My "Coding Standards" for my dev team

1.) Every developer thinks or have thought their shit don't stink. If you think you have the best code, submit it to your peers for review. The results may surprise you.

2.) It doesn't matter if you've been working here for a day or ten years. Everyone's input is valuable. I don't care if you're the best damn programmer. If you ever pull rank or seniority on someone who is trying to help, even if it isn't necessarily valid or helpful, please have your resume ready to work elsewhere.

3.) Every language is great and every language sucks in their own ways. We don't have time for a measuring contest. The only time a language debate should arise is for the goal of finding the right one for the project at hand.

4.) Comment your code. We don't have time to investigate what the structure and purpose of your code is when we need to extend upon it.

5.) If you use someone else's work, give them the credit in your comments. Plagiarism will not be tolerated.

6.) If you use flash, you will be taken out back and shot. If you survive, you will be shot again.

7.) If you load jQuery for the sole purpose of writing a simple function, #6 applies.

8.) Unless it is an actual picture, there is little to no reason for not utilizing CSS. That's what it's there for.

9.) We don't support any version of Internet Explorer and Edge other than the latest versions, and only layout/alignment fixes will be bothered with.

10.) If you are struggling with a task, reach out. While you should be able to work independently, it doesn't make sense to waste your time and everyone else's to not seek assistance when needed.

11.) I'm serious about #6 and #7. Don't do it.

Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:

Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.

-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.

I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

Manager: Good news everyone, I made a big giant announcement this morning that the app upgrades will be released today!

Dev: They definitely won’t be, we need another 2 weeks minimum. I told you yesterday

Manager: Ok well I already made the announcement that today was the day so too bad for you.

Dev: Doesn’t change the state of things

Manager: 😡 This announcement is supposed to motivate you to work faster! You guys are making me look bad when you don’t support me like this!

Dev: Working as fast as we can, it’s a 2 person dev team for 4 separate applications so it’s quite a bit to get pushed through

Manager: Ok well then stay extra then, we have to get this out asap. Tell your spouses they are not going to be seeing much of you until this work is done. People are starting to ask questions!!!!!

Dev: Not my problem, it’s done when its done. I’m not staying extra.

Manager: !!

// *************

Might be blowing my cover a little but what are they going to do? Fire me? Good luck getting this out without me. They’ve tried to replace me in the past but the cheapest person they could find was 60k more expensive than me and still couldn’t keep up. Probably they’ll ship the work overseas and the code will die in a dumpster fire and cost them even more. Ah well, just another company that doesn’t deserve code.

My brother just called me asking for help in some MS server thing and I'm like "I don't know that!" (I really don't), and he replied "Yeah, you know, mom told me to call you to ask for help.". Jesus Christ. Just because I'm in CS it doesn't mean I know everything informatics-related.
I now know your pain, devRanters. I usually don't mind being the IT support (so much that my parents call me to help them when their computers decide to randomly die or do something weird because of something they've done, but I live like 300km away because of uni so I can't just go there and help them. Sometimes I say "Ask your son" (he's taking a tech course in high school), but my brother cuts out of it like "I don't know how to fix it" without even looking at it sometimes. Well duh, me neither at times, but google is your friend damn it. Sometimes I search for the answers. Other times I just poke around in the program until I find what's wrong. Either way, when I say I don't know and/or I can't really do much about it they give me the usual "We're paying your uni fees for what?" (in a joking tone but. I'M NOT STUDYING FOR THAT, I WANNA BE A GAME DEV DAMN IT)), but goddamn it I don't know everything just because I am a CS student. I wanna help but sometimes I can't. Deal with that >:V

Please don't make junior developers feel they're a burden.
Have you ever googled "how to mentor junior developers"? It's quite mind-blowing how many articles, talks and panels are on this topic. And yet still junior developers are not feeling welcomed in their companies.
Yup, you guessed it, we also have something to add (based on our own experience):

1. Asking for help is not easy. Please don't blow juniors off by telling them to read docs when they ask a question. Always assume they've read it and did a sprint to solve the problem. They ask you, because they see you as a mentor and really need your help. If you can, spend more time with them and guide through the entire problem solving process.

2. Please don't think "I learnt it this way so you should too". If you're in charge of teaching a junior developer, don't expect them to be a carbon copy of yourself. Because even though in your opinion your approach is more "pro", they might not be there yet to use it properly. And last, but not least:

3. Of course, juniors will compare themselves with seniors on their team. And there'll be moments they feel so guilty and so afraid that they cost the company too much, that they need training, and supervision, or are between projects and are not bringing in any money, and they'll fear that their company regrets hiring them. Make sure they don't feel like a burden. As juniors, we often
have this misconception what is expected from us.

Dear tech companies, please set very clear expectations and tell your juniors you're happy. Don't get us wrong here. We don't expect unicorns, roses and pats on the back from companies. We do understand- this is business, and at the end of the day we all are here to make money. To do so, companies need to make smart investments. Junior dev with a great assistance, planned support, and a clear training program will become a great asset. It really is as simple as that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"

Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"

Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"

Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."

Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."

Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."

Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"

Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."

Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."

Cprn: - "Please do?"

Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"

Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."

Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."

Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."

Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."

Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."

Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"

Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."

Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."

Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."

Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."

Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"

Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."

I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

Today I felt sorry for my boss.

Story behind it:
My boss always encourages me to do the right thing. One of those right things is to enforce quality gates in our build pipelines which, as many of you know, means that the build fails if certain quality parameters are not met. Now an external vendor team merged the code this past thursday for a large feature that they had been working on and our build failed majestically throwing out the statistics and the offending files and lines of code.

All hell broke loose and there were escalations and what not and people working extra hours and over the weekend to try and get it right. So, I get a call from my boss earlier today to explain to me how important it is to release the feature and how it's going to be very bad if we don't. He was trying to justify his ask which was to lower the quality criteria and let the build pass for this week. Of course the dev in me was furious but then I realized it's not him but the corporate culture. Why would he or anyone would risk losing their jobs over the quality of code?

If you work at a place where IT is a support function of the company's primary business, I understand the moral compromises you guys have to make sometimes to keep the ball rolling. Thank you for your effort to make the world a better place.
So, thank you boss for all your support. I know it's not always up to you to decide on things but keep up the good work.

My dream is to build a shopping cart for web stores that doesn't fucking suck.

Seriously Bigcommerce, Shopify, Magneto, etc. All of you can eat bag of dicks and burn in hell for ever.

I don't care what languages you fancy, all of their stacks are a pile of shit, monkey patched together with popsicle sticks and duct tape and it all falls apart with high concurrency.

All their greasy haired sales teams will throw all manners of horse shit at the poor bastards who are trying to run a business so they can pad their commission checks... "High availability", "scalable", "reliable", "Increased conversation rate"... Lying dick fucks, all of them! I am calling them the fuck out on that snake oil they're all peddling.

The only thing worse than their shit APIs is the shit documentation and the shit support that accompanies them.

Support of these platforms are pretty much all the same, sure mayhaps one has 24*7 phone support and another closes at 9 or some shit like that, either way the only people they put on the phone are monkeys that will freeze up and say "I'm not a developer so I can't help you"... Guess what, "Eric"! I didn't ask if you're a fucking dev! I'm calling because one of your devs fucked up and I need you to tell him to unfuck it so I can get the fuck on with my day!

Their app/plugin market places are shameful to say the least. The overall quality of software is somewhat dire and it's mostly dominated by oversees developers who speak English about as well as the language they're developing with (not very well usually).

I could go on until I hit the character limit but I'm gonna end it here by saying, all shopping carts suck and they should burn for eternity in the depths of hell so that a savior can free all developers from this agonizing torment.

My team handles infrastructure deployment and automation in the cloud for our company, so we don't exactly develop applications ourselves, but we're responsible for building deployment pipelines, provisioning cloud resources, automating their deployments, etc.

I've ranted about this before, but it fits the weekly rant so I'll do it again.

Someone deployed an autoscaling application into our production AWS account, but they set the maximum instance count to 300. The account limit was less than that. So, of course, their application gets stuck and starts scaling out infinitely. Two hundred new servers spun up in an hour before hitting the limit and then throwing errors all over the place. They send me a ticket and I login to AWS to investigate. Not only have they broken their own application, but they've also made it impossible to deploy anything else into prod. Every other autoscaling group is now unable to scale out at all. We had to submit an emergency limit increase request to AWS, spent thousands of dollars on those stupidly-large instances, and yelled at the dev team responsible. Two weeks later, THEY INCREASED THE MAX COUNT TO 500 AND IT HAPPENED AGAIN!

And the whole thing happened because a database filled up the hard drive, so it would spin up a new server, whose hard drive would be full already and thus spin up a new server, and so on into infinity.

Thats probably the only WTF moment that resulted in me actually saying "WTF?!" out loud to the person responsible, but I've had others. One dev team had their code logging to a location they couldn't access, so we got daily requests for two weeks to download and email log files to them. Another dev team refused to believe their server was crashing due to their bad code even after we showed them the logs that demonstrated their application had a massive memory leak. Another team arbitrarily decided that they were going to deploy their code at 4 AM on a Saturday and they wanted a member of my team to be available in case something went wrong. We aren't 24/7 support. We aren't even weekend support. Or any support, technically. Another team told us we had one day to do three weeks' worth of work to deploy their application because they had set a hard deadline and then didn't tell us about it until the day before. We gave them a flat "No" for that request.

I could probably keep going, but you get the gist of it.

IBM

I have replied to them with scripts, curl commands, and Swagger docs (PROVIDED TO SUPPORT THEIR API), everything that could possibly indicate there's a bug. Regardless, they refuse to escalate me to level 1 support because "We cant reproduce the issue in a dev environment"

Well of course you can't reproduce it in a dev environment otherwise you'd have caught this in your unit tests. We have a genuine issue on our hands and you couldnt give less of a shit about it, or even understand less than half of it. I literally gave them a script to use and they replied back with this:

"I cannot replicate the error, but for a resource ID that doesnt exist it throws an HTTP 500 error"

YOUR APP... throws a 500... for a resource NOT FOUND?????????!!!!!!!!!! That is the exact OPPOSITE of spec, in fact some might call it a MISUSE OF RESTFUL APIs... maybe even HTTP PROTOCOL ITSELF.

I'm done with IBM, I'm done with their support, I'm done with their product, and I'm DONE playing TELEPHONE with FIRST TIER SUPPORT while we pay $250,000/year for SHITTY, UNRELENTING RAPE OF MY INTELLECT.

All web developers should support up to IE9 without any problems.

Why? Because in Korea, it is normal.

Every person uses that damn Win7, which has either IE9 or IE10. Without IE support, no one will browse your webpage.

Now you would ask us, why don't you use other modern browsers?

We would then ask you, why would you install a new browser that is
1. Buggy
2. Heavy
3. Takes up ram
4. Has so many features
when you have an awesome minimalistic browser that is preinstalled, and works in all Windows? No thanks.

So, if you put a message saying you will soon drop support of IE, it means that you won't target Korea. Just after the support drop, there won't be traffic to your web site.

So what is the point of this rant?
1. We love IE. Lol
2. IE is lightweight, minimalistic, and the fastest browser in the world.
3. All websites should NOT drop support for IE.
4. We don't care whether web devs will have a hard time. We just think websites are built with Wix and Wordpress, and they work in IE, meaning, IE support is the number one priority.
5. If you ever start a business in Korea, and has a website, make sure to hire an senior Korean web dev who has worked with IE for a long time.
6. Here is the tl;dr
Hate us. Period.

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

Day 1:

Me: 'Hi'

Middleware guy: 'Raise a Jira. We have always been so accommodating. Contact your manager.'

*Jeez*

===

Day 2:

Me: 'Could you please start the server in dev environment? I am a new joiner. I don't have access. Here is a jira.'

Middleware guy: 'Deadlines may be for you. It is not for me. Wait until tomorrow.'

*Damn, did he get a divorce recently?*

===

Day 5: *An urgent delivery asap* 'Hi, could you please do the configuration of the new app in staging?'

Middleware guy: 'So, here is the split up...
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Task 4
Task 5 & 6
Your app will be configured by tomorrow first half hopefully.. Oh and you can escalate if it is too late..
'
*What a b...*

===

Day 8:

Me: *Doing late sit for pushing a task* 'Hi, we have an issue. The server is not starting. Could it be due to..'

MW guy in 'second' shift: 'Oh, we don't extend support on unusual hours'

Me: 'But this is second shift.'

MW guy: 'Yeah, but I have to go home early now...'

====

Day 10:

Team Lead: 'Any innovative solutions?'

Me: 'Let's go SERVERLESS!' :D

How it is to be a dev in my country?

At bit of an odd question this week.

For me (in the USA), it's being technical support for *every* website my family uses.

Over the weekend my wife visited her aunt and I get a call.

Wife: "How do I create an ebay account?"
Me: "I don't like where this is going. We already have an account."
Wife: "Not for me, dummy, Aunt T. She found some books she wants to buy on ebay."
Me: "You go thru the process to create an account? Email, name, password, etc."
Wife: "We tried that, but it's not working."
<few seconds of silence>
Me: "Oookaaay...why isn't it working? Is there an error?"
Wife: "I don't know, we already clicked off of it. Something about the email."
<few more seconds of silence>
Me: "Can you reproduce the error and tell me?"
Wife: "Uggh..are you serious? We've done it like 10 times, its not working. Just tell me what I need to do."
Me: "If you can't tell me the error, I can't help you. I'm not there and can't see what you see."
Wife: "Stop being an asshole."
<Aunt T takes the phone>
T: "Said something about using another email address. Does that help you?"
Me: "Are you sure you don't already have a ebay account?"
T: "No, I don't think so. I hate ebay. but I really want these books. I don't want the same problems as last time."
Me: "Last time?"
T: "Yes, I bought a coffee cup on ebay from China and it never arrived."
Me: "OK, so you do have an account?"
T: "I don't know, I mean, I never got the cup."
Me: "What email address did you use? I'll send a 'remind me' email so you can reset the password and login"
<go thru the motions, she is able to login>
T: "Ahhh...I do have an account! There are the golf balls I bought for <husband> for Christmas."
<face smack>
Wife: "Why didn't you do this from the start? I thought you knew a lot about computers. We basically figured this out ourselves. Goodbye!"
<click>

One Thursday noon,
operation manager: (looking at mobile)what the.....something is wrong i am getting bunch of emails about orders getting confirmed.
Colleague dev: (checks the main email where it gets all email sent/received) holy shit all of our clients getting confirmation email for orders which were already cancelled/incomplete.
Me: imediately contacting bluehost support, asking them to down the server so just that we can stopp it, 600+ emails were already sent and people keep getting it.
*calls head of IT* telling the situation because he's not in the office atm.

CEO: wtf is happening with my business, is it a hacker?

*so we have a intrusion somebody messed the site with a script or something*

All of us(dev) sits on the code finding the vulnerabilities , trying to track the issue that how somebody was able to do that.

*After an hour*

So we have gone through almost easch function written in the code which could possibly cause that but unable to find anything which could break it.

Head asking op when did you started getting it actually?
Op: right after 12 pm.

*an other hour passes*

Head: (checking the logs) so right after the last commit, site got updated too?. And....and.....wtf what da hell who wrote this shit in last commit?
* this fuckin query is missing damn where clause* 🤬

Me: me 😰

*long pause, everyone looking at me and i couldn't look at anyone*
The shame and me that how can i do that.

Head: so its you not any intrudor 😡
Further investigating, what the holy mother of #_/&;=568 why cronjob doesn't check how old the order is. Why why why.

(So basically this happened, because of that query all cancelled/incomplete orders got updated damage done already, helping it the cronjob running on all of them sending clients email and with that function some other values got updated too, inshort the whole db is fucked up.)
and now they know who did it as well.

*Head after some time cooling down, asked me the solution for the mess i create*

Me: i took backup just couple of days before i can restore that with a script and can do manual stuff for the recent 2 days. ( operation manager was already calling people and apologising from our side )

Head: okay do it now.

Me: *in panic* wrote a script to restore the records ( checking what i wrote 100000000 times now ), ran...tested...all working...restored the data.
after that wrote an apology email, because of me staff had to work alot and it becomes so hectic just because of me.

* at the end of the day CEO, head, staff accepted apology and asked me to be careful next time, so it actually teached me a lesson and i always always try to be more careful now especially with quries. People are really good here so that's how it goes* 🙂

The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.

TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.

Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.

So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.

IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.

I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.

Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.

I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.

5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.

They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.

I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.

I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.

Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.

While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-

Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.

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 🤦🏾

I was on vacation when my employer’s new fiscal year started. My manager let me take vacation because it’s not like anything critical was going to happen. Well, joke was on us because we didn’t foresee the stupidity of others…

I had to update a few product codes in the website’s web config and deploy those changes. I was only going to be logged in for 30 minutes to complete that.

I get messaged by one of our database admins. He was doing testing and was unable to complete a payment on the website. That was strange. There was a change pushed by our offsite dev agency, but that was all frontend changes (just updating text) and wouldn’t affect payments.

We don’t want to enlist the dev agency for debugging work, especially when it’s not likely that it’s a code issue. But I was on vacation and I couldn’t stay online past the time I had budgeted for. So my employer enlists the dev agency for help. It’s going to be costly because the agency is in Lithuania, it was past their business hours, and it was emergency support.

Dev agency looks at error logs. There are Apple Pay errors, but that doesn’t explain why non Apple Pay transactions aren’t going through. They roll back my deployment and theirs, but no change. They tell my employer to contact our payment processor.

My manager and the Product Manager contact Payroll, who is the stakeholder for our payment gateways. Payroll contacts our payment gateway and finds out a service called Decision Manager was recently configured for our account. Decision Manager was declining all payments. Payroll was not the person who had Decision Manager installed and our account using this service was news to her.

Payroll works with our payment processor to get payments working again. The damage is pretty severe. Online payments were down for at least 12 hours. Our call center had logged reports from customers the night before.

At our post mortem, we had to find out who ok’d Decision Manager without telling anyone. Luckily, it was quick work. The first stakeholder up was for the Fundraising Dept. She said it wasn’t her or anyone on her team. Our VP of Analytics broke it to her that our payment processor gave us the name of the person who ok’d Decision Manager and it was someone on the Fundraising team. Fundraising then starts backtracking and says that oh yes she knew about it but transactions were still working after the Decision Manager had been configured. WTAF.

Everyone is dumbfounded by this. How could you make a big change to our payment processor and not tell anyone? How did our payment processor allow you to make this change when you’re not the account admin (you’re just a user)?

Our company head had to give an awkward speech about communication and how it’s important. The web team can’t figure out issues if you don’t tell us what you did. The company head was pissed because it was a shitty way to start off the new fiscal year. Our bill for the dev agency must have been over $1000 for debugging work that wasn’t helpful.

Amazingly, no one was fired.

99% of our server-side code is Python and PHP (legacy applications).

Asked a junior dev to make a small update to a PHP site so we could have it run some cleanup server side. Plenty of existing PHP code to look at and piece something together. Should be 50 lines max.

Did he use the existing PHP code to do this task? Nope. Did he at least use Python? Nope.

Node.js

His response?

"I couldn't figure it out and Node.js seemed to have good support for mongo so I used that instead."

We have 0 lines of server side javascript. Never had node installed. Literally none of the devs use node here. Not only is this completely outside of our tech stack, but he had to take the time to learn Node and JS just because he thought it was easier.

Much would of rather he put in twice as much time to learn the tools of our stack.

> be me
> spend 0.02 Ether (about €5) on one of those old-school MUD-style games
> send to the same Ethereum wallet from a previous purchase
> realize that the destination wallet changes for each purchase (probably to mitigate the fact that transaction history and contents in Ethereum wallets is entirely public)

> send an email to the game dev asking to return the transaction or pass it on to my player account
> *cricket noises*

About a week later, i.e. now:
*checks that Ethereum account that I accidentally sent that transaction to*
> $0 on it, transaction has been withdrawn

Now I couldn't care less about the €5 - it's only 2 beers worth - but what I do care about is honesty. Dear Chat Wars admin, that money wasn't yours. Also, I am one of those players that plays very few games but tends to commit to those I do play. The last one I played, I spent several hundreds of euros on over the couple of years I played it. I could've probably paid for your servers, spare time development and then some. But obviously not anymore. Choosing a quick grab of €5 over a relatively steady source of income from someone that tends to financially support what he likes... Re-evaluate your life choices.

Just like that incident with the stolen flash drive that was worth only €10... I couldn't care less about the raw value of them, but I do feel very disappointed in humanity when people go for a quick grab of such worthless things.

Not specifically dev related other than being hired as a dev, more a corporate thing.

I have medical issues that mean I can be a bit variable in my starting time. Company was aware and floated flexible hours as a possible solution, but never said it *was* a solution, and just left it there really breezy.

Nailed this down with my line manager a couple weeks later after HR lost their shit, apologised and thought nothing of it.

Few days later I read a blog post about IP clauses in contracts that reminded me I intended to ask, as mine didn’t have one.

Asked HR, no response for like an hour, then “we’ll get back to you on that”

Following week, pulled into a sudden meeting. “Sorry for short notice of meeting, but we’re terminating your employment effective immediately for ‘lack of commitment’”.

Utter. Bullshit.

The day before, the company literally had a company day where they banged on about their values and how they wanted to support their employees and foster an environment for good health and good mental health.

No disciplinary proceedings. My line manager found out 5 minutes before I did.

I emailed a few colleagues afterwards and apologised, and they were stunned it had gone down the way it did.

I was so blindsided and angry in the meeting, especially after I believed I’d found a company that was actually different and cared.

And I did my work, I stayed late quite often, even produced a couple internal devops tools in my time there.

The kicker is that it was within the probation period, so I have literally no recourse for any action against them.

What’s the most bullshit corporate clusterfuck you’ve been through devRant?

Me: Right, its Monday, time for a fresh start. Things have been unbearable, but i've nowhere else to go just yet. I gotta just dig deep, ignore everything bad and just get it done, It's all about positivity right? Lets just ignore the little things and keep moving.

*My morning so far, 2 hours in*

Remote dev: (timezone 5 hours earlier than me) Hey so whats the plan for this quarter?

Me: ... I posted a big detailed plan in the group chat on Friday night so you wouldn't be delayed ... but anyway, lets just move on. I need you to work on A, B and C. A is just copying what Android has already done, for B one of the backend guys working next to you is doing this, he'll be able to help you. C is all documented in the ticket.

Remote dev: cool thanks.

Local dev: So I was just chatting with remote dev ... yeah he told me he has no idea what he's suppose to do.

Me: ..... Ok i'll book a video call with him in the morning. Can't do it right now.

==========

Remote dev: Hey i'm helping the BE team do some testing. I found a bug in Android. Homepage says theres no trips. But Offers screen says there is.

Me: Ok so just to confirm, The "available" offers screen has offers to accept, but the white notification on the homepage saying "You have X offers to accept" is not showing up?

Remote dev: Correct!

*debugging for 5 mins*

Remote dev: actually no, the "accepted" offers tab has offers, but the homepage says there are no upcoming offers to work on.

Me: ..... ok, thats very different ... but sure, let me have a look.

Me: Right so the BE are ... again ... sending down expired offers. Looks like the accepted tab isn't catching it and the homepage is.

Remote dev: Right i'll open a ticket for Android.

Me: ... and BE team.

Remote dev: why?

Me: ... because they once again have timezone issues. This keeps causing issues in random places. BE need to fix this everywhere.

Remote dev: right, i'll chat to them and see if they can fix it.

==========

Product: So this ticket xxxxx is clear right?

Me: eh, kind of, so you want us to add feature X to user type A?

Product: correct.

Me: right but I don't see anywhere talking about the time it will take to build the screen for feature X

Product: What do you mean the screen?

Me: ... well, feature X is only accessible on screen Y ... we would have to change screen Y to support user type A ... you know ... so they can ... use the feature

Product: .... hhhhmmm .... i suppose you are right. Well we can't just add screen Y, we'll have to add W and Z, it won't make sense without them.

Me: ... ok sure, but our estimates put us over for this quarter. I don't think we can just add in 3 screens.

Product: No this is a must have.

Me: Ok so we'll have to drop something else.

Product: hhhmmm, don't think we can ... let me get back to you.

==========

Backend team invited me to a meeting at 6am my time on Friday.

==========

... 2 hours into Monday ... there must be vodka around here somewhere

This is not an interview test just an awkward experience in general regarding interview.

This happened two years ago when I was a fresh university graduate looking for a job in UK as an immigrant (Im EU national).

Went to an interview for a web dev+tech support position. Two fat guys with tshirts met me and started interviewing me for a sysadmin position. Started asking me about disaster recovery and stuff.

Turns out recruiter messed up not only companies but positions as well. Also these two guys didnt bother to check anything.

I pulled out the job ad for which I applied originally, interviewers had a look at it and still proceeded questioning me while knowing that I prepared for completely different position interview.

Needless to say, it went terrible and I didnt get the job. I dont know if its just me or Im unlucky, but I had a lot of encounters in UK with so many incompetent recruiters.

Definitly !rant; btw long post ahead

Soooo not so long ago i joined this community by chance just cuz i installed some app randomly found on google store and what can i say. Best decision ever!

I can say i never met such an interesting and diverse communitiy ever and i kin of ground fond of it (i usually dont get too attached to peoples).

After a while i felt the urge to get myself involved into some disscusion at some random post and i did it. But it felt empty as my image was just a plain green bubble of anonymity. But yeh, i am cool with it, i will customize it after some ++es. No problem!

I got incremented for a while and i got to make a simple generic avatar. I felt again a urge, but this time to customize even more. Sadly, anything cool needs approval by the people. Soo i kind of let it go as i am not really the kind to find myself talking in other businesses and i moved over.

Until i saw it! Not the tiger, not the bird but the dog! Annnd i wanted it so i made a joke that i am a wizard with an invisible dog. What can go wrong, right? Well the thing is.. it did not go wrong, as expected, but it went great, kinda unexpected.

How? Well, some random stranger felt me and gave me a hunble chance to get closer to my dreamy real dog. And so it begin, my crusade to get that damn dog!

But what i have realised fast is .. this is not facebook! Nor Instagram! People doesnot upvote attention whoreing or such lowly acts, but they are actually prone to support people who just.. get involved.

And so i did. I got involved. I actually got involved in a community! For a awkwardly introvert person that's something, but maybe more than few of you people can relate to this.

And today i finally reached that goal! I have a real doggo! Well, real as in not invisible, not as in a great responsability, but now i have both. But this was not such a big deal. The big deal is that i found people whos interests are alike to mine and are prone to help, support and befriend others. I must say, thanks to all! Wonderful time, and while i am not here for a long time, i will surely be!

Cheers and dev on!

Today I noticed that my first name on my Apple Developer Account was totally wrong, even though the name on my Apple ID account was correct. Trying to fix the wrong name sent me to the Apple ID Account page with the already correct name. I contacted support.

It turns out the developer accounts pull info from your Apple ID at creation time, AND NEVER AGAIN. WTF? So you can not make changes to your dev account, because they are non-updateable..

The fix? Sending a copy of a photo ID to the supporter BY FAX?!?!? This is Apple we are talking about.. in 2017.. I don't know anything anymore

TM: Hey, do you have a moment?

Me: not really, I'm already overtime and have enough work for the whole year.

TM: Yeah, we know. Just a quick meeting to discuss something awkward.

Me: Hmkay.

...

Later that day:

TM: Yeah. To make it quick - we're confused and bit dissatisfied with how project X turned out. The staging server is blazing fast, but the devs machines seem to be extremely slow... Some devs complained.

Me: No wonder. I said from the beginning that the devs shouldn't do X and Y, and that the dev machines need to be redone after staging is done - as we need to gather hands on experience first, cause no one could explain to me what resources the project actually needed.

TM: Oh. I wasn't aware of that.

Me: I guessed so. You were on vacation at the beginning and I didn't had the time to lead another team...

TM: Yeah... So the dev machines get replaced?

Me: They _could_ be replaced, but the devs would need to reset up their environment, as I and won't transfer the environment of the dev user.

TM: Ah... So they would have to retransfer their personal modifications, if they made any?

Me: Yes. As always, the basic setup just provides the necessary services, settings etc. - stuff like remote IDE settings on the machine, configuration etc is left out and we don't transfer it as it is usually too much of a hassle and risky, as every dev does have his / her own preferences, and we don't want to support every possible configuration out there.

TM: Just out of curiosity... Staging was ready like... Last year?

Me: Beginning of December, yes.

TM: Sigh.

Me: The jolly of having a kinder garten full of toys that no kid wants to clean up...

TM: No comment. The kinder garten Kids might make me a Pinata otherwise.

Me: If only they'd fill us with chocolate first instead of just beating us.

...

Tales of lazy devs, to be continued...

Background: I work at a small startup company in Canada who makes simple FAQ Chatbots for companies who waste a lot of resources on the same Customer questions over and over.

So we were making this one bot for a provincial government who wanted a bot for students to be able to ask questions regarding the upcoming election and how to vote, etc. and get the answers they were looking for. Since it's Canada and a government bot, it had to be in both English AND French.

These bots take some time to train (we use Wit.ai mostly) in english so it was a challenge to train it in French. However I am bilingual (not very strong in French but can manage) so I did my best and the bot didn't turn out too bad. (English was great, French was, Id say, "not terrible").

HOWEVER, now that it is done (The company loved it, even with the less than perfect french version). The sales team (who know nothing of the process of making/training these bots) is now telling companies we support "SEVERAL LANGUAGES" and are currently about to sign a contract with a company overseas that wants a bot done IN JAPANESE!!.

To make matters worse.. when we (the dev team) brought up that it would be EXTREMELY difficult to do this, their answer was ... "You did it in French so you can just do the same but in Japanese"

HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE.

Oh well, Rosetta Stone here I come, I guess it's time to learn Japanese.

!dev but definitely rant

Here's a fucking thought:
How is holding women over different standards at events and (non-physical) competitions (hackathons especially, somehow) NOT widely considered sexist? I don't even mean towards men - yes, of course.
But also towards women: By preferring their results in some competitions in order to "support them", you implicitly degrade them to be small children in need for praise. You imply that you expect them to perform worse. By "women-first" PR bullshit, you do what you claim to be against. Fuck you.

Why can't we just hold everyone to the same fucking standards? Women can be just as good in tech as men, when interested. I would even make a point that these different standards hold back women from trying to get into any tech-related career.

"I can't replicate it therefore your hotfix for the customer shouting at you is unnecessary"

WTF?! I had to lead this guy to the records where I'd replicated it myself in both the customer system and the demo one! There's a real sense that the core dev team in this place automatically disregards what the rest of us say (support had already mentioned it was replicable but clearly hadn't realised that they needed to spoon-feed this guy).

This place has a huge silo problem, glad I'm not staying much longer...

edit: these tags shouldn't be reordering themselves, not cool

when you are a 19yo trying to build a portfolio and you have a mother bashing everyday that you only spend time "at the computer" and I should get "a real job" and that "your dream will never come true" really is the biggest disappointment of my dev life.
It just builds pressure and sads me. She doesn't support me cuz I'm not "doing any money".
I feel like I should just quit everything or even disappear from this shitrock that is called earth....

My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.

Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"

He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.

As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.

Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.

Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.

I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)

3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.

Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".

I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.

I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.

The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.

December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.

I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.

In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.

The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.

In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.

I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.

My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.

HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.

In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.

Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.

As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...

Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!

And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).

I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.

Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.

I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.

This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.

One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.

Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation

There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.

Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.

So my department is "integrating CI/CD"

Right now, there's a very anti-automation culture in the deployment process, and out of our many applications, almost none have automated testing. And my groups is the only one that uses feature branching - one of the few groups that uses branching at all beyond "master, dev"

So yeah... You could see how this is already ENTIRELY fucked from the very beginning.

First thing they want to do is add better support for a process... Which goes directly against CI/CD.

The process is that to deploy to production (even after it is manually approved by manager), someone in another department needs to press a button to manually deploy. This, as far as I can tell, is for business rule reasons rather than technical ones.

They want us to improve that (the system will stay exactly the same with some streamlined options for said button pressers)

I'm absolutely astounded at the way our management wants to do something but goes in exactly the opposite direction. It's like the found an article of what CI/CD was and then took notes on exactly what not to do.

!rant && rant

I've been doing random HTML/CSS/JS crap since I was 11 (I'm 20 now). And worked with NodeJS/Swift/Java/Typescript for the past 4 years. For some reason, I've always been interested in public transit and the combination between public transit and Development seemed magical to me. I've tried making Departure time apps and trip planners for a few years now. And for that you need open data, for which we have a national data source and a Google Group for support with that.

I quit my study two years ago after a year doing nothing and I was on the edge of getting into depression because I didn't do anything useful for two years. Didn't see myself do anything useful in the next few years apart from some random dev crap (still public transit related).

About half a year ago I ranted on that Google Group about shit being not efficient (weird standards, weird documentation but mostly lack thereof).

For some reason a business saw that rant and sent me an email about two months ago and told me they 'potentially' had 'some' work for me. So I had some really informal conversations with that business but I still was very insecure about myself (had some shitty experience with tons of unfinished projects) and I was worried that they had higher expectations for me than what I could give them.

A week later I received an e-mail with a proposal for an actual, full-time job as a back-end developer and obviously took the opportunity.

I started a month ago with a month-long probation period and after three weeks told me I had passed the probation period.

I'm a super happy boy right now. I got a job, being super insecure, without any certifications, without finishing school (Everyone in the Netherlands tells you you NEED a diploma to get a job), more than double minimum wage (minimum wage is quite high in the Netherlands), and most important, at a business that does a lot of public transit stuff.

Apparently ranting about stuff, not finishing your school and being depressed gives you a well-paid job. :)

This rant is inspired by another rant about automated HR emails like "we appreciate your interest [bla bla] you got rejected [bla bla]". (Please bare with me).
I live in an underdeveloped country, I graduated in September, did Machine Learning for my thesis and I will soon publish a paper about it, loved it wanted to work as ML/data science engineer. On all the job postings I found there was only one job related, I sent resume, they didn't answer, couple months later that company posted that they want a full stack web dev with knowledge of mobile dev and ML, basically an all in one person, for the salary of a junior dev.
- another company posted about python/web scraping developer, I had the experience and I got in touch, they sent me a test, took me 3 days, one of the questions took me 2 days, I found an unanswered SO question with the exact wording dating to 6 months ago, I solved it, sent answers, never heard back from them again.
- one company weren't really hiring, I got in touch asking if the have a position, they sent a test, I did it, they liked it, scheduled an interview, the interviewer was arrogant, not giving any attention to what I am saying, kept asking in depth questions that even an expert might struggle answering. In the end they said they're not really hiring but they interview and see what they can find. Basically looking for experts, I mentioned that im freshly graduated from the very beginning.
- over 1000 applications on different positions on LinkedIn across the whole world, same automated rejection email, but at least they didn't keep me waiting.
- I lost hope. Found a job posting near me, python/django dev, in the interview they asked about frontend (react/vueJS) and Flutter, said I don't have experience and not interested in that, they asked about databases, C and java and other stuff that I have experience in, they hired me with an insulting salary (really insulting) cuz they knew im hopeless, filling 2 positions, python dev and tech support for an app built in the 90s with C/java and sorcery... A week into the job while I'm still learning about the app I'm supposed to support, the guy called me into the office: "here's the thing" he said, "someone else is already working on python, i want you to learn either react or vueJS or flutter" I was in shock, I didn't know what to say, I said I'll think about it, next week I said I'll learn react, so I spent the week acting like im learning react while I scroll on FB and LinkedIn (I'm bad, I know).
- in the weekend a foreign company that I applied to few weeks ago got in touch, we had some interviews and I got hired as DevOps/MLOps. It's been a month and I'm loving it, the salary is decent and I love what I do.
Conclusion: don't lose hope.

I was reading the post made by another ranter in which he was basically asked to lower the complexity of an automation script he wrote in place of something everyone else could understand. Another dev commented that more than likely it had to do with the company being worried that ranter_1 would leave and there would be no one capable of maintaining the code.

I understood this completely from both perspectives. It makes me worry how real this sometimes is. We don't get to implement X tech stack because people are worried that no one would be able to maintain Y project in the event of someone leaving. But fuck man, sometimes one wants to expand more and do things differently.

At work I came to find out that the main reason why the entirety of our stack is built in PHP is because the first dev hired into the web tech department(which is only about 12 years old in my institution) only knew PHP. The other part that deals with Java is due to some extensions to some third party applications that we have, Java knowledge (more specifically Spring and Grails) is used for those, the rest is mostly PHP. And while I LOVE PHP and don't really have anything against the language I really wonder what would it be of the institution had we've had a developer with a more....esoteric taste. Clojure, Elixir, Haskell, F# and many others. These are languages and tech stacks that bring such a forward way of thinking into the way we build things.

On the other hand, I understand if the talent pool for each of these stacks is somewhat hard to come up with, but if we don't push for certain items then they will never grow.

The other week I got scolded by the lead dev from the web tech department for using Clojure to create the demo of an application. He said that the project will most likely fall into his hands and he does not know the stack. I calmly mentioned that I would gladly take care of it if given the opportunity as well as to explain to him how the code works and provide training to everyone for it :D I also (in all of my greatness) built the same program for him in PHP. Now, I outrank him :P so the scold bounced out of the window, plus he is a friend, but the fact remains that we reached the situation in which the performance as well as the benefits of one stack were shadowed by the fact that it holds a more esoteric place in the development community.

In the end I am happy to provide the PHP codebase to him. The head of the department + my boss were already impressed with the fact that I was able to build the product in a small amount of time using a potent tech stack, they know where my abilities are and what I can do. That to me was all that matters, even if the project gets shelved, the fact that I was able to use it at work for something means a lot to me.

That and I got permission to use it for the things that will happen with my new department + the collective interest of everyone in paying me to give support even if I ever leave the institution.

Win.

As IT, I hate being too accessible to users (I'm a software dev, not help desk support). One particular user...let's call him Fred (even though his real name is Joe)...sits close to me.

---

Fred: Bobby, fix my Outlook (he says it jokingly but serious). It keeps saying it needs to be repaired.

Me: Yeah had the same issue last week. I just reinstalled it.

Fred: So...you can't fix it?

---

Fred: Bobby, I need access to X.

Me: Ok go to this link to request access and a manager will approve it.

Fred: Whaaat? That's too much work. You are IT and should just give me access.

---

Fred: Youtube isn't working.

Me: Ok...and?

Fred: It means my internet isn't working!

Me: *sigh*

I'll admit - I come from a WordPress background of almost 9 years in the making. I guess I can justify it because of all of the sites I created using it, it was the best that it could be on WP. Fast, efficient, custom - none of that off-the-shelf themeforest crap. I created everything custom. I actually knew what was going on behind the scenes of WP.

And then a buddy of mine and I had an idea for a new company/software project. I was smart enough to know that WP was not the foundation for this, so I did some NodeJS/Express tutorials. Started learning React, and really getting into the Javascript world.

And now I'm wondering WHY IN THE ABSOLUTE FUCK I ever bothered trying to become an expert in WP. It's the largest use of PHP in the fucking world and it doesn't even have native composer support. And by the time you actually get your project set up using composer you have to add a fucking mirror of the wordpress.org plugin repo to get anything to work. It's 2018 and you'd think that WP and composer would have all of this shit figured out by now.

And don't get me started on git - as soon as you have more than 1 person working on a WP site, I hope you have hourly backups of your DB because someones work will get overwritten. So you all either need to work on the same staging area of work around each other by pushing/pulling the DB and schedule your workflows.

I guess WP CLI and the REST API are a step in the right direction, but the foundation of everything is just so fucked up.

I don't feel like I've wasted my web dev career, but I definitely wish I had started down this path a lot earlier. I guess you don't know what you don't know. Thanks for reading!

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

! exactly dev

I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.

As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.

To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(

As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.

Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.

Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.

Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.

So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).

Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.

Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.

I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.

I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.

Diary of an insane lead dev: day 447

pdf thumbnails that the app generates are now in S3 instead of saved on disk.

when they were on disk, we would read them from disk into a stream and then create a stream response to the client that would then render the stream in the UI (hey, I didn't write it, I just had to support it)

one of my lazy ass junior devs jumps on modifying it before I can; his solution is to retrieve the file from the cloud now, convert the stream into a base64 encoded string, and then shove that string into an already bloated viewmodel coming from the server to be rendered in the UI.

i'm like "why on earth are you doing that? did you even test the result of this and notice that rendering those thumbnails now takes 3 times as long???"

jr: "I mean, it works doesn't it?"

seriously, if the image file is already hosted on the cloud, and you can programmatically determine its URL, why wouldn't you just throw that in the src attribute in your html tag and call it a day? why would you possibly think that the extra overhead of retrieving and converting the file before passing it off to the UI in an even larger payload than before would result in a good user experience for the client???

it took me all of 30 seconds to google and find out that AWS SDK has a method to GetPreSignedURL on a private file uploaded to s3 and you can set when it expires, and the application is dead at the end of the year.

JFC. I hate trying to reason with these fuckheads by saying "you are paid for you brain, fucking USE IT" because, clearly these code monkeys do not have brains.

"It works on our end", the sentence that made me lose my shit.

I've been working on a project were we're supposed to integrate an API into our system.

When trying to get some user id's (UUID) from said API, we got a type-error in the response (???), so I called their integration support and asked what the fuck they were doing (not really, i was kinda calm at this point).

The answer I got was following:

Integration guy: "Uh, bro, like, I don't even know, it's probably on your end"

Me: "We literally used this endpoint with the same parameters yesterday, and got a result we expected. I noticed you updated your API this morning, did you make any major changes?"

Integration guy: "Yeah we changed the type of user id from string to number"

Me: "So, you changed the type of a UUID (uuid4) from string to number? How did you not think that would be an issue? I can see in your forums that everyone else is having the same issue."

Integration guy: "Nah, it's probably a bug in your code, it works on our end"

Me in my mind: *IT WORKS ON YOUR END?!? IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IF IT WORKS ON YOUR END, FUCKTARD.*

What I actually said: "Uhm, I'm not sure if works on your end either, I'm not even sure how this change made it to production. But hey, thanks I guess, bye."

WHY AM I NOT ABLE TO YELL AT PEOPLE WHEN THEY ARE BEING RETARDED???

But really though, when you're maintaining an API, you shouldn't fucking care if things work on your end in your dev environment. What matters is how it works in production, for the end user/users.

And I know that 99% of cases it's the users fault by entering the wrong parameters or trying to request with wrongly setup auth and what not, but still.

Don't ASSUME nothing's wrong on your end. It's your fucking job to fix the issues.

And guess what? The problem was on their side.
I'm going fucking bald.

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

This is my first post. I felt like if I'm wrote this I'll just be a big fat crybaby, but i need to release this pressure from me.

I've been pretty burnt out past 6 month.

So a little bit backstory here, I've come from broken family, and currently on my 7th semester of college. But I've been part of small startup as mobile apps developer for a year and a half now.

6 month ago, it just a year of recovery from a toxic relationship that basically ruins my college life. I have really bad GPA (bad score for being absent from classes), basically no friends, and a barely passable (or even bad) skill in Android Dev. Then I got new girlfriend that really supportive for me. But after 2 months, her parents ask me if I would marry her or not. because if not, I have to broke up with her (We're in Indonesia and both of us is Muslim, so outside marriage relationship is kinda in "grey area" depend on who you ask). So I have to choose to marry her or not, and I choose the marriage. I think I have enough saving and just enough income to support both of us.

Then it's been a downward spiral from there.

The startup that I've been working on were in a pretty bad shape. I've been underpaid since the beginning (and that's not really a problem for me at that time, that's my choice and I blame no one) but abysmal growth and some miss management force us to scale back and makes me basically in a non-paying jobs.

So I take college break for a semester and been trying to find projects here and there for marriage savings, but because the weak employee protection here, lots of the projects I have completed have yet to pay the fee (even until today). And even if they paid me, most of it were really low paying jobs (we're talking $200 per 3 weeks project here, to be fair, for our average GDP, it's not bottom-low).

And the deadline is approaching, our marriage date is settled in (very) early January 2019, and i've been in this "not yet graduated but needs job" limbo. Most of employer here still has the old "Degree Based" Job specs, and not "Skill Based" one. so because de-jure I've still a "College Student" no Job listing is willing to take me in. I've apply to almost 30 Job Listing and just get interview once, and still failed because I can't move to the company area, too far and have too expensive living cost vs the salary ($300 living cost vs $450 salary, while i need to give money to my girlfriend back home for a living).

So I switch my direction to Competitions with Extra Job offering as a Bonus, and I've been pretty close to winning one, held by CIMB Bank, but still failed. It's little bit better now because CIMB came interested with me but there is red flag which I need to graduate with decent GPA before July 2019, and in current GPA? it's practically impossible.

Can it getting worse? oh it can. Remember I come from broken home family? it's inherently hard to keeps communication with both of my parents that to this day still despise each other. And while my mother is still supportive to my marriage, my father isn't. He even basically disowned me last week because my one-sided decision to marry my girlfriend, and blame my mother for being the "bad influence" for me.

And now, today, December 16th, and I'm still in this weird Limbo and have nowhere to go. with $0 in my pocket (have spent all of my savings for marriage preparation) And our marriage is approaching. I almost given up.

I once had to deal with GoDaddy customer support telling me their servers only support putty for SSH.
Well, fuck you! I use Linux and I SSH with a single command in terminal, no doubt putty is great but get your senses straight that putty is not the only way to SSH when you are being customer support for a tech company, don't just fucking recite a phrase list. Besides, they should understand Windows with putty is not the only way to SSH into servers, juicessh via Android, openssh via Linux, etc...

*btw, before you all rant about me buying from GoDaddy, I was lead dev for a startup few years back and they had already bought it from GoDaddy. Ofcourse they also provide free offers along with an order, which often includes email addresses, annoying support, gut-wrenching quality of service access...

CTO: We'll use epochs for any time related fields in our services.

After service integration...

Dev from producer team: Hey the time field is showing up as 1970 and not null in your table. That seems to be a bug.

Me: Code looks fine. We are converting epochs to timestamps here. Null is taken care by the library function itself.

The same dev: Actually we are sending zero instead of null values in that time field. But we'd want the end table to treat that as null.

Me: Why can't you send null then?

The dev: Actually avro doesn't support nulls. Hence the zero.

Me: WTF??????

Manager to me: Actually you need to convert them as null. Anyways, this is not a blocker and we can live with it for now.

END OF RANT

Why can't they fucking send it as null? And when I asked about the details, that particular event type doesn't require that field. Still the manager insists on sending that field for it.

A bit of backstory...

I have been the sole dev at my organization for awhile now (other two left for other jobs), so I have been maintaing and writing new code to support the business.

Our company was recently acquired by a larger entity and it has been very strange so far.

1. It has taken 5 weeks to acquire local admin rights on my own machine (I work remote) as well as a visual studio license.

2. We have known for a few weeks now we are getting a jr dev who will need the SAME procedures done on his machine/account and it has been two weeks now and nothing has been done. (Tickets have been put it - the issues have been escalated etc etc)

3. All of our code from our old company is in Azure Devops (which is connected to Azure AD) for some reason I haven't been able to add an external account (for my new account and org) to move the code elsewhere. I don't have the authority (I don't think) to place all of our code in a new location (GitHub,GitLab, self hosted solutions, etc)

4. All of our production VMs are billed through our old org located in Azure, so eventually that bill will stop being paid since we transitioned - I've brought this up to my manager (more non technical) who wasn't terribly worried about it.

5. I'm feeling slightly unfulfilled in this position. Earlier in my time here it was new and exciting, but there isn't much direction, not many goals, or interesting problems to solve.

Just wanted to express some issues that had been going on. Feel free to add ant feedback of suggestions 😄

Product Manager: We’re assigning you to the Guest Checkout project.

I look at the Guest Checkout epic in JIRA and see it only includes frontend scope. Nothing about backend implementation.

I also find an older ticket about guest checkout. It was written by the former Product Manager. It explicitly says our admin switch for guest checkout no longer works because rebuilt checkout to use react. Why does no one bother to check the backlog??? I found this just by searching “guest checkout.”

Me: Um, our website doesn’t support guest checkout.

PM: What?! But the admin has a guest checkout option that can be turned on and off.

Me: Those admin options only apply if you’re still using the out-of-the-box solution for the e-commerce platform. Remember how we rebuilt checkout using React? We didn’t build it to support guest checkout. That admin switch doesn’t work anymore. We can ask a backend dev to confirm.

I check the code. The code that relates to the admin switch for guest checkout no longer exists. It’s a dead switch.

BE Dev: We made a lot of customizations since we purchased the e-commerce solution. So yeah, that guest checkout switch doesn’t work.

PM: [to me] …Our BE devs are busy with other projects. Can you do the backend for guest checkout?

😳

Me: You realize I’m just a frontend dev with only some backend knowledge, right? I’m not even close to fullstack. And you want me to architect an entire guest checkout flow? That will work with our current checkout experience? And that is HIPPA compliant? On top of doing the frontend?

I was asked to fix a critical issue which had high visibility among the higher ups and were blocking QA from testing.

My dev lead (who was more like a dev manager) was having one of his insecure moments of “I need to get credit for helping fix this”, probably because he steals the oxygen from those who actually deserve to be alive and he knows he should be fired, slowly...over a BBQ.

For the next few days, I was bombarded with requests for status updates. Idea after idea of what I could do to fix the issue was hurled at me when all I needed was time to make the fix.

Dev Lead: “Dev X says he knows what the problem is and it’s a simple code fix and should be quick.” (Dev X is in the room as well)

Me: “Tell me, have you actually looked into the issue? Then you know that there are several race conditions causing this issue and the error only manifests itself during a Jenkins build and not locally. In order to know if you’ve fixed it, you have to run the Jenkins job each time which is a lengthy process.”

Dev X: “I don’t know how to access Jenkins.”

And so it continued. Just so you know, I’ve worked at controlling my anger over the years, usually triggered by asinine comments and decisions. I trained for many years with Buddhist monks atop remote mountain ranges, meditated for days under waterfalls, contemplated life in solitude as I crossed the desert, and spent many phone calls talking to Microsoft enterprise support while smiling.

But the next day, I lost my shit.

I had been working out quite a bit too so I could have probably flipped around ten large tables before I got tired. And I’m talking long tables you’d need two people to move.

For context, unresolved comments in our pull request process block the ability to merge. My code was ready and I had two other devs review and approve my code already, but my dev lead, who has never seen the code base, gave up trying to learn how to build the app, and hasn’t coded in years, decided to comment on my pull request that upper management has been waiting on and that he himself has been hounding me about.

Two stood out to me. I read them slowly.

“I think you should name this unit test better” (That unit test existed before my PR)

“This function was deleted and moved to this other file, just so people know”

A devil greeted me when I entered hell. He was quite understanding. It turns out he was also a dev.

First company:

- being sat at an office that didn't have chairs with proper back support. It would kill my back every day. Like sitting on a bar stool coding.
- not having access to basic resources (cafeteria, salary bonuses)
- being seriously underpaid ($200 under)
- not having an IT process pipeline (yeah, this is a huge one): no JIRA, no git, no VCS, no continuous integration, etc. I fucking spend 45% of the time fixing coding-unrelated shit.

Second company (very aggravating):

- dumb frontend bitch and privileged colleague who both kept telling me months on end to shut up and who wouldn't listen to my advice on anything, while my advice would actually help the company advance in productive ways. The key here is being told to shut up while stagnating. i.e. dead end job.
- people advancing in the company based on nepotism and favoritism, based on having tits and ass, rather than skills and independence.

- pointlessssssssss meetings where decisions are made solely based on the opinion of Mr. favorite senior dev. The rest just sits there like a bunch of sad saps and yay-nodders. Incompetent PO's who "would like to hear your input" but then when you give it, they completely dismiss you.

- pointlessssssssss monthly meetings with stakeholders, where the dev teams do nothing but clash and act like pussies in front of the PM just to get in his favor, but behind scenes continue to make the same mistakes and telling the CEO everything is fine. Goodness, how can it get more unproductive.

- completely antisocial and nepotistic 'colleagues' who won't even talk to you, let alone smile at you or be friendly. You saying good morning and them pretending you're vapor that doesn't exist. Go go company atmosphere! Especially during lunch, those are the worst times. Imagine sitting at lunch where everyone looks like you killed their dog and the rest is huddled up in little high school groups.
What else? The incessant and pointless smalltalk that makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Talking about dogs, kids, what show was on tv last night. The fuck man, do you have a brain?!

Third company:

- HR bitches who think they are the shit and developers are antisocial, helpless misfits, but they work with computers and they don't even fucking know what a status bar is! The irony!

- forced socializing and stigmatization for the opposite. Imagine coming into a company and you don't say good morning. Should that be a problem? No. Instead, everyone starts dogging on you and hating you just because you didn't smile in their faces and said: hiiiiiiiiiiii how did you sleep? Did you feed your dog? Fuck you.
Elliot (Mr. Robot): "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a mute button for life?" -boop, boop, boop, boop...- Ahh.. there.. that's much better."

- CEO's sucking up to you but when it comes to salary increase, they say shit like: "Ahhh ya know, it's kinda difficult." Yet another dead end job.

So, some years ago, my old firm was bought by a much larger company.

A couple years later, my CTO resigned, as he needed a week deserved break. I acted as interim CTO for half a year, with the full support of the CEO.

But then higher management removed my CEO for a politician 🤡. His first move is to ask my ex-CEO who to consider for CTO.

He adamantly vouches for me, but in the end, I'm not "political" enough. (Sure I admit I'm not the most organized person, and do not sweeten arguments to suits, but I had won the full trust of my previous superiors *and* fellow devs, and had people to cover for organizational stuff, and have successfully navigated situations with the world's biggest tech orgs).

So I'm again a dev, and they hire this new CTO at twice my salary. But as you can probably guess, who ends up still doing all the CTO work on top of his dev work? Yeah.

That drove me to quit, not because of the demotion, but for a denied minor raise when I was doing the work of someone with twice my paycheck.

As could be expected, once I quit, the CTO barely lasted 6 months.

Fun part is, I've been freelancing (successfully) from them on, and I've been contacted by this CTO, trying to hire me to do some work in his new company...

I'm torn whether to tell him to bite me, charge him a shitton of money or any other funny ideas.

Mind you, I don't dislike the guy, and he's not particularly annoying to work with, so I guess this doubles as a rant against corporate clowns, and a bit of advice seeking.

#!/usr/bin/rant
So, we are a web development and marketing agency. That's fine... except now it seems that we are a marketing and web development agency. Where the head marketing guy feels it's his job to head up web development.

This is NOT what I signed up for.

When you offer web services to a client, the one meeting with the client should understand at least basic stuff, and know when to pull in a heavyweight for more questions. Instead, our web team is summarized by a guy who listens to 80's rock music in a shared office (used to be just me in there) and spends his days trying to get 30-year-olds on Facebook to click an ad.

He was on the phone yesterday with some ecommerce / CRM support, trying to tell them that they have an API, that "it's a simple thing, I'm sure you have it", and that's all we need to do business with them. Which is not his call, it's my call, but for some reason he's the one on the phone asking for API info. The last time I took someone else's word on an API, I underquoted the work and eventually found out that their "API" was nothing more than a cron job which places a CSV file on your server via FTP.

Anyway, we now have a full-time marketer and two part-time interns, with another ad out for an AdWords specialist. Meanwhile, I'm senior dev with a server admin / retired senior dev, and if we don't focus on hiring a front-end guy soon we're going to lose business.

Long story short, I'm getting sick of having a guy who does not understand basic web concepts run the show because he's the one who talks to the client.

I am thinking about leaving this platform. To be honest I don't get anything out of it anymore and the only thing keeping me here is the less-rant'ish content like @devNews or the stories.

I am actually a bit disappointed, the quality of devrant really did degrade alot in the last few months. Don't get me wrong but I feel like people have become "normies" over here. I don't mean that in an edgy or degrading way but let me explain. When I started here I had a very high opinion of the people here. Everyone seemed like a passionate / knowledgeable individual from whom you could hear interesting stories or learn. Maybe I just saw it like that because I was still a very inexperienced dev and was looking for a dev community. But nonetheless I think devRant transformed into a place of mediocrity.

Dont get me wrong I wouldn't think of myself as aspiring or generally "better" than anyone else on here, but the content over here got a little stale.

I am not the kind of person who would "rant", in the first place, so I may have a different mindset and to be honest "ranting" has always been a thing I looked down upon. It just does not support my style of thinking. I totally get that people sometimes need to "vent" their feelings but there is nothing productive to gain from ranting, like you ain't not improving your situation by doing it. The more passionate raters over here call people things, I would never even dream about saying to people. Don't worry I'm no sjw or something like it, I don't care if you do it. If it helps you sure, why not. But there is a point where you corner yourself so much that you stop respecting your colleagues because they wrote that shitty code, instead of helping.

Some tech sure is bad, but it is not getting any better by insulting it.

Another thing I use to notice are people, thinking so highly of them selfes / being so close-minded - that they only accept their own views as true. These are the people that I always try to avoid, but that is getting harder and harder as time goes on.

Collectivism and group thinking are very strong on devRant making it really hard to defend a unpopular opinion - I get that devRant is not the kind of platform that would support actual proper arguments/discussions - but I still feels like some people shove opinions down another people's throat with no reasoning behind it.

Arguments on devRant are always won by the person coming up with the most witty response. Having another opinion is always seen as offensive. That's not exactly the definiton of open-mindedness.

Another rather annoying thing are what I call the "non dev, dev's". See: As a developer you should aspire to understand what your doing - I won't get into this too much but one sentencd: How are things like serious "Semicolon memes" a thing? I am as much into memes as the next guy, but debugging 3 hours, just to find out its a typo. I mean come on...

I sure get that devRant is not the kind of place where you would find the people I am looking for, and that's why I am leaving.

My whole post may seem super negative of the platform - and it is to an extend - but I sure also had a good time back in the day - devRant as in "the platform" surely is not at fault, but a forum is only as good as the people on it. Maybe I changed, maybe devRant did. All I know is that it is not for me anymore.

I won't delete my account and I probably will not leave completely, but all I will do is the "once a week" checkout.

Around a week ago I asked my mentor(lecturers friendly sidekick buddy 'o pal) if in iOS dev(the very next subject) I could virtualize, rent in cloud or run a hackintosh instead of buying a Mac. My mentor sounded enthusiastic and asked the lecturer of the next subject, who promptly said no, he did not support or recommend students who tried any of these approaches because in the past he had encountered students who have run into performance issues and we're unable to compile some things. Most likely those students were unable to setup GPU passthrough and whatnot.

However this is the exact point of a VM. It's exactly the same as if you had a real Mac. I believe this is just them being lazy. Tbh, this is an IT course they should be writing guides on how to do virtualisation, not preventing it.

Looks like I'm headed to the Apple store :(

I've worked in a lot of customer service jobs and the more i have to deal with client, the more story starting to pile up. But something always come back and it's frustrating. The entitlement people have. I work as a Technical Support agent and for the most part i'm actually happy to help people with fixing their problems. But once in a while i always get that idiot that doesn't do anything i told him, blame me because "my fixes" don't work or just straight up don't listen to me and think they know better. Why the fuck do you call me if you need help if you're going to ignore everything i say and act like a fucking children. I'm not the one that call for technical support.

I know this place is more for Dev, but i'm sure those kind of things happen all the time when a client think he know more than the dev themselves...

TL;DR Dear boss, firstly, you always get someone to review anything important done by a fucking intern.
Secondly, you do not give access to your fucking client's production server to an intern.
Thirdly, you don't ask your fucking intern to test the intern's work that has not been reviewed by anyone directly on your client's fucking production server.

Last week, the boss and one of the lead devs (the only guy with some serious knowledge about systems and networking) decided to give me (an intern who barely has any work experience) the task of fixing or finding an alternate solution to allowing their support team access to their client machines. Currently they used a reverse SSH tunnel and an intermediary VH but for some reason, that was very unreliable in terms of availability. I suggested using OpenVPN and explained how it would work. Seemed to be a far better idea and they accepted. After several days of working through documentations and guides and everything, I figured out how OpenVPN works and managed to deploy a TEST server and successfully test remote access using two VMs. On seeing my tests, the boss told me that he wanted to test it on the client network. I agreed. Today he comes to me and he tells me to prepare testing for tomorrow and that the client technician is going to give me access to one of their boxes. And then he adds, "It's a working prod server. We'll see if we can make it work on that" and left. I gaped at him for a while and asked another dev guy in the room if what I heard was right. He confirmed. Turns out, the lead dev and the boss's son (who also works here) had had a huge argument since morning on the same issue and finally the dev guy had washed it off his hands and declared that if anything goes wrong from testing it on production, it's entirely the boss's own fault. That's when the boss stepped in and approached me. I ran back to his office and began to explain why prod servers don't top the list of things you can fuck around with. But he simply silenced me saying, "What can go wrong?" and added, "You shouldn't stay still. You should keep moving". Okay, like firstly what the fuck and secondly, what the fuck?.
Even though OpenVPN client is not the scariest thing to install, tomorrow's going to be fun.

I no longer work for a startup company. On Monday I’ll start work for a real company, one that values project managers and their infrastructure. As a DevOps engineer, I value the IT resources that power my old companies SaaS platform. My old position is not being back filled and they’re hiring a full time dev instead of and Ops engineer. They have chosen to proceed with zero employees who know Azure or the platform their own software runs on.

Word to the wise when choosing to work for a startup. Ask these questions:

- Do they have a dedicated product manager/owner , who isn’t also the CFO?

- Do they value infrastructure and their IT resources ?

- Do they have decent powered laptops to work with?

- Do they have too much technical debt because they’re always building new features ?

- Do they work 18 hour days because they set poor work/life boundaries ?

- Who handles Support tickets , and what’s a typical support issue like?

- Do they have a branching and merging strategy? Don’t accept “we’re too small” as an answer! It’s a trap that they don’t want one.

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

We had 1 Android app to be developed for charity org for data collection for ground water level increase competition among villages.

Initial scope was very small & feasible. Around 10 forms with 3-4 fields in each to be developed in 2 months (1 for dev, 1 for testing). There was a prod version which had similar forms with no validations etc.

We had received prod source, which was total junk. No KT was given.

In existing source, spelling mistakes were there in the era of spell/grammar checking tools.

There were rural names of classes, variables in regional language in English letters & that regional language is somewhat known to some developers but even they don't know those rural names' meanings. This costed us at great length in visualizing data flow between entities. Even Google translate wasn't reliable for this language due to low Internet penetration in that language region.

OOP wasn't followed, so at 10 places exact same code exists. If error or bug needed to be fixed it had to be fixed at all those 10 places.

No foreign key relationships was there in database while actually there were logical relations among different entites.

No created, updated timestamps in records at app side to have audit trail.

Small part of that existing source was quite good with Fragments, MVP etc. while other part was ancient Activities with business logic.

We have to support Android 4.0 to 9.0 of many screen sizes & resolutions without any target devices issued to us by the client.

Then Corona lockdown happened & during that suddenly client side professionals became over efficient.

Client started adding requirements like very complex validation which has inter-entity dependencies. Then they started filing bugs from prod version on us.

Let's come to the developers' expertise,
2 developers with 8+ years of experience & they're not knowing how to resolve conflicts in git merge which were created by them only due to not following git best practice for coding like only appending new implementation in existing classes for easy auto merge etc.

They are thinking like handling click events is called development.

They don't want to think about OOP, well structured code. They don't want to re-use code mostly & when they copy paste, they think it's called re-use.

They wanted to follow old school Java development in memory scarce Android app life cycle in end user phone. They don't understand memory leaks, even though it's pin pointed by memory leak detection tools (Leak canary etc.).

Now 3.5 months are over, that competition was called off for this year due to Corona & development is still ongoing.

We are nowhere close to completion even for initial internal QA round.

On top of this, nothing is billable so it's like financial suicide.

Remember whatever said here is only 10% of what is faced.

- An Engineering lead in a half billion dollar company.

This is the last time Microsoft! I'm getting my old Arch image out and removing you from my life forever! Never again will my linux distro randomly uninstall itself without telling me in the middle of implementing new components and crash my development server. Never again will I have to deal with an update that refuses to STFU and go away until I, ME NOT YOU MICROSOFT, decides it's a good time to run the update. No more lack of customization and poor support of common dev tools. I'M DONE WITH YOU, WE NEED TO SEE OTHER PEOPLE.

When I became a dev my parents said: "it's not rocket science, or chemistry or anything good, but at least it's not stressful, or dangerous and we can get free tech support. I hope you are able to pay your own bills and find rent"

A few years, a degree and finding a supportive woman who is now my wife and and I make 4 time as much as my parents make now they want me to move back so they can get their tech support and see my wife I guess she is more social than I am

Lying recruiters really make my shit itch.

A couple of months ago a recruiter got in touch on linked in as he’d seen my cv on Indeed or somewhere.

He asks what I’m looking for and I tell him I want to move to a more development focused role rather than mosh mash of support, admin and Dev that I do at the moment.

He’s says he’s got just the role at a fairly local software company, and that the role would be at least 90% development blah blah blah.

So I set up a video call, and it immediately becomes clear that they want someone to do support/admin who might get to do a tiny bit of dev (they mainly asked about my experience with HTML) and I could tell they lost interest when I said I was more interested in backend development etc.

They didn’t want to progress the application as I wasn’t what they were looking for, which is fair enough they weren’t what I was looking for either.

But, do recruiters intentionally set out to lie to applicants about what a job is/entails or do they either get duff info from clients, or just not understand the job specs they are given?

I mean it wasted my lunch break (not including calls with the recruiter) and an hour of time for the CEO and Dev from the company.

Trigger warning:
Emotional !dev love life rant

I think this is not the right place to pour my heart out, but despite its more recent infights I still consider devRant to be a special community to me. And I guess if devRant is my goto place for support that's an issue. But maybe I just need to shout into a void because this is not about you solving this for me.

I have been in this relationship for ~6 years. My first great love. In the beginning, everything was perfect - a love story like from a cheesy movie. We've been through a lot to be together: Long distance, moving countries, a ton of bureaucracy (as she's from another country). So many memories.

It came as a surprise to me when she ended things. It really shouldn't have been. We've talked a lot about the reasons and I now see how much I've taken her for granted and neglected our relationship. I see now how I've been avoiding my problems and how I didn't work on my (mental and physical) health issues as good as I need to - not just for any relationship, but for myself. The regret/shame/guilt of not giving it 100% and of neglecting her weights heavily on me (besides the loss) and I am not sure what is worse.

Besides our relationship withering because of neglecting emotional needs, she also questioned our compability. We certainly have differences and different interests and we're both somewhat uncertain whether we really fit, if we ignore our history/emotions. It is actually a question that popped up in my head before sometimes, but I was too afraid to look into it for fear the answer is no. But here we are and ignoring that didn't help.

For now, we both need time to think about what we really want and whether this includes the other. We agreed that we need some distance to process the feelings. We still live in the same flat but for now she's staying with a friend most of the time and I'll also have a friend's place available soon. If in some time we both feel like we want to be together, we can date again - however she was also clear that she doesn't want to give any false hope and her current vision doesn't include me. If not, well have to hire a divorce lawyer. (Why you need a lawyer for that if both agree is beyond me.)

I am shattered. When it became clear to me that the relationship is over (and I ruined it), I got nauseous to the point that I threw up constantly for 6 hours. For the following 2 days I only cried and haven't eaten. Third day I started cleaning up the flat (long overdue!) - mostly for her tbh but I know it's good for myself, so better do the right thing with wrong motivation than sob all day -
talked to my psychiatrist and she brought some lunch which I could eat. Today (fourth day) she came over and we cooked lunch. I am still feeling terrible but the first days have been the worst I've ever felt and I've been trough quite a bit of (physical & chronic) pain - emotional pain hits different.

Let's see how this works out. In any case I now know very clear that I can't continue like before and need to work on my issues (for my own sake). I want be my best self, even if right now I don't have a lot of energy and am very depressed. I got an appointment with a therapist tomorrow - something I should have done years ago but I was overwhelmed with anxiety and analysis paralysis. I hope the future will be brighter and while I still wish to wake up from this nightmare and realize my faults without this breakup, I also know that I have to face reality.

PS: I do feel better now after writing this out. Thanks for listening, I guess.

It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."

Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.

We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.

Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.

* * *

In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.

I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.

After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.

Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.

We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.

Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.

And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.

What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.

Just don't.

This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!

So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.

I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.

I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!

IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!

In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.

I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!

When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.

In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL

In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!

IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.

Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.

I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.

Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.

If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.

Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.

For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!

Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!

I was a Project Manager, studied my a$$ off at 38 to become a mobile developer. Built production apps in Java, React Native. I've studied Kotlin and Flutter. Then my company almost went belly up and I had to scramble to find a job to support my family. Back to being a PM which I hate. Started with Swift because my son is old enough to play with Swift Playgrounds and thinking about making a break back into dev. Every post I see on Twitter is about Flutter, maybe RN, but not much Native iOS. Is it wrong that I'm loving it thus far? What's the future for Native iOS and Android developers?

We use a third party paid company to produce a service and give ongoing support for it, which all our revenue streams depend upon. They are shit and their service is shit. Here's how my conversation about testing went today.

Me: 'hey X wrote an integration test project for the service. It shows the service is broken 50% of the time. We should give their team access to it and have them run it as part of CI'

Colleague: 'They are too shit to setup CI'

PM: 'we are stuck with them so there is no point. It is what it is'

Boss: just ignores me. Not even a reply.

Some days later

Head of QA: 'Hey Dev and QA are broken'

Me: 'because their service is broken. I made so and so suggestion before but it was rejected. We will just have to accept Dev and QA are broken 50% of the time'

Head of QA: 'no we cant'

Me: 'ok so we should setup the tests to run by giving them access'

Head of QA: 'No we shouldn't. The tests can only be used by us and if they break it tells us so we can act on it, or choose not to'

Me: 'We would not want to act immediately on all our revenue streams breaking? Yes we can reverse engineer their client and fix errors as they occur, or we could just have them run the tests and a team our company pays for can stop adding breaking changes to their own API every other day. Right now it has been broken for 2 weeks.'

Head of QA: 'in an ideal world we would have an internal team so you're wrong'

Me: :)

I really don't understand how they can come to such a conclusion. Am I missing something or am I surrounded by total fucking idiots?

My biggest problem with Visual Studio Code is that every fucking piece of shit dev thinks it's their duty to introduce it to me. STOP. Just stop this shit, alright? Wanna use vscode? Fine, just don't tell me it's the best tool and I MUST use it instead of the tools I'm used to. I'm tired of this bullshit.
Every new project, every new team. Starting from js/java/.net monke and ending with PMs, I must hear this bullshit about god blessed IDE that I must use, because "why you need intellij/webstorm/rider? just install vscode and some plugins. we all use it in our project and it's ok".
FUCK YOU! Refactoring is not just renaming variables and extracting blocks of code into functions. If you want terminal integrated into your text editor with highlighting and LSP support, so be it. I want an IDE with rich refactoring tools, code analysis and good completion, database viewing/modeling support, good build tools support, good UI for git and git-diff, good test and code coverage support. I don't want your semi-IDE, bloated with hundreds of bugged third-party plugins, which I must spend a week on to configure and merry with each other before using.
JUST STOP this crap and let people use the tools they are proficient/comfortable/productive with.

Am i whiny or is resilience so glorified in this field?

I am a junior developer. I was assigned with two projects together with a friend and a senior. My friend and I finished our assigned tasks way before the deadline. Fast forward, my senior got reassigned to a different project since we are lacking with manpower. Naturally, his transactions were assigned to me and my friend. And my goodness, his existing codes are a piece of shit! It's all over the place. His variable naming is shit, his codes are all around the place, his codes doesn't even follow our company's coding standards, no try catch, a lot of unsafe practices. In short, cleaning his code is a pain in the ass and my friend and I got really busy with cleaning his mess. The testing of our system is really near but I just thought that maybe he's really busy with the other project that's why the quality of his codes deteriorated.

He's not. One day, I saw his in discord that he's playing during work hours lol. And the worse part is that he is playing with our boss! YES. DURING WORK HOURS. I got mad but I couldn't say anything because he is really tight with the boss.

Later on that day, we had our meeting. I was surprised when my boss told me that she's expecting that the excel part of our system is already finished. A little background here, my boss asked me to study Excel VB. However, I didnt get to study that much because I was so busy fixing bugs and after that came the cleaning of our senior's shit codes.

So I tried to say these things to my boss but I was cut out by the same senior shouting "You can do it!" over and over again. No one listened to what I was trying to say! And to make it even worse, the boss had a very proud look on her face and she even had the audacity to tell me that I'm lucky I have such a good support system. I dont.

Now, the company is planning to put me in a very demanding project. I havent finished cleaning up my senior's codes, I havent started anything with the excel and the deadline is next week!

The boss told me that even if I enter the other project, that I will still be responsible for the Excel part of our system. So fucking shoot me in the face.They were telling me that I should have a good time management system, that I should be flexible, that I should adapt easily, yada yada yada. She just makes you feel bad about yourself if you're not as 'flexible' as her.

The thing is, even if I have the best time management techniques in the world, if you bombard me with a shitload of tasks, then I won't be able to do it properly! I don't even take breaks anymore! I work literally 8 hours a day, even more than that. And I dont understand, why the hell is she overworking me when her friend (the senior dev) is just playing during work hours?

Another funniest thing is that she told us that when we encounter technical problems, we should ask our senior dev. Oh boy, if only she knows how shitty his codes are.

Do not touch Salesforce.

Especially Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

It is a fucking joke this product even exists. Buy Hubspot instead. Marketing Cloud is the single worst piece of software I have had to implement out of 4 years working in software and a lifetime working in tech.

Literally nothing works. You click a button and bam, nothing. The UI actively lies to the user. Nothing is guaranteed to work and support is some guy in India who shrugs his shoulders and walks away. Things will randomly break and warning messages are tiny, indecipherable babble that mean nothing.

If you are dev, walk away. If you are a potential customer, walk away. This company DESERVES a bad reputation for the absolute heap of dogshit that is Marketing Cloud.

The worst part is that it's likely going to affect my job and my career because of how fucking dogshit it is.

Fuck Salesforce in case the messaging isn't clear.

This is a long post and if someone comments without reading carefully I don't care about that person's opinion.

I have 3 accounts here, and that is a must have for me. Let me explain:

Let's think of people and who they are in layers.

The innermost layers are made of private and intimate things: fears, dreams, shames, basically things that are mostly shared with very close people, like family, best friends, and specially significant others.

On the other hand, outermost layers are the public persona, who you are as a citizen, who you are in your profesion, and so on.

So, you wouldn't normally tell your boss about your favorite sex positions.

Let's also say there can be layers in the middle, and all the layers sometimes overlap, but let's not get too deep into this as I think I got the point across.

Here on I explain the original thesis.

I am a developer, and as such I want to fulfill my needs on dev communities, one of them being devrant.
I wish to learn from other devs, I expose my (sometimes controversial) points of view. I rant about annoying shit in the workplace.

But also, at some level, I wish to be taken seriously as a developer, I wish to build a reputation, and I wish to be accepted, even in a shallow social level. There is a social factor to what we do and it's totally normal.

Now, the problem is that I also would want to express my inner self.

So what I do is I don't use my main account for that, I use another, in fact 2 other accounts.

There are several reasons for that:

* I want to hide intimate shit from trolls.

Imagine I griefpost about a loved one that died, then later found myself in a heated discussion about some language, and then some troll comments something like "I'm glad your x died". i wouldn't react very well.

* I want to keep my posts consistent.

If people become interested in what I post as a dev, then they are going to expect dev related stuff from me. If I start posting like controversial points of view, that's not very cool because I'd be doing like a bait n switch on them.

* I want to maintain a reputation, and I want to not get banned on the main account

Reputation as a profesional is a real thing, and it shouldn't be affected by your personal shit.
Also sometimes you argue, and things get heated, and sometimes you get suspended or banned.

You try your hardest to be respectful, but in some communities, some mods are trigger happy.

By restricting this on your alt account, you're in a way promising that you'll have the upmost behaviour on your dev account because that means being professional.

Now, I said I had 2 other accounts.

The reason for having 2 is because I separate two layers:

In the 2nd account I am open and direct regarding my points of view, and more argumentative, but still trying to be relatively civil. I would also post things that might be controversial or not popular. I try to be real basically.

You can conclude that the 2nd account is the one posting this, since this post could trigger some people.

In the 3rd account, I talk about intimate shit like traumas, fears, emotional pain, things I know I'll get support for (the same support I give others when in need) and are not controversial in any way.
This way I can vent painful things and avoid trolls.

Cool people appreciate it when you're transparent about your shortcoming and dark thoughts.

But it takes one asshole in a high horse to judge you. And sometimes you need to give that asshole the middle finger without being afraid of ruining your reputation
or getting banned,
or being scared of that asshole laughing about your intimate shit (again, I use this account for that)

I know it sounds like I have multiple personalities but I swear I'm ok, and hopefully what I said makes sense. People might say "don't use alt accounts, go to another site", but I find that devrant has some interesting people.

The obvious downside is that you end up knowing people more than what they assume, because you interact with them through different accounts.

This is kinda shady, but I'm not interested in taking advantage of others anyway so...

actually, I'm reposting to this week's rant (Family support you got becoming a dev?) because I remembered some stuff. and also because reading other people's rants reminded me of stuff. The fam and I have changed dynamics, but there is a ten-ish year span that we kinda got along, and I constantly forget about it. (because what good does nostalgia do?)

So, about the fam support.
Parents were both devs. Engineers, to be specific. So yeah, I was around the material all the time. but I was not specifically interested and they didn't push it. (They were busy with other dramas in fam and society) I was more of a bookworm. an imaginative kid, who liked to spend time either reading a fantasy book, swim, play basketball or hang out with her friends. The whole programming thing came way more natural to me than one could imagine. Me getting into uni for it was pure luck because I didn't have the grades for the other thing I wanted. (which, thank fuck, I'm doing way better now) So yeah, the support was not really required. Except for food-clothing-shelter combo.

I did want to become an astrophysicist as a child tho, which they didn't really support. Bummer.

One of our projects migrated their file-repository to another one during a major release.

Instead of giving this task to an experienced programmer, they gave it to the head of the respective dev department due to the usual release panic.

Soo.... He wrote the migration tool. It was executed during the release. Everything seemed fine so far.

A few days later. Someone from the above project came to my team due to some "strange behaviour on the production database".
They reported that they couldn't download some of the user's documents due to unknown reasons.

After quickly analyzing the current state of the new file-repository, we concluded that the affected documents did not exist in the new repository.

Then we took a look at the so called migration tool...
Well.. After nearly 30 min. we knew the root cause for that.
They only migrated the first 4 levels of the folder structure. Due to the assumption that "we don't use deeper nesting". (Facepalm)

As the head of their department wrote it, no one seems to questioned it either. Nor did they made a code review and ended up with a tool with hard coded urls to the production db, no version control, no build tool, no ci, nothing. Breaking nearly every possible company standard.

However.. That's not it. When analyzing their migration tool we noticed another even more dangerous thing.
They mixed up the id generation of the migrated documents resulting in a random assignment between customers and documents. Which is quite bad as this contains sensitive information. E.g. passports

They offered us quite a nice amount of money to fix this until EOB. We declinded as it was simply not possible in that time, but agreed to support them with the new tool.

After some time I heard that they migrated production again. And they fucked it up again. They never talked to us after we offered them support...

The third and final migration was written by us. Not only migrated it correctly. It was also way faster. By factor 20.

In the end we haven't gained anything from this rushed project as the penalties were piling up due to this fucked up migration.
After all this time I'm not sure who is to blame. In my opinion, partly all of them.
Head of department who can't and shouldn't code.
Seniors who didn't review the code and didn't ask for help.
Release mgmt who put way too much pressure on the devs.

I'll post a rant (will be long) soon-ish on the root of the asinine problem...

TL;DR
Anyone got a better suggestion of killing a WLAN router signal than a Faraday Cage?
-----------------------
As to the point as I can manage atm...
My ISP forces a proprietary router/modem for them to script my static IPv4 block (/28, aka 13 usable). Modifying this equipment in any way or using the vast majority of tactics to modify its behaviour = Federal Felony... with my history, it couldn't be construed as mistake/ignorance of this fact, so I'd likely end up working for some branch of the gov to mitigate the costs of standard prison (on both ends... handicapped af = expensive af to comply with base human rights laws... plus I'd be a dangerous prisoner from what I've been told).

I NEED the ipv6 functionality TOTALLY off... I've written this into every kernel and every container config at kernel level.

The issue is, I don't trust their shit device (which "should" also be set to no ipv6 via gui... non-GUI = fed felony).

This horrid device, they apparently made them for home use initially (to be fair it has decent specs and tolerable RAM), so included WiFi... that comes on by itself.
Disable the WiFi!... except I cant (at least not without 'tampering').
Why? Well acc to the GUI it's not enabled in the first place. Acc to the 'tech support' it's apparently a paid feature (yes, nonsense) that I have not paid for (nor would I), meaning on their end's GUI and DBs I also don't have WiFi ability from that dev.

So... Not trusting the other settings and the dev, being something im not allowed to directly config outside of their GUI that doesn't realise it's putting out a usable signal despite registering DHCP on behalf of that non-existent signal. I NEED to kill those signals.

I realise it likely sounds extreme to make and use a Faraday Cage for a router/modem (secondary modem, it parses the initial modem's output, via script, to allow the static block to be accessed). I really dont know any other way that's legal to restrict it.

Oh, in case unclear, I have tried so many ways to get them to just allow me to use any device (pref. mine, but even their's) that i can simply script myself... it's a no-go.

!dev

For a long time, I thought that the most annoying people on the ski slope are kids overestimating their abilities on a difficult piste or speeding down the slope ignoring others. Boy was I wrong; those kids are nothing compared to all the fucking morons who think that buying the most expensive gear at a local sports store makes them better at skiing.

For the love of god, if you ever consider skiing, just buy some reasonably cheap all-mountain gear, and if you think you need something better, do proper research or find a fucking expert. I'm not talking about those "experts" they have at your local sports store, I'm talking someone who provides gear and support for actual ski clubs and teams, or at least someone working at a dedicated outdoors store who actually owns some of the gear they're selling.

"Oh, but I'm an advanced skier" - right, then why don't you tell me what turning radius, width profile, and flex would best fit you? Thought so.

Look, it's clear just by looking at your $1000 "racing" skis that they have a way shorter turning radius than any competition-level skis, and if you were really going as fast as you think you are, you'd probably spin out on every other turn with such a short radius. Your curved skiing poles aren't fooling anyone either; professionals only use those in super-g and downhill because you need to go insanely fast to notice any advantage over regular poles. And people who race that fast use way more protection than I can see on you.

Okay, it's your gear, it's your body; if you're going to buy overpriced stuff that doesn't make sense or neglect protection, that's up to you. Do you know what's not up to you? Being a fucking moron and ruining skiing for everyone else. Just because you got the most expensive "expert-level" gear, you can't just use it for powder, park, or moguls when you feel like it because you don't fucking know how to ride any of these, even if your gear claims to be good for all types of skiing. And let me tell you, that expensive gear you have is much less forgiving than some entry-level gear if you decide to try other styles of skiing.

I'm fucking tired of people like that. If I go to the resort with lots of powder, I want to ride the powder, not spend most of my time avoiding groups of morons who clearly don't have the right gear and skills for the powder. If I go to the resort with a huge park, I want to ride the park, and I can't do anything if the place is covered by dipshits speeding past the objects and braking in front of the jumps. And if I want to race down the piste, I want to race, I don't want to have a bunch of morons constantly switching side in front of me to avoid "rough" parts they can't ride on.

Obligatory subjective view from inexperienced eyes of a highschooler

I think it's evolving to be more beginner-friendly and more easily accessible. I'm seeing ppl roughly my age can program pretty well (ignoring the mandatory programming classes in highschool that stuff is just no (I know, we had this convo before but do hear me out, although it teaches fundamental programming in Pascal, the execution sucks ball because "mandatory")). I'm not saying we are on par with the in-industry devs, it's just we can code well enough to at least make decent small program/script.

With newer scripting languages that are easy to pick up and syntactically similar to English which is obviously Python, both objectively and subjectively, and its ability to be OOP without scaring first-timers of the what-the-blyn-is-this blank program (looking at you C#) people can be introduced to programming and programming concepts fairly easily and they can switch from Py to other languages with little to some hiccups, from my personal exp at least.

But then there's the "too much kiddies in the field" arguments I saw on dR (I think) a while back then when SO decided to better support newbies. To that, I can only say "Please give us a chance". We're completely oblivious to how the dev world work nor how you guys do your work so before you scold us on this, at least tell us how to work like you before you go on a 2-A4-page rant on how the industry is not as good as before and how it has degraded.

That leads to the problems of politics invading programming. We have it, I hate it, goddammit I wanna murder them. Linux CoC controversy is just...no. And then there's forced diversity in hiring (also ranted on dR a while back) and corporations pissing devs off to satisfy a minor group. I'll just shut up on this. No no no no no no no NO I'm not gonna. Not gonna.

Do correct me if I'm wrong though. I'm a less than a junior dev.

So, we (I'm the backend guy and work with a UI dev) are building this product portfolio management tool for our client and they have a set of 250 users. The team has two point of contacts for the 250 users who maintain the master data, help users with data quality, tool guidance, reporting and other stuff. So one day one of these two support users come to me and say : Hey I'm not able to add new transactions coz a customer is missing.

We have the provision to create / maintain customers.

I check the production DB, application code, try creating the customer and then the transaction, everything works perfectly fine.

I ask the user for a screen sharing session, the user starts reproducing the error like this :

We have a 3 system landscape - Dev / Test and Prod

U : Logs into the test system url, creates the customer.

U : Points out the toast saying customer creation is successful.

U : opens a new tab, opens the production system, tries creating the transaction, searches for the customer and says " see !! cant find the customer here ! the master data management apps never work !! "

FML?.

My family absolutely did not support me. Throughout my life my parents wanted me to become an accountant (like my sibling) and encouraged me to pursue that. In 8th grade I initially broke the news that I wanted to get into software development and was told "computers won't be around for another 10 years (this was probably around 2010), don't go into something so stupid". For reference, we had 1 family computer up til 2008 which we had limited amounts of time with.

Every year after, up until the end of 12th grade I told them I planned on going into software dev, and they got angrier each time, before finally they stopped speaking to me for a short time over that summer after I told them I had been accepted into university for computer science.

Now, in my final year, they still think i'm throwing my life away. Their disapproval is what has been motivating me the most, to prove to myself that I can support myself and create good things.

Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".

hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.

Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.

so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```

I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.

Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.

To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.

Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.

Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.

After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.

Sometimes I hate my job.

When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.

Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.

When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.

Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!

Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?

When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:

1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.

Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).

Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.

When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:

(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".

Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.

There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".

It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?

longer rant, with curious question at the end;

my sister asked me lately how she can change the way her phone creates the name of pictures she takes (the naming scheme), as she didn't want the name to be composed of date and time (and so on) the picture was taken, cause she had to send it to her boss
after i replied that i don't know how this could be changed and that the naming scheme would have a purpose, she got angry at me because i wouldn't help her and that i should fuckin tell where it can be changed!😡
after i repeated my answer she said "what are you studying cs for?? YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS!!!😡😤"
i got furious, you guys can probably imagine as IT guy/dev 😠😠😠, given stereotypes/prejudices etc., unfortunately i'm not the guy who is good at freaking out and yelling at people, but GODDAMN IF I COULD TELL HER WHAT STUDYING THE DEGREE IS REALLY ABOUT! I'M SO FED UP WITH THIS!😤😤😤
i'm not supposed to know how her FUCKIN HONOR PHONE WORKS
WHICH I DON'T EVEN USE and never even thought about changing the naming scheme.
JUST RENAME IT AFTERWARDS!
of course her phone is so complicated that she doesn't even know how to rename the file, as she only knows how to use the google photos app (which doesn't support that?🤔) and never even considered to use the file manager ... well can't blame her for that, android isn't as simple as windows when it comes to this🤷
... in the end she just sent it, as is😪.

oh and by the way, is it actually possible?🤔

I found the best text editor for basic code fixing

For a couple of days, I was looking for a simple terminal-based text editor for taking simple code notes or basic code fixing kinds of stuff.

As an aspiring developer, I really like the concept of coding without touching the mouse.

So I downloaded the king of CLI text editors, Vim.

Now, guess what happened.

Yeah, you're right. I stuck inside vim and couldn't even quit from there.

Then, I started watching a bunch of tutorials and started reading vim's documentation.

But then I realized, I have to learn a lot of things only to operate vim and it's a pretty lengthy process.

At that time, I really needed a very simple text editor for doing basic stuff.

But, vim is not simple... you know :)

So, I had to come back to 'nano' & I was not happy enough to write codes by using 'nano'.

Suddenly, I discovered another really cool text editor called 'micro'.

It's really awesome.

It's not as advanced as vim but definitely a lot better than nano.

Micro is an open-source command-line text editor created by Zachary Yedidia.

Some basic key points of Micro:
1. It's really easy to operate.
2. It has different colours and highlights.
3. It supports syntaxes for over 70+ programming languages.
4. It has mouse support.
5. Plugins & colour schemes.

The best thing for me is colour schemes & screen split support.

Check out my full article on DEV - @souviktests.

I JUST CAN NOT UPDATE THAT ONE SERVER TO DEBIAN 9

- it has no /dev/sda but a /dev/ploopXXXXX which is mounted as / but I can't see it
- uname says it's Linux 2.6.32-042stab126.2 and it says Debian some lines later in the ssh login
- there is no boot loader (I can't find it)
- lsb_release tells me it's running Debian 9.6 stretch, I put stretch into the apt sources
- in /boot there are 2 different versions: 3.16.0-7-amd64 and 4.9.0-8-amd64
- and I do not have physical access to it

WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?!

I wanted to install OpenVPN on it but that Linux Version doesn't support the Tunnel Interface /dev/net/tun

I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:

1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.

2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.

3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.

4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.

5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.

6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.

7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.

8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.

9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.

10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.

Except…

Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.

11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.

Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.

Two cents.

HELP, ITS A MESS!!

Here is a thing : 30 hours ago, i was completely free nd useless .Had a lot of reminders to open source & learn new techs for upcoming summer vacations .

But day before yesterday my friend called me to say that he got a 6 month internship in web from some (not so big) startup and they were looking for some Android dev too, so he gave my name and wanted me to mail him my resume.

I did, and within half an hour he called, discussed about the work and wanted to test me.(as i said i didn't had plans for internship , leave alone a sudden test, but the company was work from home so i didn't denied ) The test was a big one but easy, he wanted me to design 15 UI activities for an app by looking at the wireframe. I asked for next 6 hours, did it in 4.5 and submitted him the repo...

THE TROUBLE STARTS NOW...
1) He seemed impressed i guess, coz the next day when he saw my message, he Created a group of 5 people within a few minutes and started assigning tasks(?!) And in the personal chat what he said was just weird : "You are the lead for this project" (WTF??!?)

2)I had already mentioned him that i currently had exams so won't be doing any much of practical work but after every few grp messages, he was trying to assign me some task and a deadline. Weirdly, the test was actually a wireframe based on the project idea from some of their client , and just to show my skills, i have designed layouts of 15 of their activities of their app.

3) The negetive part comes like this: THERE IS NO MONEY AND ITS A 6 MONTH INTERNSHIP !! Fed up of this continues indirect deadlines, i asked him What's my responsibilities as a team dev, what will be my tenure and what will be the pay to which he replies that:

"there is no stipend for this, we have multiple projects lined up in which you can contribute and your internship period is 6 months which could be increased/decreased on the basis of your performance. You will get a PPO, Internship certificate , mentor support and intellectual code rights (which i am guessing means my 2 word name in the about pages of the apps i develop for them ) .And as a lead , you will be getting an experience in leadership skills "

I am really confused. Work from home seems like a relaxing thing , and being a team lead for the first time definitely would make me a little more confident. But why does it feel to be kind of fraud plan? Plus there is no pay and i would be ignoring my creativity ideas for this (not completely but i am sure anyone giving a job would expect some work from me eceryday ).

WHAT SHOULD I DO???

Can gamedevelopers stop using lua as their freaking scripting language..
Every time I try and figure out how tables work and think I finally get it it throws a big fuck you curve ball.

Oh and then they use json file to store the data of a table except that those json interfaces are complete retards.

If you are going to support json files then why the fuck won't you put in a small fucking inconsecential JS interperter so you can actually find some docs regarding more complex fucking docs then those simple minded t[guildName] = "guild"

Another thing, why the fuck does lua not use {} like every other langauge. I use those curly brackets to figure out where shit start and ends half the freaking time.

Fuck this I'm out for today...
And a big fuck you with both middle fingers to any dev that thinks lua is a great scripting language for plugins.

Rant time. Oh boi.

So, a bit of context: I am a university student in Greece and I have a desktop PC with elementary OS on it. When the unis closed down because of Coronavirus, I moved back to my parents', without my PC, only a usb stick with elementary OS installed on it. That was before the lockdown. My parents have a desktop PC and my old laptop, both with Windows rn. I'm only able to work using Linux, so I've been just popping that elementary OS USB stick whenever I needed to work.

All cool and good. Until the usb got full. It was a 16GB one after all. No biggie, I bought a new 64GB one from a well known Greek tech shop along with a webcam my mother needed. It was a LEXAR one.

They fucking took a week to transfer it. As if the closest shop to me was in fucking Germany. For context, the drawing tablet I bought from China the other day only did 2 weeks to come. During this time I could barely use Linux because my USB stick had only some 600MB free.

Ok, wtv I said to myself. I am a patient person after all. I received the USB stick, along with the webcam, in good condition, in their packaging. Alright. I dd'ed everything from the 16GB stick to the 64GB one and then I extend the partition. Everything works flawlessly. And it's faster too.

Next day, I boot up from it again. It boots up good. Nice, time to do some work. I open my editor. And it fucking freezes. The editor is not some VSCode or Atom or any of that heavy shit, it's just elementary OS Code. A very lightweight Gtk3 app. Strangely though, the rest of my OS (the dock autohide, eg.) Seems totally responsive. I try to open another app. No luck. Not even switching TTYs work. Good shit. I force shutdown my PC. I try to boot again from that piece of shit. And guess what! NO BOOT BITCH. Like, fuck you. I boot from my previous 16GB one. Linux won't recognize it. No /dev/sdc like I used to have. Ok, lsusb. Nope, nothing. I disconnect it and reconnect it, and lsusb. An empty entry appears.I run it a couple of times, and the it disappears again. I switch to TTY 2. I get read errors and usb error -71.

And I want to fucking explode

I call back to support for the warranty coverage. I wait for a good 10 minutes and a nice lady picks up. I tell her the issue. She says that the support team will call me for the issue this day it the next day.

I hang up.

It feels like some fucking prank. YOU MOTHERFUCKING TOOK SO LONG TO DELIVER MY SHIT. Not to mention that the shitty courier service they are working with wouldn't deliver the goods to my home because it's slightly out of town. AND NOW YOU ARE DELAYING MY WARRANTY RETURN? HOW THE FLYING FUCK DID YOU BECOME A WELL KNOWN TECH SHOP WITH SUCH SHITTY SERVICE?

IF YOUR BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE ENOUGH TO BLOW YOUR NOSES.

YOUR THE SERVICE EQUIVALENT OF A PARTICIPATION AWARD.

Foreigners' view of Greeks suddenly doesn't seem so unreasonable. Yes, we are fucking lazy asses. And we also hate that. We hate each other for that very reason. May this country not live any longer.

So I have some XSDs for integrating with a third party supplier, which I need to convert to java classes. Easy, jaxb to the rescue!

Now when it comes to checking into source control, do I either a) check in generated files (bad) , or b) check in the XSDs and have maven generate my classes each time the project is packaged using its jaxb plugin (good).

Of course the senior dev picks option a), purely because some people in charge of support may not understand maven.

Why do I have to do things the wrong way because people don't want to learn/are incompetent? Why are there people in charge of support who don't understand simple tools?

I got assigned to work on a new project a couple of weeks ago. We got the POC code handed off from senior management, since he came up with the idea over the weekend. The project concept is hella exciting, but the dev manager and PO I have to deal with make life unbearable to say the least.

We have only 2 devs (including me) and 1 QA on this supposedly very important project. Of course, management announced the project to the clients already, so now we have to deliver ASAP cause it adds “sizzle”.

The MVP deadline is... no one knows when, either July 30th or September 1st. The MVP requirements are... unknown. I swear if someone saw the list of tasks and issues attached to “MVP” Epic, they would call us nuts trying to fit it all in.

To make things better, each PR requires 2 reviewers, so we end up adding manager as a reviewer just cause we need him to hit that “approve” button. So in attempt to make life easier, we requested to have a third developer. We are getting another developer, but that guy doesn’t know how to unit test a pure function...

Current priorities are... unit testing with coverage of 95% and if we want to refactor code, we have to add area to the list in a Google Doc. As a result, we are not tackling big things like risk of SQL injections not to mention big features like i18n (5-6 languages to support by the way and yes, it’s part of MVP as well as SSR no one knows why). Currently, I spend 2-3 hours a week in calls with the team just to figure out what the hell MVP is, what we have to do and why we have to do it. Last time we spent an hour refining 1 spike and breaking down one story into 3.

Oh, we also don’t have a deployment plan, not even to test environments since DevOps team was not aware of this project at all. Thus, QA cannot create any test suites and have to test everything manually which eats a lot of their time.

This whole project is a big hot mess and I’m considering leaving it all together especially since I’m working on two squads at the same time. I love the project, I love the idea, but management makes it unbearable, so I’m not even motivated to work on that.

markdown is not good enough! the tools aren't there for non-devs and there's no concordance on moving forward *compatibly* for anything other than headers and __possibly__ lists.

md has been around for years and still no consensus on comments, meta data, css, data imports, etc.

i could never in good faith recommend to a non-dev to use markdown, even though every academic and professional writer from legal to journalism should exclusively be using markdown to write and store their documents. the data portability and ease of search, retrieval, collection, distribution, etc of markdown compared to pdf or docx is enormous. markdown is the hex format of text, the perfect layer of data and visual so that the user and the computer can both operate on text as blocks of data rather than weirdly styled paragraphs that need to be reformatted BY HAND for citation-style or journal format, or paper size. FOR EACH SUBMISSION. Academics literally rewrite their 100-page papers to accommodate up to 10 different submission requirements.

They could be clicking MLA vs Chicago and/or using a journal's stylesheet to recompile for its styles.

Today there is some support from zotero et al to take away some of the pain, but it makes ZERO SENSE for writers to have to keep and store and keep up to date, multiple versions of the same document. Git pull does not exist for them. But the worst part is that git isnt the solution to their problem. They need a compiler more than they need version control. But they also desperately need vcs. They ALL literally have a million files named "dumdum.dumFINAL-3084_lastversion \2020, this one.dum".

They dont have git or anything like it, because they need a line-by-line solution like markdown for git to become effective.

All of writing is basically mired in the fact that people cant even roll up their paragraphs and see what the fuck it is theyre saying. Most writing reads like a long scroll through some nonsense that goes nowhere. Like this rant. but the point is that markdown and line-by line editing actually produces more logically sound writing. You start to think in terms of defining ideas in blocks, ... like code.

Hi All !!!

Woah this is my first Post after 3 years not opening this website.
i don't know why.
but maybe between 2017-2020 my live got better so i don't think will have any Rant again.ahahaha *kidding

but today i see email, that i got sticker from devRant, woah i think i will go to devRant again.

wow devRant more cool than before , i don't think this website still open. i just want to check it. i forgot my password too. but luckily still got an access to my email.

So i want to tell a story about this weekly Rant,
Family Support? what the he** is it.
my family only look for money.
at my first job finding, i always pushed for find work in Factory/Oil/Goverment that will give a BIG money.
my first reaction to this i tell i won't do that. but overtime i think i will not talk about it again.
i just want to get Dev Job anywhere.
i don't know if this is the meaning of passion or something like that.
but from the first time , i try hard to get job only is software development.
and hey Maybe my Pray Listened by Almighty God.

so i got my first job as Fullstack developer that luckily accept me as self taught software developer. i don't have any formal education.
actually i only learn software dev from Lynda.com(not promotion) .
i learn algorithm, pseudocode . then i got passed the test of psudocode.

Then because the money is good in there. my parent just accept my first job. not complaining again till now..
maybe this is what they called ikigai??

i love software development so much....

but still i always have a Rant every day about it.
someday you like it, someday you hate it.
someday yo miss it, someday you regret it.

maybe that what is called Love.Damn...

NOT DEV RELATED - JUST SPREADING AWARENESS...

For most of us, a PJ Day sounds like a luxury, but for those with lupus, it’s too often a necessity due to their disease. PJ DAY is a way to honor and support the many people with lupus while also raising funds. #knowlupus

Don't you just love it when there is no formal spec. you get a few mspaint slides and told a delivery date, scope and slides are changed by management weekly, not necessarily informing you of it. Then when your failing, deadlines pass you by you still have no clear spec 2 weeks before release, partial backend because core business devs are busy doing support on the legacy systems. No frontend cause it's been changed, redesigned and you've been forced to change frameworks and technology so many times due to corporate policy and legacy systems with another dev group holding your balls with what they allow you to do and use. Id complain but at least we've been told to be agile. This is my life now, we lost all hope and stopped caring. And management wonders why the deadlines and estimates are all off.

I'm currently the only dev that works with a client's dev team. That's not really how we usually work, usually it's a whole team of ours.

Three aspects why this sucks:

1) the client's dev team is made up of juniors and junior to intermediate devs. All of them are new to scrum. I therefore have to constantly support (dev & agile workflow), check all the PRs and have to think of everything in Refinement meetings.

2) the client's based in another timezone and the PO is super busy because we're the only agile team in their company. Therefore this is going to be the third Friday in a row where I have meetings until 6pm.

3) I also have a specific time frame I have to start working for my company, so I constantly work extra hours due to the time difference.

I'm just tired.

Seriously guys, how do you deal when remotely collaborating with lets say not the most motivated and competent devs?

Our scrum team got formed about 6 months ago from leftover devs of other teams, choosing a couple competent devs at the core and other devs who were kinda gotten rid of by their old teams, and after 6 months of working together I can see why.

Situation is that we are 7 devs in our team and 4 of devs are not pulling their weight. They are seniors on paper, but in reality not really.

They rarely take something complex to work on and even if they do, they make sure they take as much time as possible. Two of them are contractors who I imagine decided to treat the job as a paycheck and nothing more. There is no initiative, no push to make things better and in general attitude is to do bare minimum: only what is being asked and then delaying the hell out of tasks.

Im not exaggareting: Im talking about every possible way of dragging out the tasks: delaying communication, sitting around for a few days while not asking for new tasks to work on if they are blocked, also avoiding standups. Working for days on very basic comments in their MR's. Getting "sick" for a couple days on deadline when things get tough, so that someone else would come in, refactor and save the day. Once or twice it could be a coincidence, but nowadays I can already guess ahead of time what kind of trick they will pull now.

Our project is an android app where we have to support few different tablets, so the most recent new trick that I witnessed is devs avoiding hardware delivers, sometimes for months. Idea seems to be if you dont ping your team that you dont have hardware, then you can avoid working on related tasks with that hardware.

Worst part is that they get away with it. Our teamlead is a senior dev who is first time teamlead, doesnt code anymore and doesnt want to rock the boat. He is the type of teamlead who sets arbitrary deadlines, makes it sound that they are urgent and takes a few days off in the middle of chaos just before deadline. Restrospectives don't help at all and if I try to bring up stuff directly to him he tells me to bring it up during retrospectives. We discuss issues, rant a bit ant then continue carying on like nothing happened and nothing changes.

So little by little in the past 6 months we came to this point where 2-3 devs are carrying the weight of the team and are in a constant crunch mode, while others are allowed to slack. Its becoming ridiculous.

Problem is that this is starting to affect our morale. Only way that is left to keep my sanity right now is to pull away sometimes and also slack. Then I come back at full capacity, give my best for a couple weeks until I have to go and fix some basic leftover task that has been purposefully dragged out for 2 months and left unfinished, then I just want to scream and I know that its time to disconnect again.

*Email chain forwarded by support team to our dev team*
Hi,
Please assist our customer. He is unable to reset his password!

*Went through the emails turned out that customer is asking for password reset request for legacy website for which we don't work at all*

Scrum master sending another reply to look into the matter on High priority.

We again double checked for the customer but he is not registered on the new website.

Apparently, both scrum master and support team and entire company is aware that our team is not working for legacy website.
But No one reads the email properly and keep forwarding to dev team disturbing the entire team.

Some times things like this are done by product manager and her associate, but they keep replying to each other on unnecessary things till they come to conclusion and scrum master try hard to keep up with them with his own agile disciplines.

Me: There is a bug in the most recent "standard global software" release that causes data not to send properly to the device. There are 3 ways to send the same data to the device in the current release but they apparently don't do the same thing like they should. (Sent screenshots of the issue)

Standard Dev Support: "it's not a Bug it's a feature. So the development found out, that there are several problems with sending data to devices using "x" method. So they decided to stop "x" function in the latest release. Use "y" method instead."

Me: "X" and "y" methods are both still there. You didn't remove it in the latest release. So it is a fucking bug moron?!?

Wtf!!!!!

!rant

Ever find something that's just faster than something else, but when you try to break it down and analyze it, you can't find out why?

PyPy.
I decided I'd test it with a typical discord bot-style workload (decoding a JSON theoretically from an API, checking if it contains stuff, format and then returning it). It was... 1.73x the speed of python.

(Though, granted, this code is more network dependent than anything else.)

Mean +- std dev: [kitsu-python] 62.4 us +- 2.7 us -> [kitsu-pypy] 36.1 us +- 9.2 us: 1.73x faster (-42%)

Me: Whoa, how?!
So, I proceed to write microbenches for every step. Except the JSON decoding, (1.7x faster was at least twice as slow (in one case, one hundred times slower) when tested individually.
The combination of them was faster. Huh.

By this point, I was all "sign me up!", but... asyncpg (the only sane PostgreSQL driver for python IMO, using prepared statements by default and such) has some of it's functionality written in C, for performance reasons. Not Cython, actual C that links to CPython. That means no PyPy support.

Okay then.

Long post, TLDR: Given a large team building large enterprise apps with many parts (mini-projects/processes), how do you reduce the bus-factor and the # of Brent's (Phoenix Project)?

# The detailed version #

We have a lot of people making changes, building in new processes to support new flows or changes in the requirements and data.

But we also have to support these except when it gets into Production there is little information to quickly understand:
- how it works
- what it does/supposed to do
- what the inputs and dependencies are

So often times, if there's an issue, I have to reverse engineer whatever logic I can find out of a huge mess.

I guess the saying goes: the only people that know how it works is whoever wrote it and God.

I'm a senior dev but i spend a lot of time digging thru source code and PROD issues to figure out why ... is broken and how to maybe fix it.

I think in Agile there's supposed to be artifacts during development but never seen em.

Personally whenever i work on a new project, I write down notes and create design diagrams so i can confirm things and have easy to use references while working.

I don't think anyone else does that. And afterwards, I don't have anywhere to put it/share it. There is no central repo for this stuff other than our Wiki but for the most part, is like a dumping ground. You have to dig for information and hoping there's something useful.

And when people leave, information is lost forever and well... we hire a lot of monkeys... so again I feel a lot of times i m trying to recover information from a corrupted hard drive...

The only way real information is transferred is thru word of mouth, special knowledge transfer sessions.

Ideally I would like anything that goes into PROD to have design docs as well as usage instructions in order for anyone to be able to quickly pick it up as needed but I'm not sure if that's realistic.

Even unit tests don't seem to help much as they just test specific functions but don't give much detail about how a whole process is supposed to work.

Over the last few weeks, I've containerised the last of our "legacy" stacks, put together a working proof of concept in a mixture of DynamoDB and K8s (i.e. no servers to maintain directly), passing all our integration tests for said stack, and performed a full cost analysis with current & predicted traffic to demonstrate long term server costs can be less than half of what they are now on standard pricing (even less with reserved pricing). Documented all the above, pulled in the relevant higher ups to discuss further resources moving forward, etc. That as well as dealing with the normal day to day crud of batting the support department out the way (no, the reason Bob's API call isn't working is because he's using his password as the API key, that's not a bug, etc. etc.) and telling the sales department that no, we can't bolt a feature on by tomorrow that lets users log in via facial recognition, and that'd be a stupid idea anyway. Oh, and tracking down / fixing a particularly nasty but weird occasional bug we were getting (race hazards, gotta love 'em.)

Pretty pleased with that work, but hey, that's just my normal job - I enjoy it, and I like to think I do good work.

In the same timeframe, the other senior dev & de-facto lead when I'm not around, has... "researched" a single other authentication API we were considering using, and come to the conclusion that he doesn't want to use it, as it's a bit tricky. Meanwhile passed all the support stuff and dev stuff onto others, as he's been very busy with the above.

His full research amounts to a paragraph which, in summary, says "I'm not sure about this OAuth thing they mention."

Ok, fine, he works slowly, but whatever, not my problem. Recently however, I learn that he's paid *more than I am*. I mean... I'm not paid poorly, if anything rather above market rate for the area, so it's not like I could easily find more money elsewhere - but damn, that's galling all the same.

My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...

I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.

Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.

In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.

As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.

The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.

It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).

We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.

Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.

This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.

The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.

Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.

And... Fucking and!

Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.

Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.

Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.

What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").

Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.

This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?

- Am a junior dev in an awesome team & exciting project after my apprenticeship and while having just started my part time studies
- Have restructure in company so I land in an other value stream
- Get laid off by new value stream 6 months later (now) because they have a serious budget cut
- Take time to come to terms with situation. I could finally work more on my side projects or focus a bit more on my studies. Hey actually I will have 5 months time to look for something while being paid by the company and they help me brush up my CV. Pretty neat!
- Now my former boss wants me back because of my experience in the project, but only as a production support and not as dev (because budget and they're bleeding with tickets)

Not sure if I should take the offer as it feels safe to have an income and the team is cool. However, it feels a bit like a degradation as prod support sucks in that project and I'd like to code (which wouldn't be possible then).
And as this is still my first company I'm working in, it would make sense to look for something else...

Grrr need to sleep about it... Decision-making isn't exactly my strength.

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

I've posted about this a little in the past but.. my situation is that I got hired by a company as a developer, it turns out it was a lead dev role and they some how believe that I'm a one man army that's gonna finish a really huge web application started by another dev that left the company (apparently out of frustration from what I'm gathering in code comments and other employees)

All of this needs to be done in four months. I have never written a web application from the ground up and have always been subordinant to more competent developers. The team I with speaks mostly French and I can't help but notice the ever increasing social, communication, and cultural divides, being ostracized by people that I need support from because they don't speak great English has been frustrating to say the least. People have taken a step back in other areas which has me concerned they might be wanting to axe me cause I'm not making enough progress. Helppppppp

Rant and opinions wanted. Its a long one.

I have been working on a project for a month and a half. For the first week I was requesting designs that I got about 2 of out of 15. For the next week and a half the designer was on holiday so I couldn't do anything but delivered a few more designs once he got back.

This takes us 2 weeks in already. I have other things to do as well so at the same time I work on support tickets and some bespoke development coming in.

I get given 2 or 3 more designs and can't get anything else out of the designer after waiting a week so I have to design everything myself as I go and build it. Something I have never done before.

We are now 3 and a half weeks in. My boss randomly tells my pm it needs to be demo ready the next day. I work furiously to hack something together. It works but key functionality is missing.

I move house and work from home for a week and a half. I do my best but the project is full of bugs and the CSS is horrible because I didn't know what I was making at any stage. It is therefore CSS rules repeated in IDs everywhere.

My colleagues join me on the project because my boss has decided to try and sell it tomorrow.

They run through it and find all the bugs left from me working furiously to get things done quickly. Things like no search pagination and missing validation.

My boss is now pisses at me because the project is not finished, my colleagues are now all working on it. Throughout it all he knew the designer was not delivering me anything and that I was struggling.

Am I in the wrong for writing shit code that came about because I was coding with no idea of what the finished project should look like? Is he in the wrong for dumping this on me and just letting me get on with it even though he knew there were no designs?

Btw I am just finishing a 1 year internship and before this have never done web dev before.

Discuss.

Not really a dev rant, more of a "home tech support" kind of rant but I guess a lot of devs will relate...

So I was looking at building myself a little storage server, mostly for backups and stuff. This led to the fail of this rant: I thought it would be a good idea to convince my father to switch from using a ton of USB HDDs to get himself a NAS.

This is where I didn't think things through...

The only place he was able to set up the NAS is in the living room. Now I have to use my noise cancelling headphones all day just to not have to hear those HDDs rumbling around in there🤦

(also, I specifically got some super quiet fans for my gaming PC in the living room, but now I realize I could have saved some money and gotten some louder ones, since that NAS is so much louder...)

As promissed.

Day #1 on THE other project. Nothing fancy, just setting up my dev env. Got a decent pc with all the required network permissions. And this time I got w10 [last year I was working there on w7 pc via rdp from another w7 laptop. Dont ask...]
of course no localadmin rights to set shit up. Downloaded all the installs, found someone who has admin rights to run them. I even managed to get admin powershell!

Ran all installers, enabled long paths support, env vars, tweak here, tweak there,... Installed git bash to at least have a taste of shell. Decided to try out wsl. Enabled the feature, didnt reboot right away.
Rebooted. 2xclick on ubuntu setup and I get an error claiming wsl is not ebabled. Wtf? Did I do it wrong? I see bash command is there now so I must have done it right. After some googling I found out that even though I can enable wsl, it doesnt work on my version of windows. It's too okd they say. Yeah, tx MS, that's very intuitive and user friendly!

Allright, my hopes to habe a decent sub-os died. Git bash it is :( but I miss tmux soooo much. Then I came across smth that caught my eye. Msys2 it's called. Apparently it's based on cygwin and has a pacman package manager! ´pacman -S tmux´ -- hippee-ka-yay motherfuckers! It's not the best terminal emulation, but it works quite allright and it has tmux. And netcat!

Banished to mouseclickerland still managed to find a good enough shell. Yayy!

So there it is. My first day's ups and downs, disappointments and discoveries.
If you know a better shell I could set up on w10, please, share

This is an actual transcript...
Since it's way too long for the normal 5000 characters, hence splitting it up...

Infra Guy: mr Dev, could you please give some rational for update of jjb?
Dev: sparse checkout support is missing
Infra Guy: is this support mandatory to achive whatever you trying to do?
Dev: yes
Infra Guy: u trying to get set of specific folder for set of specific components?
Dev: yes
Infra Guy: bash script with cp or mv will not work for you?
Dev: no
Infra Guy: ?
Dev: when you have already present functionality why reinvent the wheel
Dev: jenkins has support for it
Dev: the jjb is the bottle neck
Infra Guy: getting this functionality onto our infra would have some implications
Dev: why should I write bash script if jenkins allows me to do that
Dev: what implications ??
Infra Guy: will you commit to solve all the issues caused by new jjb?
Dev: you show me the implications first
Infra Guy: like a year ago i have tried to get new jjb <commit_url>
Infra Guy: no, the implications is a grey area
Infra Guy: i cant show all of them and they may hit like in week or eve month
Dev: then why was it not tackled
Dev: and why was it kept like that
Infra Guy: few jobs got broken on something
Dev: it will crop up some time later
Dev: if jobs get broken because of syntax
Dev: then jobs can be fixed
Dev: is it not ???
Infra Guy: ofc
Infra Guy: its just a question who will fix them
Dev: follow the syntax and follow the guidelines
Dev: put up a test server and try and lets see
Dev: you have a dev server
Dev: why not try on that one and see what all jobs fails
Dev: and why they fail
Dev: rather than saying it will fail and who will fix
Dev: let them fail and then lets find why
Dev: I manually define a job
Dev: I get it done
Infra Guy: i dont think we have test server which have the same workload and same attention as our prod
Dev: unless you test how would you know ??
Dev: and just saying that it broke one with a version hence I wont do it
Infra Guy: and im not sure if thats fair for us to deal with implication of upgrading of the major components just cause bash script is not good enough for u
Dev: its pretty bad
Infra Guy: i do agree
Infra TL Guy: Dev, what Infra Guy is saying is that its not possible to upgrade without downtime
Infra Guy: no
Dev: how long a downtime are we looking at ??
Infra Guy: im saying that after this upgrade we will have deal with consequences for long time
Infra Guy-2: No this is not testing the upgrade is the huge effort as we dont have dev resources to handle each job to run
Dev: if your jjb compiles all the yaml without error
Dev: I am not sure what consequences are we talking of
Infra Guy: so you think there will be no consequences, right?
Dev: unless you take the plunge will you know ??
Dev: you have a dev server running at port 9000
Infra Guy: this servers runs nothing
Dev: that is good
Dev: there you can take the risk
Infra Guy: and the fack we have managed to put something onto api doesnt mean it works
Dev: what API ?
Infra Guy: jenkins api
Infra Guy: hmmm
Dev: what have you put on Jenkins API ??
Infra Guy: (
Dev: jjb is a CLI
Infra Guy: ((
Dev: is what I understand
Dev: not a Jenkins API
Infra Guy: (((
Dev: (((((
Infra Guy: jjb build xmls and push them onto api
Infra Guy: and its doent matter
Dev: so you mean to say upgrading a CLI is goig to upgrade your core jenkisn API
Dev: give me a break
Infra Guy: the matter is that even if have managed to build something and put it onto api
Infra Guy: doesnt mean it will work
Dev: the API consumes the xml file and creates a job
Infra Guy: right
Dev: if it confirms to the options which it understands
Dev: then everything will work
Dev: I am actually not getting your point Infra Guy
Infra Guy: i do agree mr Dev
Dev: we are beating around the bush
Infra Guy: just want to be sure that if this upgrade will break something
Infra Guy: we will have a person who will fix it
Dev: that is what CICD is supposed to let me know with valid reasons
Dev: why can't that upgrade be done
Infra Guy: it can be done
Infra Guy: i even have commit in place

!dev

Why is it that whenever I have a goal, everybody comes out of the woodwork to tell me I'm stupid and am not capable of achieving it, but whenever I do achieve something on my own they expect thanks and recognition for all the "support and guidance" they gave along the way?

Surely this can't be just me experiencing this?

Quietish team member sits quietly and creates the mother of all APIs, doesn't say much about it, doesn't document what he's done, falls out with the boss, leaves with 2 weeks to go before a beta release.

Already overworked dev/backend support team are plunged into manic bug fixing/business rule implementing/call standardising/chaos.

This is not how one devs.

Not one bit.

I have several tasks in my job. Not all of them are straight up dev, some are also student related. Since my coworker left I was rediculously overbudened, simply because the tasks I have to do are sooo far appart from one anothet. After talking to my boss, we get to hire some people to help (big yay!) But now it is upon me to write the recruitment adds so to speak and also talk to the people and interview them. What the heck I have no clue about this whatsoever xD i mean, i kinda feel honoured that my boss trusts me enough to do a pre selection for her. But damn. .-. I'm barely older then the applicants (it's all at uni and I'm a student and so are they)
Anyone got tips for interviews? I dont need them to do dev work. More like working with kids and presentation prep and support.

Dear God, why are punishing me by another bug report related to Edge?

Console dock freezes commonly for MINUTES, literally. It doesn't support objects, so every object is very usefully converted to "[object Object]" string. And now I am discovering that change event on input is magically not firing?

What a day. This would be solved in Chrome or Firefox in a matter of minutes, for a same time Edge doesn't even manage to render a page with dev tools opened FFS...

!dev
to;dr: fuck American mainstream media and all the lies.

I'm am so fucking fed up with American mainstream media. they constantly spew fucking blatant lies or disingenuous, misleading bullshit, and basically cover up anything that "doesn't fit the narrative".

it's like they think we're all idiots.

In South Africa, privately owned farmland is being confiscated from whites, as far as I can tell, because they're white. it's basically not being talked about in mainstream media because they're white. if it were any other race, I'm sure it would be all over the media.

"Violence again women in videogames must stop". uhhh, most videogames I've played, the violence is against about 99.9% male/0.1% females.... so....

"Donald Trump is a fascist". now I'm not saying one way or another whether I support Donald Trump or not, no opinions here just facts: Donald Trump is, at the very least, right-leaning, and fascism is a FAR LEFT IDEOLOGY. saying Donald Trump is a fascist is completely baseless and just a completely retarded claim.

literally calling for socialism.... do I even need to comment? have you ever read a history book?

countless other examples can easily be found if you look at any independent moderate to slightly right-leaning news source, podcast, etc.

I've had enough of the fucking blatant dishonesty of the mainstream media, whether it's flat out lies, or being disingenuous, or misleading, or not covering huge stories because they don't meet the narrative.

Question for leads...
Have you found that it's possible to have a balanced leadership style instead of ruling with an iron fist?

Let me explain what I mean.

There's always going to be room for improvement, there's going to be at least the occasional issue that happens, etc.
As a lead, your job is to not have issues happen and to have the team work effectively.

Now, for me, my goal was to have a balanced style in the sense that if there's a small issue or small room for improvement, but the team is already stressed, I take the heat for it if necessary and let them relax so they're not stressed and they can focus on the bigger things.
For medium improvements, I essentially put it to the vote so the team can have their say in whether they agree with the proposal on improvement.
And so on, idea being to have a balance between "Do what I tell you" and "do whatever you want".

However, I have found that doing so does essentially nothing to improve team morale and team cohesion. Any thing that needs doing and I force them into it, any thing I don't protect them from, any thing they don't agree with will still manifest as problems in the team, a single "you have to do this" will make them complain about the leadership style being "force to implement".

Being completely hands off and essentially not a lead, just basically a support dev more or less, is not what I'm really looking for, but also isn't good for a team that does genuinely have things that need to improve (stupid errors not being caught in dev OR review, system not being fully testable because of external dependencies that are not really necessary for tests, etc).

So the only option I see there is simply ruling with an iron fist and leaning into being that hated lead that just forcea you to do things and "doesn't care about you".
I've already stepped down from this lead position because I don't want to be that guy, but if I'm looking for another position I'm curious if this is just universal or hae you guys found that it IS possible to have a "good team" where you can be adults and discuss things as a team and improve as a team?

The word "shift" in reference to a workday should NEVER be used in a dev environment. There is noservice that needs to constantly be maintained, thats what customer support is for. A shift gives the mentality that you have a set time that you are responsible for a service.

Devs are responsible for finishing a product on a deadline; that is not a shift, that is a fucking workday. I especially hate it when managers refer to them as shifts, because it shows just how little they understand what the devs are doing. They think of bug fixes like they think of flipping burgers; a task that performs a service. It's not a service, stop acting like it is.

At least pretend to have a reason for using checkboxes where the behaviour is obviously a single choice. I know I'm sometimes full of crap. I know I can waste so much time arguing for something I'm wrong about. At least I have arguments to support my approach, and I don't dismiss my mistakes. I don't need you to spend the next 5 minutes changing checkboxes for radio buttons in the mockup, it took dev 5 seconds to replace "checkbox" with "radio" and move on. However, I do need you to know what you're doing, even if it turns to be wrong.

I know this world celebrates people who can do things perfectly: models with perfect bodies, singers with perfect voices, sportsmen with perfect scores, students with perfect grades. I understand that's why you wish to try again so you can do it perfectly.

That's not what the world needs. The world needs people who know why they did what they did. It's drunk drivers who break down in the court, not serial killers. Serial killers know what they did, they know why they did it, and they believe it was the right thing to do; drunk drivers on the other hand had no idea what they did or why they did it, and they try to dismiss their wrongdoings by blaming them on alcohol, not getting a taxi, parking fees, the car, or some other circumstances.

So confront your bullshit for once. Stop searching for excuses to dismiss challenging ideas and prove you can defend your position. Otherwise, don't get angry when your "impeccable" ideas lose to someone who at least tries to defend their nonsense.

I’m having this issue for the online marketplace I’m working on the side. It’s blockchain tech where you can purchase normal goods and services(no, not like Amazon or Fiverr, eww, this one’s more inclined with promoting organic growth for small businesses and freelancers).

I’m stuck with what solution is in the best interest of the user and the business for the long-term.

The dilemma about anonymity, online freedom and privacy is yes, it protects users from predators and attackers, but then, it’s harder for authorities to hunt down people who uses platforms for malicious intent, and also, digital footprint is helpful during litigation as evidence.

You don’t know who to trust.

-There is nothing to differentiate normal users with spammers, scammers, etc.
-There is no accountability for if they break the rules. They can easily delete and create a new account.

Platforms, communities big or small are plagued with these.
There are a lot of people out there who would rather project their insecurities on other people than to seek therapy.

Also, how platforms uses psychology tricks to make platforms addicting, it’s safe to assume that it’s bound to get toxic. Fixation on these platforms, leads to other needs being neglected or people forget to stay present.

Another thing, automated moderation is not that effective as there are still biases in data and human verification is still required. But then, human moderators get exposed to extreme violence, gore, etc that leads to poor mental health. (see Facebook got sued by moderators)

Also, I’ve had a recent experience where some unstable dev was stalking and harassing me. During that turmoil, I’ve found the many loopholes in every platform out there and how crappy their support is. Like they’ll just say, “make your account more secure”, bitch it’s your platform not providing enough security, your blocking feature means nothing coz anyone can still create accounts and message anyone.
It happened like February-August (it ended coz I quit going online and made private all my accounts). UGH I MISS ALL MY FRIENDS THO. FUCK THAT DUDE. He deserves to be in jail TBH

Lol if this product booms, now u know the back story lololol

I have an idea of starting my own business and I need your feedback guys. Literally appreciate any kind of feedback.

So Im an android dev who has 3 years experience under his belt. I am working fulltime and I think its time to scale. I want to open my own agency where I would take on big clients and build apps for them. I personally am able to manage/see through the whole project, handle all communication and also work on the android side if necessary. I would start from smaller projects worth of 30-40k for startups, basically create MVP for them and charge for support after that.

Problem is that as far as I understand if you want to "open your own kitchen" you need to be well connected. I dont know any big clients who would trust and purchase my services, because after all who I am? Im nobody just a dev at this moment. So I need a strategy to build some relationships with businesses.

So Im thinking long game. What if I would first open a recruitment/hiring agency? I would focus in specifically mobile dev recruitment. I have the soft skills and I already participated in dozens of recruitment processes. I also have the tech skills, I would be a competent recruiter. Maybe I could do that for a year, just communicate between devs and clients and place devs. My thinking is that in around one year I would be able to build a massive network of clients and devs.

And then, I could try opening my own dev agency. Using my gathered contacts hopefully I could land some decent projects for start and build my team or outsource from that point on.

Ofcourse Im not sure if I could pull this off alone, I would need a detailed strategy and some mentoring. But what do you think is this a viable plan?

I feel sad about being in a standstill position in my life right now. everything feels like stopped, and i am not growing.

My only source of income is my job, which does pays well, but not much. I have been in this job for 6 months (3rd job in 3 years) and although it is satisfying in terms of the work i do, everything else is just bleh. quantity of work is a lot, there is chaos everywhere, bosses are incompetent and demanding and worst of all , its hybrid, so am wasting 2-3 days every week.

apart from work, i struggle to make myself useful. outside work hours, i want to earn more money, health, popularity and power.

- for health, i goto gym , which hopefully is the onlh thing going correct in my life. although am not getting any major transformation, the feeling of pain among my muscles feels good and people seems to know me somewhat in there.

- for money, popularity and power , am again at a still.
--- power comes from popularity and money.
--- money comes from ability to influence(and optionally with knowledge) .
--- popularity also comes with knowledge and/or ability to influence.
--- knowledge can be bought/learned.

- above all are my guesses. i haven't yet cracked the exact dependency graph in here. but the simplest thing to get is knowledge and i have been trying to get a hold of it, but in vain

- i have tried a lot of stuff in last 3 years :

--- get better in android ( which i did by working professionally) ,
--- learn web frontend (html/css/js/react, etc ., for which i took courses and i know them now somewhat ) ,
--- learn web backend ( spring, node, flask, aws, etc .,for which i took courses/videos)
--- learn no code stuff (markdown generators, wordpress etc , for which i tried as hobby)
--- learn ios/hybrid stuff(flutter, react native etc, for ehich i watched videos, did courses etc)

- the problem is, am just good at one thing (android) and have a limited knowledge (5-30%) of all the others. companies won't pay me more to be a mediocre full stack dev than what they are paying me now to be a decent junior android dev

- the areas where i lack as of now is DS,Algo, Competitive programming and System designing. these are skills expected for someone trying to crack a good fortune 5xx company

- i am not so sure if i want to do these since there isn't a guarantee whether i will be happy to be in google or amazon. i could guess the amount they would pay me for being a mediocre full stack dev.

- i am not even sure if its good for me to change jobs every few months. i contribute heavily wherever i go, nd i leave at the moment am about to receive a probable reward(probable promotion/increment) for a more concrete reward ( the definite increment from a job switch)

- my existing knowledge is being wasted like the various uselss courses i did in college as i am unable to find a usecase for them. i am tired of making useless jira clones , caclulators and portfolio pages for myself which no one will be using or appreciating.

- keeping the whole tech life aside, my family runs the blood of businessmen and i am not able to progress in that as well. my father was an average grocery shop owner whose shop is now on rent and who is now doing a sales job too. however, their family shop with grandfather and brothers was once a very popular and money minting business 40 years ago.

- i sometimes feel i could do good in business area, but i am a complete blank slate in that department with no one to support (my father is old now)

- alongside non career problems ( midlife crisis, money shortage, no friends ), life feels pretty stagnant right now :/

"Dear TitanLannister : You are in the final year. A lot of shit is happening around u. its now time to make a career and take tough decisions. What would you do?"

CHOICE 1: COMPETITIVE
>>>>background : "a lot of super companies like wallmart, fb, amazon, ms, google,.. etc simply takes a straight coding test for fresher placement. They ask tough bad ass level questions, but with right guidance, a hell ton of dedicated hours of coding, and making it to the top of various coding tests could make you a potential candidate"
>>>>+ve points :
- "You got the teachers and professionals with great experience to guide you"
- "a dream job come true.you can go there and join teams that interests you"
- "it was your first exposure to computer world. maybe you would like doing it again, after 4 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You have always been an average 70 percentile guy. The task requires 2000-3000 hours of coding an year. it will be hard and you always grow bored out of this pretty quickly"
- "Even If you did that , you stand a lesser chance because your maths is shitty.There are millions running in this race with brains faster than your IDE"
- "your college will riot with you because they expect 75% attendance"
- "You are virtually out of college placements, in which , even though shitty companies come and offer even shittier 4LPA packages($6000 per annum), would take a tough logical/aptitude based test for which you won't be able to prepare"

CHOICE 2: PROFESSIONAL WORK
>>>>background: "you always wanted to create something , and therefore you started taking android based courses. you have been doing android for over 2 years and today you know a lot of things in android. you might be good in other professional lines like web dev, data analytics, ml,ai, etc too if you give time to that"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will love doing this, you always did"
- "With the support of a good team, you will always be able to complete tasks and build new things quickly"
- "Start ups might offer you the placement, they always need students with some good exposure"
>>>>-ve points :
- "Every established company which provides interesting dev work takes their first round as coding, and do not considers your extra curricular dev work. So you are placing your all hopes in 1 good start up with super offerings that would somehow be amazed by your average profile and offer you a position"
- "start ups are well, startups and may not offer a job security as strong as est. companies"
- "You are probably not as awesome dev as you think you are. for 2 years, you have only learned the concepts , and not launched more than 1 shitty app and a few open source work"

CHOICE 3: NON CODING
>>>>background: "companies coming in college placements have 1-2 rounds of aptitude,logical reasoning , analysis based questions and other non tech tests. There are also online tests available like elitmus,AMCAT, etc which, when cleared with good marks help receive placements from decent established companies like TCS, infosys, accenture,etc"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will eventually get placed from college, or online tests"
- "there will be a job security, as most of these companies bonds the person for 2-3 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You really don't like this. These companies are low profile consultant/services based companies which would put you in any area: from testing to sales, and job offers are again $5000-6000 per annum at max"
- "Since it includes college, the other factors like your average cgpa and 1 backlog will play an opposing role"
- "Again, you are a 70 percentile avg guy. who knows you might not able to crack even these simple tests"

Ugh... I am fucking confused. Please be me, and help.The things that i wrote about myself are true, but the things that i assumed about super companies, start ups or low profile companies might not be correct, these points comes from my limited knowledge ,terrified and confused brain, after all.
:(

Dear Devranters,

I am once again asking for your knowledge support.

I've been working as a legacy dev for a couple of years now and that is... pretty much it. I am kinda of a mid guy. So I tried to apply here and there and ... I got a number of offers from junior to senior roles in ranges from +/- 50% of my salary.

I am kind of a pesimist. It does look tempting to go for the top senior position with the coolest tech and most salary... but there should be a catch.. right? I am not a great dev and some of the companies have noted that I should be more of a junior dev. I havent worked with most of the tech stacks.

Question: Have you had similar experiences and which job would u pick?

@dfox Now, I'm not a web dev (or really a dev of any kind quite yet) but I noticed that your web app doesn't show emoticons properly, making it confusing at times. Is this something you can set up support for on your side, or something I can or should do on my end? (This is on Chrome btw.)

I have an app I have developed that uses concurrency. My dev env allows me to select different targets. One of those targets is WebAssembly. So I got it configured and decided to test my app. It immediately failed on compile due to the concurrency module missing. I later found that for my dev env concurrency for webassembly is experimental.

So concurrency is a thing for webassembly, but the support on my dev env end is not there yet.

Is threading difficult in webassembly?

I'm going to be making a table library (think DataTables)

So for those web dev gurus, should I render the data to a basic <table> or should I use CSS grids?

IE compatibility is not a consideration.

The table will also support grouping (pivot table) so something like rowspan will be a must

!dev
I've finally been so agitated at G+ I need somewhere to just vent.
So for context. What I'm talking about is Google+, or more specifically, the Android app. The website is bad in its own way, but that's not here nor there. No opinions on the iOS version, as I simply REFUSE to touch iOS.

So anyways. The platform itself honestly is not bad. With competent developers behind it, and them actually listening to their dwindling fucking userbase, they could easily turn it into something successful, but the issue is that they just aren't
You see, it's almost like they change dev staff every 6 or so months. Why do I believe this? Because the GUI changes about that fucking often. They also have a history of forcing updates, but allowing you to use an older version, just horrifically slapping on a new and unwelcome skin. This isn't an isolated practice by any means, but it's by far the most prevalent here.

So, now a list of some of the issues the current version has:
-After about a week, the app becomes unstably slow, to the point of it taking about a minute to refresh your home feed, or an individual page.
-Searching is never good, always being slow and rarely giving you who you asked for.
-Transparency is non fucking existent. There isn't a development roadmap to speak of, and when something happens we get it second hand from staff in a "G+ help" community.

There is a solution for the first one, going and clearing the data/cache, but really, the end user shouldn't have to regularly do that. Not to mention the storage space Google apps IN GENERAL fucking take up. Why does Google Play Services regularly use 250MB? (For most people, this really isn't much. But when you only get to fucking use 4 GB of internal storage it's a giant fuck you.)

Bah, back to the topic at hand.
There isn't a good solution to searching, or for transparency at the moment.
The spam filter is awful as well. REGULARLY letting obvious spam pass, regularly blocking and filtering genuine users. It's real annoying that the Android app itself doesn't have support for seeing these flags outside of rooting through the settings a bit, but still. The web and iOS versions have this already.

Oh, it also completely lacks a dark mode like most Google apps for some fuckin reason.

That concludes my random 1:30 AM rant about something I have no ability to change, except hope in vain that someone who has the ability to change this forwards this to the developers of G+.

I need a better sleep schedule.