I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

Biggest scaling challenge I've faced?

Around 2006~2007 the business was in double-digit growth thanks to the eCommerce boom and we were struggling to keep up with the demand.

Upper IT management being more hardware focused and always threw more hardware at the problem. At its worst, we had over 25 web servers (back then, those physical tall-rectangle boxes..no rack system yet) and corresponding SQL server for each (replicated from our main sql server)

Then business boomed again and projected the need for 40 servers (20 web servers, 20 sql servers) over the next 5 years. Hardware+software costs (they were going to have to tear down a wall in order to expand the server room) were going to be in the $$ millions.

Even though we were making money, the folks spending it didn't seem to care, but I knew this trajectory was not sustainable, so I started utilizing (this was 2007) WCF services and Microsoft's caching framework Velocity. Started out small, product lookup data (description, price, the simple stuff) and within a month, I was able to demonstrate the web site could scale with less than half of our current hardware infrastructure.

After many political battles (I've ranted about a few of those), the $$ won and even with the current load, we were able to scale back to 5 web servers and 2 sql servers. When the business increased in the double-digits again, and again...we were still the same hardware for almost 5 years. We only had to add another service server when the international side of the business started taking off.

Challenge wasn't the scaling issue, the challenge was dealing with individuals who resisted change.

The man who runs my IT department. The man who is in charge of all things and people that are technical: IT management software development, infrastructure, training, help desk, system administration​, etc. A man with a staff of fifty plus. If you were to peel back the flesh on this man's head and crack open his skull you would find dung beetles feasting on the feces that power his thoughts and motor functions. Underneath this foul membrane, if you could push past the maggots; the meal worms; his undying love for hourly binges of Johnny Walker Black on any day of the week with a name that contains a vowel; his fascination with shiny objects and his endless internal monologue wondering when they would hatch rainbow ponies that fly; his desire whenever he enters a paint store to open all the cans of paint and taste the different colors; if you could push past all of the vile crap that exists where Thomas Aquinas once theorized there was a soul, you would find a colony of paramecia at the end of their short lives laughing hysterically at how much smarter they were than the host they lived in.

This man was in charge of hiring the Manager of Software Development. The manager I report to. After seven months of ignoring this chore; after interviewing the sum total of four candidates; after making a point to tell myself and a colleague that there was no one qualified to fill this position within our company (an opinion that is both untrue and, when spoken, runs afoul of internal hiring policies) this man hired a soulless cretin with no experience in software development or with running a software development group. A man who regularly confuses web servers and SQL servers. A man who asked me how my previous manager reviewed my work, was told by me that said previous manager read my code, and then replied in his capacity as the manager of software development that "looking at code is a compete waste of time for a manager." A man so without any humanity or reason for being that he will sit silently, creepily, in conference rooms with the lights off waiting for meetings to begin. Meetings he has scheduled. That have no reason for being in the first place. Just like himself.

Shortly before the man in charge offered the Dev Manager job to the simulacrum of human flesh that is my manager, he met with me and others who had been involved in the interview process. When I informed him that hiring someone with no technical knowledge for a very technical position would be a mistake that he would suffer through for years, he replied in reference to his future hire that "his managerial experience makes up for his lack of technical knowledge."

Best. Prank. Ever. Worst prank ever too. Fuck.

Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

In an alternate universe, devs live in their own country.

They make their own rules and dictate how much they are paid. They maintain the entire world’s infrastructure.

They don’t go to work, since their entire country is the workplace and guess what? Cold beers are free(a thank you from the beer company guys for coming up with all their inventory management systems)

Pizza is free too.

There is no government (laws are passed depending on upvotes on devRant )

No racism, sexism or any other ism ending words . Devs just code.

Oh, and the state police, preferably known as keyboard warriors patrol the streets and offenders are punished by limited internet speeds. 😂. It is said some actually commit suicide because of this unbearable punishment.

Fuck yeah they have coffee farms. That’s the only thing they don’t accept as *gratitude from other nations because those sons of bitches might fuck that up too.

And everyone drives teslas 😂

Okay I have to get back to work now. That multi universe travel machine won’t buy itself.

An important message:
PrOpErLy managing servers is HARD.

I get pissed off at customers with ZERO server knowledge who think they can manage their VPS. “Just get a control panel and a VPS” from some flashy provider that makes server management look way too easy.. Clicking around in their fancy control panel, until:

- they need help with their *self-managed* VPS;
- their email ends up in spam;
- they suffer from performance issues;
- they need to restore a backup;
- something breaks, because YES, things break

Way too little people are able to answer:

- when and how do you make backups?
- how do you monitor your servers and which services?
- how do you keep track of trend analysis?

Then I come by with necessary software. SNMP for trend analysis, Graphite for infrastructure health, Sensu for monitoring, Kibana, Ansible for configuration management..

Things that servers need but that customers have never even heard of.. because they can do everything in their control panel..

Until they come crying to me because it broke and they don’t even know how to get into SSH.

I think the ones to blame are VPS providers that tell the tale of how easy it is to install a control panel and never look at your server again.

Customers become responsible for something *business-critical*! Yet they don’t know how it works.

I just blocked some of the top management from connecting to our WLAN because I was testing a verifing feature for said WiFi that kicks all devices not listed in the DB.
It happened while my boss/senior/guidance was trying to show them the advantages of a centrally managed infrastructure.
He covered my ass well and tried to sell it to them as proof of a secure solution, that unknown devices couldn't log in.
I feel like human trash right now, but that's what you get for testing in production.

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

We are a small size product based company. There was a change in management a year back and the new management decided to fire the entire engineering team one by one. I was hired as full time back-end developer (C++). Just after I joined they removed the last 2 engineers from the previous regime and handed over devops and Python API development to me as well.
There was no documentation for the main product which was a sophisticated piece of software. There were no comments in the code as well. I had to go through line by line (roughly 100,000 lines of code).
Then they decide to hire more devs.Turned out to be false hope. They hired interns who had no programming knowledge.
Now they got two clients who are interested in using the service. They lured them using empty promises. The product is not stable. The cloud infrastructure is not at all ready. The APIs are a mess. I don't know which one to work on.
Worst part is that there is no other technical person in the office.

I'm thinking about quitting now. I don't know why I haven't already.😖😖

I was noticing some slow network and it was dropping some connections. So I booted up my old XP install with Java 6 so connect to the ASA 5505, I see it’s logging max connections of 10000 has been reached.

Fine, I recon it’s my colleague backing up his entire machine to Google Drive.
Because when he shut it off, n connections dropped.

I check back in the log, and I see there’s 4-500 connections happening per second, I think WTF and check the source IP. Lots of random IPs from Vietnam, all going to a Windows2008 Server using rdp.

(I didn’t setup our servers, so I didn’t know which server it was accessing)

Ask my other colleague, he told me it’s a windows server from an earlier project that’s not used anymore.
I rdp into it, see there’s users logged in from around the world, and I immediately do a shutdown.

Would you look at that, connections per second dropped to about 50.
I guess that server isn’t going back online ever.
And I now need to ask management for a budget to update our network infrastructure, because the old ASA 5505 is begging me to die.

TL;DR gg previous employees didn’t shut down old servers and left them open to the world to enjoy

Oh look. The monitoring channel is in flames, smartphone is vibrating so hard it's having a seizure.

Hm. Nah it's fine. Not my...

Damn it. Incoming call. -.-

I'm actually on vacation (more like you need to trim down overtime before management get's angry).

They decided to test the new hardware / os stack I set up in the last weeks. I'd actually be happy about it If I wasn't on vacation and would be part in something that I invested a lot of time...

Well now I am. Guess what. It's running too good.

And that's not a joke. It's partly due to an upgrade in infrastructure (got rid of some last remaining 1 Gbps networks)… but also because I changed quite a lot on the OS / VM side plus we changed from XEN to Proxmox... With major tweaks, too.

The whole stack can now handle peak traffic where it would choke before, and even go beyond the old peak traffic.

Enough of introduction, the simple reason why shit burned down was because they tried out the current development branch and let it ran.

The development branch had an currently unfinished ratelimiter framework, since I didn't had time for an full burn in and didn't knew what the maxima / limits were. And since I hadn't finished that, I didn't finish the traffic shaping either.

Hm. Guess it's not good when you let a bunch of heavy parallelized data generators / analyzers run for free....

In the end, we simply shotgunned the docker development machines, because thanks to network congestion / retransmissions and feedback, they were not really cooperative via network / REST.

But hey: To infinity and beyond. XD

Full stack developer.

I know what it's supposed to mean, but I feel like it gives discredit to the devs who perfect their area (frontend, backend, db, infrastructure). It's, to me, like calling myself a chef because I can cook dinner..

The depth, analysis and customization of the domain to shape an api to a website is never appreciated. The finicle tweaks on the frontend to make those final touches. Then comes a brat who say they are full stack, and can do all those things. Bullshit. 99.9% of them have never done anything but move data through layers and present it.

Throw these wannabes an enterprise system with monoliths and microservices willy nelly, orchestrate that shit with a vertical slice nginx ssi with disaster recovery, horizontal scaling, domain modeling, version management, a busy little bus and events flowing all decimal points of 2pi. Then, if you fully master everything going on there, I believe you are full stack.

Otherwise you just scraped the surface of what complexities software development is about. Everyone who can read a tutorial can scrape together an "in-out" website. But if your db is looking the same as your api, your highest complexity is the alignment of an infobox, I will laugh loud at your full stack.

And if you told me in an interview that you are full stack, you'd better have 10+ years experience and a good list of failed and successful projects before I'd let you stay the next two minutes..

Haven't been here for a long time, kinda amazed I still had an account to be honest. There used to be a bunch of people I chatted with regularly on here, but my mentally ill self decided at some point to self sabotage (surprise surprise) and cut contact with almost everyone.

That said I've gone through quite a bit of therapy, which has definitely improved my outlook on life and allowed me to do some much needed self reflection. Has that made life better? Hard to say, but I like to think I've got a grasp on my mental health now, with the occasional relapse, because shit's a 🌈process🌈.

I'd like to apologize for the hurt I've caused some people here, you know who you are. My behaviour at times has been inexcusable. There's no sugarcoating it.

The past years have been a rollercoaster to say the least. Switched jobs multiple times. Went from doing frontend exclusively, to fullstack, then backend, and now engineering lead responsible for all architecture and infrastructure, learning a lot about myself and people around me along the way. Somehow I managed to get into a somewhat stable relationship, which is still a big WTF from time to time. The company I currently work for has had a metric fuckton of layoffs, just like the company I worked for before that. I can tell the lack of stability in work still affects my mental health a lot, but seeing how I've been growing a lot personally while the market seemingly has gone to shit gives me some level of confidence. I'll be alright.

This is mostly a sign of life to whom it may concern. I'm alive, existence is dreadful but manageable, shit's hard, but it's all gonna be okay in the end. I may or may not post a rant from time to time, as management loves unrealistic deadlines, and the PM can't say no to the CEO for some reason so her work ends up on my plate most of the time as well. Oh and of course the primary product of the company had a codebase which made me want to gorge my eyes out. So yeah, plenty to rant about.

Management (origin India) have been recruiting many developers from my country in Africa so as to facilitate lower pay, amongst other reasons. And today, I was told, in a suggestive but ordering tone, to start getting paid by project done, whereas I’m the head of VoIP and built the infrastructure from ground up prior to app launch.

All features(calls in both directions, voicemails, power and predictive dialer, voicemail greeting, call forwarding, etc) done already.

I was told this by a non-programming personnel.

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

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

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

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

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

Best team experience?

Well, first I'd like to mention that after some more experience in the field since, I realize that this company had some pretty terrible management infrastructure...

Nonetheless, I think my best team experience had to have been during my first programming job because my project manager... WAS A FREAKING DEVELOPER! It wasn't his job to be a developer obviously, but we were a small team essentially developing waterfall style, and he had to pick up the slack now and then for certain issues. The man was a genius and everyone appreciated him because you could talk to him about anything dev related and he would get it. The rest of my team was also very chill too, so it was all in all just a fun experience, stressful as it may have been at times.

I have not since had such a diversified project manager 😟 but then again, not the PM's job to touch code...

Sometimes In wonder if the support at my hosting company are a team of highly untrained monkeys.

I know jack shit about the finer details of server management, thats what I pay you guys for.

But you guys could at least try to be a bit more usefull.

If I ask you guys about the backup functions you could try to answer my questions instead of telling me what I can see on my screen myself. Because I can read pretty damm well.

After 3 days of getting no answers and not being able to backup to server with the tools you build and are telling us to use. The server died and now you are telling you can't recover the data?

How about fuck you! So we got no backup because of your fault you now tell us all our data is lost?

We got our own backups but rebuilding the entire server and infrastructure is going to take days.

Going to be a fun couple of days telling clients why shit isn't working.

About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.

When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.

My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"

Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.

Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.

The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.

Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now.

Friend and I work on some side hustle. He does most of the content work, I just manage the tech stuff and pay for infrastructure. Domain renewal is upcoming too, so yeah...

He has refused to adopt project management methodologies and task tracking tools multiple times and it's becoming a real problem since I am paying for infrastructure and there are no plans for generating income. There was, but it's vaguely defined and I have no fucking idea what he's working on. I ask, but it's always vague AF.

I have no idea where this thing is going and I barely have time to work on it. Two weeks before I am writing exams, he asks me to urgently help with a project he's behind on due to power outages. I just fucking can't, I have too much other things on my plate right now.

Gonna have to have a sitdown, I can't keep spending money like this and not have a damn roadmap for planning things.

A new currency is emerging in our industry. It is called "blame".
Who is to blame if we don't meet the deadline?
Who is to blame if the rushed release has x bugs?
Who is to blame if nightly build breaks, because our CI-Server is an old hunk of junk and "management" didn't approve the upgrade?
Our customer blames the delay in HIS infrastructure on us, because our system requirements are too high.

Blame blame blame. This currency is the new idol of our management team. Everyone gets blamed. They manage their "blame" ledgers instead of approving the tools we need or give us reasonable deadlines. Why Lord, oh why are there SO MANY MORONS in managment? You know what, dear "managers"? FUCK YOU., FUCK YOU SO HARD YOUR MOM WON'T RECOGNIZE YOU. YOU COULDN'T POUR PISS OUT OF A BOOT WITH INSTRUCTIONS ON THE HEEL.

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.

/Rant

Fucking hell it is so hard to find an internship these days.

Now, I am just an normal student from a small college in India. The companies who are even slightly big/established won't even consider your resume unless you are from one the best colleges or know someone extremely high up in the management. The smaller startups are so disorganised that they just want free labour for a website or an app. Now ok I admit I slacked on my entrance exams and couldn't get a good college, but at least give me a chance. Take an interview, a test something. My mates from even slightly better colleges get internship offers from bigwigs just because their college is better and companies hire from them regularly. They come to campus and also takes interns with them. Meanwhile, here we are. Sitting empty on our assess waiting for a service recruiter to pick us all up.

I feel like it's worthless to slog through this shitty college now. Shitty colleges in India are lost causes. Shitty infrastructure, shitty faculties and the number one thing they care about is ATTENDANCE. Fuck them and fuck the education system.

Oh and did I tell you that the college administration won't let you intern at a no name startup and you need a No Objection Certificate from the Department Head to be able to pursue your internship otherwise it won't count towards your curriculum.

I am sorry if this bothered any of you and sorry if I came out to be a really arrogant person but I needed someplace to vent.

The CI infrastructure and external tooling at the company I work at is a complete joke. Feels like it was designed by an intern left alone.

95% of the time a build fails or hangs, it's because we are getting race conditions or a hanging VM with our crappy Windows jenkins slaves. Quite possibly because we are not using proper tooling for monitoring those VMs as well. Anyways, I don't have access and control on it and it's not even my job to fix it.

Though, I am being asked to monitors these pieces of junk jenkins jobs outside of my work hours because company devs all over the world use it... but there is no fucking way to know it failed unless I log onto jenkins every hour and check everything manually... which is stupid as fuck for a software engineer.

I can't even implement slack hooks to get notifications or something when it fails because we will stop paying for it soon, so I have to connect to my freaking VPN on my PC and check everything.

And what's the fucking ghetto solution instead of fixing it properly? Restarting VMs and rerunning a build. Because someone in management wants to see a passing build, even though it means jackshit. Half of these jobs are tagged as unstable, so what's the fucking point?

Pisses me off when people work like morons and pressure others to do the same.

I have a saying that always gets me confused looks at work: “More is more”. What I mean by that is every time management asks for a new system, that system needs to be built, maintained, upgraded (code and infrastructure), etc. My point is that new systems are not free of cost after delivery. Am I alone in thinking that way?

I write web apps that show system health information, for support purposes. Whenever I talk to my boss about the general direction of what I'm writing he says, "I want one page that shows me everything."

This is an enormous company, with tens of millions of customers, and an infrastructure so big that there are literally millions of potential points of failure.

I hear this from management softs all the time: one page that shows me EVERYTHING. To me, that means he wants a red or green indicator that he can quickly check on his iphone while he's skiing.

I'm afraid that managing this kind of infrastructure is a bit more complicated than that. If it was that simple, you wouldn't have anyone to manage.

So we're doing this contract work for this other company and the project is just an overcomplicated piece of garbage where they shoved every buzzword technology into it just because. I managed to get the code just about organized and functional on our side of the contract and it was looking up when suddenly the management decides "we had a rough start, lets start over, learning from our mistakes"
So I was thinking "cool, there were a lot of problems with this overcomplicated pre-optimized stack, surely we can only do better".. oh boy how naive I was. See Im not the guy in charge of the infrastructure (unfortunately) and really the project structure across this huge multi service project is a free-for-all kind of management.. so we had a call on friday where they explained how the new structure should be built... 3 new technologies, more micro services and even worse dependency tree later I was contemplating suicide on the spot.

I tried to make this shit usable and efficient and all my fucking work went down the drain in a single day of these fuckers throwing more buzzwords at the problem... I can't even get a new empty project started without browsing our huge 100+ repo project git for which dependency Im still missing to even run it...

I fucking hate this retarded piece of crap project and I hope every "manager" and "developer" with an exception of very few chokes on a cock...

How hard it is percieved by management to do something in code is proportional to whether or not it's a task that sales or the CEO wants, versus what the developers need. Developers want to rewrite something, or fix infrastructure? Too much work can't justify it. Sales wants to clone Google Search? We'll expect it by next month.

its two years since ive told a story here but lets go.

we got a new client, who is revamping their infrastructure. i gave some tasks to 2 dev ops guys (i am not devops). they were primarily bash scripts that needed to be altered. (ofc i can write scripts it takes a moment, its their jd)

after a week of chasing them around, getting no result from them, i end up doing it myself because client needs it and the company needs this client. for one task, they told me it does not apply to the component we were working on. (it did, and i did it)

we have a meeting with higher management, they asked me how did i implement it, i show my entire working, my backtracing etc (everyone knows this is how you approach huge system, component focused strict deadline task). it was infuriating how they approached it by trying to understand complete system in one week. i asked them why they hadn't taken component specific approach. they said they tried but failed because..

[this because is the whole reason for the rant, because i believe this because should be a fire-able offense]

..because we were not using VS code to find things in files

HOW IS WHAT TEXT EDITOR YOU USE OR DON'T USE AN EXCUSE

ARE YOU GUYS GETTING THIS?

My university has "Economics and Technic" on its name and it straight up fails on the technical side.

We don't have proper wifi because nobody from the management wants to be responsible for whatever the fuck students do, so they borrow the public (not secure/shitty) wifi from the state for us. Great. We could also use Eduroam, except it only works OUTSIDE of the university for some fujing reason.

Also, our classrooms don't have plugs to charge our notebooks so that's not an option, I guess they just think: "well if they can't use their notebooks they might as well not use any internet at all".

With the heatwave in Europe the servers almost fried bcs management was not sure if they should turn it off or not. We got no server a day.

To top it off, for some reason, every time I access the Intranet from the university it won't login and it literally blocks my dns requests. FANTASTICAL. I even tried restoring my computer and it does the same shit, so I just gave up on it entirely.

TL;DR: My university has shitty IT-Infrastructure and I need to rant about it.

Thank you for sharing ze pain™

I manage the infrastructure of an application. Responsible for setup, maintenance and upgrades of all the associated servers, databases, filesystems and tuning. The business area is responsible for maintaining the content and structure of the app.

A couple of weeks ago, the business area started asking me for the system admin passwords in an attempt to integrate a remote service. The reason was because he didn't want to store his own credentials in Jenkins. Imagine the shock when they were told no.

Then a week ago, they asked for the password again so they could update a properties file. Again, the answer was no.

We sent them an email yesterday asking for their change management number so we could make the change to the properties file. They were absolutely shocked to find out that we hadn't already updated the file because they had already deployed their code changes to go with the properties file last Thursday. They submitted the request to us on Friday.

Getting real tired of people screwing up and pointing the finger back at me.

Few things hack me off more than devs who can't be bothered to do a task properly, so just submit some random crap as a PR that looks half correct at some surface level in the vague hope it gets approved.

This team is about creating decent, tested, reliable, resilient backend infrastructure, and we need to trust devs in order to do that. If you want to pull the half-arsed, do as little as possible and get paid as much as possible approach then sod off to higher management somewhere.

On the topic of having to make decisions as a dev that shouldn’t be made (solely, at least) by devs…

There’s a lot to like in my current work environment: I enjoy being around my colleagues, I get to do a variety of tasks, and many of them interesting to me and/or great learning opportunities, the pay doesn’t suck and so on… there’s also not much pressure put on the dev team from other parts of the organisation. The flipside of the coin is that nobody who should express some kind of vision as to how we should develop the product further does so.

Me and my fellow devs in the team are so frustrated about it. It feels like we’re just floating around, doing absolutely nothing meaningful. It’s as if the business people just don’t care. And we are the ones ending up deciding what features to develop and what the specs are for those etc. and I really don’t think we should be the ones doing that.

One would think that’s a great opportunity to work on refactoring, infrastructure, security and process improvements and so on - but somehow we get bothered just enough by mundane issues we can’t get to work on those effectively. Also, many of the things we’d want to do would need sign-off from the management, but they are not responsive really. Just not there. Except for our TM, but they don’t have the power neccessary… at least they are trying tho…

Sigh Im getting depressed from going to work whilst a few weeks ago it gave me a bunch of happines.

I think its due that management is approaching a triple deadline (?!?!?!) project in an agile/scrum way (?!?!??!)..

We can not change our data model completely when we have to be in acceptance in 3 weeks and do a demo in a few days..

Yes we can work around that but fuck database design theory and lets ignore all primary keys and foreign keys, great idea

We have to create and prioritise user stories on our own? We have two product owners and a scrum master.

Scrum master offers to deal with organising and creating tickets to organise Infrastructure without having a laptop of the client, so no Service Now access or any other system..

Guess who has to do it in the end..

Many question marks about this project

Can I list this experience? Will it look bad?

I am an entry level programmer in a software shop, or whatever they are called. I was given no mentorship on the task I have done. Not even proper documentation and it seems management is passing me around. What I mean by that is that the task I work on no one has ideas about since it seems the last guy who was responsible left. He was a senior though and it seems that I might have been too eager to find a job. Now I am being tasked for things a senior would do but I have the entry pay and knowledge and skill set. 2 months experience...

I am going to design a whole system from scratch and they have not read anything on it. From networking to applications to fees to compliance requirements. Oh the great part is they want it soon, no pressure, but we have to start certification within a tight deadline. This is a great opportunity and maybe a dumpster fire waiting to start. I will gain so much real experience but they are taking a great risk. It seems that is throughout their code and infrastructure though.

I plan to leave after the project. I also will document and hopefully they start reviewing my stuff to catch my incompetence. Not on purpose but from pressure and inexperience, which I hate cause I was excited at first.

I plan to stick the year or until Covid strips work-from-home, cause they are bit “old school”. I will begin my job search as well. I just know I will burn out long term and the money and package is shit.

Do I list them if I leave earlier but finish the project?

I’m really getting fed up with the situation I am in!

I was brought in as a development lead, which in my eyes and from the sound of it leading on the technical delivery, inspiring and leading technical development decisions and generally leading my team (one additional dev) in the delivery of work items and user stories which the PM or Business analyst produces..

Then it “evolved” into what felt more like a development manager where I was reporting to senior management on KPIs and stuff, I sucked it up and did it.

Then they brought in two new people which they call application specialists. These people spend all their time managing existing off the shelf applications, communicating with the vendor, running user groups where they work with our users on moving the product forward and planning the configuration and enablement of new functionality.

Because they are “developing” the application (in the same way a child develops, or the same way a story line develops and evolves) they fall under me..

So now I spend a split amount of time developing software and also managing what I can only explain as project managers, product owners...

Oh but then it gets better!! Now they want me(as well as our info sec lead and our infrastructure lead) to be a kind of all round delivery lead, gauging the requirements of a project, reporting in its risks to senior management, resource planning, everything a PM does! And also be the technical person delivering these projects!

Honestly, it’s seriously starting to take the fucking piss!

I am a technical programmer, a pretty good one if I say so myself, the developer reporting to me is good but needs hand holding which I am ok with! But would never be able to deliver an element of a product by himself in line with what we expect in quality of code..

Why would anyone think you take a person built and only interested in doing a technical role and make then a generic all round manager of a project??

I know why they did it! It’s because there are other managers in our department paid the same “level” as me, but because of their management responsibility’s , I however feel I am paid this much for my technical experience and abilities, thy are just blanket covering everyone the same at this level.

You would never get a manager at this salary scale with the technical skills they need, and you would never get a technical person with the skills interested in doing that type of management at this salary scale!

I’m just a mug and they know it!

So fucking angry!

I am so fucking tired being the handy man that solves every problem that arises from a disgraceful project management.

I was minding my own business when a project was handed to me two weeks before the production rollout. In this project they needed a ton of integrations with the destination system and nothing was done.

So naturally I started to ask where were the integration specifications and what infrastructure was supporting the project so I could start development right away.
There were no DEV nor QA infrastructure, only production, and no one could give me a straight answer about what exactly they needed to do. That alone was a huge red flag but the kicker was that I could only start when the software provider development team finished the configurations of the system that they wanted to integrate with. After reviewing the due dates I only had 4 days to implement the integrations before the rollout.

During those 4 days I was constantly on the phone trying to get enough information to implement everything in time. After an immeasurable effort I managed to implement every critical component for the rollout.

So fucking tired of this shit.......

Next week I'm beginning a paid intership in an sysadmin/infrastructure manager/bit of devops position. My tutor already told me he would give me things to learn alone so we could work together on stuff, and I can't wait for it to begin.
However, in the meantime I don't have a lot of things to do, so I would like to put this downtime to use and start reading stuff.

I already know I'll be doing a lot of Linux (that, I already master pretty well), and also some Active Directory, Kubernetes, and a bit of DevOps. Those are the main keywords he throwed at me during the interview.

What subject would you advice me to start learning in advance ? Do you have nice resources/books/videos on those matters ?

I would have asked to my tutor but right now he's on holidays and I don't intend to piss him off with job related questions.

On a side note : do you have any good and complete documentation or learning resource about SELinux ? I've had issues with it on my main rig for some months and can't find any good answer so I decided to learn it as best as I can and come up with an answer on my own. Since I intend to work in the field, I should what there's to know about it anyway.

I first try to figure out why I really want to build this and (if the project is intended that way) why someone would use it.

Then I strip the idea down to its bare minimums so I know what I should build for it to be of any value.

And then I start building until I no longer think it's worth working on the project.

For instance:

I am kind of surprised to see that in a world where cloud and apis become more and more leading, there isn't really a commonly accepted and flexible api management platform.

There are some cloud based platforms out there that can be configured using some interface but why is it like that? Surely you aren't going to deploy multiple versions of your core with different platforms right?

That's where my latest project comes in. I want to create an on-prem api management platform which you configure to work with your api during development. Then you can deploy it to any infrastructure alongside your core api.

This way you:

- are not bound to a specific cloud
- don't have to worry about security and firewalls
- get user management and rate limiting for free

I will probably create a collab for this once the platform is mature enough.

Should I take up the job offer of *capgemini* for the domain, infrastructure management services ( IMS-cloud)?
p.s. I'm a bachelor of engineering in computer science

I created a django app for event management for our college's event. Initially planned to host it on local network. But seems like college local infrastructure is not that capable. So I am thinking to host it online. Is there any free or dead cheap hosting for 5 days that can handle 1000 requests per day.

FML so I have recently learned I am mandated (nodoby asked me if I wanted to do it, management just assumed I would) to help and train an offshore SQA team with 10 hours of jet lag to automate their tests on physical hardware because everything they do is manual and their environment is all mocked including hardware... there is barely any doc on how they test their shit or on what they even do. I need them to show me their shit work on goddamn zoom. And then once I manage to do this by some fucking miracle, I need to show them how to take over my already automated project.

Dudes cannot even code, how the fuck am I supposed to do this? Worse is I was told I can't impose our tested infrastructure and libs on them because "we have to give them flexibility" or some bullshit.

Fucking pay cheaply 5 people offshore to get fuck all done and then put the weight on my shoulders when you are surprised it does not work? You bunch of management fucks, eh?

Lucky I am getting some shiny offers elsewhere.

Hussain Al Nowais

Address: P.O Box: 54457, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Phone: +971 2 6918000

Hussain Al Nowais is a global industrialist and business strategist with over 25 years’ experience in business management, banking, project finance, investment, industrial and real estate sectors. Mr. Al Nowais has a proven track-record in the development of industrial, infrastructure, and energy projects; and in the development and acquisition of businesses in the MENA region.Hussain Al Nowais is the founding member and Chairman of Al Nowais Investments. Currently, Mr. Al Nowais is spearheading the firm’s strategy of global expansion and strategic project development in energy, industry, infrastructure, oil & gas, healthcare, information technology, hospitality and real-estate.

#International Business, Hussain al Nowais #Hussain al Nowais