After listening to two of our senior devs play ping pong with a new member of our team for TWO DAYS!
DevA: "Try this.."
Junior: "Didn't work"
DevB: "Try that .."
Junior: "Still not working"

I ask..
Me:"What is the problem?"
Few ums...uhs..awkward seconds of silence

Junior: "App is really slow. Takes several seconds to launch and searching either crashes or takes a really long time."
DevA: "We've isolated the issue with Entity Framework. That application was written back when we used VS2010. Since that application isn't used very often, no one has had to update it since."
DevB: "Weird part is the app takes up over 3 gigs of ram. Its obviously a caching issue. We might have to open up a ticket with Microsoft."
Me: "Or remove EF and use ADO."
DevB: "That would be way too much work. The app is supposed to be fully deprecated and replaced this year."
Me: "Three of you for the past two days seems like a lot of work. If EF is the problem, you remove EF."
DevA: "The solution is way too complicated for that. There are 5 projects and 3 of those have circular dependencies. Its a mess."
DevB: "No fracking kidding...if it were written correctly the first time. There aren't even any fracking tests."
Me:"Pretty sure there are only two tables involved, maybe 3 stored procedures. A simple CRUD app like this should be fairly straight forward."
DevB: "Can't re-write the application, company won't allow it. A redesign of this magnitute could take months. If we can't fix the LINQ query, we'll going to have the DBAs change the structures to make the application faster. I don't see any other way."

Holy frack...he didn't just say that.

Over my lunch hour, I strip down the WPF application to the basics (too much to write about, but the included projects only had one or two files), and created an integration test for refactoring the data access to use ADO. After all the tests and EF removed, the app starts up instantly and searches are also instant. Didn't click through all the UI, but the basics worked.

Sat with Junior, pointed out my changes (the 'why' behind the 'what') ...and he how he could write unit tests around the ViewModel behavior in the UI (and making any changes to the data access as needed).

Today's standup:
Junior: "Employee app is fixed. Had some help removing Entity Framework and how it starts up fast and and searches are instant. Going to write unit tests today to verify the UI behaivor. I'll be able to deploy the application tomorrow."
DevA: "What?! No way! You did all that yesterday?"
Me: "I removed the Entity Framework over my lunch hour. Like I said, its basic CRUD and mostly in stored procedures. All the data points are covered by integration tests, but didn't have time for the unit tests. It's likely I broke some UI behavior, but the unit tests should catch those."
DevB: "I was going to do that today. I knew taking out Entity Framework wouldn't be a big deal."

Holy fracking frack. You fracking lying SOB. Deeeep breath...ahhh...thanks devRant. Flame thrower event diverted.

Deprecation. What’s that?

Yknow, I want to make an android app that I have in my mind for about half a year now and I already tried twice, both with Kotlin and with Java but everytime I try it's just pain and suffering and frustration...

No it's not because of the language, I like Java and I like Kotlin too and I'd say I'm at least decent at Kotlin and really good in Java...

No no.. the issue is the fucking Android SDK and the mix-and-match documentation available online!!!

Every fucking time I want to implement some sort of UI element, user action or a background service and I start googling how to do it It comes with with at least 3 different stack overflow solutions, all of them saying "that way of doing it is deprecated, instead you should X" and looking up the OFFICIAL FUCKING DOCS it will just make me roll up in the corner and cry because of how fucking inconsistent it is and the retarded domain language it uses... fucking transactions for fucking fragments inside fucking activities... because I guess the word "screen"/"view"/"template" or something similar natural just was too mainstream for the all knowing alphabet soup that google is...

And then you start looking up what the fucking difference even is and how to code it up only to find out there's at least 12 other opinions on how fragments should be used and what should be an activity and what should be a damn fragment...

But that's not all, that's just the base... I get a headache even thinking about how the fucking inflating of templates and the entire R. notation works. You want to open a fucking tiny corner menu with the settings options? WELL THEN YOU FUCKING BETTER REMEMBER TO IMPLEMENT IT THROUGH SOME SORT OF EVENT AND INFLATE THE MENU YOURSELF EVEN THOUGH ITS THE SAME FUCKING THING WITH STATIC STRINGS...

AND WHY THE FUCK DO I NEED LIKE 4 NEW FILES TO IMPLEMENT A FUCKING LISTVIEW...
also talking about ListViews... what was wrong with "ListView"... Why do we need a "RecyclerView"... oh right... because the fucks fucked the fuck up and all the legacy components were designed by a monkey and are next to useless! SO WE NEEDED A NEW NAME FOR THE FIXED VERSION, CANT NAME IT LISTVIEW AGAIN... FUCK YOU...

honestly... if I got a dolar for every "what the fuck android" I said during trying to understand that mess I'd be richer by a few hundred...

oh oh oh, but you know what? You don't like the android SDK? that's fine, you can use fucking React or Flutter or something... yeah.. because instead of torturing myself with the android SDK I want to torture myself with an abstraction of the same SDK and JavaScript as the fucking cherry on top... HAVE YOU FUCKING SEEN THE CODE FLUTTER SHOWS ON THEIR WEBSITE AS THE "Introduction" ?!!!

Look at this piece of shit:

[code in attached image, we could really use a proper Markdown support at least for rants]

THAT'S NOT EVEN THE ENTIRE THING, THAT'S JUST THE *REALLY* UGLY PART...

The fucking nesting... What is it with JS and all the fucking nesting everytime?! It looks like shit.... It reads like shit as well...

WHY, in the name OF FUCK, IS THERE MORE THAN 5 ANDROID FRAMEWORKS and ALL of them... used this FUCKING NOVEL idea of programming using A FUCKING BRACKET WALL

It always looks like:
(code(code[code{code(code{code()})}]));

If I wanted to make a fucking app or a website using fucking Haskell I'd do that.... at this point reading assembly code feels like heaven compared to this retardation... Why is this so popular?! WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE SEE IN IT?! Clearly it's not the aesthetics... it looks like a fucking frog vomit running down an emus leg, fuck that.... I don't even hate classic JavaScript, it's a good enough language and it does what I tell it to... but these ugly fucking frameworks like react, angular and whatever else uses this fucking format can go fuck right off. This is not the way JS is gonna get a better name for itself...

So:
Fuck Google

Fuck the marionette that designed the Android SDK

Fuck the Hellspawn the came up with the "functional-like" way of using JavaScript

Fuck everyone that thinks "JavaScript everywhere" is a good thing

And deeply future-fuck everyone that makes a new framework following any of these standards, stucks a .js at the end of the name and releases his hairball.js of an invention into the fucking world....

It's a mess... fuck everything android related...

Currently trying to convert a Python (2.7) framework into its C++. Surprise, surprise, the C++ APIs are also all deprecated

"Here's a guide to creating your project using our non-deprecated framework, except it will still call our deprecated methods under the hood"

Additionally, I had to make this framework work with OpenCV, which was complaining about my C++ framework being deprecated and not being able to link to missing modules (which were already installed).
All of this has eaten 4 hours of my life, I could as well throw the laptop out of the window

"Try reinstalling the missing modules separately"
*installation takes less than 1 minute*
*runs build again, everything work*

I'm done for today *flies away in desperation*

A word of advice to framework authors:
If I am currently using v2.5.5 of a library, and I update to 2.8.6, I would expect to maybe have to update a few deprecated method calls here and there.
I do not expect the entire API to be completely different, with half the classes totally renamed and restructured. Breaking changes should go into a new major version plz

Do one thing... That's where the trouble starts.

Yeah. Architecture and separation, these are the foundation.

If you don't do these two in a proper and sane way, you most likely end up with the rotten pile of shit most companies call micro services.

Hot glued unmaintainable mess of deprecated shit stapled together by a custom framework abomination cause no one gave a flying fuck to properly design it.

I see these things daily.

I write the reminders every week.

"Hey, lil retarded dev, you don't need that dependency, you can just use languages feature XY added in version XY"

"But that's how I always did it"

Moments where you want to apply violence from the category "inhumane".

Or even more retarded: Yeah it does everything that was written in that one epic that took 6 months with 30 devs to finish.

I sometimes really wonder how some people managed to survive till they got the job. Parents must have been pretty vigilant 24/7...

In reply to atheist in another rant ;)

Management has been promising we'd leave .NET framework for 2 years now. Never fucking happens. A new ASP.NET project was just started last week and yup, OF COURSE, its .NET Framework 4.8.

I'd even be happy with one of the earlier .NET Core versions at this point for fucks sake. I have no clue why tech leads are so happy to create a brand new project on a deprecated framework version.

And yes, I have checked thoroughly. Our whole infrastructure works with .NET Core onward. People are just too lazy to learn new stuff.

Stuff like switching to .NET 6, actually doing unit testing, improving our CI/CD pipeline, refactoring problematic codebases, etc. -> all this stuff is the kind of things they promise me I can work on later whenever I'm so bogged down with work that I'm looking for a light at the end of the tunnel. All empty promises.

Ideally we should be on .NET 6 since its LTS and just stay on the LTS versions as the year goes on.

I am usually lurking in here since I never really worked as a Software Developer, but until I start going to the University, I thought I might also find myself a job in Software Development.

Well... I don't know where to start.

Someone in here heard of JBoss? Me neither... we're using it... It is a Framework to deploy fortified Java Web Applications. My first day was very chaotic and was dedicated to get this fucking shit to work. I got JBoss 7.5 from my colleagues and started deploying the hello world program...

So. Many. Things. Gone. Wrong...

After like 5 hours of troubleshooting, I had to install/setup a new wrapper with my own batch scripts, install SPECIFICALLY jdk 1.7_17 (anything else won't work) and downgrade JBoss to 7.2.

Yeah that's the first thing. Let's continue about JBoss. Version 7.2 uh? What's the newest one though? Oh it's now known as WildFly... huh... FUCKING HELL, THE NEWEST ONE IS VERSION 10.1??? AND EVEN 10.1 IS 1 YEAR OLD? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKK AAAAAAHH...

So yeah, after that, without any expectation, I had a look at our codebase. Unit tests huh? I couldn't find a single self written one to test the applications functions... I asked my fellow devs and they told me that "it is too time consuming and we have to focus on new features, the QM Team will just manually test the application". Ever heard this bullshit? A big fat ass codebase with shittons of customers and not a single unit test...

So last but not least, since it is a web application, it also got a site. Y'know RichFaces? The deprecated front end library for Java Webpages? Where you got like 150 Tables per page everyone with a random id everytime you reload? Yeah I don't think I have to explain that to you guys...

So now YOU tell me? Is this a place to be 😂😂😂

A little background on project fubar:

Project fubar was started a couple of years ago, by an entirely different set of devs, against an entirely different set of requirements which were never made transparent to this day, on a new platform and framework.

That means it had APIs either outdated or deprecated, front-end logic that did things it wasn't supposed to be doing and lots of scope creep and technical debt.

I had to support and fix fubar for the last few months to prime it for UAT. It was the equivalent of plugging leaks which created more leaks.

Finally, I couldn't take it and asked for a week off. I timed it so it would be right after what would have been the final UAT deployment and I'd be back after they completed their test rounds, so I could fix any new or returning defects.

Today I just found out that fubar got put on hold, that UAT was a failure and all fubar-related work had to stop. I have some mixed feelings on this: I worked hard to get fubar working as business wanted, and I was proud of that. But I also didn't like that fubar was constantly changing in scope and function.

I wonder if anyone else has ever felt the same thing?

I started my degree project with PySide. After a few weeks I read that PySide would cease to exist (or at least wouldn't receive Qt5 support). At that point I was already to far in the project to change the underlying framework.

I hoped to continue developing that project, but because I was already working with deprecated technology after quite literally only a few weeks, I lost interest because I didn't want to start from scratch again.

Just started Online Banking at my bank. Checked how much money I have and what I can do on the website.

Afterwards I opened the dev tools and see that there is a js warning. So I open the console and the fucking first thing I see is: Loglevel set to INFO. WHAT THE FUCK?!?

Other things I found out:
API Endpoints are logged here. Two deprecation warnings for a function used. A warning about a deprecated service used.

The log level is now set to WARN. Several more deprecation warnings for the framework from before.

The fuck is this?

I'm on vacation.
A friend asked me if I could work on a freelance web project. I was getting bored of summer vacations so I said yes.
It was a website for online lottery and it was already developed by some freelancers.
Owner wanted more freelancers to revamp design and administration panel.

I looked at the site and knew that I had seen the worst design and code of my life.

Frontend was made of two colors only, black and yellow. Out of both, black was more prominent. Moreover it had nothing related to Js as if it was developed as a challenge to be accomplished without java script.

Admin panel and backend was much worse than that. No security practices and deprecated essential libraries.

The nightmare is about to end as I have inducted a much better design from themeforest for frontend.
Backend is in my homebrew php framework.
(Good luck future freelancers 😆)
I'm positive that next edits will be features additions only and no one will blame my code.

#Suphle Rant 9: a tsunami on authenticators

I was approaching the finish line, slowly but surely. I had a rare ecstatic day after finding a long forgotten netlify app where I'd linked docs deployment to the repository. I didn't realise it was weighing down on me, the thought of how to do that. I just corrected some deprecated settings and saw the 93% finished work online. Everything suddenly made me happier that day

With half an appendix chapter to go, I decided to review an important class I stole from my old company for clues when I need to illustrate something involved using a semblance of a real world example (in the appendix, not abstract foo-bar passable for the docs)

It turns out, I hadn't implemented a functionality for restricting access to resources to only verified accounts. It just hasn't been required in the scheme of things. No matter, should be a piece of cake. I create a new middleware and it's done before I get to 50 lines. Then I try to update the documentation but to my surprise, user verification status turns out to be a subset of authentication locking. Instead of duplicating bindings for both authentication and verification, dev might as well use one middleware that checks for both and throws exceptions where appropriate.

BUT!

These aspects of the framework aren't middleware, at all. Call it poor design but I didn't envisage a situation where the indicators (authentication, path based authorisation and a 3rd one I don't recall), would perform behaviour deviating from the default. They were directly connected to their handlers and executed after within the final middleware. So there's no way to replace that default authentication scheme with one that additionally checks for verification status.

Whew

You aren't going to believe this. It may seem like I'm not serious and will never finish. I shut my system down for that day, even unsure how those indicators now have to refactored to work as middleware, their binding and detachment, considering route collections are composed down a trie

I'm mysteriously stronger the following day, draw up designs, draft a bunch of notes, roll my sleeves, and the tsunami began. Was surprisingly able to get most of previous middleware tests passing again before bed, with the exception of reshuffled classes. So I guess we can be optimistic that those other indicators won't cause more suffering or take us additional days off course