Is this the code life
Another scrum meeting
Caught in the the Node life
No escape from reality
Open your eyes
Look up to the screens and see..
I'm just a dev boy
Doing some debugging
Because there's warnings here
Errors there
Segment faults
Everywhere
Anytime you distract
Takes another hour from me
From me

*piano starts

Mama. Just committed a bug
Merge the branch to production
Did it fast for milestones
Mama. The repo has just begun
But now they going to throw the stack away.
Mama. U u u uu
Didn't mean to code in LAMP
But it's the only stack i know how to setup
In Ubuntu. Without docker
I really don't get vagrant

*piano

It's too late
My team is done
Some dev is working in Nepal
A UX dev. Now what is that?
Goodbye everybody
I've got to go
Gotta leave this lame meeting
And face the truth
Oh nooooo. I i interns
(they have questions)
I want to debug
I don't want to stay till 3 in the morning

*epic guitar

I see a litlle dev over there
Let's code review, let's code review
Did he do the last commit?
Coding in the white board
Very very frightening me
That's bug(that's a bug)
That's a bug (that's a bug)
What the f*ck did you do that?
Magnificcooooooo

I was just coding and nobody liked it
He was coding and nobody liked it, spare his some time to do his debugging

Easy man. Here go. Will you let me code?
A meeting. No,we will not let you code. ( let me code)
A meeting. we will not let you code. ( let me code)
A meeting. we will not let you code. ( let me code)
We will not let you code
Never never let you go
Never let you code, oh
No no no no no no no
Oh mama mia, mama mia ( dude, you've gotta let me code)
Screw you guys, I'm gonna code and commit. Commit. Comiiiiitt!

*epic guitar

So you think you can review me and spit in my eye?
So you think you can dump me and erase my branch?
Oh baby, cant do this to me baby
I've just have to log out.
I've just have to log outta here

*epic guitar solo

Nothing really matters
The users will not care
Nothing really matters
To them

Any way this code blows

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

Victory!

Today I finally closed a 'Nessy' bug (A scary bug you can't reproduce typically only sighted by one person). Below is my response...

"There were no errors in the error logs because writing to the error log was causing the error."

aslkfjasf. i've spent 12 hours today (and lots more over the past two days) trying to reproduce a bug that my [sort of] coworker insists is present. I haven't seen any proof of it anywhere, let alone steps to reproduce it.

I've poured through the code, following all of its tangled noodles of madness from start to fuck-this-shit. I've read and reread the pile of demon excrement so many times i can still read the code when i close my eyes. so. not. kidding.

anyway, the coworker person is getting mad because i haven't fixed the bug after days, and haven't even reproduced it yet. This feature is already taking way too fucking long so I totally don't blame him. but urghh it's like trying to unwind a string someone tied into a tight little ball of knots because they were bored.

but i just figured out why I haven't been able to reproduce it.

the stupid fucking unreliable dipshit ex-"i'm a rockstar and my code rocks"-CTO buffoon (aka API Guy, aka the `a=b if a!=b`loody pointless waste of mixed spaces and tabs) that wrote the original APIs ... 'kay, i need to stop for breath.

The dumbfuck wrote the APIs (which I based the new ones on mostly wholesale because wtf messy?), but he never implemented a very fucking important feature for a specific merchant type. It works for literally every type except the (soon-to-be) most common one. and it just so happens that i need that very specific feature to reproduce this bug.

Why is that one specific merchant type handled so differently? No fucking idea.

But exactly how they're handled differently is why I'm so fking pissed off. It's his error checking. (Some) of his functions return different object types (hash, database object, string, nullable bool, ...) depending on what happened. like, when creating a new gift, it (eventually...) either returns a new Gift object or a string error basically saying "ahhh everything's broken again!" -- which is never displayed, compared against, or recorded anywhere, ofc. Here, the API expects a Hash. That particular function call *always* returns a Hash, no matter what happens in the myriad, twisting, and interwoven branches the code could take. So the check is completely pointless.

EXCEPT. if an object associated with another object associated with the passed object (yep) has a type of 8. in which case, one of the methods in the chain returns a PrintQueue that gets passed back up the call stack. implicitly, and nested three levels in. ofc.

And if the API doesn't get its precious Hash, it exclaims that the merchant itself is broken, and tells the user to contact support. despite, you know, the PrintQueue showing that everything worked perfectly. In fact, that merchant's printer will be happily printing away in the background.

All because type checking is this guy's preferred method of detecting errors. (Raise? what's that? OOP? Nah, let's do diverging splintered-monolithic with some Ruby objects thrown in.)

just.
what the crap.

people should keep their mental diarrhea away from their keyboards.

Anyway. the summary of this long-winded, exhaustion-fueled tirade is that our second-most-loved feature doesn't work on our second-most-common merchant type.

and ofc that was the type of merchant i've been testing on. for days. while having both a [semi] coworker and my boss growing increasingly angry at me for my lack of progress.

It's also a huge feature, and the boss doesn't understand that. (can't or won't, idk)

So.
yep.
that's been my week.

...... WHAT A FUCKING BUFFOON!

Here's a true story about a "fight" between me and my project manager...

I've been working as a Frontend developer for nearly two years, managed to acquire a decent amount of knowledge, in some cases well above the rest of my coworkers, and one day I got into a bit of a disagreement with my project manager.

Basically he wanted me to copy/paste some feature from another project (needless to say, that... "thing" has more bugs than an ant farm), and against his orders I started doing that feature from scratch, to build a solid foundation from the very start.
I had a lengthy deadline to deliver that feature, they were expecting me to take some time to fix some of the bugs as well, but my idea was to make it bug-free from the moment the feature was released. Both my method and the one I should be copying worked the exact same, but mine was superior in every way, had no bugs, was scalable and upgradeable with little effort, there was no reason not to accept it.

We use scrum as our work methodology, so we have daily meetings. In one of those, the project manager asked me how was the progress on that new feature, and I told him I was just polishing up the code and integrating it with the rest of the project, to make sure everything was working properly. I still had a full day left before the deadline set for that feature, and I was expecting to take about half an hour to finish up a couple lines of code and test everything, no issues so far...

But then he exploded, and demanded to know why wasn't I copying the code from the other project, to which I answered "because this way things will work better".
Right after he said that the feature was working on the other project, copying and pasting it should take a few minutes to do and maybe a couple of extra hours to fix any issues that might have appeared...
The problem here is, the other project was made by trainees, I honestly can't navigate through 3 pages without bumping into an average of 2 errors per page, I was placed into this new project because they know I do quality code, and they wanted this project to be properly made, unlike the previous one, so I was baffled when he said that he preferred me to copy code instead of doing "good" code...
My next reply was "just because something has been made and is working that doesn't mean that it has been properly made nor will work as it should, I could save a few hours copying code (except I wouldn't save any, it would take me more time to adapt the code than to do it from scratch) but then I'll be wasting weeks of work because of new bugs that will be reported over time, because trust me, they will appear... "

I told him this in a very calm manner, but everybody in the meeting room paused and started staring at me, not many dare challenge that specific project manager, and I had just done that...
After a few seconds of silence the PM finally said... "look, if you manage to finish your task inside the set deadline I'll forget we ever had this conversation, but I'll leave a note on my book, just in case..."

I finished that task in about 30 mins, as expected, still had 7 hours till deadline, and I completely forgot about that feature until now because it has never given any issues whatsoever, and is now being used for other projects as well.

It was one of my proudest/rage inducing moments in this project, and honestly, I think I have hit my PM with a very big white glove because some weeks after this event the CEO himself came to the whole team to congratulate us on the outstanding work being made so far, in a project that acted against the PM's orders 90% of the time.

!!pointless story

Bug report comes in from a coworker. "Cloudinary uploads aren't working. I can't sign up new customers."

"I'll look into it" I say.

I go to one of our sites, and lo! No Cloudinary image loads. Well that can't be good.

I check out mobile app -- our only customer-facing platform. None of the images load! Multiple "Oops!" snackbars from 500 errors on every screen / after every action.

"None of our Cloudinary images load, even in the mobile app," I report.

Nobody seems to notice, but they're probably busy.

I go to log into the Cloudinary site, and realize I don't have the credentials.

"What are the Cloudinary credentials, @ceo?" I ask.

I'm met with more silence. I use this opportunity to look through the logs, try different URLs/transforms directly. Oddly, everything seems fine except on our site.

I check Slack again, and see nothing's changed, so I set about trying to guess the credentials.

Let's see... the ceo is basically illiterate when it come to tech, so it's probably not his email. It's a startup, and custom emails for things cost money, and haven't been a thing here forever, so it's probably oen of the CTO's email aliases. he likes dots and full names so that narrows it down. Now for the password.... his are always crappy (so they're "easy to remember") and usually have the abbreviated company name in them. He also likes adding numbers, generally two-digit numbers, and has a thing for 7s and 9s. Mix in some caps, spaces, order...

Took me a few minutes, but I managed to figured it out.

"Nevermind, I guessed them." I reported.

After getting into Cloudinary, I couldn't find anything amiss. Everything looked great. No outage warnings, metrics looked fine, images all loaded. Ex-cto didn't revoke payment or cancel the account.

I checked our app; everything started loading -- albeit slowly.

I checked the aforementioned site; after a few minutes, everything loaded there, too.

Not sure what else to do, and with everything appearing to work, I said "Fixed!" and closed the issue.

About 20 minutes later, the original person said "thanks" -- never did hear anything from the ceo. I've heard him chatting away in the other room the entire time.

Regardless, good thing for crappy passwords, eh?

Bad code 😂

I don't want to write clean code anymore :(

I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...

Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...

That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"

they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.

oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.

and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.

it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------

uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.

well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.

note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.

Some days I feel like I work in a different universe.

Last night our alerting system sent out a dept. wide email regarding a high number of errors coming from the web site.

Email shows the number of errors and a summary of the error messages.

Ex. 60 errors
59 Object reference not set to an instance of an object
1 The remote server returned an unexpected response: (413) Request Entity Too Large

Web team responds to the email..

"Order processing team's service is returning a 413 error. I'll fill out a corrective action ticket in the morning to address that error in their service. "

Those tickets are taken pretty seriously by upper mgmt, so I thought someone on the order processing team would point out the 1 error vs. 59 (coming from the web team's code).

Two hours go by, nobody responds, so I decide to jump into something that was none of my business.

"Am I missing something? Can everyone see the 59 null reference exceptions? The 413 exception only occurred once. It was the null reference exceptions that triggered the alert. Looking back at the logs, the site has been bleeding null reference exceptions for hours. Not enough for an alert, but there appears to be a bug that needs to be looked into."

After a dept. managers meeting this morning:

MyBoss: "Whoa..you kicked the hornets nest with your response last night."
Me: "Good. What happened?"
<Dan dept VP, Jake web dept mgr>
MyBoss: "Dan asked Jake if they were going to fix the null reference exceptions and Jake got pissed. Said the null reference errors were caused by the 413 error."
Me: "How does he know that? They don't log any stack traces. I don't think those two systems don't even talk to one another."
<boss laughs>
MyBoss:"That's what Dan asked!..oh..then Jake started in on the alert thresholds were too low, and we need to look into fixing your alerting code."
Me: "What!? Good Lord, tell me you chimed in."
MyBoss: "Didn't have to. Dan starting laughing and said there better be a ticket submitted on their service within the next hour. Then Jake walked out of the meeting. Oh boy, he was pissed."
Me: "I don't understand how they operate over there. It's a different universe.
MyBoss: "Since the alert was for their system, nobody looked at the details. I know I didn't. If you didn't respond pointing out the real problem, they would have passed the buck to the other team and wasted hours chasing a non-existent problem. Now they have to take resources away from their main project and answer to the VP for the delay. I'm sure they are prefixing your name right now with 'that asshole'"
Me: "Not the first, won't be the last."

Girls never understand that...

The overhead on my JS projects is killing me. Today, I went to implement a simple feature on a project I haven't touched in a few weeks. I wasted 80% of my time on mindless setup crap.

- "Ooh, a simple new feature to implement. Let's get crackin'!"
- update 1st party lib
- ....hmm, better update node modules
- and Typescript typings while I'm at it
- "ugh yeah," revert one node module to outdated version because of that one weird proxy bug
- remove dead tsd references
- fix TS "errors" generated by new typings
- fix bug in 1st party lib
- clean up some files because the linter is nagging me
- pee
- change 6 lines of code <-- the work
- commit!

Team Lead just filed a bug saying there was no errors on the server over the weekend. O.o

sometimes I hate python....

Ive just chased down a bug where a simple string saved in a simple dict sometimes came out as a f*cking tuple(!) when I needed it!

turned out that at some point this dict got updated with values from some other dict. And at some other point, I decided it was a great idea to rewrite that update code into individual setter's instead ... and of course forgot to remove one the trailing comma's, thus creating a perfectly legal tuple .... *sigh*

No errors, no warnings - just plain corrupt data....

So I once had a job as a C# developer at a company that rewrote its legacy software in .Net after years of running VB3 code - the project had originally started in 1994 and ran on Windows 3.11.

As one of the only two guys in the team that actually knew VB I was eventually put in charge of bug for bug compatibility. Since our software did some financial estimations that were impossible to do without it (because they were not well defined), our clients didn't much care if the results were slightly wrong, as long as they were exactly compatible with the previous version - compatibility proved the results were correct.

This job mostly consisted of finding rounding errors caused by the old VB3 code, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

One day, after dealing with many smaller functions, I felt I was ready to finally tackle the most complicated function in our code. This was a beast of a function, called Calc, which was called from everywhere in the code, did a whole bunch of calculations, and returned a single number. It consisted of 500 or so lines of spaghetti.

This function had a very peculiar structure:

Function Calc(...)
...
If SomeVariable Then
...
If Not SomeVariable Then
...
(the most important bit of calculation happened here)
...
End If
...
End If
...
End Function

But for some reason it actually worked. For days I tried to find out what's going on, where the SomeVariable was being changed or how the nesting indentation was actually wrong and didn't match the source, but to no avail. Eventually, though, after many days, I did find the answer.

SomeVariable = 1

Somehow, the makers of VB3 though it would be a good idea for Not X to be calculated as (-1 - X). So if a variable was not a boolean (-1 for True, 0 for False), both X and Not X could be truthy, non-zero values.

And kids these days complain about JavaScript's handling of ==...

Commit Message Part2:
6528fff Code was clean until manager requested to fuck it up
241b35f Who knows WTF?!
4381a32 Argh! About to give up :(
c3bf1a9 more debug... who overwrote!
2d68d6d Fixed a bug cause Maciej said to
b112c1a This branch is so dirty, even your mom can't clean it.
bb456d4 Shit code!
4878b46 Copy-paste to fix previous copy-paste
e2c7e87 A fix I believe, not like I tested or anything
f56109f derpherp
e4b8f4c formatted all
3691208 I'm just a grunt. Don't blame me for this awful PoS.
0888b69 just checking if git is working properly...
62741aa I'm too old for this shit!
0735196 COMMIT ALL THE FILES!
09caccf I CAN HAZ PYTHON, I CAN HAZ INDENTS
1e1cda8 giggle.
ab70bde Fixed errors
934436d Now added delete for real
5f84e30 My bad
99baff8 CHRIS, WE WENT OVER THIS. C++ IO SUCKS.
953473d final commit.
f0c3b57 Just committing so I can go home
4e5ce4e yolo push
deb4e3b I CAN HAZ PYTHON, I CAN HAZ INDENTS
710c06a Commit committed....
3c45e67 it is hump day _^_
4487788 Committing in accordance with the prophecy.
bf86e7e This solves it.
4804f68 FONDLED THE CODE
051d42e REALLY FUCKING FIXED

Had a bug, 89 errors.

fixed the bug, 91 errors

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

!rant

Yesterday I got a pretty straight-forward task of fixing SASS linting errors from our project. I thought, "How many errors could there be?" Turns out there were just around 2000 errors across 109 files!

I was almost like, "Man, this is going to take a lot of my time!"

So, I started fixing the errors one-by-one with my headphones on and switching music genres after every 2 hours.

After almost 6 hours of continuous bug-fixing, my mind kind of became repellant to the possibility of the outer world and my fingers automatically fell on the right keys in almost no time. My brain was functioning like a computer itself.

And after the end of 7 hours, I reduced the number to less than 1000 errors.

Today, I continued the task and found out that there were some scoping errors I made yesterday (web developers would know this pain of '&').

And after working for almost 6 hours today, I got the number down to 500.

Not a rant, but I felt extremely content with what I did today.

I guess every day is not just about programming, sometimes, it's also about making your code better.

Thanks for reading! :)

Hey guys,

this rant will be long again. I'm sorry for any grammar errors or something like that, english isn't my native language. Furthermore I'm actually very sad and not in a good mood.

Why? What happened? Some of you may already know - I'm doing my apprenticeship / education in a smal company.
There I'm learning a lot, I'm developing awesome features directly for the clients, experience of which other in my age (I'm only 19 years old) can only dream.
Working in such a small company is very exhausting, but I love my job, I love programming. I turned my hobby into a profession and I'm very proud of it.
But then there are moments like the last time, when I had to present something for a client - the first presentation was good, the last was a disaster, nothing worked - but I learned from it.

But this time everything is worse than bad - I mean really, really worse than bad.

I've worked the whole week on a cool new feature - I've done everything that it works yesterday, that everything gets done before the deadline of yesterday.

To achieve this I've coded thursday till 10pm ! At home! Friday I tested the whole day everything to ensure that everything is working properly. I fixed several bugs and then at the end of the day everything seems to be working. Even my boss said that it looks good and he thinks that the rollout to all clients will become good and without any issues.

But unfortunately deceived.

Yesterday evening I wrote a long mail to my boss - with a "manual". He was very proud and said that he is confident that everything will work fine. He trusts me completly.

Then, this morning I received a mail from him - nothing works anymore - all clients have issues, everything stays blank - because I've forgotten to ensure that the new feature (a plugin) and its functionality is supported by the device (needs a installation).
First - I was very shoked - but in the same moment I thought - one moment - you've written an if statement, if the plugin is installed - so why the fuck should it broken everything?!
I looked instant to the code via git. This has to be a very bad joke from my boss I thought. But then I saw the fucking bug - I've written:
if(plugin) { // do shit }
but it has to be if(typeof plugin !== 'undefined')

I fucked up everything - due to this fucking mistake. This little piece of shit I've forgotten on one single line fucked up everything. I'm sorry for this mode of expression but I thought - no this can not be true - it must be a bad bad nightmare.
I've tested this so long, every scenario, everything. Worked till the night so it gets finished. No one, no one from my classmates would ever think of working so long. But I did it, because I love my job. I've implemented a check to ensure that the plugin is installed - but implemented it wrong - exactly this line which caused all the errors should prevent exactly this - what an irony of fate.

I've instantly called my boss and apologized for this mistake. The mistake can't be undone. My boss now has to go to all clients to fix it. This will be very expensive...

Oh my goodnes, I just cried.
I'm only working about half a year in this company - they trust me so much - but I'm not perfect - I make mistakes - like everyone else. This time my boss didn't looked over my code, didn't review it, because he trusted me completly - now this happens. I think this destroyed the trust :( I'm so sad.
He only said that we will talk on monday, how we can prevent such things in the feature..
Oh guys, I don't know - I've fucked up everything, we were so overhelmed that everything would work :(
Now I'm the looser who fucked up - because not testing enough - even when I tested it for days, even at home - worked at home - till the night - for free, for nothing - voluntary.

This is the thanks for that.
Thousand good things - but one mistake and you're the little asshole. You - a 19 year old guy, which works since 6 months in a company. A boss which trusts you and don't look over your code. One line which should prevent crashing, crashed everything.

I'm sorry that this rant is so long, I just need to talk to you guys because I'm so sad. Again. This has happend to frequently lately.

Somewhere in a lonely break room
There's a guy starting to realize that eternal hell has been unleashed unto him.
It's two a.m.

It's two a.m.
The boss has gone
I'm sitting here waitin'
This desktop's slow
I am getting tired of fixin' all my coworkers' problems
Yeah there's a bug on the loose
Errors in the code
This is unreadable
Rubber ducky can't help
I cannot debug, my whole life spins into a frenzy

Help I'm slippin' into the programming zone
Git push to the prod
Set up a repo
My hard drive just crashed
All my code is gone
Where am I to go
Now that I've broke my distro
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow

I'm falling down a spiral
Solution unkown
Disgusting legacy, ugly code
Can't get no connection
Can't get through to commit

Well the night weights heavy
On my confused mind
Where's the error on this line
When the CEO comes
He knows damn well
To keep his distance
And he says

Help I'm slippin' into the programming zone
Git push to the prod
Set up a repo
My hard drive just crashed
All my code is gone
Where am I to go
Now that I've broke my distro
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow

When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow

When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow

Manager: Hey software engineer, how's the project going?

Software Engineer: Good, just debugging my code.

Manager: Debugging? What kind of bug are you trying to fix?

Software Engineer: The ones that make my computer turn into a lava lamp.

Manager: Ha ha, very funny. But seriously, how can I help?

Software Engineer: Well, I need a bigger monitor. My current one doesn't have enough real estate to display all the errors.

Manager: How about a second monitor?

Software Engineer: No, I need a bigger universe.

Manager: I'll see what I can do. In the meantime, keep coding. We have a deadline to meet.

Software Engineer: No problem, I have all the time in the world. I just need to find a way to slow down time.

Manager: I wish I had your optimism. Just let me know if you need anything else.

Software Engineer: How about a unicorn? I heard they're good at coding.

Manager: I'll see what I can do, but in the meantime, stick to using a keyboard.

The only serious, as in customer affecting, bug I never git fixed was an indexing bug that caused an exception requiring manual intervention by one of us.

Despite going at it for many years I never found the root cause before I left the company.

The reason it was so difficult was that it only occurred every second month or less and with different customers.
It was also not triggering directly when the error occurred but a while later once the error had caused accumulated errors until one value got negative.

Also, it was a combination SQL, backend code and frontend js and the time from initial error until an invalid value could be hours, days or even weeks.

And we never ever managed to replicate it our self and found no common pattern between occasions.

We think it was some kind of race condition when updating the db that caused duplicate values or a hole in the index series (db transaction or db index was not an option for various reason that would require a redesign of the central tables and most if the central code).

This then grew into multiple error on consecutive updates until one f them resulted in a negative number that then caused a regex in js to fail.

I was supporting a legacy CRM app which front end used Visual Basic 6 and almost the entire business logic was written on SQL store procedures.

A "feature" of the product was the open code, anyone with admin access could modify forms, code and store procedures.

We also sold "official" (and expensive) consulting services to modify the code.

A long time customer owned this thing and it was heavily customized. They had hired us to change something, hired a third party to make other changes and decided to modify some stuff themselves because, why not?

Suddenly they came to product support asking to fix a bug. The problem happened on a non customized form.

After reviewing, I realized the form used several of the modified store procedures in the business layer. I tried saying we don't support custom code but my boss was being pushed and said "look into it"

All 3 parties denied responsibility and said their changes were NOT the problem (of course). Neither of them commented or documented their changes.

The customer started to threaten to sue us.

I spent 5 full days following every field on the form through the nested and recurrent SQL store procedures and turns out it was a very simple error. A failed insert statement.

I was puzzled of why the thing didn't throw any error even while debugging. Turns out in SQL 2003 (this was a while ago) someone used a print line statement and SQL stopped throwing errors to the console. I can only assume "printing" in SQL empties the buffered error which would be shown in the console.

I removed the print statement and the error showed up, we fixed it and didn't get sued
:)

So this one made me create an account on here...

At work, there's a feature of our application that allows the user to design something (keeping it vague on purpose) and to request a 3D render of their creation.

Working with dynamically positioned objects, textures and such, errors are bound to happen. That's why we implemented a bug report feature.

We have a small team tasked with monitoring the bug reports and taking action upon it, either by fixing a 3D scene, or raising the issue to the dev team.

The other day, a member of that team told me (since I'm part of the dev team) he had received a complain that the image a user received was empty. Strange, we didn't update the code in a while.

So I check the server, all the docker containers are running fine, the code is fine, no errors anywhere.

Then, as I'm scratching my head, that guy comes back to me and says "I don't know if it can help you, but it's been doing it for a week and a half now".

"And we're only hearing about it now?!", I replied.

"Well, I have bug reports going back to the 15th, but we haven't been checking the reports for a while now since everything was fine", he says as if it was actually a normal thing to say.

"How can you know everything is fine if you're not looking at the thing that says if there's an issue?!", I replied with a face filled with despair.

"Well we didn't receive any new reports in a while, so we just stopped looking. And now the report tool window is actually closed on my machine", he says with a smile and a little laugh in his tone.

In the end, I got to fix the server issue quite easily. But still, the feature wasn't working for 1.5 weeks and more that 330 images weren't sent properly...

So yeah, Doctor, the patient's heart is beating again! Let's unplug the monitor, it should be fine.

Welcome to my little piece of hell :)

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

Ever want to smack someone in the face with a sea bass? Like left out of the water for 3 days with all kinds of juicy and smelly goodness?
When we get an X number system errors, an email is sent to our team. Couple of hours ago I had to move the alerts from one system to another, re-naming some because I suck at naming things. I guess when I copied, I duplicated one. About an hour ago we get a system alert (as it should, there was a server hiccup) and there were two emails with the same data (just named differently)
DevA: “Why are there two emails?”
Me: “Oh, that’s me. I think I copied the alert instead of move. I’ll fix it tomorrow.”
DevA: “Hmm, but the data is the same. It’s a duplicate.”
Me: “Yea, I know. Networking responded and said it’s fixed. We won’t get another email.”
- 15 minutes later
DevA leans over and says to the boss (who was in a meeting and just sat down)…
DevA: “I looked at the alert, it’s duplicated, but the name is different. I don’t understand why.”
Me: “Like I said, the alert is duplicated. When I migrated, I copied instead of moved. No big deal.”
DevA: “Oh …oh ..yea.…OK.”
- 5 minutes later
DevA: “I looked at the query, we might have to add a filter to prevent duplicate emails. Probably some logic problems in the search.”
Me: “I just deleted the duplicate alert.”
DevA: “Oh…OK…that fixes it too.”

Good lord…as I was typing this, he just told another dev the ‘duplicate’ emails were because of a logic bug in the search. I’m getting my fishing pole.

Hey, Unity!

I love you and how your bug system works, but can you polish your errors?
I don't have any experience in programming and I am only a level designer.
I have no idea what this error meant so I begged to my boss crying that this FATAL error popped up.
Then my boss comforted me with pizza and coke.
I just realized that my boss is better than Unity.

I'm sorry, Unity. I was just about to buy the Unity license, but I changed my mind to just use the [personal edition and hack the dark theme by hex edit.

Best regards,
cozyplanes

(* This is a real e-mail sent to Unity Help Center *)

Might be more of a self-rant.. We’re developing an application with token-based authentication.
It’s a big an complex authentication model and flow, which we wrapped up a month ago. All of us very proud of it.

All of a sudden none of it worked.
We debugged for days, there were no errors or anything to trace what was happening.

Today we realized that we set the expiration of the token to 20 years.
Aaaand the expiration time is later on converted to epoch.

Guess what happens when you try to use a value > 2 147 483 647 in C#? Stuff blows up, cuz that’s the limit of an int32.

So yeah, feels good having prepared for the Y2K38 bug already, even though we’ll be replaced by AI writing better software than my dumb ass by then.

(To be fair, it was hidden in Microsoft Owin, which could use some error handling and/or proper messages..)

Maybe not worst, but most frustrating. One of the systems I helped maintain at my first job had a few different bugs that caused bad data in the database. The "solution" to the problem was to write SQL queries to directly fix the production data. This would take one member of our team (it rotated weekly) about an hour every day to fix because there were literally dozens of these errors.

All the devs knew that we could identify the root cause and fix it in, probably, 3-4 days tops. Management would never approve the time because it would take longer to fix the root cause than it took to fix the data.

I worked at that company for 7 years. The bug was there when I came on, and it was there when I left.

!$rant

So I'm getting closer to finishing my devrant-widget project but ran into an issue because some people use emojis in their about, skills, website, etc *cough @alice.. cough* and well.. it creates internal server errors because emojis dont magically convert themselves xD But I think I found a fix. On to the next bug.

Well I'm a first year student in computer science and in the first semester we started to learn C language and the IDE they told us to use for better learning was Devcpp.
We made a few small projects and all went well, but now in the second semester we started to make bigger projects with linked lists and memory allocation and Devcpp starts to be a complete bug itself... We are working hard in the project and after saving the project with no errors at all, at the next day, Devcpp starts to make any function we made invalid...
So we spoke to the same teacher about this and asked what can we do about it....
"Are you using Devcpp? You shouldn't, it is not that good for C"...
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Working on my Google Foo Bar level 4 challenge.

9 days past figuring out how to solve this problem..

And finally reached on a working solution. When started compiling my solution.

And then i Find out, the fucking Google tool is facing some bug and not allowing compilation. Tried hard to do everything but still getting errors...
And after searching on Google just found I'm fucked up.. It's on Google's end and they are not fixing it since so many days..

Just 5 days left to complete.. And i have no idea what should i do...

4 month work just fucked up

While merging colleagues code...
Because Android studio log cat sucks donkey balls 😂

Today, I had a segmentation fault in a data structure, so I wrote a function to test the integrity of the data structure. It worked, and I found and fixed the bug. However, the test still complained about the integrity. After debugging some very strange errors for 5 hours, I discover that there was a bug in the integrity test. The data structure works just fine. FML.

Progress: I have Lua code running, however it returns an error every time.

An error containing the result I wanted.

I once agreed to maintain and develop an application used in a different section of the school to keep inventory and make sure everything is where it is supposed to be.

At first there was enthusiasm, together with 2 of my classmates we agreed and git clone-d the .NET application that now graduated students built and maintained for the past few years. What could go wrong right?!

It became clear that the original students that worked on it followed an older curriculum, meaning they still got taught .NET instead of the core variant that we get now, not only that but it also seemed that they either did not fully grasp the Clean/Onion architecture or didn't get it in class since there were infrastructure components in the 'Domain' project of the solution. Think of 2 DBContexts in the domain model, yep.

One of us bailed in the first week, the other one and I felt bad for the people using the app so we went on and tried to work on the first bugs that were described in a document. One of these bugs was 'whenever I filter on something in the list, everybody gets to see that filter on their screen instead of only me'. Woah that's weird! Let's see how they put that together!

Oh god, they are using a _static_ variable to store filters, no wonder that it doesn't work properly. Ever heard of sessions?!

Second bug: Sometimes people can't create an account when we sign them up from the admin panel. Alright that is weird, let's figure that one out! Wait a second it seems to work in development? What's this about.

Oh wait I can't create an account on production either? Oh that's weird, wait a second... Why do I have to put my e-mail in a form that was sent to me through e-mail? Why is my address not filled in already? OOH, if someone types in the wrong e-mail address (which is easy since our school has 4 variants of the same f*cking e-mail address) it won't work since it can't recognize the user! Brilliant! Remove e-mail input box and make a token/queryparam determine the user account.

Ah that seems good, it's a mess but it seems a tiny bit better now, great! We're making progress and some sweet buck.

Next bug, trillions of 50x errors on random pages, that's a weird one.

Hm everything works in development, that's odd. Is the production data corrupted?

DID I MENTION that in order to get into the system in development we have to load in a f*cking production database backup ON OUR DEVELOPMENT MACHINE and then ask one of the users' password to login to it and create an account for ourselves? Seeding? What's that, right?!

Anyway, back to bug fixing. I e-mail the the people responsible for the app and get a production admin account, oh I also can't ssh into it because of policies so I have to do everything over e-mail and figure out what's causing the errors. I somehow also wonder if they have any kind of virtualization in place, giving students a VM to do that stuff in doesn't seem so weird does it ? Even with school policies?

Oh btw, 'deploying' means sending a .zip file to a guy in another building and telling him how to configure it, apparently this resulted in a missing folder that the application needed to work and couldn't make on its own. This after 2 weeks of e-mailing back and forth.

After 3 months i quit out of despair and sadness, and due to the fact that I just couldn't do it anymore. I separated everything into logical subprojects and let the last guy handle it, he was OK with that and understood why I left.

Luckily, around that time I already had an actual job at a software development company :)

Discovered pro tip of my life :
Never trust your code

Achievements unlocked :
Successfully running C++ GPU accelerated offscreen rendering engine with texture loading code having faulty validation bug over a year on production for more than 1.5M daily Android active users without any issues.

History : Recently I was writing a new rendering engineering that uses our GPU pipeline engine.. and our prototype android app benchmark test always fails with black rendering frame detection assertion.

Practice:
Spend more than a month to debug a GPU pipeline system based on directed acyclic graph based rendering algorithm.

New abilities added :
Able to debug OpenGL ES code on Android using print statement placed in source code using binary search.

But why?
I was aware of the issue over a month and just ignored it thinking it's a driver bug in my android device.. but when the api was used by one of Android dev, he reported the same issue. In the same day at night 2:59AM ....

Satan came to me and told me that " ok listen man, here is what I am gonna do with you today, your new code will be going production in a week, and the renderer will give you just one black frame after random time, and after today 3AM, your code will not show GL Errors if you debug or trace. Buhahahaha ahhaha haahha..... Puffff"

And he was gone..
Thanks satan for not killing me.. I will not trust stable production code anymore enevn though every line is documented and peer reviewed.

tl : "hey dotenv, we have a presentation with VP tomorrow, do you want to present any of your achievements in product?"

me: "umm, what achievements ?"

tl : "you know, something that you added in app which made a good impact to various metrics like DAU, MAU, less bad reviews etc"

me: "umm... i coded the tasks and features created by you folks. they got shipped at some point of your liking, and are now being tracked by you for its success failure. So i am not sure what to take credit for"

TL: "no, no.. i mean like any bugs or issues that you fixed outside of your daily jira tasks which you tracked to be a sucess"

me: "well as far as tracking is concerned, then neither i know how to track them nor i did. but yea, i identified a bug where an outdated payload was generating bad request and giving a silent failure instead of success which recently got shipped. maybe its helping users get actual response instead of "we will get back to you in some time" , so this might get considered?

TL : "oh that? that we have already added as one of the team's achievements (=PM+TL's achievement) and have tracked it to be a succes"

me : "what th- okay. then how about that api failure which was identified by AVP as "something is not right" in which the api was intermittently taking a long time to respond. he tagged me and i set up logs to identify which type of users got that issue and the actual cause of that api failure. that was definitely a good fox for app as we ended up with good reviews on playstore for our new release?"

TL : "oh that? how can you take credit for that fix? it was identified by AVP, you just added similar logs that we were using for tracking errors and implemented a fix when it came to you as a sprint task? its a team achievement"

me : "but you guys didn't identified the cause through your logs!? my log was more granular. and even if that's the case, we aren't allowed to pick any task just as is, without getting it added to sprint , right?"

TL : "nah, that was a team win"

*6 months later, during appraisal time"
TL : "Hey dotenv, you haven't displayed any leadership skills and haven't gone put of the box to improve the product. Here's your peanut appraisal 🗑️"

me : 🥲🔫🤯🪦

------------

fuck this stupid neaurocrst structure. i hate being a selfish prick than a team player, but either give credits as well as punishment to the team or gove credits as well as punishment to the single person. but wtf is thos culture of giving reward to team and punishment to individual? fckin communists

------

A mail I got two days ago started out like this:

"Hello Mr. $myLastname,

I know the Internet Explorer is quite old but we found some errors[...]"

My mind: "NooooOOoOOOO"

They find a lot of weird stuff too, dropdowns, carousels all that major stuff didn't work.

Turns out it was a bug with bootstrap 4.1.0. It's fixed in 4.1.1 and until, release we can use 4.0 just fine.

My feelings in those 15 minutes resemble a sine wave.

So this one day I'm at work and the manager peaks into my office and just says "can you check that platform X is building, pretty much done just a basic bug check" (this bloke had negative 1 technical experience)

I'm not sure what he means, the whole thing is built in Java and I know nothing about that...

I log in the platform on dev server, sure enough it seems to work, charts are drawn, no errors, then I try to log out; this button does nothing...

I don't bother telling the manager, I just go to the dev who's a friend of mine and tell him about it.

A week later, manager jumps in the room all excited "we're launching this product tomorrow, mind checking again?"

Sure, I log in, ... There's no log out button, it's gone... I ask the dev.

"Yeah I fixed it, it's gone now!"

Before solving the bug -
[•] 2 Errors 1 Warning
------------------------------------------
After solving the bug -
[•] 1043 Errors 7 Warnings

Fuck the what the fuck? 😵

Ah, developers, the unsung heroes of caffeine-fueled coding marathons and keyboard clacking symphonies! These mystical beings have a way of turning coffee and pizza into lines of code that somehow make the world go 'round.

Have you ever seen a developer in their natural habitat? They huddle in dimly lit rooms, surrounded by monitors glowing like magic crystals. Their battle cries of "It works on my machine!" echo through the corridors, as they summon the mighty powers of Stack Overflow and Google to conquer bugs and errors.

And let's talk about the coffee addiction – it's like they believe caffeine is the elixir of code immortality. The way they guard their mugs, you'd think it's the Holy Grail. In fact, a developer without coffee is like a computer without RAM – it just doesn't function properly.

But don't let their nerdy exteriors fool you. Deep down, they're dreamers. They dream of a world where every line of code is bug-free and every user is happy. A world where the boss understands what "just one more line of code" really means.

Speaking of bosses, developers have a unique ability to turn simple requests into complex projects. "Can you make a small tweak?" the boss asks innocently. And the developer replies, "Sure, it's just a minor change," while mentally calculating the time it'll take and the potential for scope creep.

Let's not forget their passion for acronyms. TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) is their second language. API, CSS, HTML, PHP, SQL... it's like they're playing a never-ending game of Scrabble with abbreviations.

And documentation? Well, that's their arch-nemesis. It's as if writing clear instructions is harder than debugging quantum mechanics. "The code is self-explanatory," they claim, leaving everyone else scratching their heads.

In the end, developers are a quirky bunch, but we love them for it. Their quirks and peculiarities are what make them the creative, brilliant minds that power our digital world. So here's to developers, the masters of logic and the wizards of the virtual realm!

I HATE SURFACES SO FRICKING MUCH. OK, sure they're decent when they work. But the problem is that half the time our Surfaces here DON'T work. From not connecting to the network, to only one external screen working when docked, to shutting down due to overheating because Microsoft didn't put fans in them, to the battery getting too hot and bulging.... So. Many. Problems. It finally culminated this past weekend when I had to set up a Laptop 3. It already had a local AD profile set up, so I needed to reset it and let it autoprovision. Should be easy. Generally a half-hour or so job. I perform the reset, and it begins reinstalling Windows. Halfway through, it BSOD's with a NO_BOOT_MEDIA error. Great, now it's stuck in a boot loop. Tried several things to fix it. Nothing worked. Oh well, I may as well just do a clean install of Windows. I plug a flash drive into my PC, download the Media Creation Tool, and try to create an image. It goes through the lengthy process of downloading Windows, then begins creating the media. At 68% it just errors out with no explanation. Hmm. Strange. I try again. Same issue. Well, it's 5:15 on a Friday evening. I'm not staying at work. But the user needs this laptop Monday morning. Fine, I'll take it home and work on it over the weekend. At home, I use my personal PC to create a bootable USB drive. No hitches this time. I plug it into the laptop and boot from it. However, once I hit the Windows installation screen the keyboard stops working. The trackpad doesn't work. The touchscreen doesn't work. Weird, none of the other Surfaces had this issue. Fine, I'll use an external keyboard. Except Microsoft is brilliant and only put one USB-A port on the machine. BRILLIANT. Fortunately I have a USB hub so I plug that in. Now I can use a USB keyboard to proceed through Windows installation. However, when I get to the network connection stage no wireless networks come up. At this point I'm beginning to realize that the drivers which work fine when navigating the UEFI somehow don't work during Windows installation. Oh well. I proceed through setup and then install the drivers. But of course the machine hasn't autoprovisioned because it had no internet connection during setup. OK fine, I decide to reset it again. Surely that BSOD was just a fluke. Nope. Happens again. I again proceed through Windows installation and install the drivers. I decide to try a fresh installation *without* resetting first, thinking maybe whatever bug is causing the BSOD is also deleting the drivers. No dice. OK, I go Googling. Turns out this is a common issue. The Laptop 3 uses wonky drivers and the generic Windows installation drivers won't work right. This is ridiculous. Windows is made by Microsoft. Surface is made by Microsoft. And I'm supposed to believe that I can't even install Windows on the machine properly? Oh well, I'll try it. Apparently I need to extract the Laptop 3 drivers, convert the ESD install file to a WIM file, inject the drivers, then split the WIM file since it's now too big to fit on a FAT32 drive. I honestly didn't even expect this to work, but it did. I ran into quite a few more problems with autoprovisioning which required two more reinstallations, but I won't go into detail on that. All in all, I totaled up 9 hours on that laptop over the weekend. Suffice to say our organization is now looking very hard at DELL for our next machines.

Can someone please write a plugin that automatically translates bug tickets into startup-ese? It would make it very easy to present the most common offenders to higher management on quarterly reviews.

Example:
-
$< "screen A is all messed up"
$> "We are disrupting the establishment in screen A"
-
$< "API B is not responding, giving timeout errors"
$> "We are facing logistical challenges in API B"

A dev found a bug I created where I set a SQL parameter name to @OrderID instead of the expected @Order. The standard is @OrderID, there is one stored proc where it's @Order.
Oops...I didn't catch it because the integration test didn't cover that area of the code. My mistake...I should have checked...I take complete responsibility for the screw up.

He let me know by email..
"When refactoring, from now on check the stored procedure parameters, there are a few that don't follow the standard."

I was like "from now on..."? ...wow....bold comment from someone responsible for code that doesn't check for nulls, doesn't log errors, and relies on exceptions for flow control. You wouldn't even have known about the error if I didn't modify your code to log the error (the try..except returned false)

I really wanted to reply ...

"Fixed. From now on, when you come across those easily found bugs, go head and fix it, write a test, and move on. Don't send a condescending email to me, my boss, your boss, all the DBAs, and the entire fracking order processing team. Thanks."

But..I thanked him for finding and letting me know...we're a team..blah blah blah..

Frack..people suck.

Does anyone work on a team with multiple stacks?

For example we have batch jobs in Java but also have a JS front-end and APIs.

How do you divide the developers and the work across these projects?

Currently everyone does everything but I feel like this is inefficient and hard to develop expertise. And different people or even the same person will make the same mistakes over and over again because they don't know how to do X or they forget or overlook some quirk. When I switched Beck to JS took me like a week to get a Promises nailed down again. And this morning someone else had a production bug and couldn't figure it out. But when I looked at the code I could pretty much see where an issue could be (uncaught exception in a promise)

Also the testing frameworks are very different and there's a lot of infrastructure technical debt, things that really should've been done a long time or fixed but no one had the time or expertise to do it or notice it (until it causes a production issue and then everyone is like WTF is happening??!!!!).

I'm not the manager but I always feel that the team needs to be split along the language lines and specific people need to own these projects to review and code changes for all these common newbie errors. And also developer enough expertise to foresee problems before it becomes a production issue.

My team and I are working on a huge project that's been in development for years.

First deadline was in the fall last year. We were never going to make that.

Then we were supposed to be ready just after the summer holidays (months ago). We didn't make that either.

Then we were supposed to launch last week. Didn't happen, still too many critical errors and unfinished, untested features.

Now we are having daily meetings to discuss whether we'll be ready to release... that day!

Meanwhile, stability issues and other critical errors keep popping up. The product is barely finished and has not been through rigorous testing with all the latest features and bug fixes. Not to mention that we don't really have a deployment pipeline either.

And here's the kicker: The customers don't know this is coming. It's highly anticipated, but only internally. It is a replacement for an existing product, which strives towards not changing the frontend too much.

Why do we rush it so? I get that a deadline can help motivate you to reach your goal, but how motivated will we be if the launch fails and we get buried in bugs and missing features?
Would it not be better to launch it with at least the confidence of knowing that we've tried to test it properly?

Yesterday was a horrible day...
First of all, as we are short of few devs, I was assigned production bugs... Few applications from mobile app were getting fucked up. All fields in db were empty, no customer name, email, mobile number, etc.
I started investigating, took dump from db, analyzed the created_at time stamps. Installed app, tried to reproduce bug, everything worked. Tried API calls from postman, again worked. There were no error emails too.
So I asked for server access logs, devops took 4 hrs just to give me the log. Went through 4 million lines and found 500 errors on mobile apis. Went to the file, no error handling in place.
So I have a bug to fix which occurs 1 in 100 case, no stack trace, no idea what is failing. Fuck my job.

when you're teaching the freshman, and they're flipping out over trying to understand c compiler errors, while you think to yourself "just wait till that first bug that only breaks something sometimes but you don't always notice..."

"Whenever there is a decline in quality of code and rise of bugs and errors oh dear coder, I manifest to show the path of bug and error free coding" said code-god
- Chapter 1 Verse 1, Code Gita

The fucking worst part of my job is when I get thrown an error on a bug I'm trying to fix and it doesn't even contain an error message. For example, I'll try to verify a self signed certificate but I get an error and literally the only error thrown is [Error 0], no fucking message. If you try to track down the error in the docs they don't even fucking list errors. Times like these make me wish I could castrate people with my

!rant

I was propably 15 years old the first time i saw my friend coding html and and other related stuff i cannot remember! It intriqued me and i really wanted to learn it (i wanted to learn to hack.. xD..) but at the given time i wasn't happy in life and i was pretty much addicted to WoW..

So.. forward 12 years, where i had gone to the military, thought about becoming a physiotherapist, psychiatrist, korean translator and game designer.. oh and countless attempts from another friend to get me interested in c#.. i decided to start studying computers (software/hardware) at DTU (danish university).

That was rougly 8-9 months ago and i am now pretty decent in C, HTML, C++, Java, MySQL and koncepts about networks and OOP designs :).

I am super grateful to all the trial and errors throughout my life that have brought me to this place :)

Still 27, still has alot to learn, but i am really happy where i am right now. Even so, that i am spending my free time making my own projects :)

I also get super happy whenever i fix a bug of mine :p.

I truly believe that you will skyrocket to succes if you do what you love.

For me, i just discovered that part of myself a little late :)

Not sure what i hope to achieve with this post, but i hope it can give an insight into what people go through and yeah.. go for what you want!

Have a great time everyone!

And first !rant on this app!
I love all your rants! vs !rants

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

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

Project manager: Hey tyga hows the project going?
Tyga the coder/rapper:bug city bitch, bug bug city bitch, 10, 10, 10, 20 errors on my terminal bitch

Details of the bug report sent by our customer:
"Sometimes some errors happens on website".
Me:
"Be patient man... I feel you!".

"Most memorable bug you fixed?"

A recent instance happened in one of my Scratch projects, and the bug involved "Infinities."

I had an opportunity to teach kids programming, and it involved Scratch. So, to have something to show those kids at least, I decided to make a small game.
In that game, I had an object that takes some time before appearing after being cloned (i.e., instantiated.) The duration was calculated by dividing a constant with a variable:
[Wait for ((3) / (variable)) seconds]
The bug is that I forgot about the case where 'variable' can be 0, which is classic and insignificant.

Well, the thing is that I learned two things the hard way:
1: Scratch is very flexible about integers and floats (e.g., at one second, it looks like an integer, but one operation later, it's a float.)
2: Scratch does not provide any 'runtime errors' that can crash the project.

In other languages, similar "wait" methods take "milliseconds" in an integer, so it would have barfed out a "DivideByZeroException" or something. But Scratch was so robust against project-crashing behavior that it literally waited for f*<king "infinity seconds," effectively hanging that clone without warning or runtime errors. This masked my bug. It took way too long to debug that s#!+.

Don't blanket-mask any errors.

Trying to fix errors and bugs results in some weird behaviour

like I don't know how I went from making an app to cleaning the gutters on my roof but here I am

Today I had to fix a bug and it took me about 2 hours to find out that it related to a bug in a component which doesn't belong to the bugs component. In development everything where fine. But after deployment the bug occured. Found out that when running Vue webpack projects in dev it handles errors different, kind of a global try catch block. After deployment the application breaks.
This teached me again that we should not ignore any red error line in console.

I'm studying atm and I survived Haskell, SKI, ... now, in the second semester we started with Python (yeay ♡) and Java (that's fine).

One of the first exercises is about installing Jython ('cause it's good, right? /sarcasm off), using the lecturer's module and write some code for it. It's about painting some shitty graphics *gasp*...

I use PyCharm (not really necessary for these crappy exercises) and programming on Windows and/or Linux.

Downloaded Jython, installed it, set it as interpreter - works fine (win10, pycharm).
Some students got weird errors using linux - for me it's the same but meh Idc.

Today I tried using Jython on my notebook, too (win10, pycharm). Downloaded it from the Jython Project website. Can't update pip, can't run modules - error is about fckin charsets...

Some other student figured out - wrong version of Jython. The newer version has some bug fixes.
2.7.1 is the one and only - the download section of their website offers 2.7.0 as latest release...

So - how to know there is a version 2.7.1?
#1 version control website = Wikipedia

So... there is a blog, guy's writing about this release - this installer is hosted at maven central. Yeay. Obvious. Thanks.

Can't describe such stupidity - maybe it's the user again 😂

A CASE AGAINST BLUE PRISM
Let's review one of the worst weeks I had with Blue Prism

Monday: Yay! Solved one of the problems we've been carrying around for a week before.

One of the robots suddenly became slow. Like, REAL slow. A process that would take 3 minutes per record now takes 45, and that broke apart all the following schedule.

There were no updates on the application server, the production machine, the robot, it just became slow. And not always slow; a process manually run from console room would work, a process in debug room would work, it's just the scheduled part that caused problems.

It turned out, BP didn't seem to like that particular combination of schedulation + process + machine. Moving the process to a different machine seemingly fixed that. IDK why.

Tuesday: One of our processes waits for a code to appear in the page, and when that happens, it memorizes this code. However, now it is always returning blank. Worked for months, now it breaks every single time.
After half a day of debugging a bug which DIDN'T HAPPEN IN DEBUG MODE YET AGAIN, at 11pm I decided to just place a nonsensical timeout in page before reading and call it a day.

WEDNESDAY: a scheduled process didn't start. "No sessions created". Thanks Blue Prism, very cool.

THURSTAY: This time, schedulation did start, but the process is "waiting". As in: it's 9:30 am, the process has been stuck in the same step since 6:00 am. Turns out, it blocked during a navigate stage; you need to send a string to clipboard using the standard BP action for that, then paste and click "enter", but for some reason the standard BP object sent "ORRCO" instead of "ORRICO" to clipboard, which obviously returned no results and then... the process just didn't feel like doing things anymore. No errors, no logs, nothing: just sitting on its ass. Because fuck you that's why.

Friday: another process uses a very moderate amount of scripts to work. Nothing really fancy, just a couple of lines of code to place in page some IDs and selector to help BP do its thing, otherwise selecting these elements would be a nightmare.

But

Failed while invoking javascript method:Exception from HRESULT: 0x80020101-> at mshtml.HTMLWindow2Class.IHTMLWindow2_execScript(String code, String language)

The same script -it's not dynamically generated-worked yesterday, the day before and the day after. But sometimes it will not. Why? The answer, my friend, is blowin'' in the wind

Real question, not troll. There is debate about it and I really can't figure it out.

Besides having the title software "engineer," is there really such a thing as a software engineer?

In the US, to be an engineer you have to be regularly tested by a regulated governing body, apprentice under another engineer for years, and be certified on a state level. Whereupon you are personally liable for your designs being FREE from errors.

For one thing, nobody can write bug free code, and the idea of being personally responsible for each bug is terrifying.
And two, I've seen news of people calling themselves software engineers in the USA and Canada and getting a cease and desist or sued for it, despite any level of qualification.

I'm sure there are engineers, especially electrical, computer engineers who also program.

But... ?

I don't know, I can't say either way.
That's why I'm asking.

Just dropping some current experience here.

Content security policies are big mess in both chrome and firefox.

Chrome has some 4 years old "bug" where you can't add hash of JS file to 'style-src' policy to permit inline-styles THAT would be set by this script (jQuery actually).
Firefox is beautifully unhelpful, it just pops of error "blocked ..something..", not even saying what it was.

EDIT:
And I am missing a pair of some steel balls to ask about this on SO because there is this much of very similar questions, nonetheless -if I did read them right- every one of them is talking about enabling style attribute, and that's something different.

EDIT2: Chrome currently generates 138 errors "jquery-3.4.0.min.js:2 Refused to apply inline style..." , this ain't hitting production.

After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...

So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.

Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.

Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...

So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.

Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).

We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).

I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...

Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks...

Since I started my routine of checking bug logs every morning, I've had 2 instances where a website vulnerability scanner was run against a production website and generated over 2,000 Coldfusion errors.

At the time, I was super nervous about the apparent hack attempt, and hyped that the attackers never actually got in. It's nice to know that despite the various errors indicating vulnerable / breakable code, they were ultimately unsuccessful. I know now that a determined attacker could probably have wrecked our production websites. Since then I've made a ton of security-related updates and I'm actually thankful for the script kiddie getting my attention with that scan.

PS. We're now building a website for a local security company who is going to work with us to pen test the site when it's finished! Gulp.

AHHHHHHHHHHGGGH

I HATE VPN SETUP

- Trying OpenSwan
Installing open swan on a Debian machine.. setting up the config.
Restarting openswan. Syntax error. No syntax error to be found.
Different tutorial.. it starts! Try to connect.. I can’t connect. Look at the logs. No errors.
Tcpdump. My traffic is coming through.. all fine.. try to connect again.. it works! (Nothing changed!)
Try to ping somewhere else.. no connectivity.
Try to ping an IP in the same network.. works fine. So I have connectivity, just no internet.
Spend an hour finding out about traffic directions of which no one seems to know what they really mean.
Boss tells me to stop using openswan because it’s deprecated and replaced by strong swan..

- Strongswan
Reinstall Debian machine, install strongswan. Copy openswan config. Oh, they’re incompatible? Look up strong swan config, and the service starts.
Connect to the VPN.. it works! Again, no internet, just connectivity in the same network. Spend 2h debugging the config, disable firewalls everywhere, find an ancient bug in the Debian package related to my issues.. ok, let’s try compiling from source.. you know what, let’s not. I’ll throw this Debian machine away and try something completely different.

- pfSense
Ok, this looks easy enough! Let’s just click through the initial setup, change some firewall rules, create an L2TP VPN with a simple wizard.
Try to connect to VPN. First, it times out. Maybe a firewall issue? Turn off firewall.. ah, something happens now. I get an error message right after trying to connect to the VPN. Hmm, the port doesn’t even get opened when I enable the firewall.. this implementation seems a bit buggy.. let’s try their OpenVPN module.

Configure OpenVPN. Documentation isn’t that clear.. apparently a client isn’t actually a client but a user is a client.. ok, there’s a hidden checkbox somewhere.
Now where do I download my certificate? Oh, I need a plug-in for that.. ok, interesting. Able to download the certificate, import it, connect and.. YES!!! I can ping! But, I have no DNS..
Apparently, ICMP isn’t getting filtered but all outbound ports are.. yet the firewall is completely disabled. Maybe I need outbound NAT? Oh. There’s no clear documentation on where to configure it. Find some ancient doc, set it up, still no outbound connectivity.

AHAHAHAHHHHHHHHHHG

Then I tried VyOS. I had a great L2TP VPN working in less than 15 mins. Thank you VyOS for actually providing proper docs and proper software.

Testers who keep on filing bug reports after being told that ALL 999 errors are caused by a specific back end system

Just started doing my project for Java Class, a Polynomial Calculator App.

Get it done, get a dozen errors. Fix every bug. Find other bugs when inputting.
Brainstorm 5 minutes and realize I could change the way I write the polynomial at input.
Change 20 lines of code that do String, Split, Run through the split and check for coefficient and power, parse them to float in an array to specific positiona - to 5 simple lines.

Program works fine. No more previous errors.
Have the great idea to add the following:
-If you divide the Polynomial by 0 output "Are you retarded?"

P.s. I'm happy about my first project even if I hate Java.

What is the most impactful mistake you ever did in your code?

My main project in work is making program in C# (right now .NET Standard) that can read scans of invoices that are sent from contractors. I'm working on it for almost two years now (with breaks and only halftime because university). Alone. And for last two months I've been redesigning, refactoring and making whole app "better", using experience and knowledge gained in the last two years.

Obviously my boss wasn't happy with that but I got him to accept it, promising that it'll make it work faster, expansion will be simpler and I'll make core as a separate library that can be used anywhere, not only in the JobRouter ecosystem.

And so I reworked most of the code, made it cleaner, I hope, and a tad quicker. And I was happy with it while testing on a package of invoices. Today I made first integration with customer's JobRouter.

The results aren't any better - in some cases they are much worse. Especially while searching for invoice entries, which can be in any shape or form and on any of document's pages.

I guess, being a Junior, I wasn't really up to the task. I'm sick of working on a "guessing" program that has to work with every invoice template users can imagine. I'm sick of not getting any recognition for what I did good. And I'm sick of constantly being pushed to make it work better when I just don't have any more ideas or my skills are just lacking.

To be honest, I don't know what to do. I'll probably have to work on making it search the data better. But it's not trivial to just look at the code and see errors. Iterating on the code while working with different invoices worked for a bit in older versions, but I reached the point where changes made to make one invoice be read better, made another one worse.

Its like on those GIFs where you squish one bug to make another two appear.

So yeah, I'm currently really doubting my career, skills and intelligence.

Look, I don't know who are you? and what you want?
If you let me fix this problem then I will not look for you and I will not pursue you.
But if you don't
I will look for you,
I will find you and I will kill you..!!

"The Perils and Triumphs of Debugging: A Developer's Odyssey"

You know you're in for an adventurous coding session when you decide to dive headfirst into debugging. It's like setting sail on the tumultuous seas of code, not quite sure if you'll end up on the shores of success or stranded on the island of endless errors.

As a developer, I often find myself in this perilous predicament, armed with my trusty text editor and a cup of coffee, ready to conquer the bugs lurking in the shadows. The first line of code looks innocent enough, but little did I know that it was the calm before the storm.

The journey begins with that one cryptic error message that might as well be written in an ancient, forgotten language. It's a puzzle, a riddle, and a test of patience all rolled into one. You read it, re-read it, and then call over your colleague, hoping they possess the magical incantation to decipher it. Alas, they're just as clueless.

With each debugging attempt, you explore uncharted territories of your codebase, and every line feels like a step into the abyss. You question your life choices and wonder why you didn't become a chef instead. But then, as you unravel one issue, two more pop up like hydra heads. The sense of despair is palpable.

But, my fellow developers, there's a silver lining in this chaotic journey. The moment when you finally squash that bug is an unparalleled triumph. It's the victory music after a challenging boss fight, the "Eureka!" moment that echoes through the office, and the affirmation that, yes, you can tame this unruly beast we call code.

So, the next time you find yourself knee-deep in debugging hell, remember that you're not alone. We've all been there, and we've all emerged stronger, wiser, and maybe just a little crazier. Debugging is our odyssey, and every error is a dragon to be slain. Embrace the chaos, and may your code be ever bug-free!

Okay. Here's the ONLY two scenarios where automated testing is justified:
- An outsourcing company who is given the task of bug elimination in legacy code with a really short timeframe. Then yes, writing tests is like waging war on bugs, securing more and more land inch after inch.
- A company located in an area where hiring ten junior developers is cheaper than hiring one principal developer. Then yes, the business advantage is very real.

That's it. That's the only two scenarios where automated testing is justified. Other such scenarios doesn't exist.

Why? Because any robust testing system (not just "adding some tests here and there") is a _declarative_ one. On top of already being declarative (opposed to the imperative environment where the actual code exists), if you go further and implement TDD, your tests suddenly begins to describe your domain area, turning into a declarative DSL.

Such transformations are inevitable. You can't catch bugs in the first place if your tests are ignorant of entities your code is working with.

That being said, any TDD-driven project consists of two things:
- Imperative code that implements business logic
- Declarative DSL made of automated tests that also describes the same business logic

Can't you see that this system is _wet_? The tests set alone in a TDD-driven project are enough to trivially derive the actual, complete code from it.

It's almost like it's easier to just write in a declarative language in the first place, in the same way tests are written in TDD project, and scrap the imperative part altogether.

In imperative languages, absence of errors can be mathematically guaranteed. In imperative languages, the best performance (e.g. the lowest algorithmic complexity) can also be mathematically guaranteed. There is a perfectly real point after which Haskell rips C apart in terms of performance, and that point happens earlier on than you think.

If you transitioned from a junior who doesn't get why tests are needed to a competent engineer who sees value in TDD, that's amazing. But like with any professional development, it's better to remember that it's always possible to go further. After the two milestones I described, the third exists — the complete shift into the declarative world.

For a human brain, it's natural to blindly and aggressively reject whatever information leads to the need of exiting the comfort zone. Hence the usual shitstorm that happens every time I say something about automated testing. I understand you, and more than that, I forgive you.

The only advice I would allow myself to give you is just for fun, on a weekend, open a tutorial to a language you never tried before, and spend 20 minutes messing around with it. Maybe you'll laugh at me, but that's the exact way I got from earning $200 to earning $3500 back when I was hired as a CTO for the first time.

Good luck!

Work load, bug fixes, plenty of errors, back and neck pain and eye strain does not irritate me as much as HRs not responding to your emails.

Start my code day, no bugs in sight,
Each line I write, like code's delight.

Second function, errors suppressed,
Silent fixes, my skills put to the test.

Third loop, logic numb, yet breaking,
A contradiction in every line I'm making.

Fourth bug, clinging like a leech,
In the grip of coding's caffeine breach.

Fifth syntax, thoughtless actions cascade,
A program's dance, in lines arrayed.

Sixth compile, colleagues say, 'Go home,'
But where's home in this code dome?

'They say home is where the heart is,
But my heart's in a million logic twists,
Which line shall I follow?
The optimized or the broken,
I cannot tell them apart.'

In the last bit of code, I saved my hope,
When debugging was still an option,
So go ahead and save yourself from glitches,
For you are worthy of a million exceptions.

So, I just (few hours ago)made a new variable that's either brilliant or innately flawed... not sure yet. It's an oddly unique var...

__bs__

So far I only made it in python and windows env (i script like the methodology of css).

I bet you're wondering how I've defined __bs__ and the practicality of it.
__bs__ is derived from a calculated level of bullshit that annoys me to tolerate, maintain, etc. as well as things that tend to throw nonsensical errors, py crap like changing my strings to ints at seemingly random times/events/cosmic alignments/etc or other things that have a history of pulling some bs, for known or unknown reasons.

How/why did this come about now?

Well I was updating some symlinks and scripts(ps1 and bat) cuz my hdd is so close to death I'm wondering if hdd ghosts exist as it's somehow still working (even ostream could tell it should be dead, by the sound alone).

A nonsense bug with powershell allowing itself to start/run custom ps1scripts with the originating command coming from a specific batch script, which worked fine before and nothing directly connected to it has changed.

I got annoyed so took an ironic break from it to work on python crap. Python has an innately high level of bs so i did need to add some extra calculations when defining if a py script or function is actually __bs__ or just py.

The current flavour of py bs was the datetime* module... making all of my scripts using datetime have matching import statements to avoid more bs.

I've kept a log of general bs per project/use case. It's more like a warning list... like when ive spent hours debugging something by it's traceback, meticulous... to eventually find out it had absolutely nothing to do with the exception listed. Also logged aliases i created, things that break or go boom if used in certain ways, packages that ive edited, etc.

The issue with my previous logging is that it's a log... id need to read it before doing anything, no matter how quick/simple it should be, or im bound to get annoyed with... bs.

So far i have it set to alert if __bs__ is above a certain int when i open something to edit. I can also check __bs__ fot what's causing the bs. I plan to turn it into a warning and recording system for how much bs i deal with and have historical data of personal performance vs bs tolerance. There's a few other applications i think ill want to use it for, assume it's not bs itself.

*in case you prefer sanity and haven't dealt with py and datetime enough, here's the jist:
If you were to search any major forum like StackOverflow for datetime use in py, youd find things like datetime.datetime.now() and datetime.now() both used, to get the same returned value. You'll also find tons of posts for help and trying to report 'bugs', way more than average. This is because the datetime package has a name conflict... with itself. It may have been a bug several years ago, but it beeb explicitly defined as intentional since.

The Code Abyss Beckons! 🤯

Hey fellow devs, brace yourselves for a wild ride into the chaotic realm of code confessions and debugging dramas! 🎢💻

So, here I am, standing at the precipice of my latest coding adventure, armed with a keyboard and a questionable amount of caffeine. 🚨☕

Today's quest involves unraveling the mysteries of a legacy code that seems to have been written in a language only decipherable by ancient coding sages. 😱📜

As I navigate through the nested loops of confusion and dance with the dragons of runtime errors, I can't help but wonder: Is this what the Matrix feels like for developers? 🕵️‍♂️💊

In the midst of my debugging odyssey, I stumbled upon a comment in the code that simply said, "// Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." 🏴‍☠️📛 Well, isn't that reassuring?

And then there's the moment when you finally fix that elusive bug, and you feel like you've just tamed a mythical creature. 🦄✨ Victory dance, anyone? 💃🕺

But let's not forget the rubber duck sitting on my desk, patiently listening to my monologues about algorithms and existential coding crises. 🦆🗣️

So, dear coding comrades, how's your journey through the code abyss going? Any epic wins or facepalming fails to share? Let the rants flow like a river of improperly closed tags! 🌊🚫

May your semicolons be where they should and your documentation be ever truthful. Happy coding, and may your merge conflicts be swift and painless! 🌈🤞

#CodeOdyssey #DebuggingDrama #DevRantChronicles

I had written a feature that stored some data for all methods in a code base. And it worked in 99.9% of all cases, but for some projects, somehow there were errors in the logs that I couldn't understand.
After hours of debugging, it turned out that I inserted the method objects into a map, and the (existing) base class for these objects used the character offsets for the method's start & end in the hashCode() implementation. This meant that in the (extremely rare) case of two methods in two files with the exact same start and end offsets, inserting them into a map would overwrite the previous value.
Once uncovered, this bug was trivial to fix ;)

So I'm writing my compiler and I decide to test error handling, see if I'm catching unexpected tokens and whatnot. I try duplicating a semi-colon at the end of a line, for sure it'll give me an error since that's an unexpected token, isn't it? So I run the compiler and... No errors? I start debugging for a few minutes, snoop around, everything seems ok... "Huh, that's weird" and then it dawns on me, a semi-colon only marks the end of a statement. So, technically, it's not an unexpected token if you have an empty statement (which wouldn't break any rules about statements). I decide to try out my theory. I put ;;;;;;;; at the end of a random line in my rust code, hit compile and... it compiles! So that means it is not a bug anymore! I mean, if the big guys that actually know a tad about language design, compilers and all that cool stuff allow it in their languages, why shouldn't it? So I did it, I turned a bug into a feature and now I can go to sleep in peace and stop dreaming about fucking abstract syntax trees (don't mind my kinks >:) ).

Yeah anyways thanks for reading, till next time! Bye!

Guys, I'm refactoring a server code from es5 to es6 and I would like to know how to get es6 errors like when I'm working with React. I have installed babel, and I can compile es6 code but I get errors that target the es5 (compiled) code so it's not easy to find the bug sources

It's so frustrating to explain rxjs pitfalls to the manager.

To avoid the diamond problems and glitches caused by combineLatest and debounceTime(0), I decided to use single stream with nested reactivity.

Then the manager asked me to use withLatestFrom instead of combineLatest.

Sure withLatestFrom makes sense to the original author, when the original author is able to remember the reactive graph and put proper dependencies to combineLasted/withLatestFrom accordingly, but anyone else who touches the component later needs to retrace the reactive graph to avoid the glitch. Sometimes it's just impossible when many dependencies are derived from combineLatest+debounceTime(0). When no one is trained to code reactively, I don't expect people to know where to put a dependency. After many trials and errors, the only way to avoid the diamond problem is to use nested reactivity where child streams are created within root stream each time root stream emits.

The mentioned manager put all sorts of side effects in observable chains. The manager keeps saying the stream is too large when their subscription functions (sometimes nested) are way worse with litered mutations everywhere. Anything in observable can be traced by go to definition but tracing side effects usually requires global searches.

Recently, he put startWith to the end of a synced stream to fix a bug where button would collapse when there is no content (initial null emission). Rather than fixing the default height, he thinks using startWith(defaultLabel) is a good idea. Of course, he doesn't know that a synced stream should only emit 1 value on new subscription and that extra emitted value will cause rxjs glich down the pipe.

I hate corporate jobs

The joys of being a multi-project, multi-language developer! You think you'll juggle a couple of balls, but suddenly you're in a full-blown circus act, with chainsaws, flaming torches, and a monkey on your back yelling "more features!"

In the morning, you're all TypeScript: "Yes, of course, types make everything more reliable!" By lunch, you're neck-deep in Python and realize types are a vague suggestion at best, leaving you guessing like some bug-squashing mystic. And then just when you’ve finally wrapped your head around that context switch, FastAPI starts demanding things that make you wonder, "Why can’t we all just get along and be JavaScript?"

Oh, and don’t even get me started on syntax. One minute it’s req.body this and express.json() that. The next, Python’s just there with a smug look, saying, "Indentation is my thing, deal with it!" And don’t look now, because meanwhile, Stripe’s trying to barge in with a million webhooks, payment statuses, and event types like “connect” and “payment,” each a subtle bomb to blow up your error logs.

Of course, every language has its "elegant" way of handling errors—which, translated, means fifty shades of “Why isn’t this working?” in different flavors! But hey, at least the machines can’t see us crying through the screen.

Alright, fellow DevRanters, gather 'round for a tale of woe and frustration. 🙄

I was knee-deep in my code, chasing down a bug that had me stumped for hours. I thought I was on the verge of a breakthrough, but then it happened—the code disappeared! Poof! Vanished into the digital abyss without a trace. 😱

I mean, it's one thing to wrestle with bugs and errors, but it's a whole new level of insanity when your code decides to pull a disappearing act on you. I scoured my directories, I even questioned my own sanity. But nope, my code was just playing hide and seek.

So, here I am, feeling like a detective in a coding noir thriller. 🕵️‍♂️ The hunt for the vanishing code continues, but I'm not giving up. This bug won't escape me! 💪

Has anyone else had their code pull a vanishing act when you needed it the most? Share your tales of coding mystery and mayhem below! 🕵️‍♀️👇