Biggest scaling challenge I've faced?

Around 2006~2007 the business was in double-digit growth thanks to the eCommerce boom and we were struggling to keep up with the demand.

Upper IT management being more hardware focused and always threw more hardware at the problem. At its worst, we had over 25 web servers (back then, those physical tall-rectangle boxes..no rack system yet) and corresponding SQL server for each (replicated from our main sql server)

Then business boomed again and projected the need for 40 servers (20 web servers, 20 sql servers) over the next 5 years. Hardware+software costs (they were going to have to tear down a wall in order to expand the server room) were going to be in the $$ millions.

Even though we were making money, the folks spending it didn't seem to care, but I knew this trajectory was not sustainable, so I started utilizing (this was 2007) WCF services and Microsoft's caching framework Velocity. Started out small, product lookup data (description, price, the simple stuff) and within a month, I was able to demonstrate the web site could scale with less than half of our current hardware infrastructure.

After many political battles (I've ranted about a few of those), the $$ won and even with the current load, we were able to scale back to 5 web servers and 2 sql servers. When the business increased in the double-digits again, and again...we were still the same hardware for almost 5 years. We only had to add another service server when the international side of the business started taking off.

Challenge wasn't the scaling issue, the challenge was dealing with individuals who resisted change.

My current project at work: purchase verification, aka anti-fraud.

It's been two weeks, and my boss is flipping out because it isn't done. A robust anti-fraud solution. in two weeks. And he thought one week was a little much.

like, fucking really?

There are companies whose entire service is helping combat fraud. and he wants this done in a bloody week?

What makes me laugh through my tears of frustration is that the company that moved into the previous office? Yep, anti-fraud. Their entire business model is providing anti-fraud services to other businesses. They even tried selling him on it when they moved in. Bossman sales guy turned it around and sold my freaking desk out from under me instead.

But like. They're a small company: they had 9 people when they moved in, and were looking to add three more, so a total of 12 people. (I totally considered jumping ship, but their stack was too different.)

So. Bossman wants me to replace 9-12 people and their entire business in a fucking week. Yeah.

"Oh, but it's just sms verification" says he. What he also wants is the ability to flag users as fraudulent, have sticky verifications so they can't bypass them by backing out, have email checks as well as sms, have deferred verification to allow collecting required info (e.g. phone number), verification fallback, lockouts, manual admin whitelisting, admin blacklisting, and different rules per merchant and rule groups for affiliates to apply to all of their merchants, and of course the ability to customize those merchant/affiliate anti-fraud rules. But he shortens this gigantic list to "I want sms verification," despite actually asking for all of the above. I don't want to know about the mental gymnastics and/or blindfolding required to equate the two, but he's nuts.

Yeah.
All of that.
In a goddamn week.

And I get chewed out when it isn't done? Fuck off.

Go build me a goddamn 5m ft^2 castle out of basalt and marble using only your toothbrush and a rusty garden trowel, and have it done in a week. No outsourcing.

talk about ridiculous.

Once we were going to present a web service to governmental firm. All is going well so far and my boss asks me to host the web application the day before the presentation.

I hosted it and all was good with demo production tests, but I had a bad feeling.

While it was running on our server, I also ran it locally with a reverse proxy just in case.

* Meeting starts *

* Ice broken and down to business *

"And now our developer will run the demo for you..."

* Run the demo from my laptop to double check --> 500 Internal Server Error *

Holy shit!!!

* Opens reverse proxy link on my laptop. Present demo during meeting. Demo works like a charm. *

Firm representative: "Great! Looking forward to go live."

*Our team walks out*

GM: "Good job guys"

ME:

Some days I feel like I work in a different universe.

Last night our alerting system sent out a dept. wide email regarding a high number of errors coming from the web site.

Email shows the number of errors and a summary of the error messages.

Ex. 60 errors
59 Object reference not set to an instance of an object
1 The remote server returned an unexpected response: (413) Request Entity Too Large

Web team responds to the email..

"Order processing team's service is returning a 413 error. I'll fill out a corrective action ticket in the morning to address that error in their service. "

Those tickets are taken pretty seriously by upper mgmt, so I thought someone on the order processing team would point out the 1 error vs. 59 (coming from the web team's code).

Two hours go by, nobody responds, so I decide to jump into something that was none of my business.

"Am I missing something? Can everyone see the 59 null reference exceptions? The 413 exception only occurred once. It was the null reference exceptions that triggered the alert. Looking back at the logs, the site has been bleeding null reference exceptions for hours. Not enough for an alert, but there appears to be a bug that needs to be looked into."

After a dept. managers meeting this morning:

MyBoss: "Whoa..you kicked the hornets nest with your response last night."
Me: "Good. What happened?"
<Dan dept VP, Jake web dept mgr>
MyBoss: "Dan asked Jake if they were going to fix the null reference exceptions and Jake got pissed. Said the null reference errors were caused by the 413 error."
Me: "How does he know that? They don't log any stack traces. I don't think those two systems don't even talk to one another."
<boss laughs>
MyBoss:"That's what Dan asked!..oh..then Jake started in on the alert thresholds were too low, and we need to look into fixing your alerting code."
Me: "What!? Good Lord, tell me you chimed in."
MyBoss: "Didn't have to. Dan starting laughing and said there better be a ticket submitted on their service within the next hour. Then Jake walked out of the meeting. Oh boy, he was pissed."
Me: "I don't understand how they operate over there. It's a different universe.
MyBoss: "Since the alert was for their system, nobody looked at the details. I know I didn't. If you didn't respond pointing out the real problem, they would have passed the buck to the other team and wasted hours chasing a non-existent problem. Now they have to take resources away from their main project and answer to the VP for the delay. I'm sure they are prefixing your name right now with 'that asshole'"
Me: "Not the first, won't be the last."

So, yesterday I was talking to a friend who had a fukin BUSINESS IDEA of starting Uber like service for his local town(where his university is).

Apparently, the moron was searching for someone to make an Uber like app for him (Both fukin Android and iOS) and he was hoping to get it done in under fukin 5000 INR (less than 100 USD).

I was like wtf 😐

For a week+ I've been listening to a senior dev ("Bob") continually make fun of another not-quite-a-senior dev ("Tom") over a performance bug in his code. "If he did it right the first time...", "Tom refuses to write tests...that's his problem", "I would have wrote the code correctly ..." all kinds of passive-aggressive put downs. Bob then brags how without him helping Tom, the application would have been a failure (really building himself up).
Bob is out of town and Tom asked me a question about logging performance data in his code. I look and see Bob has done nothing..nothing at all to help Tom. Tom wrote his own JSON and XML parser (data is coming from two different sources) and all kinds of IO stream plumbing code.
I use Visual Studio's feature create classes from JSON/XML, used the XML Serialzier and Newtonsoft.Json to handling the conversion plumbing.
With several hundred of lines gone (down to one line each for the XML/JSON-> object), I wrote unit tests around the business transaction, integration test for the service and database access. Maybe couple of hours worth of work.
I'm 100% sure Bob knew Tom was going in a bad direction (maybe even pushing him that direction), just to swoop in and "save the day" in front of Tom's manager at some future point in time.

This morning's standup ..
Boss: "You're helping Tom since Bob is on vacation? What are you helping with?"
Me: "I refactored the JSON and XML data access, wrote initial unit and integration tests. Tom will have to verify, but I believe any performance problem will now be isolated to the database integration. The problem Bob was talking about on Monday is gone. I thought spending time helping Tom was better than making fun of him."
<couple seconds of silence>
Boss:"Yea...want to let you know, I really, really appreciate that."

Bob, put people first, everyone wins.

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

I am fed up working with unskilled software developers. Or to be more specific, working with people who have no idea of sofware architecture.

Most people I've worked with have simply no idea what they are doing in the broad picture, they can only follow patterns they see and implement their feature in the same way. They can't think about the abstract concepts which should be the foundation of the project.

They fail to write unit tests which are maintainable. They write one fucking test per method which is testing 50 things at the same time, making it often impossible to understand what is being tested.

They think putting stuff in private methods makes their class better and is some kind of separation of concerns.

They write classes and afterwards create interfaces for these classes named {Class}Interface, shoving all the methods into that interface. They think it's good design to do so.

They are unable to think about the reasons why things are done the way they are done and that you don't do stuff for the sake of doing stuff, but to achieve certain goals like interchangeability.

They don't undestand how to separate business logic from the application code.

They have no sense for naming things beautifully. They don't see how naming things is a major part of good software architecture.

They get layer concepts wrong and then create godlike {EntityName}Service classes, which do everything related to a particular entity.

They fail to shape the boundaries within a software project, entangling stuff which should live in individual modules.

All I want is to work in a team with professionals.

Sorry for being late, stuffs came inbetween!

I have done a few privacy rants/posts before but why not another one. @tahnik did one a few days ago so I thought I'd do a new one myself based on his rant.

So, online privacy. Some people say it's entirely dead, that's bullshit. It's up to an individual, though, how far they want to go as for protecting it.

I personally want to retain as much control over my data as possible (this seems to be a weird thing these days for unknown reasons...). That's why I spend quite some time/effort to take precautions, read myself into how to protect my data more and so on.

'Everyone should have the choice of what services they use' - fully agreed, no doubt about that.

I just find one thing problematic. Some services/companies handle data in a way or have certain business models which takes the control which some people want/have over their data away when you communicate with someone using that service.

Some people (like me) don't want anything to do with google but even when I want to email my best fucking friend, I lose the control over that email data since he uses gmail.

So, when someone chooses to use gmail and I *HAVE* to email them, my choice is gone.

TO BE VERY CLEAR: I'm not blaming that on the users, I'm blaming that on the company/service.

Then for example, google analytics. It's a very good/powerful when you're solely looking at its functions.
I just don't want to be part of their data collection as I don't want to get any data into the google engine.

There's a solution for that: installing an addon in order to opt out.

I'm sorry, WHAT?! --> I <-- have to install an addon in order to opt out of something that is happening on my own motherfucking computer?! What the actual fuck, I don't call that a fucking solution. I'll use Privacy Badger + hosts files to block that instead.

Google vs 'privacy' friendly search engines - I don't trust DDG completely because their backend is closed/not available to the public but I'd rather use them then a search engine which is known to be integrated into PRISM/other surveillance engines by default.

I don't mind the existence of certain services, as long as they don't integrated you with data hungry companies/mass surveillance without you even using their services.

Now lets see how fast the comment section explodes!

Every time management says "were now using SaaS product X, and they're giving a webinar so we can learn how to use their solutions to take our business to the next level!" — I can't help but associate it with Nigerian Prince scams.

The longer I'm a developer, the more I think vertical integration and inventing your own shitty wheels isn't such a bad idea.

Their generalized, overpriced seat-per-month service always boils down to "vendor lock-in, nothing can be customized or exported, integrations are a pain in the ass, and within a few months the bills will explode because of some overage fee".

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.

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

I'm so close to giving up. Yesterday, I travelled 4 hours in one direction for a job interview for a graduate position as a web developer. As I arrived at the interview, I was welcomed by a senior dev and one of the HR people.

I sit down and they start explaining how everything will commence(standard procedure stuff) and afterwards hand me the technical test. At this time I am super calm cause I did my homework, checked out their products, their websites and knew right away what I was going to work on. As I turn the page, I see at the top with huge fucking capital letters "JAVA OOP test".

I take a minute and look back at them, like wtf is happening. Turns out that they are looking for a java dev. They picked me for the role because I had literally 1 fucking sentence in my CV and where I have said that I studied java in one semester of uni. FYI my entire portfolio, cv and cover letter are focused on JS, html, css both for client and server side.

As the fucking HR guy stood there and asked me "is there something wrong", I felt broken inside. For the first time in my fucking life I felt like I was done and couldn't continue anymore. I felt like this is some bitch-slap from karma about something but I still can't figure out what. I just walked out of there being unable to realize what happened.

I just feel like I should end my developer career before it has even started, just go do business analysis or something. Why the fuck would someone put a job description entirely talking about Angular, Less/SASS, bootstrap and jQuery and then say that is a Java dev OOP role. Who the fuck allows those people to take good salaries yet still deliver the up most shittiest quality service.

Before the interview, I checked out their websites which are simply horrendous with the comparability of a fucking baked potato. Idk really what to do, I don't mean to sound as a whiny little b.... but as I walked out of their office, I felt broken inside. Sorry for the long rant.

I resigned yesterday to focus on my business full time. After 5 years and 1 previous failed attempt to leave the company, its finally done.

My boss threw his toys out of the pram and was borderline abusive about the whole thing. "it's like a kick in the balls" "you've clearly been planning this (said in an accusatory tone)" "you've said you were leaving before which is why you have 3 months notice now (to which my response was, and that is why I am giving you 3 months notice?!)"

Along with many other comments and general angry tone.

Honestly, I couldn't sleep the night before as I was so nervous. We're a small company and to some degree, a kind of family so I didn't want to break that. The more he spoke though, the easier it got. It simply cemented by decision to leave. They made no attempt to keep me. Showed no support. No gratitude for my 5 years of service. Nothing.

Well, you will be down your only dev in 3 months so good luck, I suspect you'll need it more than I will.

Job Interview for a CTO role for a premium employer, a big law firm.

All is going well, I am telling them about my years of experience doing complex software integrations in business environments. Talking CRM/ERP, project management and development with external service providers. I tell them I want a salary of 100k and they nod in silence.

Then out of the blue one of the three stakeholders/managers leans over for a final question:
"Soo, we have this really big IT problem and if you would happen to know a solution to it, you would really prove your worth: I have these 10k+ E-Mails in my Outlook folder which doubles as an archive and Outlook keeps getting slower all the time. What can we do?"

Worked with a European consulting company to integrate some shared business data (aka. calling a service).
VP of IT called an emergency meeting (IT managers, network admins) deeply concerned about the performance of the international web site since adding our services.
VP: “The partner’s site is much slower than ours. Only common piece that could cause that is your service.”
Me: “Um, their site is vastly different than ours. I don’t think we can compare their performance to ours.”
VP: “Performance is #1! I need your service fixed ASAP!”
Me: “OK, but what exactly is slow? How did you measure their site? The servers are in Germany”
VP: “I measured performance from my house last night.”
Me: “Did you use an application?”
VP: “<laughs> oh no, I was at home. When I opened the page, I counted one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, then the page displayed.”
Me: “Wow…um…OK…uh…how long does our page take to load?”
VP: “Two Mississippi’s”
Me: “Um…wow…OK…wow…uh, no, we don’t measure performance like that, but I’ll work with our partners and develop a performance benchmark to determine if the shared service is behaving differently.”
VP: “Whatever it is, the service is slow. Bill, what do you think is slowing down the service?”
NetworkAdmin-Bill: “The Atlantic Ocean?”
VP got up and left the meeting.

> ticket comes, new feature is requested
> create the new feature from scratch. Code is neatly splitted in files and methods, each with clear responsibilities
> every method is documented, there are clear service layers for the business logic, which resulted in controller having 10 lines of code, give or take
> commit the whole code, everything works
> check the develop branch today, team leader littered business logic in the controllers because "the codebase is a mess anyway"

I really need to let this out somewhere...

Why the f...? Srsly.. Why would anyone do that? I'm joining another project. Apparently lead dev has adopted a coding style, where:

1. Every dev writes code however he likes, i.e. no clean-code requirement at all.
2. All services are crud-only. I mean all service classes. All must have those 4 methods; no more, no less.
3. Half of the business logic is inside controllers.
4. Not a single comment... Interfaces, models, etc. -- not a single one.
5. Xmls -- tabs, classes - spaces.
6. Xml schemas are downloaded with each build rather than stored downloaded once and stored locally.
7. I can keep going on and on.

Is it just me or are these some really weird decisions?

So I know most of you got some kind of hate for Facebook and Zuckerberg (aka Z U C C) now, but ffs, watching some of the highlights of this congress-thing that went on makes me more or less feel sympathy for him and his idea, even tho I know he wants to achieve exactly this.

Some of the questions asked can suck a big fucken data-dick. "How many Facebook Like-Buttons are there on Non-Facebook pages?", "How many data-categories do you gather?", "How do you sustain a business model and stay free?" - DUDE WHAT IN HEAVENS NAME?? And they ask that shit so serious and so "now-i'm-going-to-bust-you"-esk, but actually the question is just plain stupid and shows how the questioning side has no clue about the shit.

My point of view is that people decided to have an online life and have to take what it does. Having a smartphone with a Facebook service installed (owning an account or not) is enough to track your location, stored under your IMEI or some shit like that. They may not even go that far but that's just my opinion.
If you are online everything can see you and use you that way. Borders are a fictious thing. A dude in Czechia can easily shoot you when you're on the German side of the border between those two countries. And still we gave up on walls...:p

Welcome to a world which is ruled by dumbass people where nerds who just want to have some fun need to defend themselves because the people up there don't know a single shit.

Two years ago I started a small online business. It was not a long term investment and it literally ended up being a one man business. The idea was to provide a service to a small group of people who will benefit from my idea and to offer it to them at a very cheap price. (It being the cheapest helped its popularity a lot).

However, never once did it actually make any profit. (and i never wanted it to make a profit) I wanted it to be self sustaining business and it was.

This was a project for my University by the way, I started off in my first year because of my extensive knowledge in the particular matter, and I only sold to people on campus.

Now that its been 4 years, my batch is graduating, and so there aren't many people to spread the word about this project. It's finally the time to actually say goodbye to this project.

I leased a dedicated server two years ago, and I am finally saying goodbye to that too (can't afford to keep it live anymore). And seriously, it feels sad to shut this machine down haha, I've had so much fun playing around with the configurations (even though it was a production server).

It's clear that this downsizing will continue and I will be closing the service in the near future.

Soo, my manager asked me to create tool for CSI. Sort of ticketing tool for service improvements.

So I spent a few months working on it including design, websocket based real time statistics, exports to their belowed excel, easy to use, fast and so on.
I've presented it to mgmt, told them that deployment was easy and just need a simple linux virtual and all is automated.

They told me that they don't have a server. Company where main business is cloud services. Didn't pay me a penny for my effort even though worked on that mostly in my free time.
I didn't even want anything for the tool, just for my time.

Then a month later they've introduced similar thing based on Sharepoint with 1/10th of fuctionality, slow as hell, buggy, unintuitive.

And guess what, I can't open source my tool because it is a company property.

So, fuck it, never gonna do anything again without proper contract, even if for the same department.

I've already left that hell hole, but thought I would share my story.

Last Sunday, we deployed 300 major application/service configuration changes, 60+ load balancer changes, DNS cutovers, changes to mission critical SQL servers, and informatica connection changes. This impacted every line of business, all customer facing apps, and all internal apps.

6 days from DEV to PROD, which includes all developer effort.

Deployment succesful!

I may have over delivered my service to this first customer i got.

It doesn't help that pricing was dirt cheap and i over promised in a bid to make it attractive.

But in my hurry to please the client, I've been feeling so much stress since last 24 hrs. Dealing with customers suck. I hate this.

They can be little dumb and doesn't think much before blaming you if something's not working as expected.

I hate this feeling and now i remember why my initial business model was designed such that I wouldn't have to deal with clients.

But somewhere along the way, i forgot about that. :/

I wish I could get rid of this customer.

<rant>
Don't fucking tell me to move business logic from the service to the controller. Don't fucking tell me it will enable an "event driven architecture." Don't fucking use Angular for this project if you're just gonna shit on best practices and write convoluted, messy, inconsistent code and force your coworkers to do the same!
</rant>

I am working on a webservice that some other consultants upstairs are set to consume.

Last week, monday, the consultants send multiple emails and one of them comes downstairs to find out why the service isn't working correcrly. My manager tells them in email that it is still being developed and won't be ready for ten business days.

However in the meantime the service has some barebones functionality that they can try out.

And wouldn't you know it, I get emails and visits every other day along the way asking why the service is down or doesn't function.

When is the service going to be down? Why isn't this working? Hey you need to fix this

IT'S NOT DONE YET

Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.

My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).

Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.

And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...

And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."

Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...

PayPal = GayPal

PHASE 1

1. I create my personal gaypal account
2. I use my real data
3. Try to link my debit card, denied
4. Call gaypal support via international phone number
5. Guy asks me for my full name email phone number debit card street address, all confirmed and verified
6. Finally i can add my card

PAHSE 2

7. Now the account is temporarily limited and in review, for absolutely no fucking reason, need 3 days for it to be done

8. Five (5) days later still limited i cant deposit or withdraw money

9. Call gaypal support again via phone number, burn my phone bill

10. Guy tells me to wait for 3 days and he'll resolve it

PHASE 3

11. One (1) day later (and not 3), i wake up from a yellow account to a red account where my account is now permanently limited WITHOUT ANY FUCKING REASON WHY

12. They blocked my card and forever blocked my name from using gaypal

13. I contact them on twitter to tell me what their fucking problem is and they tell me this:

"Hi there, thank you for being so patient while your conversation was being escalated to me. I understand from your messages that your PayPal account has been permanently limited, I appreciate this can be concerning. Sometimes PayPal makes the decision to end a relationship with a customer if we believe there has been a violation of our terms of service or if a customer's business or business practices pose a high risk to PayPal or the PayPal community. This type of decision isn’t something we do lightly, and I can assure you that we fully review all factors of an account before making this type of decision. While I appreciate that you don’t agree with the outcome, this is something that would have been fully reviewed and we would be unable to change it. If there are funds on your balance, they can be held for up to 180 days from when you received your most recent payment. This is to reduce the impact of any disputes or chargebacks being filed against you. After this point, you will then receive an email with more information on accessing your balance.

As you can appreciate, I would not be able to share the exact reason why the account was permanently limited as I cannot provide any account-specific information on Twitter for security reasons. Also, we may not be able to share additional information with you as our reviews are based on confidential criteria, and we have no obligation to disclose the details of our risk management or security procedures or our confidential information to you. As you can no longer use our services, I recommend researching payment processors you can use going forward. I aplogise for any inconvenience caused."

PHASE 4

14. I see they basically replied in context of "fuck you and suck my fucking dick". So I reply aggressively:

"That seems like you're a fraudulent company robbing people. The fact that you can't tell me what exactly have i broken for your terms of service, means you're hiding something, because i haven't broken anything. I have NOT violated your terms of service. Prove to me that i have. Your words and confidentially means nothing. CALL MY NUMBER and talk to me privately and explain to me what the problem is. Go 1 on 1 with the account owner and lets talk

You have no right to block my financial statements for 180 days WITHOUT A REASON. I am NOT going to wait 6 months to get my money out

Had i done something wrong or violated your terms of service, I would admit it and not bother trying to get my account back. But knowing i did nothing wrong AND STILL GOT BLOCKED, i will not back down without getting my money out or a reason what the problem is.

Do you understand?"

15. They reply:

"I regret that we're unable to provide you with the answer you're looking for with this. As no additional information can be provided on this topic, any additional questions pertaining to this issue would yield no further responses. Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in utilizing another payment processor."

16. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I AM BLOCKED FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THEY TOOK MY MONEY AND DONT GIVE A FUCK TO ANSWER WHY THEY DID THAT?

HOW CAN I FILE A LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS FRAUDULENT CORPORATION?

Why am I sad, depressed, demotivated, you ask?
Because I was asked to create-react-app with nodemailer, it worked well on heroku, YAYYY MEE, "

"NOTHING GOES WRONG IN DEPLOYMENT FUCK YEAH"

Little did I know that was a "demo" for the business people, My superior / manager/boss wants me to deploy on 1and1 service provider,

> Okay 1 and 1 service provider does provide Nodej, so it shouldn't be hard.
> Turns out it is a Windows hosting server IIS 10 without URL Rewrite.
> *INTERNAL SCREAMING*
I went up to him to talk about this issue and requested to let me talk to 1 and 1, and get this sorted

> But bro, if we cannot fix it, I think they also cannot fix, probably.

*INTERNAL SCREAMING AT PEAK*

I just want URL Rewrite installed on IIS10 so that I can move on to the next project.
A little background for this project
> No support from him during development.

> I personally used HD Images, because why not?

> Website seems slow because of HD Images, and now he complains about it.

You fucking (managers) want a website to be scalable and fast and yet you choose to focus on B U S I N E S S instead of support the real guy.

I'm fucking sick and tired, it took me 24 hours figure out the issue because there is nothing on 1 and 1 support/ forum/help center.

Another 24 hours to try and fix, yet no luck.

I'm gonna finally point the domain name to heroku. Fuck, I'm so fucking done

Yay, now I know what that windows update was about... oh no, this isn't another "fuck windows, update broke shit again" post.

This is a "wtf, you dodgey shit bags" kind of post, "you" managed to install Skype, install this stupid ducking "meet now" service - which is fucking hidden (anyone have any pointers? Google's not doing its job yet), and now I have to uninstall office completely to remove Skype 🤦‍♂️

Why won't you fuckers let it go, didn't we ALL move to teams recently?

My new favourite commit message:

"All changes as of 18th Sept"

How tremendously useful? There I was looking to know what changes were made to enable a feature / service, thought I could look for that in the commit message, but no you've given me a much more efficient way of finding out.

I simply need to download the contents of your memory, find out what date you made a change, and then dig through the massive commit to find the piece of info I need.

Forget experience using Git features, managing merges, following Git flow, or even any other SCM ... how can people be so tick when it comes to recording what they've done.

Heres a little cheat sheet for those struggling:

- Commit message
Describe what you actually ****ing did. Don't tell me the date or the time, thankfully Git records those. Don't tell me the day of the week, if I need to know I can figure that out, just tell me what ... you ... did.

- Feature branch names
Now this is a tricky one. You might be surprised to know that this isn't in fact suppose to be whatever random adjective or noun popped into your head ... I know, I too was shocked. The purpose of this is to let other people know what new feature is being worked on in this branch.

- Reusing feature branches
Now I know you started it to add some unit tests, and naming it "testing" is sort of ok. But its actually not ok to name it testing when you add 3 unit tests ... then rip out and replace 60% of the business logic. Perhaps it would have been wiser to create a new feature branch, given you are now working on a new feature.

!rant
I am on vacation from my full time job this week. I wanted to use this week to write a PoC for a potential customer of my side business. really interesting project for me.

potential customer is a window and door manufacturer and needs an application to manage their racks.

their ERP system already has a simple rack management but it is only useable in house.

they want the drivers to be able to scan racks they deliver to a customer with a native app and they want to have a webapp for the customers to see racks that are assigned to them as well as reporting a rack ready for collection. And that all needs to be in sync with their local ERP system.

as i am a .net guy i decided to go with the abp framework (because it got recommended to me) and xamarin for the native app part (because i have experience in this).

i have now spent 4 days implementing this and it has been so rewarding. the framework is so powerful and it's template saved me endless hours.

i even wrote a very basic connector service which synchronizes data between my app and the clients ERP system. Just one way until now because of time issue, but i learned to scaffold an ef core with db first. It is noticable that the ERP system is 2-tiered - meaning the clients directly talk to the db.

Tomorrow i will implement the xamarin client.

4 days just coding what i want to. choosi g my own velocity and making my own priorities without any interruptions or discussions and a bunch of new things to learn.

Probably wasted half a day because of stupidy (implemented some bugs) but fixing and learning is part of the journey and i lime that part, too.

i am so relaxed right now 😁 just wanted to share this without a real reason :P

Got moved to higher prio project

- disastrous security
- Built with Knockout.js in 2016
- entire folders of business logic duplicated 3 times to allow for the business requirements of separate regional branches to evolve independently
- Application server in ASP.NET Core MVC but the *real* backend is a WCF service
- there is an outstanding ticket for a list view that fails to load because the API response exceeds the .NET serializer's maximum length. The proposed solution is to stream it down to the client which then collects it into a JS array and renders a DOM node for all 6k rows
- mgmt wants to scale up to the entire European region, not with a single installation but still with a single codebase
- the Germans want interactivity with Relay
- prod database copied around and cleaned to establish new environments, migrations lost to time
- read-only queries have a tendency to deadlock

You realize that the ERP software you use at your company is shit when:
- there is no service-side ERP backend handling requests
- the whole permission system is client-side (!)
- every client directly connects to the MSSQL database with a supervisor user (stored in plain text in a local config file)
- the MSSQL database contains tables with:
- typos
- names like "contract" but then also "contracts"
- mixed german and english words
- the multiple-business-unit implementation uses 4 columns named "Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 3, Layer 4" in EACH table
- you find out that the ERP software is created with a fucking "software creation tool"
- there is no API, so you have to program one yourself to use for services

Yet, they charge us shit ton of money for their broken ass software.

My own colo server. My own cloud. My own infra.

Fuck all of the CSP's and their fucking broken TOS and their data privacy violations!

Why do you think Amazon is so cheap? Because when they discover a product/service/software on AWS makes money, they WILL Reverse engineer it, make it and price you out of the market. It's their business model!

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.

Unpopular opinion: unit tests are often overrated.

Although a well written test suite is almost essential in some parts of the application (I.E. business logic) I cringe when I see hundreds or thousands of line which “mocks” everything to test a micro service which just does CRUD operations on a database, in cases like that unit tests are just a waste of time because almost every operation involves a mock which may not behave like the real database and often needs to be rewritten when the code undergoes a huge refactoring. In these case a integration test suite is faster to write and way more helpful.

In a meeting yesterday working through our WebAPI coding standards, starting from File -> New project..etc..etc.. and ironing out some of the left-or-right decisions so we can have a consistent coding style, working in a meeting room with an overhead projector and sharing keyboard around with one another.

Then we hit the routing 'rules' in the WebApiConfig, "api/{controller}/{id}"…

DevMgr: "Do we need the 'api' prefix? It seems redundant."
Ralph: "Yes it's needed. Prefixing the controllers with 'api' is industry best practice. Otherwise, how is anyone to know it's a web api"
Prancer: "Yea, it's part of the REST standard."
Me: "I don't think so. That is only part of the Asp.Net routing rule. We can put anything we want or take anything out."
DevMgr: "Yea, it looks silly. All the new services are going to be business process specific."
Ralph: "That's how everyone does it. It's kind of the point of why REST services are called WebApi"
Prancer: "What's the point of doing any of this work if we're not going to follow industry standards."
Me: "I understand if the service is part of larger web site, but we're developing standalone services. Prefixing routes with 'api' is redundant. I mean who are these 'everyone' you're talking about?"
<ralph rolls his eyes>
Ralph: "Lets see …uhhh… Netflix?. They're kinda a big deal."
Me: "Like I said, it's an integral part of their site and the services they provide. That's fine. I'm talking about the 12 other 3rd party services we integrate with. None of them have 'api' on any of their routes."
Prancer: "We're talking about serious web services."
Me: "Last time I checked, UPS is a big and serious service."
Ralph: "Their services are a fracking joke" – he didn't say fracking.
Me: "Our payroll system, our billing system, billion dollar companies, didn't have '/api' prefix anywhere. Heck, even that free faxing service we used for a while was a dead-simple routing path."
<I take the keyboard away from Ralph, remove the 'api' from the route.>
Me: "There. Done. Now, lets talk about error handling.."

Rest of the meeting Ralph and Prancer don't say much of anything, arms crossed…I swear Ralph looked like he was going to cry.
This morning I catch my boss…
Me: "What did you think of the meeting? I thought Ralph was going to take a swing at me when I took the keyboard away from him."
DevMgr: "Oh yes…I almost laughed out loud….blows my freaking mind how worked up people get about crap that doesn't matter. Api..or not…who the frack cares. Just make it consistent"
Me: "Exactly…I didn't care either way, but I enjoyed calling out that nonsense."
DevMgr: "Yes..waaay too much."

If I didn't call them on their BS and the 'standard' allowed to continue, I can bet my paycheck when the subject comes up in a few months (another mgr asks 'isn't this api prefix redundant?') Ralph and Prancer will be the first to say "Yea, its stupid. We fought really hard to remove it from the standard...its not our fault...its <insert scapegoat> fault."

I explained last week in great detail to a new team member of a dev team (yeah hire or fire part 2) why it is an extremely bad idea to do proactive error handling somewhere down in the stack...

Example
Controller -> Business/Application Logic -> Infrastructure Layer

(shortened)

Now in the infrastructure layer we have a cache that caches an http rest call to another service.

One should not implement retry or some other proactive error handling down in the cache / infra stack, instead propagate the error to the upper layer(s) like application / business logic.
Let them decide what's the course of action, so ...
1) no error is swallowed
2) no unintended side effects like latency spikes / hickups due to retries or similar techniques happens
3) one can actually understand what the services do - behaviour should either be configured explicitly or passed down as a programmed choice from the upper layer... Not randomly implemented in some services.

The explanation was long and I thought ... Well let's call the recruit like the Gremlin he is... Gizmo got the message.

Today Gizmo presented a new solution.

The solution was to log and swallow all exceptions and just return null everywhere.

Yay... Gizmo. You won the Oscar for bad choices TM.

Thx for not asking whether that brain fart made any sense and wasting 5 days with implementing the worst of it all.

Fuck stupid managers.

My current agency tried to create a bundle of generic Microservices with the hope of save time and money on future projects. That was two years ago (i was working here from 4 months ago).

What they have now? well, a sort of distributed monolyth were if one service goes down, everything else fails, infinite technical debt, no security policies (yeah, all the apis are open!!!) Business rules on the frontend . . .

And what the stupid manager say? "Everything must be ok because i designed it very well, i research a lot for this"

Stupid boomer.

PD: Yeah, despite the fact he is judt a manager, he take the responsibility to design the full architecture, idk why no one srops him.

Listened for about a half-hour yesterday to DevA ‘beat down’ DevB writing a console app for trying out a proof-of-concept idea he had.

DevB: “What’s the URL of the development server?”
DevA: “Why? What are you doing?”
DevB: “I’m needing to throw some messages to it so I can capture data for something I’m working on.”
DevA: “How are you calling the service?”
DevB: “I wrote a console app”
- you could almost hear the eye roll -
DevA: “A console app? Why in the world would you write a console app?”
DevB: “Oh..um..no reason. I just need log some test data for something I’m playing around with. How should I do it?”
DevA: “If it’s test data, you should have wrote a unit test. You see, unit tests …”
- yammer on and on for about 5 minutes about the virtues of unit tests…never really explaining anything -
DevB: “Yea, I’m not needing to test the result or anything. I just need to log some data.”
DevA: “Then you should use a unit test for that, not a console app. With a unit test, you’ll be able to validate the data. That’s what unit tests are for. Microsoft should have never put in console apps in Visual Studio. It just leads to bad coding practices.”
DevB: “Um…I don’t care. It’s a console app because I just need data…thanks anyway”

Today, DevC was talking to DevA

DevC: “Charlie is testing the order module, but there isn’t any test data. Do you still have the data generating script?”
DevA: “Oh yea, I’ll send him my console app that populates the database.”

It was all I could do from screaming “You stupid –bleep-er!! What the f–bleep-ck was all that yesterday?!”, but none of my business. Better to devrant about it than start a fight.

its been there since many years, but:

When did we turned the wrong way and made it acceptable that Windows can blantly say in my face that i cannot deactivate the transmission of data unless i have the "Business" Variant of their Software. Its called Windows 10 PROFESSIONAL. Why are there no international Laws against that? Where was the molotov throwing mob when this became the norm?

Additonally. that cute telemetry service consumes a considerable amount of cpu and disk power from time to time.

and no, Linux is not an alternative. It never was. There is proprietary software and driver sets used for lab equipment and machines that cannot run under linux, noone will ever have the time to tool something for it and the user base is too specific to hope for any community solution.

sidenote: even Level 0 STILL transmits data. I want mode -1

!notarant

Excited to use my new mechanical keyboard. Awwww YISSS! Been waiting forever.

!rant
But seriously who thought of combining Fedex and the United States Postal Service in a delivery method. Sure it sounds great in theory but from my experience, Fedex has the worst tracking ever and USPS is slow in delivering to business addresses.

I'm thinking of starting a service of creating WordPress sites for people.
But there are like 1928372829+ companies doing that.

Am I late to the party?

At my last gig, part of our business process was to generate a unique human-readable ID that could tie an individual to our product and service. Well, we had a few rather superstitious, paranoid and vocal customers who felt 'uneasy' when they received their unique ID with 666 in it.

So after having a good laugh and roll on the floor, I got to write an exorciseUniqueId() method that compelled the evil numbers to stop possessing those innocent IDs!

Three days ago my focus was shifted from a development role to a support role. I was shifted to replace another support guy who had used fraud to get the position. I have no experience with this role but there was decent KT and I'm catching on fine. During onboarding and KT I'm serving as the first contact for new tickets and whatnot...

Today I got a ticket with an error on our production instance that no one had ever seen before. It prevented the guy from using our service entirely. I tried to reproduce it and... I couldn't use the service either. No one could. Everything was down. I could see the sweat building on my manager's forehead.

Thankfully another member on my team has done a bit of support before, so we collaborated with each other and other teams throughout the day to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it. I'm listening to them chat remotely as we speak - so far I've been working on it 9 hours straight.

This service is used by everyone - it's a business critical service with due dates on actions and escalations to managers... Imagine if the support ticketing service for your company crashed. That means a lot of people are asking what's wrong, requiring extensions, etc. I've been answering to managers and seniors in the business throughout the day.

The best part? We figured out why the server went down, and the reason is fantastic: someone updated the server's code without telling anyone, and all they had done was remove critical parsing code. Just took it right out, pushed, redeployed. We don't know who did it or who even has access to do that. I guess I have some detective work cut out for me after we've fixed everything that was broken by that.

I miss coding already.

Man I have no idea how my company is running as stable as they do. Every time I peak under the curtain of some piece of machinery I find such bad practices…

Just found out our in house database manager only supports listing all objects in a table, updating objects by first reading each row you need to update and only support “select *” queries.

This is after having to argue with some engineers that using http or grpc when interacting with the new service I’m writing in the none-jvm language is better than writing our own driver for their custom rpc and service discovery system.

But like honestly I’d be mad if these decisions had a visible performance impact on the business, but it somehow doesn’t… this is bizzaro world where all I learned from my 8 years experience as a professional goes out the window…

New twist on an old favorite.

Background:
- TeamA provides a service internal to the company.
- That service is made accessible to a cloud environment, also has a requirement to be made available to machines on the local network so you can develop against it.
- Company is too cheap/stupid to get a s2s vpn to their cloud provider.
- Company also only hosts production in the cloud, so all other dev is done locally, or on production non-similar infra, local dev is podman.
- They accomplish service connectivity by use of an inordinately complicated edge gateway/router/firewall/message translator/ouija board/julienne fry maker, also controlled by said service team.

Scenario:
Me: "Hey, we're cool with signing requests using an x509 cert. That said, doing so requires different code than connecting to an unsecured endpoint. Please make this service accessible to developer machines and lower environments on the internal network so we can, you know, develop."
TeamA: "The service should be accessible to [cloud ip range]"
Me: "Yes, that's a production range. We need to be able to test the signing code without testing in production"
TeamA: "Can you mock the data?"
Me: "The code we are testing is relating to auth, not business logic"
TeamA: "What are you trying to do?"
Me: "We are trying to test the code that uses the x509 you provide to connect to the service"
TeamA: "Can you deploy to the cloud"
Me: "Again, no, the cloud is only production per policy, all lower environments are in the local data center"
TeamA: "can you try connecting to the gateway?"
Me: "Yes, we have, it's not accessible, it only has public DNS, and only allows [cloud ip range]"
TeamA: "it work when we try it"
Me: "Can you please supply repro steps so we can adjust our process"
TeamA: "Yes, log into the gateway and try issuing the call from there"
Me: (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

tl;dr: Works on my server

A few days ago I decided to install Windows 7 on a VM (bad idea as it turned out). All fine and dandy and I ran Windows Update a few times to get it at least as up-to-date as it'll get.

I noticed that out of the 4GB RAM I had allocated, an svchost process responsible for the updates was gobbling up all the available memory, just leaving 82MB for everything else. The process itself was as you might imagine consuming over 3GB RAM just for itself. That's how an OS should work right after installation, I'm sure you'll agree.

So I complained about it. Haven't used Windows anywhere for a while so I wasn't used anymore to this level of efficiency. Disk activity went through the roof, though to be fair the underlying disk wasn't an SSD (qcow2 on ZFS on a spinning drive). RAM consumption is something I already covered. CPU temperature shot up to 95C.

So as any idiot would do, I disabled the service related to that process (the svchost process for wuauserv) and the problem went away. But I complained of course, saying that such amazing system utilization metrics wasn't something I expected. I mean for 4GB allocated, having as much as 82MB usable to get stuff done with! 95C on the CPU, on a lot of chips that's the junction temperature! Absolutely beautiful.

When I complained I heard that I had to replace the thermal grease. I do that twice a year. I wrote a custom fan driver for my system that works absolutely great. It was obviously shit. I must be a horrible sysadmin for solving a problem by eliminating the cause, and companies hiring me must be ashamed of themselves. My hardware must be shit (that's a common one with Windows users) despite being a business laptop and the guest system being a VM. Oh and I'm an idiot of course for complaining about such amazing system metrics in Windows.

I love Windows and its community...

College: We will give you six to twelve weeks to build a decent, fully-equipped application that involves a backend with domain business logic, DAL, service layer, security, etc.

In the real world: we give you an afternoon. If it takes two days, you are slow.

Gotta love it.

Client had this great idea for a business where he would kennel dogs at his house and have a premium upgrade to the service where he would sell dog treats and other items as well as have a private members only area where they could view their dog.
My first question was "Is there any demand from your customers for such things and what type of budget do you have?"
His response was "I don't have much of a budget but I can give you some hockey tickets and give you a stake in the profit."

I politely declined. He didn't even have any cameras in his house to pull off such a thing, either let alone he didn't have a boarding license. Oh clients.

ChaseBank is getting up my nose. Twice in four business days my account was flagged and I had to change my password for 'security' purposes. I spent the better part of 90 minutes in a futile attempt to find out why, when there's been no suspicious activity on my account, I'm being flagged. My father contacted a branch manager near him who told him to dial the priolrity customer service number and key in the letters (I shit you not) HO HO. I called the number. It's the same damn number I'd been calling. I called the branch. They told me I'd definitely receive a call back last Friday by 1800. No call. So, yesterday I called the manager of that branch, verified its location, told the manager he was supposed to call me by 1800 last Friday, and Chase Corporate would be in touch with him soon to explain that when you tell a customer you'll call them, you'll fucking call them.

you know what im tires of?

Finding a good domain name for a potential business, unregistered, and then using algorithms, the registrar itself snipes it and cybersquats it as "premium".

In otherwords, if you do find a good name, theres no point becauss it'll just be immediately labelled "premium" by an algorithm and lock you out with 5,000 dollar pay wall.

people in 2003 didnt have to deal with this shit. Registrars should be allowed to do this.

Five domain names now, out of a couple dozen I tried, the five good ones I came up with, all five, "premium".

It wasnt like they were even .coms or common words either. Hell one of them had a number in it.

Nope "we have determined spontaneously, through algorithm, you haves selected what may be a valuable domain name, thank you for the service of identifying it for us, we will now reserve it, even though no one else wants it, at a prohibitively high cost."

Like a homeless women finding a winning lottery ticket in a parking lot, and the rich fucking owner running out demanding that she give him it because it was lost in HIS public parking lot.

Like you motherfuckers dont already have enough? You know what a good domain is? Its a basis for credbility. Its the difference between whether people use your service or not. Its the foundation for excitement or interest.

And here we have this "algorithmically marked as premium" bullshit, fucking the poors out of any chance of even a good start.

"Haahahaha cocksuckers, you're not internet startups in the early two thousands! If you dont habe five grand go drop on a dpmain name that isnt even fucking owned, enjoy staying part of the fucking lowerclass!"

These fuckers. Cant believe this bullshit.

Just another day in motherfucking america, where you have to start rich to even get ahead. just one more way gen x, gen y, and gen z got fuckity fucked right in the ass.

fuck this country so much. fuck it all.

never even gonna have a chance to own a home or anything else.

nobody ever offered me a real fucking chance, not once in my god damned life. not even my fucking parents.

might as well drink myself into a coma.

Am I the only one who gets intimidated when shit its roof?

Yesterday, during crucial business hours, one of the major OMS db column type got overflowed. Caused around 30 mins downtime and then later, pool of all connections with high concurrent requests flushed down stream which caused thunder herd.

One by one.. all services went down; Fucking java service couldn't even start because of load..

This is the moment I fell in love with GoLang. We shard request using GoLang service, it just started and picked up the load beautifully..

At the end, it is around 6 millions business loss, but a good lesson learned :)

FUCKING AI ASSISTANTS - THOSE MANDATORY, NO-YOU-CANNOT-OPT-OUT AI SHOVELWARE ON EVERY FUCKING SERVICE OR APP.
THOSE FUCKERS OOM'D MY PC IN THE MIDDLE OF A RUSH.
Sorry for the excessive caps, just needed to vent while the BLOODY AI BLOATWARE INFESTED CORPORATE MACHINE reboots for the FUCKING 6TH TIME ALREADY.
I hope the ENTIRE AI BUSINESS (in its current form) OOM's ITSELF.

You cannot completely delete a windows service, as long as the services panel is open. The service stays undead and prevents any reinstallation until the services panel is closed.

Thanks Microsoft.
Separation of GUI and business logic does not apply here, because it's kernel logic, right?

But at least you're consistents, there is a similar issue with not installing USB drivers if the new hardware dialog is open.

I got my domain from Swisscom (Switzerlands "T-Mobile") Every damn time I try to renew/adjust the domain it feels like I have to search for the fucking Higgs Boson. Searching for it on DDG only yields wrong results. Domains are hidden deep within the business part of their homepage. Their buisness site barely mentions domains, the login is somehow tied to an account you would normally use in combination with your phone number which only adds more to the confusion and the whole domain thing seems to be a shitty frontend coverup of someone elses service.

We use at our company one of the largest Python ORM and dont code ourselfs on it, event tough I can code. Its some special contract which our General Manager made, before we as Devs where in the Project and everything is provided from the external Company as Service. The Servers are in our own Datacenter, but we dont have access.

We have our Consultants (Project Manager) as payd hires and they got their own Devs.

Im in lead of Code Reviews and Interfaces. Also Im in the "Run" Team, which observes, debuggs and keeps the System alive as 3rd-Level (Application Managers).

What Im trying to achieve is going away from legacy .csv/sftp connections to RestAPI and on large Datasets GraphQL. Before I was on the Project, they build really crappy Interfaces.

Before I joined the Project in my Company, I was a Dev for a couple of Finance Applications and Webservices, where I also did coding on Business critical Applications with high demand Scaling.

So forth, I was moved by my Boss over to the Project because it wasn't doing so well and they needed our own Devs on it.

Alot of Issues/Mistakes I identified in the Software:
- Lots of Code Bugs
- Missing Process Logic
- No Lifecycle
- Very fast growing Database
- A lot of Bad Practices

Since my switch I fixed alot of bugs, was the man of the hour for fixing major Incidents and so on so forth. A lot of improvements have been made. Also the Team Spirit of 15+ People inside the Project became better, because they could consult me for solutions/problems.

But damn I hate our Consultants. We pay them and I need to sketch the concepts, they are to dumb for it. They dont understand Rest or APIs in general, I need to teach them alot about Best Practices and how to Code an API. Then they question everything and bring out a crooked flawed prototype back to me.

WE F* PAY THEM FOR BULLCRAP! THEY DONT EVEN WRITE DOCUMENTATION, THEY ARE SO LAZY!

I even had a Meeting with the main Consultant about Performance Problems and how we should approach it from a technical side and Process side. The Software is Core Business relevant and its running over 3 Years. He just argumented around the Problem and didnt provide solutions.

I confronted our General Manager a couple of times with this, but since 3 Years its going on and on.

Im happy with my Team and Boss, they have my back and I love my Job, but dealing with these Nutjobs of Consultants is draining my nerves/energy.

Im really am at my wits end how to deal with this anymore? Been pulling trough since 1 year. I wanna stay at my company because everything else besides the Nutjob Consultants is great.

I told my Boss about it a couple of times and she agrees with me, but the General Manager doesnt let go of these Consultants.

Even when they fuck up hard and crash production, they fucking Bill us... It's their fault :(

Had to explain for 30 minutes to a consultant why:
1. registering a the container in the container.
2. writing abstraction for the container to use the abstraction of the container internally.
3. doing service locator thus hiding dependences.
4. having your business logic code know about DI.
5. writing log4net in a massively over complicated manner just because you didn't read the fucking manual.
6. coping code from github into our source.

are just wrong.

One of the big ISP/entertainment companies dug up the roads a few months back and laid fibre optic cables (cutting through a power cable in the process but that's another story).

Recently had someone turn up at my door to chat about their services. All sounded very good, I took a card and gave it some thought and did some research.

So, it'd be a little cheaper than my current provider (FTTC setup). It'd be faster for downloads, slightly slower for uploads (I want fast upload). IPv6 is only on their business packages. I use IPv6 a lot. I also have several static IPv4 addresses.

It would involve getting a cable in to where my equipment rack is, and one to where the TV is (which I spent ages building a TV unit with power, network etc.)

To record/watch TV in another room with their service, I'd need to pay extra. The service just provides HD channels that I can already get, unless I pay more. At the moment I have MythTV handling all the recording of TV shows I want, and Kodi to play them back on different TVs, via CAT6 I spent ages installing into the walls.

Then there's the uncertainty of how nicely their equipment will play with my relatively complicated setup.

I decided, it isn't worth it really for me. I would have to change a load of stuff just to end up with what I already have... But with more limitations.

Anyway, the guy turned up again a few days later, I told him of my decision and away he went.

Since then I have been visited by 2 other employees of this company to try to sell me the service.

It is probably great and convenient if you are not like me and DIY all your home network and media distribution setup...

Also the ISP I'm with is quite small. They are very knowledgeable and friendly and I can get through to someone quickly if i phone. What I use meets my needs, so I prefer to support the smaller company in this case.

My company is getting a new website. This involves getting new hosting.

I made the old one, and it's all just static html. I'm not that attached to it but it's an important detail.

The bosses want the switch to the new site to happen instantly, but I pointed out that with DNS propagation times etc it can't really happen that way.

So I suggested the new web guys host our old site for a few days and we change the DNS now. Then when they want to launch we don't have to wait for the DNS and they can just swap it out.

This involves dropping 10MB of html files into the web directory on the new server.

For this service they are charging us for 2 hours of their time!

I guess I'm in the wrong business...

Story time;

Major project, multi million budget, huge business and IT coordination, board level status updates, meeting started back in March 2018 for a Go Live of Aug 2019.

Based on draft requirements (and experience) I request the test environment be built for half of the work. Turns out that no one told Server Eng and they are out of space in both dev and prod until Q2 of 2019. We went from Green to Red because a Service Request.

In a previous job, I was trying to organize a common repository with our shitty business partner so we could both be able to contribute our part so our work would not overlap. Not like they cared anyways.

One thing I quickly noticed is those fuckers would just straight up commit untested changes on master and cripples our whole testing and prod deployment at times because we were depending on a shitty IoT service they provided us onto which we had no control whatsoever.

I told my boss, who was often complaining about them being unreliable in the first place, I would simply restrict them from merging and commiting to develop or to master without my approval. We cannot keep working like this.

He told me that we could not impose on them our work practices and that I should not try to piss them off. To be diplomatic.

I politely and professionally refused to do it, but he did change his mind in the end. He and I left not too long after. I guess he felt obliged to respond that having his job at stake but you cannot condone voluntarily shitty work.

People of
"<in the first 5 minutes>
Sorry if I pronounced your name wrong
<continues on hours long obvious power trip>"
..

What is your home address?

Someone mentioned that client want to use wordpress instead of they current website because it is cheaper! Ok lets see how cheap it is.. each time wp release update after updating you need go through all website and check if nothing is broken.. plugins will need update as well because usually they run on specific wp version. Fixing theme and plugins requires dev time.. despite all those things.. have common sense. Maybe it is good for some type of business to host few pages without any business logic or use as blog without scare to loose everything and do not store users data.. someone mentioned that it is secure to run anything because updates are the best security to avoid security breaches. So why banks are not running on WP? Why health service is not using WP?

Being victim of an arbitrary worplace's culture on dev experience and documentation makes me a very frustrated dev.

Often I do want to document, and by that, I don't mean laying an inline comment that is exactly the function's name, I mean going full technical writer on steroids. I can and WILL get very verbose, yes, explaining every single way you can use a service - no matter how self explanatory the code might look.
I know developers (and me included) can, and sometimes will, write the best variable and function names at the time, wondering if they reached the peak of clean, DRY code that would make Robert Martin have a seizure and piss himself, only to find weeks later after working on something else that their work is unreadable. Of course.
I know the doc's public, it's me, and I've done this.

But then again explain for the people in the back how the FUUUUCK are we meant to suggest improvements, when we are not the ones who are prioritising features and shit WITH the business?

Just email me when the fucking team recycles, and no new team member knows how to even setup the IDEs because this huge piece of monumental shit called CompanyTM is also run by VPN. Fuck, no one wants to access that garbage, you have no docs.

I once tried setting up a culture for documentation. I did an herculean amount of work studying what solutions were internally homologated, how steep the learning curve would be from what we had at the moment (NOTHING, WE HAD FUCKING NOTHING, jesus christ, I even interviewed SEVENTEEN other squads to PROVE they FUCKING NEED
DOCS
TO WORK

You know what happened to that effort?
It had a few "clap" reactions on a Teams meeting and it never reached the kanban.
It didn't even made it to backlog.

I honestly hope that, someday, an alien fenomenon affects the whole company, making their memories completely reset, only to have the first one - after the whole public ordeal on why our brains became milkshake -, to say: "oh, boy, I wish we had documented this".
Then I will bring them to the back and shoot them.

Not as much a rant as interest, but did any of you guys recently start a business or witnessed the start of one? I really wanted to know how those find the services and tools that get them off the ground or enhance the business, is there lists with "must have" services for specific business categories etc?

So I've a little freelance project, is basically a blog. I've decided to use microservices with angular in the front end and python in the backend.

I've been about 2 weeks copy pasting code in my api because all the modules are pretty simple CRUDs that do the same thing, there is not heavy business logic or anything, just database handling.

I was really tired of copy pasting modules and his test, only changing function names and parameters, today I've this "epifany" about the inheritance and thinked about using it in my service, creating a base class and making all the other classes children of him.

Before the change my project has 220 tests (100% coverage) now I have only 40 tests (the same 100% coverage)

So, the lesson is: don't start throwing code like an idiot and start your project with some good planning

I've always wanted to do something in IT Support, but I didn't know where to start. I've been helping my co-workers optimize their system and even helped retrieve photos from a tablet that had a broken screen; her service plan said along the lines of "if they weren't there they were lost," I was able to retrieve them in a matter of hours (Really guys! I'm shocked! It was just a broken touchscreen, the storage was just fine. I think I'll remember this moment).

And because my growing impopularity, I started a new business called The Webnician. The company is split into two sections, the Technician, and the Web Developer. Hence, The Web(Tech)nician. I am proud of my name choice.

Then I wanted to become a certified technician, so I did some research on how to become one and found out I need to take the CompTIA A+ 220-901 and 220-902 exam and... I couldn't be more excited!

I've always loved computers, and maybe my late father had some say into it. Nevertheless, I am excited to begin my journey, even though it took awhile to find where I needed to go. I hope you all can follow me on my journey and support my new business.

I don't have anything else to say, so I'll just leave here.

Allright, so now I have to extend a brand new application, released to LIVE just weeks ago by devs at out client's company. This application is advertised as very well structured, easy to work on, µservices-based masterpiece.

Well either I lack a loooot of xp to understand the "µservices", "easy to work on" and "well structured" parts in this app or I'm really underpaid to deal with all of this...

- part of business logic is implemented in controllers. Good luck reusing it w/o bringing up all the mappings...
- magic numbers every-fucking-where... I tried adding some constants to make it at least a tiny bit more configurable... I was yelled at by the lead dev of the app for this later.
- crud-only subservices (wrapped by facade-like services, but still.. CRUD (sub)services? Then what's a repository for...?). As a result devs didn't have a place where they could write business logic. So business logic is now in: controllers (also responsible for mapping), helpers (also application layer; used by controllers; using services).
- no transactions wrapping several actions, like removing item from CURRENT table first and then recreating it in HISTORY table. No rollback/recovery mechanism in service layers if things go South.
- no clean-code. One can easily find lines (streams) 400+ cols long.
- no encapsulation. Object fields are accessed directly
- Controllers, once get result from Services (i.e. Facade), must have a tree of: if (result instanceof SomeService.SomeSubservice1.Item1) {...} else if (result instanceof SomeService.SomeSubservice2.Item4) {...} etc. to build a proper DTO. IMO this is not a way to make abstraction - application should NOT know services' internals.
- µservices use different tables (hats off for this one!) but their records must have the same IDs. E.g. if I order a burger and coke - there are 2 order items in my order #442. When I make a payment I create an invoice which must have an id #442. And I'm talking about data layer, not service or application (dto)! Shouldn't µservices be loosely coupled and be able to serve independently...? What happens if I reuse InvoiceµService in some other app?

What are your thoughts?

I manage the infrastructure of an application. Responsible for setup, maintenance and upgrades of all the associated servers, databases, filesystems and tuning. The business area is responsible for maintaining the content and structure of the app.

A couple of weeks ago, the business area started asking me for the system admin passwords in an attempt to integrate a remote service. The reason was because he didn't want to store his own credentials in Jenkins. Imagine the shock when they were told no.

Then a week ago, they asked for the password again so they could update a properties file. Again, the answer was no.

We sent them an email yesterday asking for their change management number so we could make the change to the properties file. They were absolutely shocked to find out that we hadn't already updated the file because they had already deployed their code changes to go with the properties file last Thursday. They submitted the request to us on Friday.

Getting real tired of people screwing up and pointing the finger back at me.

Found a nice house I want to buy. It is at the moment in foreclosure. So, we need the documents for it, to see if it worth it.

Documents are held by an agency. They want 360 € as an annual subscription service to share it with us. Sure.. No issue, let's contact the court.

Oh, the court says they cannot give us a copy, we can just look at it. After making an appointment in person and driving down there. How is the agency getting it, then? After all, the agency promises access to all foreclosure documents Germany wide. They can give me a fucking copy. Court states on its website, there won't be any answer via email. I need to call them and go down in person.

Well, this is why the game is rigged. I have nothing against a service that accumulates all these information from around the country. That's a fair business model. But then the enshittification started and everyone else gets worse service so I have little choice but to use their service.

Worst part of being a dev?

Explaining the issue simply enough for the business while not looking like im purposely dumbing down what i do.

"The thing failed to connect due to an issue on the service side. Think of trying to order taco bell while its closed for cleaning."

In the mid-2010s, we barely had any apps in our native language and popular coupon and review sites were lackluster in our neck of the woods.
So me and some old uni colleagues got together to make a WhatsApp based "wtf is going on right now and right around here"
think Groupon meets yelp meets Google maps meet trending topics. The idea was that local business would post deals and events and people would comment on it giving stars on real time, with geolocation. So you could see what was going on right next to you, and business owners only needed WhatsApp installed to post new topics.

We... failed to go viral. That simple. Things get frustrating when infinite no-questions-asked venture capital is not available.

Then me and the other founders got very lucrative jobs in former British colonies and that was it.

This idea might still work nowadays, but it would be reeeealy hard to navigate around Whatsapp's terms of service.
Good luck to anyone who might want to try.

So, I'm starting cross platform mobile app development with NativeScript. Just side projects at the moment, nothing "business-related".

Well, as for the Android part, I'm free to choose whether I'd like to develop on Windows 10- or on my Linux machine. I can compile the project on either system. As for publishing it to Google Play, I might do it, I might not do it, since it is possible to install an app by providing the apk file.

As for the Apple part: I'd either have to buy an completely overpriced Apple computer (iMac, MacBook, etc.) or subscribe to a pricey online CI/CD service... just to be able to compile the fucking project. And if that wouldn't be enough, Apple wants to charge me 99 $ a year so I may have a chance to publish the app to their App Store... of course without any guarantees that my app will be published, because it might be revoked by them. WHAT THE FUCK?

Windows update service on servers...that trigger a 15 minute countdown to reboot when you log in. Even under business hours.

I’ve now discovered that management actually decides for themselves what software engineering is. 🧐

It is getting increasingly common that in different architectural groups the decision has already been made… by management…without actually passing through our review… as a little more senior blokes and gals.

Not even a discussion? On the fit?

That leads me to the conclusion, since I consider the management (at least the two or three closest layers) are morons, good at talking but not really knowing anything about what we do (we kind of take stuff and make other stuff from it by using energy and other stuff in HUGE FUCKING FACILITIES AROUND THE PLANET), that even they did not make the decision. It was forced upon them. They did not decide either! Because they can’t! Because they are idiots all of them!

I have not investigated this issue but this is the logical conclusion. Or not.

Recently, for instance, decisions were made to route information flows by some tech. Some new tech. At some place in our eco-system. At a certain time. And, if we were to have reviewed this initiative in our process we would have said:

”Well, I hear you! But we are not going to do that right now because WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING HUGE GLOBAL PROJECT THAT CHANGES PRETTY MUCH FUCKING EVERYTHING AND WE CAN NOT JUST IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING EXECUTION PROCESS OF THE PROJECT CHANGE THE FOUNDATIONS OF MESSAGE ROUTING BECAUSE WE LACK THE NUMBER OF HUMANS TO DO THE FUCKING JOB. So, we need to take a look at this and to get a better understanding when we can make this happen.”

What is the point of having this step in our organization if it is just pass-through? What is the point? Meetings? Just having meetings? Spending time mastering the organizational skill of administrating meetings? Feeling important? Using big words (holistic being my favourite)?

Below, juniors devs are being hired doing stupid stuff that does not need doing. For months and months.

I believe now that half of the dev staff does not need to be there and three quarters of the team, service, delivery (etc) managers are unnecessary. I mean, the good juniors are going to change jobs soon either way and we are stuck in this vicious cycle where we are not being allowed to be innovative in software engineering. Stability is of the essence here but the rate of our releases are just silly slow. I would say that we are far, far away from any track that leads us to where we want to be. Agile. Innovative. Close to business. Learning. Teaching. Faster. Stability despite response to implementing changing business needs.

And then there are the consultants…

*sigh*

Oddly enough, i have simultaneously been less busy and more productive since working 66% remotely.

I find myself with more time that feels "wasted" or not busy, but my metrics show that I have more production, better results, and far nicer documentation. A bunch of us also sat down and did a bunch of coursework on really putting together a domain script library for one click onboarding of new servers or new client setups. We spun up a bunch of new virtual environments that literally solved headaches that had existed for years that never got dealt with because of too many other tickets.

Some of our web clients freaked out at us because the business is moving away from doing maintenance of legacy web work (small to midsize businesses). But it didn't matter. Rather than respond with a "make them happy," the response was "well, we will get rid of them as clients. We need to focus our energy on the essential service sectors we support."

Hell, we even got an automated test that has been broken apparently since 2018 to work again.

Granted, the incoming workload has slowed down. But it's still interesting to me to see that despite the slowdown, there isn't any concern; its still paying the bills and we are getting rid of technical debt everywhere. Tbh, this has really been a good reality check.

My current side project. I’m doing a POC to upskill in functional programming. A Java/Dropwizard web service calling onto business logic written in Clojure. The bit im excited about is an HTML engine im writing in Clojure. So instead of inter-mixing raw HTML with code, my views will be written entirely in Clojure

Just received an email from a high maintenance client - this is verbatim what I've just read:

"If I could pull out my Windows vista and then plug in a newer windows system without any stress I'd go for this. Do you do this service? I could pay you for an hour to come my business, Unplug, Plug in and sort this out etc etc. It sounds like a quick job to me."

Note I'm a software developer, nothing to do with day to day IT support stuff. The client's business property is a 45 min drive from my own.

So basically, according to my client I can charge a single hour (£85.00 +vat) for a 90 minutes round trip, to migrate their PC to a newer operating system and move all their data and apps over and then setup the new OS. All for £85.00 +vat. All excluding the fact I

What the literal heck. I'm face palming all over the place.

A home hosted build server for continuous integration is always crap and a blocker for everyone. If you don’t have 5(yes, five) full time admins/devops to support that, forget about building the infrastucture yourself. There are companies whose business is to provide CI as a service, why do you think you can beat them with your crappy Jenkins installation?

I’ve seen a 200 company failing with 2 people. I’ve seen another one completely failing, because the admins didn’t know what CI meant, and a small one failing with 0.5. The only place where it kind of worked used Gitlab.

Screw AIX! More importantly screw the IBM designer that though cache batteries were a good way to monitize their platform to help validate the service contracts. I guess it "works", but at what cost?

Just lost the last 4 business days going down this rabbit hole with a customer's server.

Edit: Quick note, yes, the customer is on track for a migration soon.

Why would you post your code on GitHub and charge to use it. I'm not using your servers your not providing me any service I need but you still expect me to pay for open source code you posted yourself. What is going through your mind. To come up with that business plan

To be a Java (or other business popular language) developer
* Java 6, 8 and features up to 14
* SQL + nosql
* Caching
* Logging eg log4j2,
* Searching eg elastic stack
* Reactive
* Framework (at least 1, but hey, knowing 1 is lame..)
* Networking or at least base http knowledge
* Tomcat, jboss or other shit
* Aws, heroku, GCE or other SAAS/paas
* Rest, RPC, soap
* Business Hello World example
* Hexagonal Architecture
* TDD
* Ddd
* Cqrs
* 12 app factor
* Solid
* Patterns
* docket
* Kubernetes
* Microservices
* Security, oauth2
* concurrency
* AMPQ
* Cloud
* Eureka or consul as service Discovery
* Config server
* Hazel cast
*
*
* Endless story ...

Then we can start hello word app

I go to add a method call in a business logic class that's used exclusively in a particular service, and get blocked in the PR by some other guy-

Other Guy: refactor this into the shared framework referenced by all our microservices

Me: it is only and would only be used in this service

OG: what about the other business logic class in this service?

Me: it's not used there, and if it does end up used there then we can refactor it into a class that they both reference then

OG: I need to know when the abstraction of this function will be done. is it going to be delivered next sprint?

Me: YAGNI - better to avoid doing extra work when we don't know if we'll even need it

OG: tbh you can still abstract it with some generics and lambda magic, but im not gonna enforce that

Me: premature abstraction is the root of all evil (tongueout)

OG: not really, its the root of not having a million miles of tech debt in 2 years

I just can't win for losing with the anti-YAGNI yogi.

I really want to start up a business as sort of a consulting service, or a software contractor...

Does anyone know how to get started in contracting? I see contracts online and they are only like 2-3 month long contracts? How can I get involved with that to get some experience and not have to quit my current job...? Is it possible to do both?

Also it seems like a lot of the ones I see are where you have to go live there during the duration of the contract... Why don't they do any remote contracts...?

I've only worked at one place as a Software Developer, and from my previous post you can tell that I really hate it, but my location is hard to find anything else at all... Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Reset 900 domain service account credentials, placed them in a vault, and updated over 6000 items on our domain leveraging those credentials saturday night. 99% success rate today when we opened for business. What did you do this weekend ?

I'm pretty much at my dream job currently. A lot of autonomy as a developer, solo projects, as there are only two developers in-house and each of us is covering roughly half of the systems, we rarely work on the same thing at the same time. We do have weekly sync checkins to keep each other appraised and offer a helping hand/eye when needed.

But.

There's always a but.

Our IT department used to service 500 to 1000 employees 7 years ago, and now, through growth, opening new sibling companies, and merging with our competitors we're at 6k, give or take.

Maybe it's the aftermerge crunch to harmonize our IT systems but I've been working 10+ hours from August. It's an interesting couple of new pieces of software that I'm writing but, the deadlines are pretty tight and business requirements are anything but tight still.

I love my job, but I wish to get the bigger stuff done soon so I can take it easy.

You know what really grinds my gears? Products that have no right of linking your data to an online platform.

Case and point: Password Managers. Nearly all of them work only with an account on a given service, have the passwords stored on their servers and so on and so forth. There is 0 transparency and for that matter 0 security. I found my choice, though it infuriates me terribly.

Another thing are budget managers. The switch for YNAB from local to on servers really annoys me. They should have no business in storing my very private data on their server. I don't understand people using it either.

This may be the most beautifully succinct service doc intro sentence I've ever written...

working on a shell library with the business logic for an Angular "white label" app workspace, and `ShellService` just got introduced as:

"this service serves to serve all other services.."

me thinks today is a good day for coding. 😎

Lazy piece of shit deliveryman simply stating that nobody was at home when in fact, the only person that wasn't there was him. No bell was ringing and my phone didn't receive any calls either. Customer service wasn't even that surprised when I asked them about it.
"Yeah, I tried to call the guy, but he wouldn't answer. I'm gonna try sending him again"

Boi, just yeet that bitch from your business!

!question
My friend's friend requested my service to make an eCommerce website for her side business.

Should I keep all the domain, hosting, and SSL under my name and charge them after putting some margin to earn some cash? Or cut the hassle and just let them purchase it themselves?

What is challenging of becoming freelance programmer, is that not only have to deal with stupid requirements from the client, and attitude of certain client. We also need to face the challenges of other freelancer defaming you , bombard you with a bunch of negativity.

So here's the story, there is this guy knowing that I give the service for creating mobile app for 50USD and client happy with the price. While he get NONE of the business as the price is 80USD.

I'm trying to improve my email setup once again and need your advice. My idea is as follows:
- 2-5 users
- 1 (sub)domain per user with a catchall
- users need to be able to also send from <any>@<subdomain>.<domain>
- costs up to 1€ per user (without domain)
- provider & server not hosted in five eyes and reasonably privacy friendly
- supports standard protocols (IMAP, SMTP)
- reliable
- does not depend on me to manage it daily/weekly
- Billing/Payment for all accounts/domains at once would be nice-to-have, but not necessary

I registered a domain with wint.global the other day and I actually managed to get this to work, but unfortunately their hosting has been very underwhelming.. the server was unreachable for a few minutes yesterday not only once, but roughly once an hour, and I'd really rather be able to actually receive (and retrieve) my mail. Also their Plesk is quite slow. To be fair for their price it's more like I pay for the domain and get the hosting for free, but I digress..

I am also considering self hosting, but realistically that means running it on a VPS and keeping at secure and patched, which I'd rather outsource to a company who can afford someone to regularly read CVEs and keep things running. I don't really want to worry about maintaining servers when I'm on holiday for example and while an unpatched game server is an acceptable risk, I'd rather keep my email server on good shape.

So in the end the question is: Which provider can fulfill my email dreams?

My research so far:
1. Tutanota doesn't offer standard protocols. I get their reasons but that also makes me depended on their service/software, which I wouldn't like. Multiple domains only on the business plans.
2.With Migadu I could easily hit their limits of incoming mails if someone signs up for too many newsletters and I can't (and don't want to) micromanage that.
3. Strato: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains. Also I don't like the company for multiple reasons. However I can access a domains hosted there and could try...
4. united-domains: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains.
5. posteo: No custom domains allowed.

I'm getting tired.. *sigh*

Release team was recently disbanded, they handed off release management to the Dev scrum masters. The other day we had a weekly release for a product that uses a network service that is shared with other products. The devs didn’t know how to set up the build correctly. They had a purge setting on that removed the network service for products that weren’t being touched in the release. The end result was that the other products were inaccessible for an hour and a half! They eventually found their mistake, but we were lucky that it was outside of core business hours.

These devs need to learn how to work the build tools! Or maybe we should rethink getting rid of the release team.

I NEED A HACKER TO RECOVER MY LOST BITCOIN / CRYPTO > iFORCE HACKER RECOVERY

Hiring a professional hacker like iFORCE HACKER RECOVERY has various advantages, including specific knowledge of cryptocurrency recovery techniques. 

A useful service to the cryptocurrency sector is offered by iFORCE HACKER RECOVERY, which shields investors from dishonest business practices and aids in the recovery of lost or stolen money

Started a seo project/busines and i was working day and night...can't finish it because i started working from 8 am to 7 pm in an auto service so i can feed myself and pay the bills...any advice on how to make some money online so i can work from home and continue with my project and finaly get my business going?

Tl;Dr: Would my salary sugesstion be alright? Will get a promotion. Currently salary 115k $. I would suggest between 135k - 150k $ annual salary

So I work at a large Corpo and was asked by my department Boss, if I want to take a Promotion in our Applications team as Technical Lead. I would have the same Job, but will be the Service Owner and lead the team on a functional base. Would be 5 People. Personal Leadership would still be trough my superior.

Im alright with that, I currently dont want to lead people, but teaching them how to do it like I do right now is fine with me. Also most of the time when Shit hits the Fan Im on the call already to fix a critical Bug.

I trust my boss alot and was always treated fair by her. My currently salary is at 115k annual and Im 29 years old.

Currently Im studying on my Science BSc and work fulltime. I will take the promotion, because its like already now too my Job, I get payd better and not some random pen pusher will be set infront of me.

Also I could deny now all the fuck ups our Business People decide in Projects. I would have a lever more to challenge. (Parry this Peasant 🤣)

Just jumping from 115k up is my mental Challenge. I first thought about just 124k, but the responsibility is alot (Business Critical Applications). Also on the Job Market the Peers are ranging from 140k - 160k.

Im always thinking about the say, you need to be greedy sometimes yourself if its justified. Else some Manager gonna cash in the slip.

Should I suggest 135k or by your experience would you advertise higher like 145k-150k?

Folks,
My current employer is service based. Its a good work culture and everything, But..

They are not evaluating their employees skills and stuff. They assign roles of employee on the basis of their business needs, which is fine at certain extend.

But this ultimately causing some employees (including me) to Not have the role we have expertise in.

What to do in such situation? Switching is the only way?

A long time ago I got an idea for an Internet concierge shopping service that would pair you up with a human to help you comparison shop anything. Obviously this was before AI or the kind of tech we’re used to now. The idea was that the help of a real live person to help you track down deals was better than some of the emerging product recommendation engines I was researching. I figured I’d at least make a short term business out of it until tech caught up. So I built the site, DB, and business logic and recruited my bargain-hunting wife to help people find good buys. It worked ok, but wasn’t easy to monetize because people wanted her help for free rather than pay any kind of fee. Their perception was they weren’t saving a substantial amount if they had to pay someone to help them. Of course, our pitch was that by paying someone to help them, they might avoid paying more by trying it on their own.

It was an interesting experiment anyways.

BEST CRYPTO RECOVERY SERVICES - CONTACT iFORCE HACKER RECOVERY

iFORCE HACKER RECOVERY is Genuine and recommended.

I was previously duped into using a cryptocurrency investment platform that I discovered on Tiktok. I lost over $116k to this nasty business after investing and accumulating earnings; withdrawals were prohibited on the scheduled deadline. I contacted customer service, but received no response; I realized I had been duped, and I began looking for a way to reclaim my cryptocurrency. I found myself fortunate to stumble across a post on the internet about a Recovery Expert named iFORCE HACKER RECOVERY who helped me recover 90% of my lost funds and I am highly grateful. I would definitely recommend iFORCE HACKER RECOVERY to anyone looking to reclaim lost monies from a fraud.    

Website; iforcehackersrecovery .c om

Whatpp; +1 240 ( 803, 37) 06
E-Mail: contact@iforcehackersrecovery . c om

Ok so giving chatgpt small instructions seems to kind of work
The question is how to connect to it through your own interface? Chat is cutting off code

I don't think this will put programmers out of business

You have to know what you're doing to instruct it lol

Do you think they'll lose their whole user base making this a 1000.00 a year pay service?

you know one should tread very carefully when getting a business dealing out of friendship.

if their is a boss-employee dynamics in the business, as in you are the boss and they are being paid to work for you or vice versa, then during work , be prepared to take criticism constructively. as a friend, the relation is different, we say each other anything and it is laughed off, but during work, there is a matter of respect, seniority and professionalism.

another kind of dynamics are the freelance/favour relation where friend is giving you free/paid service/advice or vice versa. this is even more shittier situation and is almost always bound to fuck up.
- the guy receiving service will try to negotiate a better deal because friend factor ('you will take so much money from your homie?')
- the guy providing service will try to offer a bad deal because friend factor ('i know he trust me. let me offer him a bad quote as he don't know anything of this domain')
- the guy providing service may not consider the service/advice as priority because friends factor ('he is a homie. he can wait')
- the guy receiving service may not be satisfied with the product/offerring/guidance because friends factor ('you could have added this x feature too bro, i paid you')

overall friend factor sucks. somehow the boss-employee factor worked for me as i was careful after 1 bad attempt

If you have ever fallen victim to a bitcoin or cryptocurrency fraud, I strongly suggest using Wizard James Recovery service to assist you get your money back. A few weeks ago, someone on Instagram claimed to be in the investment business and that I could profit greatly from all of my investments. I was swayed by this and invested $560,000 in this cryptocurrency scam after he assured me that I would receive a substantial return on my investment within a few days. However, when it came time to collect my profits, I discovered it was all a scam, and they stopped contacting me and logged me out of their platform. My coworker told me about Wizard James Recovery Service and how they could hack into their system to help me get my money back. After I got in touch with them and gave them the details they asked for, I had my money back in less than a week. I'm relieved and thought I'd spread the word to as many others as possible who could be in need of their assistance. The following details can help you get in touch with them. WhatsApp: +-4-4- 7-4-1-8 3-6-7-2-0-4, Email: wizardjamesrecovery @ usa . com

Before starting with the catering business, all one needs to understand how catering on demand works. Also need to know how one can generate more profit and increase the target audience. With catering on demand, you can integrate with additional features into the catering app so as to make your app more unique. This will increase the chance to increase target audience and generate more revenue with your catering app. Hence, it is a good way for an entrepreneur to boost catering service startup with catering on demand.

RECOVER DIGITAL COIN WALLETS-BTC-INVESTMENT FUNDS HIRE_TECHNOCRATE RECOVERY

TECHNOCRATE RECOVERY successfully recovered all of my lost funds. I'm Overwhelmed with gratitude, I couldn't contain my joy as I shared the news with my friend. "You did this, thank you!!!" I exclaimed over the phone, unable to find the words to express my relief and appreciation. It was a moment of triumph, a testament to the effectiveness of TECHNOCRATE RECOVERY's expertise and dedication. Since then, I've made it my mission to spread the word about their remarkable service. In a world fraught with scams and uncertainties, knowing that there's a reliable team capable of restoring lost assets brings a sense of reassurance. I urge anyone facing similar challenges to consult the best in the business—TECHNOCRATE RECOVERY. Don't hesitate to reach out; you never know whose life you might positively impact. Trust in the experts, and reclaim your digital assets"

SEND MAIL: Technocratrecovery(@)contractor. net
WEBSITE INFO: w ww.technocraterecover y.site

Sistah Bell's Food and Catering: Your Go-To Choice for Event Catering and Catering Services in Stockbridge, GA

When it comes to hosting a memorable event, the right catering can make all the difference. At Sistah Bell's Food and Catering, located at 747 Davis Rd, Suite 600, Stockbridge, GA, we pride ourselves on offering exceptional event catering and a wide range of catering services designed to meet your needs. Whether you’re searching for “event catering near me” or “catering services near me,” our team is dedicated to delivering delicious food and professional service that will leave a lasting impression on your guests.

About Sistah Bell's Food and Catering
Sistah Bell's Food and Catering combines the best of Southern hospitality with a passion for flavorful, high-quality cuisine. Our mission is to provide clients with an unforgettable dining experience, tailored to their unique preferences and event requirements. From intimate gatherings to large corporate functions, we have the expertise to make any event a success.

Event Catering Near Me
Finding reliable event catering is essential for ensuring your gathering runs smoothly. At Sistah Bell's Food and Catering, we specialize in creating personalized catering experiences that reflect your vision and style.

Our event catering services include:

Customizable Menus: We work closely with you to design a menu that suits the theme and nature of your event, whether it’s a wedding, birthday celebration, corporate gathering, or community event. Our offerings range from traditional Southern dishes to contemporary favorites.
Diverse Food Options: We understand that every event has different culinary needs. That’s why we provide a wide variety of appetizers, entrees, sides, and desserts to cater to all tastes and dietary preferences.
On-Site and Drop-Off Catering: Whether you prefer an elaborate buffet setup or a convenient drop-off service, we can accommodate your requirements. Our team ensures that all food is prepared to perfection and delivered fresh to your venue.
Professional Setup and Service: Our dedicated staff is trained to provide exceptional service, from setup to cleanup. We take care of the details, allowing you to enjoy your event without worry.
Catering Services Near Me
Sistah Bell's Food and Catering is your trusted partner for all catering services in the Stockbridge and Atlanta area. Our comprehensive catering solutions are designed to make your life easier while providing outstanding food and service.

Our catering services include:

Corporate Catering: We offer tailored menus for business meetings, conferences, and employee gatherings. Our goal is to keep your team energized and satisfied, no matter the occasion.
Wedding Catering: Make your special day unforgettable with our elegant wedding catering options. We work with couples to create customized menus that reflect their tastes and enhance their celebration.
Family and Community Events: From family reunions to local festivals, we bring our Southern flair to every community gathering. Our friendly service and delicious food will delight your guests.
Special Dietary Options: We recognize that dietary needs vary among guests. Our team is happy to provide vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and allergy-sensitive options, ensuring everyone can enjoy the meal.
Why Choose Sistah Bell's Food and Catering?
Quality Ingredients: We use only the freshest ingredients in our dishes, ensuring that each meal is not only delicious but also nourishing.
Personalized Service: We believe in building relationships with our clients and tailoring our services to meet their specific needs.
Experience and Expertise: With years of experience in the catering industry, we have the knowledge and skills to handle events of all sizes and types.
Community Focus: As a local business, we are proud to serve our community, offering reliable catering services that clients can trust.
Contact Sistah Bell's Food and Catering Today
If you’re looking for exceptional event catering or catering services near you, look no further than Sistah Bell's Food and Catering. Contact us today at +1 (404) 482-1571 to discuss your event needs, explore our menu options, and learn how we can help make your next gathering a success.

Discover Bali with Luxury Car Rental Bali
Bali, with its stunning landscapes, rich culture, and vibrant atmosphere, is a dream destination for travelers seeking adventure and relaxation. To enhance your experience on this beautiful island, look no further than Luxury Car Rental Bali. We offer a wide range of premium vehicles that provide comfort, style, and performance, ensuring that your journey through Bali is as memorable as the destination itself.

Sewa Chevrolet Impala Bali: Experience Timeless Elegance
For those who appreciate classic American luxury, our Sewa Chevrolet Impala Bali service is the perfect choice. The Chevrolet Impala is a symbol of elegance and sophistication, offering a smooth ride and spacious interior that make it ideal for both leisure and business travel. Whether you’re heading to a special event, exploring Bali’s scenic routes, or simply enjoying a night out, the Impala delivers a blend of comfort and style that enhances every journey.

Adventure Awaits with Rental Jeep CJ Bali
For the adventurous spirit, our Rental Jeep CJ Bali service offers the perfect vehicle to navigate Bali’s diverse terrains. The Jeep CJ is renowned for its rugged capability and off-road prowess, making it an excellent choice for exploring the island’s hidden gems, from lush jungles to rocky coastlines. With its sturdy design and open-air experience, the Jeep CJ allows you to immerse yourself in Bali’s natural beauty while enjoying the thrill of off-road driving.

Sewa Jeep CJ Bali: Perfect for Group Adventures
If you’re traveling with family or friends, our Sewa Jeep CJ Bali service ensures that everyone can join in on the adventure. With ample space for passengers and gear, the Jeep CJ is perfect for group outings, beach days, or exploring Bali’s iconic landmarks. Experience the freedom of the open road and create unforgettable memories as you traverse the island’s scenic routes in this iconic vehicle.

Enhance Your Journey with Police Escort Bali
For those seeking added security and peace of mind during their travels, our Police Escort Bali service offers a unique and reassuring experience. Whether you are attending a high-profile event, traveling with valuable assets, or simply want to ensure a safe and smooth journey, our professional police escort service provides an extra layer of security. Enjoy your time in Bali with the confidence that you are in safe hands, allowing you to focus on creating unforgettable memories.

Why Choose Luxury Car Rental Bali?
At Luxury Car Rental Bali, we pride ourselves on providing an exceptional experience for our clients. Here are just a few reasons to choose us for your luxury car rental needs:

Diverse Fleet: Our extensive selection includes classic vehicles like the Chevrolet Impala and rugged options like the Jeep CJ, ensuring you find the perfect ride for any occasion.
Outstanding Customer Service: Our friendly and professional team is dedicated to delivering personalized service, ensuring a seamless rental experience from start to finish.
Flexible Rental Options: Whether you need a vehicle for a day, a week, or longer, we offer flexible rental plans tailored to your specific needs.
Convenient Location: Our office is conveniently located at Jl. Kuwum II. 18 X Kerobokan, Kerobokan Kelod, Kec. Kuta Utara, Kabupaten Badung, Bali 80361, Indonesia, making it easy to access our premium vehicles.
Book Your Dream Vehicle Today!
Don’t miss the chance to explore Bali in style and comfort. For inquiries or to reserve your dream car, contact us at +6287771617888. Experience the beauty of Bali like never before—choose Luxury Car Rental Bali for an unforgettable adventure!