Recap: https://www.devrant.io/rants/878300

I was out Thursday at the Hospital. I'm what the doctors would call "Ill as fuck"

So, Friday I’m back in the office to the usual: "How was that appointment?"
I know people mean well when they ask this. So, I do the polite thing and tell them it went as well as it could.

Realistically it does't matter how well it went... They haven't cured Crohn's because I showed up to the appointment. They know I'm fucked already.

But, push it down, add it to the future aneurism.

I had to go through the usual resignation meetings with managers:
"We"re fucked now you're going"
"yep"
"we need to get a handle on how fucked"
"already done that for you, here"s a trello board, very fucked."
"we need to put a plan together to drop all the junior devs in the shit with the work you’ve been doing"
"You need about 4 devs, please refer to the previous trello board for your plan"

Meanwhile, me and Morpheus are in constant communication because all of this is like a Shakespearean comedy.

So, I overhear a conversation between a Junior Dev and the Solution Architect.

[SA] took over the project because he knows better than two tried and tested senior devs -_- (fuckwit).

JD: "It took me one and a half days to build it out"
SA: "Yeah, it must have taken me twice as long... It must be a problem with the project, you should just be able to check it out and run it."
JD: "I know, it has to be wrong"

All of this is about Morpheus' work of art, of an Ionic 3 hybrid app.

I fumed quietly at my desk because I've been ordered by the Stazi to be hands off.

Since Morpheus and me were pulled from the project [JD] and [JD2] were dropped into it to get it over the line.

It"s unfortunate and I was clear and honest with my advice to them: I personally would not take over the project because I"d be way out of my depth... Oh, and the App works, so uh, there's no work to do.

They have been constantly at our desks. Asking fuckdiculous questions about how to perform basic tasks. So they can get Morpheus" frigging masterpiece to the user.

It"s like watching that touch up of jesus that got borked by an amateur. Shit I have google, it's like watching this happen: http://ti.me/NnNSAb

[JD] came to me Friday evening.
"I can’t get this to build to iOS or install on [Test Analyst]'s phone."

Me: "No worries brother, where are you stuck right now?"

[JD] describes the first steps with clear indication he hasn't googled his problem.

Life lesson: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lmgtfy

Que an hour of me showing [JD] how to build an Ion3 project for iOS. Fuck it, your man's in a bind and he"s asked politely for help. I can show him quicker than he can read 3 sets of docos.

I took him through 'ionic cordova build ios', the archive and release processes in XCode 9, then the apk bundling process for droid. Finally we have an MAM so the upload process for that too.

All the while cleaning up his AppIDs, Profiles, deployment attempts.
Damn they were a mess.

I did this with a smile on my face, not because I could say "I told you so"... But. because when any developer asks you how to do something. If you know how to do it, you should always be happy to learn them some new tricks!

Dude's alright, he's been dropped in the shit. Now I know how badly so I'll help him learn things that are useful to his role, but aren't project specific.

As a plausi-senior dev (I'll tell you about that later); it's my job to make sure my team have what they need to go home smiling!

I’m not a hateful fucker, the guy asked me an honest question so I am happy to give him the honest answer.

I took him through it a few times and explained a few best practices. Most were how to do his AppID and ProvProfile set up. Good lad, took it all on board.

However! In his frustration, he pointed the finger at Morpheus' "David" (ref: Michelangelo).

He miraculously morphed into a shiny colourful parrot and fed me SA's line:
"you should just be able to build from a clean clone"

My response was calm and clear:
"You can, it took me 20 minutes on Thursday evening. I was bored and curios, so I wanted to validate Morpheus' work. Here it is on my iOS device and my Android device. It would have taken me 5 if my laptop wasn’t so horrifically out of date."

I validated Morpheus' work so I have evidence, I trust that brilliant bastard.
I just need to be able to prove it's good.

[JD] took this on board.
Maybe listening to two tried and trusted senior devs is better than listening to a headstrong Solution Architect.

When JD left for the weekend I was working a late one (https://www.devrant.io/rants/874765).

His sign off was beautiful.
"I think I can happily admit defeat on this one, it can wait until Monday."

To which I replied: "no worries brother, if you need a hand give me a shout."

Rule 1: Don't be a cunt.
Rule 2: If someone needs help and you can give it: Give it!
Rule 3: Don't interrupt James' cigarette time.
Rule 4: goto Rule 3.

A follow up for this rant : https://devrant.com/rants/1429631/...

its morning and i have been awoke all night, but i am so happy and feel like crying seeing you people's response. :''''') Thank-You for helping a young birdie like me from getting exploit.

In Summery, I am successfully out of this trickery, but with cowardice, a little exploited and being continuously nagged by my friend as a 'fool'.

Although i would be honest, i did took a time to take my decision and got carried away by his words.

After a few hours of creating a group, he scheduled a conference call , and asked me to submit the flow by which my junior devs will work.
At that time i was still unclear about weather to work or not and had just took a break from studies. So thought of checking the progress and after a few minutes, came up with a work-flow, dropped in the group and muted it.

At night i thought of checking my personal messages , and that guy had PMed me that team is not working, check on their progress. This got me pissed and i diverted the topic by asking when he would be mailing my letter of joining.
His fucking reply to this was :"After the project gets completed!"

(One more Example of his attempts to be manipulative coming up, but along with my cowardice ) :/

WTF? with a team like this and their leader being 'me'( who still calls him noob after 2 internships and 10 months android exp), this project would have taken at least one month and i was not even counting myself in the coding part(The Exams).
So just to clarify what would be the precise date by which he is expecting the task, to which he said "27th"(i.e, tomorrow!)

I didn't responded. And rather checked about the details of the guy( knew that the company was start-up, but start-ups does sound hopeful, if they are doing it right) .A quick social media search gave me the results that he is a fuckin 25 year old guy who just did a masters and started this company. there was no mention of investors anywhere but his company's linkedin profile showed up and with "11-50" members.

After half an hour i told him that am not in this anymore, left the group and went back to study.(He wanted to ask for reasons, but i denied by saying a change of mind ,personal problems, etc)

Well the reality is over but here comes the cowardice part:
1)Our team was working on a private repo hosted on my account and i voluntarily asked him to take back the ownership, just to come out of this safely w/o pissing him off.
2)The "test" he took of me was the wireframe given by their client and which was the actual project we 5 were working on. So, as a "test", i created 15 activities of their client's app and have willingly transferred it to them.
3) in my defence, i only did it because (i) i feared this small start-up could harm my reputation on open platforms like linkedin and (ii)the things i developed were so easy that i don't mind giving them. they were just ui, designed a lot quickly but except that, they were nothing(even a button needs a code in the backend to perform something and i had not done it) . moreover, the guys working under me had changed a lot of things, so i felt bad for them and dropped the idea of damaging it.

Right now am just out of sleep, null of thoughts and just wondering weather am a good person, a safe player or just a stupid, easily manipulated fool

But Once again My deepest regard from my heart for @RustyCookie , @geaz ,@tarstrong ,and @YouAreAPIRate for a positive advice.

My love for devrant is growing everyday <3 <3 <3 <3

Creating a stripped down version of a product is a big red flag to me (e.g. "easy/light mode").
It means the main product is too complicated; it handles too many things. Instead, shift the focus back to the core of the product by removing features.

In the our day-to-day it is completely normal to stumble upon things that used to work but now have been changed: they have been deprecated.

Deprecating and removing features should be added to any product iteration. Thus being "normal" and a common occurrence in any changelog; just like features and bug fixes.

This gives non-tech product owners "permission" to remove bloat. Devs stop whining about "the big rewrite". And end-users don't suddenly have to learn yet another tool with "basic" features missing.

I think the best example is google (https://killedbygoogle.com/) and the worst is the amazon shopping website (what a mess!).

In reply to this:
https://devrant.com/rants/260590/...

As a senior dev for over 13 years, I will break you point by point in the most realistic way, so you don't get in troubles for following internet boring paternal advices.

1) False. Being go-ahead, pro active and prone to learn is a good thing in most places.
This doesn't mean being an entitled asshole, but standing for yourself (don't get put down and used to do shit for others, or it will become the routine) and show good learning and exploration skills will definitely put you under a good light.
2)False. 2 things to check:
a) if the guy over you is an entitled asshole who thinkg you're going to steal his job and will try to sabotage you or not answer acting annoyed, or if it's a cool guy.
Choose wisely your questions and put them all togheter. Don't be that guy that fires questions in crumbles, one every 2 minutes.
Put them togheter and try to work out the obvious and what can be done through google or chatgpt by yourself. Then collect the hard ones for the experienced guy and ask them all at once. He's been put over you to help you.

3) Idiotic. NO.
Working code = good code. It's always been like this.
If you follow this idiotic advice you will annoy everyone.
The thing about renaming variables and crap it's called a standard. Most company will have a document with one if there is a need to follow it.
What remains are common programming conventions that everyone mostly follows.

Else you'll end up getting crazy at all the rules and small conventions and will start to do messy hot spaghetti code filled with syntactic sugar that no one likes, included yourself.

4)LMAO.
This mostly never happens (seniors send to juniors) in real life.
But it happens on the other side (junior code gets reviewed).
He must either be a crap programmer or stopped learning years ago(?)

5) This is absolutely true.
Programming is not a forgiving job if you're not honest.
Covering up mess in programming is mostly impossible, expecially when git and all that stuff with your name on it came out.
Be honest, admit your faults, ask if not sure.
Code is code, if it's wrong it won't work magically and sooner or later it will fire back.

6)Somewhat true, but it all depends on the deadline you're given and the complexity of the logic to be implemented.
If very complex you have to divide an conquer (usually)

7)LMAO, this one might be true for multi billionaire companies with thousand of employees.
Normal companies rarely do that because it's a waste of time. They pass knowledge by word or with concise documentation that later gets explained by seniors or TL's to the devs.
Try following this and as a junior:
1) you will have written shit docs and wasted time
2) you will come up to the devs at the deadline with half of the code done and them saying wtf who told you to do that

8) See? What an oxymoron ahahah
Look at point 3 of this guy than re-read this.
This alone should prove you that I'm right for everything else.

9) Half true.
Watch your ass. You need to understand what you're going to put yourself into.
If it's some unknown deep sea shit, with no documentations whatsoever you will end up with a sore ass and pulling your hair finding crumbles of code that make that unknown thing work.
Believe me and not him.
I have been there. To say one, I've been doing some high level project for using powerful RFID reading antennas for doing large warehouse inventory with high speed (instead of counting manually or scanning pieces, the put rfid tags inside the boxes and pass a scanner between shelves, reading all the inventory).
I had to deal with all the RFID protocol, the math behind radio waves (yes, knowing it will let you configure them more efficently and avoid conflicts), know a whole new SDK from them I've never used again (useless knowledge = time wasted and no resume worthy material for your next job) and so on.
It was a grueling, hair pulling, horrible experience that brought me nothing in return execpt the skill of accepting and embracing the pain of such experiences.

And I can go on with other stories. Horror Stories.
If it's something that is doable but it's complex, hard or just interesting, go for it. Expecially if the tech involved is something marketable.

10) Yes, and you can't stop learning, expecially now that AI will start to cover more and more of our work.

Just discovered https://twitter.com/ExpertBeginner1. It's the story of my life. Giant classes, copying and pasting, and architects who create frameworks. It's great when we combine all three: A "framework" created by an architect which is made of giant classes that you copy and paste. Imagine a giant generic class where the generic argument is only used by dead code. Pause for a moment and try to visualize that.

It inherits from a base class with lots of virtual methods called by base methods that throw NotImplementedException, so if you don't need them you have to override them to return empty collections. If you're going to do something so messed up you could just put those default implementations in the base. But no, you can inherit, it compiles, and then it throws a runtime error unless you override methods the compiler doesn't require you to override.

The one method you're required to override has a TODO comment telling you what to put there. Except don't ever do what the comment says because that's the old standard. The new standard says never, ever do that.

Most of the time when I read about copy-and-paste coding it's about devs who copy and paste because they don't know how to write or reuse code. They don't mention the environments where copying and pasting the same classes over and over again is the requirement and you're not allowed to write your own code.

Creating base classes where you just override a method or two can potentially work, but only in the right scenarios and only if you do it right. If you're copying and pasting a class that inherits from the base class and consists entirely of repeated code, why the heck isn't that the base class? It could be a total mess, but at least it would be out of sight and each successive developer wouldn't become responsible for it by including it in their own code.

It's a temporary engagement, but I feel almost violated. I know it's a first-world problem, and I get to work indoors and take vacations. I'm grateful for those things.

Before leaving I had to document the entire process of copying and pasting an entire repo, making a ton of baseline edits that should just be in the template but aren't, and then copying and pasting from other places into the copied and pasted code. That makes me a collaborator. I apologize more than once in the documentation, all 20 pages of it that you have to read and follow before you even get to the part where you write the code for what you actually need it to do.

This architect has succeeded in making every single thing anyone does more about servicing the needs of his "framework" than about writing actual code to do what needs doing. Now that the framework is in and around everything it creates the illusion that it's a critical part of our operations. It's not. It's useless overhead.

Because management is deceived into thinking they need it they overlook the fact that it blows up, big and small, every single day. The log is full of failures that I know no one ever sees. A big chunk of what they think it does fails silently, and they don't even notice until months later when they realize how much data they're missing. But if they lose, say, 25% they'll never notice.

When they do notice they just act like it's normal, go into fire drill mode, and fix it. Doom. You're all doomed. I'm standing on the deck of the Titanic next to my jet ski.