Storytime!

Manager: Hey fullstackchris, the maps widget on our app stopped working recently...

Dev: (Skeptical, little did he know) Sigh... probably didn't raise quota or something stupid... Logs on to google cloud console to check it out...

Google Dashboard: Your bill.... $5,197 (!!!!!!) Payment method declined (you think?!)

Dev: 😱 WTF!?!?!! (Calls managers) Uh, we have HUGE problem, charges for $5000+ in our google account, did you guys remove the quota limits or not see any limit reached warnings!?

Managers: Uh, we didn't even know that an API could cost money, besides, we never check that email account!

Dev: 🤦‍♂️ yeah obviously you get charged, especially when there have literally been millions of requests. Anyway, the bigger question is where or how our key got leaked. Somewhat started hammering one of the google APIs with one of our keys (Proceeds to hunt for usages of said API key in the codebase)

Dev: (sweating 😰) did I expose an API key somewhere? Man, I hope it's not my fault...

Terminal: grep results in, CMS codebase!

Dev: ah, what do we have here, app.config, seems fine.... wait, why did they expose it to a PUBLIC endpoint?!

Long story short:

The previous consulting goons put our Angular CMS JSON config on a publicly accessible endpoint.

WITH A GOOGLE MAPS API KEY.

JUST CHILLING IN PLAINTEXT.

Though I'm relieved it wasn't my fault, my faith in humanity is still somewhat diminished. 🤷‍♂️

Oh, and it's only Monday. 😎

Cheers!

Manager: I’m so sick and tired of you devs whining about technical debt and how it’s slowing down our progress, so here’s the deal. You have until the end of this week to eliminate all technical debt in the codebase. After that I NEVER WANT TO HEAR YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT TECHNICAL DEBT EVER AGAIN!!!

Dev: …

"Hey, Root, someone screwed up and now all of our prod servers are running this useless query constantly. I know I already changed your priorities six times in the past three weeks, but: Go fix it! This is higher priority! We already took some guesses at how and supplied the necessary code changes in the ticket, so this shouldn't take you long. Remember, HIGH PRIORITY!"

1. I have no idea how to reproduce it.
2. They have no idea how to reproduce it.
3. The server log doesn't include queries.
4. The application log doesn't include queries.
5. The tooling intercepts and strips out some log entries the legendary devs considered useless. (Tangent: It also now requires a tool to read the logs because log entries are now long json blobs instead of plain text.)
6. The codebase uses different loggers like everywhere, uses a custom logger by default, and often overwrites that custom logger with the default logger some levels in. gg
7. The fixes shown in the ticket are pretty lame. (I've fixed these already, and added one they missed.)
8. I'm sick and tired and burned out and just can't bring myself to care. I'm only doing this so i don't get fired.
9. Why not have the person who screwed this up fix it? Did they quit? I mean, I wouldn't blame them.

Why must everything this company does be so infuriatingly complicated?

Hey @Root! I know you won't have time to finish Ticket A before holiday vacation, so work on Ticket B instead.

I finished Ticket A in time. except for converting/fixing some horrible spaghetti monstrosity. More or less: "we overwrote this gem's middleware and now it calls back into our codebase under specific circumstances, and then calls the gem again, which calls the middleware again." Wtf? It's an atrocity against rationality.

The second day after vacation:

Hey @Root, drop Ticket B and work on Ticket C instead. Can you knock this out quick, like before friday? ... Uh, sure. It looks easy.

Ticket C was not easy. Ticket C was a frontend CSS job to add a print button, and for unknown reasons, none of the styles apply during printing. The only code involved is adding a button with a single line of javascript: `window.print()`, so why give it to the chick who hasn't been given a frontend ticket in over a year? Why not give it to the frontend guy who does this all day every day? Because "do it anyway," that's why.

And in somewhere between 13 (now 5) minutes and two hours from now, I'm going to have a 1:1 with my boss to discuss the week. Having finished almost all of Ticket A won't matter because it's not a "recent priority" -- despite it being a priority before, and a lot of work. I've made no progress on Ticket B due to interruptions (and a total and complete lack of caring because I'm burned out and quite literally can no longer care), and no progress on ticket C because... it's all horribly broken and therefore not quick. I assigned it to Mr. Frontend, which I'll probably get chewed out for.

So, my 1:1 with bossmang today is going to be awful. And the worst part of all: I'm out of rum! Which means sobriety in the face of adversity! :<

but like, wtf. Just give me a ticket and let me work on it until it's done. Stop changing the damn priorities every other freaking day!

I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.

Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂

Should I be afraid right now?

Dev: can I swap out an existing UI framework from this codebase for a completely different one, because it doesn't do the small enhancement I've been tasked to do?

Me: ...............

please lord, give me strength in these pressing times.

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

Trash, trash, trash.
Who the fuck writes this shit?

Who the fuck lets these trash should-be-junior devs roll their own crypto? and then approves it?

The garbage heap of a feature (signing for all apis) doesn't follow Ruby standards, doesn't follow codebase conventions, has `// this is bridge` style comments (and no documentation), and it requires consumer devs to do unnecessary work to integrate it, and on top of all this: it leaks end-user data. on all apis. in plaintext.

Fucking hell.

(Forgot to post this a few days ago. Was just too tired.)

Finally finished the code review from hell.

The patch on top of the PR is +1448 -1114, and nearly all of it is rearchitecting, not moving.

I think I spent six days on it, 4-5 productive hours a day? Seems like a lot. This codebase is a bitch to work in.

I’m spent.

Me passing time on the weekend

Random call from unknown number

Turns out it's the manager

M: hey , how is your weekend going ...

Me: nothing much ... Whatsup ?

M : yeah well , we wanted to push some minor adhoc fixes as some clients wanted it urgently

The Devops folks need developer support . Can you pitch in and monitor

Me : I'm not aware of what changes are going , i don't think i can provide support

M : don't worry it's minor changes , it's already tested in pre prod , you just need to be on call for 30 mins

Me : ugh okay .. guess 1 hr won't hurt

M: thanks 👍🏽

Me: *logs in

*Notices the last merged PR
+ 400 lines , implemented by junior dev and merged by manager

*Wait , how is this a *minor* release...

*Release got triggered already and the CI CD pipeline is in progress

*5 mins later

*Pipeline fails , devops sends email - test coverage below 50%

Manager immediately pitches in ...

M: hey , i see test coverage is down , can you increase it ?

Me: and how do u suppose I do that ?

M : well it's simple just write UTC for the missing lines ... Will it take time ?

Me : * ah shit here we go again

Yeah it will take time , there are around 400 lines , I am not aware of this component all together

Can you ask junior dev to pitch in and write the UTC for this

*Actually junior dev is out on a vacation with his girlfriend

M : well he's out for the weekend , but
as a senior dev , i expect you to have holistic understanding of the codebase and not give excuses ,
this is a priority fix which client are demanding we need this released ASAP

Me : * wait wat ?

---

I ended up being online for next 3 hours figuring out the code change and bumping up the UTC 🤦🏾

Riddle me this Batman, why am I constantly afraid that other developers are going to fuck up my work after my time on the codebase?

Hey Root, remember that super high-priority ticket that we ignored for five months before demanding you rewrite it a specific way in one day?

Yeah, the new approach we made you use broke the expected usecases, and now the page is completely useless to the support team and they're freaking out. Drop everything you're doing and go fix it! Code-complete for this release is tonight! -- This right after "impacting our business flow" while being collapsed on the fucking floor.

Jesus FUCKING christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

If I dropped the ball on a high-priority ticket for two weeks, I'd get fired, let alone for five fucking months.

If I was a manager and demanded a one-day rewrite I can only imagine the amount of chewing out I'd receive, especially on something high-priority.

And let's not forget product ownership: imagine if I screwed up feature planning for someone so badly I made them break a support tool in production. I'd never hear the end of it.

Fucking double standards.

And while I'm at it. Some of the code I've seen in this codebase is awful. Uncommented spaghetti, or an unreadable mess with single-letter variables, super-tightly coupled modules so updates are nearly impossible, typos in freaking constants added across sixty+ files, obviously-incorrect comments, ... . I'll have to start posting snippets to show them off. But could I get away with any of it? ha. Hell no. My code must be absolutely perfect. I hear about any and every flaw, doesn't matter how minor, and nothing can go out until everything is just so.

Hell, I even hear about flaws in other peoples' code during my code reviews. Why? Because I should have fixed it, that's why. But if I do, I get yelled at for "muddying the waters."

Just. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

It's like playing a shell game where no matter which shell I pick (or point to their goddamn sleeve where they're clearly hiding it), I get insulted for being so consistently useless, and god damn, how can I never find the fucking pea or follow the damned rules? I'm so terrible and this is why "nobody trusts me." Fuck you.

I'll tell you why I can't find your damned pea: IT'S RATTLING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HEADS, you ASSHOLE FUCKING IMBECILES.

That's right: one pea among the lot of them.

goddamn I am fucking pissed off.

Our codebase is in a

I've told the same story multiple times but the subject of "painfully incompetent co-worker" just comes up so often.

I have one coworker who never really grew out of the mindset of a college student who just took "Intro to Programming". If a problem couldn't be solved with a textbook solution, then he would waste several weeks struggling with it until eventually someone else would pick up the ticket and finish it in a couple days. And if he found a janky workaround for a problem, he'd consider that problem "solved" and never think about it again.

He lasted less than a year before he quit and went off to get a job somewhere else, leaving the rest of our team to comb through his messy code and fix it. Unfortunately, our team is mostly split across multiple projects and our processes were kind of a mess until recently, so his work was a black box of code that had never been reviewed.

I opened the box and found only despair and regret. He was using deprecated features from older versions of the language to work around language bugs that no longer existed. He overused constants to a ridiculous degree (hundreds of constants, all of which are used exactly once in the entire codebase, stored in a single mutable map variable named "values" because why not). He didn't really seem to understand DRY at all. His code threw warnings in the IDE and had weird errors that were difficult to reproduce because there was just a whole pile of race conditions.

I ended up having to take a figurative hacksaw to it, ripping out huge sections of unnecessary crap and modernizing it to use recent language features to get rid of the deprecation warnings and intermittent errors. And then I went through the same process again for every other project he'd touched.

Good riddance.

Send help..

The project we're currently working on:

- an angular codebase that's broken beyond recognition - nothing's working as it should

- user stories are estimated in hours, but estimations are treated as hard facts. Since the app is so broken, everything takes longer than usual and it's almost impossible to consider every potential hardship during refinements, therefore, we constantly need more time than we have estimated

- retrospectives (intentional plural here, since one time isn't enough) are used to discuss why we cannot manage to finish tickets within the estimations

- the design was made beforehand and is extremely inconsistent and inaccessible

- if you open a new ticket, you need to add a reason for why this ticket is needed - in addition to the ticket description..

- The moment you move a ticket to QA, the "Scrum Master" breathes down your neck, shoving new tickets in your face. Despite having to finish up the other two you're still working on

- multiple teams are working on the application, but - of course - communication is overrated.

I could go on, but I'm too tired..
We were supposed to help the client for a couple of months - we're close to a year now and still nowhere near done.

If refactoring scares you, fuck off out my team.

If you keep code in the codebase simply because it took you ages to write it, fuck off out of my team.

Some people must be wishing pain and suffering upon themselves and their colleagues.

I get really defiant when i repeatedly get micromanaged with bullshit instructions, such as asking me to have my just started c++ library poc which also involves a lot of learning and will earliest be usable in a few months, "ready for our customer devs" in 2 weeks from now.

just no, you fucking retard.

also, the lib alone wouldn't make any sense, since the code parts working with it don't yet exist at all.
and then getting instructed to ask customers if they can provide you with c++ code that solves the task for them in their own software, which of course will somehow magically fit in my existing codebase. even if it existed (which it fortunately doesn't because they do everything in C#), i don't think i'm going to be faster trying to somehow solder in their code into my library, of which i'm still brainstorming about the general architecture.

if you have so fucking unrealistic expectations, maybe stop sniffing glue all day and don't make this my fucking problem.

One year ago I did the Week 242 Group Rant:
Dev goals for 2021?
⬜️Finish my indie Game
⬜️Publish my Indie Game.
⬜️Make my wife pregnant.
⬜️Clean codebase current C++ job
⬜️Learn Piano play
⬜️Create clean coding presentation
⬜️Be more productive

Now its 2022 lets se how far we got.
⬜️Finish my indie Game
⬜️Publish my Indie Game.
✅Make my wife pregnant.
⬜️Clean codebase current C++ job
⬜️Learn Piano play
⬜️Create clean coding presentation
⬜️Be more productive

What I did instead:
✅Worked on my indie Game
✅Went on vacation
✅Make my wife pregnant.
✅Construct, Paint, Decorate house.
✅Hold presentation about profilers

Future Goals:
⬜️Take care of my new born daughter soon.
⬜️Finish my indie Game
⬜️Learn to play Piano
⬜️Socialize a bit more

That log4j RCE is some fucking nasty business!!! Its exploits have already been observed multiple times in our company scope.

Time for some unplanned Saturday evening hot-patches :/

P.S. Why the fuck leave such a feature enabled as default??? I mean really, whose brilliant idea was "let's leave the message parser enabled as well as the LDAP query hooks... BY FUCKING DEFAULT!!!"

I mean really, is anyone using that? ANYONE?

And then they laugh at me when I say "stay away from frameworks", "use as little libraries as possible", "avoid foreign code in your codebase",...

you know what.... JOKE'S ON YOU!

Wrote some code that solved a program in a semi unique way for the codebase. As in not oft used functionality of language.

Some time later... This might be hard to understand. Maybe I should do a different way.

Some time later... No, I will leave a comment to describe what is going on.

Some time later... That comment is kind of cryptic. Maybe should rethink.

Some time later... No, if the next dev doesn't know how this works then they should learn how it works. (reasoning here is that the functionality requires a knowledge of internals of language)

Some time later... Also, if nobody else gets this then they have to ask me how it works. Job security?

Some time later... STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS CODE AND MOVE ON!

I was asked to look into a site I haven't actively developed since about 3-4 years. It should be a simple side-gig.
I was told this site has been actively developed by the person who came after me, and this person had a few other people help out as well.
The most daunting task in my head was to go through their changes and see why stuff is broken (I was told functionality had been removed, things were changed for the worse, etc etc).
I ssh into the machine and it works. For SOME reason I still have access, which is a good thing since there's literally nobody to ask for access at the moment.
I cd into the project, do a git remote get-url origin to see if they've changed the repo location. Doesn't work. There is no origin. It's "upstream" now. Ok, no biggie. git remote get-url upstream. Repo is still there. Good.
Just to check, see if there's anything untracked with git status. Nothing. Good.
What was the last thing that was worked on? git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph. Wait... Something about the commit message seems familiar. git log. .... This is *my* last commit message. The hell?
I open the repo in the browser, login with some credentials my browser had saved (again, good because I have no clue about the password). Repo hasn't gotten a commit since mine. That can't be right.
Check branches. Oh....Like a dozen new branches. Lots of commits with text that is really not helpful at all. Looks like they were trying to set up a pipeline and testing it out over and over again.
A lot of other changes including the deletion of a database config and schema changes. 0 tests. Doesn't seem like these changes were ever in production.
...
At least I don't have to rack my head trying to understand someone else's code but.... I might just have to throw everything that was done into the garbage. I'm not gonna be the one to push all these changes I don't know about to prod and see what breaks and what doesn't break
.
I feel bad for whoever worked on the codebase after me, because all their changes are now just a waste of time and space that will never be used.

These fucking imbecile devs left me a bunch of bugs in a 150k LOC legacy hell...
Too bad it took some 8 months for them to finally surface in prod. God damned...
Technically, this whole codebase is one giant abyss filled to the brim with bugs.

I work in a fintech company and our product is a point of sale app. Two senior indian dev contractors just spent 3.5 months on a feature where all they had to do was map two tables by using a third mapper table and display 2 lists to the user so he could update the data in those two tables.

After hearing same excuses (that they are working in it) for the past few weeks, I took it upon myself and made a proof of concept for them.

Yeah our codebase is kinda shit but even me, a fcking junior with 3 years of experience managed to do it in 1 week.

Meanwhile these fuckers spent 14 weeks beating around the bush and couldnt even save data to a fucking database. They just added UI and thats it. When asked how investigation is going fuckers couldnt even come up with any findings. For weeks. Seniors my fucking ass.

If not for me, I guess they would have taken till the end of the year. No, fuck you, here is an example now pickup your slack.

Im tired of picking after you. God damn incompetent leeches

"So Alecx, how did you solve the issues with the data provided to you by hr for <X> application?"

Said the VP of my institution in charge of my department.

"It was complex sir, I could not figure out much of the general ideas of the data schema since it came from a bunch of people not trained in I.T (HR) and as such I had to do some experiments in the data to find the relationships with the data, this brought about 4 different relations in the data, the program determined them for me based on the most common type of data, the model deemed it a "user", from that I just extracted the information that I needed, and generated the tables through Golang's gorm"

VP nodding and listening intently...."how did you make those relationships?" me "I started a simple pattern recognition module through supervised mach..." VP: Machine learning, that sounds like A.I

Me: "Yes sir, it was, but the problem was fairly easy for the schema to determ.." VP: A.I, at our institution, back in my day it was a dream to have such technology, you are the director of web tech, what is it to you to know of this?"

Me: "I just like to experiment with new stuff, it was the easiest rout to determine these things, I just felt that i should use it if I can"

VP: "This is amazing, I'll go by your office later"

Dude speaks wonders of me. The idea was simple, read through the CSV that was provided to me, have the parsing done in a notebook, make it determine the relationships in the data and spout out a bunch of JSON that I could use. Hook it up to a simple gorm golang script and generate the tables for that. Much simpler than the bullshit that we have in php. I used this to create a new database since the previous application had issues. The app will still have a php frontend and backend, but now I don't leave the parsing of the data to php, which quite frankly, php sucks for imho. The Python codebase will then create the json files through the predictive modeling (98% accuaracy) and then the go program will populate the db for me.

There are also some node scripts that help test the data since the data is json.

All in all a good day of work. The VP seems scared since he knows no one on this side of town knows about this kind of tech. Me? I am just happy I get to experiment. Y'all should have seen his face when I showed him a rather large app written in Clojure, the man just went 0.0 when he saw Lisp code.

I think I scare him.

May be just me, but I am quite frustrated with complexity of systems nowadays, even more how it’s became a norm for developers to import a library for every little sh*t…

Like, do you even need to import that OSS library, can’t you make it without it? Is it really worth it to import that monstrous library of 10k loc, just so you can save writing those 50loc for just once?

It almost feels like it’s driven by logic “if you don’t own the code, then you don’t need to maintain it”. But ironically you still need to mantain it, only now not the code (best case), but the library itself. You have to upgrade it (for security, bug fixes) and you better pray there’re no breaking changes. And if you encounter an edge case/bug that no one addressed yet, then well, I bet you wished you didn’t use that library in the first place.

It’s so much easier to support small piece of code within your codebase, than fix a bug in a library, that possibly has thousands of unnecessary dependencies, enormous abstraction trees, and infinity loc to support all possible use cases, which your project doesn’t even care about.

Just to make it clear, I am not talking, about cases where some library would really do some heavy lifting for you, it would be non-sensical not to use it in that case.

And talking about complexity, let’s not even mention microservices, kubernetes, and other hyped stuff…

Does anyone else shares the sentiment?

> MISTER IHATEFORALIVING, YOU CAN'T CREATE YOUR FUNCTIONS! YOU MUST USE WHAT WE ALREADY HAVE, OTHERWISE WE FILL OUR CODEBASE WITH USELESS FUNCTIONS!

The very much useful functions in our codebase:

> turning the whole codebase into a muddy ball of dirt because the leader didn't like 1 (one) call to an async function on startup

Way to go buddy, you sure show them how it's done.

Problem: ugly-ass php spaghetti code that has a technical debt of 16(!!!) years. I mean, it's so spaghetti that has two legacy frameworks that talk to each other inside the same monolith.

Observation: after two months my colleagues, trying to refactoring stuff, they were able to touch so little stuff that it almost made no difference.

How much is worth a rewrite? Because i don't think i can make a difference on a codebase so messy.
I know that rewrite is not the answer 99.9999% of the time, but i have tons of doubts here.

A gigantic codebase of several tens of millions of loc [prolly hundreds of mill's as we don't see all of it] in java EE.

Very complex business logic where bells have their own whistles with their own bells with .... You get it.

Very fine-tuned performance to make app so performant that the only bottleneck becomes the db. The beefiest rds instance becomes too laggy [orm, so sqls are immutable]

Client moves to rewrite the whole thing in PHP. Motivation: lower TTM

:facepalm:

A little over a year into my job at my current company back in January, I have a yearly meeting with my manager to discuss the progress I’ve made and to talk about what’s next. This is the meeting where we are supposed to discuss a potential pay raise but it’s the last topic of a predefined agenda.
So we spend a couple hours talking about how work has been for me. I started there as a junior developer with very little experience in the field but was quickly able to jump into a project with a fairly large codebase to help out the only other developer working on the project. Before long they’re so happy with me that they actually put me in charge of the application, which means my responsibilities evolve toward a whole lot more communication with the client and everything else that comes along with being in charge, including a lot of stress. I also salvaged another application initially developed by another company but that was so bugged it should’ve just been sent to the pits and rewritten from scratch. I was also asked to develop a couple POCs that were satisfactorily delivered.

Anyway, after almost two hours of going over my accomplishments and getting praises from my manager, we finally get to the part where we’re supposed to discuss a pay raise. He immediately cuts me off by saying the subject is not on the table due to the current crisis and our company struggling to make ends meet. I tell him I understand how hard it must be for them but also explain that I know for a fact other companies in the field are still making financial efforts to reward employees they’re happy with. He responds by saying that he’s aware of that, but he also “knows” that those same companies are laying off people that don’t deserve to be laid off despite the fact that they’re receiving government aid to stay afloat.
In the weeks following that meeting, I find out our company is doing the exact same thing my manager was condemning (laying off good people, taking massive advantage of government aid) and all the while not giving anybody a raise.
In any case, I really felt like that meeting was huge waste of time. What’s the point of going over everything I’ve done, congratulating me for my great work and even promising to give me even more responsibility if you don’t want to reward me for any of it? Do you honestly think I’m working hard so I can get a pat on the back or brownie points from you? I’ve got a family to take care of and I am trying to make their lives a little better each day by putting in hard work. But if hard work and climbing the latter of responsibility does not help me achieve that, what’s the point??

Monthly Update call
Me : I need 2 undivided weeks in the next 3 months to make some refactoring to our codebase, so we dont have issues in scaling.

Senior Manager (with years of tech experience almost equal to my age) :
Why would we need that, We are already hosted on AWS so we can just spin up more instances.

Me ( trying to hold the rage inside) : No it doesnt work that way, that will only hurt us more than help.

Him : What if we try with a bigger instance size. Its AWS, sure they will have a bigger instance.

Me : No, tha....
Him : (cuts me off) How about we use autoscaling and let AWS decide

Me : (Silently praying for a gun that shots across video calls.)

That’s how you should format a date in JS/TS!

Sometimes my boss wants me to fire a bullet without a gun, they want me to throw the bullet so hard that it feels like it was shot via a gun.

Maintaining a legacy app sucks so bad when you don't even have the full codebase and some douche bag decided to just randomly throw the codebase on the fucking SVN. 😠

Just got a new job at an old school hardware company. The codebase is giving me heart attack. They don't care about dev experience or code navigation at all. Every attempts to modernize the codebase is so half assed. All patches are so bloated that make the codebase even worse.

Frontend is migrated from prototype-oop-jquery cluster fuck to AngularJS, then finally angular. Holy moly, all business logics are baked into UI "classes" using prototype chain. When they migrated to AngularJS, someone simply added a wrapper to that jQuery cluster fuck class and overwrote all the prototype with a 10k +lines file. Since all the methods are hidden in either prototype, JS object, or callback function, it's impossible to trace the data pipeline using IDE when "go to definition" on update() method gives you all the update methods/string in all objects/classes. And they don't care about immutability. References are taken out, renamed, and mutated everywhere. Finding the source of a bug is fucking guessing game.

I don't know what trick they use that makes cLion static analyzer fail.

And there is no unit test or spec doc.

Fuck me dead

I recently started working on a 3 months old project, that was outsourced to two Indians genius. One of them left just before I arrived.

I had the chance to discover those guys were not using any version control system, just exchanging a zip file. I don’t even talk about the codebase, never seen such a mess …

Even better the project managers, were not using any IT program to follow the project advancement, but just Excel!!!

After a few days I realised that the remaining dev was not committing anything, the guy was always lying, (so many people died around him + some emergencies)

So, the guy got fired, but don’t worry management found new genius to save the project 🙂

Can someone tell me if outsourcing is really working?

Boss: How long will it take to finish the project?

Me: (Gives date for finishing dev and deployment.)

Boss: great, sound reasonable.

Me: ...

Boss: wait. Aren't you on vacation the two weeks after that.

Me: jup.

Boss: yeah we are not doing that again. Client can wait another two weeks.

Before someone says no Boss/PM is like that, he was/is a developer too so discussing deadlines and efforts is usually pretty relaxed since he knows our codebase and how long it takes to do things.

Disclaimer: I hold no grudges or prejudices toward [CENSORED] company. I love the concept of the business model and the perks they pay their employees. Unfortunately, the company is very petty, and negligence is the core of the management. I got into an interview for the position, of Senior Software Engineer, and the interview wouldn't take place if wasn't for me to follow up with the person in charge countless times a day. The Vice President of Engineering was the most confused person ever encountered. Instead of asking challenging questions that plausibly could explain and portray how well I can manage a team, the methodology of working with various technology, and my problem-solving skills. They asked me questions that possibly indicated they don't even know what they need or questions that can easily get from a Google Search. I was given 40 hours to build a demo application whereby I had to send them a copy of the source code and the binary file. The person who contacted me don't even bother with what I told her that it is not a good practice to place the binary in cloud storage (Google Drive, OneDrive, etc) and I request extra time to complete the demo application. Since I got the requirement to hand them the repository of the codebase, it is common practice to place the binary in the release section in the Git Platform (Jire, Azure DevOps, Github, Gitlab, etc). Which he surprisingly doesn't know what that is. There's the API key I place locally in .env hidden from the codebase (it's not good practice to place credentials in the codebase), I got a request that not only subscript to an API is necessary but I have to place them in the codebase. I succeed to pass the source code on time with the quality of 40 hours, I told him that I could have done it better, clearer and cleaner if I was given more grace of time. (Because they are not the only company asking me to write a demo application prior to the assessment. Extra grace was I needed)

So long story short, I asked him how is it working in a [CENSORED] company during my turn to ask questions. I got told that the "environment is friendly, diverse". But with utmost curiosity, I contacted several former employees (Software Engineer) on LinkedIn, and I got told that the company has high turnover, despises diversity the nepotism is intense. Most of the favours are done based on how well you create an illusion of you working for them and being close to the upper management. I request shreds of evidence from those former employees to substantiate what they told me. Seeing the pieces of evidence of how they manage the projects, their method of communication, and how biased the upper management actually is led me to withdraw from continuing my application. Honestly, I wouldn't want to work for a company where the majority can't communicate.

Very senior colleague: *hits a problem that is a minor inconvenience*
VSC: "I have to restart this task, the two weeks I put into it must be deleted!"
Me: "You forgot to do *this* here, add this 1 line and it's ok."
VSC: *An hour of rumbling about the codebase*
VSC: *adds my fix*
VSC: "Ok, it works now, you can review again"
Me: *cries inside*

That feeling when you’ve got a reputation of preciseness etc, and the code you just submitted for review has so many silly little mistakes you just want to do that ostrich thing. Gosh, how can I suddenly suck at my job this bad?

Okay, the changes affect EVERYTHING in our codebase (a major change in core business logic), and there is no way I could’ve tested every possible case by myself without a decent coverage of automated tests - which we obviously don’t have. So yet another argument for it (damn management, won’t you listen?!)… but still, some of the mistakes found during code review make me seem like a complete idiot.

So we've got a gif that doesn't show up in our React Native application. Of course, the designers assume it's me: "are you sure the gif is in the codebase? how are you using it in your component"? yeah ok boomer. I'm like, look at this other gif, works fine. "oh" So I tell them, double check the export options on how you are building the gif, maybe there is something there. so now they are asking ME for those export options. I'M A DEV, NOT A DESIGNER, DO YOUR JOB AND FIGURE IT OUT. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT PROGRAM YOU ARE USING

oh as an aside, I was putting up a website for a client and they are like "my logo is quite similar to many others, is this something to worry about legally?" OH, SO NOW I'M A LAWYER TOO??!!?!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE GOOGLE IS LITERALLY IN FRONT OF YOU

why do people continually think just because we can code we are fucking designers / lawyers / astronauts
/ god?
man this pisses me off - i think of that draw red lines with blue ink expert video, in the end, just smile and nod: "i can do... absolutely anything... trust me, I'm an expert"

So.. how does being in a company makes you a better engineer?

For eg, this year my team shipped these 2 interesting features (among other things) that were never part of our product.
these were crazy ideas, that got liked by our users, and might have impacted the finances of company positively.

However the engineers (not me, i worked on them even less) that worked on it, did they got their knowledge growth? they just analysed the old codebase, its shitty architecture and drawbacks, and added the feature around it in a similar manner. so basically it was building debris over the debris

but is this growth? if that engg was me, would my experience in dealing with debris and building debris over it (that somehow works) be helpful for any other organisation?

And number (2) : is my organisation even a good one if its allowing to build debris over debris and not leaving a space for discussion or cleaning the mess or thinking about better architectures, data structures for scalability and robustness?

An engineer's growth should be made by giving them a chance to explore new and best solutions and not the best hacks i guess

Have you ever encountered a situation like this before?

You worked in a team, made many adjustments in the codebase, and all the changes you've made are the best practice (after some research or asking the community).

But the team leader decided to go with the "messy" version of the code and the team leader does adjust the principle of "bad code" in favour of your coworker, just because he/she is a friend of the team leader.

So, whatever you adjust or contribute is simply nullified but any adjustments made by your coworker are considered "new updates".

Every work experience so far.

The first one... Internship abroad, very messy codebase, almost no code review.

At the end I was so tired I started watching movies during worktime.

Working along in a codebase for a few weeks. Then finding out there is a better more performant way to do something. Having to go back and tweak everything to use that feature you should have been using in the first place.

Thankfully, this has taught me to be more modular in the code.

When I have to apply a strong coat of
reverse engineering to understand an
open source codebase, what's the
point of being open.

 

No but really, the

WORKS ON MY BRAIN

movement is quite strong ..

I always had this mentality that I shouldn’t rely on a certain library or framework for my entire project because what if one day they stop supporting it. (Yeah I’m talking to u vuetify) That’s why I came up with this code structure that for everything that I wanna do I have a ‘driver’ library all coded by myself that interacts with that third party framework or library so if they stop supporting it I could just change a couple of lines of code in my driver file and my codebase should be working again. But I feel like this ‘driver’ approach is not the most efficient way of going in terms of memory usage. Do you guys think I should keep it simple and directly use those libraries or this is actually not a bad approach.

i love waking up every morning to the crushing wait of all the TODOs infesting my codebase

I'm lucky enough to be able to work with an extremely competent yet down-to-earth and generous senior engineer that it's a pita to write his review abt "area in which he can improve" - the dude already wrote 1/2 the codebase to keep the team running.

I got back from my holiday, back to work, and have spent 20 minutes of every hour at work waiting for my laptop to build while I navigate this “codebase” to put a teeny feature change in. A one liner.

Honestly everything about this makes me want to cry.

my brain feels like an AI. It just slices things it sees and layers them over and over again. It doesn’t even change things, leaving them pristine and intact, it doesn’t filter stuff out. I cite memes exactly, word by word, with the exact intonation, because I literally just lip syncing to that meme playing in my head as if I was watching a youtube video. Some days I’m not even conscious of my surroundings, I don’t realize where I am, what I do, I’m just caught in that process I can barely put in words. People ask me to do something for them, I do it, and they’re like “no! it’s not what I asked for, well, it is, but not in this sense!” If they asked me if I could make their company the most profitable one in their niche, my brain will probably decide to instead sink and destroy other companies there. All that unspoken, “common sense” knowledge, I don’t understand. I feel detached, as if everyone else was “in” on something, some common notion, meanwhile I’m alone with my perfect things. I feel like a perfect Haskell codebase trying to interact with biker bar gloryhole dirty equivalent of an API. I want things to be exact, I want things to be precise, I want words you say to have specific meaning that I can understand, and I’ll ask you even though it takes overcoming my anxiety and guilt for asking “stupid” questions. If you throw in some clue, my brain will generate a Vsauce video worth of elaboration on that, and I’ll just tell it to you. Sometimes I feel like I just don’t fit, I can’t have fun at party with other people, if there are more than five of them, I’ll probably cry for no apparent reason. My consciousness operates smoothly, and then it don’t, it overheats, crashes and burns, then comes the numbness and derealisation.

I’m not okay. Now more than ever, I sometimes want to just end it.

For the love of sex, can someone help me out??!!

There is a VS Code extension that helps in creating a step-by-step tutorial of a codebase. Can someone please tell me its name?!

Google is a bitch today.

Just when I had almost fallen in love with this new job which I started 8 months ago, this happens.

My “manager” had conversation with me. He was complaining that my work is of poor quality (objectively speaking, it is not). I don’t even directly work with this manager anymore. He “leads” this big project and he really wanted me to get involved in it but I struggled because it’s a big codebase and I was a new joiner. Months later, a new project was started and I worked on the backend for it. And I really liked that project more as I literally wrote it from scratch. And even the “mangers” for that project was a bit chilled out.

Now, the first “manager” kept trying to involve me in the first project but new requirements kept popping up in the second project and I was happy to work there. Somewhere down the this, this irked the first “manager”. Also, the company is known to be very cheap with salaries (a good work culture though) and they are paying me more than others since I switched from another company to work there. So they are probably expecting more output for the salary they are paying me. That seems to be the main problem here.

Obviously this first “manager” has never worked a development job before, let alone reviewing my code or something. So I was confused after this conversation. He’s asking me if I noticed these issues in my work and how I can do better and I bluntly replied no, I don’t see any issues in my work. He said he’ll speak to me again on Friday (2 days from now) and expects me to give an answer about how I can improve and stuff. He seems to be power-tripping do so I’ll probably be firm about my position. Will probably mention the money part as well.

It sucks that I left a corporation because of work culture issues and joined this smaller company. And I see the same corporate disconnect cropping up here.

So I started working at a large, multi billion dollar healthcare company here in the US, time for round 2,(previously I wasn't a dev or in IT at all). We have the shittiest codebase I have ever laid eyes on, and its all recent! It's like all these contractors only know the basics of programming(i'm talking intro to programming college level). You would think that they would start using test driven development by now, since every deployment they fix 1 thing and break 30 more. Then we have to wait 3 months for a new fix, and repeat the cycle, when the code is being used to process and pay healthcare claims.

Then some of my coworkers seem to have decided to treat me like I'm stupid, just because I can't understand a single fucking word what they're saying. I have hearing loss, and your mumbling and quiet tone on top of your think accent while you stop annunciated your words is quite fucking hard to understand. Now I know english isn't your first language and its difficult, I know, mine is Spanish. But for the love of god learn to speak the fuck up, and also learn to write actual SQL scripts and not be a fucking script kiddie you fucking amateur. The business is telling you your data is wrong because you're trying to find data that exists is complex and your simple select * from table where you='amateur with "10years" experience in SQL' ain't going to fucking cut it. Learn to solve problems and think analytically instead of copy fucking pasta.

Weekly Q: How do you keep yourself motivated?
A: No matter what - I allocate a little bit of time every week to something I really care about right now.

When I was green it was mostly learning. Now it's mostly codebase cleanup, dev experience improvement or dabbling with some feature that's not prio.

Might not sound like a lot but doing it weekly does add up.

There are a couple:

A system that updates user accounts to connect them into our wifi system by parsing thousands of processing files written in Clojure. The project was short lived and mainly experimental, It has complete test cases and the jar generated from it is still purring silently on the main application. It was used to replace an $85k vendor application that made no fucking sense. The code has not been touched in 2 years and the jar is still there. The dba mentioned the solution to the vendor, the vendor tried buying it from me, but being that it belongs to the institution nothing was touched, still, it got the VP's attention that I can make programs that would be bought for that level, it caught his attention even more when I showed him the codebase and he recognized a Lisp variant (he is old, and was back in the day a Fortran and Cobol developer)

A small Python categorical ML program that determines certain attributes of user generated data and effectively places them on the proper categories on the main DB. The program generates estimates of the users and the predictions have a 95% correctness rate. The DBA still needs to double check the generated results before doing the db updates. I don't remember how I coded it because I was mostly drunk when I experiment on the scenario. It also got the attention of the VP and director since the web tech manager was apparently doing crazy ML shit that they were not expecting me to do, it made them paranoid that I would eventually leave for a ML role somewhere, still here, but I want more moneys!!

A program that generates PDF documentation from user data, written in Go, Python and Perl (yes Perl) I even got shit from the lead developer since I used languages outside of their current scope of work. Dude had no option but to follow along with it :P since I am his boss

Many more. I am normally proud of my work code. But my biggest moment is my current ntural language processing unit that I am trying to code for my home, but I don't have enough power to build it with my computers, currently, my AI is too stupid, but sometimes it does reply back to my commands and does the things I ask it to do (simple things, opening a browser, search for a song etc) but 7 times out of ten it wont work :P

I just found the current main project of the people who originally wrote the codebase I’m mainly working with. After all these years they still write incoherent spaghetti mess. I need to make a throwaway GH account just to tell them people like them are the reason people hate PHP…

Hello all,

I am an apprentice, 19. I joined this software developer apprenticeship to leave college as it was not particularly great for my mental health, and programming is the only thing I can do reasonably well.

The company that I find myself in is a strange one. It has about twenty or so employees, but we all instructed to operate as if we are a giant company—our sales person, for example, will tell our clients that we have hundreds.

The development team is a collection of software developers. There is no database administrator, network administrator, software engineer (not in name only), test engineer, requirements engineer, etc. There are just several software developers. Of these developers, one has left by now. When he joined, he was promised to be working on a new system: he left after spending seven years on an old system. A new developer has just arrived to replace him: he was told he would be working with Raspberry Pis; it was interesting to see his face after we informed him that we do not use Raspberry Pis.

The codebase is fourty-years-old and written in Delphi, which is some kind of cousin of pascal, from what I understand. Code is not peer-reviewed. Instead, it is self-reviewed, and you just push whatever changes you make. The code is very much spaghetti, and there is a whole array of bugs that, at least to me, look impossible to track down and fix. I have a bug assigned to me at the moment were someone appears somewhere when they are not supposed to. After asking seniors about this, I learn of this huge checking mechanism and all of its flaws: a huge, flawed checking mechanism... for toggling a single boolean value. This isn't a complicated boolean value, by the way, this is just a value to say whether someone has clocked in or clocked out of a building, via a button.

In terms of versioning, we have several releases, and we often do development work in older releases (or new releases and then write them into older releases) because our clients are larger than us and often refuse to upgrade, and the boss does not want to lose any contracts. We also essentially have multiple master branches.

With the lack of testers, bizarre version control, what appears to be unfiffled promises to staff, etc. I must ask that, since this is my first gig as a software developer, is any of this normal?

A sweaty furry sodomizing a dead dog would still be less disgusting than the codebase on which I have to work, some highlights are:
- The same class repeated 40 times with little variations instead of using some decent parametrization
- Inexistent encapsulation and separation of concerns, most changes requires to modify and recompile 2-3 indipendent Maven projects
- Abuse of inheritance which instead of being used to create "is-a" relationship as it should be it's used to reuse some methods of a class in another instead of using Spring dependency injection as we should be

It would be understandable in a 20 years old legacy projects but in something which started 2 months ago it drives me mad, I tried to fight to change it but in the big enterprise to which I'm "body-rented" it's impossible

Talk of PHP legacy codebase...

Python async is a total, unapologetic shitshow. It’s as if the design goal was explicitly to invalidate the maximum number of thoughtful stackoverflow QAs possible. Pro tip: make you sure to memorize the release dates of every minor version of python from 3.5-3.10, so that you know which stackoverflow answers are not relevant in any way to your codebase.

is the job of being a "software engineer" (code monkey) supposed to be many parts of wannabe archeologist figuring out what the fuck is going on, happened, and reading the codebase , so you can figure out how to implement your jira ticket?

I was asked to make proof of concept small frontend app with some simplified requirements, they asked me because it should be written in the stack I done most of my career work with. I do it in 3 days instead of 5, using those 2 days to optimise the app and explore different approaches. I noted down my findings, what to avoid and reasons and also what is good to use and reasons and shared with everyone.

We waited for the project to start, I started working on another project in the meantime and there was a big rush to make project go live etc., so I was consumed 100% on that new project.

So they put in charge backend php developer to do frontend js work. I said ok, do you need help in starting out? Nah, my proof of concept repo is enough.

4 days before that small project goes live they asked me to do code review. All things I noted down to avoid are in the codebase, few bad practices but everything is over-engineered (in a very bad way), some parts should be more flexible as current setup is very rigid, having almost all kinds of CSS, I saw SASS, CSS variables, 2 different CSS-in-JS tools with some additional libraries that is used to toggle classes.

I don't know how to approach this as I am not asshole as a person and I don't want to say to my colleague that his codebase is completely trash, but it is.

The worst parts: They called me to help finish the app and budget is almost spent!

I would rewrite the whole app as the state of the current app is unusable and everything is glued with bad Chinese ducktape that barely holds.

Additional points because it won't bundle as everything is f**ked.

I am seriously thinking of duplicating master branch and refactor the whole fricking app but won't do that as I am burning midnight oil on other two projects. Don't worry overtimes are paid.

I hate those shitty situations, this project was supposed to be tiny, sweet and example of decent project in this company but it is instead big fat franken-app that will be example how smart it is to avoid putting backend dev to do frontend work (I also agree for vice versa)!

Worst was getting head hunted into my current role at this terrific company.
Three months later I’m done with it.
It’s not shit shitty codebase, or the lack of direction that self governing teams have. It’s not the megalomaniac company owner. It’s the bullshit team mobbing and 8 hours of video calls a day.

The best part.
Come he’ll or high water I’m getting myself out before the end of the year.
I’d rather be busy and have f’k all chance of promotion than any more of this. At least the day will fly by.
Just hope I don’t make the same mistake twice, that’s become my biggest worry now.

I prefer to build my solutions bottom-up, creating a component right after identifying the need for it but before whatever would be using it, because this gives me the flexibility to think about the problem in the general sense and produce an optimal solution without overspecialization.

VSCode's Rust plugin is a bit overzelous about dead code detection and runs it whenever the codebase is deemed to be correct, highlighting every item that isn't referenced from main, even if it is referenced from something else that's unreferenced.

Whenever I finally defeat the borrow checker and produce a correct solution my entire codebase lights up in yellow like a christmas tree and I'm completely addicted to this.

Switching workplace after new year.
Already told boss I'm quitting last week. And it is like as soon as It was official I lost all patience with the company bullshit and lost the little interest I had left for my daily work. The codebase seemes bad before but now it feel 100x worse.

Work ethic keeps me from doing nothing but man I just want to get out.

Will be so nice to work with a new project and code base.

I was recently hired as a fullstack developer internally in another team

While interviewing the manager specifically mentioned angular in the skill sets but *surprised* the codebase is in angular js

The previous ui guy didn't bother to upgrade to further versions and basically managed by adding band-aid fixes and patches to new requirements

Now the manager wants me to revamp the ui asap because it looks like something from early 2010s , i explain to him that I know angular ( previous projects was in angular 12 ) and this is in angular js which is totally different

To revamp it would basically mean rewrite

Manager thinks I'm cooking up excuses to avoid work or stretch my estimates ...

Situation: I have a love hate relationship with python due to the lack of types as I have in more established languages such as C#, Java and shit even TypeScript

Situation (cont): A rather large codebase that i have developed for multiple processes at work run on Python.

I don't hate it, I just don't absolutely love it, there is a lot of things to like about Python, but man I do have some conflicts with it, I have been facing out to use other solutions that feel scripty, such as the newer versions of C# with .net, but I would say that about 80% of our codebase runs on Python, the rest is PHP.

I am somewhat traditional in the way my programs run, I started with C++ and Java, then for whatever reason (I blame codecademy at the time) switched over to Ruby and Javascript, mostly Javascript. I do not remember how I found Python, I do remember learning it with an online tutorial, shit was easy to get started with.

My codebase running on Python is huge, and they do a lot from automation scripts, to data gathering and database management, never had I been bitten with the "oh noes is so slow" bug since my code is not Google level big, for everything else Python seems rather fast imho

I dunno, big time love hate relationship

Joined a new project. The codebase is… Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, is there ANY decent project in vue which has an hint of readibility in this damn world?

Every single time anyone talks about vue I roll my eyes “no I swear we managed it well!” 600 lines of code components. Is there even a good way to structure it for big apps?

At what point do you stop overthinking random code optimizations and move on to the next task?

Best:
- I built a good automation mechanism with a decent UI [slackbot]
- used as few frameworks and ext libs as I could. Mostly based on bare java
- client wanted to migrate it to Spring
- got 3 peeps assigned for the migration
- 2 months later their effort failed.
- win: my project has not been molested with Spring

Worst:
- i had an idea to develop smth on top of jmeter, using jmeter as a lib
- I downloaded and imported jmeter's src code
- static contexts, singletons, jmx/rmi everywhere [java is deprecating rmi support]
- not gonna happen... Not gonna build a new project on top of a legacy codebase.

Just finished a defect fix, and turns out there's another unrelated but harder bug in the codebase. We are in the last few days of the release.

I told my tech leads that it was an unrelated problem and showed them in detail. I told them I was starting work on it now, but there should probably be a new defect entered for it.

They actually said for me to piggyback the old defect and let this go under the radar. Actually laughed it off like it was no big deal. Like WTF! I don't think its very unreasonable for devs to want separate defects for separate bugs. They're worried about analytics and shit, but I'm the one left holding the rug, looking like I spent a week on a trivial defect.

Nothing like having to work on a codebase which has most of the class and variable names in a language you don't speak :/

probably when 8 hours before rushed release i pushed my part of the codebase into the wrong branch which fucked up everyone else's rushed release of different parts of that codebase and now a colleague had to spend several hours unfucking the repo on top of finishing the rushed release of his part of the codebase.

oh and in the end my code didn't even work as it was supposed to.

Question: We are planning to transition our old ES5 codebase to modern ES6/ES7 and even typescript.

What would be the build tool you would recommend if we want to start supporting ES6/ES7 and even Typescript?

Webpack, Vite some other?

This is a vanilla Javascript Project with large codebase it's been built using custom build tools like UglifyJS and UglifyCSS and of after lots of begging it finally got the green light to move to a more modern build tool and start supporting a more standard JavaScript Features.

Mainly I want to move to TypeScript but transition would be slow so the build tool would need to support .ts and .js as well, that is traspile both the .ts and .js into one final production build.

What build tool would you recommend for that?

Some people are plain worse than a windows update.

Please overcommunicate! And ask questions. Assumptions are leading to nothing but overwork in a project where there are 8 devs contributing on a single codebase.

I really need a fresh codebase.
Just to rejuvenate and trick my mind.

Mathematics feels like a giant old undocumented codebase in that, yes you could read the comments of each function, you would rather have a nice complete, well formatted docs page that in human terms explains how things work together, why they are here and where they came from.

To the reactjs-centered fucks who develop the popular web component viewing software called storybook: have you ever heard about semver?
89 alpha/beta/rc releases for a minor update 6.3 -> 6.4 with "100's of fixes and enhancements" "in preparation of the HUGE 7.0 release". Gee I wonder will it have 1000's of bugfixes? How bug-ridden is this software?
Every minor upgrade since 5.x is backwards-incompatible and requires a day of frustration finding out in how many more fucking NPM packages you split your codebase just because it's cool. I know move fast and break things, but some of us have other things to do than resolving node_modules incompatibilities you know. "No just hit 'npx sb upgrade' you say". I did, I really did! And the browser showed a blank screen of death with tons of cryptic React errors, it really did! Thank God you abstracted away all your dependencies in that sb command, now you can't even read the docs about what could have gone wrong with a specific sub-package. You have @storybook/html but the docs redirect to React pages, so good luck if you use something else

This is so sad... like.. the IDEA of storybook is great. But why did faith put the capacity to develop such a tool into the hands of people who think the world centers around React and JSX.. HTML should have been the default, and then you build on top of that for your fav framework, not the other way around

How to disconnect from work after working hours? Im working for the last 4 months as a mid level dev in this company. I mean Im able to problem-solve and do my work but sometimes I get so addicted to problem solving that I get worried and become obsessed, hyperfixated (especialy if Im stuck on something for lets say a couple weeks). It goes to the point where I work from home 12-14 hours a day just to figure out some bug in the flow.

Thing is, our codebase is large and when doing every new refactor/feature some surprises happen. I dont have a decent mentor who could teach me one on one or even do pair programming with. All i have is just some colleagues who can point me to right direction or do a code review from time to time. Thats it.

I dont know why I take this so personally. For example I had to do a feature which I did in 1 week, then MR got approved by devs and QA. After that during regression they found like 3 blockers and I felt really bad and ashamed. While in reality our BA did not define feature properly, devs who reviewed it didnt even launch the code and poke around in the app, and our team's QA tested only the happy scenario. Basically this is failing/getting delayed because of a failure in like 6-7 people chain.

However for some reason Im taking this very personally, that I, as a dev failed. Maybe due to my ADHD or something but for the next days or weeks as long as I dont find solution I will isolate myself and tryhard until I get it right. Then have a few days of chill until I face another obstacle in another task again. And this keeps repeating and repeating.

My senior colleague tells me to chill and dont let work take such a toll on my emotional/physical/mental health. But its hard. He has 7 years of experience and has decent memory. I have 2-3 years of experience and have ADHD, we are not the same. I dont know how to become a guy who clocks out after 8 hours of work done everyday. Its like I feel that they might fire me or I will look bad if I dont put in enough effort. Not like I was ever fired for performance issues... Anyways I dont know how to start working to live, instead of living for work.

I hate who Im becoming. I dont work out anymore, started smoking a lot, dont exercise. I live this self induced anxiety driven workaholic lifestyle.

Hey all, just wondering what it was like for you when starting out your career.

I'm a newish dev, been full time for about a year hired right after my internship. My role has a bunch of hats ranging from DevOps/sys admin to software engineering, sort of a weird mashup of skills so it's not pure software engineering. I mainly work with python, Ansible, and some terraform.

However I still just want to say I'm sorely disappointed in my undergrad classes.

I have a "concentration" in software engineering. I did struggle in classes as I was working full time to pay for classes without taking out loans, but I don't really remember learning a whole lot that was useful in industry.

Overall I just feel like just paid money for a degree that didn't teach me very much useful stuff. Maybe I'm just lacking experience? Maybe what I learned I just don't notice myself applying because it's subconscious?
My coworkers have taught me so much, and I'm very thankful they invested that time into me. I still get ripped to shreds during code reviews lmao (definitely not as much compared to when I first started but I'm also still learning and will always be)
Plus our company docs are pretty good so I can always read through them or search our codebase for examples on how to utilize in house tools etc.

I definitely hit the jackpot with this job, just feeling like I should have been prepared more.

Can github (not google) copilot be run on a company server? Or some scaled down version?

I could see this being useful for a version that only parses the code the company wants it to parse. Like an existing codebase. I often find snippets on how to solve something in the existing codebase, but it is usually hit or miss.

I feel super discouraged. I just got a new job from being let go from my previous one, and I’m already thinking about quitting.

They really threw me into the weeds with a couple of complex tasks that require a lot of BE work and all I really do is FE. I’m still just trying to learn how the framework actually works. I think they expect me to become full stack. Now I find myself just starting at the computer screen most of the day because I have no fucking idea how to start working. The codebase and local environment is also fucked up super bad and barely runs on my machine.

Also, whenever I reach out these people they give the most minimal answers and have swollen egos. The frameworks they use have a really shitty community and bad documentation, so googling anything is really pointless. Working on this project, it has made me consider giving up development.

I am wondering if this is just a me thing though. Should I quit or stick with it for a bit?

I overheard this mid level dev discussing a new task with a senior dev. They're discussing compile error in cmake. I realized that the mid level dev asked so many basic stuff that are easily google-able. Mind you, our codebase is cmake based, how come she didn't know even the basics and yet survive in our company for years?
I felt bad for the senior dev, as I knew he's busy with his work. He couldn't do his job because he had to do hand-holding with this dev.

My biggest mistake is often trying to solve things by myself which will take hours instead of just asking a senior. But asking other dev for every little things are also annoying. Why can't you just google shit up or RTFM?

I saw this once in our codebase =>

!!statement

Why would you do that?

As a dev, how can you work with a teamlead that second, third and 4th guesses your decisions?

Simple example: fixed a bug, but temlead was shitting bricks about some error. Did a thorough research and told him that that error message was already in codebase for years and can be safely ignored because there is no workaround. Main thing is that our solution is working and I followed the latest standards. Basically I had to advocate for myself. Fine. Shit happens I get it. But it seems that this is becoming a pattern.

Then I had to do another issue: fix some bugs. While testing I was not able to reproduce any bugs. Filmed a video of app, attached all proofs to the jira issue and informed the teamlead. He couldnt believe his eyes! One month ago he saw the bug and now its gone! I had to retest 3-4 times everything and he still doesnt take my word for it.

I cant continue working like this. I have few years of experience under my belt, never had to deal with such insecure teamlead. How can I work if he second guesses everything what I do? Jesus.

Spent 4 fucking weeks trying to implement this motherfucking feature and in the end after 15 failed implementations it turns out that my first implementation was good. Turns out this other devs fucking feature had a bug (he forgot to add two lines to clear current state and to update current state again). Motherfucker.

Took me over 100 hours to debug that piece of shiet spaghetti codebase and I had to go through grief stages few times to the point where I started questioning my own damn ability

Sometimes it sucks not being able to go step by steap and think in a linear way. I guess if I followed the breadcrumbs I would have solved it sooner. But poking around things and trying out random solutions was like going through a maze blindfolded until I got it right but I guess thats how my brain works.

How to handle a company in which I work as a junior android dev for the past 7 weeks where there is zero mentoring?

I have 2.5 year experience in android dev and then I had a 1.5 year gap. I was looking for a company where I can get back on track, fill my knowledge gaps and get back in shape. So I accepted lower starting salary because of this gap that I had. Me and manager agreed that I will get a 'buddy' assigned and will get some mentoring but nope..

70% of my scrum team with teamlead are overseas in USA and I have just 2 senior colleagues from my scrumteam that visit office only once a week. Ofcourse there are other scrum teams visiting office daily but I personally dread even going to office.
Nobody is waiting for me in there. What's the point if when I need to ask something I have to always call someone? I can do it from home, no need to go to the office.

My manager dropped the ball and basically disappeared after first 2 days of helping me setting up, we had just two biweekly half-assed 1on1’s where he basically rants about some stuff but doesn’t track my progress at all. I bet he doesn’t even know what I’m working on. Everything he seems to be concerned about is that I come to work into office atleast 3 days a week and then I can work remaining 2 days from home.

I feel like they are treating me as a mid level dev where I have to figure out everything by myself and actual feedback is given only in code reviews. I have no idea what is the expectation of me and wether Im doing good or well. Only my team business analyst praised me once saying that I had a strong onboarding start and I am moving baldly forward… What onboarding? It was just me and documentation and calling everybody asking questions…

My teammates didn't even bother accepting me into a team or giving me a basic code overview, we interact mainly in fucking code review comments or when I awkwardly call them when I already wasted days on something and feel like I'm missing some knowledge and I am to the point where I don't cere if they are awkward, I just ask what I need to know.

Seriously when my probation is done (after 6 weeks) I'm thinking of asking for a 43% raise because I am even sacrificing weekends to catch up with this fucked up broken phone communication style where I have to figure out everything by myself. I will have MR's to prove that I was able to contribute from week 1 so my ass is covered.

I even heard that a fresh uni graduate with 0 android experience was hired just for 15% les salary then me. I compared our output, I am doing much better so I definetly feel that Im worthy of a raise. Also I am getting a hang of codebase and expected codestyle, so either these fuckers will pay for it or I will go somewhere else to work for even less salary as long as I get some decent mentoring and have a decent team with decent culture. A place where I could close my laptop and go home instead of wasting time catching up and always feel behind. I want to see people around me who have some emotional intelligene, not some robots who care only about their own work and never interact.

Fuck this shit

I’m interning at this place and the code is ALL OVER THE PLACE. I have to rewrite every damn function and the code base is so obfuscated and stupid on multiple levels. I’m sick of this shit and literally every damn thing needs to be rewritten from scratch

Feel dirty writing in c. How do people even deal with unsafe pointer type casting/memory allocation/free? The codebase is plagued with memory leaks and there is no test.

I will just pretend I can't read c code and play dumb when shit happens

Lol, installing an Abp package literally breaks startup, you don't even have to use the package, just install it and the shit breaks.

God I hate this bloated piece of shit framework, can't wait to move this codebase to Go.

Started freelancing via agency as android dev for this client. The product is a kyc mobile sdk with a flow of around 20 steps for identification. My job is to maintain the sdk/fix bugs/add features and so on.

Communication seems to be so fucking terrible.

For example the product owner is not technical and sucks at defining issues.
QA sucks at testing and providing feedback. Backend sucks at documentation and seems to live in a parallel universe, swagger docs are outdated. Previous android dev whom I replaced gave me 2 hours of his time during his last month in the company, answered some questions and then left today (which was release day) with around 6 bugs hanging. Now because we are behind schedule the PO is grilling my ass so I would provide hourly estimates, while I dont even know the codebase yet since I spent maybe 30 hours on it in the last month.

What a clusterfuck. I feel like Im in a kindergaden where people are either lazy or incompetent. It seems that sweet gig of 40 hours a month will become much more hours or my output will be low :)

Every single css tutorial:
"Don't use !important"
Meanwhile in the codebase I'm working with at least half the classes have !important on one or more properties

Can you give me some tips on how to debug a massive app? (Android app running on android studio which is basically intellij idea).

For example I need to fix a bug where a certain action results in unexpected behaviour.

But oh my god the codebase is so large (mainly architecture is MVVM and rxjava) that searching for the specific place is like searching for a needle in haystack.

For example I added a breakpoint in few places, but I can see only like 4 or 5 last frames in the stack that led to the current action, last frame is a lambda which doesnt help me so frankly Im unable to even track where current event started. I am loosing my mind. I cant even find where the buttonclick action started because everything is reactive and done with observables which can be anywhere.

Any tips on debugging will be appreciated

Its most enjoyable when you are working on a codebase that was cleary planned and thought out beforehand. Bugs are easy to fix, features are easy to make because you already have a blueprint of how its supposed to look, modifying features is easy because you already know where to look to make the changes. You can work with plain jquery or fucking visual basic and youll still have a better time then with any modern framework if you have that.

Any advice on how to deal with gatekeeping developers? How to deal with red tape?

I work with people that are resistant to code and process change. Continuous pedantic pushback on nearly anything; one raised a fuss over metrics not being satisfactory at a 5% threshold for alerting stating that 4.99% metrics variance wouldn't trigger an alert.

It's genuinely as though my coworkers are all scared of code based on the way they behave. They don't seem to code very often either.

I'm someone that codes quickly but I have to constantly write proposals for quite literally any change to the codebase. Even IF there were issues we could always rollback (and even then we have metrics, alerts, canary rollouts, feature flags, etc etc). As a quick aside, my pace isn't related to the pushback nor experience/skill level. Just affects my morale and mental heth to be blocked.

I can communicate effectively and I try to be as clear as possible in my proposals but this is absolutely driving me up the wall and killing my motivation.

This is a faang-level company and I would've expected better.

Any advice on how to best navigate this? Is this the norm???

Had a branch that I was ready to push to a remote and open a PR tp this big open source project.

I was making a git pull from their master in order to not have merge conflicts on remote... and then I see that their master branch already had the feature that I was trying to implement, merged 10 days ago.

A lot of work... for nothing.

Because I had to wait on some old ass company policy process bs on open source software to give me permission to push to a codebase we're using in their internal product.

Well in today's meeting I made a reference to this... they still insisted on intellecxual preperty bs. Im questioning their ability to think.

Im pushing fixes and enhancements to that without permission, idgaf

Want to experience how a real dev nightmare feels like? Then try creating a native mac app. And make sure you use SwiftUI.

* No access to the SDK source code, thus you can only rely on documentation
* Everything you find on google is intended for iOS (including official documentation)
* Talking about official documentation it’s almost worthless
* Apple team doesn’t give a shit about macOS, so most obvious features are missing.

On a serious note, SwiftUI can be fun when it works, when it doesn’t you still can fallback to AppKit, but your codebase looks like some frankenstein monster.

I sometimes regret I was so stuborn to make a native app, instead of just cross-platform app with WebView.

#Suphle Rant 3: Road to PHP8, Flow travails

Some primer: Flows is a feature that causes the framework to bypass handling the request now but read it from cache. This cache entry is meant to be populated without warming, based on the preceding request. It's sort of like prefetching but done on the back end

While building Suphle, I made some notes on some chapters about caveats and gotchas I may forget while documenting. One such note was that when users make the Flow request, the framework will attempt to determine who user is, using authentication mechanism defined on the first module (of the modular monolith)

Now, I got to this point during documentation and started wondering whether it's impossible for the originating request to have used a different authentication mechanism, which would result in an empty entry for returning user. I *think* it's possible cuz I've got something else called "route mirroring", where web based routes can be converted to API routes. They'll then return JSON, get served under defined API path, use JWT, all automatically. But I just couldn't connect the dots for the life of me, regarding how any of this could impact authentication on the Flow request

While trying to figure out how to write the test for this or whether it was even necessary (since I had no use case), it struck me that since Flow requests are not triggered by an actual user, any code attempting to read authenticated user will see nothing!

I HATE it when I realize there's ambiguity or an oversight, after the amount of attention and suffering devoted. This, along with a chain of personal troubles set off despondency for a couple of days. No appetite for food or talk. Grudgingly refactored in this update over some days. Wrote some tests, not all passed. More pain. May have to convert them to unit tests

For clarity, my expectation is, I built this. Nothing should be impossible for me

Surprisingly, I caught a somewhat lucky break –an ex colleague referred me to the 1st gig I'm getting in 1+ year. It's about writing a plugin for some obscure forum software. I'm not too excited cuz it's poorly documented and I'll have to do a lot of groping, they use arrays instead of objects etc. There's no guarantee I'll find how to implement all client's requirements

While brooding last night, surfing the PHP subreddit, stumbled on a post about using Rector to downgrade a codebase. I've always been interested in the reverse but didn't have any incentive to fret over it. Randomly googled and saw a post promising a codebase can be upgraded with 3 commands in 5 minutes to PHP 8. Piqued my interest around 12:something AM. Stayed up all night upgrading it, replacing PHPSTAN with Psalm, initializing the guy's project, merging Flow auth with master etc. I think it may have taken 5 minutes without the challenge of getting local dev environment to PHP 8

My mood is much lighter than it was, although the battle is not won yet –image tests are failing. For some weird reason, PHP8 can't read generated test images. Hope I can ride on that newfound lease on life to study the forum and get the features working

I have some other rant but this is already a lot to digest in one sitting. See you in rant #4

What's the general Software Engineering rule of thumb again for frontend templating code?

If I look at certain websites, I notice some code smells in PHP such as:
$.modal = <?php echo $(base)["username"] != 'me' ?' ': echo 'style="display=none"' ?>

or just in general places in the code where PHP gets used as a templating engine for gluing together pieces of HTML code based on conditionals spread out over the codebase and the database itself too. To make things worse, this carries over to JavaScript ajax functions. As a developer, this to me just seems like spaghetticode.

On the other hand, many popular frameworks properly do templating, such as EJS, containing templating in one place and not mixing it with logic too much but just having simple output like <%= %>.

I know I've seen frameworks like Angular 1 contain pieces of HTML into directives, but maybe that's something different, more 'OO'-simulating or cleaner.

Was working on a nestjs api and building it on a starter template. After a year of work nest framework has been upgraded by two major version and api is unupgradable and in dependency hell.

Solved it by doing a transplant into new codebase built using cli. Only took two days. Everything went better than expected.

Questions to other freelances out there.
I suppose it's a common occurrence to be involved in some project, asked to add some feature or modify something, and then looking at the source and find an unmanageable burning mess.
If upon such a discovery you decide you're not taking the job - for example, given the situation you need to charge quite a lot more and the customer cannot pay the appropriate amount - how do you go on explaining your reasons?
You just go out directly telling them about the dire situation of their codebase? Try to find a nice way of telling the truth? Make some excuse (cannot because personal reasons)?

Just curious

How do you deal when you are overpromising and underdelivering due to really shitty unpredictable codebase? Im having 2-3 bad sprints in a row now.

For context: Im working on this point of sale app for the past 4 months and for the last 3 sprints I am strugglig with surprises and edgecases. I swear to god each time I want to implement something more complex, I have to create another 4-5 tickets just to fix the constraints or old bugs that prevent my feature implementation just so I could squeeze my feature in. That offsets my original given deadlines and its so fucking draining to explain myself to my teamlead about why feature has to be reverted why it was delayed again and so on.

So last time basically it went like this: Got assigned a feature, estimated 2 weeks to do it. I did the feature in time, got reviewed and approved by devs, got approved by QA and feature got merged to develop.

Then, during regression testing 3 blockers came up so I had to revert the feature from develop. Because QA took a very long time to test the feature and discover the blockers, now its like 3 days left until the end of the sprint. My teamlead instantly started shitting bricks, asked me to fix the blockers asap.

Now to deal with 3 blockers I had to reimplement the whole feature and create like 3 extra tickets to fix existing bugs. Feature refactor got moved to yet another sprint and 3 tickets turned into like 8 tickets. Most of them are done, I created them just to for papertrail purposes so that they would be aware of how complex this is.

It taking me already extra 2 weeks or so and I am almost done with it but Im going into really deep rabbithole here. I would ask for help but out of other 7 devs in the team only one is actually competent and helpful so I tried to avoid going to him and instead chose to do 16 hour days for 2 weeks in a row.

Guess what I cant sustain it anymore. I get it that its my fault maybe I should have asked for help sooner.

But its so fucking frustrating trying to do mental gymnastics over here while majority of my team is picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them but they manage to look good infront of everyone.

Meanwhile Im tryharding here and its no enough, I guess I still look incompetent infront of everyone because my 2 weeks task turned into 6 weeks and I was too stubborn to ask for help. Whats even worse now is that teamlead wants me to lead a new initiative what stresses me even more because I havent finished the current one yet. So basically Im tryharding so much and I will get even extra work on top. Fucking perfect.

My frustration comes from the point that I kinda overpromised and underdelivered. But the thing is, at this point its nearly impossible to predict how much a complex feature implementation might take. I can estimate that for example 2 weeks should be enough to implement a popup, but I cant forsee the weird edgecases that can be discovered only during development.

My frustration comes from devs just reviewing the code and not launching the app on their emulator to test it. Also what frustrates me is that we dont have enough QA resources so sometimes feature stands for extra 1-2 weeks just to be tested. So we run into a situation where long delays for testing causes late bug discovery that causes late refactors which causes late deliveries and for some reason I am the one who takes all the pressure and I have to puloff 16 hour workdays to get something done on time.

I am so fucking tired from last 2 sprints. Basically each day fucking explaining that I am still refactoring/fixing the blocker. I am so tired of feeling behind.

Now I know what you will say: always underpromise and overdeliver. But how? Explain to me how? Ok example. A feature thats add a new popup? Shouldnt take usually more than 2 weeks to do my part. What I cant promise is that devs will do a proper review, that QA wont take 2 extra weeks just to test the feature and I wont need another extra 2 weeks just to fix the blockers.

I see other scrum team devs picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them. Meanwhile Im doing mental gymnastics here and trying to implement something complex (which initially seemed like an easy task). For the last 2 weeks Im working until 4am.

Im fucking done. I need a break and I will start asking other devs for help. I dont care about saving my face anymore. I will start just spamming people if anything takes longer than a day to implement. Fuck it.

I am setting boundaries. 8 hours a day and In out. New blockers and 2 days left till end of the sprint? Sorry teamlead we will move fixes to another sprint.

It doesnt help that my teamlead is pressuring me and asking the same shit over and over. I dont want them to think that I am incompetent. I dont know how to deal with this shit. Im tired of explaining myself again and again. Should I just fucking pick low hanging fruit tasks but deliver them in a steady pace? Fucking hell.

Duck whoever thought using jruby was a good idea! fuck this codebase, outdated dependencies hell and fuck most of the ruby gems documentation

TIL RVM and I are on different assumptions. I'm talking about RVM allowing unbound variables in its scripts.
I don't because I literally have run "rm -rf /" on my Mac because of an unbound variable in the past. So, when I write a shell script, the second line is always "set -eu."
And because RVM allows unbound variables, this line crashes RVM.
Then for some stupidity on my part, I looked into GitHub for its codebase first to get even more clueless about the issue before finally googling to see if anyone had experienced the same problem 🤦

I’ve been jumping on techs for a web application I wrote in Next.js and Mongo (mongoose) using Typescript.
The problem- I hate looking at codebase. Partly due to mongoose has a bug which makes type intelisense slow.
Moving forward, I’ve been creating different projects of the backend, in plain node typescript, in nest, in graphql but my inner self wasn’t satisfied.

Last night I deleted all the projects and decided not to change anything and continue working on the garbage code I’ve written a year ago.