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Management : "How long you think it would take?"
Me : "now this is a rough estimate, but I think building the back-end and database alone could take 6-months minimum"
Management : "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? YOU ARE NOT SERIOUS"
me : "its a big proj..."
Management : "I thought it will be something like 10 days, already told the client it can be done"
me : "but we are not ready"
Management : "how are we not ready? we already have the virtual 3D shop, and we can use this ready-to-deploy eCommerce service as our data base "
... "you need to figure this out, this is not acceptable" he continued
* 2 Days Later -talking to my direct boss *
Boss : "since you don't know how to do it..."
me : "what ? I didn't say I can't do it, all I said it will take six months"
Boss : "yeah yeah, anyway there is this studio, a professional polish studio, we called them and they can do it, we will sign a contract with them, this will let you focus on the front-end. good?"
me : "well alright then"
Boss : "please write a doc, explaining everything needed from the backend"
-to me that was the end of it, took a long time to tell me they made the deal-
* 5 Months later *
- "Abdu, can you come here for a minute..."
- "yes boss?"
- "the document we asked you to do for the Polish studio, did you specify that we needed an integration with the API we are using for eCommerce?"
scared to death I answered : "why of course I did!"
I ran to my PC to check it out because I didn't know, I forgot because no one even comment on my doc. I check it out, and it was clearly explained... I got relaxed...
turns out they didn't even do what we asked them for. took them 5 months, and with no communication whatsoever. all their work was useless to us. complete dump waste.
----------------
never mentioned this until a year later... in a heat of moment when they were asking me to make an impossible task with no men and no time... I reminded them of this story... management didn't like it. but it was the truth. they didnt push this crazily this time13 -
I see my boss interested in learning new languages as if it is gonna be some sort of holy grail but his logic remains the same.
I'm in a step of my life that I finally understand that this language fight is a total waste of time:
PhP is fucking delicious to deploy
Java is fucking delicious to work with spring boot
Python has a fucking delicious syntax and I wanna marry it
Go is fucking delicious to outperform others
Anyway, my point is that when you get the hang of it you should learn concepts and improve your logic instead of hoping language x is gonna save you, its not.13 -
Highlights from my week:
Prod access: Needed it for my last four tickets; just got it approved this week. No longer need it (urgently, anyway). During setup, sysops didn’t sync accounts, and didn’t know how. Left me to figure out the urls on my own. MFA not working.
Work phone: Discovered its MFA is tied to another coworker’s prod credentials. Security just made it work for both instead of fixing it.
My merchant communication ticket: I discovered sysops typo’d my cronjob so my feature hasn’t run since its release, and therefore never alerted merchants. They didn’t want to fix it outside of a standard release. Some yelling convinced them to do it anyway.
AWS ticket: wow I seriously don’t give a crap. Most boring ticket I have ever worked on. Also, the AWS guy said the project might not even be possible, so. Weee, great use of my time.
“Tiny, easy-peasy ticket”: Sounds easy (change a link based on record type). Impossible to test locally, or even view; requires environments I can’t access or deploy to. Specs don’t cover the record type, nor support creating them. Found and patched it anyway.
Completed work: Four of my tickets (two high-priority) have been sitting in code review for over a month now.
Prod release: Release team #2 didn’t release and didn’t bother telling anyone; Release team #1 tried releasing tickets that relied upon it. Good times were had.
QA: Begs for service status page; VP of engineering scoffs at it and says its practically impossible to build. I volunteered. QA cheered; VP ignored me.
Retro: Oops! Scrum master didn’t show up.
Coworker demo: dogshit code that works 1 out of 15 times; didn’t consider UX or user preferences. Today is code-freeze too, so it’s getting released like this. (Feature is using an AI service to rearrange menu options by usage and time of day…)
Micromanager response: “The UX doesn’t matter; our consumers want AI-driven models, and we can say we have delivered on that. It works, and that’s what matters. Good job on delivering!”
Yep.
So, how’s your week going?2 -
Long rant ahead.. 5k characters pretty much completely used. So feel free to have another cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂
So.. a while back this flash drive was stolen from me, right. Well it turns out that other than me, the other guy in that incident also got to the police 😃
Now, let me explain the smiley face. At the time of the incident I was completely at fault. I had no real reason to throw a punch at this guy and my only "excuse" would be that I was drunk as fuck - I've never drank so much as I did that day. Needless to say, not a very good excuse and I don't treat it as such.
But that guy and whoever else it was that he was with, that was the guy (or at least part of the group that did) that stole that flash drive from me.
Context: https://devrant.com/rants/2049733 and https://devrant.com/rants/2088970
So that's great! I thought that I'd lost this flash drive and most importantly the data on it forever. But just this Friday evening as I was meeting with my friend to buy some illicit electronics (high voltage, low frequency arc generators if you catch my drift), a policeman came along and told me about that other guy filing a report as well, with apparently much of the blame now lying on his side due to him having punched me right into the hospital.
So I told the cop, well most of the blame is on me really, I shouldn't have started that fight to begin with, and for that matter not have drunk that much, yada yada yada.. anyway he walked away (good grief, as I was having that friend on visit to purchase those electronics at that exact time!) and he said that this case could just be classified then. Maybe just come along next week to the police office to file a proper explanation but maybe even that won't be needed.
So yeah, great. But for me there's more in it of course - that other guy knows more about that flash drive and the data on it that I care about. So I figured, let's go to the police office and arrange an appointment with this guy. And I got thinking about the technicalities for if I see that drive back and want to recover its data.
So I've got 2 phones, 1 rooted but reliant on the other one that's unrooted for a data connection to my home (because Android Q, and no bootable TWRP available for it yet). And theoretically a laptop that I can put Arch on it no problem but its display backlight is cooked. So if I want to bring that one I'd have to rely on a display from them. Good luck getting that done. No option. And then there's a flash drive that I can bake up with a portable Arch install that I can sideload from one of their machines but on that.. even more so - good luck getting that done. So my phones are my only option.
Just to be clear, the technical challenge is to read that flash drive and get as much data off of it as possible. The drive is 32GB large and has about 16GB used. So I'll need at least that much on whatever I decide to store a copy on, assuming unchanged contents (unlikely). My Nexus 6P with a VPN profile to connect to my home network has 32GB of storage. So theoretically I could use dd and pipe it to gzip to compress the zeroes. That'd give me a resulting file that's close to the actual usage on the flash drive in size. But just in case.. my OnePlus 6T has 256GB of storage but it's got no root access.. so I don't have block access to an attached flash drive from it. Worst case I'd have to open a WiFi hotspot to it and get an sshd going for the Nexus to connect to.
And there we have it! A large storage device, no root access, that nonetheless can make use of something else that doesn't have the storage but satisfies the other requirements.
And then we have things like parted to read out the partition table (and if unchanged, cryptsetup to read out LUKS). Now, I don't know if Termux has these and frankly I don't care. What I need for that is a chroot. But I can't just install Arch x86_64 on a flash drive and plug it into my phone. Linux Deploy to the rescue! 😁
It can make chrooted installations of common distributions on arm64, and it comes extremely close to actual Linux. With some Linux magic I could make that able to read the block device from Android and do all the required sorcery with it. Just a USB-C to 3x USB-A hub required (which I have), with the target flash drive and one to store my chroot on, connected to my Nexus. And fixed!
Let's see if I can get that flash drive back!
P.S.: if you're into electronics and worried about getting stuff like this stolen, customize it. I happen to know one particular property of that flash drive that I can use for verification, although it wasn't explicitly customized. But for instance in that flash drive there was a decorative LED. Those are current limited by a resistor. Factory default can be say 200 ohm - replace it with one with a higher value. That way you can without any doubt verify it to be yours. Along with other extra security additions, this is one of the things I'll be adding to my "keychain v2".11 -
You lousy fucking test class of an ass wipe,
TLDR; it fails and it passes all at the same time.
So during a deployment, one of the pre-deployment test classes fails, not something anyone has worked on so figured I run it manually to see what’s going on, but no the shit of a thing passed second time around.
Now because we can’t deploy without 100% of the test classes passing so I have to organise another deployment which it fails again. Fuck this,
Unprotects master
Git checkout master
Git merge dev
Git push master -f
Protects master
Skrew this!
Well would you look at that, it works now 😰 -
So I am finally plunging into continuous integration. If I make one more deploy script mistake, I've lost enough time to merit having learned a better solution than bash scripting calling git and rhc and py files I wrote. I have failing tests that are failing because they weren't updated after the million and a half urgent changes in the past 2 months, so it's time to act like I am a TDD fanatic and write the tests correctly. So much work. All from me listening to the constant req changes, listening to the urgency, letting non-devs get under my skin if you will. I'm optimistic in all the wrong places - I think I can write that by end of day let's try it. I'm lazy in the wrong places - I think that I can write that test later, because all I changed was XYZ (which took all night but I said I'd get it as close as possible didn't I?). And I think these handful of bash scripts are good enough to make sure I run tests? But remember, I didn't write the tests or I didn't go back and update them. Or the tests that fail, I'm too lazy. And so much of the tests, I would need to use, idk selenium for, and damnit if I really don't want to dig for element IDs to wait for every time I need an AJAX call.
Okay wow, I really did rant here. And discredited myself a bit lol I need to ignore the wrong lazy and embrace the right lazy. Protect myself from myself and from contributors. It really is, up to me now, to rescue myself from my bad habits. Bad habits perpetuated by clients urgency every day, to change things, that should have been finalized in November if we wanted a stable flipping system in January. It feels like the blind (client) leading the blind (me, when I do dumb shit like rush features out the door half tested).
Anyway all this came out, because I have been reading about continuous integration and stumbled upon this quote. And thought someone might laugh at the anachronism like I did
2 -
A client decided to give a refresh to his website. So he said he wanted me to take care of it. Curious because he has an IT guy full-time just for the website.
When I offered the hosting service too the IT guy got crazy, he started making a lot of questions like why should I take full control of the website. I replied that's optional, I can just deploy the website in the current server.
The client said, yes I want you to take care of everything.
IT guy again making questions about what database I'm planning to use, what framework, what version, bla bla bla.
At this point I said to my self: Well, maybe this guy made an awesome job. Probably he used a framework that I don't know. The database must be neat and tidy.
So, I go an check the current website... WordPress... Are you freaking kidding me? The IT guy getting crazy for a premium WP template? Why is he full-time anyway? Why is the client looking for someone else?1 -
I did not think that making a serverless Discord bot would be such a learning experience. The code itself was easy. The hard part was the infrastructure, because I decided to automate it all with Terraform and deploy it on AWS.
Before this project, I had no idea how API Gateways worked. Now I still have very little idea how they work but I managed to build one anyway. Eventually. And then I had to figure out how to automate the deployment of a lambda layer and function that would both still be managed in the Terraform state, with any code changes triggering a rebuild and update for the resource.
And then I had to untangle a dependency mess because API Gateways have some weird issues where two resources that have no explicit dependencies on each other will throw an error if they don't deploy in the right order.
And then I went the wrong way with Github actions trying to conditionally chain multiple workflows together before I realized I could just put multiple jobs with conditions in a single workflow.
And now after all that work over the course of 2 days, I have a bot that does this:
2 -
Our NOC engineer is a CLi nuthead. I send him a link to cmder on Githib.... Might be interesting. Here is the conversation that followed :
Him: it's just cmd with colours. Why do you send me shit?
Me:
Him: You mean I have to install it to use it?
Me:
Him: I see zero benifits. Pretty useless
Me: Well... 10k people think otherwise
Him: I don't understand this Githib anyway. Don't see why we should deploy this everywhere
Me: *Put my noise cancelling headphones back on*2 -
So the saga of broken fucking everything continues at work, and I'm managing it, effectively, and doing it correctly on the first go-round. It's a long process though, because the two retards who preceded me were equally inept for completely different, yet equally disruptive and destructive reasons. The first dude was just plain psychotic, probably still is. I'd post some of his code, but I don't want anyone's face to melt off like those Nazi dudes at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I can handle it because I'm constantly inebriated, which is not as fun as it sounds. If you have to ask yourself if you can handle it, you probably aren't, unless you've had to Uber to/from work due to still being fucking drunk. Anyway, enough about that, and it was only like twice. The rest of the times, I was more blazed than Jerry Garcia at a weed smoking contest. Moving along.
UPS shipping labels broke two weeks ago, I fixed it, but these fucking 10xers jointly decided to not only never implement anything resembling error handling, other than EMPTY GOD DAMN "try/catch"es (empty catch, wow so efficient), and instead of using COMMENTS, which I know are a new thing, they'd wrap blocks of code in something like: if 1 = 0 {} FUCK YOU DICKFACES. As I was saying before I got emotional again, they tied the success to all kinds of unrelated, irrelevant shit. I'm literally needle/haystacking my way through the entire 200GB codebase, ALONE, trying to find all the borked things. Helpfully, my phone is ringing all the time from customer service, complaining about things that are either nothing to do with the site, or due to user stupidity, 75% of the time.
A certain department at my company relies on some pretty specific documents to do their job, and these documents are/were generated from data in the database. So until I can find and fix all of the things, I've diverted my own attention as much as possible to the rapid implementation of a report generation microservice so that no one elses work is further disrupted while I continue my cursed easter egg hunt from fucking hell.
After a little more than two days, I'm about to lauch a standalone MS to handle the reports, and it's unfortunately more complicated than I'd like, because it requires a certain library that isn't available on Winblows, so I've dockerized the application. Anyway, just after lunch, I've finished my final round of tests, and I'm about ready to begin migrating it to the server and setting up (shitty fucking shit) IIS to serve it appropriately. At this point, this particular report has been unavailable by web for about 8 days.
A little after lunch, and with no forewarning of any kind, the manager of managers runs upstairs and screams at me to "work faster" and that "this needs to be back online RIGHT NOW", but I also know that this individual is going to throw a fit if things on this pdf aren't a pixel perfect match. So I just say "that's some amazing advice, I wish I'd had the foresight to just do it better and work faster". Silence for a good five seconds, then I follow up with "please leave and let me get back to my work". At that moment from around the corner, my "supervisor" suddenly, magically even, remembers that he has had the ability to print this crucial, amazingly super fucking important document all along, despite me directly asking him a week ago, and he prints it and takes it where it needs to go. In the time that it takes him to go to that other department and return, I deploy my service.
I spent the rest of the day browsing indeed and linkedin jobs, but damn this market is kinda weird right now, yeah?2 -
When you have a manager that gets the requirements for a super simple content page one month ago...
Then argues with some people about where it needs to go...
Then when it was decided two weeks ago that it needed to be a new publishing site insists on getting approval to deploy the new site even when I said hey I can have this guy set up publishing on our external server...
Gets approval anyway, now the deadline for it to be activated and working is tomorrow and because he is "a Wordpress developer" (by which he can install a theme) he thinks he knows how to fix Wordpress...
Because of the security at our company it needs to be over https and we are doing ssl offload from our publisher and Wordpress doesn't seem to like it or it is his jacked up Windows box running Wordpress? Wtf
Best of all he said "do you think we will meet the deadline". I said I don't think we have a choice, this will be used by a lot of people Saturday for a conference. OMG I was ready to scream...
Now today I need to setup a new cms on an external server and get it done by tomorrow morning, with content. FML -
I have this sbt test that keeps failing on CI. Locally it works fine but soon as it goes through circle CI, shit gets fucked. Now when I incessantly keep rerunning the working flow without any change, it eventually passes and I am able to deploy. I have no idea wtf is happening or what to do about it. Isn't containerizatiom supposed to solve this whole worked on my machine conundrum? I am too unenthusiastic and numb to even feel anyway about this. Wish everything would end.5
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