One of these is full of shit.

Well now, I wouldn't want to mention anyone specific since talking about someone behind their back and calling them 'weird' isn't very nice. 🙄 But absolutely HYPOTHETICALLY speaking, if I HAD a weird coworker, they would probably...
- ... strut about the office, telling all how great yet underpaid their work is
- ... write lots of 'concepts' because coding is for lowly programmers
- ... insist that the code they have to do when boss is looking is simply too complicated for unit testing, and 'that's great!'
- ... brag about their/wear to work a ridiculous array of ties in every colour imaginable, when everyone else shows up casual

- ... trap people into listening to them talk for hours about...
-- ... ties
-- ... their misspent youth
-- ... how awesome they are/were/will be
-- ... why it's a good idea to eat cheese

- ... never let me forget I'm female, coz *insert BS reasons why all devs must by nature be male here*
- ... send me little unsolicited notes and mails with funny (sexist) jokes *har har*

- ... be let go, at which point everyone else discovers why they had so much time that they could spend chatting away at the watering hole
- ... earn the eternal hatred of anyone picking up the pieces of their 'work'
- ... try to steal our customers away who will laugh in their bloody face

Just my theory, of course..

"Ralph" has been working on a process that updates a field in a SharePoint list and bellying aching for almost a month. Couldn't use the C# client, too hard...tried to use the SharePoint REST entry point, using C# too complex...Javascript also was overly complex. Tried to use PowerShell, that worked but could only run on the SharePoint Server and it didn't have access to the 3rd party system.

In our stand up this morning, again, he was belly aching he is still not done because of the complexity of SharePoint.

I thought "Good lord...what the frack is the problem? Surely other devs in the world aren't having this much of a problem."

Fire up google...search for an example...copy the MSDN C# example...run it...tada...updated the SharePoint list just fine. Maybe 15 minutes of effort (< 20 lines of mostly copy+pasted code).

Next stand up, I'm contemplating calling him out on the BS, but I suspect he had working code for a while. Wouldn't be the first time he has dragged his ass working on a project until folks get fed up waiting and he has an "intellectual breakthrough" and brags how all his effort was worth the time. Similar to the firefighter who starts fires just so he can 'be the hero'.

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."

Okay I'm doing the whole leetcode bs, interviewing with a faang like company.

I'm genuinely curious to see if their engineers are actually any good. It seems backwards to me to hire someone based on something they most likely know by heart.

It's like trying to stress test an API by calling a cached endpoint. It will look fast AF, and it will be, but it won't compute shit.

Anyway, if I get the job and the engineers aren't crappy, then I'll forever stfu about how lame this is. But if I get the job and the devs are crappy, oh boy you'll hear me for a long time.

¡rant|rant

Nice to do some refactoring of the whole data access layer of our core logistics software, let me tell an story.

The project is around 80k lines of code, with a lot of integrations with an ERP system and an sql database.

The ERP system is old, shitty api for it also, only static methods through an wrapper to an c++ library

imagine an order table.

To access an order, you would first need to open the database by calling Api.Open(...file paths) (yes, it's an fucking flat file type database)

Now the database is open, now you would open the orders table with method Api.Table(int tableId) and in return you would get an integer value, the pointer.

Now for the actual order. first you need to search for it by setting the search parameter to the column ID of the order number while checking all calls for some BS error code

Api.SetInt(int pointer, int column, int query Value)
Then call the find method.

Api.Find(int pointer)

Then to top this shitcake of an api of: if it doesn't find your shit it will use the "close enough" method of search.

And now to read a singe string 😑

First you will look in the outdated and incorrect documentation given to you from the devil himself and look for the column ID to find the length of the column.

Then you create a string variable with ALL FUCKING SPACES.

Now you call the Api.GetStr(int pointer, int column, ref string emptyString, int length)

Now you have passed your poor string to the api's demon orgy by reference.

Then some more BS error code checking.

Now you have read an string value 😀

Now keep in mind to repeat these steps for all 300+ columns in the order table.

News from the creators: SQL server? yes, sql is good so everything will be better?

Now imagine the poor developers that got tasked to convert this shitcake to use a MS SQL server, that they did.

Now I can honestly say that I found the best SQL server benchmark tool. This sucker creams out just above ~105K sql statements per second on peak and ~15K per second for 1.5 second to read an order. 1.5 second to read less than 4 fucking kilobytes!

Right at that moment I released that our software would grind to an fucking halt before even thinking about starting it. And that me & myself and I would be tasked to fix it.

4 months later and two weeks until functional beta, here I am. We created our own api with the SQL server 😀

And the outcome of all this...

Fixes bugs older than a year, Forces rewriting part of code base. Forces removal of dirty fixes. allows proper unit and integration testing and even database testing with snapshot feature.

The whole ERP system could be replaced with ~10 lines of code (provided same relational structure) on the application while adding it to our own API library.

Best part is probably the performance improvements 😀. Up to 4500 times faster and 60 times less memory usage also with only managed memory.

Fuckers didn't even give my account access to the fucking soap action I was calling after 3 weeks of email chains and other back and forth.

First the credentials I was given "we're fully set up" and now this BS??

Fucking test your live and sandbox environments work BEFORE you let your clients start their integrations.

And if they have issues, try to emulate the e-2-e test and prove you can complete the transaction yourself BEFORE emailing back 🤦

Oh china, you always know how to snap me out of long stints of mundane and/or annoying, chore-esq work.
//...and letting me excuse a 10min, otherwise purely wrong procrastination down a current political rabbit hole

I gotta say, at least in china they are bold enough to put their image and identity on whatever they make... but in that 'im selling pseudo-sex, not because im sexy--just the opposite, so you know I relate' way.

Side note: i got an automated spam call survey yesterday*... it ot got to the 1st (of claimed 3) question.. which had a surprising amount of actual reiterations before looping... it was determined to get opinions(and totally incept the lemmings, soccer moms and politically ignorant into their stance, plus intense rage/disgust/dreams of standing on a soap box and fighting about this new issue they were totally unaware of.)... about this actively serving, politician's demand that china sell tiktok or totally stop allowing any operations/use on american soil... because of the heavily implied heinous nature of controlling and twisting society via media to it's explicitly declared communism... even directly called china, as a whole, communists, with impressive dramatics (and i coached public speaking hs and college kids then over a decade of business consulting, typically involving coaching vocals and implicit vocab)

I actually listened to it because it's what a typical subject, brought out of the koolaid fog, would view as ridiculously ironic(assuming they knew the actual, and therefore inherently ironic, def if irony... most dont. It's disturbing)... but it you have decent common sense, and dont emotionally view your entirety as wrong/broken/needing to be fixed in a cult-like manner, it's the oposite of irony. History of/and politics pull this crap all the time. It still works.

It reminds me of how my moniker, awesomeest, came about. In 3rd grade i realised that even adults, knowing they were chatting with an 8yr old, even if they knew/used the correct spelling of a, less common, term... if i misspelled it as if i thought it was right, theyd actually change their spelling to match (in perpetuity) albeit my vocab was easily high school level by then...likely at least in part to my flawless(aka blind/ignorant) demeanor of confidence that whatever i said/thought was totally correct, as a matter of fact. Not like the insecure ppl trying to prove something

I used to find it so comical... now it's just sad.

This bs automated political spam/manipulation is the modern version of i remember of kids farting in the late 90s... the culprit quickly accusing someone else of their offense, but even extra immature kids 25+ yrs ago figured that out... and even made the retort a catchy rhyme..."the one who smelt it, dealt it"

*i basically programmed in a counter attack/something akin to immature passive aggressive ' who"s really the one wasting the other's time and resources now?!? Ha!' ...odd numbers automatically go into a sort of echo chamber instead of ringing, with a manual escape to actually ringing/calling prompt built in.

I can listen in at any time without it having any effecf/sound too.

I'm curious if anyone participates in these minor acts of terrorism to complete an unrequested, intrusive, and human-less format of a proclaimed opinion poll? And if you do, are you honest? Why do you do it?

Annoyance at spam aside... the real victim I mentally mourn, and view it's method of demise akin to a cardinal sin (assuming religion...blah blah)... is the data! I <3 data... good, unobscured, not contrived, simple, pure, raw data... killed before its birth :'(