versions of iOS just run the bugger you over priced aluminum chassis dildo riding fruit Fuckers.

Now back to the goddamn cluster fuck I just got delivered. What the goddamn fuck. This level of bullshittery I have not seen before. And apparently Cordova is only partly de-sandboxed? I don’t know for sure because I don’t have time to test it because I’m running the entire technological stack of this company on a junior dev salary!

When you tell me it goes though all this QA and you spend 2 weeks on just QA tickets for fucks sake the first operation I do, the most common fucking operation on the app, the shit we have been building around all this fucking time, should not fucking error out. For fucks sake at least try to get the main fucking thing working. I recognize you did a lot of work and implemented a number of features but what the fuck good are they if I can’t even run them for one fucking time.

It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."

Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.

We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.

Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.

* * *

In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.

I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.

After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.

Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.

We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.

Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.

And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.

What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.

Just don't.

I had rough week last week. Accidentally deployed dev code to production, soon found out there was no production version of code to do a redeploy. Deployed another app to production, it was working fine then another Dev changed a data type in the database from bool to nullable Boolean which broke some Linq queries. Looked like I deployed crap code. 3rd week with company.

Man soo much has happened. I broke ( 2. Months ago ) my main phone = Oneplus 1. Then I proceeded to throw my sim card into my backup phone = iPhone 4. So within that time I've started working at the same remote company my brother/ I work for as a python dev. But I am deffinatly learning as I go. Been there a month this week! So with this being my second job. I finally had enough money to buy nonessential so 4 day ago I ordered a new glass and digitizer assembly for my main phone it came today I fixed in just under 2 hours as my first phone repair. Pretty proud

In a meeting, we made some pretty major adjustments to a dev server. We broke it. Under pressure, I cracked and I randomly forgot the syntax for a sql update statement that might’ve at least got it back semi-online. To be fair, it’s been several years since I’ve needed any sql. Thank goodness I grabbed a snapshot as soon as I realized things were about to get edited. Saved. 😁

Around 6 years ago I started at this company. I was really excited, I read all their docs then I started coding. At every code review, I noticed something was a little off. I seemed to get lots of weird nitpicking about code styling. It was strange, I was using a linter, I read their rules but basically every review was filled with random comments. About 3 months in I noticed, "oh! there aren't actually any rules, people are debating them in my code reviews!" A few more reviews went by and then I commented, "ya I'm not doing any of this, code review isn't a place to have philosophical debates." All hell broke loose! I got a few pissed off developers, and I said, listen I don't care what the rules are, you just need to clearly fucking articulate them and if you want to introduce one, I don't care about that either just don't do it in the middle of my review. I pissed off 1 dev real bad. Me and this dev were working together, the QA person on the team stood up and said "hey! you know what I love about your code reviews?!" The other dev and myself looked at each other kind of nervously, "I love that you're both right, these are all problems!"... 1 year later (and until now) me and the other dev are still friends. Leave it to QA to properly identify the bug.

just woke up in the middle of the night dreaming of merging some branches after working a 16 hour shift straight because my company is too fucking broke to hire another freakin' dev...

well fuck it who needs sleep at all! let's get some coffee...

Best: Got my first dev job a month before I graduated my bootcamp. Was hired till rona layoffs started happening. Found another dev job 4 months later, and just received a promotion from said job just before going on holiday leave.

Worst: Being laid off for those 4 months. Sure unemployment + stimulus got me through financially, but mentally and emotionally I was starting to crack. I had thought I broke through the barrier with that first job and was going to be set. That layoff threw a wrench in my whole plan. In those 4 months unemployed I developed some imposter syndrome. Regardless, I plugged along with my side projects. One company was really impressed with one of them and was using a similar stack for an upcoming project, so luckily they ended up hiring me. Confidence restored.

This is the LAST TIME a critical PC component will fail me in the middle of a project. Wtf is up with hardware makers these days? Why can't you make a video card that will last for more than a year, AMD?? FFS!

Desktop for gaming, laptop for code. Now to redo my workstation AGAIN. 😭

My family absolutely did not support me. Throughout my life my parents wanted me to become an accountant (like my sibling) and encouraged me to pursue that. In 8th grade I initially broke the news that I wanted to get into software development and was told "computers won't be around for another 10 years (this was probably around 2010), don't go into something so stupid". For reference, we had 1 family computer up til 2008 which we had limited amounts of time with.

Every year after, up until the end of 12th grade I told them I planned on going into software dev, and they got angrier each time, before finally they stopped speaking to me for a short time over that summer after I told them I had been accepted into university for computer science.

Now, in my final year, they still think i'm throwing my life away. Their disapproval is what has been motivating me the most, to prove to myself that I can support myself and create good things.

I messed up . My testicle problem isn't going anywhere soon, and one ultrasound report already says could be a tumor. 2nd test will be done in 10 days, but if its a cancer, then my life just got officially reduced by 20 years and practically reduced to this year, coz fuck this life if I can't be normal.

I already
- haven't ever got love or chance to kiss a loved one,
-have a super beta personality and never got enough respect from anyone
- am not having any friends at current stage
- shifted from my native location and living in a new isolated place
- got ugly ass looks, height and weight to never feel happy

and now with a probable tumor coming which would lead to hair lossing chemo sesssions, ball removal surgery and followed by lifelong of infertility, I would prefer death over a meaningless loveless life

I am so devastated as to why i got into this state. nothing has been going good for lalst 2 years.
- i left my previous company which had a great culture, less work but asked for relocation . i joined this current company with horrible work culture, 3 days working and overload of stress
- I had fights with my friends and don't have any friends anymore
- i broke my arm this year.
- i caught terrible cough last year which took time but got better
- there have been constant bickering and fights among parents for 100s of reason . no more than 2 days goes by when any 2/3 people of our nucleolus family is not fighting
- and countless more shitty stuff

I was on a path to become a mediocre okayish guy. i was having a decent salary , learning new stuff everyday, fighting new task battles, becoming a beeter dev amd aiming to go for senior dev/TL role, buying car l, new home and planning for marriage, ...

but nope. God has some other plans.. some ugly and cruel plans, for the guys who don't even had the chance to live a villionous life.

I wonder how that guy from my scchool who used to date so many girls is doing now. God must be very angry with his Casanova behaviour. Oh wait, that asshole is earning 160k and married her gf from last 8 years!

i wonder how that gu from my homies is doing who used to hookup with random girls every weekend. Oh wait, he got promoted to TL and bought a new home!

I wonder how my friend who smokes 4 cigs a day and drinks beer every night is doing. Oh, he's going on international trips every month , earning 600k and have a clean medical record!

yepp such a great decision maker that guy on the top is . Let me connect with him soon and ask these questions , will let you know what he says. :/

Tldr: I think I made a company fire some dev a year ago.
I was working for this company remotely, alone, on a very big and old legacy php project where they still used echo '<code><code/>'; and i was a very junior junior front end developer, needed to make the website work somehow (whole new design). They brought in a random guy to work with me, and we started working.. I was using bitbucket to version my changes, and I asked him to do the same. He tried pushing his changes once and then practically never again because he started working in files that i was working on and there were git conflicts, and he gave up, even though i asked him to do that... he then statted using general classes to style the page (like .color) with absolute positioning and it broke everything everywhere. He then proceeded to minify half of the php files 'because of performance', I remember talking to other few people in the company and he disappeared a few more days later. I never finished the project because they stopped it randomly and i think i got him fired even though he could've continued working in the company

We are 3-4 days away from deployment to production. We are still bug fixing. But one coworkers decided this is the time to make a fuss about the way everything is set up. He doesn't like the dev database. So he knocks it over.. and while so doing it, he doesn't inform the team. And when I ask if something else is gonna knock over? No answer! (And something broke down too..)
Now we have issues to test our bugfixes. The whole thing took me half a day finding out and made me distracted with frustration, and not just for me. Most bugs could've been done in that half a day!
I so wanna punch the guy xD but no, I gotta save face, pfff!

Background: I am currently working with a DB that has websocket functionality ("notify a client on insert/etc."). However, you do have to whitelist tables in order to use them with sockets.

I wanted to optimize my code and didn't want to mess with my coworkers dev-data, therefore I duplicated the table. After improving some small things I noticed that the interface does not change with new socket data. I have spent the last hour or so trying to figure out where I broke it.

I just realized that I forgot to whitelist that duplicated table 😐 Most relieving moment today 😅

Bonus side effect: The code is much cleaner now since I refactored a lot of the realtime-logic in order to understand it/fix the bug.

So I got reprimanded for some error on a site. I proved that this was a back end problem and that this has nothing to do with me (I'm just a front end dev). Didn't get a single apology, the dev who broke the thing got off scot free and now i have to work overtime while they publish the changes to test them

going from totally broke to at least enough capital supply so i can go into city and walk around shopping centers after 6 years and feel like i just entered from a caveman world into the year 2718 and being isolated from dev world and work environment and bein relaxed from studying without constant stress and pain and agony and worries and burnouts and rage and dropping off all the negativity and ignoring it to become a normal person again at least for a day, makes me appreciate life again

Robbery of nearby future :
A broke dev decided to do a robbery by stealing the whole DAVE -2 system from the Tesla S3 model
While asking why he chose a drastic path as this, he said "My client wanted the training to be ready within 2 days and I couldn't arrange that much GPU in such small notice, so decided to do what I did.*ignored(But I reinstalled it back in the car)*
As you can see, client's have turned into money hungry, cock sucking, fist fucking, and God-knows-what-fetish wanting prices of shit"
Over to you, Clara

I really like my position as the head of my department. But I am most definitely hitting walls(and in some way breaking them) concerning the way the CTO(my direct boss) deals with a lot of the things that his management team wants to do.

For example, the previous manager could only do so much in terms of directing a software team since she did not have a formal background in computer science or engineering, thus the developers that she had would tell her the different deals with many things and she would have to take their word for it. Nothing necessarily bad with this, but it just meant that a lot of things could have gone smoother had she the knowledge to fix said items. Whenever she would try to use resources(dev time or such) the CTO will resort to the all powerful manthra of "if it ain't broke don't fix it!".

but it was about more than fixing things that were breaking, our internal services and admin boards were built using all of the WRONG proper development practices, it feels as if they took the book of best practices.....and said fuck it and did whatever the fuck they wanted. It is the worst PHP/Java/JS code I have ever seen in my entire life and the reason why even though I do not concur with it I will always understand the dislike from other developers. Our services look like something that came out from the 90s, no style, no engineering concepts in place, no versioning no testing NADA zip(these are all web based services)

One in particular, it was an admin board used internally to let students evaluate their professors, the entire app is shit, and it was broken, for some UNGODLY reason, the original dev decided to use some weird external libraries he got from some blog somewhere and as such something that would take about 5 or 6 files is now a mess with over 200 php/js files all over the fucking place. The CTO insisted on fixing them, they were all broken, and I continuously told him that redesigning the application would be faster.

Mofo fought me on it, and in the end I did what I wanted and rebuilt the app.

It took me one afternoon. One fucking afternoon, over possibly 2 weeks of fixing it.

See, I am not one to just do whatever he pleases, but I am firm in my belief that if I know a better way I will do it and save precious time. The dude had to agree with me on this and promised to consider this shit on other items that will undoubtedly come up. He was lying out of his ass but oh well..........

W

A friend of mine who wants to learn about Linux has a stronger will than me, as I think installing Linux in 2020 is gonna break me but he's still stoked as shit. I'm fucking serious. He asked me to install several distros, in order of interest (because they all fucking failed, because of fucking course they did) on a USB HDD he was using just for this.

We tried, in order:

Arch: initramfs wiped his Windows HDD when it crashed. IDFK how, but it zeroed the top 32KB of the drive. It wasn't even the right HDD...

Linux Mint: nvidia drivers refused to see his GPU after install. No matter what we did. Live media saw it fine until it was installed on the external drive, too.

Debian: Installer couldn't see the external HDD, ever. No matter what we did. It had a /dev entry, lsblk and fdisk saw it, I could format and mount it, but the installer crashed when it refreshed the device list when it was present. Every goddamn time.

Fedora: Installer broke halfway through as an executable (or 70) were corrupted, but the disc matched the ISO and the ISO sums correctly, so this is apparently how it was packed and shipped.

CentOS: Refused to boot. Just entirely. GRUB would go to load the kernel and it'd hang.

All ISOs and discs were verified as matching provided sums using MD5 and SHA256. How the fuck is Linux so fucking hard to get working on older hardware in 2020? Worked great in 2008, worked great in 2018, why is 2020 such a goddamn issue?

Where do I start...

I have seen a QA load local code to a machine, run it and then say it was ready to deploy. Little did we know she wasn’t following the deployment process at all and didn’t even realize she had to. We were a week trying to figure out why the deploys wouldn’t work until she spoke up.

I knew a dev/founder that said to me “source control is only for large projects”, I tried to convince him and his cofounder to use github or bitbucket. Nope, they weren’t into it (fresh out of school listening to professors who hadn’t worked a development day in 20 years) One cofounder got disgruntled, thought he was doing most of the work and decided to quit, he also decided to wipe the code off his co-founders machine. I literally saw a grown man come out of a meeting crying knowing he would never gain back the respect of those mentors and advisors.

I once saw a developer create a printed ticket receipt for a web app. Instead of making a page and styling it to fit a smaller width, he decided to do everything in string literals. More precisely, he made one big long fucking strong literal and then broke it up using custom regex to add styling to different sections. We had a meeting and he was totally convinced this was the only way. In the end we scrapped the entire code and the dude didn’t last very long after that.

Worst of all! I once saw a developer find a IBM Model M keyboard and said “I’m gonna throw out this junky keyboard”. I told him to shut his stupid fucking mouth and give the the keyboard.

He did

The universe has taken a cactus.

It proceeded to gift the cactus with a toxin that greatly enhances the stimulus of pain.

After the universe watched it's miraculous creation it decided to shove it up so far my arse that my gag reflex turned on and I puked a lot of cactus.

Didn't sleep well, weekend hardware migration finish, today an old server got moved.

Some part, most likely the redundant PSU, had a short circuit - decided to take the switches out... Which are the only non redundant hardware...

There was only one critical system in the whole rack, that was one redundant firewall.

Guess what happened..... Naaaa?

*drum roll*

For whatever reason, the second firewall didn't kick in, so large part of internal network unreachable as VPN was on the firewall.

:thumbsup:

That's not cactus level yet.

Spontaneously a large part of the work at home crew decided to call, cause getting an email wasn't enough.

So while all the phones were ringing and we had the joyful fun to carefully take apart a whole rack to check for possible faulty wiring / electric burns / hardware damage and getting firewall up and running again...

Some dev decided to run a deployment (doable as one of the few working at the company at the moment -.-).

I work from home, but we had a conference phone call running the whole time so I could "deescalate" and keep others up-to-date. So me on headphone with conference call, regular phone for calls, while typing mails / sms for de-escalation.

Now we're reaching cactus level, cause being tortured by being annoyed out of hell by all telephone ringing, the beeping of UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), the screaming of admins from the server room and the roaring of air coolers…

Suddenly said dev must have stood in the midst of the chaos… and asked for help cause "the deployment broke, project XY is offline"...

I think it was the first time since years that I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Bad idea (health issues)… but oh boy was it a pleasure to hear my own voice echo through the conference speaker and creating an echoic sound effect.

It was definitely worth coughing out my loungs for the next hour and I think it was the best emotional outburst ever.

I feel a bit sorry for the dev, but only a tiny bit.

After the whole rack thing, the broken deployment fixing and the "my ears are bleeding and I think I will never be able to talk again" action...

We had to roll out several emergency deployments to fix CVEs (eg libexpat).

This day was a marvelous shit show.

I will now cry myself to sleep with some codein.

Let me start this off by stating I'm a Java dev, and a noob with C++.

Thought it'd be cool to learn some OpenCL, since I want to do some maths stuff and why not learn something new.

So I sat down, installed Nvidia proprietary drivers, broke my x-org server, purged, reinstalled, rebooted and after a while I got stuff sorted out.

Then on to my IDE. I use CLion and it uses Cmake. C++ noob knows shit about Cmake, so struggle for two hours trying to figure out wtf is going on with the OpenCL libs and why they're only partially detected. Fml.

Finally, everything is configured and I'm set. I start working on a Hello World program using OpenCL. Finish it in 20 mins, all good. No output. Do some googling, check my program a million times. Nothing wrong here. Check the kernel, everything as in the tutorial.

I start checking error codes after a while reported by OpenCL (which I had no clue was a thing) and I get some code saying the program was not created properly (to run the kernel). No fucking clue what's up with that. Google around, find another tutorial, rewrite my code in case I'm using outdated code or something. Nothing.

Fast forward an hour, I find out that OpenCL has logs! So I grab some code from the website I found it on, and voila, I finally get some info on what's going on.

Get a load of this bs.

In the kernel file, so that OpenCL knows that it's a function to run, you have to put __kernel. But in all the places I read, it said to put it as _kernel.

Add the underscore, compile, run and everything is perfect.

Then I tried just putting 'kernel'. Also compiles and runs fine.

Two hours hours and my program was fixed by adding an underscore. IF ONLY C++ GAVE AN INDICATION OF WHAT BLEW UP INSTEAD OF SITTING BACK AND BEING LIKE "oh wow man feels bad, work some magic and try again" THEN THIS WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN SO LONG.

Then again, it was OpenCL that was being shitty with its styling enforcement or whatever the hell the underscore business is. But screw it. C++ eats shit too for this. Sure, maybe Java babies you by giving you the exact error and position that the error took place at. But at least that way you don't waste hours of your life chasing invisible bugs 😠😠

I'm going to eat some food... Too much energy was consumed fighting the system... Then I'll get back to OpenCL because 😇 but that doesn't make it less bs.

On Facebook open day:

Graduate dev lady telling a story about how much responsibility they are given and how she broke the password reset button for hours when her task was to instruct old users with weak passwords to update them...

//my first post, so not sure if it's appropriate, but surely did this come as a shock

!rant I'm lucky to work with 2 of the best back-enders in my career. We were royally pushed/screwed over today due to PM's last minute demands for a phone app that they were demoing to 1000's at a conference. Guess what, certain elements broke. But the guys jumped in to get the API fixed. It's a bit much being the only phone dev on the team but with such strong backend support, it makes it a pleasure to come into work. You know who you guys are. Thank you. Remember a little support makes all the difference in the workplace.

Wrote a new feature for our flagship product in C. Worked perfectly, no issues. I was told to wait before submitting to SVN.

Because my company is a little cheap in engineering, they took my Green Hills license for another dev to use. I wasn't using it, and now can't compile.

Then, a month later, I was asked to submit my feature to the repo, they needed it in done version, do I did. Still not able to recompile to see if other changes broke anything...

As you probably guessed, no one's code complied after pulling from the repo! Big embarrassment. Weeks later I was told that it wasn't my fault in the end... I don't remember how my code impacted it, but man, it was a bad day for this dev.

Never again!

I fucking hate the way we have test in our company. They're worse than useless. They test internals but don't test the actual fucking behavior. I just broke the dev branch with a stupid mistake - because of course one of the core behaviors of our app is not tested. But I had to fix tests in three places just because I removed a useless util in favor of using a built-in JS feature.

Not sure if junior dev is lying or just really bad at using the search function. He made sweeping changes in code he inherited from me and failed to find all the jQuery selectors that broke because of it. And he didn't think of clicking on all the other buttons on the page to check they are still doing their thing. Of course claiming that there is no time for testing when I pointed out his mistake. Wish he'd stop being such a bad, this is not the first time this has happened!

How to cope with getting cockblocked by coronavirus before job change?

I signed a contract for a job in a foreign country. I was excited for the advantages like better work/life balance, finally getting to linux dev env, friendlier company. But now, I can not even apply for work permit because of restrictions.

Due to already having signed contract already, I completely lost my touch with my current job. I hate it so much that I am having unpaid leaves even though I could do nothing since we are working half team at the same time. Dont tell me to “learn new skills”, I tried, it does not work for me. I am not in the mood for learning.

New company is great that they reassured me I would not lost the opportunity, I would join them whenever I can. So I dont fear losing job but uncertainty kills me. European travel ban was up to 15 May, prolonged to 15 june, which prevents me to apply for work visa. I guess this was the last straw that broke camel’s back.

The first dev project, like real dev project, I participated in was a school one and it was double.
The class was meant to make us learn about the software's life cycle, so the teacher wanted us to develop a simple, yet complicated, thing: a Web platform to help tutors send/refer students to the university services (psychologist, nutriologist, etc) and to keep track of them visits.
We all agreed on it being easy.
Boy were we so wrong.
I was appointed as dev leader as well as some others (I was the programming leader, the other ones were the DB guy and the security guy) and as such I was in charge of the technology used (well, now we all know that the client is the one in charge of that as well as the designer) and I chose Django because we had some experience with it. We used it for the two projects the teacher asked us to do (the second one was to find a little shop and develop something for it, obviously with the permission and all that), but in the second one I decided to use React on top of Djangl, which ended being a really good combination tho.
So, in the first project, the other ones (all the classroom) started to discuss and decided to use some other stuff like unnecessary carousel for images, unnecessary functions, they created mock ups for stuff that was never there to begin with, etc. It was really awful, we had meetings with the client (the teacher) with updates on the project, and in not a single one he was satisfied with the results. But still, we continued with the path the majority chose and it was the worst: deadlines were not met, team members just vanished until the end of the semester, one guy broke his leg (and was a dev leader) and never said a word not did anything about the project. At the end, we presented literal garbage, the UI was awful, its colors were so ugly because we had to use the university official colors, the functionality was not there, there literally was a calendar to make appointments for the services (when did the client ask for that? No one knows), but hey, you could add services and their data to it, was it what the client wanted? Of course not! What do you think we are? Devs?
Suffice to say that, although we passed with good grades, the project and the team was shit (and I'm counting me in)
The good part is that the second project was finished by me and it looked really good, yet it didn't matter, the first project was supposed to be used by the university, but that thing was unusable.
Then, in the subsequent vacations I tried to make pretty and functional/usable, yet I failed because I had a deadline for another thing I had to do, but hey, the login screen looked amazing!

I had a few products that I was working on, put myself really hard into those products, started a business and was ready to take a first round of investments when suddenly I lost my job in mid May because I had to take care of my mom that suffered a Stroke and since then I've been helping her.

This is driving me crazy because I'm engaged and had to use all of the money I was saving to pay my moms house and medical expenses; Now my fiancee is handling everything alone and not being able to help her and my mom, because I'm broke right now, is driving me crazy.

I only get crappy dev projects that put my mental health down. Don't really know what to do, I've been putting all my stress on my fiancee since last week and now she doesn't want to talk

I thought that even in this whole situation going on, I wasn't going to be so affected mentally and emotionally and honestly I don't know what to do nothing makes me feel better and start to think straight

!dev

So I work at a monitoring station (yeah not a professional dev yet), so basically our entire day is spent on the phone. Yesterday morning, our phone system broke. Everyone is getting calls from all departments. Even departments they're not in.

As if my job isn't stressful enough as it is, now this fucking thing happens, and whattya know, shit still isn't working today...

This is an actual transcript...
Since it's way too long for the normal 5000 characters, hence splitting it up...

Infra Guy: mr Dev, could you please give some rational for update of jjb?
Dev: sparse checkout support is missing
Infra Guy: is this support mandatory to achive whatever you trying to do?
Dev: yes
Infra Guy: u trying to get set of specific folder for set of specific components?
Dev: yes
Infra Guy: bash script with cp or mv will not work for you?
Dev: no
Infra Guy: ?
Dev: when you have already present functionality why reinvent the wheel
Dev: jenkins has support for it
Dev: the jjb is the bottle neck
Infra Guy: getting this functionality onto our infra would have some implications
Dev: why should I write bash script if jenkins allows me to do that
Dev: what implications ??
Infra Guy: will you commit to solve all the issues caused by new jjb?
Dev: you show me the implications first
Infra Guy: like a year ago i have tried to get new jjb <commit_url>
Infra Guy: no, the implications is a grey area
Infra Guy: i cant show all of them and they may hit like in week or eve month
Dev: then why was it not tackled
Dev: and why was it kept like that
Infra Guy: few jobs got broken on something
Dev: it will crop up some time later
Dev: if jobs get broken because of syntax
Dev: then jobs can be fixed
Dev: is it not ???
Infra Guy: ofc
Infra Guy: its just a question who will fix them
Dev: follow the syntax and follow the guidelines
Dev: put up a test server and try and lets see
Dev: you have a dev server
Dev: why not try on that one and see what all jobs fails
Dev: and why they fail
Dev: rather than saying it will fail and who will fix
Dev: let them fail and then lets find why
Dev: I manually define a job
Dev: I get it done
Infra Guy: i dont think we have test server which have the same workload and same attention as our prod
Dev: unless you test how would you know ??
Dev: and just saying that it broke one with a version hence I wont do it
Infra Guy: and im not sure if thats fair for us to deal with implication of upgrading of the major components just cause bash script is not good enough for u
Dev: its pretty bad
Infra Guy: i do agree
Infra TL Guy: Dev, what Infra Guy is saying is that its not possible to upgrade without downtime
Infra Guy: no
Dev: how long a downtime are we looking at ??
Infra Guy: im saying that after this upgrade we will have deal with consequences for long time
Infra Guy-2: No this is not testing the upgrade is the huge effort as we dont have dev resources to handle each job to run
Dev: if your jjb compiles all the yaml without error
Dev: I am not sure what consequences are we talking of
Infra Guy: so you think there will be no consequences, right?
Dev: unless you take the plunge will you know ??
Dev: you have a dev server running at port 9000
Infra Guy: this servers runs nothing
Dev: that is good
Dev: there you can take the risk
Infra Guy: and the fack we have managed to put something onto api doesnt mean it works
Dev: what API ?
Infra Guy: jenkins api
Infra Guy: hmmm
Dev: what have you put on Jenkins API ??
Infra Guy: (
Dev: jjb is a CLI
Infra Guy: ((
Dev: is what I understand
Dev: not a Jenkins API
Infra Guy: (((
Dev: (((((
Infra Guy: jjb build xmls and push them onto api
Infra Guy: and its doent matter
Dev: so you mean to say upgrading a CLI is goig to upgrade your core jenkisn API
Dev: give me a break
Infra Guy: the matter is that even if have managed to build something and put it onto api
Infra Guy: doesnt mean it will work
Dev: the API consumes the xml file and creates a job
Infra Guy: right
Dev: if it confirms to the options which it understands
Dev: then everything will work
Dev: I am actually not getting your point Infra Guy
Infra Guy: i do agree mr Dev
Dev: we are beating around the bush
Infra Guy: just want to be sure that if this upgrade will break something
Infra Guy: we will have a person who will fix it
Dev: that is what CICD is supposed to let me know with valid reasons
Dev: why can't that upgrade be done
Infra Guy: it can be done
Infra Guy: i even have commit in place

In my first few months of my first dev job, I written this fragile piece of code in, trigger warning, PHP that sent out email reports to my clients. It was a two men team, and we have no clue about TDD or how to do unit testing for such code. We would just run that piece of code manually do send out dummy emails to ensure things were working.

One day the code broke. I was told by my boss to fix it. Spent the entire day trying to fix but couldn't get anything done. Finally at around 7pm my boss came by and asked why is it I couldn't get it fixed. He helped me troubleshoot and fixed it. And subsequently told me "c'mon man you're better than this."

It turns out that he changed a part of a code that was supposed return an array of strings to an array of objects, adding a second attribute that wasn't even in use.

So what that meant is that he changed a piece of working code, to include a property he didn't need, committed and push to production without even manually testing it. AND TALKED SHIT TO ME.

That was the day I learned git blame and began my journey on TDD.

Microsoft owed a lot of its product development to the VB language. VB6 made an acute impact in the dev world. With a RAD environment, a proper language that executes to the machine level. A good IDE etc etc.

VB.NET broke a lot of balls due to the fact that the .NET framework came to the world and C# became a special name in the .NET arsenal. for years, both languages were hand on hand. With a bunch of neckbeards hating on VB.NET and another group of neckbeards advocating for VB.NET to step in to their roots concerning the VB6 standard.

Fast forward and Microsoft is complete hating on VB.NET regarding the .net core environment.

This is for me the biggest hurdle with Microsoft technologies, while I love C#, I am very hesitant to trust in their technology stacks since they have a thing about ignoring things they developed. Remember Visual Fox Pro? ded, remember classic ASP with VBScript and JScript? dead

Shit like that makes me not trust Microsoft, F# is a fascinating language, but nothing stops me from believing they will discard it at one point or another.

Honestly, there is nothing wrong with VB.NET, I feel that the language is fucking easy to get, a glimpse of a VB.NET project and I know what is happening, the syntax, as verbose as it is, really makes it easy for anyone to follow along with it.

The problem? Because it is so easy to work with, most devs in that realm never bothered to move forward, which is why there are no big projects build with this language, as such, people coming forward as maintainers are rare, and few in between.

I just want to go back to the good ol days of RAD and for Embarcadero to get their heads out their ass and release Delphi for everyone. Object pascal is dummy easy.

Not a dev question but a cultural question for any of the German devs I’ve seen post here.

My American daughter is living in Germany on an exchange student program. She’s frustrated right now because her host dad and host brother are being really rude and impatient with her over her difficulties with speaking the language. She currently writes it better than she speaks but that and her efforts to keep trying don’t seem to matter to them. This conflict spills over into other social interactions. They constantly berate and make fun of her over everything. The host mom and host sister are nicer and more patient. But they also have to put up with this boorish behavior from the males.

On a train ride home, my daughter was sexually propositioned no less than three times in one hour by three different men. And at festivals she went to where there was lots of drinking, it was even worse.

A German exchange student we once had living with us here in the US regularly broke program rules, slept around, and even downloaded child porn on our network (highly illegal and alarming). My wife was the coordinator for many years to govern the students who came here from many countries and we struggle to think of any but one or two German boys who acted like gentlemen toward ladies.

So is it just a “German guy” thing and commonly accepted in the culture? Or is this type of behavior generally frowned upon and these guys are just in a minority of jerks that we keep having the bad luck of running into?

I know the same question can be and is often asked about American men, too. But I’m more interested in knowing how Germans view Germans who act this way.

Class normal people:
Def good day:
"Manager was out, had great lunch, got a. special someone's number, successfully avoided traffic, got in special someone's pants"

Def bad day:
"Stubbed toe this morning, rained all day, broke up w. special someone, sat in traffic for 2 hrs"

Class software dev:
Def good day:
"Wrote lots of working code, little to no bugs, checked in no-probs, ahead od schedule for ship, extra time for ping-pong!"

Def bad day:
"Somone fucked up the latest build, coffee machine's broken, ran out of adderall, manager on everyone's @$$ for a fix, 5 hrs later...no fix, no blames, no coffee, board meeting; fml"

So some other dev in team changed something, and it broke the tests that I wrote. Ideally the dev should be responsible for fixing the tests too when I communicated this in the team channel my manager pinged me and asked me to fix it urgently. I'm already on PIP and wth is this? am I suppose to fix these tests too?

So I've spent all day chasing around this issue for a coworker who was trying to help a client with a new report they were deploying to their system.

Now I learned a couple of things today because of this. Due to moving buildings, our new network completely broke our report server because the DNS can't resolve it's name. Since we're rewriting this system from the ground up, I haven't been majorly concerned about getting this fixed, but with this coming up, being persistent, I'm glad I figured it out. IT did give us a static IP for this VM, but they never bothered to add a DNS entry for it, so for the past couple of months, this hasn't worked for some reason, and now that's why.

So the root cause of my issue can been seen from 2 directions, the dev of the report, and the dev of the UI that reads it. The dev who wrote this code originally is checking very specifically for 'asc' and 'desc', meanwhile my mans who wrote the report has his order by with 'ASC' where he needs it.
(MAN, THE PREVIOUS DEV WAS GREAT)

I'm glad I was able to help him, but god damn, that took all day, AND TO FIND IT WAS A CAPTIALIZATION ISSUE, AAAAAAAAA FUCK ME

Emotionally painful dev learning experience: My laptop (and only computer I had in the area) broke at the worst possible time during university and the guy fixing it fucked it up meaning it took even longer. Combine this with:

*Stuck having to learn Android Studio in two weeks to make a whole-ass app with a professor who didn't know how to make a Hello World and gave us no resources. Pair project so I had someone depending on me to do my part, meaning a lot of sharing their computer just to be able to use Android Studio.
*Having to work on another solo project by using various public and awfully specced university computers. Said project involved real-time 3D graphics and was running at about a third of the speed it should on every machine.
*Realizing how much I depended on my laptop for entertainment and that I basically had nothing that could help me de-stress and relax at home.
*Not knowing when the laptop's spare parts would arrive or if the repair man would give me bad news and even more delays.
*A very poorly timed issue in my relationship.

I know university can be stressful even though it never really affected me before or since but man, those couple of weeks broke me.

First six months as a dev broke something in production for the first time.

Took me months to get confidence back.

I'm not liking docker so far. I assume it gets better later, but I've had a miserable experience using it as part of my dev environment so far. Just now I updated it and it broke my db container, so now I'm looking to either downgrade docker or fix the issue, both beings things that take time away from coding.

My intern broke the dev and test environment, now I got to fix them... Lucky me

At what point do you say a junior dev is no longer a junior? What metrics do you use? Like scope of knowledge, impact on team / code decisions, years experience, management skills, etc.?

I feel I'm qualified as a mid level developer now despite only being a junior for a little over a year. I had tons of internships in college and was kind of placed in a role where growing fast was required.

I broke a sweat for most of that ~1 year I worked as a junior and my contributions to my project aren't insignificant

I don't say that to toot my own horn here, I really do want to ground myself in reality. But I don't know if my standards are too low or my organizations standards are too high. FWIW, other devs on my team have commented privately / informally that the junior title isn't super fitting.

I'm still pretty dependent on my boss but that's more for final say of things. He'll often have some input to my work but I'll also be involved with design discussion and take up a large chunk of work without question. On light sprints I'm knocking out 20+ taskhours of work, going closer to 30/40 when things pick up. Not uncommon to kill 10 user stories in a sprint.

I don't know, what do you guys think?

Why did I go broke?

Because every time I tried to cash in my promises, I’d end up nullifying my income with undefined deductions! I thought I could get by on short functions and quick closures, but in the end, I found myself callbacked into a corner with no scope for improvement.

I tried to debug my financial situation, but my stack overflowed with deferred payments, and I couldn’t even parse where all my money was going. The compiler of my life just kept throwing unexpected "expenses" errors.

In a final attempt, I refactored my entire approach, renaming myself Async to buy some time, but it was too late. My funds were hoisted to the global scope, and before I knew it, I was reduced to Boolean poverty.

Now, I live my life in strict mode, always awaiting the day I’ll finally get a return on my investment... but deep down, I know I’m just an object in a mutable state.

P.S : I'm a JS DEV

I can work productively and for very long hours with a lot of stuff which many dev considers productivity hurdles:

- single small monitor? No problem (in fact in one occasion in which my roommate accidentally broke my laptop charghing port and I couldn't get a spare I worked on an iPad connected trough SSH to a Linux machine completing one of the hardest tasks I ever did without significant loss of productivity)
- old machine? That's ok as long as I can run a minimal Linux and not struggle with Windows
- noise and chatter around me? A 10€ pair of earbuds are enough for me, no noise cancelling needed
- "legacy" stack/programming language? I'd rather spend my days coding in Swift or Rust but in the end I believe which is the dev and its skill which gets the job done not fancy language features so Java 8 will be fine
- no JetBrains or other fancy IDE? Altough some refactoring and code generation stuff is amazing Neovim or VS Code, maybe with the help of some UNIX CLI tools here and there are more than enough

despite this I found out there is a single thing which is like kryptonite for my productivity bringing it from above average* to dangerously low and it's the lack of a quick feedback loop.
For programming tasks that's not a problem because it doesn't matter the language there's always a compiler/interpreter I can use to quickly check what I did and this helps to get quickly in a good work flow but since I went to work with a customer which wants everything deployed on a lazily put together "private cloud" which needs configurations in non-standard and badly documented file formats, has a lot of stuff which instead of being automated gets done trough slowly processed tickets, sometimes things breaks and may take MONTHS to see them fixed... my productivity took a big hit since while I'm still quick at the dev stuff (if I'm able to put together a decent local environment and I don't depend on the cloud of nightmares, something which isn't always warranted) my productivity plummets when I have to integrate what I did or what someone else did in this "cloud" since lacking decent documentation everything has do be done trough a lot of manual tasks and most importantly slow iterations of trial and error. When I have to do that kind stuff (sadly quite often) my brain feels like stuck on "1st gear": I get slow, quickly tired and often I procrastinate a lot even if I force myself out of non work related internet stuff.

*I don't want this to sound braggy but being a passionate developer which breathes computers since childhood and dedicating part of my freetime on continuously improving my skill I have an edge over who do this without much passion or even reluctantly and I say this without wanting to be an èlitist gatekeeper, everyone has to work and tot everybody as the privilege of being passionate in a skill which nowadays has so much market

waste a few hours trying to debug shit im working on a feature branch, only to check main branch and it turns out somebody else broke main but the dev environment i'm piggy backing on using is cutting edge

i now miss having a separate individual dev environment to use, but i suppose id lose on some perks probably

!dev
Anger management is real. I just broke my PS4 controller coz of NBA 2k. My fucking players just cost me a game 7

You want to get employed but, you can't find a job or get hired because you don't have a degree and degree is a requirement to get employed.

So, you decide to go back to College and study Compsc but, you aren't allowed because of the messed up education system in your country.

So, you decide to study abroad but, you realize you are broke.

So, you become a freelancer but, unfortunately you find your self thinking hell is way better than this lol

So, this time you decide to quite and just return to your boring legal job.
But, then you can't stop thinking about coding and you just can't stop the excitement and the frustration you feel every time you hear people talk about code.

So, hope fully for the last time you decide to do Android dev and publish your own Apps and become an Entrepreneur even though you know it is hard and you might fail many times before you achieve success. You just went for it.

It what it is, just roll with. What other option do you have?! Lol

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.

I try to delete a partition from my sundisk Pendrive using GParted but when I do this I got the error that is shown in the image.

And If I try to use "fdisk" which run `sudo fdisk /dev/sda` following command it gives me ```welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.34).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.

fdisk: cannot open /dev/sda: Read-only file system```

following error does that mean my pendrive permanently broke can anybody help me!