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Yesterday: Senior dev messages out a screenshot of someone using an extension method I wrote (he didn’t know I wrote it)..
SeniorDev: “OMG…that has to be the stupidest thing I ever saw.”
Me: “Stupid? Why?”
SeniorDev: “Why are they having to check the value from the database to see if it’s DBNull and if it is, return null. The database value is already null. So stupid.”
Me: “DBNull is not null, it has a value. When you call the .ToString, it returns an empty string.”
SeniorDev: ”No it doesn’t, it returns null.”
<oh no he didn’t….the smack down begins>
Me: “Really? Are you sure?”
SeniorDev: “Yes! And if the developer bothered to write any unit tests, he would have known.”
Me: “Unit tests? Why do you assume there aren’t any unit tests? Did you look?”
<at this moment, couple other devs take off their head phones and turn around>
SeniorDev:”Well…uh…I just assumed there aren’t because this is an obvious use case. If there was a test, it would have failed.”
Me: “Well, let’s take a look..”
<open up the test project…navigate to the specific use case>
Me: “Yep, there it is. DBNull.Value.ToString does not return a Null value.”
SeniorDev: “Huh? Must be a new feature of C#. Anyway, if the developers wrote their code correctly, they wouldn’t have to use those extension methods. It’s a mess.”
<trying really hard not drop the F-Bomb or two>
Me: “Couple of years ago the DBAs changed the data access standard so any nullable values would always default to null. So no empty strings, zeros, negative values to indicate a non-value. Downside was now the developers couldn’t assume the value returned the expected data type. What they ended up writing was a lot of code to check the value if it was DBNull. Lots of variations of ‘if …’ , ternary operators, some creative lamda expressions, which led to unexpected behavior in the user interface. Developers blamed the DBAs, DBAs blamed the developers. Remember, Tom and DBA-Sam almost got into a fist fight over it.”
SeniorDev: “Oh…yea…but that’s a management problem, not a programming problem.”
Me: “Probably, but since the developers starting using the extension methods, bug tickets related to mis-matched data has nearly disappeared. When was the last time you saw DBA-Sam complain about the developers?”
SeniorDev: “I guess not for a while, but it’s still no excuse.”
Me: “Excuse? Excuse for what?”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence>
SeniorDev: “Hey, did you guys see the video of the guy punching the kangaroo? It’s hilarious…here, check this out.. ”
Pin shoulders the mat…1 2 3….I win.6 -
As a long-time iPhone user, I am really sorry to say it but I think Apple has completed their transition to being a company that is incompetent when it comes to software development and software development processes.
I’ve grown tired of hearing some developers tell me about Apple’s scale and how software development is hard and how bugs should be expected. All of those are true, but like most rules of law, incompetence and gross negligence trumps all of that.
I’m writing this because of the telugu “bug”/massive, massive security issue in iOS 11.2.5. I personally think it’s one of the worst security issues in the history of modern devices/software in terms of its ease of exploitation, vast reach, and devastating impact if used strategically. But, as a software developer, I would have been able to see past all of that, but Apple has shown their true incompetence on this issue and this isn’t about a bug.
It’s about a company that has a catastrophic bug in their desktop and mobile platforms and haven’t been able to, or cared to, patch it in the 3 or so days it’s been known about. It’s about a company, who as of a view days ago, hasn’t followed the basic software development process of removing an update (11.2.5) that was found to be flawed and broken. Bugs happen, but that kind of incompetence is cultural and isn’t a mistake and it certainly isn’t something that people should try to justify.
This has also shown Apple’s gross incompetence in terms of software QA. This isn’t the first time a non-standard character has crashed iOS. Why would a competent software company implement a step in their QA, after the previous incident(s), to specifically test for issues like this? While Android has its issues too and I know some here don’t like Google, no one can deny that Google at least has a solid and far superior QA process compared to Apple.
Why am I writing this? Because I’m fed up. Apple has completely lost its way. devRant was inaccessible to iOS users a couple of times because of this bug and I know many, many other apps and websites that feature user-generated content experienced the same thing. It’s catastrophic. Many times we get sidetracked and really into security issues, like meltdown/spectre that are exponentially harder to take advantage of than this one. This issue can be exploited by a 3 year old. I bet no one can produce a case where a security issue was this exploitable yet this ignored on a whole.
Alas, here we are, days later, and the incompetent leadership at Apple has still not patched one of the worst security bugs the world has ever seen.
82 -
One of our web developers reported a bug with my image api that shrunk large images to a thumbnail size. Basically looked like this img = ResizeImage(largeImage, 50); // shrink the image by 50%
The 'bug' was when he was passed in the thumbnail image and requesting a 300% increase, and the image was too pixelated.
I tried to explain that if you need the larger image, use the image from disk (since the images were already sized optimally for display) and the api was just for resizing downward.
Thinking I was done, the next day I was called into a large conference room with the company vice-president, two of the web-dev managers, and several of the web developers.
VP: "I received an alarming email saying you refused to fix that bug in your code. Is that correct?"
Me: "Bug? No, there is no bug. The image api is executing just as it is supposed to."
MGR1: "Uh...no it isn't. Images using *your* code is pixelated and unfit for our site and our customers."
MGR2: "Yes, I looked at your code and don't understand what the big deal is. Looks like a simple fix."
<web developers nodding their heads>
Me: "OK, I'll bite. What is the simple fix?"
<MGR2 looks over at one of the devs>
Dev1: "Well, for example, if we request an image resize of 300, and the image is only 50x50, only increase the size by 10. Maybe 15."
Me: "Wow..OK. So what if the image is, for example, 640x480?"
MGR1: "75. Maybe 80 if it's a picture of boots."
VP: "Oh yes, boots. We need good pictures of boots."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how to break this to you, but my code doesn't do 'maybe'. I mean, you have the image from disk.
You obviously used the api to create the thumbnail, but are trying to use the thumbnail to go back to the regular size. Why not use the original image?"
<Web-Dev managers look awkwardly towards the web devs>
Dev3: "Yea, well uh...um...that would require us to create a variable or something to store the original image. The place in the code where we need the regular image, it's easier to call your method."
Me: "Um, not really. You still have to resolve the product name from the URL path. Deriving the original file name is what you are doing already. Just do the same thing in your part of the code."
Dev2: "But we'd have to change our code"
Mgr2: "I know..I know. How about if we, for example, send you 12345.jpg and request a resize greater than 100, you go to disk and look for that image?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily>
Me: "Um, no that won't work. All I see is the image stream. I have no idea what file is and the api shouldn't be guessing, going to disk or anything like that."
Dev1: "What if we pass you the file name?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily again>
Me: "No, that would break the API contract and ...uh..wait...I'm familiar with your code. How about I make the change? I'm pretty sure I'll only have to change one method"
VP: "What! No...it’s gotta be more than that. Our site is huge."
<Mgrs and devs grumble and shift around in their chairs>
Me: "I'm done talking about this. I can change your code for you or you can do it. There is no bug and I'm not changing the api because you can't use it correctly."
Later I discovered they stopped using the resize api and wrote dynamic html to 'resize' the images on the client (download the 5+ meg images, and use the length and width properties)23 -
Yesterday, in a meeting with project stakeholders and a dev was demoing his software when an un-handled exception occurred, causing the app to crash.
Dev: “Oh..that’s weird. Doesn’t do that on my machine. Better look at the log”
- Dev looks at the log and sees the exception was a divide by zero error.
Dev: “Ohhh…yea…the average price calculation, it’s a bug in the database.”
<I burst out laughing>
Me: “That’s funny.”
<Dev manager was not laughing>
DevMgr: “What’s funny about bugs in the database?”
Me: “Divide by zero exceptions are not an indication of a data error, it’s a bug in the code.”
Dev: “Uhh…how so? The price factor is zero, which comes from a table, so that’s a bug in the database”
Me: “Jim, will you have sales with a price factor of zero?”
StakeholderJim: “Yea, for add-on items that we’re not putting on sale. Hats, gloves, things like that.”
Dev: “Steve, did anyone tell you the factor could be zero?”
DBA-Steve: “Uh...no…just that the value couldn’t be null. You guys can put whatever you want.”
DevMgr: “So, how will you fix this bug?”
DBA-Steve: “Bug? …oh…um…I guess I could default the value to 1.”
Dev: “What if the user types in a zero? Can you switch it to a 1?”
Me: “Or you check the factor value before you try to divide. That will fix the exception and Steve won’t have to do anything.”
<awkward couple of seconds of silence>
DevMgr: “Lets wrap this up. Steve, go ahead and make the necessary database changes to make sure the factor is never zero.”
StakeholderJim: “That doesn’t sound right. Add-on items should never have a factor. A value of 1 could screw up the average.”
Dev: “Don’t worry, we’ll know the difference.”
<everyone seems happy and leaves the meeting>
I completely lost any sort of brain power to say anything after Dev said that. All the little voices kept saying were ‘WTF? WTF just happened? No really…W T F just happened!?’ over and over. I still have no idea on how to articulate to anyone with any sort of sense about what happened. Thanks DevRant for letting me rant.15 -
Manager: Why haven’t you shipped any code today? It’s almost lunch.
Dev: Stuck on a bug
Manager: I’ll help you
Dev: Please don—
Manager: Have you tried thinking outside the box?
Dev: …Dear god please end my existence
Manager: You could try stack overflow too, have you ever used that site before?
Dev: 😮 🔫
Manager: Also sometimes bugs are caused by npm modules so rule that out first
Dev: *On knees praying to Zues for forgiveness and/or conveiniently placed lightning strike*12 -
User: We have been dealing with this bug for a month now! How come nobody has fixed it?
Dev: Who did notify about this issue?
User: You’re not listening we have been dealing with this for a MONTH!
Dev: When this issue first occurred did you tell anyone?
User: Yes!
Dev: Who?
User: …. Ok I don’t remember but I know I said something to someone. Anyway it doesn’t matter, your job is IT so how come this isn’t fixed?
Dev: Did you have an email? Ticket number? Teams message? Any record of where this was dropped?
User: I think you’re missing the point. We haven’t been able to do out jobs for A MONTH. We’ve just been sitting around completely helpless. We’ve been trying to figure a system using paper and pencil to replace the electronic one but it’s too complicated. How come this wasn’t fixed the second it happened?
Dev: It’s hard to respond to an issue if it’s not brought to out attention.
User: Ok but we are too busy to create a ticket! We have a million things to do and we can’t do any of them because your app doesn’t work! We’ve been sitting here telling each other how terrible this system is AND IT HAS BEEN A MONTH.
Dev: …. Yeah I got that12 -
Client: “Hey this thing isn’t working correctly.”
Me: “Hmm, looks like there was a bug in the last update. The team and I are going to work on a fix. In the meantime here’s a tool to help you get what you need.”
Client:”Yay!”
*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey this thing isn’t working.”
Me:”Hey, yeah, it’s the same thing. That bug I told you about? Yeah, we’re still working on it. We’ll let you know when it’s finished I promise but we’re trying to fix it without introducing more bugs.”
Client:”Ok sounds good.”
*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey this thing isn’t working.”
Me:”Bro...we just went over this...”
*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey seems like there’s a bug in our system that was found by -insert random coworker’s name here-. Are we looking into to this?”
Me:”Wtf dude.”
*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey this thing isn’t working.”
Me: -smashes my face against keyboard-7 -
A guide to estimations.
1) don’t give an immediate answer. The first “timeframe” you give will be held against you and will result in overtime and working weekends.
2) think of a relevant piece of work and the time that took.
2.1) if it’s something you haven’t done before, add some adequate research time.
3) allow half a day of testing for every day of development.
4) add a day as buffer - this is good for on the fly bug fixes
5) calculate time
6) now give an educated estimate.
7) this should take you 5 seconds to get through mentally.
8) if scope creep occurs: goto:15 -
From Mr Robot
“Most coders think debugging hardware is about fixing a mistake.
But that's bullshit.
Debugging’s actually all about finding the bug.
About understanding why the bug was there to begin with.
About knowing that it’s existence was no accident.”
— ELLIOT
1 -
My first contribution to a GitHub project was finally merged to the master branch today! It was just a bug fix but it’s a start!!11
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Not really a bug, but once I tried to learn building function ajax per table asynchronously instead of calling all of them at once. Spend like couple of hours of trial of error. It wasn’t needed at the time, but suddenly I need to fetch something separately because of a new feature. Just write a couple and line it’s done
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Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”
4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”4 -
“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.”1 -
Cool, I found a bug in Ruby!
And it’s preventing my debugging from working!
Asjfkladfsj
It’s 2:30am and I want to finish this crap.
No, I’m not doing any work tomorrow. I’m taking the day off to sleep.15 -
So I was using Coffee Meet Bagel to talk to a girl who is currently travelling. We noticed that the messages were sorted out of orders with incorrect time due to the different time zone we are in.
So naturally, I sent them a big report.
Their support team replied by telling me to do the usual. Restart, update, reinstall, delete everything etc (it’s their default answer!!).
I told them I have done those.
They then rephrased my bug report and told me this is expected as the chat was between two parties with a different time so the messages are sorted out of order due to the time difference.
I guess most developer will get ticked off by that... so I sent them a few pseudo code on how chat across different time zones should have been dealt with...
Life of a developer. Debugging and coding even when on a dating app... 🤷🏽♂️
11 -
Ever want to smack someone in the face with a sea bass? Like left out of the water for 3 days with all kinds of juicy and smelly goodness?
When we get an X number system errors, an email is sent to our team. Couple of hours ago I had to move the alerts from one system to another, re-naming some because I suck at naming things. I guess when I copied, I duplicated one. About an hour ago we get a system alert (as it should, there was a server hiccup) and there were two emails with the same data (just named differently)
DevA: “Why are there two emails?”
Me: “Oh, that’s me. I think I copied the alert instead of move. I’ll fix it tomorrow.”
DevA: “Hmm, but the data is the same. It’s a duplicate.”
Me: “Yea, I know. Networking responded and said it’s fixed. We won’t get another email.”
- 15 minutes later
DevA leans over and says to the boss (who was in a meeting and just sat down)…
DevA: “I looked at the alert, it’s duplicated, but the name is different. I don’t understand why.”
Me: “Like I said, the alert is duplicated. When I migrated, I copied instead of moved. No big deal.”
DevA: “Oh …oh ..yea.…OK.”
- 5 minutes later
DevA: “I looked at the query, we might have to add a filter to prevent duplicate emails. Probably some logic problems in the search.”
Me: “I just deleted the duplicate alert.”
DevA: “Oh…OK…that fixes it too.”
Good lord…as I was typing this, he just told another dev the ‘duplicate’ emails were because of a logic bug in the search. I’m getting my fishing pole. -
Finally finished the screwdriver followup ticket. I think.
I spent almost two full days (14 hours) on a seemingly simple bug on Friday, and then another four hours yesterday. Worse yet: I can’t test this locally due to how Apple notifications work, so I can only debug this on one particular server that lives outside of our VPN — which is ofc in high demand. And the servers are unreliable, often have incorrect configuration, missing data, random 504s, and ssh likes to disconnect. Especially while running setup scripts, hence the above. So it’s difficult to know if things are failing because there’s a bug or the server is just a piece of shit, or just doesn’t like you that day.
But the worst fucking part of all? The bug appeared different on Monday than it did on Friday. Like, significantly different.
On Friday, a particular event killed all notifications for all subsequent events thereafter, even unrelated ones, and nothing would cause them to work again. This had me diving through the bowels of several systems, scouring the application logs, replicating the issue across multiple devices, etc. I verified the exact same behavior several times over, and it made absolutely no sense. I wrote specs to verify the screwdriver code worked as expected, and it always did. But an integration test that used consumer-facing controller actions exhibited the behavior, so it wasn’t in my code.
On Monday while someone else was watching: That particular event killed all notifications but ONLY FOR RELATED EVENTS, AND THEY RESUMED AFTER ANOTHER EVENT. All other events and their notifications worked perfectly.
AKL;SJF;LSF
I think I fixed it — waiting on verification — and if it is indeed fixed, it was because two fucking push event records were treated as unique and silently failing to save, run callbacks, etc.
BUT THIS DOESN’T MATCH WHAT I VERIFIED MULTIPLE TIMES! ASDFJ;AKLSDF
I’m so fucking done with this bs.8 -
Might be more of a self-rant.. We’re developing an application with token-based authentication.
It’s a big an complex authentication model and flow, which we wrapped up a month ago. All of us very proud of it.
All of a sudden none of it worked.
We debugged for days, there were no errors or anything to trace what was happening.
Today we realized that we set the expiration of the token to 20 years.
Aaaand the expiration time is later on converted to epoch.
Guess what happens when you try to use a value > 2 147 483 647 in C#? Stuff blows up, cuz that’s the limit of an int32.
So yeah, feels good having prepared for the Y2K38 bug already, even though we’ll be replaced by AI writing better software than my dumb ass by then.
(To be fair, it was hidden in Microsoft Owin, which could use some error handling and/or proper messages..) -
*At the daily status meeting*
Manager: I don’t have anything to table or anything I want to ask about. I honestly don’t know what the point of this meeting even is.
*Throughout every other living breathing moment of time*
Manager: Hey, I had an idea
Manager: Hey, I wanted to get your thoughts on something
Manager: Hey, what do you think about…
Manager: Hey, what are you currently working on?
Manager: Do you think you could just *sneak* in this new feature request and have it to me by EOD?
Manager: Hey, I just sent you an email
The email: Hey I think I found a bug, it’s with image alignment in Microsoft Word and it’s pretty breaking to my productivity report. Do you think you could take a look right now? Thoughts?5 -
Shit Developers say:
Fuck you Jasmine and your camelCase
I’ve been wrestling cucumbers all day
Oh no all the cucumbers are broken
In a fit of refactoring madness I have gone and changed a lot
Did you seriously just give ME nil?... No!
If the shit sticks, then we put nice paint on it
Fucking red dot motherfucker (Ben and his failing specs)
You know what we don’t do often..kill each others builds. Kill them and reschedule for later. Mwahaha ha ha.
This build is going to be so rad...(5mins later)...Ok this is not going to pass..I can feel it in my waters!
Can i do that in a digital way or do i have to move my meaty body downstairs to find him?
All the donkeys have be out the gate by sundown
God, imagine if you could patent mathematical solutions
actually, I wouldn't be surprised if you can in the states "no, you can't use a laplace transform, you haven't got the rights, you have to use a less accurate transform on your matrices"
ooooo a boolean that's phrased in the negative, my favourite for code review destruction!
Fuck the police i'll call the object here
Web RTC - its super easy, all you have to do is..probably some hard stuff
I want to go to that conference so I can start arguments with dickheads about semicolons. Just for fun.
This this is not the same as that this.
Can’t come to work I can’t find any clothes. It’s best for everyone if I just don’t come in. ...2 hours later... Yeah my clothes were just in the other room and i couldn’t be fucked moving
(OH about bad bug reports) - you know when they are all like oh joogly joogly doesn’t doodle doodle and it should wobbly doodle you know? and im all like fuck i don’t know any of that shit you are talking about.
Him: "I don’t like it, it’s against REST convention its so 2006 that my eyes are bleeding. As a privileged white male i feel entitled to complain about this." Me: "you. were. eleven in 2006
Source: Kellective Github2 -
So I’m working on a project right and I don’t run it after writing 104 lines of untested code and it doesn’t work.
Which is expected but then I do some stuff and fix that, I get a new error which is great cause I’m getting closer.
Cut to tonight. I’m trying to hunt and kill this bug. And after doing nothing but copying the code to another text file so I can upload that copy and get help.
I decide to run it with a little just print statement in it to make sure it’s definitely broken and I’m not asking online for no reason.
And.. it works.. WHAT???
I uncomment the rest of the function and get rid of the print statement and scream because ITS WORKING!!
I MEAN IT HAS BUGS BUT THEYRE BUGS I CAN FIX AND FOCUS ON AFTER I FREAK OUT ABOUT IT WORKING AFTER ME CHANGING FUCKING NOTHING.8 -
*Reports bug on Firefox (bugzilla) 3 months ago*
*spend a lot of time being clear and descriptive as possible*
*gets literally no attention*
*someone else reports the exact same bug 5 days ago but with a picture and less words*
*everyone responds*
*mfw I didn’t know you could add pictures 😑*
*my bug gets closed for being a duplicate even though it’s the original*
Fuck you cunts9 -
Yet another day at work:
My job is to write test libraries for web services and test others code. Yes I know to code, and have a niche in software testing.
Sometimes developers (whose code I find bugs in) get so defensive and scream in emails and meetings if I point out an issue in their code.
Today, when I pointed a bug in his repo, a developer questioned me in an email asking if I even understood his code, and as a tester I shouldn’t look at his code and only blackbox test it.
I wish I can educate the defensive developer that sometimes, it’s okay to make mistakes and be corrected. That’s how we deliver services that doesn’t suck in production.10 -
You know, one of my worst fears as a programmer isn’t a bug, or shitty clients, it’s not even happening on my computer.
It’s when I can’t find a good playlist to listen to because the good ones I listen to way to much and I get sick of them so I get stuck with nothing and my Brain simply can’t function without a butt shaking toon!1 -
Are my rants supposed to be well documented, too? Or like submitted as if it’s a GitHub issue, where I shall add details such as what’s not working, how do you expect it to work, steps to replicate the bug, screenshots?
Why tf am I even overthinking this?! Lmao8 -
Hi ppl of devRant! I’m not really a dev but I love reading your rants :) I decided to post my first rant because I think I could use some advice from you.
Background: I’m a student just finished my first year at uni. Earlier I applied for a developer intern just for fun and somehow magically got in. However, I'm a statistics major (not even CS!) and only know basic java stuff. I guess they hired me because I speak ok english and a little french? I live in a non-English speaking country but the company has a lot of foreign customers.
The problem is, the longer I stay, the more I feel that they only hired me out of charity *sobs* There isn’t much for me to do, and most of the time I couldn’t understand what my co-workers are doing so I can’t really help them either. Plus, they don’t seem to need my language skill as much, so I kinda feel useless here.
It’s my 5th (maybe already 6th?) week here and the only thing I did was fixing an itty bitty bug that literally needed only one additional line of code. Yes it took me a while to set up the environment, learn js from scratch since they use js for this project, and locate the issue but I’m pretty sure it’d probably take someone who’s familiar with the project, like, 3 mins? And now that I’ve fixed it and the merge request was passed, I’m out of work to do again. I talked to the lead and he pretty much just said “read more of the code”. Guess I can do that. I’ve spent like 4 days going through the code but is this really promising?
I want to spend time on learning actual stuff rather than yet another resume ornament. So what should I do? Should I ask for more help/more work to do, or keep learning on my own (I’m quite interested in algorithms, maybe I could make use of my time to study that?), or even leave?
Sorry for the long rant. I know ass-kicking devs probably hate useless, underqualified ppl at work in real life but believe me it really hurts to be one and I hate myself enough already so I’d appreciate any thoughts/advice :/10 -
So in the project I’m working on we were about to do a push to live, no major functionality just minor adjustments and nice to have stuff. One of the things I did was a reminder, nothing special just sends an email out if something hasn’t been done for 3 days and then sends an email every day following. Push to live and every thing goes fine with no issues. Day 1 there are no issues. Day 2 there are no issues. Day 3 and I’m inundated with people telling me that the emails are getting sent to practically everyone, shit. What have I done? What have I missed?
So I start looking at the live database hoping for a data problem, no such luck. I look at my code looking for something blatantly obvious but nothing. I start replicating the data but I can’t reproduce this bug and it’s annoying the hell out of me. I checked one of the emails that the client sent to us more thoroughly and seen that it was sent at 07:01. This is odd as our webjob runs at 1am so I start looking at environmental factors and started looking at release management, more out of hope than expectation. I check the staging environment and see that the webjob ran at 7:00. Coincidence I thought, the webjob gets packaged on the release pipeline and everything in the database was dummy data anyway but I’d better check anyway. The database was an exact copy of the live database, turns out a “senior developer” wanted to sanity check everything by running live data through the code so he copied the database over. It was fine for the first couple of days but the data was now 3 days out of date triggering my email code and I get hit with the shit storm. I’ve never met such an incompetent developer in my fucking life, functions 700 lines long, classes that are over 20000 lines, repetition every where and the only design patterns he’s used is when he picks up a child’s colouring book. I can live with the fact that he writes code like someone on their first day of University But copying a database because he wants to “visualise” the fucking data is absolutely farcical. No wonder the project is fucked with a “developer” (in the loosest possible use of the word) is at the helm. -
Second week sick I see how my life slowed down and how meaningless everything around is, everyone is rushing about some bullshit, name it new amazing job opportunity, black Friday great deal, super duper product idea or some most important bug on production that we need to fix asap.
All that can’t wait a week when I’m healthy?
Seriously, people lost their minds in today’s world to some bullshit.
I’m to old and to depressed to care about such idiotic things. Living my life as I want and on my own peace, don’t care everyone is running, I’m slowly walking and I like it.
It’s better to walk straight than run around like an idiot.1 -
How do you clean up branches while working with PR ?!
It’s a nightmare. For each “bug” or feture there is a pull request created. As far as I know you MUST create a branch.
It’s easy to clean up GitHub (I’m just deleting branch after accepting PR. Which actually doesn’t even delete it for X days or something).
But local branches. OMG. It takes me at least 10 min/week to clean up and some of our devs don’t bother. They literally have 50+ local branches.
How do you manage that ?
I’m just about to write a script which deletes every local branch except selected (Yep UI with list of branches). But seems like overkill.5 -
Is it sad that I look forward to the weekend so that I can actually write some code rather than:
- Helping clients that can’t / won’t read docs
- Explaining to test colleagues that we need repro steps and can’t fix a bug based on “I was doing something and it crashed”
- Writing any regular expressions for another dev where it’s more complicated than ^[A-Z0-9]*$
- Wading through legacy VBA that’s littered with GoTo, global variables (even i, j and k for loops are fucking global!) and all the other fucking lazy shortcuts that save you 10 seconds at dev time and cost you (which ends up meaning me) hours in subsequent debugging.
I love writing code, and I think I’m pretty good at it, so can I please just get on with it?
Fellow ranters, please tell me I’m not alone in this. -
Betty: Opens slack chat with Bob, Tony and me to ask me to fix some data for a client who messed the setup. (Don’t worry just building a script that takes 3 hours to complete and that I must supervise)
Betty: Opens slack chat with Ron, Tim and me to ask me to force the system I made to ignore protocol because someone else’s fuck up made it so she didn’t get the output she expected.
Betty: proceeds to ask for status updates constantly on both chats. She also disguises them as her asking what she can do to “get it across faster” knowing there’s jack shit I or anyone can do to make it go “faster”.
Also Betty, vomits BS about my micro service being unstable in front of managers even though it is it’s correctness what brought to light a bug fucking up thousands of records silently.
Go fuck yourself Betty ☺️ and fuck the client5 -
iPhone alarm clock suddenly stopped playing sounds this week (again), fortunately my wake up time is not critical.
After every major osx upgrade I feel that I need to restart macbook more and more often cause system suddenly hangs.
Yesterday I spotted that after each restart there is information that if system hangs on login screen for a while I should restart computer again ( well thanks for advice that I don’t have to wait till I die ).
Cursor randomly disappears after I connected microsoft usb mouse ( microsoft mouse eating cursor from apple windows ).
Why I use microsoft mouse you ask ? That’s the best thing microsoft made, it’s literally indestructible. I dropped and kicked that mouse hundred times, still works perfectly fine.
I think also somehow osx forced minor bug fix upgrade once without my permission so they’re slowly going the forgotten microsoft path that is always forcing updates you don’t want to install in this particular moment.
Because their engineers know better when and why I want to update.
Looks like Apple engineering is slowly degrading or QA care less about older hardware users.
I am not used to buy new shit when old works just fine, those shiny little things are my work tools not something I show around to impress people how cool I am.
That’s all disappointing but still better then windows experience cause didn’t reinstalled osx from scratch since almost 5 years and it’s working at the same speed like it was new ( not impressed linux users here but from my previous experience with windows “registry” that means something and this hardware already paid for itself).6 -
How do you guys get into open-source? It’s hacktoctoberfest and I am trying to contribute to ANY project. I searched a lot, the popular python libraries I use don’t really have many good-first-issue. Most issues are very very specific that the time I try to even understand it, the person who actually implemented will probably resolve the bug. Where to even begin? How will I know which project to contribute to? I have googled but never really got answer. Searched projects but most of them were dead.4
-
Was working on a high priority security feature. We had an unreasonable timeline to get all of the work done. If we didn’t get the changes onto production before our deadline we faced the possibility of our entire suit being taken offline. Other parts of the company had already been shut down until the remediations could be made -so we knew the company execs weren’t bluffing.
I was the sole developer on the project. I designed it, implemented it, and organized the efforts to get it through the rest of the dev cycle. After about 3 month of work it was all up and bug free (after a few bugs had been found and squashed). I was exhausted, and ended up taking about a week and a half off to recharge.
The project consisted of restructuring our customized frontend control binding (asp.net -custom content controls), integrations with several services to replace portions of our data consumption and storage logic, and an enormous lift and shift that touched over 6k files.
When you touch this much code in such a short period of time it’s difficult to code review, to not introduce bugs, and _to not stop thinking about what potential problems your changes may be causing in the background_.3 -
AHHHHHHHHHHGGGH
I HATE VPN SETUP
- Trying OpenSwan
Installing open swan on a Debian machine.. setting up the config.
Restarting openswan. Syntax error. No syntax error to be found.
Different tutorial.. it starts! Try to connect.. I can’t connect. Look at the logs. No errors.
Tcpdump. My traffic is coming through.. all fine.. try to connect again.. it works! (Nothing changed!)
Try to ping somewhere else.. no connectivity.
Try to ping an IP in the same network.. works fine. So I have connectivity, just no internet.
Spend an hour finding out about traffic directions of which no one seems to know what they really mean.
Boss tells me to stop using openswan because it’s deprecated and replaced by strong swan..
- Strongswan
Reinstall Debian machine, install strongswan. Copy openswan config. Oh, they’re incompatible? Look up strong swan config, and the service starts.
Connect to the VPN.. it works! Again, no internet, just connectivity in the same network. Spend 2h debugging the config, disable firewalls everywhere, find an ancient bug in the Debian package related to my issues.. ok, let’s try compiling from source.. you know what, let’s not. I’ll throw this Debian machine away and try something completely different.
- pfSense
Ok, this looks easy enough! Let’s just click through the initial setup, change some firewall rules, create an L2TP VPN with a simple wizard.
Try to connect to VPN. First, it times out. Maybe a firewall issue? Turn off firewall.. ah, something happens now. I get an error message right after trying to connect to the VPN. Hmm, the port doesn’t even get opened when I enable the firewall.. this implementation seems a bit buggy.. let’s try their OpenVPN module.
Configure OpenVPN. Documentation isn’t that clear.. apparently a client isn’t actually a client but a user is a client.. ok, there’s a hidden checkbox somewhere.
Now where do I download my certificate? Oh, I need a plug-in for that.. ok, interesting. Able to download the certificate, import it, connect and.. YES!!! I can ping! But, I have no DNS..
Apparently, ICMP isn’t getting filtered but all outbound ports are.. yet the firewall is completely disabled. Maybe I need outbound NAT? Oh. There’s no clear documentation on where to configure it. Find some ancient doc, set it up, still no outbound connectivity.
AHAHAHAHHHHHHHHHHG
Then I tried VyOS. I had a great L2TP VPN working in less than 15 mins. Thank you VyOS for actually providing proper docs and proper software.3 -
PM: there’s a bug could you investigate and fix this?
Coworker: *investigates*
CW: is this correct? *shows a totally different solution to what he was asked to* *naming a variable “fn”*
Me: but that’s not what you’re asked to do. You know it’s possible to do that right (the supposedly solution)
Cw: but that would have longer code
Me: (what?) 🙃
Wtf do you mean longer code?
Cw: shorter code > spec
Me: 🤦♀️
Cw: shorter code > readability
Me: 🤦♀️1 -
Don’t have any Laptop Stickers but do have stickers on my Roller Derby Helmet, and my fav has to be:
“It’s not a bug it’s a feature!”1 -
@dfox Bug report:
Noticed a problem with the app counting the characters in comments. 3 or 4 times I’ve tried to write a comment that comes down to single digits remaining.
When trying to post I get a message like:
“Oops something went wrong trying to post your comment. It’s probably blank”
But, according to the counter, it should have been fine.3 -
I build a project for internal team around a year ago. QA did sanity and we released. Product wasn’t used and suddenly they decided they want to use project. They forgot almost everything about project feature. I had product doc and ask them to follow. Still they kept making mistake. And finally they found an edge case bug. Now these idiots making noise that product is buggy we are blocked. We are not able to use.
After I fixed it is working but these idiots are asking why there was bug and made us blocked to use product. They couldn’t follow doc to use their own product. They are just trying to pin blame on me and wash their hands. I was really pissed . I told there was bug but why the fuck it took a year to know ? And yes there is bug but it’s edge case and it happens when you guys make mistakes from your side then only it happens. Even if it is bug. What the fuck you want. Have you never made any mistake in your life? Go fuck yourself. There was bug but I don’t care. Bugs are part of release.1 -
Ok just wanna share things that got me stuck for hours on my recent project and their solution. I hope it’s gonna help someone.
To start with, when I was implementing svg to png, i set an image object’s source with a data url. Normally this is going to trigger the onload hook. However for some fucked up reason it never triggered. The solution is to use setAttribute function and then the hook will be triggered.
Second, you can get rounded triangle by setting stroke width and set stroke linejoin and line cap as round. But remember, if stroke width is 6, then it’s 3 inside and 3 outside.
Third, if you have a rotation of svg element, and later on you want to manually compute the rotated point’s position, it’s most likely some vanilla code is not going to work. You see, when you rotate for x degree, it is actually rotating -x degree. I’m not sure if it’s a bug of my code, but it’s there.
And now the worst thing: if you look up how transform on svg is performed, stackoverflow is going to tell you it’s by order. But that’s somehow not true for my project. If I do set transform to do translation then rotation, the order it was applied is actually reversed. It’s rotation first then translation, like ffs why? Who the fuck said it was in order? It’s clearly in reverse fucking order.
Ok last thing, you can scale svg around it’s center, but absolutely don’t do that because it’s gonna fuck up tanslation and rotation applied to this svg. If you need to scale, translate it first then scale it will be better.
Anyway just some things i encountered. I’m gonna stay away from svg for at least two months now1
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