!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

Oh wow. That timing though.

This is a really accurate changelog .

YouTube TV changelog:

Android app update available! I wonder what they've changed? 🤔

Changelog: "We improved the app and made it better."

Well thanks. 🖕

Spotify, I don't think "changelog" means what you think it means.

A good honest changelog.

I love the Slack changelogs 😂

I love this kind of changelog.

Me: hey dev, my in-app purchase isn't reflected on other phones with your app
Dev: *cricket noises*
About a week later...
Google Play: an update for this app is available
20 minutes later...
Dev: nope, that isn't an issue.

You updated the app minutes ago after being silent for so long. No mention of it being fixed in the changelog, no mention of it being fixed in the reply.. nothing. But I'll eat my hat if you didn't silently add it in and shoved it under the rug. Dickhead.

At least the issue doesn't exist.. anymore.

Please don't be like that...

Latest facebook for iOS update is 219 mega-fucking-bytes. Yet, no real changelog to tell me what da fuck changed!!!!!! Fuck that developer for real!!!

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Perfect change log doesn't exis-

This is some real dedication to the changelog and branding.

I just hate it when an update for an app is available and there's no changelog. Seriously, tell us what this update is about!

It's like they don't even try, to write a changelog

What the f**k is this changelog.

Microsoft: We're brings new updates to Edge....

Me: Oh nice, was about time.
**Reads changelog**

"Edge now has support for Internet Explorer"

"No, really, you can now run IE in Edge."

Me: Oh for Fuck Sake!

GIVE ME A PROPER FUCKING CHANGELOG

Trello nailed the changelog with their offline sync update
(Yeah the rewrote the whole song)

And you call this a changelog?

I really hope that Twitter doesn't use this internally.

Anyone else out there embedding an artificial delay in a splashscreen, just to shorten it in a future release so you can add to the changelog: "optimized startup time"?
#muahahaha

Just in case you were wondering...

Gotta love witty changelogs

Bad Changelog = Shit

Like the new feature on Google Play Store where the changelog can be directly seen in a dropdown on the updates page.

Can we talk about changelogs for a second?

Almost every major app in the play store has changelogs like "Improving your experience" or "We did some changes to enhance your experience".
Wtf is this bullshit. Is it that hard to write the actual changes in the changelogs so that I know what got changed, huh?
Guess its kinda hard to write " We are shoving more telemetry crap down your throat" in a changelog.

Fuck sake.

Don't you love it when there is a new minor release or a critical dependency and it breaks backwards compatibility without mentioning any of it in the changelog or docs?
I absolutely love it! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
I certainly did not waste 3 hours of my life to find it. No i didn't.

So notepad++ just updated itself. This is the changelog, look at the 13. change on line 16.

Tumblr's newest changelog

It's a feature, not a bug!

Don't mind the excessive verbosity. It's a changelog allright!

08.08.2017 Changelog award is going to...

Our front-end team is pissed at me because they found a feature I pushed last month and claimed they didn't know it existed and how can they help clients if they don't know what's going on with the platform and - I pointed them to the Pivotal story of the feature that they were included in as well as the full changelog announcement I made to the entire team the day I pushed it.

Knowledge is power, especially when it's in writing with a timestamp.

I see more than just a changelog!

Tumblr has the best changelog, ever!

WHAT'S NEW

We removed some things that weren’t working properly, fixed some things that weren’t working properly, and added some things that might not work properly.

Discord App devs always got the best ChangeLog on the Play Store 😂

When your app's changelog says 'Bugfixes' for two months continuously, you are definitely doing something wrong :P

The joys of using overpriced enterprise software...

Me: Hey, I tried connect to the server, but I'm getting a "connection refused" error. Is it really running.
Other: hmm, I'll check
Other: The host restarted, but I'll get the software up again, no problemo
Other: I started the server again, but there's, but it's throwing errors while initializing. Time to write customer support

And then you get that premium customer support that think we don't know how to use their software at times. And once they realize we do, they don't know much better either. And once they realize we know how to use it there are 3 possibilities:
* They need our help to debug stuff before knowing what is going on
* They need to release a new version and accidentally break backwards compatibility and create enough work for us to burn through the clients contact hours
* They provide helpful advice (secret ending)

These fuck don't even release a proper changelog for their software nor their manuals.

Really?.. why is it so hard to just write the changelog?!

I hate when a software update changelog looks like this:

The latest update is now available, update your software to get the most out of it.

I want a fucking changelog before updating my things. Like: fixed a bug, new button with cool new feature. Just something. I have to know. Can't just install something blindly that could ruin my software, especially when it's not reversible..

updated my app and wrote "nobody reads this :/" into the changelog. did not thought that i was wrong :D

I'm laughing at this Changelog

Love some of the dev updates on the play store...

When you escape the change log...

Can we please stop using continuous delivery on mobile. I don't want to update your app every other week just because you decided to change a comment.
Also Bugfixes and improvements doesn't say anything as a changelog!

!isNotRant(this);

I'm an avid user of Snapchat and have used it for quite a while, but there's always been something that pisses me off.

When an app gets an update, I'm quick to check the changelog and see what's now and what's been fixed. That's my little snippet of information I like to know on a release. And then there's Snapchat.

They put fuck all in their changelogs. By fuck all I don't mean a little bit of information, I mean they don't list anything. They, instead, lost features from their last major release which could've been 10 or so releases back. Even Twitter's "Fixed some bugs" is more informative than their bs.

So I ended up writing a well worded and surprisingly clean message in their feedback section about this, but I'm not expecting much. In short I said "You changelogs are crap, you need to put more into them to show a bit more respect, showing stuff from a few releases ago isn't helpful" and my favourite "if you can't do it in the team that releases, get the primary devs to write the changelogs for you".

I'm saying this here to see if anyone agrees with my opinion. If you're going to release an update, you really need to tell us what's updated.

Thoughts?

Imagine if libraries and framework you were using started making chabgelogs like the one they make in the mobiles apps.

*We've made some new features and some buh fixes 💫*

Reason I am an Android Developer:

10% - I want to make apps to serve humanity
90% - Meh, just wanna write some cool Changelogs

Is anyone else get irritated while upgrading apps and seeing changelogs as:
1. minor improvements
2. performance boost
3. information not provided by the dev
4. repeating changelogs from the past few updates.

just tell me what minor improvement u fixed?
where performance is boost?
how can I trust if tomorrow you decide to add some malicious code.

I don't know but it really irritates me. Sometimes I don't even upgrade the app until they have something in the changelog.

Maybe because I am getting old now.

Long meeting with a coworker presenting a huge, complicated system to track changes to configuration files.

Basically, whenever someone needs to change a config file, this person is supposed to manually enter an entry to a changelog file, and the build system is supposed to give an error if the person forgets to update the changelog.

At the end of the 1 hour long presentation, I raise my hand and say: "we are already using git for our config files, look:

$ git log <filename>

here you can see the list of changes to the file. What you describe is already available, no need to reinvent it."

Long akward silence in the room.

The presenter: "okay, I will look into that. Any other questions?"

Haven't heard about that project since then.

Bugs fixed, bugs have been fixed, bugs removed, daily bug fixing, bugs have been weekly fixed, update, daily update, weekly update, ...

That's good to know.

Google, I can understand why you would want to translate the change logs to my language, but THIS IS NOT MY LANGUAGE! I am very curious what language it is though.

Very well.

when will the next update roll out? (devrant unofficial uwp)

I think the changelog will be an essay.....

@JS96

This is the story of the API documentation.
Which btw I couldn't find on the producent's website anywhere. I had the pdf shared with me by a coworker.

I knew the api was fucked up the moment I looked at endpoint documentation.

GET params? WHERE, ORDERBY etc. Literally make a SQL select in a GET request.

Returned stuff? The whole thing. Not some DTO, you literally get everything you can get.
Eg if you get IP in your response, you get it in several formats: dotted form, as hex, and as int. In 3 different json fields.

Oh, and regarding IP - one would imagine you can use masks or prefixes for subnets, right? Nope. The only param you can use there is the subnet size. So you have to calculate the power of 2 every time you want to make a request.

That's from the endpoint documentation. But what about some general info on the API, before all that?

As I was looking for something, I decided to read that intro and general info about the API.

Okay, so there was a change log between API versions. "removed [endpoint which sounds like correct REST design], please use [this generic thing with SQL-like GETs]"... Several of them.

And there was also this sentence which said that the API is not restful, "it's REST-like". <facepalm>

If it was a bad attempt at REST API, I would let it go. But this sentence clearly showed they knew they did everything wrong. And the changelog showed they didn't stop there, they were actively making it worse.

Good change log Twitter !

Best update ever 😁

To the 8 months ago *me*.

You're an idiot learn how to properly keep a changelog I just spent almost an hour fixig that freaking spaghetti mess you wrote!

Respect to the devs of this app, noticed a changelog entry "Improved memory usage".
More devs should take ram consumption into account!

Changelog slack

Sent a company-wide email with changelog of an internal tool. Front end guy made some simple UI fix while i fixed a nasty bug that was causing data loss in the back end.... Everyone praises the UI fix...
Kill me now 😫

One of my coworker change the code from

```
void foo() {
if (condition)
{
}
else
{
}
}
```

to

```
condition ? ifTrue : ifFalse;
```

and add it to changelog

```
- fix bugs // yes with an "s"
- feature added
- some list of the bug fixed.
```

I refer back to the commit, only one Fucking commit and on changes. Bro, what the fuck?

I like when the changelog in PlayStore's apps says "Fixed errors and performance improvement" and the main errors are still there and the performance is worse.
:)

Windows update process takes half an hour. Restart pc.
A message: "updates have been installed" ...

Ffs You think I didn't notice? And why is there no more information? What exactly did you need this half hour of updating for? At least give me a changelog, or the biggest changes.

Please help them :-)

> # Changelog
>
> ## x.y.z
>
> - Added something
> - Fixed something
> - Other changes

'Other changes'?! What other changes! Either tell me what they are or don't even add it, considering usually not every little thing is listed in the first place..

What's so damn hard about a simple change log when you update your app? Or at least point me to somewhere where I can see that. Ugh. Come on.

Ideas:

1. Scrape github

2. Attach feature size estimate (an abstract scale) as examples across many projects.

3. Use this as prompt/finetunning data.

4. Train and prompt on project descriptions relative to feature size and number of contributors/changes in the changelog.

5. Package and release a model that takes descriptions of ideas and generates reasonable estimates of time and manpower.

6. Optional, sell as an estimate service to corporate and make money introducing some sanity to the world for a change.

Changelog for a food delivery app.

We have a system at work with captcha....

I may have renamed a few thousand images and people have been getting pissed...

Of course I remember the shift in filename so I just correct them and they look at me like "how the fuck is that a 6" and im like "well I think it's a 6, the computer thinks it's a 6... Have you had your eyes tested recently"

Half the office are wearing new glasses, the other half have decided that Google has "gone too far" and that "I bet their algorithm has fucked this up"

I'll change it back in a few more days with a note in the changelog about how a "particularly aggressive AI got out of hand and was being too selective"

How to reproduce:
- have a single login form for admins and ordinary users
- add a second button right next to 'login' which reads 'login as admin' in order to have a separate login for them
- release a new version of software with this change solely and changelog informing about it
- have customers admin tell you everybody is complaining about not being able to login with thwor admin accounts

Gitkraken's Glo latest change log.

Gotta love this team <3

I have some doubt about the second assertion 🤔

Logging! Oh, My!

Please share your thoughts on Dependabot security alerts on Github, more specifically for NPM packages in package-lock.json.

In 99% of cases I've found them useless as:
- package-lock.json is in the repo, but not in the NPM package (=no value to users)
- most of the updates relate to devDependencies (=no value to users)
- it clutters the git history (and changelog if it is auto-generated) with a batch of patch updates (updated depx to .1, .2, .3) while the only important thing in the next release notes is the delta (updated depx from .1 to .3) (=no value to users)

So, myself an a friend are working on a project together. I leave for a weekend trip, I come back and find out the changelog is out of date like... six versions. I’m the type of person that likes to keep things like this. I had to manually go to the commit history and check when the package.json version was bumbed.

Yesterday, he updated it twice and pushed the versions to server, without updating the changelog. Turns out we accidentally skipped a version and decided to combine the two.

Now I have to find the dates each version was published since I like to do that too. Great fun.

Thanks Jira for the smile :)

Thanks Samsung for the detailed comprehensive changelog

App Update changelog: "Bug fixes and performance improvements."

What the update is actually about: "Well. We've added some cool intrusive Ads that will screw up your entire app experience. But we don't care."

CircleCI takes the cake for the most annoying of constant development advertisement campaigns on YouTube, change my mind.
I mean, the product is nice and everything, but what the hell? Why should *I* make sense of your changelog - just go and show what it does in practice! Ugh, why I must teach you marketing, CircleCI, smh...

Pushed some code last night. Can't remember exactly how I wrote my changelog. I think it was coherent? Checked DevRant first.

Well done, Kickstarter!
Now that's what I call
a proper changelog.

Changelog:
"improved performance through newer third party libraries"

Oh, they did a proper quality check and blackbox test in the two days the app hasn't been updated?
At least better than "we update the app regularly to continuously make the app better" copied into each changelog.

What do people here use to 'manage' projects in small teams?

Im currently working in a team of 2 and using gitlab for git and using the changelog for changes and todo stuff.

Its working 'alright' but its still a bit of a hassle specialy for 2 persons.

People here use other tools that are faster to use etc?

I'm working on some custom software for work, and I've been keeping a changelog. I use three main headers: Added, Fixed, and Changed. Under what header should 'general stability improvements' go? These stability improvements are too vague and broad to specifically mention what changed (because nothing changed, just some source code was re-arranged/re-worded) What category would you put this?
Edit: This changelog is for the `non-tech` employees

Check out the Changeling podcast series. Solid content about all aspects of working as an engineer.