Got assigned an intern to mentor him, with an explicit order not to do any of the legwork for him.

We start out with some fuzzy requirements. Intern starts overengineering a generic solution, so I make out a best architecture that conforms to the business requirements and I explain it to the intern why are we going to use such approach and tell him how we are going to do it in three phases.

I explain the intern the first phase, break it down in small tasks for him and return to my projects...

After a couple of days of no words from the intern, I decide to check up on him to see how is he progressing, only to hear him complaining the task is boring. So, instead of doing the assigned tasks, he decided he should do a "design" for a feature I told him explicitly not to do, since it is going to be designed by the design team later on.

I explain it to the intern that we have to do the boring task first because we can't proceed with the next phase of the implementation without the necessary data from the phase one.

Intern says okay and assures me he got it now. Few days later, I check up on him, and he tells me he feels he is doing all the work and that I don't contribute to the project. I call up my boss and tell him intern wants a meeting. Since I was working from home, I quickly pack my things and head to the office. Boss talks to the intern before I managed to get to the office. Once I got there, I meet the intern, and he tells me everything is okay. I ask what did the boss say to make things okay all of a sudden, and he tells me he said we are a team now. Our company has a flat hierarchy model, so he tells me he doesn't feel he needs a mentor, that we are both equal, and that I have no idea how to work in a team, and then proceeds to comfort me on how human interaction is hard and that I will learn it one day... I was like wtf?

I tell him to finish the phase one of the project and start with the phase two, and I leave home again.

I call up my boss and ask him what did he say to the intern, and he says: "nothing much, just explained the project a little bit and how it fits in the grand scheme of things.". I ask about the equal team members thing, and me not being a mentor any longer, the boss goes wtf, saying he never said anything about that to him.

So the kid can't focus on a single task, over-engineers everything and doesn't feel he can learn anything from developers with more experience, doesn't want to obey commands, and also likes to lie to manipulate others.

Tomorrow we'll decide what to do with him...

Sorry for the long rant, it was a long stressful day.

"We need you to build a feature on our website to stop people taking screenshots. I can use the print screen key and then easily print out our website design. You need to make the site design harder to copy".

This is an extract from a recent client email I received. To say I'm in shock is an understatement.

"Let's go for the low hanging fruit first" 🤢

"I think we should do some market research" 🤢

"Yeah that is also on my radar" 🤢

OKAY YOU FUCKING CUNT, STOP WITH YOUR PATRONIZING SHIT.

FIRST OF ALL, ARE YOU REALLY SO SMALL MINDED THAT YOU CAN'T REACH ANY HIGHER? THIS TREE IS FUCKING RAW AMD BARE ON THE BOTTOM, WITH YOUR FILTHY CLAWS GRASPING FOR ALL THOSE EASY NARROW FIXES.

SECONDLY, A FUCKING EMAIL SURVEY WITH BIASED QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY 3 HOBOS IS NOT BLOODY MARKET RESEARCH.

THIRDLY, IF THIS NUCLEAR ICBM OF AN INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEM IS ON YOUR RADAR, MAYBE STOP FONDLING YOUR SWEATY BALLS FOR A MINUTE AND TAKE ACTION.

"Okay lets peel this onion, so we hit the ground running" 😩🤢😞

NO, LET'S NOT "HIT THE GROUND RUNNING", YOU'RE GOING TO FUCKING TRIP AND MESS UP YOUR FACE EVEN MORE. HOW ABOUT GET YOUR PILE OF SHIT IN ORDER FOR ONCE, PREPARE FOR A MEETING? HOW ABOUT THOUGHTFUL ACTION, SOME FEATURE DESIGN?

"No, just implement it quick and dirty" 🤢😡👿

OH YOU WANT IT QUICK AND DIRTY? IS THAT HOW YOU FUCK YOUR DAD AS WELL?

"Let's evaluate the fix in a few weeks. We really had good synergy here team" 🤢😫

YEAH SURE, LET'S EVALUATE THIS.... BUT LET'S EVALUATE IT RIGHT NOW: 😡

"Ahem....

1. You're always late for meetings.
2. After 6 months, you still barely know what we do as a company, you still don't know the teams, and you still don't know the product.
3. You do not listen to engineers flooding you with red flags, requiring time for a redesign to fix serious scaling issues.
4. Everything must be a quickfix, nothing is allowed to require thought, because you CAN ABSOLUTELY NOT think ahead for more than 30 seconds.

OH AND IF YOU EVER AGAIN COVER UP ONE OF YOUR MANY SHORTCOMINGS WITH THAT FUCKING SLIMEY DOUCHEBAG MANAGER VOCABULARY OF YOURS, LET'S SEE HOW MUCH SYNERGY YOU FEEL WHEN YOU'RE DEEPTHROATHING A CACTUS."

Years ago, when I was a young developer, I was asked to design and implement a complex but usefull feature. It took me some time, but I was really proud of my creation. It passed all the tests and was approved for production deployment. However, while the code was deployed, the customer asked for it to remain disabled for a while.

Months passed, other features were added often breaking the one I created. But I was relentless. I've fixed it every time. I've kept it ready for great launch...

After a few years, when I was already working on a different project, I received an email about my feature. It turned out that everyone simply forgot about it. You might expect that it was finally turned on... Nope, that email was a kind request to remove that feature from code.

We're using a ticket system at work that a local company wrote specifically for IT-support companies. It's missing so many (to us) essential features that they flat out ignored the feature requests for. I started dissecting their front-end code to find ways to get the site to do what we want and find a lot of ugly code.
Stuff like if(!confirm("blablabla") == false) and whole JavaScript libraries just to perform one task in one page that are loaded on every page you visit, complaining in the js console that they are loaded in the wrong order. It also uses a websocket on a completely arbitrary port making it impossible to work with it if you are on a restricted wifi. They flat out lie about their customers not wanting an offline app even though their communications platform on which they got asked this question once again got swarmed with big customers disagreeing as the mobile perofrmance and design of the mobile webpage is just atrocious.

So i dig farther and farthee adding all the features we want into a userscript with a beat little 'custom namespace' i make pretty good progress until i find a site that does asynchronous loading of its subpages all of a sudden. They never do that anywhere else. Injecting code into the overcomolicated jQuery mess that they call code is impossible to me, so i track changes via a mutationObserver (awesome stuff for userscripts, never heard of it before) and get that running too.

The userscript got such a volume of functions in such a short time that my boss even used it to demonstrate to them what we want and asked them why they couldn't do it in a reasonable timeframe.

All in all I'm pretty proud if the script, but i hate that software companies that write such a mess of code in different coding styles all over the place even get a foot into the door.

And that's just the code part: They very veeeery often just break stuff in updates that then require multiple hotfixes throughout the day after we complain about it. These errors even go so far to break functionality completely or just throw 500s in our face. It really gives you the impression that they are not testing that thing at all.

And the worst: They actively encourage their trainees to write as much code as possible to get paid more than their contract says, so of course they just break stuff all the time to write as much as possible.
Where did i get that information you ask? They state it on ther fucking career page!

We also have reverse proxy in front of that page that manages the HTTPS encryption and Let's Encrypt renewal. Guess what: They internally check if the certificate on the machine is valid and the system refuses to work if it isn't. How do you upload a certificate to the system you asked? You don't! You have to mail it to them for them to SSH into the system and install it manually. When will that be possible you ask? SOON™.
At least after a while i got them to just disable the 'feature'.

While we are at 'features' (sorry for the bad structure): They have this genius 'smart redirect' feature that is supposed to throw you right back where you were once you're done editing something. Brilliant idea, how do they do it? Using a callback libk like everyone else? Noooo. A serverside database entry that only gets correctly updated half of the time. So while multitasking in multiple tabs because the performance of that thing almost forces you to makes it a whole lot worse you are not protected from it if you don't. Example: you did work on ticket A and save that. You get redirected to ticket B you worked on this morning even though its fucking 5 o' clock in the evening. So of course you get confused over wherever you selected the right ticket to begin with. So you have to check that almost everytime.

Alright, rant over.
Let's see if i beed to make another one after their big 'all feature requests on hold, UI redesign, everything will be fixed and much better'-update.

When you design something and it becomes something else but you're too lazy to re-design it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

For people who think/find that open source solutions are always better than commercial/paid/proprietary ones, you are not going to like this rant.

I'm starting to get really fucking fed up with people always, whenever I see someone (including myself) mentioning that an open source solution which is an alternative to a closed source one, saying that it's shit.
I've had countless encounters on here (also irl) where someone mentions that an open source solution (GIMP or Libre Office for example) is shit by default while they've maybe (or probably?) not even used it themselves.
Also people going "you can't even compare those two as for what they can do/features/functions". I'm definitely not saying that those open solutions are perfect. But to call them worthless or shit and/or to say that you literally 'cannot compare them' or that the open solution just doesn't work as a *FACT* is fucking bullshit.

Let's take GIMP for example, the use case of a friend of mine:

- He works both with macOS and Linux Mint, he *needs* a design/photo editing tool which is cross platform. (or at least one which works on macOS+Linux)
- He does not mind paying for software but he prefers to use software which is free as in freedom because he also likes to tinker with the software (a lot of people find this argument bullshit, I noticed on here. Why is that? It's a valid reason. Maybe not for you but we're not talking about you right now).
- He likes Photoshop but due to Linux incompatibility and the fact that he can't tinker around with the code, it's not an option for him.
- He'd gladly go for paid software but GIMP fills all his design/photo editing needs (also the more advanced ones but don't ask them to me because I have no fucking clue how that shit works)
- GIMP *just works* for him, he never has trouble with it.

Let's take Libre Office, my own use case:

- It *NEEDS* to work on Linux, which Libre does.
- It *HAS* to be open source, ethic/moral thingy; Libre Office is open source.
- It doesn't need to work complete magic but it needs proper basic document and 'excel' sheet functionalities which is the case with Libre and it works *for me*.
- I don't mind paying for it, will probably donate in the future (seeding the macOS+windows+linux versions fulltime at the moment)

See, for our use cases, it works very well. So why go into "it's no match for proprietary alternatives" mode right away? It actually is, as you see in the examples above.

Please stop saying that those solutions *don't work* or *are shit* because they do work and are useful for me and loads of people around the world.
Do they have *ALL* the features which their proprietary alternatives have? Maybe, maybe not, maybe they're missing some and maybe they even have some features which the proprietary alternatives don't have, I haven't checked out every feature.

I'm not saying that it works for you, for the record, I'm just saying that just because for you it is a fact that they're bad/shit/hardly working, doesn't mean they are for others.

Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:

- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div

and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software

have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.

but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?

recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.

Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.

There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD

why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well

i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.

How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life

we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!

BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!

Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.

Imagine if a structural engineer whose bridge has collapsed and killed several people calls it a feature.

Imagine if that structural engineer made a mistake in the tensile strength of this or that type of bolt and shoved it under the rug as "won't fix".

Imagine that it's you who's relying on that bridge to commute every day. Would you use it, knowing that its QA might not have been very rigorous and could fail at any point in time?

Seriously, you developers have all kinds of fancy stuff like Continuous Integration, Agile development, pipelines, unit testing and some more buzzwords. So why is it that the bridges don't collapse, yet new critical security vulnerabilities caused by bad design, unfixed bugs etc appear every day?

Your actions have consequences. Maybe not for yourself but likely it will have on someone else who's relying on your software. And good QA instead of that whole stupid "move fast and break things" is imperative.

Software developers call themselves the same engineers as the structural engineer and the electrical engineer whose mistakes can kill people. I can't help but be utterly disappointed with the status quo in software development. Don't you carry the title of the engineer with pride? The pride that comes from the responsibility that your application creates?

I wish I'd taken the blue pill. I didn't want to know that software "engineering" was this bad, this insanity-inducing.

But more than anything, it surprises me that the world that relies so much on software hasn't collapsed in some incredible way yet, despite the quality of what's driving it.

Let me preface this by saying I'm not a designer.

While I can make individual bits of a site look good, and I'm actually pretty skilled with CSS/Sass, overall design completely escapes me. I can't come up with good designs, nor do I really understand *why* good designs are good. It's just not something I can do, which feels really weird to say. but it's true.

So, when I made the Surfboard site (that's the project's internal name), I hacked everything together and focused on the functionality, and later did a branding and responsive pass. I managed to make the site look quite nice, and made it scale well across sizes/devices despite being completely new to responsiveness. (I'm proud, okay? deal.)

After lots of me asking (in response to people loudly complaining that the UI doesn't have X feature, scale properly on Y device, and doesn't look as good as Z site), the company finally reached out to its UI contractor who does their design work. After a week or two, he sent a few mockups.

The mockups consisted of my existing design with a darker background, much better buttons, several different header bars (a different color) with different logo/text placements, and several restyled steppers. He also removed a couple of drop shadows and made some very minor styling changes (bold text, some copy edits). Oh, he also changed the branding colors. Nothing else changed. It's basically the same exact site but a few things look a little better. and the branding is different.

My intermediary with the designer asked for "any feedback before finalizing the designs" -- which I thought odd because he sent mocks for two out of the ten pages (nine plus a 404 page). (Nevermind most of the mocks showed controls from the wrong page...).

So, I typed up a full page of feedback. Much of it was asking for specifics such as responsive sizing on the new header layout, how the new button layout would work for different button counts, asking for the multitude of missing pages/components, asking why the new colors don't match the rest of our branding, etc. I also added a personal nitpick about flat-looking controls because I fucking hate them. Everything I wrote was very friendly and professional.

... His response was full of gems. Let me share a few.

1. "Everything about the current onboarding site looks like a complete after-thought." (After submitting a design basically identical to mine! gg!)

2. "Yes [the colors match our current branding]." (No. They don't. I checked. The dark grey is different, the medium grey is different, the silver is different, the light blue is different. He even changed the goddamn color of the goddamn LOGO for fuck's sake! How the fuck is that "matching"?!)

3. "Appreciate the feedback [re: overlapping colored boxes, aka 'flat'], design is certainly subjective. However, this is the direction we are going." (yet it differs from the rest of our already-redesigned sites you're basing this off. and it's ugly as shit. gg again :/)

4. "Just looked at the 404 page. It looks pretty bad, and reflects very poorly on the [brand name] brand. Definitely will make a change here!" (Hey! I love that thing. It's a tilted, dotted outline of a missing [brand product] entirely drawn with CSS. It has a light gray "???" underlay and some 404 text inside. Everyone I showed it to, coworkers and otherwise, loved it. "Looks pretty bad". fuck you.)

I know I shouldn't judge someone so quickly, but what the fuck. This guy reminds me of one of those pompous artists/actors who's better than everyone and who can never be wrong, even while they're contradicting themselves.

just.
asfjasfk;ajsg;klsadfhas;kldfjsdl.

GUI user: "How can you work from such a basic text interface like that terminal?"
Me: "How can you work with all those stupid buttons that more often than not can't do jack shit?"

Being a Powerline user, I do think that design matters a lot. But so does usability (I don't want my programs to take half a minute to load their bloated UI's) and the ability to use every feature that this or that piece of software has in its command line arguments but not necessarily as a GUI option.

Every single one of them, and every one that will come after them.

Google, it started out as 2 people in their garage, wanting to make a search engine that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

Microsoft, it started out with Bill Gates - young high school computer nerd - who wanted to make an operating system for the world to use. Something that's better than the competition. And boy did he do so. Well "better than the competition" aside, he did make it for the world to use. And the world adopted it. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

See where I'm going here?

Apple, it started out with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, just like Google did, wanting to make hardware that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just to make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. Planned obsolescence has been baked into it, just like it is in every other piece of technology. Quality control and thinking through the design has become a thing of the past. User choice, yeah who cares about that.

Samsung, it started out centuries ago actually, and I don't really remember the details of it.. ColdFusion has a video on it if memory serves me right. Do watch it if you're interested. Anyway, just like all the others they started out as a company which wanted to make the world a little bit better. And damn right did they do so.. initially. Look what they've become now. Forcing their stupid TouchWiz UI upon their customers (or products?), a Bixby button that can't even be reprogrammed.. and the latest thing.. Knox, advertised as a security feature, but as everyone who likes rooting their devices and mucking with it knows, it is an anti-feature that only serves for lockdown. Why shouldn't you be able to turn in a phone for RMA when a hardware error occurs, when all you've personally modified is the software? Why should changing the software blow that eFuse, so that you can be sure that you can't replace it without specialized equipment and a very steady hand?

I could go on and on forever about more of the tech giants out there, but I feel like this suffices for now. Otherwise I won't have anything else left for future rants! But one thing I know for sure. Every tech company started, starts, and will start out with a desire to make the world a better place, and once they gain a significant customer base, they will without exception turn into the same kind of Evil Megacorp., just like the ones before them. Some may say that capitalism itself is to blame for this, the greed for more when you already have a lot. Who knows? I'd rather say that the very human nature itself is to blame for it. We're by design greedy beings, and I hate it. I hate being human for that. I don't want humans to be evil towards one another, and be greedy for ever more. But I guess that that's just the way it is, and some things do actually never change...

A CMS raping WordPress so hard up the ass till there is no tomorrow. I hate that bastardized piece of fuck. “Hey I want you to fix my page and its wordpress. I pay 20 bucks.“ Well fuck you too sir. Wordpress is no cms you wanna be coders. Get back to your fucking photoshop and design something original! Every fucking wp page looks the same. Every “nice feature“ is some kind of monkeypatched workarround. No problem i set preview pictures for every post just to enable some weird slider to function.

I also love those buttfucked files with just a “require foo“ which also just requires “bar“. Drop that fuck. Implement autoloading. Nobody uses php4 anymore step into the future. “easy to learn“ fuck me and fuck you untill you vomit jizz! Clusterfucked spaghetticode thats easy, easy to put another rotten load of clusterfuck on top. Also those security features. I put an empty index.php to prevent directory traversal. N I C E! Stop using wordpress as CMS, its a blog engine. Nothing great has every been written on top of wordpress and never will. I dare you to deny everything related to it and if you are one of those designer guyd, you can gargle my jizz you fucknut!

Starting 2017 i will start a counter and rape every 10th Wordpress which gets abused as cms i encounter into oblivion on their 0,99$ webhosting shit.

Fuck this I'm so mad about that crap

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck customers.

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

Managers: wE wAnT tO bE LeAn aNd MoVe FaSt As PoSsIBLe wiTh NeW FeAtUrEs

Same Managers: Can you make this icon 2 pixels smaller?! Shift this element left?! Swap out this icon?! Use a different color here?! A perfect feature and design is critical!!!!!!

FullStackClown: You can either be lean and fast, or be fucking nitpicking clowns 🤡 about this stuff and slow us all down. Choose one.

Managers: ...

FullStackClown: Sit down and shut up

I am fed up working with unskilled software developers. Or to be more specific, working with people who have no idea of sofware architecture.

Most people I've worked with have simply no idea what they are doing in the broad picture, they can only follow patterns they see and implement their feature in the same way. They can't think about the abstract concepts which should be the foundation of the project.

They fail to write unit tests which are maintainable. They write one fucking test per method which is testing 50 things at the same time, making it often impossible to understand what is being tested.

They think putting stuff in private methods makes their class better and is some kind of separation of concerns.

They write classes and afterwards create interfaces for these classes named {Class}Interface, shoving all the methods into that interface. They think it's good design to do so.

They are unable to think about the reasons why things are done the way they are done and that you don't do stuff for the sake of doing stuff, but to achieve certain goals like interchangeability.

They don't undestand how to separate business logic from the application code.

They have no sense for naming things beautifully. They don't see how naming things is a major part of good software architecture.

They get layer concepts wrong and then create godlike {EntityName}Service classes, which do everything related to a particular entity.

They fail to shape the boundaries within a software project, entangling stuff which should live in individual modules.

All I want is to work in a team with professionals.

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

I just told my biggest client that they have to start changing things or they will need to find a different company to work with.

I'm hired to program what they want. They are suppossed to do all the concepting, functional designs, QA, testing.

So they tell me to program feature x, not realising that this interact with feature y. And then complain about the change in feature y. Make me do a lot of extra work and then complain that my estimates are way off.

So I told them they also need to hire my company for the software design and QA and prefferable testing because I'm done getting blamed.

Manager: Here's the design for the next feature, we're ready to hand it over to the consultant

FullStackClown: Uh... okay... is it spec'd out with requirements?

Manager: Huh?

FullStackClown: Well, already look at this design and user flow, did you consider what happens when <insert edge case X here>, <insert edge case Y here>, or <insert edge case Z here>? How is the consultant going to know what to put in for business logic if you don't even know or define it yourself?

Manager: Huh?

FullStackClown: Sigh... yeah, I'm too busy right now to be a kindergarten teacher, come back in a few days once you understand how your own feature is supposed to work

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

C=consultant
M=Me
D=my Dumb boss

M: so how are you guys planning to implement the block all accounts feature?
C: oh it should be easy! We will just loop over every account and lock it!
M: what about implementing a flag that just blocks anyone from accessing the site till further notice?
C: what? I’m sure it’ll work. Just need a list of all accounts, we don’t need anything fancy!
M: what happens when we want to revert back to the pre-block state?
C: oh, so we will just unblock everybody
M: even people who were previously blocked for good reasons?
C: i guess so, unless you think otherwise
M: we r….
D: listen! We just need to be able to block all accounts, who cares about this details! So long as we block all accounts! We need this nuclear option in case something bad happens…
M: but what about when that bad thing passes and…
D: when it passes it passes who cares!

Arghhh so much rage here… like first at the stupid engineering design of looping over all of the accounts instead of using a simple flag. Like 1 http call (from one microservice to another) is a lot better than O(n)… not to mention, we won’t have to deal with failures and retries.

And second for my boss being a dumbass… ok you deal with being to afraid to unblock people after we used this “genius nuclear option”!

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

“If it happens once, it’s a bug.
If it happens twice, it’s a feature.
If it happens more than twice, it’s a design philosophy.”

Client:
"Ok,. so your saying that its gonna take you 63 hrs to create a simplified CRM with basic functionality and auto fill docs or automated work flow docs as an added feature?"

My response (after already under-quoting and planning on cutting some corners because he has a smaller budget than normally necessary):
"It sounds simpler than it is. There are a lot of things I need to take into account that you wouldn't even think about.

For instance:

Making sure your emails don't go to the client's spam folder. This requires the sending domain to be verified via DNS settings. I have to ensure your email content passes a spam test (link to text ratio needs to be good). I assumed you'd want an email that has your logo and looks good. This means testing the design in Outlook to make sure it's not broken.

What if the email doesn't send due to an invalid email address, or bounces back? You'll need to be notified.

What if the client list for the week contains duplicates? You need them merged or ignored.

Generating a PDF from HTML can be tricky because the conversion isn't apples to apples so there are things I need to adjust to make them as close as possible.

Making a site completely mobile friendly (the tier 3 option) can be very time consuming as well. It's not about whether or not it fits on a mobile phone, it's about whether or not it's intuitive and useful. You're essentially getting a mobile app without paying for separate development of an app.

If I took everything into consideration and built this to be 100% bullet proof, it would cost tens of thousands.

I'm doing my best to leverage your needs with the probability of running into an issue. I'm not going waste my time/your money on something that will likely never happen."

So… I released v2.0.0 of devRant UWP a few weeks ago.
Then I got a lot of reports of problems on Windows 10 Mobile and older (than 1809) versions of Windows 10 on Desktop.
I decided to resubmit v2.0.0-beta16 to the store, and try to find the issue in the update… I didn't find it.
The code seems the same as the working version (at least the part I try to test is 100% equal).

So it seems I fucked up the vs project.

This means that to find the issue I can spend weeks to search it over and over inside the latest project (using shitty emulators of older Windows 10 builds to debug it), or I could just restore it to the old v2.0.0-beta16 (released in august) and implement again every single new feature and fix (something like 5 new features, dozens of improvements, changes and bug fixes).

In any case, this will require a lot of time (which I don't have at this moment).
I'm really sorry for this inconvenience, I know some of you use my client daily (~3.000 users I guess), I'm really glad someone likes it, and thanks a lot for the awesome reviews and feedback, but stable v2 (v2.1.0 at this point) will be available not earlier than in February.

Probably some of you have already download v2.0.0 while it was available in the store, and maybe it works on your device (please let me know in the comments below if you did, how is it going, and also if you like the new features and improvements).

After this epic fail, and more than 1 year (way too much) of v2 public beta, I want to throw the current project in the trash, and start it from scratch.
Which means I will start to work on v3 as soon as you will see v2.1.0 in the store, making it faster, lighter and with better support for the latest Windows 10 (Fluent Design and not) features, dropping the support for the very old UWP API.

Thanks for your attention.

Have a good day (or night)!

Ticket: “feature [x] doesn’t work”

Me: “I’ll need more details: how do I reach feature [x]? In which of the three projects you assigned me is that?”

Manager: “the design is in the ticket”

Me, in my head: “can you effin listen to what I told you before giving air to your mouth?”
Me, in person: “yeah I just need to know which project this refers to and how to reach it”

Manager: “but you have to open the ticket as a separate page!”

Me: “sure!” *waits 15 min, opens a ticket for more details, assigns it to manager, flags as blocking, flags the other one as blocked*

5 mins later: details are given and I can proudly fox it by remembering the manager they have to login in order to see feature [x]

Later in the workweek:

Manager at 8:00 URGENT FEATURE! MUST BE DELIVERED BY EOD

Me, 10:00 “can jump on it, need authorisation for [a procedure]

Me, 11,12,13,15,16,17:30: pings for an answer

Manager, 17:58 “ah sorry didn’t see, we can do it tomorrow”

Is this the matrix? Am I being stopped from developing cause I am randomly accessing matrix’s code without knowing it? Is this the Truman show? And most importantly: can I please take part to a manager hiring session? I am curious to see how tf you hire such peculiar people.

There are three things in my workflow that I don't like:

1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.

It's common to be handled work at 2pm that needs to be deployed by the end of day. Usually it's bug fixes, and that's ok I guess, but sometimes it's brand new features. How the fuck am I supposed to do a good job in such a short time? I don't even have time to wrap my head around the details and I'm expected to implement it, test it, make sure it doesn't break anything and make it pass through code review? With still time to deploy and make sure it's ok? In a few hours? I'm not fucking superman!

2. Not being asked about estimates.

Everything is handed to me with a fixed deadline, usually pulled off my PM's ass, who has no frontend experience. "You have two weeks to make this website." "You must have this done this by tomorrow morning." The result, of course, is rushed code that was barely tested (by hand, no time for unit or integration tests).

3. Being the last part of the product development process.

Being the last part means that our deadlines are the most strict. If we don't meet the deadline, the client will be pissed. The thing is, the design part is usually the one that exceeds its time (because clients keep asking for changes). So when the project lands on our desks it's already delayed and we have to rush it.

This all sounds too much like bad planning to me. I guess it's the result of not doing scrum. There are no sprints, no planning meetings, only weekly status update meetings. Are your jobs similar? Is it just usual "agency work"?

I'm so tired of the constant pressure and having to rush my work. Oh, and the worst part is we don't have time for anything else. We're still stuck with webpack 2 because we never have time to update it ffs.

Today on forgotten games – Ballance.

The game is absolutely outstanding. Graphics is absolutely amazing even though the game was developed in 2004. The sound effects are perfect, I can literally feel the wooden ball rolling on steel rails. The background music is also amazing, we're talking Alexander Brandon level here.

The game is about rolling the ball through the levels trying not to fall off. There are three balls: the stone one, the wooden one and the paper one, different in weight, velocity and momentum.

I admire the clever level design. It uses in-game map features in multi-purpose way, for example some levels use ball transformers (the things that transform the ball from one kind to another) as a trap for your ball to lose momentum. It even seems like that levels were designed by some crazy modders for advanced players, but they weren't, and traveling through them feels like you're a pro gamer playing custom levels.

Even though levels seem simple at first glance, they allow non-linear gameplay and different gaming styles.

The gameplay itself is pure meditation. But even though the concept seem straightforward – just follow the level and don't fall – it's not. You have to use all three ball types: there are air vents to fly above upon, which only paper ball can do, there are obstacles to push, which only stone ball can do, and so on.

For additional sonic satisfaction the levels even feature some metal domes that serve no purpose but to be bumped into just for making amazing gong sound.

I like it that when you get cocky and think like that's easy, I got this, the game quickly puts you into place. It basically says nigga you ain't shit, you got nothing on me.

Overall it's basically a mesmerizing travel through cleverly designed levels surrounded by relaxing music and outstanding graphics.

Definitely a must-have for mechanical keyboard gamers, it's a pure satisfaction playing this game with a great level of precision and control mechanical keyboard allows.

Search for "ballance widescreen fix" for modern displays support.

This is a friend's story:

So I've been trying to upload a free sticker pack for iMessage to AppStore for a while now. Why "trying"? because it keeps getting declined for the silliest reasons. It's nothing complex: just a bunch of our company's stickers about dev life. "Stickers for devs, from devs."

The first time Apple has declined the app because of the overall design, the second time it was because we used iMessage in the title. But this time it makes no sense at all. This is the message I got from Apple:

"Your app contains references to test, trial, demo, beta, pre-release or other incomplete content.
Specifically, some of your app’s stickers have “beta” references."

Huh? Check out the pic - one of our dev-related stickers says "still in beta". I guess Apple took that way too literally. Good thing they didn't tell me my app was too buggy because it has a sticker of a bug which says "it's not a bug, it's a feature"...

On second thought, what if AppStore is a modern-day Genie? Maybe I should add a sticker that says "Apple owns me $20 million in stock"? Or just one that says "Apple approves this sticker pack".

#Thisneverhappens_on_googleplay #appstore_make_a_wish #rookout

Last week, the team lead told me that he can't merge because my code has code smells and going forward, can't have that. We use Sonar and well the way to "fix it" according to him is to mark the line using //NOSONAR.

Most of the issues are minor like Unused imports and for me incomplete TODOs.

And before the "verbal" rule was only need to fix Major + issues. And well the reason I use TODOs is to mark code that probably needs changing in the future. I know there's going to be some feature that these lines have to be changed. But the requirements are fully defined yet from business.

But I sort of blew up on him. YOU WANT TO ENFORCE ZERO CODE SMELLS NOW?!?!?! AND THESE MINOR ISSUES? MARK THEM WITH NOSONAR?

HERE'S WHAT I THINK FOR THE LAST X YEARS... THE CODE DESIGN IS SHIT, MINOR CODE SMELLS AND MANUALLY MARKING THE ONES U NEED TO KEEP... ARE THE LEAST OF OUR PROBLEMS...

THE OTHER PROBLEMS I'VE MENTIONED BEFORE EVER. MOS YEAR BUT YOU DIMWITS NEVER LISTEN.

YOU THINK MY TODOS ARE BAD... 90% OF THE CODE AND FEATURES (THE ONES NOT DONE BY ME) LOOK AND SMELL LIKE MONKEY SHIT. UNDOCUMENTED, MESSY, FULL OF BUGS.

AND GUESS WHAT? NEW FEATURE, SOME DEV FORGETS TO CHANGE SOME COMPONENT THAT DEPENDS ON IT. WOULDN'T IT BE GREATE IF THERE WERE BOOKMARKS... O WAIT...

i just was catching up on comics again and saw this one... with triggered my memory and this rant... My first thought was to forward it to him...

System design meeting with the client.

Client: We need feature X in the design document
Me: But feature X was not a requirement, so it's not in the document and we will not add it.
Client: But feature X should be a common feature today.
Me: That doesn't matter, it wasn't a requirement. And besides that you don't even need it today, the planned system doesn't even support feature X, so we couldn't implement it, even if it was mentioned in the design document.
Client: But we may need it some day, and what do you do, when we decide to enhance the system in a few years and we need that feature then?
Me: Then we make you an offer for feature X.
Inner me: You ordered a bicyle and now you want it converted into a delivery truck next year without charge. That's not how things work.

I just received this gem this morning.
First of let me start by saying that I am against scammers and all this Nigerian prince crap.
But some of this shit is so bad that it actually pisses me off. My intelligence feels insulted.

Look at this email. These fuckers spent hours perfecting the Hotmail feel to it. The logo, design and even font are in par. As I started reading the shit, the spelling mistakes are so obvious that I wondered; do these nut suckers know that whatever email editor they use, it autocorrects for you? Are they just ignoring the recommendations? I mean they could've even used the "Did you mean" feature in Google. Or any of the freely available grammatical check sites out there.

Think of this as plagiarism. It's bad but a majority of us can appreciate a well planned out one.

I'm yet to encounter a really good scam email that almost had me click their link. There's always an obvious stand out! Is there like a copyright holder to a perfectly well put scam email?!

(And yes, you just read a rant about someone complaining that scammers aren't doing a great job)

> Last year wrote a unittest - I was asked to delete it
> no design patterns. Not a single one
> no encapsulation
> fucked up inheritance [I had no idea it was possible at all...]
> generics every-fucking-where
> I could go on...

this month the lead dev was not in and I had to make a new feature. Guess what I did :)

tdd [coverage >90%], a couple of builders, a factory or two, two composites, one decorator, only a few generics - only where really needed. Private fields, not a single @Autowired field [they were fucking my tdd], nicely abstracted integrations, and so on. Everything is writen according to clean code: max 10loc methods, <140col lines, reusable constants and utils, SOLID as a rock, etc.

Due date is next week. Took me 3 weeks to craft it.

Guess who's gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiisssedd 😁

the best part - I don't even work there, our company was hired for xx hours as helping hands 😁

that's not all. They have like 6 envs and their deployment is all-fucking-manual. Will try to learn how to dockerize that app and deploy it on docker. Gosh I wish I could see his face when he's back 😁

p.S. From ethical point of view, he's the only dev who believes his code is perfect. No other dev in the team agrees. AND he once said: 'it's gonna be my way or no way at all'. So I don't think I did wrong... Did I? :)

First day on my first job ever, the boss asks me what I want to do. I indicated that I had some experience with php and the yii framework (which was at some point very cool xD), so I wanted to start with something like that. And so it goes: after two days of watching laracasts (which is an awesome platform by the way! :O) I got assigned to a project.

Now the company I work at uses some kind of self built system that tracks how many hours are spent on which project, and compares that to how many hours was estimated implementing a feature would take. That's cool, but then I saw that for the project I was working on the time estimated was 5 work days. This was the estimate for both designing the interfaces and implementing both front and backend. I knew in advance that this was probably way to little time for me, but didn't want to come over as the new kid who can't do shit x)

Anyway, I started on the project and was having fun, but the biggest time consuming aspect of the project was not necessarily that I didn't have enough experience: it was that the developer who started this project and made most of the design choices had written some very messy code, without tests or apparently any refactoring. Also, everything was extremly inconsistent and not according to all the best practices I just watched in my laracasts spree.

So fastforward a little: we're way over the estimated hours. Yay. Now suddenly the boss comes by with an almost angry face that the client is becoming angry and we need to finish soon. He makes it entirely our (me and the front end guy) problem and I just decide to say nothing and try to work faster.

Now I'm stuck writing fugly code on top of more fugly code and when I mentioned to my front end guy that I was almost finished with feature but I only needed to finish up the tests, he said something like "oh just don't write tests, that'll take too long"... Is that really the mindset of this company?! No wonder the project I work on was in a very bad state.

Thanks to devrant I see now that I just need to say something if I know that I won't be able to complete something in a certain amount of time and that other people are just like me (thank god). :) I think I'll need to post more rants to vent my frustrations x)

NO FUCKING GOOD NIGHT FOR FLOYD.

THIS MULTI FACTOR AUTHENTICATION IS A FUCKING NIGHTMARE.

So my organisation uses some MFA app as an SSO to access any and everything. Fantastic. Absolutely wonderful. No VPN shit and one password to rule them all.

But, for some reason I accidentally deleted the app from my phone and as any normal human being would do, I also reinstalled the app.

Well, post reinstalling, the app does not detect the linked Org account.

I was cool, when I'll login, the system will throw a prompt to map the phone.

So I login to org URL from my machine and lo and behold, the URL says that MFA is already linked to the phone and I have to enter the Citrix type code to login.

But phone does not show the code because account is no longer linked and web does not have option to change/re-register the phone.

What the actual unholy fuck?????? Bloody retards. How am I suppose to get in now?

So after a Googling for a bit, a thread mentioned that this is most common issue faced by users with this MFA app. The only way to get this resolved is to contact your IT team.

Cool. Let's do that.

I opened the link to my IT portal and it asks me to login via SSO which is what I need help with in first place.

I can't login to Slack because fuckers ask SSO every time the app is exited. So no contact there.

Thankfully bastards allow Outlook so was able to drop a note to one of my team member, whom I connected recently and is very nice, asking her to help me sort this IT team.

If this is the most common use case then why the fuck not add a feature to help people overcome this shit?

And my IT team is absolute nuts. No other way allowed to reset the linking or connect them or any help links provided on login page.

Whoever was behind this design should be dipped in donkey shit and deep fried in pig urine.

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 :)

FUCK YOU BUSINESS GUY
FUCK YOUR SCOPE CREEP
SOLO DEV AINT GIVING U 20 FEATURES IN ONE MOTHERFUCKING WEEK

Seriously, though. Being a solo full-stackq developer who can do both frontend (react, redux) and backend (feathers, node) does NOT mean you have twice the manpower to accomplish all of your shitty shit. Just because you have an idea does NOT mean I have to implement all of it. You don't even have a motherfucking specifications for me, yet you expect me to deliver shitloads of complete fucking feature in a fucking week. This is not a fucking joke. I am NOT your mother fucking tool. I need time to build my stack, design and perfect the interface. I don't want a shitty motherfucking product on my fucking portfolio.

*dies inside*

~2 years ago:

Me: Managed to figure out how to port that library. Just need designs and then we can build feature X. I've tested it in ugly developer-y screens. It works fully

Boss: Thats awesome, saw the video, looks great. This is a really important feature, thanks for looking into this

~1.5 years ago:

Me: Ok i've started working on the designs, just FYI we don't have designs for feature X

Boss: Ok, must have slipped, noted

~1 year ago:

Me: I've seen more posts about users wanting apps with features X in it. Still don't have designs, we working on that?

Boss: I'll check with design

~3 Months ago:

Boss: Ok were going to have to get serious about pulling features out and reducing MVP so we can get this out there. I think feature A, D, Y and X have to be dropped for v1. Theres too much left to do on them

Me: sure

~1 week ago:

Boss: We need to start getting ready for xxxxx. Can you do me a favour and start writing up some developer docs etc, kind of like this one we did for this other project

This morning opening my emails from last night:

Boss: I've reviewed the doc, looks good, only minor things need tweaking. Let me ask you something though, you said feature X was pulled out and its "pending design work". Its not only pending design work is it? Is it that far along?

==========
What I actually replied:

Yes ... i've sent you videos of it functional in the past, and discussed this ... more than once. Just design ... and some testing of the new designs obviously

==========
What that meant:

Yes. May god have mercy on your soul if you reply anything even remotely close to "oh I had no idea, lets revisit adding this to v1". I will not be held accountable for my actions

UX: here, build this page.
Me, frontend: alright...

2 weeks later...
UX: build this new page.
Me: ehmm, this is an exact copy of the last one, except it has different spacing and messed up colours, some don't even fit the customer's colour scheme...
UX: yeah, well, do it anyways!

1 week later:
UX: so, the customer didn't like this second page, it will now have to be changed to look like the first...
Me: 😤

My team lead be like when we're in a meeting with the boss:

He: I'll have a working session with her, we'll brainstorm on how to come up with a better design and improve such and such feature, once that's done, we would call you to have another meeting.
Boss: sounds good, I'm looking forward to it.
Me: *internally rolls eyes...*
He: thank you everyone.
.
*meeting done*
.
.
.
couple of minutes later, I get a message from him:

He: hey, it turns out I'm busy and I can't have that session with you, do come up with a new idea/design and share it with me.
Me: .... *fuck you, like you didn't know you were busy before making that fake promise*
.
.
.

The fucker will take credit again for things he didn't do.

Spent a lot of time designing a proper HTTP (dare I even say RESTful) API for our - what is until now a closed system, using a little-known/badly-supported message-over-websocket protocol to do RPC-style communications - supposedly enterprise-grade product.

I make the API spec go through several rounds of review with the rest of the dev team and customers/partners alike. After a few iterations, everybody agrees that the spec will meet the necessary requirements.

I start implementing according to spec. Because this is the first time we're actually building proper HTTP handling into the product, but we of course have to make it work at least somewhat with the RPC-style codebase, it's mostly foundational work. But still, I manage to get some initial endpoints fully implemented and working as per the spec we agreed. The first PR is created, reviews are positive, the direction is clear and what's there already works.

At this point in time, I leave on my honeymoon for two weeks. Naturally, I assume that the remaining endpoints will be completed following the outlines/example of the endpoints which I built. When I come back, the team mentions that the implementation is completed and I believe all is well.

The feature is deployed selectively to some alpha customers to start validation testing before the big rollout. It's been like that for a good month, until a few days ago when I get a question related to a PoC integration which they can't seem to get to work.

I start investigating and notice that the API hasn't been implemented according to the previously agreed upon spec at all. Not only did the team manage to implement the missing functionality in strange and some even broken ways, they also managed to refactor my previously working endpoints into being non-compliant.

Now, I'm a flexible guy. It's not because something isn't done exactly as I've imagined it that it's automatically bad. However, I know from experience that designing a good/clear/future-proof API is a tricky exercise. I've put a lot of time and effort into deliberate design decisions that made up the spec that we all reviewed repeatedly and agreed upon. The current implementation might also be fine, but I now have to go over each endpoint again and reason about whether the implementation still fulfills the requirements (both soft and hard) that we set out to meet.

I'm met with resistance, pushback and disbelief from product management and dev co-workers alike when I raise the concern that the API might actually not be production-ready (while I'm frantically rewriting my integration tests and figuring out how the actual implementation works in comparison to what was spec'ed).

Oh, and did I mention that product management wants to release this by end-of-week?!

Yay, I have to rewrite + design a 15-20 year old website 🎉

Originally written in, God knows what version of php, HTML and JS by a Java dev, and patched every other year when something broke or a new feature was needed, every time by someone new...
Some years ago the system was moved from a Windows host to Ubuntu and that was a nightmare in its own, because of all the hard-coded paths...

Welp, at least some fucker found another fucker who is willing to create a new design for the site, so that's off my plate...

A lesson I learned. Clients can't separate design from functionality. They will piss and main about a feature not working right when what they really mean is the aesthetic is not to their liking.

My designer just had an user interview where the user is a developer and my designer showed him the mock-ups of a no code tool that we are building, asking the dev for his input.

She literally had a session with a guy announcing him that we are building a tool that will put him out of work and moreover asked him for inputs so that we miss no use case.

And in another story, one of my dev lead decided to decommission an entire feature and replace it will a hacky solution because the devs in her team were not comfortable using the current design in their development stage. Hence, without user research, any strong use case, or considering business implications, she went ahead and drafted the entire approach on how to fuck everyone.

I am out of my honeymoon phase at my new org and I am scared. Shit scared.

Dam wandows... My system is up to date almost all the time as I install those forced updates before they are actually forced, just so I can be in control of saving things and not losing anything valuable during a forced restart. I've updated literally last evening and made sure the day is done only after all the updates have been made. Today I was working on a personal project and made an hour break for lunch and some rest. My computer went to sleep as it usually does when I leave it for 10 minutes or so... Or so I thought. After my break I sat behind the damn computer to get back to work only to realize that I woke it up to wrong system (windows is secondary as I only use it for this single project that needs to be done in .net and UWP) and there's no work to get back to. It just made an update without even letting me know there is one to be made.
I swear, if the person who made this design choice have paid only 1% of all the lost works' worth, they would smash the thing on day one and went bankrupt in first 2hrs of that 'feature' living it's life. And people wonder I daily drive *NIX based system...

I had code waiting in review for ten days, blocking other work. On the eleventh day, the final reviewer (who was standing behind me as I wrote it) says "I'm not sure that I agree with the design, here."

I get you, man, I can re-write the algorithm, but I am so not in that context anymore and you've just delayed release of the feature by at least a week. Ugggh.

Fuck Homestead.

For the fortune of you not to know, Homestead is a sad attempt at a Wix-like build your own website platform.

However, Homestead is the most unusable piece of shit platform that humans have ever had the misery of interacting with

Lets start off with the login page. The login page is small, unresponsive and half the time just deletes your input whenever you press submit.

It's important to note that unless you're running MacOS or Windows, Homestead will send to an error page on which there's a link to contact support, but pressing that link requires MacOS or Windows.

Fine, I'll fiddle around with my user-agent, and we'll be in soon enough. But now we come to the joy that is the website editor itself.

The website editor is clunky, hard to use, and has enough menus and submenus and sidebars to make the Jira UI shake with fear. Each interface option label is either ridiculously ambiguous or just straight up wrong. The built-in HTML editor doesn't support HTML5, in the name of "browser compatibility".

CSS? Pah! Who needs it! Our psuedo-90s skeuomorphic ugly-as-shit prebuilt styles will work just fine. Responsive design? Bullshit! Nobody uses a smartphone to browse the web, so why do we need to handle it?

Uploading a file? Good fucking luck buddy. There's a complicated dance among the minefield of pop-ups that ask you to confirm some shit or modify some shit and you gotta click the right option each time or else the file won't upload.

Wanna use https like 86% of the entire web and all modern websites? That's a premium feature. Fork over an extra $10 a month

Ok ok, I made it through all that. Dig through the thousands of menus to find the 'publish changes' button, and sigh with relief.

Open up a private browser tab to check my work, and nope. The site looks like shit, even by Homestead's standards. That's because Homestead claims to be a WYSIWYG editor, but it's a damn lie. The site looks like shit, so it's time do dive back into the hellhole that is this damn site editor.

And rinse and repeat. Deal with the shitty editor, publish, and pray it doesn't look like garbage. Be too scared to test on other devices because this flaming pile of dog shit pretending to be a website is bad enough on my device.

Two more months, then I'm done with this client. Someone get me a drink

How I felt after spending an entire afternoon planning and designing a new feature for a project only to realize half of my design was wrong after I started implementing it

It was around 2013, I was working on a project that had a great business idea, a really really bright feature (to this day I state the same) and all I was getting was around 400e/month of salary. (still was a junior dev)

So, I've been going on vacation to Spain for almost 1.5 month, everything was settled, there were no more pending jobs for me as I've finished everything that I could until more things would be done on the application and design that were needed.

It was 2nd week there, I didn't have a laptop with me as it was full vacation mode, no internet connection as it was almost 100e/month at that time, house I've lived in had no internet either. Then, one morning I receive a call that I must be on a skype meeting in any case - it was live or die situation. Me being me - went to a local internet cafe that was around 3km away from the house (on foot) - logged in to the call and proceeded. (I knew something is going to be fishy).

And there it was - I was needed to go back to my laptop and code a huge ass functionality so that we could present it to our testing clients. It was estimated to take around 3 weeks of full working days. No future payment, no compensation was offered but as stupid as I was - I went on with that and worked half of my vacation on full-day schedule... The functionality was delivered... Only after 4 months since the delivery date - the functionality was tested and after total of 9 months - was presented to the testers... I was pissed and asked for compensation as it was my vacation but all I heard was - NO, you took too long of a vacation and therefore it's your own fault. Soon after that I've started to receive every bit of blame if I was even 1 hour off the set deadline that was set by the manager that didn't have a single clue how programming works or even how to use the internet properly....

All in all, I'm still hurt of the 3 weeks that I've missed but since I've left the job 4 years ago (my salary had increased but I've quadrupled it since then) - I tend to see that it's a common practice to require things NOW and only deal with them MONTHS later...

Morale of the story:
Avoid working on your vacation at any means. If that will mean a lost job - then be it, you'll find a new one, presumably a better job.

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

Yeah. Architecture and separation, these are the foundation.

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

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

I see these things daily.

I write the reminders every week.

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

"But that's how I always did it"

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

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

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

In reply to atheist in another rant ;)

Whelp. I started making a very simple website with a single-page design, which I intended to use for managing my own personal knowledge on a particular subject matter, with some basic categorization features and a simple rich text editor for entering data. Partly as an exercise in web development, and partly due to not being happy with existing options out there. All was going well...

...and then feature creep happened. Now I have implemented support for multiple users with different access levels; user profiles; encrypted login system (and encrypted cookies that contain no sensitive data lol) and session handling according to (perceived) best practices; secure password recovery; user-management interface for admins; public, private and group-based sections with multiple categories and posts in each category that can be sorted by sort order value or drag and drop; custom user-created groups where they can give other users access to their sections; notifications; context menus for everything; post & user flagging system, moderation queue and support system; post revisions with comparison between different revisions; support for mobile devices and touch/swipe gestures to open/close menus or navigate between posts; easily extendible css themes with two different dark themes and one ugly as heck light theme; lazy loading of images in posts that won't load until you actually open them; auto-saving of posts in case of browser crash or accidental navigation away from page; plus various other small stuff like syntax highlighting for code, internal post linking, favouriting of posts, free-text filter, no-javascript mode, invitation system, secure (yeah right) image uploading, post-locking...

On my TODO-list: Comment and/or upvote system, spoiler tag, GDPR compliance (if I ever launch it haha), data-limits, a simple user action log for admins/moderators, overall improved security measures, refactor various controllers, clean up the code...

It STILL uses a single-page design, and the amount of feature requests (and bugs) added to my Trello board increases exponentially with every passing week. No other living person has seen the website yet, and at the pace I'm going, humanity will have gone through at least one major extinction event before I consider it "done" enough to show anyone.

help

dev: “I want to start working on [feature]”

Me: “I already started to work on it, sorry for not mentioning it, we need specs from design team before I can go on, but I’d suggest going for another task meanwhile”

Manager: “noooo design is very very busy, [dev] will take care of it.”

Me: “[dev] still needs specs from the design team... and I am half done with it so no real point in re-writing the same code I wrote”

Manager: “just trust me, we do this and [dev] takes care of it.”

*me and [dev] look at each other perplexed and just nod to the manager cause it’s Thursday and the fucks to give are over*

... am I actually a patient in an asylum? I question my sanity after this exchange of words.

Workload rant.

Our new line manager is overly expecting from all of us (product/design/tech) and is micro managing on ground level without having any real sense of reality. He just wants everything to be built overnight.

He is smart, no doubt about that. But guess, I learnt from him what I had to. Not to stereotype but he is a typical Indian manager who keeps pushing boundaries.

He just added 80 features for Q1 roadmap with on 3 PMs, 1 Designer, 1TPM, and bunch of techies .

What the actual fuck! 😂😂😂 And he wanted to add more, thankfully we ran out of time in the meeting.

And my super talent and genius blabbering co-woker who works mechanically just fucked herself real bad. Lol

I kept telling her not to add Feature XYZ to the roadmap because:
1. There'll be spill over from Q4
2. She is already overloaded with 1 task and keeps crying all day about being unable to handle it
3. She is setting wrong expectations with management for herself and rest of the team
4. Boss will add more work and she'll be fucked

She was adamant and did not listen.

Now this is what happened:
1. ALL her Q4 items got pushed to Q1. LMFAO
2. She was literally crying since morning on calls for being overloaded and we are yet to start Q1 assignments
3. Additional tasks along side feature XYZ were added on her plate

I tried to push back the manager and that's when he said okay, let's keep some items for Q2.

But holy shit. 80 features between such a small team and wanted to done in few weeks.

I need to pump more steam in my job hunt activity. This place is ridiculously toxic.

This picture represents a whole lot of things for me in software development when it comes to bad design or security... You add a new feature along the way and it seems to work well - but basically you f-ed everything up.

I don't mind Apple marketing themselves as these revolutionary thinkers and innovators, because I figured most people see behind the marketing but appreciate Apple for what it is. It's a big company that makes well built products, that are efficient and give good support to those products.

But I'm sick to death of tech journalists talking about how every new feature is the death of Android. They have to be kidding themselves if they think what Apple's doing is innovating. Samsung's been designing screens for the bezelless market for a LONG time, and their technology in that is incredibly advanced (it's why if you use their iPhone x you'll be looking at a screen from Samsung!)

They finally adopted wireless charging and pretended it was brand new, but I remember when they came out with the Apple watch, marketing it like they'd broken ground when Android Wear watches had been out for a year!

I don't want people to think I hate Apple, I own a few of their products. I think they're remarkably invested in user privacy; homekit imo is one of the most forward thinking implementations of smart home technology that I've seen, and the new processor in the iPhone x is a Mammoth powerhouse. So, I'm not necessarily saying anything about that, but what I am saying is that they're iñcredible at marketing, but fanboys but are not self-aware can enough to recognize when the Designed-by-Apple hype over shadows the actual objectivity or the situation. There are articles already talking about Apple's wireless charging.

TL;DR I swear to god if an apple fanboy comes at me saying the bezelless design was Apple's innovation, I'm going to snap. I appreciate what Apple does well, but unfortunately people can't appreciate a product without needing to identify with it.

SharePoint things that I get yelled at by customers for:

Setting up page permissions wrong (even though the real problem is that a coworker didn’t check the page in)

Writing the workflow wrong and nobody is getting emailed (even though they didn’t select who to send the email to)

Not magically knowing that they wanted the new intern (who started Tuesday) to be given full design rights on their page

Not magically knowing that their discussion mod quit a year ago (before I started here) and now nobody can feature a post

Not spinning up an entire new site so that they could post a link to a single sign up sheet for their team (of 10 people) barbecue

Somehow making it so MS Edge can’t handle high res images correctly (because I totally created Edge (which isn’t even a supported browser here))

Not responding immediately when they submitted a ticket at 7:00pm (I’m off at 5) asking me to change one word on a page they have edit rights to

Not giving their admin assistant global design rights for our entire organization

Not giving them access to a confidential folder that has nothing to do with their job

Telling the owner of aforementioned folder that they’re not allowed to store confidential data in SharePoint

Making workflows too confusing for them to figure out

Fixing shit workflows that their ex coworker built wrong

Generally having the word SharePoint associated with my name

Spend hours implementing a working landscape design for mobile app. Priority #1 most important feature. Review meeting attendees decide not to support landscape mode because...well, for no good reason at all.

Client wants some cool feature -> I spend a week coding it -> shit's cool -> client updates the design -> the feature is gone from the design

I still get paid by the hour but uhhhhhhhh it really makes me feel like my work is pointless.

Few weeks ago: Please write the system design docs for feature X of the new project Y. We need it in two weeks.
Few days later: Stop working on the docs, the customer hasn't yet bought that feature.
Few days later: We found that we included that feature in the main contract already. We need the docs in two days.
Today (docs delivered a month ago): There was a misinterpretation of the requirements and the contract, the customer hasn't bought the feature with the main contract, it has to be sold additionally. You didn't do anything 'til now, did you?

It would be really nice, if sales could finally decide what the customer bought and then tell me about the requirements that are already covered in the docs anyway. But I fear it could end in asking the customer 🤪🔫

I just finished designing an entire asset management pipeline and christ on a fucking pogo stick, if it isn't convoluted.

Theres a lot of game engines out there, but all of them do it a little different. They all tackle a slightly different problem, without even realizing it.

1. asset management

2. asset change management

3. behavior change management

4. data management

5. combinatorial design management.

6. Combinatorial Behavior management

7. Feature completion

ASSET MANAGEMENT is exactly what it says on the tin.

ASSET CHANGE management can be thought of handling the import, export, formatting, platform specific packing, and versioning (including forking) of an asset.

BEHAVIORAL CHANGE management is a subset of asset management, because code is a subset of assets (depending on how you define 'assets'). The oldest known example of this is commenting and uncommenting code.
Or worse, printf debugging.

This can be file versioning, basic undo services, graph management of forks and mergers, toggles for features or modules, etc.

DATA management is about anything that doesn't fall into the other categories, everything from mission text to npc dialogues, quests, location names, item stats, the works. Anything you'd be tempted to put in a database, falls under this category. Haven't yet seen many engines offer this as an explicit built in tool as of yet, because the other problems are non-trivial as is, so this is a bit of low hanging fruit that gets handled by external tools, or loaded from formats as simple as json.

COMBINATORIAL DESIGN management is the idea of prefabbing, blueprints of broader object design using nested prototypes of existing game objects, to create more complex, reusable set pieces. Unity did this well. GM does this in part.

COMBINATORIAL BEHAVIOR management is entity-component systems, plus tooling to make it easy to add, remove, and configure components and their values on entity blueprints, also not uncommon. Both stencyl and unity do this. GM has a precursor to this in the form of configurable fields, but these fields are not based on component scripts attached to objects.

FEATURE COMPLETION is that set of gameplay mechanics or styles of design that an engine naturally makes easier to include or build in a game.

I don't think I'm aiming for all that, but I think at minimum a good engine has to do asset management, behavioral change management, prefabs, and entity-component systems with management tools for that. And ideally, asset change management.

The only type of client I like being, is a hostile one.

That's why I intend to answer every question of the dev team, with a question.

"So would you like this banner to be blue, or green?"

Does green evoke the same emotions as blue?

"Probably not, but we're asking you so we know how to finish the design..."

Does a design have a will of its own?

"Ok... What do you think about the new e-mail feature?"

Does anyone use e-mail nowadays?

"There are plenty of people who use e-mail professionally."

Are you a professional?

"I don't think this collaboration is going to work out"

Are we done?

(Parody of Ron Swanson)

So the story is true and this is what we have to deal with now..

My friend and I started to build a Web Application for a Roleplay Community. The project was for a client mainly and they don't mind if we try to sell this project to the public. All goes well except the shitty design, which is the one our client asked for. So after 6 months of work we planned to switch our backend to Nodejs, the switch look quite easy in our brains [PHP => NODEJS] because we already use Nodejs for instant functions without reloading the page.

So during the planning we earn a client which is one of the member of the clan, but he pay for another clan which is 6x bigger then the one we're in. So we continue to develop and think about the switch. We learn a news about a new competitor, this one sucks, we tried their App and it's not worth the money they ask. A few days after another competitor enter the market, this one is a big challenge for us. "Sit down tight, yea you reading this"..

The competitor use BUBBLE to create their shit, they earned 10 clients in one week and just punch us with "THE ROCK" hand, they release a lot of feature each week, they're 6 devs on that (if we can call them devs), we're 2 programmers (True Programmers). What we do in 1 week they do it in 5 hours with Bubble, the switching to Nodejs was a badluck, you couldn't add feature because of this switch during 2 weeks, this made us later and second in the race. My friend (at the same time my employee and back-end programmer) move into another appartment which obligate him to work full-time. At this time I'm f****, I'm only a Front-End Programmer vs 6 Wannabe Devs with a mother**** tool of *** (#Bubble).

This is where I am, in this beautiful opportunity to win this market but with this bad luck occuring = the opportunity is low, but our advantage is we don't have made our project public yet so they're the only good option for the communities to get that kind of web app, the others are not included and only a copy of this (Their Product) or just a big junk made with Wix.

At this time I'm working hard to make this opportunity happen, I have my math which I have to finish to have my High School diploma to do, a part-time job to get if I want to stay with an internet connection and finally I have to find a way to still be able to make my dream come true (Working on my Business at full time & Make money from it) and continue to be a Front-End Programmer/CEO of an enterprise.

Worst architecture I've seen?

The worst (working here) follow the academic pattern of trying to be perfect when the only measure of 'perfect' should be the user saying "Thank you" or one that no one knows about (the 'it just works' architectural pattern).

A senior developer with a masters degree in software engineering developed a class/object architecture for representing an Invoice in our system. Took almost 3 months to come up with ..

- Contained over 50 interfaces (IInvoice, IOrder, IProduct, etc. mostly just data bags)
- Abstract classes that implemented the interfaces
- Concrete classes that injected behavior via the abstract classes (constructors, Copy methods, converter functions, etc)
- Various data access (SQL server/WCF services) factories

During code reviews I kept saying this design was too complex and too brittle for the changes everyone knew were coming. The web team that would ultimately be using the framework had, at best, vague requirements. Because he had a masters degree, he knew best.

He was proud of nearly perfect academic design (almost 100% test code coverage, very nice class diagrams, lines and boxes, auto-generated documentation, etc), until the DBAs changed table relationships (1:1 turned into 1:M and M:M), field names, etc, and users changed business requirements (ex. concept of an invoice fee changed the total amount due calculation, which broke nearly everything).

That change caused a ripple affect that resulted in a major delay in the web site feature release.

By the time the developer fixed all the issues, the web team wrote their framework and hit the database directly (Dapper+simple DTOs) and his library was never used.

Immediately start coding every feature all at once as fast as possible. After about a week I realize the architecture is so bad I can't continue so I stop, and design the architecture properly so it will scale. Then I delete everything I had and start from scratch. Finally after about another week I lose interest and let it rot in the side project graveyard.

Rinse and repeat.

-See vaguely interesting feature in language (currently C#)
-Look at the docs and psuedocode to get a feel for what the feature is intended for
-Design small project around the feature
-Learn the feature by using it

have been working on a small project in the last couple of months. a few client meetings we are discussing a timeline feature for orders and assignments. the calendars (yeah a few on one screen cuz ... yeah) the client keeps complaining that they should look differently and in the same time says "Design is not important *designer-guy-he-works-with* can change it once we are done"
me - :/

side note: the calendars are tightly coupled with the js code powering them, so yeah ... looking forward to it
..

Every design change in windows 11:
- All that could have been achieved in win 10 with an update 🙂

Every new feature in windows 11:
- All that could have been achieved in win 10 with an update 🙂

Just another way to trash our older PCs. Planned obsolescence.

Google said, free forever photo storage, takes it back.
Microsoft said, last verison of windows 'll be the 10, takes it back.

😊 Everything's friking nice.

Oh god where do I start!?

In my current role I've had horrific experiences with management and higher ups.

The first time I knew it would be a problem: I was on a Java project that was due to go live within the month. The devs and PM on the project were all due to move on at the end. I was sitting next to the PM, and overheard him saying "we'll implement [important key feature] in hypercare"... I blew my top at him, then had my managers come and see if I was OK.

That particular project overran with me and the permanent devs having to implement the core features of the app for 6mo after everyone else had left.

I've had to be the bearer of bad news a lot.

I work now and then with the CTO, my worst with her:
We had implemented a prototype for the CEO of a sister company, he was chuffed with it. She said something like "why is it not on brand" - there was no brand, so I winged it and used a common design pattern that the CEO had suggested he would like with the sister company's colours and logo. The CTO said something like "the problem is we have wilful amateurs designing..." wilful amateurs. Having worked in web design since I was 12 I'm better than a wilful amateur, that one cut deep.

I've had loads with PMs recently, they basically go:

PM: we need this obscure set up.
Me & team: why not use common sense set up.
PM: I don't care, just do obscure set up.

The most recent was they wanted £250k infrastructure for something that was being done on an AWS TC2.small.

Also recently, and in another direction:

PM: we want this mobile app deploying to our internal MDM.
Us: we don't know what the hell it is, what is it!?
PM: it's [megacorp]'s survey filler app that adds survey results into their core cloud platform
Us: fair enough, we don't like writing form fillers, let us have a look at it.

*queue MITM plain text login, private company data being stored in plain text at /sdcard/ on android.

Us: really sorry guys, this is in no way secure.
Pm: *in a huff now because I took a dump on his doorstep*

I'll think of more when I can.

[tl;dr at the bottom]
(Project Team Group Chat)
dev: @Desing team, i have a question, there's a required field missing in you design, can i go to your desktop to get an quick answer/explanation about that?
design team:....
dev: hello..?
PM: [writes a huge text to tell me that i can not interrupt them even if its a blocker and that we (dev team) shoul write them down and tell them only once a day in the scrum meeting]
dev: uuumm ok

-next day-
dev: so about that field, why did you...
Client: WHAT? There's a problem with the design!? oh boy, lets re-check every view right now with the whole team!
(it took like 2 hours, the field was missing just because they forgot that feature)
PM: okay, @DesingTeam, answer any questions from developers when they ask you...

tl;dr
we spent almost two hours with the client just because desing team didn't want to answer me a little question

To be honest I forgot completely about the ducks and was kind of disappointed to see them, don't understand me wrong, its a great addition to the shop (especially to support devrant more when buying them and I will probably do too) and trogus (wow it's pronounced t-rogus) deserves a lot of respect for going through the very hard process of developing it, getting somebody to do a decent quality result etc. but I was hoping for the new site that got hyped up some time ago or some update to the app that fixes design issues on phones that have 2k resolution and no statusbar and more. ("just open a github issue" - I don't have one right now and it didn't get much attention anyway, since I am in the niche of people with those kind of setups, most people it seems have phones that can even barely run the app lol). The login still pops up each time you visit the site (basically just click it away, but it's rather annoying to have it pop up), it's nowhere near to the original app (although the native app is written in some sort of wrapper anyway?) - especially what comes to options, customizing, deactivating things, posting into categories (newest feature), getting notifications etc

There is some community builds that try to recreate a better desktop experience, but sadly fail to do so (sorry to devrantron and others, but what the fuck were you thinking when you rounded only the top right and left corner?) - since they always have something that is just thrown out to "be there" or design fails (which devrant just lacks and looks good across the board), that makes me rather cautious if that program doesn't send my credentials to some african prince. ("just look at the sourcecode", yes I have better things to do, thanks)

I could just create my own build, having to reverse engineer the whole website and app (granted, most of it are just api calls), but I simply lack the time (so I understand why my mentioned problems aren't getting really any attention or can't be implemented that fast, yet still its somewhat bugging)

I have listened to the Q&A and I know you guys are working full time at for example adobe (amazing that you both have time to be putting it towards devrant), so its not as much of a rant, just wanted to get out my disappointment about the event I felt personally. Still nice to have seen you and talk with the community a bit (although the time I feel was picked more towards your US audience rather than EU?).

Demo for client goes bad when we encounter a bug adding a new entry into the back end. Entry shows up in the admin but not the front side.

<thoughtbubble> "I can't believe this, we just tested it! How can this be? How? How?" </thoughtbubble>

Perhaps, the cache? Nope.

<thoughtbubble> "You gotta be fucking kidding me!" </thoughtbubble>

Perhaps the front side is pointing to dev? Nope.

<thoughtbubble> "Oh shit... make something up quick. Make it sound good." </thoughtbubble>

Tells client we'll have to look into it. (real smooth)

Looked into it and it turns out the bug was actually a feature. Apparently when you assign an "end date" to a date in the past... by design, it won't show.

However, was it bad UI? That's a different argument.

So at our company, we use Google Sheets to for to coordinate everything, from designs to bug reporting to localization decisions, etc... Except for roadmaps, we use Trello for that. I found this very unintuitive and disorganized. Google Sheets GUI, as you all know, was not tailored for development project coordination. It is a spreadsheet creation tool. Pages of document are loosely connected to each other and you often have to keep a link to each of them because each Google Sheets document is isolated from each other by design. Not to mention the constant requests for permission for each document, wasting everybody's time.

I brought up the suggestion to the CEO that we should migrate everything to GitHub because everybody already needed a Github account to pull the latest version of our codebase even if they're not developers themselves. Gihub interface is easier to navigate, there's an Issues tab for bug report, a Wiki tab for designs and a Projects tab for roadmaps, eliminating the need for a separate Trello account. All tabs are organized within each project. This is how I've seen people coordinated with each other on open-source projects, it's a proven, battle-tested model of coordination between different roles in a software project.

The CEO shot down the proposal immediately, reason cited: The design team is not familiar with using the Github website because they've never thought of Github as a website for any role other than developers.

Fast-forward to a recent meeting where the person operating the computer connected to the big TV is struggling to scroll down a 600+ row long spreadsheet trying to find one of the open bugs. At that point, the CEO asked if there's anyway to hide resolved bugs. I immediately brought up Github and received support from our tester (vocal support anyway, other devs might have felt the same but were afraid to speak up). As you all know, Github by default only shows open issues by default, reducing the clutter that would be generated by past closed issues. This is the most obvious solution to the CEO's problem. But this CEO still stubbornly rejected the proposal.

2 lessons to take away from this story:

- Developer seems to be the only role in a development team that is willing to learn new tools for their work. Everybody else just tries to stretch the limit of the tools they already knew even if it meant fitting a square peg into a round hole. Well, I can't speak for testers, out of 2 testers I interacted with, one I never asked her opinion about Github, and the other one was the guy mentioned above. But I do know a pixel artist in the same company having a similar condition. She tries to make pixel arts using Photoshop. Didn't get to talk to her about this because we're not on the same project, but if we were, I'd suggest her use Aseprite, or (at least Pixelorama if the company doesn't want to spend for Aseprite's price tag) for the purpose of drawing pixel arts. Not sure how willing she would be at learning new tools, though.

- Github and other git hosts have a bit of a branding problem. Their names - Github, BitBucket, GitLab, etc... - are evocative of a tool exclusively used by developers, yet their websites have these features that are supposed to be used by different roles other than developers. Issues tabs are used by testers as well as developers. Wiki tabs are used by designers alongside developers. Projects and Insights tabs are used by project managers/product owners. Discussion tabs are used by every roles. Artists can even submit new assets through Pull Requests tabs if the Art Directors know how to use the site interface (Art Directors' job is literally just code review, but for artistic assets). These websites are more than just git hosts. They are straight-up Jira replacement with git hosting as a bonus feature. How can we get that through the head of non-developers so that we don't have to keep 4+ accounts for different websites for the same project?

Generally devs who are too arrogant to accept help or constructive criticism. There’s this data visualisation library that missed a specific feature that psychologists use quite frequently, so I added it myself and opened a PR. The maintainer closed it because people should use whatever he’d already implemented. It’s like not giving someone the option to listen to disco because rock music is better. Yeah, cool story bro. Now all my visualisation projects depend on my fork instead. Same with the now abandoned Material Design Library devs. They didn’t have a drop down with free input, so I opened a PR with my solution. Closed as it was out of scope, simply because Google didn’t specifically include that in the Material specs, only an input and a drop down separately which my solution matched. I also opened a PR for an obviously missing feature (being able to validate forms via JS), closed as this behaviour wasn’t in the Material specs either. No wonder MDL died before it was ever finished.

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

Team lead: guys, we need to brainstorm on feature X. We can have this service do blah blah..., have a cache at blah blah...

Me: I think it's too complicated. We can simplify the design by doing blah blah... and measure the performance as we go, let's not do premature optimization.

Team lead: no, we definitely need this. We'll pitch this to the CTO later

*Later when we meet the CTO*
Team lead: Hi Mr CTO, about feature X, we're gonna do this blah blah... what do you think?

CTO: *basically repeats what I said*

Team lead: Thank you for the insights, really helpful. We will do as you suggest.

WHAT THE FUCK?

Once again, due to poor management, I find myself exporting svgs from Figma, saving them as pngs, and importing them into our application... (remember I'm a developer, NOT a designer)

Don't we have a design team who can export the needed assets for a feature?

"Noooooo fullstackclown can do all of that himself! He's an expert!!!"

The fucks are lucky I dabble in digital art as a hobby and even know how to do this stuff...

FML

I work for an investment wank. Worked for a few. The classic setup - it's like something out of a museum, and they HATE engineers. You are only of value if work on the trade floor close to the money.

They treat software engineering like it's data entry. For the local roles they demand x number of years experience, but almost all roles are outsourced, and they take literally ANYONE the agency offers. Most of them can't even write a for loop. They don't know what recursion is.

If you put in a tech test, the agency cries to a PMO, who calls you a bully, and hires the clueless intern. An intern or two is great, if they have passion, but you don't want a whole department staffed by interns, especially ones who make clear they only took this job for the money. Literally takes 100 people to change a lightbulb. More meetings and bullshit than development.

The Head of Engineering worked with Cobol, can't write code, has no idea what anyone does, hates Agile, hates JIRA. Clueless, bitter, insecure dinosaur. In no position to know who to hire or what developers should be doing. Randomly deletes tickets and epics from JIRA in spite, then screams about deadlines.

Testing is the same in all 3 environments - Dev, SIT, and UAT. They have literally deployment instructions they run in all 3 - that is their "testing". The Head of Engineering doesn't believe test automation is possible.

They literally don't have architects. Literally no form of technical leadership whatsoever. Just screaming PMOs and lots of intern devs.

PMO full of lots of BAs refuses to use JIRA. Doesn't think it is its job to talk to the clients. Does nothing really except demands 2 hour phone calls every day which ALL developers and testers must attend to get shouted at. No screenshare. Just pure chaos. No system. Not Agile. Not Waterfall. Just spam the shit out of you, literally 2,000 emails a day, then scream if one task was missed.

Developers, PMO, everyone spends ALL day in Zoom. Zoom call after call. Almost no code is ever written. Whatever code is written is so bad. No design patterns. Hardcoded to death. Then when a new feature comes in that should take the day, it takes these unskilled devs 6 months, with PMO screaming like a banshee, demanding literally 12 hours days and weekends.

Everything on spreadsheets. Every JIRA ticket is copy pasted to Excel and emailed around, though Excel can do this.

The DevOps team doesn't know how to use Jenkins or GitHub.

You are not allowed to use NoSQL database because it is high risk.

My boss uses agile development so he doesn't has to think about use cases he wants to be covered by the application.

He's just throwing in a "design" (an image that is probably created with Paint) without any further specifications and inconsistent elements, let the developer work two days on it, see the outcome, complains why it's not how he wanted it to be and then starts thinking how the feature should be integrated in the app and notices that his "requirements" from the image could not provide any advantage or usage at all for the user of the application. Asking for clarification before starting to work just leads to spongy statements or silence when he notices that he didn't think through to the end.

Sad is that this has not happened only once but is usually the way a new feature is developed...

A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.

Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.

We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.

I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.

At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.

At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX

You might get where this is going...

None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.

Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.

Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board

No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.

Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.

Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.

One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board

Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.

At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).

The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board

I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).

There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).

I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.

The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.

Devs: How should we design the UI?
Design & Marketing: We were thinking something like the Ferrari website (or app that has nothing to do with our industry)

Devs: How about we add <feature that all of our competitors have>? We're falling quite behind on that and its hindering us from connecting with their REST API.
Marketing: Nah that's too complicated, and our customers haven't requested it. How about we add some animal animations over there instead?

So I was rejected by the management today for promotion to Senior 2 although I have done several major feature developments + infra design and basically end to end ownership.

Reason for no promotion? That's the best fucking part, according to the feedback, the work I performed on the service I created is well-designed,
and the code quality is commendable. However, they pointed out a notable difference in code quality between the micro-service
I built and the rest of the project developed by others. This, apparently, suggests that I lack a strong sense of ownership over the broader product.

First of all, we have super tight deadlines (almost 996), and I burned midnight oil to make sure the service I am in-charge of is designed really well.
Also, how in the flying fuck the other how the inability of others to maintain good code quality elsewhere in the product is being used as evidence against my sense of ownership
and initiative in ensuring high engineering quality for the repository I wasn't even working on

What a delusional management, the entire feedback feels like just an excuse to fuck off, we are not promoting you...
May be instead of doing actual engineering work, I should have just do minimal work and write more design docs / technical artifacts

It is very demoralizing after I worked hard for so many months, product went out really well.. yet when performance review comes, rejected with a petty reason

I'm in a team of 3 in a small to medium sized company (over 50 engineers). We all work as full stack engineers.. but I think the definition of full stack here is getting super bloated. Let me give u an example. My team hold a few production apps, and we just launched a new one. The whole team (the 3 of us) are fully responsible on it from planning, design, database model, api, frontend (a react page spa), an extra client. Ok, so all this seems normal to a full stack dev.

Now, we also handle provisioning infra in aws using terraform, doing deployments, building a CI/CD pipeline using jenkins, monitoring, writing tests, building an analytics dashboard.

Recently our tech writer also left, so now we are also handling writing feature releases.

Few days ago, we also had a meeting where they sort of discussed that the maintenance of the engineering shared services, e.g. jenkins servers, (and about 2-3 other services) will now be split between teams in a shared board, previously this was handled only be team leads, but now they want to delegate it down.

And ofcourse not to mention supporting the app itself and updating bug tickets with findings.

I feel like my daily responsiblities are becoming the job responsibilities of at least 3 jobs.

Is this what full stack engineering looks like in your company? Do u handle everything from app design, building, cloud, ops, analytics etc..

When the PM doesn't stop the customer from requesting a bad feature (in terms of user experience / design)

Is there a way to make the ( + ) Floating Action Button disappear down and reappear up on scroll event, like it does on all the Google apps with Material Design?

Story of my first successful project

Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.

Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"

I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).

I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".

Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.

Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)

Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."

End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team.

Dear designers,
Your job is to design not to overthink and overcomplicate a simple feature

So, here we are using postgres in production with the fancy feature of UPSERT. We’ve got loads of request popping in, both new and updates - so the UPSERT getting triggered alot. Today we faced a problem with integer within our app stating that the number is too high. We were like «WTF? Already?!»! After looking in to the features of UPSERT, we came to realize that any sequence will be incremented regardless of an insert being handled. This results then in an ID field being defined with ids such as:
1
2
5
19
222
73377
282828282
Etc. You get the point..
This design is so WTF and I have absolutely no idea why anyone would like their IDs to be generated and incremended even though there is no insert. I hope it is due to my naivity that I cannot comprhend it. Oh well. UPSERT, you’re forever gone 👍🔥

I just realized that I may be hard to fire because I create a lot of apps. All other devs on my team work on the same big projects and maybe share code more.

But I tend to be the only dev for a lot of my work. In addition to building and deploying a few standalone projects.... That no one else has used. I write usage and design docs but nobody reads those.

And one application is very complex, has many parts. It even took me a while to pick it up at first and I've been the only dev on it for years... So built a lot of things on top.

Today I was actually talking to the business team that uses it and they were like when is feature A, B, C going to be done. And I finally said, has to be one at a time bc I'm the only dev...

Though last week I did ask for some help to look into one of them while I worked on another more complex one but I gotta train them. And well their part involves only a small part of the entire app.

Was wondering what kind of workflow you use.
My team is currently a big unorganized chaos...
Our manager wants us to take the form of:
Feature idea -> Design -> Build -> Test -> Train (explain to users how to use it) -> Deploy

The `Train` step is something rather odd to me, as that would mean teaching every single employee how to use the product we're making.

Wouldn't it just be better to skip the `train` section (and maybe use some kind of wiki?) and try to make everything as clearly labeled and obvious as possible?

I prefer it doing 2 tasks parallely during the initial phase of requirement gathering and design phase.(makes more sense if you are working extremely new system and framework)
1. Keep collecting requirements from clients and understand them.
2. Collect different designing aspects for the project and parallely, build a POC for 2 purpose: to get hands into the new Framework and also as a demo to clients. Working on POC helps in 3 ways: Improving understanding of requirement, improving framework knowledge, and playing around with code whenever bored of designing and reading tons of existing designs..
3. Once primary requirements are clear and fixed, analyse all different designs, if possible I setup meetings with senior devs, principal engineers (they help a lot when it comes to reviews on scalability and reliability of a design)
4. The above design is mostly architectural level. Once design is fixed, then I start taking each component and prepare a detailed implementation design. (Notice that whenever I am bored of designing, I spend sometime in building POC)
5. In detail design, I focus on modularity and flexibility. Anything defined should have getters and setters for example. This will help you reuse your code. Keep the interface between components in your design as generic as possible, so that in case your MySQL is change to Postgre or NoSQL, your design should be able to adapt new features..
6. Instead of building entire project, define feature targets and deliver small features.. this will help you to be in line with the requirements with minimum deviation.

Am currently handling a very bad code, once you add any feature the app crash and you have to fix the whole POKER application ( as you know poker is a really complicated and everything related to each other). The app crash and every single line of code goes wrong. As well i do barely have a break and am working overtime and during the weekend.
In addition to all of this i have a very complicated design and animation to the chips. Adding to this am the only developer working on this project.

Summing-up am working 10 to 11 hours per day 7 days a week. And still the manager is dissing me as if am not a good developer.

I feel so bad, i cant describe how am currently feeling.

So guys do you believe handling a very bad code might reflect your coding skills ?

ok this may look like a lazy ass beginner crying out for spoon feeding( which it kinda is), but i want some real industrial training in non documented Android coding.

For last 2 years i have been reading tons of Android articles and documentation on "how to use this library", "how to add this feature", "what this function of this class does", but not much about how to use it efficiently, like the way its used in industry.

When I interned with a startup, all they wanted from me was to push new design changes, fix layout bugs and work as fastly as i could. I had no time to understand their core code, which had so many things that i could have learned : those mvp/mvvm design/architecture patterns, dependency injections, kotlin , coroutines, state management designs, data bindings, eventbuses and handling, and VIPER,RIBS (I mean, not everything was particularly in their code, i picked up a few keywords from here n there)... a lot of stuff that is used by many apps for their codebase.
I can read up these stuff by myself, but i always end up feeling bored coz frankly, i got no big/valuable project to implement it upon and feel excited about it. I feel that open source projects from OSS companies could be my window, but their chat spaces are also mostly empty to discuss/get some guidance.

I want some specific training about these. Can you guys provide any online/offline course/company training/books in this subject, the best practices?

Do you guys still see the relevance of using code freezing instead of just properly managing versions, repositories and branches in a cyclical manner, given how advanced software practices and tools are supposed to be?

To give some context, the company I work for uses the complete trash project management practice of asking teams to work on a sprint basis, but there is still a quarterly milestone and code freeze to commit to and it's where shit hits the fan.

Development teams rush features at the end of the quarter because they had to commit at the very least to a 6 months in advance planning (lol?) and turns out, not being able to design and investigate properly a feature combined with inflexible timelines has high chances to fail. So in the end, features are half-assed and QA has barely any time to test it out thoroughly. Anyways, by the time QA raises some concerns about a few major bugs, it's already code freeze time. But it's cool, we will just include these bug fixes and some new features in the following patches. Some real good symver, mate!

Of course, it sure does not help that teams stopped using submodules because git is too hard apparently, so we are stuck with +10Gb piece of trash monolithic repository and it's hell to manage, especially when fuckfaces merges untested code on the main branches. I can't blame Devops for ragequitting if they do.

To me, it's just some management bullshit and the whole process, IMO, belongs to fucking trash along with a few project managers... but I could always be wrong given my limited insight.

Anyways, I just wanted to discuss this subject because so far I cannot see code freezing being anything else than an outdated waterfall practice to appease investors and high management on timelines.

Working in a service based company in a project with dumb fcking manager/lead who can't plan proper workflow and design, where backend and frontend work on the same feature simultaneously and u get API's in the end of the Sprint and it has be integrated, tested and deployed in the same day...and the manager is a fcking virgin and starts drooling with backend team as they are most females and is very lenient towards them

Do you plan the application, on which you will be working, before you actually begin to write code?

I do web development and usually begin with something rough or look at designs of other developers. Like an dashboard example, when I see an image on google search that I like, I try to make something simmilar and when I have the surface I can add the functionality and improve the design.

Sometimes I have to make changes in half of the development because at the beginning there was no assumption that there will be a need for a certain functionality or I change a implemented feature to work properly, so I have to refactor something I made as a ground on which other parts will rely, although if I had planed the application in detail, maybe it wouldn't come to such refactoring.

In school we did prototypes, used to draw flowcharts and hold on a precedence diagrams that we made, but now at work when I receive an projekt I just begin to code :-D maybe this should change, how do you do it? If you plan your project, how do you do it?

I made 3 designs (more like proof of concepts) 2 months ago for a certain feature request.

2 months ago:
I presented to the CTO & CEO and the senior developer.
Senior developer prefers design A
CTO prefers design A with some very minor changes
CEO prefers design C with some major changes (ok, at this point is it more design D)
CTO & senior dev tried to argue for his idea but gave up.
So we decide to implement Design D

Now:
Customers complained that the designs is not clear (UX-wise)
CEO: "I have the idea to make some adjustments" and explained design A.

This happens pretty much for every other feature request since I started doing designs for new features. Previously they implemented it without designs.

So...we just sent a design proposal for a new feature to our biggest client. Their response? -Hmmm, let s drop this feature for now...OMG have you guys seen the new airbnb design for ios, like it s soooo cooool, we want that, redesign the whole app like this. - Yeah sure, except our app has nothing in common with theirs...Isn't it great when clients make decisions like this based on checking a new app version in the toilet real quick? 😝 Needless to say, we're not redesigning...

I start by diving straight into the code. A blank brand new file in whatever language I have chosen to create my project in. If it's a language I'm unfamiliar with, I'll start with some templates of getting started (for example, I wanted to make a node.js application with a connected website, so I found some code using express to link the two together).

Once I've started, I'll eventually create a text file for ideas which I may or may not plan to implement later. If a particular feature is rather complex, I'll draw it out on my whiteboard, giving me a visual guide to help me.

My main aim is to simply get a "foot in the door"; once that's achieved, it makes working on the project much more enjoyable. I tend to turn it into a bit of "play" by coming up with suggestions which I would probably not implement in my final design, but add just for the fun of it. If I chose to drop those ideas, I'll save the code - chances are, I would have learnt something new in the process (For example, I learnt how to perform GET requests and figured out what cURL was for the first time by simply adding a "dad joke generator" to a discord bot, just for a laugh)

fuck the overengineered bulshit that ZF2 is... fuck crappy mvc in web, fuck shitty design, tuck events, fuck 'security feature' that obfuscates the fucking redirect login/logout urls fuck not having your full link, but just the path everywhere, fuck whitelabeling, fuck somebody's sister, fuck me and fuck you....

Without diving into OO or "Micro$oft", I think the one major flaw in C# is the ability to use "regions".

It's like a feature that was specifically designed to hide shitty code.

If you know how to separate your logic properly and focus on good design principles, you should never have to use a "region" to "clean up" the way your source looks!

Yet again, another feature hand off where most everything I was told in the meeting is contradicted by the feature doc and design they give me at the end. So now I get another day of pulling teeth to try and get what I need to do my job. I'm looking forward to next week when these same people ask why the project isn't on the arbitrary track they also haven't shared with me.

Generally have great experience with our management.
I work at a scale-up, so I've had some run-ins with the founder shifting priorities too often in the early days, but he's got enough notion of tech to understand when we're telling about the why(not)s of what we can and can't do
A while back we got a product owner/manager/scrum master and he's great too. I've had times when he put pressure on making deadlines when it was really not helping, but overall great guy with a lot of empathy and respect for his team.

But recently I've been starting to feel like we (the dev team) are getting more and more excluded from the decision-making process of the features & designs that we're going to be working on. We used to have a say in what we felt like was a good idea for a feature or a design, but it feels to me like we don't get asked that question any more of late...

Not sure if I'm imagining it, or overreacting to a logical (possibly positive?) evolution in our development workflow...

I have been working on this feature for over a month now. It all started with a shitty technical design. I'm still finding issues with the described logic and structure...

I honestly have come a long way. But I still have these moments when I just lose confidence In myself, and while grieving it can be worse/more frequent.

I’m being taught some networking programming from this person I befriended and it’s going wonderfully! But I don’t know how much I’m taking in. I don’t know if I’ll be able to completely understand while I’m using what I’m learning, but I guess part of the learning is by using and doing. But what if I need to change it up for a different purpose but I don’t know how?

What if I’m not programming enough? When working on this project/learning the stuff from my new teacher friend to actually make some of the stuff I usually work on that for 30 mins to an hour and a half maybe even 2. Relax, do some college, play games, then later I’ll try to work through a few exercises of my C# WinForms book.
And before you say it I’m not balancing too much on my head. I’ve learned GUI’s before with Python I’m just reflecting that to C# and it’s easy and I’m always in a separate headspace for networking. But it all just doesn’t feel like enough?

It also doesn’t help that i don’t feel like I’m doing anything special that I can boost my confidence with. Usually in a project I won’t feel like I’m doing anything until a cool or special feature is made and I know that’s bad I hate it but I can’t avoid it and I want to feel good even when nothing completely out of this world is made that day.

And I’ve definitely come a long way I’m proud of myself but I just hate getting these feels. And It happens a bit when I’m learning because I’m afraid I’m not learning and I’m gonna keep copy pasting the same code snippets for different projects and I don’t want that I want to be able to fucking edit and change it or make a completely new one of whatever it is but my design but I guess that takes experience with it first.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

Story of my life - Feature creep, creeping featurism or featuritis is the ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, such as in computer software. These extra features go beyond the basic function of the product and can result in software bloat and over-complication rather than simple design.

Slowly I'm learning not to give a shit anymore. This project I'm on can burn. I'll make progress and help out my fellow devs, but if it takes me longer than estimated to complete my tasks because of the unforeseen technical debt arising from this piss-poor excuse of an application design (plus we're 13 devs working on like 5 different feature branches - God help us with our merge conflicts) then so be it. If my tech lead complains, he can find someone else to take the wheel.

I need some advice to avoid stressing myself out. I'm in a situation where I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place at work, and it feels like there's no one to turn to. This is a long one, because context is needed.

I've been working on a fairly big CMS based website for a few years that's turned into multiple solutions that I'm more or less responsible for. During that time I've been optimizing the code base with proper design patterns, setting up continuous delivery, updating packaging etc. because I care that the next developer can quickly grasp what's going on, should they take over the project in the future. During that time I've been accused of over-engineering, which to an extent is true. It's something I've gotten a lot better at over the years, but I'm only human and error prone, so sometimes that's just how it is.

Anyways, after a few years of working on the project I get a new colleague that's going to help me on my CMS projects. It doesn't take long for me to realize that their code style is a mess. Inconsistent line breaks and naming conventions, really god awful anti-pattern code. There's no attempt to mimic the code style I've been using throughout the project, it's just complete chaos. The code "works", although it's not something I'd call production code. But they're new and learning, so I just sort of deal with it and remain patient, pointing out where they could optimize their code, teaching them basic object oriented design patterns like... just using freaking objects once in a while.

Fast forward a few years until now. They've learned nothing. Every time I read their code it's the same mess it's always been.

Concrete example: a part of the project uses Vue to render some common components in the frontend. Looking through the code, there is currently *no* attempt to include any air between functions, or any part of the code for that matter. Everything gets transpiled and minified so there's absolutely NO REASON to "compress" the code like this. Furthermore, they have often directly manipulated the DOM from the JavaScript code rather than rendering the component based on the model state. Completely rendering the use of Vue pointless.

And this is just the frontend part of the code. The backend is often orders of magnitude worse. They will - COMPLETELY RANDOMLY - sometimes leave in 5-10 lines of whitespace for no discernable reason. It frustrates me to no end. I keep asking them to verify their staged changes before every commit, but nothing changes. They also blatantly copy/paste bits of my code to other components without thinking about what they do. So I'll have this random bit of backend code that injects 3-5 dependencies there's simply no reason for and aren't being used. When I ask why they put them there I simply get a “I don't know, I just did it like you did it”.

I simply cannot trust this person to write production code, and the more I let them take over things, the more the technical debt we accumulate. I have talked to my boss about this, and things have improved, but nowhere near where I need it to be.

On the other side of this are my project manager and my boss. They, of course, both want me to implement solutions with low estimates, and as fast and simply as possible. Which would be fine if I wasn't the only person fighting against this technical debt on my team. Add in the fact that specs are oftentimes VERY implicit, so I'm stuck guessing what we actually need and having to constantly ask if this or that feature should exist.

And then, out of nowhere, I get assigned a another project after some colleague quits, during a time I’m already overbooked. The project is very complex and I'm expected to give estimates on tasks that would take me several hours just to research.

I'm super stressed and have no one I can turn to for help, hence this post. I haven't put the people in this post in the best light, but they're honestly good people that I genuinely like. I just want to write good code, but it's like I have to fight for my right to do it.

There is nothing worst than being asked to use a proprietary software.

I literally started coding as a kid so I wouldn't have to learn anyone else's idiotic design, or waste time being limited by the lack of feature, or hit a paywall every time I'm finally about to get shit done.

Use open source industry standards or gtfo.

Every fucking time i see dual boot with a machine with WinCrap, the windows manager always end up messing with the boot at the bios forcing me to reinstall grub again to make a proper boot. Most of the time the Windows Boot Manager still is corrupt.

I feel rage about that, why does Windows is so badly design when it come to boot manager? I would think they would fucking figure it out after the 90'S!! But no, to fucking busy fucking with people's machine with broken update and feature nobody use... Fuck Microsoft!

Spent half of the day redesigning proposed feature design. Somehow my Note skills are better than PowerPoint skills of someone with PHD in medicine.

Monday 🥂

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!

Some mobile file managers kick me back to the beginning after selecting items for copying or moving.

When tapping on "copy" or "move" after selecting files/folders, some file managers like ES File Explorer (back when it was popular) conveniently remain in the current directory, whereas the stock Android file manager and many vendors' pre-installed file managers like that of Samsung kick me back to the initial directory. On phones with MicroSD, that's the storage selector, and on phones without, that's /storage/emulated/0/.

If I wanted to move files into a sub folder of the currently viewed directory, I have to navigate all the way back to that current directory, which is, needless to say, annoying.

Who thought it was a smart idea to kick the user back to the initial directory? But vendors' pre-installed file managers tend to be garbage anyway. Samsung's "My Files" file manager does not let me enter file names longer than 50 characters, does not let me change the extensions of files, does not support selecting files from search results or jumping to their parent directory, does obviously lack range selection, hides the status bar while opened (what's the point of that?!), its search feature is slow and sometimes crashes, and it can only search the entire device storage or memory card and not individual directories.

It's almost like Samsung deliberately tried to design a file manager as terrible as they possibly could.

Okay..

So, what do I have here?
A cross platform mobile app with NO unit tests.
😕
I have to write a big new feature from scratch. (Things can't go wrong, right?)
Started working on it, pointed out problems with the UI/UX designs. The design changed multiple times, still I thought I could finish it by the expected date. And, so I did.
The feature went through testing, and they found bugs. (Surprise...?)
It's already kinda scary to touch someone's code that has no unit tests and no comments. And I think, it's all the more difficult to not introduce bugs.
Also, had to work on the weekend to fix the bugs.
I had some good learnings here, but I'm not sure how I can prevent bugs without unit tests and proper feedback cycle. :/

There's been a fad in the company where the managers ask for the opinions of other departments to "get different perspectives".

On one hand, we get feedback by non-experts, which is obviously bad because they're not in their field. "Feature X is kinda complicated. We could simplify it by doing A." and the manager goes "that's a brilliant idea! Let's do that!" and the devs go "we did consider that, but it has drawback N. And perhaps you wanna do B, but that has drawback M..."

And then they were asking for us programmers for inputs on their designs for logos, etc. Naturally, as programmers, we wanted quick access to many functionalities. But marketing wants a simpler and more intuitive design, even if it involves more clicks. This wasn't in my job description! I just wanna code! Thinking is your job!

Like pull-to-refresh, auto-selecting the file name in "save as" dialogues is a design trend we are perpetuating without questioning its usefulness.

The "rename" feature of file managers and the file name fields in "Save as" dialogues and screenshot tools automatically select file names without the ending, expecting the user to want to replace it.

It would more sense to place the cursor between the file name and the ending ".png".

I can't remember the last time I replaced a file name. I almost always rename files to add a comment or time stamp at the end.

Adding a comment after the time stamp, for example, "Screenshot at 2024-02-04 12-04-37 progress bar.png", makes more sense than replacing the file name. A file name with a time stamp is more easily searched.

Recently asked myself questions:
Which is the most unpleasant when you developing a mobile application (for me its when design(UI/UX) changes after feature was developed.
which is the most complicated stage in developing a mobile application for you
Place plus(like) if you are mobile dev
P.S. Unicorns are real🦄🦄🦄

Every time we ask the directors what they think about the design. They introduce a new feature...

Can't you just decide what color will be the plane without changing the maximum speed????

Need some advise from all you clever devs out there.

When I finished uni I worked for a year at a good company but ultimately I was bored by the topic.

I got a new job at a place that was run by a Hitler wannabee that didn't want to do anything properly including writing tests and any time I improved an area or wrote a test would take me aside to have a go so I quit after 3 months.

Getti g a new job was not that hard but being at companies for short stints was a big issue.

My new job I've been here 3 months again but the code base is a shit hole, no standardisation, no one knows anything about industry standards, no tests again, pull requests that are in name only as clearly broken areas that you comment on get ignored so you might as well not bother, fake agile where all user stories are not user stories and we just lie every sprint about what we finished, no estimates and so forth, and a code base that is such a piece of shit that to add a new feature you have to hack every time. The project only started a few months back.

For instance we were implementing permissions and roles. My team lead does the table design. I spent 4 hours trying to convince him it was not fit for purpose and now we have spent a month on this area and we can't even enforce the permissions on the backend so basically they don't exist. This is the tip of the iceberg as this shit happens constantly and the worst thing is even though I say there is a problem we just ignore it so the app will always be insecure.

None of the team knows angular or wants to learn but all our apps use angular..

These are just examples, there is a lot more problems right from agile being run by people that don't understand agile to sending database entities instead of view models to client apps, but not all as some use view models so we just duplicate all the api controllers.

Our angular apps are a huge mess now because I have to keep hacking them since the backend is wrong.

We have a huge architectural problem that will set us back 1 month as we won't be able to actually access functionality and we need to release in 3 months, their solution even understanding my point fully is to ignore it. Legit.

The worst thing is that although my team is not dumb, if you try to explain this stuff to them they either just don't understand what you are saying or don't care.

With all that said I don't think they are even aware of these issues somehow so I dont think it's on purpose, and I do like the people and company, but I have reached the point that I don't give a shit anymore if something is wrong as its just so much easier to stay silent and makes no difference anyway.

I get paid very well, it's close to home and I actually learn a lot since their skill level is so low I have to pick up the slack and do all kinds of things I've never done much of like release management or database optimisation and I like that.

Would you leave and get a new job?

Why, oh why, must every project succumb to the siren call of feature creep? We start with a simple, elegant design, but before long, we're drowning in a sea of unnecessary bells and whistles. Let's stick to the essentials, folks. Quality over quantity, simplicity over complexity. Less is more, remember?

I got my first developer job three years ago. I’ve always had a great eye for detail, and getting things done while following best practices. I learned that a few years ago from typography, which I think is a fascinating subject, which has a lot of shared ideas with software development.

In my first job, I immediately took a lot more responsibility than what I was assigned to. This job was as a React Developer, but I quickly got into backend development and set up kubernetes clusters, CI/CD.

Looking back, this was to me quite an achievement, considering I had never done anything even remotely close to it.

I did however, work my ass off. 18 hours work days without telling my boss, so only getting paid for 8. Plus I worked weekends.

I did love it. After a while, I got promotes to Senior Developer, and got responsibility for everything technical. I tried asking for help, but everybody else was either a student, or working purely front-end or app-development. Meanwhile, I was Devops, API-design, backend, Ci/CD, handling remote installations (all our customers are Airgapped), customer support, front-end and occasionally app-development when the app-developers could not handle their shit. Basically, I was the goto-guy for every problem, every feature, every fix. I don’t say this to brag.

I recently quit my job, started working as a consultant, because I almost doubled my pay. However the new job is boring as shit. I’m now an overpaid React Developer. And I really hate React. Not because it is shit, but simply because it is boring.

I’m thinking of going back to my old job. It was a lot of work, but it was really interesting. However, after I quit, they have changed their whole stack. No more Golang, Containers, Kubernetes, webRTC and other fun new technologies. Now, it is just plain, PHP without any dependecies. It is both boring, and idiotic. So I’m thinking of just quitting. Either doing some personal projects like game-development. I dont know.

I love the feeling of producing the design specifications to a client, who is complaining that a feature doesn't work the way he expected. Even though you highlighted that it would be combersome to use before development.