!!fml

"Root, go fix this bug. It'll take you two days."

The "bug" is a feature that was never implemented for one particular payment type.

The code in question is two years old, full of typos, smells, junior-isms, and is convoluted AF. The feature's commit touched 190 files and implemented many other features as well. Thus far, I have been unable to narrow down where this particular feature's code lives for the other payment types, nor which code or payment paths lead to it. Burned out, I can barely focus on the screen, let alone follow its many twisting and dynamically-inferred paths. I hint as to the ticket's scavenger hunt nature during standup.

"But I wrote comments on the ticket telling you exactly where to look to fix it," Thundercunt admonishes in front of the team.

"Sure, you did," Root replies. "You reworded what the original dev had said in the comments 20 minutes prior, and agreed with him. His comments were helpful, but it doesn't tell me how any of it works," she continues.

TC scoffs and closes the meeting.

Root stares blankly, seeing neither code nor screen, questions her life decisions, and recalls the previous tickets she has worked on: nearly every one of them busywork, fixing other people's bugs. Bugs she never could have gotten away with if she tried.

"Why do I put up with this?" She asks. "They don't care, and it's killing me."

But the bills remain, and so must she.

"Fuck my life" she finally decides.

Craziest bug, not so much in the sense of what it was (although it was itself wacky too), but in what I went through to fix it.

The year was 1986. I was finishing up coding on a C64 demo that I had promised would be out on a specific weekend. I had invented a new demo effect for it, which was pretty much the thing we all tried to do back then because it would guarantee a modicum of "fame", and we were all hyper-ego driven back then :) So, I knew I wanted to have it perfect when people saw it, to maximize impressiveness!

The problem was that I had this ONE little pixel in the corner of the screen that would cycle through colors as the effect proceeded. A pixel totally apart from the effect itself. A pixel that should have been totally inactive the entire time as part of a black background.

A pixel that REALLY pissed me off because it ruined the utter perfection otherwise on display, and I just couldn't have that!

Now, back then, all demos were coded in straight Assembly. If you've ever done anything of even mild complexity in Assembly, then you know how much of a PITA it can be to find bugs sometimes.

This one was no exception.

This happened on a Friday, and like I said, I promised it for the weekend. Thus began my 53 hours of hell, which to this day is still the single longest stretch of time straight that I've stayed awake.

Yes, I spent literally over 2+ days, sitting in front of my computer, really only ever taking bio breaks and getting snacks (pretty sure I didn't even shower)... all to get one damn pixel to obey me. I would conquer that f'ing pixel even if it killed me in the process!

And, eventually, I did fix it. The problem?

An 'i' instead of an 'l'. I shit you not!

After all these years I really don't remember the details, except for the big one that sticks in my mind, that I had an 'i' character in some line of code where an 'l' should have been. I just kept missing it, over and over and over again. I mean, I kinda understand after many hours, your brain turns to mush. and you make more mistakes, so I get missing it after a while... but missing it early on when I was still fresh just blows my mind.

As I recall, I finally uploaded the demo to the distro sight at around 11:30pm, so at least I made my deadline before practically dropping dead in bed (and then having to get up for school the next morning- D'oh!). And it WAS a pretty impressive demo... though I never did get the fame I expected from it (most likely because it didn't get distributed far and wide enough).

And that's the story of what I'd say was my craziest bug ever, the one that probably came closest to killing me :)

You know what really grinds my gears? As a junior webdeveloper (mostly backend) I try my hardest to deliver quality content and other people's ignorance is killing me in my current job.

Let's rant about a recent project I had under my hood, for this project (a webshop) I had to restructure the database and had to include validation on basicly every field (what the heck, no validation I hear you say??), apperently they let an incompetent INTERN make this f***king webshop. The list of mistakes in this project can bring you close to the moon I'd say, seriously.

Database design 101 is basicly auto incremented ID's, and using IDs in general instead of using name (among a list of other stuff obv.). Well, this intern decided it was a good idea to filter a custom address-book module based on a NAME, so it wasn't setup as: /addressbook/{id} (unique ID, never a problem) but as /addressbook/{name}, which results in only showing one address if the first names on the addresses are the same. Lots of bugs that go by this type of incompetence and ignorance. Want to hear another joke? Look no further, this guy also decided it was a great idea to generate the next ID of an order. So the ordernumber wasn't made up by the auto incremented id on the order model, but by a count of all the orders and that was the next order number. This broke so many times, unbelievable.

To close the list of mistakes off, the intern decided it was a great idea to couple the address of a user directly to an order. Because the user is able to ship stuff to addresses within his addressbook, this bug could delete whole orders out of the system by simply deleting the address in your addressbook.

Enough about my intern rant, after working my ass of and going above and beyond the expectations of the customer, the guy from sales who was responsible for it showed what an a**hole he was. Lets call this guy Tom.

Little backstory: our department is a very small part of the company but we are responsible for so much if you think about it. The company thinks we've transitioned to company wide SCRUM, but in reality we are so far from it. I think the story below is a great example of what causes this.

Anyway, we as the web department work within Gitlab. All of our issues and sprints are organized and updated within this place. The rest of the company works with FileMaker, such a pile of shit software but I've managed to work around its buggyness. Anyway, When I was done with the project described above I notified all the stakeholders, this includes Tom. I made a write-up of all the changes I had made to the project, including screenshots and examples, within Gitlab. I asked for feedback and made sure to tag Tom so he was notified of my changes to the project.

After hearing nothing for 2 weeks, guess who came to my desk yesterday? F**king tom asking what had changed during my time on the project. I told him politely to check Gitlab and said on a friendly tone that I had notified him over 2 weeks ago. He, I shit you not, blantly told me that he never looks on there "because of all the notifications" and that I should 'tell him what to do' within FileMaker (which I already had updated referencing Gitlab with the write-up of my changes). That dick move of him made me lose all respect for this guy, what an ignorant piece of shit he is afterall.

The thing that triggers me the most in the last story is that I spent so much free time to perfect the project I was working on (the webshop). I even completed some features which weren't scheduled during the sprint I was working on, and all I was asking for was a little appreciation and feedback. Instead, he showed me how ignorant and what a dick he was.

I absolutely have no reason to keep on working for this company if co-workers keep treating me like this. The code base of the webshop is now in a way better condition, but there are a dozen other projects like this one. And guess what? All writen by the same intern.

/rant :P

I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.

This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.

First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.

I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.

A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.

So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.

At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.

Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...

So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.

Never a single word from the community about me.

Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).

I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.

This junior dev is killing me with all of the bugs in the code ... like did you even test it to see if it works fml

That feeling you get when your team is killing a lot of bugs

Node: The most passive aggressive language I've had the displeasure of programming in.

Reference an undefined variable in a module? Prepare to waste your time hunting for it, because the runtime won't tell you about it until you reference a property or method on the quietly undefined module object.

Think you know how promises work? As a hiring manager, I've found that less than 5% of otherwise well-experienced devs are out of the Dunning Kruger danger zone.

Async causes edge cases and extra dev effort that add to the effort required to make a quality product.

Got a bug in one of your modules? Prepare yourself for some downtime because a single misplaced parentheses can take out the entire Node process, killing unrelated pages and even static file hosting.

All this makes for a programming experience that demands much higher cognitive load, creates more categories of bugs, and leads to code bloat/smell much more quickly than other commonly substituted languages.

From a business perspective, the money you save on scaling (assuming your app is more compute efficient under Node) is wasted on salaries and opportunity costs stemming from longer dev time, more QA, and more frequent outages.

IMO, Node is an awesome experiment, a fun language, a great tool for specific use cases, and a terrible fucking choice for an entire website.

I'm working on a project that is being shipped to production this friday, so we're killing all bugs and finishing all remaining features.
Sadly, one of the main devs just took his vacation last friday for THREE WEEKS, and being the small team we are, it feels like we'll need to work non-stop extra hours every day to meet the deadline.

The problem is, I can't sleep right now and it's 2:30 am, so fuck me.

Intergalactic issues...

Killing people is bad. But, there should be a law to allow killing people who don't write proper unit tests for their code. And also those "team leaders" who approve and merge code without unit tests.

Little backstory. Starts with a question.

What is the most critical part of a quoting tool (tool for resellers to set discounts and margins and create quotations)? The calculations, right?
If one formula is incorrect in one use case, people lose real money. This is the component which the user should be able to trust 100%. Right?

Okay. So this team was supposed to create a calculation engine to support all these calculations. The development was done, and the system was given to the QA team. For the last two months, the QA team finds bugs and assigns those to the development team and the development team fix those and assigns it back to the QA team. But then the QA team realizes that something else has been broken, a different calculation.

Upon investigation, today, I found out that the developers did not write a single unit test for the entire engine. There are at least 2000 different test cases involving the formulas and the QA team was doing all of that manually.

Now, Our continuous integration tool mandates coverage of 75%. What the developer did was to write a dummy test case, so that the entire code was covered.

I really really really really really think that developers should write unit tests, and proper unit tests, for each of the code lines (or, “logical blocks of code”) they write.

Goddamn it! I'm trying my absolute best to get all the bugs you keep complaining about, but when you don't bother to explain exactly what you did to get to the bug you're making it really hard for me to help you. I know there's a goddamn deadline but you're killing me by making me take shots in the dark!!! FUCCCCCCCCCCCK!

Is there anything worse than bugs that you can reproduce easy but lack exception/error messages so you can't fix it?

I'm working on a hobby project for Android and I can't solve a bug and it's killing me (the whole project depend on it). I went through all phases:

1. I notice the bug early but couldnt reproduce it so I let it be.
2. I notice it happen a lot when I started to use the framework for real. Decided now that I need to fix it.
3. Found the exact way to reproduce it.
4. Trying different ways to fix it, nothing works.
5. Write question on stack overflow, no answers.
6. ???

It feels like if you can reproduce the bug 100% of the time it should be easy to fix right? Well hell no - no exceptions, no error message and adb hangs until I stop the procedur. The last kick in the balls? When I stop the procedur I get all logcat messages back and everything look like normal. Just give me a damn error message! Tell me what you're doing or what I'm doing wrong!

Don't know if i have to focus on fixing bugs in my code or killing annoying bugs in the room.

I'm currently working on a dynamics CRM project which has been going on for almost a year, we're on week 19 of defect rectification brought on by a mixture of the clients abysmal testing and spec writing and the pain of debugging in Dynamics.

This project has left me emotionally and physically drained. I used to love where I worked and the guys I worked with but right now I'm the lowest I've felt in a long time.

I have autism and I really struggle with situations I have little control over, I also pride myself on being able to diagnose and fix problems quickly, I've been working on the same 2 bugs for the last 3 week's. I squashed one on Friday but this other one is persistent and I feel like it's killing me.

I've mentioned my low mood to my boss who could only say "It will be over soon". Well I was supposed to be transferred to a new none dynamics project in September, but yeah that didn't happen.

I really enjoy Angular and I've found this long project has caused my skills in it to rust to the point where even the most basic elements are a struggle.

I hate Dynamics and I hate the prospect of going in tomorrow and facing it again.

It's 3AM and here I am trying to fix the mess that I made last night when I was drunk and the deadline is 12PM (only 9 hours left).. You don't but if you do know how do I kill my boss so that I would look like a bug from a software made by our company killed him to take revenge of killing the bugs?

2 years ago(jan-oct 2020) i was a college student giving his final exams. some of my personal stats were:

- current knowledge of Android Framework and associated stuff(android, java, kotlin, making and deploying apps , best practises, etc) : 30%
- current knowledge of Web tech (html/css/js/php): 5%
- current knowledge of creating backend/frontend apps:2%
also
- free time: somewhat
- Personal health: barely caring about

====

Same year i got my first job (oct 2020) which i switched in next year (oct 2021). before joining the next(my current) job, my personal stats were:
- current knowledge of Java : 30%
- current knowledge of Kotlin : 70-80%
- current knowledge of Android and Android Stuff(the framework, making production ready apps, deploying, best practises , etc) : 70-80%
- current knowledge of Web tech (html/css/js/php): 3-5%
- current knowledge of creating backend/frontend apps:1%
also:
- Free time: lol, i was working at 1 am too
- Personal health: even lesser caring about, body fats and thick muscles at various places

====

it will be almost a year of me working for these guys in November and this has been an interesting year so far. the stats are:
- current knowledge of Java : 35%
- current knowledge of Kotlin : 20-30%
- current knowledge of Android and Android Stuff(the framework, making production ready apps, deploying, best practises , etc) : 20-30%
- current knowledge of Web tech (html/css/js/node/react): 20-25%
- current knowledge of new stuff* (cordova,unity,flutter, react native, ios) : 5-10%
- current knowledge of creating backend/frontend apps:10-15%
also:
- Free time: a good amount of free time, like in addition to weekends and festivals, i take 2-4 leaves every month
- Personal health: improving a lot. loosing weight, gaining muscles, getting better stamina at running and other activities

====

So i am currently at a weird place. As from my stats, you can see that previously i was in a android heavy role in a company that put a lot of pressure, but i was able to become a better sellable dev through it.

My current role is also of an android dev here, but we maintain b2b products and i am sometimes asked to fix bugs in hybrid apps like unity, react native and cordova, so gained a few knowledge there too. and since i have a lot of free time in my hand, i explored a bit of web technologies too (apart from enjoying a relaxing life and focusing on personal health)

However my main concern is that am becoming a less sellable Dev. The lack of exposure/will to work on android tech has made me outdated from a framework that was once my stronghold. remember that i joined my first company purely because of my passion and knowledge of android os.

When i got offer from this company, i also had another, $5000/year lesser offer in hand. both of these offers were very generous , but i went with the greed and took the offer from this company despite knowing that they are looking for someone who will act as a developer-maintainer kind of person, while the other company giving lesser pay had a need of a pure android engineer.

So i am currently 24. should i keep on doing this relaxing but slowly killing job, or go into a painful, pressurizing but probably making me a better "android" engineer job ?