*Builds a web component for a client website*

CLIENT: I don't like it, can I have it a tiny bit over to the right more

ME: Taps the arrow key a few times making it look like I'm doing something.(Which actually does nothing)

Client: 👌Perfect

😂😂😂 Wut 😂😂😂

Owner of company I freelance for: I need you to find out what CMS [website] is running in.

[Checking...]

Me: It's running in Drupal

Owner: Prove to me that it's running in Drupal, because she's saying you're wrong.

Me: Who the hell is "she"?

Owner: The boss over at [PR Company we do work for]

Me: Is she a developer?

Owner: No, of course not. She barely knows how to run a computer.

Me: Then tell I said it's running in Drupal, and if she wants proof, tell her I'm the developer she has begged to fix two other failing projects and I have delivered both times ahead of schedule.

Owner: If you don't show me proof, I'll fire you. I don't need attitude from my employees.

Me: A.) I'm not your employee, you are my client. I don't clock in for you and you don't withhold taxes from my pay. B.) If that's how you want to be, tell her to use terminal and cURL the website for the response header, as well as cross-reference folder structure for CSS/JS file inclusion to show it's running in Drupal.

Owner: What the fuck is terminal?

Me: If you don't know what terminal is, neither will she, meaning you have no business telling me how to do my job. Stick with assigning me tasks and let me use my expertise to get them done. Micromanaging need not apply here, mmm'kay pumpkin?

Owner: You sure are grouchy today.

Me: Yep...

So, since I hear from a lot of people (on here and irl) that Linux has a 'very high learning curve', let me share my experiences with the first time my dad touched Linux (Elementary OS) without me interfering at all! (keep in mind that he is very a-technical)

*le me boots the system* (I already did setup a user account for him and gave him the password).

Dad: *enters password and presses enter*
Me: "Hmm that went faster than expected."
Dad: "Uhm I know how to login son, it's not that hard and pretty obvious".
Me: "Alright, why don't you try to open up the default word documents editor on here! I'll be right back!"
Me: *Goes away and returns after a minute*.
Dad: *already a few test sentences typed in LibreOffice writer* it's going pretty well :)!
Me: "Oo how did you find that?!"
Dad: "Well, there's a thingy that says 'applications' so I clicked in and found it in the "Office" section, do you think I am blind or something?!"
Me: 😐. uhm no but I just didn't think you'd find it that quickly. Now try to install Chromium browser! *thinking: he'll fail this one for sure* I'll be right back :).
Me: *returns again after a minute or so*
Dad: *already searching for stuff through Chromium*
Me: "wait, how the hell did you do that so quickly, it's not the easiest thingy for most people".
Dad: "Jesus, it's not that hard! I went to the application browsing thingy, typed 'software' and then a sorta software store icon showed up so I clicked it and it opened a windows with a search bar saying something like 'search for applications/software'. clicked in it, typed 'chromium', saw it coming up, there was a very clear 'install' button, it asked for my password, I put it in and after a little it gave a notification that it was installed. Then I went to that application browsing thingy again and typed Chromium. Then I hit enter because it selected an icon called chromium...."
Me: O.o. Okay this is going very good, now open an email client and login to your email address!
Dad: *goes to application browsing thingy, types 'email', evolution icon shows up, dad clicks it, email address setup steps show up and dad follows them quickly. After about a minute, everything is setup.

I expected this to be a hard process for someone who dealt with Windows his entire life but damn, I underestimated it.
Asked him if he found it easy/what he liked about it:
"Well, it's very clear where I can find everything, default browser/email/word document editor programs are easy to find and that's about all I need so yeah, great system!"

I am proud of you, dad!

My friend sent me this.

Client: we need you to give us access to the code ASAP. We don't like this black box approach.

Me: You have always had access to the code. It is here on this bitbucket repo and your usernames have admin access.

Client: We want the code moved to our GitHub before EOD.

I check out how to move repos over and it's fairly easy.

Me: just give me access to create a repo on your GitHub account and you can have the code moved over.

Client: Sorry it's late in the day and we stepped out to get drinks. (It was 2:30 pm). Not sure why you think there is a rush on this, we'll handle it first thing next week.

Me: WTF

Everytime

Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

This was my first freelancer project. Just dropped out of school, i think i was 17. No money, no proper hardware, i had a very old laptop & stolen wifi from our neighbor. I lived in a very small room at my mom’s flat, she wanted me out as soon as i turn 18. At the time my plan was to work on freelancer stuff and make my own games. “It will be fine, fuck school, who needs school? 😂“ I haven’t really finished anything back then, so i only had a few wip hobby projects to show ppl as my references. I saw a freelancer job posting. The task was to make a simple quiz game for mobile, it paid 350$. Back then that was a lot of money for me so i took it. I met the client, he said “2-3 week tops, i send you everything, you do the code” Cool. I finally had a “job”😃. The 2-3 weeks turned into a 8 month blur of all-nighting and just implement one more thing and its finished. I did not really have any experience on how to deal with clients and i really needed this project to finally have something on my porfolio. I motivated myself with “if i can finish this i can finish anything”. I think the story of my most definitive all-nighting was 3 months into the development. I finally got everything from the client so it was like just put it together and its done. The client wanted 300 levels, beeing a noob i was i started making all the 300 unity scenes by hand, aligning the pictures, the ui, testing each level, making adjustments to the code, etc.. after a really long night and a fuckton of caffeine i was done. I sent it to the client at around 9 am and gone to sleep. When i woke up i checked my emails to saw this: Cool! But can we do hints? (wich needed a fuckton of rework of my code) I think i had my first mental breakdown while working on the project. After that he wanted more modifications and because i made every level by hand i had to remake all of them like 10 times 😂
But in the end it turned out positive, he really helped me to start my carrier, we became sord of friends and the project gave me a lot of confidence and experience on how to deal with stuff when shit goes wrong because everything that can go wrong in a project gone wrong. It was the most valuable developer lesson. Plus it sounds so cool to say “i was born in development hell, b*tch!”🕶
I attached a pic of the laptop i worked on 😂
Thanks for reading 😃

Confessions of a Programmer

#1
If a client is an unbearable asshole during the initial communication, I look for every excuse to pad on the hours for the estimate to get paid more. If a client goes above and beyond in their douchbaggery, I tack on an additional $40/hour.

#2
Sometimes I will present an elaborate solution to a client, but really I'm just reading off the features of a plugin or library I'm going to download or buy after the call. Not because I can't build it myself, but because I'd rather spend more time on other/my own projects.

#3
Clients assume because I know one language, I know them all. Rather than turning down the work, I take a crash course to work in that language, or outsource the work and clean it up afterwards, whichever is more practical at the time.

#4
I use cPanel on a dedicated to manage our client websites. I'm not paid enough to bother with setting up everything manually.

#5
Certain projects I build have a 3-day backdoor built into it. If the client doesn't pay upon completion, a unique hash triggered as a GET variable deletes a core file in my work, rendering the work useless. If it wasn't triggered by the 4th day, the file allowing me to trigger this backdoor is removed. This is only used for clients where the project must be launched on their servers, or if there has been a previous issue collecting payment.

#6
I slip in the initial contract that all preceeding phone calls will be monitored and recorded, and that they acknowledge the recordings are admissable in court. This has saved me from losing money twice now.

#7
I have never used an IDE. (I know, I know, it's really inefficient and dumb, but I'm just more comfortable with Sublime. Plus I often find myself mobile and without my computer, so I have to program from my phone.)

#8
Each day resembles a betting spectacle of which work will be late, which will be rushed out and which will never see the light of day.

#9
I have used "sick" and "family emergency" as an excuse to just sleep in far more than I can count.

#10
When a client from hell crosses over the line in their conduct (such as getting very nasty and personal, or sending threats), I anonymously report them to the BBB and on RipOffReport.

Client: "Do you think we could finish specs in week 33, see a demo in week 35, and aim for the product to be finished in week 39?"

I jump on the conference room table, rip the shirt off my sweaty chest, and yell:

"WEEKS OF WHAT? 31 WEEKS SINCE YOU BECAME A CLIENT, 35 WEEKS FROM NOW, 39 WEEKS INTO THE PREGNANCY? BLOODY FUCKING HELL MAN, DO YOU HAVE TO TALK LIKE A RETARD?"

Client, unfazed: "Weeks since the start of the year, sir"

Me, swinging my pants above my head like a lasso:

"WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF SNOWFLAKE ARE YOU, YOU REALLY EXPECT ME TO COUNT THE WEEKS SINCE THE START OF THE YEAR? WHAT ABOUT JUST USING DAY OF THE MONTH YOU OBNOXIOUS DIMWIT?"

Client: "We always use weeks at our company to plan things"

Me, winding the legs of my pants around the neck of the client:

"I HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE USE WEEKNUMBERS, JAKE. I. FUCKING. HATE. IT."

Client, still pretending everything is fine: "If you want I could send you a screenshot of my outlook calendar?"

Me, sitting in underpants on the client's back, sweaty legs wrapped around his waist, trying to pull out his gel-infested manager-hair while strangling him with my pants:

"TIME OF DEATH, UNIX TIMESTAMP 1595240810, ISO 8601 DATE 2020-07-20T10:26:50+00:00. ANOTHER PROJECT SUCCESSFULLY WRAPPED UP"

(parts of this story may have been dramatized to reflect my underlying emotions)

LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

Never underestimate the power of the mighty user!

School principal : P / Me : M / Interviewer over Skype : S

P. I recently heard you run a software club in our school.
M. Yes. (started from March)
P. Well, one software community seems that he found you somewhere, and asked me if we can do a quick interview.
M. Sure. What is it?
P. So he will connect to skype.
M. Let's start then...

*A few moments later...*
M. Wwwwhhhhaaaaattttttt?
P. Calm down! What's the problem?
M. How can I have more than 5 years of android development?
S. Ok. Recorded. Next question.
M. (uhhh)
*A few moments later...*
M. What? Why in the heck do I use subversion?........
Yes... Ah... Ummm....
No! Why should i make a gui client for subversion?
*A few moments later...*
S. Do you have hacking experience?
M. Of what? I know hacking is illegal here..
S. Like... Anything!
M. Do YOU have an experience?
S. Yup.
M. What?
S. Google.
M. How?
S. (silence) Ok. Let's move on.
M. (wtf is this guy)
*A few moments later...*
S. Okay. We were about to hire you but you didnt met our job requirements.
M. ......What? What was the job?
S. Web developer Intern
M. I got no questions regarding "web".
S. I know devs should be great at all things.
M. Shut the hell up. What company are you?
S. (says something)
M. (Searches in google) Doesnt come in search results.
S. Where did you searched it? (trembling voice)
M. (Searches in naver, search engine of korea) Nothing. Are you sure you are a company?
S. (ends call)

Hate these fake interviews. And i have no idea how they found my school
I never wrote my school anywhere.

I have to let it out. It's been brewing for years now.

Why does MySQL still exist?

Really, WHY?!
It was lousy as hell 8 years ago, and since then it hasn't changed one bit. Why do people use it?

First off, it doesn't conform to standards, allowing you to aggregate without explicitly grouping, in which case you get god knows what type of shit in there, and then everybody asks why the numbers are so weird.

Second... it's $(CURRENT_YEAR) for fucks sake! This is the time of large data sets and complex requirements from those data sets. Just an hour through SO will show you dozens of poor people trying to do with MySQL what MySQL just can't do because it's stupid.

Recursion? 4 lines in any other large RDBMS, and tough luck in MySQL. So what next? Are you supposed to use Lemograph alongside MySQL just because you don't know that PostgreSQL is free and super fast?

Window functions to mix rows and do neat stuff? Naaah, who the hell needs that, right? Who needs to find the products ordered by the customer with the biggest order anyway? Oh you need that actually? Well you should write 3-4 queries, nest them in an incredibly fucked up way, summon a demon and feed it the first menstrual blood of your virgin daughter.

There used to be some excuses in the past "but but but, shared hosting only has MySQL". Which was wrong by the way. This was true only for big hosting names, and for people who didn't bother searching for alternatives. And now it's even better, since VPS and PaaS solutions are now available at prices lower than shared hosting, which give you better speed, performance and stability than shared hosting ever did.

"But but but Wordpress uses MySQL" - well then kill it! There are other platforms out there, that aren't just outrageously horrible on the inside and outside. Wordpress is crap, and work on it pays crap. Learn Laravel, Symfony, Zend, or even Drupal. You'll be able to create much more value than those shitty Wordpress sites that nobody ever visits or pay money on.

"But but but my client wants some static pages presented beside their online shop" - so why use Wordpress then? Static pages are static pages. Whip up a basic MVC set-up in literally any framework out there, avoid MySQL, include a basic ACL package for that framework, create a controller where you add a CKEditor to edit page content, and stick a nice template from themeforest for that page and be done with that shit! Save the mock-up for later use if you do that stuff often. Or if you're lazy to even do that, then take up Drupal.

But sure, this is going a bit over the scope. I actually don't care where you insert content for your few pages. It can be a JSON file for all I care. But if I catch you doing an e-commerce solution, or anything else than just text storage, on MySQL, I'll literally start re-assessing your ability to think rationally.

I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.

My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).

Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.

I introduce to you, my team ...

Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.

UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."

Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.

Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.

Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.

Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.

Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.

Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.

The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.

There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.

All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.

I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.

Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?

And yeah, FML.

So today I got removed from my freelance project because the client found out I listen to slipknot! What the actual FUCK? How the FUCK does it matter what I listen to?

And that cunt eater isn't willing to pay for the work I've already completed since "Slipknot is anti-Christian".

Burn in hell you piece of shit.

Client: "We are extremely satisfied with your great work for almost three years now and we are super thrilled to work with you in the future and benefit from your amazing work."
Dev: *makes one tiny little mistake*
Client: "Oh burn in hell you cock sucking piece of shit!"

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

I have a client (a friend of a friend of a friend) who came to me to build them a "simple" booking solution for their home cleaning business. Easy enough, I first thought.

Having taken a deposit based on my initial quote and contracts all signed, roll on exactly 8 months to where I find myself today.

It turns out, there is no cleaning business as the business will be totally reliant on the website. The original goalposts have now been moved to a completely different fucking country. The (now) required functionality has STILL yet to be finalised (I told client I'm not writing another line of code until EVERYTHING has been mapped out and made crystal clear), as every single face-to-face meeting / back and forth email turns into the client requesting hundreds more brilliant, essential features that make absolutely ZERO fucking sense. And now, to top it all off and push me into writing my first ever rant on here, I've just received an email from the client this morning saying "what I would like to have is like an online restaurant live booking system". WTF?!?!?

I work from home and have only my dog for company today, so please don't judge me. Just needed to let it all out.

The strangest place I've ever coded... I woudn't say it was the strangest, but definitely the least expected?

The hospital's recovery room after my second child.

I was working at/in Hell at the time (see previous rants concerning API Guy and the asshole salesman CEO). Said salesman douchebag ceo bossman had no recollection of me being expecting, going to the hospital, or even why I was there (and if he did, he wouldn't have cared at all). He still insisted I work on his shit features because they were so important for his ever-so-important client and their new signups that they were going to do anyway. I loathe him so fucking much.

Anyway, the feature in question was pretty tiny: during the new client onboarding process, if the client came from a specific affiliate link, the frontpage should change to reflect that affiliate's branding -- different background, a custom header, etc. It was pretty easy to do, though I made certain he didn't know that. During an hour while everyone else was asleep (and while I wasn't passing out from exhaustion), I pulled out my macbook air and built his stupid feature next to my hours-hold newborn.

Did I get any appreciation for that? Sure! He showed appreciation by not yelling at me for a few days. But only because he thought the feature was difficult and that I got it done quickly, not because anything else was difficult. Asshole.

Yes, I told him several times before and several times more afterward. I don't know what goes though his head or how it even works, but it didn't seem like a big deal to him, and he kept forgetting, or maybe he just pretended to listen like he always did. Fucking asshole apparently never heard of maternity leave. I could rant and swear and curse and fume and rage about him for years 🤬 I can't believe I was so excited when I netted that job.

But anyway, building the feature was actually kind of relaxing. I organized and wrote the entire project myself, so working with it was a pleasure, and it was an easy change that I could abstract nicely and cleanly. I totally didn't mind doing it, and actually kind of enjoyed it. I just hated who I was doing it for, and that he didn't fucking care. Used and abused? absolutely. I hope he dies in the most painful, gruesome way possible. Spaghettification might not even be awful enough

- My client on regular day.

U can manage your tasks by your own. App looks stable and you are doing well.

- Same client when I'm on Vacation

This thing is not working, that thing is not working. This is do or die situation for us. you have to cancel your vacation plans.

- Same client after I come back from vacation in which I wasted precious hours of my vacation time and fixed all the bugs.

I didn't release your changes yet coz I wanted to release it together with you. I was like "THEN WHY THE FUCK YOU RUINED MY VACATION" -_-

The scariest client from hell by far is...

my wife.

FML

!Story

The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.

I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.

They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...

And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.

So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.

I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.

After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.

I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.

So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.

Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.

So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.

I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.

Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.

We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.

"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"

I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.

My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.

If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.

Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.

Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.

If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.

I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.

I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.

SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."

Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"

SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"

Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.

SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."

We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"

SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."

Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."

He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.

So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.

You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.

User removes admin access to himself and complains why he can't perform admin functions...

FRONTend
BACKend
WEEKend
Everything has END
But Client has no END. 😭😂😭😂

*wrestling commentator voice*
"In this weeks episode of encoding hell:
The iiiinnnfamous UTF-8 Byte Order Mark veeeersus PHP!"

For an online shop we developed, there is currently a CSV upload feature in review by our client. Before we developed this feature, we created together with the client a very precise specification, including the file format and encoding (UTF-8).

After the first test day, the client informed us, that there were invalid characters after processing the uploaded file.
We checked the code and compared the customer's file with our template.
The file was encoded in ISO-8859-1 and NOT as specified UTF-8.
But what ever, we had to add an encoding check, thus allowing both encodings from now on.

Well well well welly welly fucking well...

Test day 2: We receive an email from said client, that the CSV is not working, again.
This time: UTF-8 encoding, but some fields had more colums with different values than specified.
Fucking hell.
We tell the customer that.
(I was about to write a nice death threat novel to them, but my boss held me back)

Testing day 3, today:
"The uploading feature is not working with our file, please fix it."
I tried to debug it, but only got misleading errors. After about 30 minutes, at 20 stacks of hatered, I finally had an idea to check the file in a hex editor:

God fucking what!?!!?!11?!1!!!?2!!

The encoding was valid UTF-8, all columns and fields were correct, but this time the file contained somthing different.
Something the world does not need.
Something nearly as wasteful as driving a monster truck in first gear from NYC to LA.

It was the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark.
3 bytes of pure hell.
Fucking 0xEFBBBF.
The archenemy of PHP and sane people.

If the devil had sex with the ethernet port of a rusty Mac OS X Server, then 9 microseconds later a UTF-8 BOM would have been born.

OK, maybe if PHP would actually cope with these bytes of death without crashing, that would be great.

When you get a client from real MOTHERFUCKING hell.

You just really FUCKING want to say this:

Scorched earth MOTHERFUCKER. I will massacre you. Now SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET ME DO MY JOB.
First, take a big step back and literally, FUCK YOUR OWN FACE.
I will rain down an ungodly FUCKING firestorm upon you.
You're gonna have to call the FUCKING United Nations and get a FUCKING BINDING RESOLUTION to keep me from FUCKING destroying you.
I am talking SCORCHED EARTH MOTHERFUCKER.
I will MASSACRE you.
I WILL FUCK YOU UP!

But for your own sake you keep it at this:
Yes sir/ma'am :).

A client obsessed with *security* won’t give us access to the server that hosts the website we built.

Code release involves building templates, compressing the changed files into a zip folder, and emailing them to the client with instructions on where the changed files go

Dear Clients,

You are always correct and stupid.

Worst WTF dev experience? The login process from hell to a well-fortified dev environment at a client's site.
I assume a noob admin found a list of security tips and just went like "all of the above!".

You boot a Linux VM, necessary to connect to their VPN. Why necessary? Because 1) their VPN is so restrictive it has no internet access 2) the VPN connection prevents *your local PC* from accessing the internet as well. Coworkers have been seen bringing in their private laptops just to be able to google stuff.
So you connect via Cisco AnyConnect proprietary bullshit. A standard VPN client won't work. Their system sends you a one-time key via SMS as your password.

Once on their VPN, you start a remote desktop session to their internal "hopping server", which is a Windows server. After logging in with your Windows user credentials, you start a Windows Remote Desktop session *on that hopping server* to *another* Windows server, where you login with yet another set of Windows user credentials. For all these logins you have 30 seconds, otherwise back to step 1.
On that server you open a browser to access their JIRA, GitLab, etc or SSH into the actual dev machines - which AGAIN need yet another set of credentials.

So in total: VM -> VPN + RDP inside VM -> RDP #2 -> Browser/SSH/... -> Final system to work on
Input lag of one to multiple seconds. It was fucking unusable.

Now, the servers were very disconnect-happy to prevent anything "fishy" going on. Sitting at my desk at my company, connected to my company's wifi, was apparently fishy enough to kick me out every 5 to 20 minutes. And that meant starting from step 1 inside the VM again. So, never forget to plugin your network cable.

There's a special place in hell for this admin. And if there isn't, I'll PERSONALLY make the devil create one. Even now that I'm not even working on this any more.

That feeling when the company looses a 120k account and it is blamed on your expert opinion and poor handling off the situation when It's really the fuckwits in sales who in their greed for provisions make shitty pitches.

I got a call to attend a meeting with a customer. Present was also the "developer" from the customers side who was to oversee the projects. The pitch was made earlier, but no information was provided beforehand so I was going in blind, covering for a suddenly absent lead. The point was to roughly present how the project was to be executed and I was told to voice my opinion on development time estimate that the clients expert had given. They were outsourcing and had already fired their whole team.

I gave a number based on the provided information and all hell breaks loose. Suddenly it's a total circle jerk. Shit goes down. The "dev" tells that he can do it himself in half the time and starts showing some shitExcelsOfTotalAbsurdness that prove it. I calculate his claim and end up with a result that he has 60+ hours in his day, so I ask why doesn't he do it then? Why the outsourcing if they could just give him a raise and save a ton of cash.. sudden silence and you just can hear the rusty gears turn while they try to make a new excuse.

Well it went south. Today I found out that the client was our sales guys buddy. so TL;DR of it was that our sales guy was trying to make a quick buck and give a break to his buddy and hang the shitbucket on our team. I pointed out that this was a shitty business deal that would go into the red, but the sales guy turned it around and now "I cost company 120k/month account on a long project" and because I acted unprofessionally customer is unhappy.

I FUCKING HATE THIS SHIT

secretly hoping to get fired over this

Client: You are bad developers. Your code has bugs and the site isn't even pretty. And why is it so damn expensive??
Us: ...

Same client (a month later): I need this campaign landing page with the option to register and an admin for user management. It should be done till the day after tomorrow because the URL is already in print. Here's the catalogue (in .pdf) in which it will appear. Use it as a style guide.

FUCK YOU!

When a new client visits the company..

Developer: Changes are difficult from here, are you sure this is how you want it. 🤔

Client: yes. 👍

Developer: ((3;"'&}×π{sk*[=¶^[|) ☕😴

Client: Oh, actually can we have this too and maybe remove this bit because we don't need it now thanks. ☺️

🤐🙃🔫

I worked for over 13 hours yesterday on super-urgent projects. I got so much done it's insane.

Projects:
1) the printer auto-configuration script.
2) changing Stripe from test mode to live mode in production
3) website responsiveness

I finished two within five minutes and pushed to both QA and Production. actually urgent, actually necessary. Easy change.

The printer auto-configure script was honestly fun to write, if very involved. However, the APIs I needed to call to fetch data, create a printer client, etc... none of them were tested, and they were _all_ broken in at least two ways. The CTO (api guy in my previous rant) was slow at fixing them, so getting the APIs working took literally four hours. One of them (test print) still doesn't work.

Responsiveness... this was my first time making a website responsive. Ever. Also, one of the pages I needed to style was very complicated (nested fixed-aspect-ratio + flexbox); I ended up duplicating the markup and hacking the styling together just to make it work. The code is horrible. But! "Friday's the day! it's going live and we're pushing traffic to it!" So, I invested a lot of time and energy into making it ready and as pretty as I could, and finally got it working. That page alone took me two hours.

The site and the printer script (and obv the Stripe change as well) absolutely needed to be done by this morning. Super important.

well.

1) Auto-configure script. Ostensibly we would have an intern come in and configure the printers. However, we have no printers that need configuring, so she did marketing instead. :/ Also, the docs Epson sent us only work for the T88V printer (we have exactly one, which we happened to set up and connect to). They do not work for the T88VI printers, which is what we ordered. and all we'll ever be ordering. So. :/ I'll need to rewrite a large chunk of my code to make this work. Joy :/

2) Stripe Live mode. Nobody even seemed to notice that we were collecting info in Test mode, or that I fixed it. so. um. :/

3) Responsiveness.
Well. That deadline is actually next Wednesday. The marketing won't even start until then, and I haven't even been given the final changes yet (like come on). Also! I asked for a QA review last night before I'd push it to production. One person glanced at it. Nobody else cared. Nobody else cared enough to look in the morning, either, so it's still on QA. Super-important deadline indeed. :/

Honestly?

I feel like Alice (from Dilbert) after she worked frantically on urgent projects that ended up just being cancelled. (That one where Wally smells that lovely buttery-popcorn scent of unnecessary work.)

I worked 13 hours yesterday.
for nothing.

fucking. hell.

!Rant
I highly recommend everyone fire at least one client in your lifetime. It is a glorious feeling!

There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.

The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.

I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.

At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.

I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.

Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.

However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.

This fucking kid has the audacity to ask for me to decompile someone else's work and recompile it for a newer version. Wtf man

Preface: i'm pretty... definitely wasted. rum is amazing.

anyway, I spent today fighting with ActionCable. but as per usu, here's the rant's backstory:

I spent two or three days fighting with ActionCable a few weeks ago. idr how long because I had a 102*f fever at the time, but I managed to write a chat client frontend in React that hooked up to API Guy's copypasta backend. (He literally just copy/pasted it from a chat app tutorial. gg). My code wasn't great, but it did most of what it needed to do. It set up a websocket, had listeners for the various events, connected to the ActionCable server and channel, and wrote out updates to the DOM as they came in. It worked pretty well.

Back to the present!

I spent today trying to get the rest to work, which basically amounted to just fetching historical messages from the server. Turns out that's actually really hard to do, especially when THE FKING OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION'S EXAMPLES ARE WRONG! Seriously, that crap has scoping and (coffeescript) syntax errors; it doesn't even run. but I didn't know that until the end, because seriously, who posts broken code on official docs? ugh! I spent five hours torturing my code in an effort to get it to work (plus however many more back when I had a fever), only to discover that the examples themselves are broken. No wonder I never got it working!

So, I rooted around for more tutorials or blogs or anything else with functional sample code. Basically every example out there is the same goddamn chat app tutorial with their own commentary. Remember that copy/paste? yeah, that's the one. Still pissed off about that. Also: that tutorial doesn't fetch history, or do anything other than the most basic functionality that I had already written. Totally useless to me.

After quite a bit of searching, the only semi-decent resource I was able to find was a blog from 2015 that's entirely written in Japanese. No, I can't read more than a handful of words, but I've been using it as a reference because its code is seriously more helpful than what's on official Rails docs. -_-

Still never got it to work, though. but after those five futile hours of fighting with the same crap, I sort of gave up and did something else.

zzz.

Anyway.
The moral of the story is that if you publish broken code examples beacuse you didn't even fking bother to test them first, some extremely pissed off and vindictive and fashionable developer will totally waterboard the hell out of you for the cumulative total of her wasted development time because screw you and your goddamn laziness.

So I look the code of a client from my freelance job... And may I know what the hell is this?

Bad news:
Everyone now wants their damn solution done "ASAP". Yet they fail to provide basic information. They never show up at any meeting. And ignore all my emails. FUCK!

Good news:
It's Taco Tuesday.

- Project for a 40+b$ company.
- No business analysis.
- Only some 64 pages tech paper dividing the project in 4 iterations (pretty well written).
- « Please estimate the first iteration ».
- Can we do it in 2 weeks? Only items in first iteration, I think we can but we need a BA before we accept the project.
- Confirmed by senior dev front. 10 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- Confirmed by senior dev back. 12 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- UX/UI senior designer says he can't estimate such a technical, says we defo need a BA before any estimations.

PM, who is actually the department manager, says OK we can do it. No BA and estimations are halved, UI/UX 2 days.

He fucking signs the contract.

SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER, WE NEED STUFF FROM FUTURE ITERATIONS IF WE DON'T WANT TO THROW AWAY ALL THE FIRST ITER WORK.

PROJECT BECOME A CLUSTERFUCK.
NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ANYTHING. THE CLIENT HAS NO CLUE EITHER.

The fucking dep. mgr assigns another PM and says he don't have time anymore.

NOBODY HAS A CLUE WHAT THE PROJECT IS AT THIS POINT.

We have 3 days left.

Whole team came to a conclusion: the only sane thing to do is to give our grouped resignation letters.

Thanks. It was fun while it lasted. Your dep. can go to hell.

When the stupid client is unable to explain the requirements correctly the first time and drops a frickin bomb 3 days before the deadline and boss still want to "meet" the deadline.

Me: "if this goes on, I will be dead on the line by the deadline"

When the client wants a bigger logo...

... Wtf?!

At a certain client, was asked to help them with an "intermediary" solution to stopgap a license renewal on their HR recruiting system.

This is something I was very familiar with, so no big. Did some requirements gathering, told them we could knock it out in 6 weeks.

We start the project, no problems, everything is fine until about 2.5 weeks in. At this point, someone demands that we engage with the testing team early. It grates a little as this client had the typical Indian outsourcing mega-corp pointey-clickey shit show "testing" (automation? Did you mean '10 additional testers?') you get at companies who put business people in charge of technology, but I couldn't really argue with it.

So we're progressing along and the project manager decides now is a great time to bugger the fuck off to India for 3 months, so she's totally gone. This is the point it goes off the rails. Without a PM to control the scope, the "lead tester," we'll call her Shrilldesi, proceeds to sit in a room and start trying to control the design of the system. Rather than testing anything in the specification, she just looked at the existing full HRIS recruiting system they were using and starts submitting bugs for missing features. The fuckwit serfs they'd assigned from HR to oversee this process just allowed it to happen totally losing focus on the fact this was an interim solution to hold them over for 6 months and avoid a contract renewal.

I get real passive aggressive at this point and refuse to deliver anything outside the original scope. We negotiate and end up with about 150% scope bloat and a now untenable timeline that we delivered about 2 weeks late, but in the end that absolute whore made my life a living hell for the duration of the project. She then got the recognition at the project release for her "excellent work," no mention of the people who actually did the work.

Tl;Dr people suck and if you value your sanity, you'll avoid companies that say things like, "we're not in the technology business" as an excuse to have shitty, ignorant staff.

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

Clients always add up:
- The time it took you to create the project.
- Enhancement times.

Client: "How are we still working on this a year later?"

Me: "Well motherfucker, you requested a change recently. It has nothing to do with the original request, nor the last 39 updates."

Like it's my fucking fault you keep changing your mind.

Today one person called me to ask if he could create a corporate email without buying the domain.
*More people that wanna be rich without spending a penny *

It was my internship and I've end up working on a law company specializing on Australian construction laws they're working on a website that will take care of all the paperworks for the contractors. They have a dev team who's working on it but they don't have a web designer. I was accepted for the job as an intern/web designer/tester. I was so happy that I've got a really cool internship as a designer but that's only for a second.

The hell starts on day one. They've told me that they're using agile workflow and that they need to make the website responsive. It was based on bootstrap and gosh their code was so broken. HTML tags overlay on each other, some are unclosed. I've tried to fix the problems and did a great job at that. Made the front page responsive and all laid out. When I went to the next php file it has a different header.php and footer.php and same problems apply and we're not even touching the worst.

They didn't use any version management and they're cowboying everything. Now that the website is on the staging server they use Cpanel text editor to edit the code! My headache started to pileup.

The Australian client asked me to provide icons and fix the colors of the website. Also the typography looks great already. I've fixed almost all the problems and I'm satisfied with the design when suddenly a new co-worker from a famous and expensive college was absorbed by the company. He worked as the marketing specialist who has no experience at web design at all. He told me to do this and that and the whole website changed. He bullied me for my skills in design (I'm an intern) and just took over the whole design. Everyone even the boss listen to him as if everything he say is right. He's skilled at design but not web design. He made the website look like a freakin movie poster.

All my works are for nothing, I got headache for nothing and I've got hated for nothing.

It was the day when I finished my internship. It was a long 3 months. After a month I've heard from my co-interns that the whole dev team was fired including the marketing specialist. Also the whole website is scrapped and has been rebuilt by a single guy who used WordPress which he did in only a month.

So today one of my client told me that my script is freezing their website on IE browsers. I tested and told them that website is being freezed even without my script.
Now they sent me analyzed scenario and they concluded that it freezes 4 out of 10 times without script. But it freezes 12 out if 15 times with script -_-. So there is something really wrong with the script and I need to fix it urgently otherwise they will kick me out. #fuckedupLogic
Funny thing is that same script is loaded in so many other client's website and it doesn't freeze any shit.

Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.

One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.

I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.

I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.

We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.

[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.

tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.

LPT: NEVER accept a freelance job without looking at the project's source first

Client: I have a project made by a company that is now abandoning it, I want you to fix some bugs

Me: Okay, can you:
1) Give me a build to test the current state of the game
2) Tell me what the bugs are
3) Show me the source
4) Tell me your budget

Client: *sends a list of 10 bugs* Here's the APK and to give you the project I'll need you to sign an NDA

Me: Sure...

*tests build*
*sees at least 20 bugs*
*still downloading source*
*bugs look quite easy to fix should be done under an hour*

Me: Okay, so, I can fix each bug for $10 and I can do 2 today

Client: Okay can you fix 8 bugs today for $40??

*sigh*

Me: No I cannot.

Client: okay then 2 today for $20 is fine, I want a refund if you can't fix them today

*sigh*

Me: Look dude, this isn't the first time I am doing this, aight? I'll fix the bugs today you can pay me after check they are done, savvy?

Client: okay

*source is downloaded*
*literal apes wrote the scripts, commented out code EVERYWHERE
Debug logs after every line printing every frame causing FPS drops, empty objects in the scene
multiple unused UI objects
everything is spaghetti*

*give up, after 2 hours of hell*
*tfw averted an order cancellation by not taking the order and telling client that they can pay me after I am done*

Attached is an image of a level object pool
It's an array with each element representing a level.
The numbers and "Final" are ids for objects in an object pool
The whole string is .Split(',') into an array (RIP MEMORY BTW) and then a loop goes through each element in the split array and instantiates the object from an object pool

When a client turns on you when it's time to pay... 😑

I miss old times rants...So i guess, here it goes mine:

Tomorrow is the day of the first demo to our client of a "forward-looking project" which is totally fucked up, because our "Technical Quality Assurance" - basically a developer from the '90-s, who gained the position by "he is a good guy from my last company where we worked together on sum old legacy project...".
He fucked up our marvellous, loose coupling, publish/subscribe microservice architecture, which was meant to replace an old, un-maintainable enormous monolitch app. Basically we have to replace some old-ass db stored functions.
Everyone was on our side, even the sysadmins were on our side, and he just walked in the conversation, and said: No, i don't like it, 'cause it's not clear how it would even work... Make it an RPC without loose coupling with the good-old common lib pattern, which made it now (it's the 4th 2 week/sprint, and it is a dependency hell). I could go on day and night about his "awesome ideas", and all the lovely e-mails and pull request comments... But back to business

So tomorrow is the demo. The client side project manager accidentally invited EVERYONE to this, even fucking CIO, legal department, all the designers... so yeah... pretty nice couple of swallowed company...

Today was a day, when my lead colleague just simply stayed home, to be more productive, our companys project manager had to work on other prjects, and can't help, and all the 3 other prject members were thinking it is important to interrupt me frequently...

I have to install our projects which is not even had a heart beat... not even on developer machines. Ok it is not a reeeeaaally big thing, but it is 6 MS from which 2 not even building because of tight coupling fucktard bitch..., But ok, i mean, i do my best, and make it work for the first time ever... I worked like 10 ours, just on the first fucking app to build, and deploy, run on the server, connect to db and rabbit mq... 10 FUCKING HOURS!!! (sorry, i mean) and it all was about 1, i mean ONE FUCKING LINE!

Let me explain: spring boot amqp with SSL was never tested before this time. I searched everything i could tought about, what could cause "Connection reset"... Yeah... not so helpful error message... I even have to "hack" into the demo server to test the keystore-truststore at localhost... and all the fucking configs, user names, urls, everything was correct... But one fucking line was missing...
EXCEPT ONE FUCKING LINE:
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=false # Whether to enable SSL support.

This little bitch took me 6 hours to figure out...so please guys, learn from my fault and check the spring boot appendix for default application properties, if everything is correct, but it is not working...

And of course, if you want SSL then ENABLE it...
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=true

BTW i really miss those old rants from angry devs, and i hope someone will smile on my fucking torture

You know the worst thing about being a freelancer? You're expected to wear every fucking hat and you don't get normal hours.

Over the past few days I have been working with a client of a client attampting to fix his server. He's running CentOS on VMWare and somehow ended up breaking the system.

Upon inspection there was no way to fix his system remotely. It wouldn't even boot in recovery mode. So we've been attempting to recover his data so that we can reinstall CentOS and not have to start completely from scratch.

So for the past 3 days straight I have been remotely logging in to a Debian Live CD and manually sending folders to a FTP server of his. He has somewhere close to 30 sites on this server, and upwards of 1 million files in total.

Yesterday either the system freaked out or he did something, but the entire fucking system stopped responding which forced me to reboot it, reinsert the live CD, reinstall evertything, and re-mount his broken systems drives.

Here we are 3 days in, we're still not done, and I'm getting slightly pissy because if you don't know Linux well enough to fix this shit yourself, you shouldn't be acting as your own sysadmin for 30+ sites.

Also, backups are a thing right? VMWare also has snapshots. I know the extra storage isn't cheap, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than paying soemone like me $35/hr to go and fix all of your shitty mistakes.

When project is finished, everything is according specs, and on final review the client says: "everything looks nice! But I would like to change just a few small details. I would like a different design and functionality".

Seriously?!

When I request that a client sends me the images they would like on their website. I do not expect 25 Emails each with one fucking image.

Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.

"Coding is free dude, why are you charging me for that when I can just use Google to copy-paste code from there and there, boy.. think about it"

-- Typical Client

I am beginning to hate the relationship between email and my clients. I never thought it would come to the point where email is the worst communication platform I've ever used because some of my clients simply don't know how to use it properly.

I have one client who never uses the subject header in his emails. This makes conversational threads very difficult to follow, and I can't just scan the inbox I have for him. I have to actually do searches on my emails just to find recent conversations.

For some reason nobody knows how to start a new email thread. I have multiple clients that will just take the last email that I sent them, regardless of what it's about, and start a new conversation completely unrelated to the other email by hitting"reply". I end up with email threads that are 60 to 100 emails long and contain many different subjects, which again makes it hard to find anything. Never mind that they've usually put two or three important attachments, or username password combinations, or other valuable information in there amongst all the noise.

Worst of all, I have a few clients and co-workers who insist on starting a new email thread whenever anything about a particular issue comes up. This means that just today I have five separate email threads about the same goddamn issue from the same damn person. Am I supposed to respond to each thread with the same damned information? One of these people is supposed to be both a media consultant and an SEO expert and really should know better. Also, if you do actually send me an email with a subject like "the robot.txt error", please don't give me one sentence about that and five paragraphs about what color you'd like the background to be. That's ridiculous. How the hell am I supposed to find that later? Especially since we already discussed this in the other email that sitting in my inbox.

I swear I am setting up a bug tracking system simply so that my clients can log in and leave me bug reports, and feature requests, and will stop filling up my poor email boxes with what amounts to piles and piles threads that I have to sort through.

For a person who suffers with a form of ADD this is extremely frustrating. Why is it so difficult for my colleagues and clients to write good emails with good subject lines, and reply to the right damn emails?

Am I just being too anal, or does this bother others as well?

Not myself but friend of mine. Early 2000s working at a large university. Top notch office PCs for the time, best internet connection in the country.

He discovers this "Bittorrent" program. Meh, just another file sharing thing... but who cares, it's 2003-ish so everyone downloads shit from the internet.

Installs it on his office PC, because its university so no one cares.

Friday afternoon, he starts download of his favourite music album (some hard to get live version or something), then goes off into the weekend, computer is left running as always.

Download is finished after an hour or so, then his Bittorrent client starts seeding. Lots of people want this album. Bittorrent adapts to bandwith and when your connection is good you get upvoted in the network and everyone is connecting to you.

Monday comes, my friend arrives back at his desk, bit late because he slept in and its university so no one cares.

Suddenly realises many missed calls on his desk phone. Calls back, it's from the IT department.

Friend: "You have called me? What can I do for you?"
IT Guy (screaming): "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING??? YOUR PC IS CAUSING 50% OF THE UNIVERSITY'S INTERNET TRAFFIC.!!!!"
Friend: "Whops."
IT Guy (hysterical): "WHATEVER YOU ARE RUNNING STOP IT NOW!!!!"

Friend: *stops Bittorrend client, enjoys his favourite album*

Lucky him, it's a university, so in the end no one cared.

Client from hell, next chapter.

As money comes in, project won't be canceled.

Only madness comes for free.

Newest insanity.... We had to explain that in a warehouse system a unique article number as an identifier is a must.... This discussion took 20 minutes.

The reason? Saving 2 secs as they don't have to enter the supplier item number....

Their plan?

Article Number can be...
Integer, automatically assigned
String, Supplier Name and Supplier Item Number seperated by a delimiter....

The argument that stopped this insanity... Costs.

We argued that if we are forced to implement something which we believe will be a high costs, no value, nonsense feature we won't do the necessary migration and programming after reversal as in 'find someone else who unbreaks this insanity'...

Did they understand that a warehouse system without article number for reference is dumb? Nope.

So... About a month ago 2 interns started a project from scratch at my company. My boss gave them a project to follow as an example (more for the api and database side).

Wednesday they ended the internship and I've began to help fix the rest of the kinks that were left to be fixed. Friday we were finishing up the app and api to send to the client for tests. The database was created with 4 tables that were equal in structure... Imagine that you need a table for orders and they have status like pending, cancelled, finished and accepted. What they've done was they created 4 tables, one for each status....

Why the hell would you do this???

When client stops paying you, but asks for updates anyway...

Not been a good day so far:
1. Woke up to my Synology in a 'Volume crashed' state. Tried to contact support via web page; support web page not loading.
2. Ancient software at work stops working. As the last remaining C++ dev, I gotta troubleshoot. Original developer wrote test program...in VB6.
3. Server config file changed, but all the admins swear up and down nobody's made any changes.
4. Client calls account rep and wants to know about our security policies, so he schedules a meeting with me and client and forgets to mention until he's emailing me asking where the hell I am. From the tone of the conversation between the rep and the client, it's clear that somehow I'm to blame for being late.

Sigh.

Well, hey, at least it's Friday, right? Right?

> move out
> few months to get married
> get a client
> get another client
> first client starts to get messed up
> tell the first client to cancel the contract
> second client cancels my contract because the first client is pissing me off and making my productivity decline
> first client don't wanna cancel the contract nor pay me
> brings a lawyer
> 3 weeks to get married
> no job
> bills to pay
> lawyer to pay

great to be me

When you try your best but you don't succeed
When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse

...

I am currently facing a client from hell. I don't even wanna write down the shits she is giving us. This lyrics are just prefect for my scenario.

Bad managers, rude clients and annoying colleagues...

A lot of the stories here I read have at least any of the words listed above. My advice to most of you guys is: LEAVE.

And do it NOW.

The thing is, most of the stuff you're complaining about won't change. And you will be stuck there longer than you want to be and/or notice, trust me i've been there.

Especially the rude client part is where I've had lots of experience in, you have to search for a company which will abstract that layer for you. If you're on here most likely you're a developer and not everybody is a team lead. So why the F in hell are you even in conversations about budget and/or are you doing the most of the talking in the retrospective? If your project manager is ANY good he is doing that all for you.
There is so much to choose from (my experience in western countries) so please dont be stuck in a dead end job. Or start freelancing or whatever..

Me: You provided the wrong credentials for AWS. That’s why it won’t work. Please provide updated ones using document I emailed you last month.

Client: I forgot how to do that. Will you be free tonight after 9pm?

Me:.....

Yes. This really just happened. No. I am not doing it unless they pay hourly.

I was reluctant to try out flutter earlier on because of claims online stating that hybrid frameworks aren't there yet. That's one hell of a crap!
I fell in love with flutter after completing my first flutter app. Shit was just too easy. So many helpful libraries which has eased my overall workload lately.
We built a Native Android app which took 2months+ to complete and I just finished porting it to flutter for iOS and Android in 3 weeks. Boss was happy, Client was happy, I am freaking joyous, everybody is happy!

From the mouth of a Native Android Dev with over 5yr of exp. This shit called flutter is worthy of all the hype. I fucking kid you not!

I don't know about the past... I assume it was shitty then cus I also blasted it based on git issues but now it seems even more faster to build production worthy apps than anything I've encountered.

My first project it’s an emotional roller coaster. I was a little trainee/ junior dev at my job with a little more than a month learning RoR and one day my tech lead receives an email from the big boss saying: “We got a big client who wants a total redesign of his web and we said yes we can do it in a month, so please check if anything it’s reusable”, after reading my tech lead said to me “Do you want to help me with this ?” And well, we spend like 2-3 hours checking all the controllers, views, assets, etc. We conclude that the project was mostly front end changes and the back end will stay the same, so yeah it can be done in a month. The next day in a meeting with all the team I was nominee to be the person in charge of that project, because it was an easy project and all my teammates hate to do front end stuff, so I take the challenge. After that I met the Project Manager, another guy who recently start as PM about a month, so yeah we were two new guys who need to handle the project of a big client, nothing can go wrong. We did the planing, I give an estimation ( first one in my life ) for the tasks and added like 4 hours in case anything goes wrong. Then the first sprint came by, and I couldn’t finish it because the time given to some features was to low and the “design” was a mockup made by the PM, ok, no problems, we add more time to the tasks and we ask for a real design. At the half of the sprint the client start adding more and more stuff, the PM doesn’t talk back, just say yes yes yes. Then in a blink of an eye the easy project became a three months projects with no design at all, two devs ( a new guy who recently begin as dev enter the project ), just mockups and good hopes. But somehow we did it, we finish it! Nope. The early Monday of the next week I received an email of the PM saying we would have a second version and the estimation of the tech lead was a minimum of six months ( that became 8 months). This time was hell, because the client doesn’t decide what the hell he wants so a task would take a couple of days more or so, the PM became the personal bitch of the client, but it wasn’t his fault, because we later knew that the company became partner with this client and because of that the PM didn’t have too much choice :/, the designs were cool, but they weren’t on time ever, our only design guy had to do designs to our project and another 5 projects of the company, so yeah, we weren’t the only ones suffering. At the end we survive, the project was done and the client somehow was happy. Of course the project didn’t end and it was terminated half a year later, but I’ll always remember it because thanks to this project I was given the opportunity to work as a Front end dev and I’m happy still working as one.

What the hell is wrong with using GitHub, or Git??? A client told me he’s concerned because it’s been, in his words, “compromised” and the admins can “see our code for trouble shooting purposes” and he doesn’t feel comfortable with that…🤨 like…no one wants this code my dude, like the fuck!?! We’re already using a skeleton project from someone else’s git, yet you dnt want this project on there??? Ooooor, is it because you dnt know how to use it??? Nor do you want to take the time to learn it??? 🤨 fuck boy. 😡😡😡😡😡😡🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

story time:
I use onedrive for sharing some files and shit. So one day one of my folders, which I got from a downloaded zip, caused an error "files couldn't be synced because of unallowed character in the title".
Turns out there was a space at the end of the folder title. I change the name, I get some error.
"Okay, no problem, I don't need that folder anymore anyway" So I delete it, doesn't work, the error message reads "Can't delete folder because it no longer exists.". "What the hell" try deleting it some more. Emptying it before deleting. Deleting the parent folder. I try formatting it before deleting. Nothing works.
Deleting from the online onedrive client causes it to briefly disappears but refreshing places it back right where it came from.

So I resort to my last hope, customer support.
I explain the whole thing.

I get a reply. Oh boy.

I get explained that if the recycle bin is full, the file will be placed back.
After that, I get an explanation on how to remove a file xD

Thanks OneDrive Team, really helpful.

You have a meeting with a really really important client who is a typical client from hell who constantly changes his mind about everything and then blames you for “not getting things done” and always says “this is not what I asked for” every god damn time.

Anyway, he now jokingly asks you if you think he has been a troublesome client and before you have time to answer he continues the meeting.

What do you do? Do you suck it up like a weakling and disappear up your own asshole or do you tell him what a monster he is?

Receive several documents of blog posts from a client, each one titled "Blog $n - $category - $title." Cool, the client gave them to me in order and I just have to plug them in.

Enter blogs on site starting with Blog 1.

Client sees the blogs on the site and loses their shit. "I specifically numbered the blogs so you knew what order to put them in! How hard is it to put them in numerical order? Blog 1 is the newest blog and should be first on the page."

The site displays the newest post first, but because any normal person would have named the oldest blog "blog 1" and counted up from there the blogs are in the reverse order the client expected.

What the hell kind of dense motherfucker numbers their blog files in a manner which requires them to rename every file each time they write a new blog post?