> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.

Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)

Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.

So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.

And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.

Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...

People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.

Summary

PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.

That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.

Enjoy.

I love how the Keybase Linux client installs itself straight into /keybase. Unix directory structure guidelines? Oh no, those don't apply to us. And after uninstalling the application they don't even remove the directory. Leaving dirt and not even having the courtesy to clean it up. Their engineers sure are one of a kind.

Also, remember that EFAIL case? I received an email from them at the time, stating some stuff that was about as consistent as their respect for Unix directory structure guidelines. Overtyping straight from said email here:

[…] and our filesystem all do not use PGP.
> whatever that means.

The only time you'll ever use PGP encryption in Keybase is when you're sitting there thinking "Oh, I really want to use legacy PGP encryption."
> Legacy encryption.. yeah right. Just as legacy as Vim is, isn't it?

You have PGP as part of your cryptographic identity.
> OH REALLY?! NO SHIT!!! I ACTIVELY USED 3 OS'S AND FAILED ON 2 BECAUSE OF YOUR SHITTY CLIENT, JUST TO UPLOAD MY FUCKING PUBLIC KEY!!!

You'll want to remove your PGP key from your Keybase identity.
> Hmm, yeah you might want to do so. Not because EFAIL or anything, just because Keybase clearly is a total failure on all levels.

Written quickly,
the Keybase team
> Well that's fucking clear. Could've taken some time to think before hitting "Send" though.

Don't get me wrong, I love the initiatives like this with all my heart, and greatly encourage secure messaging that leverages PGP. But when the implementation sucks this much, I start to ask myself questions about whether I should really trust this thing with my private conversations. Luckily I refrained from uploading my private key to their servers, otherwise I would've been really fucked.

Another project with legacy code got just dusted off at work. Shits fucked beyond recognition! We got:
- Rando variable names that mean nothing
- Timers running with a cycle time of 2.5ms if you start them with the multiplier 1.
- An Interrupt routine thats 300 lines long.
- Another interrupt thats starting an ADC conversion and waiting for it to complete before returning.
- For loops that start with one and subtract one from the iterator in the loop
- Every value that would normally be expressed as a regular number is written down in Hex. Eg: if(val==0x05)
- State machine built without writing down which state is which. Its just a number. (In hex obviously!)
- All running on a Microcontroller you cant debug on.
- Using a compiler no one has ever heard of before.
- Weird ass Port manipulations
- 15 different .hex and .elf files with no clue whats in them.
- No version control
- We tried explaining the code to a monkey and it hanged itself.

Folks...

I think I need to get away from web development...

Honestly, no grudge held against web/mobile development itsef... But the projects, the teams, the workflows... It's always shitty af.

I'm fed up with the bad architecture, poor management decisions, unmaintained legacy code, broken windows, arrogant juniors, arrogant seniors, code smells left to rot, the freaking red door... Hell! The fucking "we don't have time for that" answer to testing... Damn!

Been there done that.

Feels like it's always the same crap and unfortunately, it's rare to start a professional project from scratch.

Fucking angular, broken piece of shit.
Fucking react (& RN) community modules, broken pieces of shit.
Fucking lazy-ass node developers.
Fucking ES and fucking garbage proposals submitted to the TC39.

I wish I could do Haskell / Rust / Clojure professionally... I could even enjoy Go with a good team... Anything but that huge pile of dogshit JS and its community of brainfucked so-called developers.

Worst dev experience was when I was asked to "take a look at" a propriatery Windows app built by a now non-existent team at the company.

The code base resembled the quality of legacy code where about every hour I felt like I needed to vomit. But that wasn't even the worst part for me.

This was the first time I had to develop on Windows and was sent a separate dedicated laptop for this. Now I started to have a bad feeling about this because as far as I had known every single dev at the company used company Macs for development (including me for other projects). It turned out the Windows laptop was indeed configured for a non-dev team :)

Having liased with IT admins for a day I finally got my environment set up and hit install on the dependencies and in 10 minutes it got to less than 10%. The laptop was pretty powerful so I couldn't belive wtf was going on, fans were ramping. Checked task manager and the company Anti-Malware was hogging the whole CPU.

I was so mad that I managed to get the IT admins to completely disable it and then it was only the pain of working with shitty code on Windows which would have been more than enough from the start. Thankfully it only lasted a week.

A couple of months ago, the father of a friend of mine, asked me if I wanted to help him out with a project.

His late father, whom he inherited a one-person upholstering company from, once created a system in filemaker to do, among others, his financial administration. This system, however, grew organically as time went by, but he passed away before he explained to his son how it worked.

Now this man was running the company, using the parts of the system that he knows, but things were starting to break down. He asked me if I could help him understand what is going on and fix a couple of things.

However, the more I look at it, the more I realize what a monstrosity this has become, because the system has never been cleaned up. For example:

- There is a suppliers table, with the columns "E-MAIL" and "EMAIL". The latter one containing the supplier's website address.
- In order to be able to generate year reports, at the start of a year he copies the previous year's file, removes all records from it and starts using that as the new year's file. (This year, he accidentally created a shortcut instead of copying...)
- Some tables have a misterious column called "#1". It always contains a 1.
- The system consists of about 20 files, each of them containing a single table, although only 10 of them are really used. The other ones are just legacy.
- File, table, column, and layout names are capitalized randomly (all caps, no cap, starting uppercase) and are usually abbreviations, like "st2", "oms3", "off\rek", "b", "VERDBEST6" and "antst".
- One table has 92 columns.
- Of those 92 columns, only about 20, maybe 30, are in use.

Now, my task is finding out what parts are useful and in use, extracting those and create a baby monster out of the giant monster this system has become.

Sidenote: I actually enjoy having to learn a bit about accounting in order to understand this. Planning to use the knowledge I gain to keep track of my own finances.

That one horrendous in-house legacy application that should be ditched, but no one is brave enough to start building replacement from scratch ... Every company has one.

There are so many weird hacks in the quite legacy app I work with I could write a book about all them hacks…

But I must admit, the worst of them all is internal time. Yes, so some blockhead thought it’s a good idea to represent time in a manner completely removed from Datetime objects or timestamps or even string representations. Instead we deal with them as intervals represented by integers - and because this is not fucked up enough by itself, the internal time doesn’t start at midnight, yet the integer representations do. It’s a bloody mess. No wonder most of the bugs we face have to do with dates and time…

It grinds my gears to no end as to how insanely BAD most Electrical engineering software is. Lets start with Tina. A circuit simulator. A few versions ago it was rather good but now it feel like its built upon more legacy crap than fucking Windows! This causes it to have memory access violations and crashes even when you look at it from an odd angle.
On topic of circuit simulation. LT-Spice! It has less errors than Tina but is impossible to use without being lobotomized first. Who the FUCK decided it was a good idea to reinvent keyboard shortcuts by movin all of them to the F-row at the top of the keyboard. Also there is no option to delete a component. YOU NEED TO USE CUT IN ORDER TO REMOVE IT!
And at last Altium Designer for Layouting and Schematics. Whose license costs 9 grand. No one outside of some companies will buy this because of the price. Altium realized this and made two watered down versions of it. Which dont really get updates anymore. (last one was in 2018) So they essentially made a cash grab from people who cant afford their actual product. There also exist other (and a lot cheaper) products than what Altium offers. The problem is that they dont work well with interoperability. Schematics drawn in one program will look distorted in another or not import at all. And since Altium is the industry standard you got yourself this nice steaming soup of impossible collaboration. Its kinda like Adobe being absolute shit at progressing their software just because they got no competition. Or rather they do but the industry wont switch cause adobe is so engraved into it.

Every single stakeholder in my company tells me that I should be working on something different, every time I talk to them. For example - we've got some issues, that I've ranted on previously. I go to my manager, and tell him that it's going to take longer than I'd hoped, because the author of this part of the codebase wasn't familiar with functional programming or OOP, didn't document anything, and just generally produced an unmaintainable, borderline indescribable mess. The next guy after him made it all so much worse, because they're both a couple of tryhard douchebags, and I hope they fucking die. For real. I hope fire ants are involved.

Anyway, getting carried away there, whew. So I tell my manager that we'd be further ahead just replacing the code, because it's only doing a couple of things, and should not be so complex. He says "cool, but what you really need to be doing is rebuilding this other thing." So I switch gears and work on that other thing until I hit a point that requires the input of another stakeholder. I go to talk to this guy, and all hell breaks loose "why are you working on that, this is higher priority", and I explain the sequence of events. Manager denies having said what he said, I look like an asshole, yet again. Then the old "this should be simple, just change this" from the dudes who don't know code, and don't want to know. I try to explain, offer to show them precisely why their "simple ask" is anything but, but they just start screaming about how they hate technology. Yeah, well me fucking too. I keep hearing about how much "job security" I have, but man I'm going to lose my mind at this rate. I have seventeen motherfucking things that are "emergencies", and as many fucking dumb ass unintuitive workflows to go through to get them changed. All on production, because this place is fucking stupid. Just let me discard this shitty legacy code and be done with it already. FUCK.

Thank fucking fuck it's friday. In about six, seven hours, my goal is to be so fucking wasted that I can't feel my face. Get drunk, play with the dog, install a new distro on the desktop, maybe play a little guitar (the guitar is normal sized. It's not a ukulele or anything). Perfect friday night.

I swear to god, if I read another medium post on how you managed to be focused and productive I will fucking... well... roll my eyes, make a facepalm and rant about it on devRant!

Who gives a shit if I'm unproductive and unfocused?!

Well, look at me now, I'm fucking productive while I write about you, you fucking peace off shit! And guess what? I'm not even using any of your 40 todo apps or time trackers. There is no pomodoro timer next to me or framed quotes from Steve Jobs hanging on the wall. Oh, I must be a fucking genius!

But what if YOU became unproductive?
What will happen when YOU start to procrastinate?

Do you really think the world would care?

Oh, but you are not really a writer are you? you're a developer building your app!?
Well fuck, I guess you're going to change the world than?
It's your big project. Your life's work, your legacy.

Let me remind you...

All apps will be abandoned!
All blog post will be forgotten!
Productive people will die!
Focused people will die!
Enthusiastic bloggers writing about productivity will die!
All CEOs and CTOs will die!
All developers will die!
Steve Jobs is dead!
In x years, you and I will also be dead!

Whatever you do, it's not really that important!
It's really not.

You're not going to change the world.
The world doesn't need another app.
The world doesn't need your advice on how to be productive.
You are not special.

Deal with it!

After a rough exit from one company, I was diverted into Ops just to continue to have food on the table and keeping the lights on. This, over time, unfortunately made me more or less unemployable as a dev again. Got stuck in that place 13 years doing almost no professional coding.

During the last 5 years I took courses, got side jobs writing articles and tutorials, went to interviews and generally worked hard to get the fuck out of ops and into development again.

After getting to choose between level 1 customer support and quitting in a re-org, I quit without having a new gig. I got a lucky break through someone I'd worked with earlier to start a junior position working on some legacy systems with legacy tech.

After all that work late nights churning away using up my passion for coding, I now can't make my self pick up even Advent of code or Hacktoberfest... My passion is dead... I hope I get it back, but for now I fill my spare time with my guitar...

So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.

I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".

But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.

The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".

Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.

It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.

It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.

But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.

THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!

So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.

Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...

It drives me Insane that AWS still doesn't support Swift 3 for iOS. We're almost to the point where Apple is going to drop Swift 2 support in XCode and Amazon STILL has not gotten it.

I've started deploying Gateway APIs in Objective-C and linking them to the bridging header just so we can finally move foreword in our company and quit relying on legacy Swift support. Which is something I was really trying to avoid because we don't like mixing languages unless absolutely necessary. It's not a problem, but it's incredibly annoying to me. What IS a problem is having to start new projects already using legacy code from the very beginning.

What is amazon going to do when the next release of XCode comes out? Tell all new customers to downgrade?

Why even offer native Swift APIs if you're going to go this long and still not migrate, Amazon?!

Let's face it: I am and will always be a tinkerer. Yes, I know my ways around, I can sneak into legacy code bases easily and throw new stuff in there, I've seen software stacks. But scarcely sound design, really modular. Even from the cleverer, experienced ones. They can master more complexity, so they can handle more spaghetti. Some essay from the 80's had this grand idea to organically 'grow' software. That's how it looks like most of the times: cancerous, parasitic super fungi (armillaria). Yeah, we all know have to fight bit-rot and entropy, but it was all lost before already. We'll never get rid of legacy protocols, legacy code.
And even when we go green field, start a fresh. Yeah, take a great design, make everything new, after some months of throwing features and outer constraints at the thing, it's the same old mud again.
But we can still dream on: some day I will design great APIs, I will have great test coverage, documentation, UML design, autometed tests, fuzzing, memchecking, I'll work professionally, clean coder style.
Pfft forget it. Maybe change for consulting, because we'll continue to dream of the 'clean' code, so you can sell the next 'recipe', development method. It's like diets. As effective. For the one selling.

Ooh what a nice feeling it is when you come back from a short vacation and everything is in the gutter... My team is divided into the two other teams... (I said divided but I ment everyone got assigned into team X... And I am the only one who was put into team Y)

Besides the whole team fiasco, I think my legacy project decided to role around in the garbage... Because I have no idea where all those bugs came from...

One positive thing is that I won't be working alone on that legacy project anymore, at the start of next week I get help from my new team... Now let's hope they don't suck!

1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.

"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."

"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."

"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "

"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"

"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)

Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.

2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.

But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.

3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.

4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.

5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.

6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)

7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.

8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.

9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.

Writing unit tests on a weekend and catching up on work that needs to be done because I m too busy on weekdays to have time to think about this...

The sad thing is test coverage is shit in the entire code base as boss just decided to start enforcing requirements now... And I have this huge migrating from legacy system project that needs to be merged. And we'll the legacy system is even shittier

So I have to write unit tests for shit code that was never written with testing in mind...

On the other hand I reworked some testing utilities to make it easier... For everyone... I want a huge bonus.... That I probably won't get...

when you think you're done coding and can finally start writing...
So you guys have seen my Unreal Engine adventures. I have to use a plugin for it, on top of everything, to extract some data. I've been using this plugin since ages on another pc, but now I had to set it up from scratch since this is a new project, new models, etc.
There is a new version. If I use the new one, it will break the chain which is to follow.
The old version is so legacy that the guy who wrote it does not remember how to set it up.

After hours, and tons of hacks and outcommenting stuff (there is physics involved with which I do nothing), it finally starts doing something. Finally!
Although I'm slowly loosing my sanity in the process....
Even if it now records the data, I cannot say if this is good enough or if the poses are all wonky now.

And that is my masters thesis. Submission deadline is on monday. Ha.
Ironically, since the start of this thesis, I felt like this will either make me or break me. ;D So much fun... FK

So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.

And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).

And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.

First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.

Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.

Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.

Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉

What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆.

I'm 22 years old and 1.5 years into my first Startup Job. (and second Dev job)
I feel kind of uncomfortable now and I would like to ask your opinions.
I'll start with the work related description of my situation and later add a bit of my life situation.

I develop as hobby since I can think. I'm pretty engaged and love to do things right. So I quickly found myself in the position of the de-facto lead fullstack Developer.
Although, to be clear, were only a few devs - which are now replaced by not so many other devs. I feel often like the only person able to design and decide and implement in a way that won't kill us later (and I spend half of my time fixing technical debt).

I mostly like what I do , because it's a challenge and I feel needed. I learn new things and I am pretty flexible in work time. (but I also often work till late in the night, sacrificing friendship time)
But there are so many things I would love to do and used to do, but now I have no motivation to develop outside of my job.
I don't really feel that what my company is doing is something I find valuable. (Image rights management)

I earn pretty well - in comparison to what I'm used to: 20€/hour, Brutto 2.800 / month for 32 hours a week. In Berlin. (Minus tax and stuff it's 1.800€). It's more than enough for what I need.
But when I see what others in similar positions earn (~4.000), I feel weird. I got promised a raise since nearly a year now. I don't feel I could demand it. I also got the hint that I could get virtual shares. But nothing happened.

Now what further complicates the situation is that I will go to Portugal in April for at least half a year, for joining a social project I love. My plan used to be that I work from there for a few hours a week - but I'm starting to hesitate as I fear that I will actually work more and it will keep me from fully being there.

So, I kind of feel emotionally attached - I like (some of) the people, I know (or at least believe) that the company will have a big problem without me. (I hold a lot of the knowledge for legacy applications) .
But I also feel like I'm putting too much of myself into the company and it is not really giving me back. And it's also not so much worth it... Or is it?

Should I stick to the company and keep my pretty secure position and be financially supported during my time in Portugal, while possibly sacrificing my time there?
Should I ask for a raise (possibly even retroactively) and then still quit later? (they will probably try to get my 1 month of cancelation period upped to 3).

Also, is this a risk for my "career"?

Serverless and death of Programming?!

_TL;DR_
I hate serverless at work, love it at home, what's your advice?
- Is this the way things be from now on, suck it up.
- This will mature soon and Code will be king again.
- Look for legacy code work on big Java monolith or something.
- Do front-end which is not yet ruined.
- Start my own stuff.

_Long Rant_

Once one mechanic told me "I become mechanic to escape electrical engineering, but with modern cars...". I'm having similar feelings about programming now.

_Serverless Won_
All of the sudden everyone is doing Serverless, so I looked into it too, accidentally joined the company that does enterprise scale Serverless mostly.
First of all, I like serverless (AWS Lambda in specific) and what it enables - it makes 100% sense and 100% business sense for 80% of time.

So all is great? Not so much... I love it as independent developer, as it enables me to quickly launch products I would have been hesitant due to effort required before. However I hate it in my work - to be continued bellow...

_I'm fake engineer_
I love programming! I love writing code. I'm not really an engineer in the sense that I don't like hustle with tools and spending days fixing obscure environment issues, I rather strive for clean environment where there's nothing between me and code. Of course world is not perfect and I had to tolerate some amounts of hustle like Java and it's application servers, JVM issues, tools, environments... JS tools (although pain is not even close to Java), then it was Docker-ization abuse everywhere, but along the way it was more or less programming at the center. Code was the king, devOps and business skills become very important to developers but still second to code. Distinction here is not that I can't or don't do engineering, its that it requires effort, while coding is just natural thing that I can do with zero motivation.

_Programming is Dead?!_
Why I hate Serverless at work? Because it's a mess - I had a glimpse of this mess with microservices, but this is way worse...

On business/social level:
- First of all developers will be operations now and it's uphill battle to push for separation on business level and also infrastructure specifics are harder to isolate. I liked previous dev-devops collaboration before - everyone doing the thing that are better at.
- Devs now have to be good at code, devOps and business in many organisations.
- Shift of power balance - Code is no longer the king among developers and I'm seeing it now. Code quality drops, junior devs have too hard of the time to learn proper coding practices while AWS/Terraform/... is the main productivity factors. E.g. same code guru on code reviews in old days - respectable performer and source of Truth, now - rambling looser who couldn't get his lambda configured properly.

On not enjoying work:
- Lets start with fact - Code, Terraform, AWS, Business mess - you have to deal with all of it and with close to equal % amount of time now, I want to code mostly, at least 50% of time.
- Everything is in the air ("cloud computing" after all) - gone are the days of starting application and seeing results. Everything holds on assumptions that will only be tested in actual environment. Zero feedback loop - I assume I get this request/SQS message/..., I assume I have configured all the things correctly in sea of Terraform configs and modules from other repos - SQS queues, environment variables... I assume I taken in consideration tens of different terraform configurations of other lambdas/things that might be affected...

It's a such a pleasure now, after the work to open my code editor and work on my personal React.js app...

More of a moaning than ranting.

I feel like I care a bit too much.

I'm not a great programmer - I may be decent, but nothing more. I know Java and C# enough to write production code that works but as I gather more experience it's getting more and more annoying that I have no one to teach me in work. All I know is what I have learned by myself, from courses online, books and just writing code.

And what drives me crazy is how I'm being pushed from one project and technology to another! It's been a week since I've returned from my exams and I've already worked in C# (ASP.Net Core, MS Office AddIn, WPF, .Net console app), Java (Spring, some legacy project with JBoss, Android) and to top it all, I had to come back to the worst project I've ever been in, where I'm implementing some third party system to county administration, just to finish it off.

I'm happy to gather experience - invaluable with only two years of real, production experience, but I can't focus on one thing because I'm immediately forced to work on another. For some reason I'm seen as Jack-of-all-trades but I really don't feel like that. It makes me anxious as fuck. Not to mention that my personal development as a Dev is held off because of working all alone with no supervisor.

Post Scriptum
Fuck my boss. He won't let me refractor our biggest project yet (console, C#) because "he can listen to my moaning all day but when clients start complaining he has to act fast". Yeah, right. Wish me luck with fixing sluggish performance without reworking base of the app.

Idk why but this morning I was thinking about this high school elective class where we learned Adobe flash. But specifically 2 instances where I ignored the teacher and did my own thing

1. We were using Sprite sheets and he had us use photoshop to cut out the Sprite to a different layer and manually save each Sprite one by one to disk to use in flash. Some sheets had 50 fucking sprites
So I found a script for Adobe (action script I think they called their Javascript derivative) that exported every layer for me without all the manual clicking. There is probably an even better way. But this worked for how lazy I was back then

2. Our final projects we could do anything but he suggested not doing anything too complicated cause of time constraints and he barely taught is the scrptinh language for Adobe flash so making flash games was almost out of the question.
Me being stupid really wanted to make a working pong game. So I spent too long watching a German (i dont know German) tutorial video I found, and troubleshooting outdated code from that video. And improving things where I could with my limited knowledge made worse cause I wasn't interested in programming and didn't start learning python until the following year

Yeah don't know why I was thinking about those. But I feel it's a good perspective on how far I've come. From hacking together a pong clone with no skills, to being hired to automate and optimize processes and legacy projects

I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)

I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table

Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.

Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.

Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.

All of the above pay the same salary.

Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).

On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.

On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.

I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.

Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.

I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.

I have a small NUC-like machine in my home with an old external hdd connected to it. I use it to run my local gitlab, nextcloud and to test a few websites I build for the lolz.
If you too have a homelab, whether it's a single raspberry or an entire room full or racks, you know damn well that everything you have running locally as a web service keeps going until it doesn't, for whatever fucking reason. This time, it was the turn of my nextcloud.
The machine has arch linux running, I chose it since I already use it on my coding laptop and being a rolling release means I don't have to manually upgrade to a newer version, risking various fuck-ups and consequent screaming of profanity.
The downside is that arch is a bleeding-edge distro, so, despite being pretty good for what concerns security, as updates are pushed out some packages may still require legacy software to work as intended, since obviously not all developers for all packages can release simultaneously.
The problem was that php reached 8.2.x but nextcloud couldn't use anything beyond 8.1, so the highlighted solution was to download php-legacy, a package with a set of utilities which the cloud could use instead of mainline php.

Pretty easy, right? fuck my life, here we go.

I edited apache-httpd's configurations to link the new libraries, updated every reference in every virtual host that could possibly screw up the web server.

Done.

Then I went on and disabled the php-fpm mainline, creating a new systemd unit that would instead run the legacy executable and afterwards I edited nextcloud's additional configs so they use that instead.

Done, getting a bit dizzy, but I reboot everything and breathe.

At this point the migration should be complete, but wait, the server returns an error saying that the application is still trying to use php 8.2+...wait, what in the sysadmin Christ?

Back to nextcloud config, everything is set, everything else in every other fucking php-legacy and web server is fine, the old fpm service is disabled, I am confused, and why in the FUCKING FUCK is the new php-fpm unit failing to start at boot with "error 78/config - directory not found"? Hello? Am I being trolled by a shitty dual-core amazon fake NUC?
Maybe yes, cause it turns out that the unit was referencing a directory in the external hdd, which gets mounted at boot time after the unit itself starts, so nothing much, just a matter of tinkering with cron jobs, a reboot and at least this one is off my balls.

But why still isn't the server responding correctly? why? WHY?

After slamming my cock on the keyboard here and there scrolling back through all the config files I think to myself, hmmm, my gitlab is working flawlessly, well yeah, I didn't need to install the whole web stack, everything was nice and easy wrapped in a docker container...so why am I even here, why the fuck am I bothering with all this layered web-app bullshit, why don't I just run the up-to-date docker image that someone else has already set up for me, back up all the data and reupload them on the application?

Oh joy, you can't imagine, after 3...almost 4 hours of pure computer-touching the relief I had from seeing the blue web page with the "welcome to nextcloud" title.

Right now it's copying back all the files, and the external hdd is now linked to include the data folder.
Like really, everything was solved in two lines of bash.

I am still fuming, but at least I learned a valuable lesson, if you want a service up for yourself, implement it and deploy it as fucking easy straight-forward as you can, giving MAXIMUM priority to already fully-working options that are out there just waiting to be downloaded and used. I swing my scrotal sack on web-apps elegance as long as it's MY homelab in MY place.

Eat a fat dick php.

sudo pacman -Rns nextcloud
sudo systemctl disable --now php-fpm-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns php-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns $(sudo pacman -Qdtq)

Modern Web Developer
(To the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" from Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance")

I am the very model of a modern web developer
I’m quite fluent with JavaScript; An HTML whisperer
My code is clean and elegant, I genuinely innovate
And even know my way around a Promise and async / await

I’m very well acquainted too with matters vector graphical
I understand why SVG coordinates seem magical
And even without Photoshop I elegantly can produce
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose

[Chorus]
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose

I'm quite adept at ES6 expressions like destructuring
I know the ins and outs of functional reactive programming
In short, in matters browser-based or Node.js if you prefer
I am the very model of a modern web developer

[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer

I know our mythic history, the humble start, the browser wars
I know why Douglas Crockford fought the battle over ES4
The World Wide Web Consortium and Ecma International
My knowledge of our legacy is truly supernatural

With LESS and SASS and CSS, designing for mobility
I’ll perfectly apply the right amount of specificity
From custom fonts and parallax to grid and flex and border-box
I know most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox

[Chorus]
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox

And when it comes to lazy loading, bundling up and splitting code
There’s nothing quite like Webpack, which of course is built on top of Node
Considering my resume, I’m certain that you will concur
I am the very model of a modern web developer

[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer

When new frameworks and libraries emerge I must be ravenous
And gobble up the hot new thing, my appetite is bottomless
React and Vue and Angular, Immutable, RxJS
The list will be outdated long before I'm finished singing this

My pull requests rely on multitudinous utilities
To help me lint and test and build, a deluge of analyses
And every single day there are a hundred thousand more to learn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn

[Chorus]
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn

This pace is agonizing! Code from yesterday is obsolete!
The speed of innovation is enough to knock me off my feet!
It's happening too fast! I can’t keep up! I’m tired! It’s all a blur!
I am the very model of a modern web developer!

[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer!

I've just joined a new company out of despair after several month out of jobs without being able to even get interviews.
I've been warned about the code being a bit behind with modern Android stack, they needed to migrate from rx to coroutine and compose is not a priority at the moment.
Fine with it, I like handling and planning migration, that's a nice challenge.
But if only that were the only problems !! Far from it, the code is a formidable mess, I've never seen so much amateurism... Most of it was written from the previous Lead Dev who stayed there for years and touched everything with their very bad practices.
I don't even know where to start honestly...
While the code is in Kotlin, it stink Java. Nothing wrong about Java, but if you code in kotlin, you need to understand what kotlin try to achieve. And that's not the case here. There is freaking nullable everywhere, for no reason at all, the data classes contains lot of var in their constructors, equals are override to compare only one or 2 params and no hashcode override with it.
Sealed class, what for ?! Let me just write a List<Pair<Enum, Any>> and cast your any depending on the enum !
Oh and you know what, let's cast everywhere, no check, and for once no null safe, there is enough nullable in the code !

What about the reactive part ? well let's recreate a kind of broken eventbus with rx ! Cause why not ?!
The viewmodel observable don't contain data, they just contain enum for the progress of the states we're checking.
In the viewmodel function we update that enum states and emit it to be observed and make the data available as a var for the view to pick it up when needed.
But why put the business logic in the viewmodel, let's put in the views, and grab and check the variable contain in the viewmodel whenever it fits.
Testing the business logic ? uh let me just test my variable initialisation in the viewmodel instead.
The vm, the views, make about 2000 lines, the test over 3000, and not a single test really test the business logic in it ! I've made big refactoring we're all the tests stayed green, while the function are full of side effects ! WTF ?!
Oh and what about that migration from rx to coroutine ? well better not break the existing code and continue writting like rx, everything is cold flow ! We just need to store a boolean saying if we already did our call to the data layer then we decide to start our flow or not.
As for the RecyclerView, having too many viewHolder is just so annoying, let's put all our different views in one, and hide what we don't need.
Keystore has been push on the repo, but it's private no ? So who cares ?!
And wait i'm not done ! Some of the main brick of the apps depends on library that hasn't been updated for years, and you know what... yes they were hosted on Jcenter and it's only now that they decide to do something about it, we we're warned about the sunset of jcenter 2 years ago !!!!
So what about compose ? What do you want with compose ?! there is no design system in that app obviously, so don't even think about it !
And there... among all of that mess, I'm supposed to do code review... how the fuck do you do a code review when all the code that is around stink ?!
And there is so much more but by now I'm afraid you're thinking i'm just pissing on the old code like everyone... but damn I guarantee, that's the worst code I've ever seen, and i've work on more than 15 app from small to big on different contract with a lot of legacy code, but nothing that bad !

Need advice about switching to contracting.

TL;DR;

So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.

Now the full story:

Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.

Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.

Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.

Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.

So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.

Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.

Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!

My team and me nearly finished a big new feature for our website.
I am a junior dev and this was the first big thing I was in charge of and now that I see how it unfold I feel really bad.

It consists of php backend (integrated into a 20 years old monolith) and vue frontend (punctually jumpstarted by a clusterfuck of typescript files included into php rendered html) and especially the frontend part looks so bad.

Vue is relatively young in our project and almost nobody has a clue about it. I learned so much about vue in the process, but the result is a behemoth of awfulness that grew over several months.

I have a really strong desire rewrite the whole mess, but I will never be officially allowed because it works and practically all the flaws in our code base are subject to the classic

"well, someday, somebody probably has to do something about that, but for now let's start this shiny new feature"

So for now I think about doing it secretly and pass it to my buddy to review it. I guess chances are high that not even the colleagues in my team (apart from my buddy) are going to notice, since they aren't as interested into vue as I am and don't have the overview over this features code as I do, but on the other hand it feels like something I could get in trouble for and apart from the cursed code base my company is great.

Have you ever bin that disgusted by your own production code before it was even one year old?