A devRant Update!

Hey everyone,

We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.

Highlights since our last update:

- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.

- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!

- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!

Some stuff we have in the pipeline:

- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!

A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:

We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.

What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!

Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.

Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus

EDIT: since this announcement, collabs have been made free to post for all devRant members!

Introducing two big new devRant features!

First, the one @trogus and I are most excited about - Collabs!

Collabs are an easy way to start projects or work on existing projects with the awesome members of the devRant community. You can post a collab listing for the awesome open source project you started that could use some more contributors, that fun idea you have for a brand new project, or really anything you want to gather some fellow devs for. We think it will be a lot of fun.

Collabs also is a devRant first - it's our first paid feature. For each 2 week collab posting, we're charging $14.99. But we wanted to make sure to thank devRant users who have been with us for a while and anyone who contributes often, so anyone with 2,000 points or higher (now or in the future) gets one free collab listing!

The main reason we see collabs as a great first paid feature is because requiring payment or 2,000 points serves to be a slight barrier in posting a collab. We think for collaborations to be successful it's important to have some way to keep out listings where the poster has no intent of following through and we hope this is a good start to doing that.

NOTE: if the collab you are looking to create is devRant-centric (ex. a devRant Chrome extension), we will give you a free credit especially for that so you don't have to pay or use your earned free one. Just contact us (info@devrant.io) if your project falls into that category.

In addition, after tons of demand from the community, you can now change your username and email address! One important note is that you only get to change your username one time every 6 months, so use it cautiously :) You can access this feature in the "more" tab, then settings, then "Edit username or email."

If you have any questions or feedback about any of this, just let us know! We hope everyone enjoys :)

--- HTTP/3 is coming! And it won't use TCP! ---

A recent announcement reveals that HTTP - the protocol used by browsers to communicate with web servers - will get a major change in version 3!

Before, the HTTP protocols (version 1.0, 1.1 and 2.2) were all layered on top of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol).
TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of data over an IP network.
It can handle hardware failures, timeouts, etc. and makes sure the data is received in the order it was transmitted in.
Also you can easily detect if any corruption during transmission has occurred.
All these features are necessary for a protocol such as HTTP, but TCP wasn't originally designed for HTTP!
It's a "one-size-fits-all" solution, suitable for *any* application that needs this kind of reliability.
TCP does a lot of round trips between the client and the server to make sure everybody receives their data. Especially if you're using SSL. This results in a high network latency.
So if we had a protocol which is basically designed for HTTP, it could help a lot at fixing all these problems.
This is the idea behind "QUIC", an experimental network protocol, originally created by Google, using UDP.

Now we all know how unreliable UDP is: You don't know if the data you sent was received nor does the receiver know if there is anything missing. Also, data is unordered, so if anything takes longer to send, it will most likely mix up with the other pieces of data. The only good part of UDP is its simplicity.
So why use this crappy thing for such an important protocol as HTTP?
Well, QUIC fixes all these problems UDP has, and provides the reliability of TCP but without introducing lots of round trips and a high latency! (How cool is that?)

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working (or is still working) on a standardized version of QUIC, although it's very different from Google's original proposal.
The IETF also wants to create a version of HTTP that uses QUIC, previously referred to as HTTP-over-QUIC. HTTP-over-QUIC isn't, however, HTTP/2 over QUIC.
It's a new, updated version of HTTP built for QUIC.

Now, the chairman of both the HTTP working group and the QUIC working group for IETF, Mark Nottingham, wanted to rename HTTP-over-QUIC to HTTP/3, and it seems like his proposal got accepted!
So version 3 of HTTP will have QUIC as an essential, integral feature, and we can expect that it no longer uses TCP as its network protocol.

We will see how it turns out in the end, but I'm sure we will have to wait a couple more years for HTTP/3, when it has been thoroughly tested and integrated.

Thank you for reading!

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

- Free app:
"5 stars - OMG this app is awesome!!!"
- Add new feature with In-app purchase:
"1 star - App sucks balls. Why we must pay? Make free and I rate 5 stars"
I call them The Rating Terrorists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Dev: So how do you want this feature fixed?

Manager: It should work how it worked before.

Dev: I'm new to this feature, I don't know how it worked before or what is broken about it.

Manager: Well just make it work like it worked before.

Dev: I DONT KNOW HOW IT WORKED BEFORE THAT IS WHY I AM ASKING YOU. PLEASE TELL ME SO I CAN DO MY JOB.

Manager: Just how it worked before!

Dev: ...

Manager: ...

Dev: fuck you

rant? rant!

I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.

The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.

During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.

A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).

After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.

Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.

I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).

I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

First rant here. Long, but please bear with me:

So after slogging my ass off in various early stage startups for over 4 years and keeping up with the almost non-existent development process, I joined an organisation which has some of the brightest and smartest minds I have had the pleasure to work with.

Mind you, this company is the market leader in it's field and has a 50+ people in it's tech team and the quality of work is pretty impressive.

Now for this week's sprint, I was asked to develop a feature which already exists on the Android app and they want to introduce in the iOS app too. The backend APIs are all in place and all I need to do is build it with virtually no dependency. My PM asks me to start with the UI and ask the backend dev for the API list whenever I need them.This is where the story turns.

For my first API, I go to the backend dev and ask him to share the API documentation and he looks at me as if I have asked him to dance the fucking cha cha. With a straight face he tells me that, 'The organisation doesn't maintain any kind of documentation for it's APIs.' Now this really shocks me. Even in a 5 men tech teams I have worked on, we have always maintained a spec doc for the APIs and this is a company which is known for it's tech practices.

Being the new guy I compose myself and ask if they have anything for me here: Postman collection, a workflowy doc, a goddamn txt file; anything which might help me, and he laughs at my dilusion and says no.

Dejected, I ask for a way to get the APIs and I am told that there are only two ways: either I keep bothering the Android dev for the APIs(No, I don't have the access to the android repo and nor am I gonna get it) which he had worked on 4 months back or I install the prod app on my phone, and use Charles to get every fucking API which is really, really annoying.

I thought writing out this rant would make me feel better, turns out it just made me angrier. Why the fuck can't they document such an important thing!?

Never have I been so furious whilst at work as yesterday, I am still super pissed about going back today but knowing it's only for another few weeks makes it baerable.

I have been the lead developer on a project for the last 3~ months and our CTO is the product owner. So every now and then he decides to just work on a feature he is interested in- fair enough I guess. But everything I have to go and clean up his horrendous code. Everything he writes is an absolute joke, it's like he is constantly in Hackathon mode "let's just copy and paste some code here, hardcoded shit there and forgot about separation of code- it all goes in 1 file".

So yesterday he added a application to the project and instead of reusing a shared data access layer he added an entirely new ORM, which is near identical to the existing ORM in use, for this one application.

Being anal about these things, the first thing I did was delete his shit and simply reference the shared library then refactor a little code to make it compatible.

WELL!! I certainly hit a nerve, he went crazy spamming messages on Slack demanding I revert as it broke ONE SINGLE QUERY that he hadn't checked in (he does 1 huge commit for 10 of everyone else's). I stuck to my principals and explained both ORM's are similar and that we only needed one, the second would cause a fragmented codebase for no benefit whatsoever.

The lead Dev was then forced to come and convince me to revert, again I refused and called out the shit quality of their code. The battle raged on via the public slack group and I could hear colleagues enjoying the heated debate, new users even started joining the group just to get in on mine and the cto's difference of opinion.

I even offered to fix his code for him if he were to commit it, obviously that was not taken well ;).

Once I finally got a luck at the cluster fuck of shit he had written it took me around 5 minutes to fix and I ever improved performance. Regardless he was having none of it. Still the demands to revert continued.

I left the office steaming after long discussions with the lead Dev caught in the middle.

Fortunately my day was salvages with a positive technical discussion that evening at a company with whome I had a job offer from.

I really hate burning bridges and have never left a company under bad terms but this dictator is making me look forward to breaking the news today I will be gone in 4 weeks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

just.
asfjasfk;ajsg;klsadfhas;kldfjsdl.

"Hey, about that matter from yesterday..."
"Yes, what about that?"
"We need to talk about that again! How often do you trigger that system?"
"Once."
"You sure?"
"Yes, but i can check it, if you like."
*find references*
"See, only once."
"Can it happen at a random point later one?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes"
"Can you check it?"
"Okay."
*shows code"
"Look here, as you can see, it will not happen at other times."
"Do you have an idea why it could happen anyway?"
"Maybe that system does the action without my software telling it to do so, wasn't that specified that way?"
"Yes, but it normally does that roughly 10 seconds after you give the command the first time, so we thought maybe you could say what makes it do the action at other points maybe."
"Did you check that systems sourcecode?"
"No not yet. But did that happen with the older version?"
"No. But we didn't try."
"Did you change something between the versions?"
"Yes, the new feature."
"Could that make a change in behaviour?"
"I don't see how."
"Can you remove that feature for test?"
"We can take the old version."
"No, we need the new version, but without the feature you added."
"That IS the old version, there is no other difference!"
"Are you sure?"
"Would you like to see it in source control?"
"No, ~ okay. What do you think causes the problem?"
"I haven't had any new ideas since we talked yesterday."
"Okay. Mhhh,...okay. Lets talk again later."

YES SURE! BRING IT ON! I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO THAT! PLEASE COME BY OR CALL ME AGAIN! AND BRING THE BOSS WITH YOU, TO SHOW HOW SERIOUS THE MATTER IS! LET ME TELL HIM THE STUFF I TOLD SEVEN TIMES LAST WEEK!

Here's a true story about a "fight" between me and my project manager...

I've been working as a Frontend developer for nearly two years, managed to acquire a decent amount of knowledge, in some cases well above the rest of my coworkers, and one day I got into a bit of a disagreement with my project manager.

Basically he wanted me to copy/paste some feature from another project (needless to say, that... "thing" has more bugs than an ant farm), and against his orders I started doing that feature from scratch, to build a solid foundation from the very start.
I had a lengthy deadline to deliver that feature, they were expecting me to take some time to fix some of the bugs as well, but my idea was to make it bug-free from the moment the feature was released. Both my method and the one I should be copying worked the exact same, but mine was superior in every way, had no bugs, was scalable and upgradeable with little effort, there was no reason not to accept it.

We use scrum as our work methodology, so we have daily meetings. In one of those, the project manager asked me how was the progress on that new feature, and I told him I was just polishing up the code and integrating it with the rest of the project, to make sure everything was working properly. I still had a full day left before the deadline set for that feature, and I was expecting to take about half an hour to finish up a couple lines of code and test everything, no issues so far...

But then he exploded, and demanded to know why wasn't I copying the code from the other project, to which I answered "because this way things will work better".
Right after he said that the feature was working on the other project, copying and pasting it should take a few minutes to do and maybe a couple of extra hours to fix any issues that might have appeared...
The problem here is, the other project was made by trainees, I honestly can't navigate through 3 pages without bumping into an average of 2 errors per page, I was placed into this new project because they know I do quality code, and they wanted this project to be properly made, unlike the previous one, so I was baffled when he said that he preferred me to copy code instead of doing "good" code...
My next reply was "just because something has been made and is working that doesn't mean that it has been properly made nor will work as it should, I could save a few hours copying code (except I wouldn't save any, it would take me more time to adapt the code than to do it from scratch) but then I'll be wasting weeks of work because of new bugs that will be reported over time, because trust me, they will appear... "

I told him this in a very calm manner, but everybody in the meeting room paused and started staring at me, not many dare challenge that specific project manager, and I had just done that...
After a few seconds of silence the PM finally said... "look, if you manage to finish your task inside the set deadline I'll forget we ever had this conversation, but I'll leave a note on my book, just in case..."

I finished that task in about 30 mins, as expected, still had 7 hours till deadline, and I completely forgot about that feature until now because it has never given any issues whatsoever, and is now being used for other projects as well.

It was one of my proudest/rage inducing moments in this project, and honestly, I think I have hit my PM with a very big white glove because some weeks after this event the CEO himself came to the whole team to congratulate us on the outstanding work being made so far, in a project that acted against the PM's orders 90% of the time.

how to make a feature request
1. dump Db table with 153 column to Excel
2. print!
3. circle column 47 on page 3, scribble feature description
4. scan! remember to use proprietary file format no one has
5. new e-mail, add "VERY URGENT!!!" to subject line
6. write "will call, discuss details monday"
6.a. attach proprietary-scanned-excel-dump-feature-description (optional)
7. postscript: deadline wednesday!!
8. wait for tuesday
9. send!
...

Stupid bloody PM.

I asked him for two images a long time ago: a 1x and a 2x ‘0’ monogram for Apple wallets, since we currently have monograms for glyphs 1-9 and a-z. And this is in production, so any merchant whose name starts with a ‘0’ will cause a crash. We’ve been fortunate thus far.

But this PM. He lied about who needed to make the images for three weeks, saying it’s up to the designer, when he actually made them himself. He also said he was going to take care of handing the task off, and never did, and then said designer when on FTO. When I asked the designer about it after he came back, he had no clue what graphics (and even the feature) I was talking about, or even what the requirements for the graphics might be. I had to confront the PM before he admitted he made the originals, and (begrudgingly) said he would make the new ones.

When said PM did finally make the images, the colors were all wrong. They’re not the light teal from our branding, they’re dark blue and the font is different, making them pretty ugly.

Also, after assuring me that the naming convention for the new images is the same, I discover that they’re neither organized into folders nor even named properly. (And yes, he is aware of how it should be.) I can rename and move them around easily enough, but come on, don’t say you did the work and then give me a mess to clean up!

And to top it all off, he completely spaced making the ‘u’ monograms, so I’m still short a fucking glyph!

Asdfjskldf.

How do you do every single thing wrong? Like, how!?

I don't want to write clean code anymore :(

I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...

Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...

That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"

they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.

oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.

and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.

it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------

uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.

well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.

note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck customers.

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

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

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

Managers: ...

FullStackClown: Sit down and shut up

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

!rant & story_time
This happend to the startup I was working for at ~2011. I was a junior Android dev, working on a very popular app.
During experiments for a new feature, I discovered that the system AlarmManager has a serious bug - you can set a repeating alarm with interval=0ms. If your app takes more then 1 ms to handle the Intent, then the AlarmManager will start to fill up the intent Queue, with unexpected results to the OS. causing it to slow down, and reboot when it ran out of Ram. Why? my guess was that because the AlarmManager was part of the OS, then any issues caused by it caused the system process to ran out of ram, crashing it, and the whole system with it. the real kicker was that even after a reboot, the AlarmManager still had Intents queued, causing the device to bootloop for a while, untill the queue was cleared. My boss decided to report the problem to google, as this was an issue in the OS. I built an example app, that caused the crash 10-30 seconds after starting, and submitted to Google. Google responded later that day with "not an issue, no one will ever do this".
Well... At this point I decided to review the autoupdate feature in our app, to make sure this will not happen to us. We just released a new feature where a user can set an update schedule option in the app settings - where you could setup a daily, weekly, or hourly update for the app. after reviewing it, It looked good, and the issue was not triggered in the manual QA I did. So, it was all good. And we released an updated version to the store.
After we did an update-install, we discoverd that, there was a provlem reading the previous version SharedPrefs value for the update schdule settings, and the value defaulted to 0...
the result was, our app caused all our users to go into a bootloop, and because the alarm was reset when the devices booted up, the bootloop could only be solved in a factory reset, or removing our app, before the device rebooted, and then waiting a few reboot cycles.
We lost 50 places in the market, and it took us 6 months to get back to where we were.

It was not my fault, but it sucked big time!

Ticket: Add <feature> to <thing>. It works in <other things> so just copy it over. Easy.

Thing: tangled, over-complicated mess.
Feature: tangled and broken, and winds much too deep to refactor. Gets an almost-right answer by doing lots of things that shouldn't work but somehow manage to.

I write a quick patch that avoids the decent into madness and duplicates the broken behavior in a simple way for consistency and ease of fixing later. I inform my boss of my findings and push the code.

He gets angry and mildly chews me out for it. During the code review, he calls my patch naive, and says the original feature is obviously not broken or convoluted. During the course of proving me wrong, he has trouble following it, and eventually finds out that it really is broken -- and refuses to admit i was right about any of it. I'm still in trouble for taking too long, doing it naively, and not doing it correctly.

He schedules a meeting with product to see if we should do it correctly. He tells product to say no. Product says no. He then tells me to duplicate the broken behavior. ... which I already did.

At this point I'm in trouble for:
1) Taking too long copying a simple feature over.
2) Showing said feature is not simple, but convoluted and broken.
3) Reimplementing the broken feature in a simpler way.
4) Not making my new implementation correct despite it not working anywhere else, and despite how that would be inconsistent.

Did everything right, still in the wrong.

Also, they decided I'm not allowed to fix the original, that it should stay broken, and that I should make sure it's broken here, too.

You just have to admire the sound reasoning and mutual respect on display. Best in class.

Be me, new dev on a team. Taking a look through source code to get up to speed.

Dev: **thinking to self** why is there no package lock.. let me bring this up to boss man

Dev: hey boss man, you’ve got no package lock, did we forget to commit it?

Manager: no I don’t like package locks.

Dev: ...why?

Manager: they fuck up computer. The project never ran with a package lock.

Dev: ..how will you make sure that every dev has the same packages while developing?

Manager: don’t worry, I’ve done this before, we haven’t had any issues.

**couple weeks goes by**

Dev: pushes code

Manager: hey your feature is not working on my machine

Dev: it’s working on mine, and the dev servers. Let’s take a look and see

**finds out he deletes his package lock every time he does npm install, so therefore he literally has the latest of like a 50 packages with no testing**

Dev: well you see you have some packages here that updates, and have broken some of the features.

Manager: >=|, fix it.

Dev: commit a working package lock so we’re all on the same.

Manager: just set the package version to whatever works.

Dev: okay

**more weeks go by**

Manager: why are we having so many issues between devs, why are things working on some computers and not others??? We can’t be having this it’s wasting time.

Dev: **takes a look at everyone’s packages** we all have different packages.

Manager: that’s it, no one can use Mac computers. You must use these windows computers, and you must install npm v6.0 and node v15.11. Everyone must have the same system and software install to guarantee we’re all on the same page

Dev: so can we also commit package lock so we’re all having the same packages as well?

Manager: No, package locks don’t work.

**few days go by**

Manager: GUYS WHY IS THE CODE DEPLOYING TO PRODUCTION NOT WORKING. IT WAS WORKING IN DEV

DEV: **looks at packages**, when the project was built on dev on 9/1 package x was on version 1.1, when it was approved and moved to prod on 9/3 package x was now on version 1.2 which was a change that broke our code.

Manager: CHANGE THE DEPLOYMENT SCRIPTS THEN. MAKE PROD RSYNC NODE_MODULES WITH DEV

Dev: okay

Manager: just trust me, I’ve been doing this for years

Who the fuck put this man in charge.

Story #1: So I took a month of parental leave. And was planning to extend it a little longer to deal with my final exams. I was planning to spend lots of quality time with my wife and newborn son. Little did I know... It turns out that out of 5 OoO weeks I was looking forward I actually had 3 at most. The rest I've spent working remotely as I was insisted to deploy a brand new and poorly tested feature to PROD 2 days before my paternity leave. So I spent 2 weeks debugging things in PROD. Remotely. Needless to say that did suck.

Story #2: After story #1 I've learnt my lesson. This summer I took 3 weeks annual leave to renovate my apartment. I asked to not to be disturbed unless there's an emergency. And an emergency it was. One of our app users had a planned hi-load batch job lasting for 2-3 months. Hundreds of thousands of items had to be created and processed. It turns out the _processing_ algo had some flaws and was acting out. I was called out and asked to assist. I knew this sort of debugging is going to take a lot of my time so this time I put my conditions on the table: I will assist but I'll extend my leave by 1.5 the time I spend working now. They took the deal. Instead of 3 weeks I had 5 weeks of vacation!

I don't care that much about my salary. I prefer to exchange it for my time off hence I didn't ask for compensations.

Bottom line: NEVER EVER underestimate or undersell your time and effort. You are a valuable asset and if the team/client needs you on your day off -- make it count. Your time off is YOUR time. Never forget it.

Agile in practice.

I finished my story with 3 days left in our 2 week sprint.

Me: What story should I pull in next?
PM: Story <number> to add <new feature>
Me: ok, sounds good
PM: Will you finish it before our sprint ends?
Me: No, probably will take me 5-7 days.
PM: But it can't spill over, it will make our metrics look bad.
Me: I can't finish it in 3 days.
PM: ....
Me: Can't you just explain the spillover as us working ahead?
PM: It will look bad on our <automated-report>
Me: ....
Me: So don't want me to get started on <new feature>?
PM: ....
Me: <internally sighing> What do you want me to do?
PM: Maybe you can pair program with <Overpaid-Idiot-Programmer> to help finish their story
Me: ....
Me: feelsbadman.jpg

The guy where I can only shake my head when I see his code, and he is really proud of if implementations, while he

- doesn't care about warnings

- breaks builds and doesn't care

- doesn't care about code styles and indents in a very column based way

- adds tons of comments to his code, mostly hard to understand, and sometimes that much you can hardly find the code

- implements a tokenizer where you have to inherit from its interface (Why would I wanna implement whole functions for a tokenizer and not just use it in place where needed? How do I use two of those in one class?)

- implement a "generic" state machine base class with fixed lengths array of 3 events and 3 strings (Why would I need events and strings hardcoded in a "generic" state machine? Why a maximum of 3?)

- once delivered a software without the needed runtime components, so the whole system (embedded device) wasn't working properly and only by chance missed the point of disabling update mechanisms

- make your ears bleed about his big inventions whenever he sees you, no matter how often he already told you about that blazing new feature

The code is a freaking mess. Shared behavior, terrible variable/method naming, misleading module naming, dynamic polymorphic spaghetti, whitespace errors, no consistency, confusing even if you understand what the code is doing, ... . It should never have passed code review. It probably wasn't code reviewed.

The comments are sparse and useless. Quality level: // This is bridge.

The documentation does not exist.

Testing steps for QA are missing several steps, including setup, so actually using the feature is bloody challenging. If one thing is wrong, the feature just doesn't show up (and ofc won't tell you why).

The specs for the feature are outdated and cover only 4 of 19+ cases. And are neigh useless for those 4.

The specs for the report I'm fixing don't even check the data on the report; it just checks for one bit of data on each row it creates -- a name -- which is also the same on each row. gg.

The object factories (for specs) are a mess, and often create objects indirectly, or in backwards order with odd post-create overwriting to make things work. Following the factories is a major chore, let alone fixing or extending them.

The new type has practically zero test coverage.

The factory for the new type also only creates one variant -- and does so incorrectly.

And to top it all off: the guy who wrote the feature barely ever responds. If he does, he uses fewer words than my bird knows, then stops responding. I've yet to get a useful answer out of him. (and he apparently communicates just fine, according to my micromanager.)

But "it's just fixing a report; it'll be easy!"
Oh, fuck off.

When a minor bug inspires clients to add a new functionality :|

Instead of 'video calling' icon to make video calls, I mistakenly displayed calendar icon in the App and now clients want me to add schedule video call feature :|

Today is sprint demo day. As usual I'm only half paying attention since being a Platform Engineer, my work is always technically being "demoed" (shit's running ain't it? There you go, enjoy the EC2 instances.)

One team presents a new thing they built. I'm still half paying attention, half playing Rocket League on another monitor.

Then someone says

"We're storing in prod-db-3"

They have my curiosity.

"Storing x amount of data at y rate"

They now have my attention. I speak up "Do you have a plan to drop data after a certain period of time?"

They don't. I reply "Okay, then your new feature only has about 2 months to live before you exhaust the disk on prod-db-3 and we need to add more storage"

I am asked if we can add more storage preemptively.

"Sure, I say." I then direct my attention to the VP "{VP} I'll make the change request to approve the spend for additional volume on prod-db-3"

VP immediately balks and asks why this wasn't considered before. I calmly reply "I'm not sure. This is the first time I'm learning of this new feature even coming to life. Had anyone consulted with the Platform team we'd have made sure the storage availability was there."

VP asks product guy what happened.

"We didn't think we'd need platform resources for this so we never reached out for anything".

I calmly mute myself, turn my camera back off and go back to Rocket League as the VP goes off about planning and collaboration.

"CT we'll reach out to you next week about getting this all done"

*unmute, camera stays off* "Sounds good" *clears ball*

I think I nailed it.

I had an interview on Friday. Never had I ever such a good one. Everything went so smoothly I'm amazed to this moment.

It started pretty much normally. Few questions about me and my CV. Next some soft skills check and few minutes talking in English to make sure I know how to speak.

Next, two funny trick questions. I hope I'll translate them good enough.
1) You've got 6 cups in a row. Three of them, next to each other, are empty. Remaining 3 are full. You've got one movement to make them stand alternately, ie. Full, empty, etc. or Empty, full etc.
2) You've got yourself a cake. Normal, birthday cake in a shape of a cylinder. On three cuts, you have to cut it in 8 equal pieces.

Next was technical interview. The only thing I couldn't answer to was a formula to get angle between camera and two objects on the scene. Something about cos x.

They told me that I was the only recruitee to make project using Hololens SDK. Other people made the images gallery in 2D only.

Also they were VERY impressed that I managed to send them fix that changed a lot of the gallery in an hour. No one was expecting it so fast since the feature wasn't all that simple. Or so they said. Code was written so it wasn't hard to implement this change.

Now I've got to wait at least a week for their response. As you could imagine, I'm nervously checking my email each time I get any spam.

I'd like to thank @fire-phoenix and @Root that were responding to my last posts about this new work tasks and current hardships. I know it's a bit too early to celebrate but I'm just so hyped for how well everything went 😀

Hey guys,

this rant will be long again. I'm sorry for any grammar errors or something like that, english isn't my native language. Furthermore I'm actually very sad and not in a good mood.

Why? What happened? Some of you may already know - I'm doing my apprenticeship / education in a smal company.
There I'm learning a lot, I'm developing awesome features directly for the clients, experience of which other in my age (I'm only 19 years old) can only dream.
Working in such a small company is very exhausting, but I love my job, I love programming. I turned my hobby into a profession and I'm very proud of it.
But then there are moments like the last time, when I had to present something for a client - the first presentation was good, the last was a disaster, nothing worked - but I learned from it.

But this time everything is worse than bad - I mean really, really worse than bad.

I've worked the whole week on a cool new feature - I've done everything that it works yesterday, that everything gets done before the deadline of yesterday.

To achieve this I've coded thursday till 10pm ! At home! Friday I tested the whole day everything to ensure that everything is working properly. I fixed several bugs and then at the end of the day everything seems to be working. Even my boss said that it looks good and he thinks that the rollout to all clients will become good and without any issues.

But unfortunately deceived.

Yesterday evening I wrote a long mail to my boss - with a "manual". He was very proud and said that he is confident that everything will work fine. He trusts me completly.

Then, this morning I received a mail from him - nothing works anymore - all clients have issues, everything stays blank - because I've forgotten to ensure that the new feature (a plugin) and its functionality is supported by the device (needs a installation).
First - I was very shoked - but in the same moment I thought - one moment - you've written an if statement, if the plugin is installed - so why the fuck should it broken everything?!
I looked instant to the code via git. This has to be a very bad joke from my boss I thought. But then I saw the fucking bug - I've written:
if(plugin) { // do shit }
but it has to be if(typeof plugin !== 'undefined')

I fucked up everything - due to this fucking mistake. This little piece of shit I've forgotten on one single line fucked up everything. I'm sorry for this mode of expression but I thought - no this can not be true - it must be a bad bad nightmare.
I've tested this so long, every scenario, everything. Worked till the night so it gets finished. No one, no one from my classmates would ever think of working so long. But I did it, because I love my job. I've implemented a check to ensure that the plugin is installed - but implemented it wrong - exactly this line which caused all the errors should prevent exactly this - what an irony of fate.

I've instantly called my boss and apologized for this mistake. The mistake can't be undone. My boss now has to go to all clients to fix it. This will be very expensive...

Oh my goodnes, I just cried.
I'm only working about half a year in this company - they trust me so much - but I'm not perfect - I make mistakes - like everyone else. This time my boss didn't looked over my code, didn't review it, because he trusted me completly - now this happens. I think this destroyed the trust :( I'm so sad.
He only said that we will talk on monday, how we can prevent such things in the feature..
Oh guys, I don't know - I've fucked up everything, we were so overhelmed that everything would work :(
Now I'm the looser who fucked up - because not testing enough - even when I tested it for days, even at home - worked at home - till the night - for free, for nothing - voluntary.

This is the thanks for that.
Thousand good things - but one mistake and you're the little asshole. You - a 19 year old guy, which works since 6 months in a company. A boss which trusts you and don't look over your code. One line which should prevent crashing, crashed everything.

I'm sorry that this rant is so long, I just need to talk to you guys because I'm so sad. Again. This has happend to frequently lately.

manager: Just create that new feature real quick... We'll refactor and make it a good feature in a couple months...

me: *see image*

How I spend my days at work working with legacy code:

* Writing tests before I do anything
* Noticing that i cannot write tests because of antipatterns. Lots of them.
* Refactoring to make at least a tiny bit testable.
* Then writing tests.
* More rewriting and refactoring
* Finally adding that one feature my boss asked me for
* Writing tests for that new feature (my do that before implementing)
* Explaining to my boss why it took me so long and agreeing on stopping writing tests.
* 2 days later: explaining why i still broke something.

But in the end my code works just fine.
my colleagues handle things differently. They just ignore problems as long as at least one feature works a bit.

After completing my sprint and some lingering stuff in the backlog

Me: Hey, there's this tiny feature people have really requested, I'll go build it since I got nothing else to do at the moment. It'll only take like 1h

PO: Hmm ok. Don't work on that yet, we need to check with business people and agree on the user stories and bla bla bla

Me: Ok, well there's these bugs I can take care of then, I'll get them fixed, won't be long.

PO: Hmmm, we need to measure the impact first. Let me get back to you on that a bit later

Me: Meh, oh. I'll refactor this bad component meanwhile then.

PO: Have you created a story for that in JIRA? Create the story first and then we'll groom it and take it in when we've time

Me in my head: Dafuq! Im trying to work on your fucking project but you keep throwing all that business bueraucracy shit at me. What am I supposed to do then? Sip coffee in the kitchen and talk about the other fucking billion failed "new business opportunities" with my peers? Fuck this circle jerk of a billion management people all trying to make themselves important. Nothing. Ever. Gets. Fucking. Done!!!

Me: Ah right, I'll do that *proceeds to the water cooler*

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

1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.

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

2. Not being asked about estimates.

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

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

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

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

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

➡️You Are Not A Software Developer⬅️

When I became a developer, I thought that my job is to write software. When my customer had a problem, I was ready to write software that solves that problem. I was taught to write software.

But what customers need is not software. They need a solution to their problem. Your job is to find the most cost-effective solution, what software often is not.

According to the universal law of software development, more code leads to more bugs:

e = mc²

Or

errors = (more code)²

The number of bugs grows with the amount of code. You have to prioritize, reproduce and fix bugs.

The more code you write, the more your team and the team after it has to maintain. Even if you split the system into micro services, the complexity remains.

Writing well-tested, clean code takes a lot of time. When you’re writing code, other important work is idle. The work that prevents your company from becoming rich.

A for-profit company wants to make money and reduce expenses. Then the company hires you to solve problems that prevent it from becoming rich. Confused by your job title, you take their money and turn it into expensive software.

But business has nothing to do about software. Even software business is not about software. Business is about making money.

Your job is to understand how the company is making money, help make more money and reduce expenses. Once you know that, you will become the most valuable asset in the company.

Stop viewing yourself as a software developer. You are a money maker.

Think about how to save and make money for your customers.

Find the most annoying problem and fix it:

▶️Is adding a new feature too costly? Solve the problem manually.
▶️Is testing slow? Become a tester.
▶️Is hiring not going well? Speak at a meetup and advertise your company.
▶️Is your team not productive enough? Bring them coffee.

Your job title doesn’t matter. Ego doesn’t matter either.

Titles and roles are distracting us from what matters to our customers – money.💸

You are a money maker. Thinking as a money maker can help choose the next skill for development. For example:

Serverless: pay only for resources you consume, spend less time on capacity planning = 💰

Machine Learning: get rid of manual decision-making = 💰

TDD: shorter feedback cycle, fewer bugs = 💰

Soft Skills: inspire teammates, so they are more productive and happy = 💰

If you don’t know what to learn next — answer a simple question:

What skills can help my company make more money and reduce expenses?

Very unlikely it’s another web framework written in JavaScript.

Article by Eduards Sizovs
Sizovs.net

"I'm almost done, I'll just need to add tests!"

Booom! You did it, that was a nuke going off in my head.

No, you shouldn't just need to add tests. The tests should have been written from the get go! You most likely won't cover all the cases. You won't know if adding the tests will break your feature, as you had none, as you refactor your untested mess in order to make your code testable.

When reading your mess of a test case and the painful mocking process you went through, I silently cry out into the void: "Why oh why!? All of this suffering could have been avoided!"

Since most of the time, your mocking pain boils down to not understanding what your "unit" in your "unit test" should be.

So let it be said:

- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, then just write a function / class whose *only* purpose is: parse the XML file, return a value object. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, it MUST NOT: download a zip, extract that zip, merge all those files to one big file, parse that big file, talk to some other random APIs as a side-effect, and then return a value object.

Because then you suddenly have to mock away a http service and deal with zip files in your test cases.

The http util of your programming language will most likely work. Your unzip library will most likely work. So just assume it working. There are valid use cases where you want to make sure you acutally send a request and get a response, yet I am talking unit test here only.

In the scope of a class, keep the public methods to a reasonable minimum. As for each public method you shall at least create one test case. If you ever have the feeling "I want to test that private method" replace that statement in your head with: "I should extract that functionality to a new class where that method public. I then can create a unit test case a for that." That new service then becomes a dependency in your current service. Problem solved.

Also, mocking away dependencies should a simple process. If your mocking process fills half the screen, your test setup is overly complicated and your class is doing too much.

That's why I currently dig functional programming so much. When you build pure functions without side effects, unit tests are easy to write. Yet you can apply pure functions to OOP as well (to a degree). Embrace immutability.

Sidenote:

It's really not helpful that a lot of developers don't understand the difference between unit, functional acceptance, integration testing. Then they wonder why they can't test something easily, write overly complex test cases, until someone points out to them: No, in the scope of unit tests, we don't need to test our persistance layer. We just assume that it works. We should only test our businsess logic. You know: "Assuming that I get that response from the database, I expect that to happen." You don't need a test db, make a real query against that, in order to test that. (That still is a valid thing to do. Yet not in the scope of unit tests.)

Isn't it lovely when someone wants feature X and Y and one is five minutes (and mostly CSS) and the other one is hundreds of hours of backend code.

"I don't want to know, just make it happen. Jeez how hard can it be, it's just a new button"

Sprint planning meeting, two hours trying to plan what to do with a new feature we wanted to add to one of our systems.

The boss gets out of the meeting room to get a phone number to make a call (we needed to ask something to one of our clients).

5 minutes later, the boss comes back and saw that the lead dev was going to his own desk.

Boss: Where do you think you’re going?
Lead dev: I’m bored :v

😂😂😂😂😂

Ok, so I work at this "Great" company. I joined a new team recently with a project that is supposed to be a lot better than many of the other projects we have.

THESE MOTHEERRRRRFUCKERS don't even have hot reload on the app. You have to rebuild the app everytime you make a change. Are you kidding me?! We are using React. One of the basics of React is hot reload. I get into a fucking meeting and one of the devs is like, "I have one important thing to tell you, don't use hooks (a not so new feature in react yet something everyone should use at this point)" and the critical reason we don't use it is because they don't want to confuse the Java devs who are used to their little oop style o_O

Maaaan fuck your developers, it's not my fault you guys can't learn something so simple like functional programming. I haven't even started a sprint yet, I'll burn this app and make you rewrite it all.

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

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

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

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

Guess who's gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiisssedd 😁

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

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

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

Here I am trying to get some tickets for a theater, and I noticed an interesting thing. It seems that the website holds no session persistence. In other words it doesn't check to see if the user has stopped trying to order tickets, instead it holds the seats for about 30 minutes. This is kind of stupid because when you back out, your treated as a completely new session, you have no way of trying to get back the seats you had chosen.

Sooo, what does this mean? It means that I can start selecting a bunch of seats and continue selecting a bunch of seats. There appears to be no server-side checks to prevent someone from just booking the entire theater.

Soooooo, what does this mean? I could potentially spam the entire country's theaters (any that use this website as a booking system) and make it impossible for people to book seats through this website.

What do you guys think? Is this a bug or feature?

!rant
Just started working for a new company. Super cool. Just like the last one (as far as perks), except they actually trust their devs.

Old company: Make sure your code is extensible
Devs at old company: You know it's not written in stone right?
Old company: Does that mean you can make it do this?
Devs at old company: No. That's the wrong code base

New company: I need a feature. Get it done when you can
New company devs: Well, guess I'll take some time to refactor all this stuff while I'm at it
~Some time later~
New company: Thanks, that feature works great!

No staring over shoulders, asking when it will be done. No asking why we want to refactor something. As long as work continues to flow, there are no issues. It's great!

Also, if we want to try a new tech, we just have to put together a short paper explaining why it will work better in that situation than the tech that's already in place.

Asus have now decided that a removable battery is a feature people do not need anymore on a powerful laptop.

My battery or charger had a fit and blew the fuse on my charger and broke the battery, and now I have to send my laptop back because they can't send me a new battery, as replacing it myself would void the warranty.

Please for the love of all that isn't completely retarded, nobody start taking more pages out of Apple's book, even some completely non-technical people could handle changing a battery before, this benefits no one.

To make things worse, I'm on holiday right now and leaving the country for a year a few weeks after I get back, so if they can't get it back to me fast enough, I won't have the laptop for the whole bloody reason I bought it for, just because some smart arse designer has clearly never owned a laptop in their life.

I do not like the direction laptop vendors are taking.

New laptops tend to feature fewer ports, making the user more dependent on adapters. Similarly to smartphones, this is a detrimental trend initiated by Apple and replicated by the rest of the pack.

As of 2022, many mid-range laptops feature just one USB-A port and one USB-C port, resembling Apple's toxic minimalism. In 2010, mid-class laptops commonly had three or four USB ports. I have even seen an MSi gaming laptop with six USB ports. Now, much of the edges is wasted "clean" space.

Sure, there are USB hubs, but those only work well with low-power devices. When attaching two external hard drives to transfer data between them, they might not be able to spin up due to insufficient power from the USB port or undervoltage caused by the impedance (resistance) of the USB cable between the laptop's USB port and hub. There are USB hubs which can be externally powered, but that means yet another wall adapter one has to carry.

Non-replaceable [shortest-lived component] mean difficult repairs and no more reserve batteries, as well as no extra-sized battery packs. When the battery expires, one might have to waste four hours on a repair shop for a replacement that would have taken a minute on a 2010 laptop.

The SD card slot is being replaced with inferior MicroSD or removed entirely. This is especially bad for photographers and videographers who would frequently plug memory cards into their laptop. SD cards are far more comfortable than MicroSD cards, and no, bulky external adapters that reserve the device's only USB port and protrude can not replace an integrated SD card slot.

Most mid-range laptops in the early 2010s also had a LAN port for immediate interference-free connection. That is now reserved for gaming-class / desknote laptops.

Obviously, components like RAM and storage are far more difficult to upgrade in more modern laptops, or not possible at all if soldered in.

Touch pads increasingly have the buttons underneath the touch surface rather than separate, meaning one has to be careful not to move the mouse while clicking. Otherwise, it could cause an unwanted drag-and-drop gesture. Some touch pads are smart enough to detect when a user intends to click, and lock the movement, but not all. A right-click drag-and-drop gesture might not be possible due to the finger on the button being registered as touch. Clicking with short tapping could be unreliable and sluggish. While one should have external peripherals anyway, one might not always have brought them with. The fallback input device is now even less comfortable.

Some laptop vendors include a sponge sheet that they want users to put between the keyboard and the screen before folding it, "to avoid damaging the screen", even though making it two millimetres thicker could do the same without relying on a sponge sheet. So they want me to carry that bulky thing everywhere around? How about no?

That's the irony. They wanted to make laptops lighter and slimmer, but that made them adapter- and sponge sheet-dependent, defeating the portability purpose.

Sure, the CPU performance has improved. Vendors proudly show off in their advertisements which generation of Intel Core they have this time. As if that is something users especially care about. Hoo-ray, generation 14 is now yet another 5% faster than the previous generation! But what is the benefit of that if I have to rely on annoying adapters to get the same work done that I could formerly do without those adapters?

Microsoft has also copied Apple in demanding internet connection before Windows 11 will set up. The setup screen says "You will need an Internet connection…" - no, technically I would not. What does technically stand in the way of Windows 11 setting up offline? After all, previous Windows versions like Windows 95 could do so 25 years earlier. But also far more recent versions. Thankfully, Linux distributions do not do that.

If "new" and "modern" mean more locked-in and less practical and difficult to repair, I would rather have "old" than "new".

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

Time to add a new feature in an Android app:-
Java code with basic layout to implement the feature - 1 hour
Polishing the layout - 30 mins
Time to fucking make the scroll view wrap around the text and not overflow in the dialog so that the buttons below are visible - 6-10 hours!!!

I've started programming when I was 12. Right now I'm 25. I can clearly say that I'm passionate, I've touched I think almost every "type" of programming ever. From game development, through IoT and finished at eCommerce. I never stop learning.

My workmates are pissing me off. For code review sometimes I'm waiting even 3 days when I've changed like 5-6 files. They don't want to introduce "new" technologies (by new I mean who are existing at least 2-3 years, got stable community). They don't want to refactor some core of the application because it's working - they don't care about it as they can later say "legacy system so this basic feature took me a week".

Code quality means for them "use shorthand syntax, this code is ugly" - the basic shit which can do any linter

When I'm doing code review, I'm checking out to this branch, test it, check if the solution is scalable. Then I make my comments. I just hear "stop bitching about it just approve".

Thank God I've made through interview and I'm going to switch job in next week.

me and my boss plan to make a new feature to our system.

i model the database tables

he says that there are too many tables

i say its atomic and acid

he says to put all the columns in a single table

Static HTML pages are better than "web apps".

Static HTML pages are more lightweight and destroy "web apps" in performance, and also have superior compatibility. I see pretty much no benefit in a "web app" over a static HTML page. "Web apps" appear like an overhyped trend that is empty inside.

During my web browsing experience, static HTML pages have consistently loaded faster and more reliably, since the browser is immediately served with content useful for consumption, whereas on JavaScript-based web "apps", the useful content comes in **last**, after the browser has worked its way through a pile of script.

For example, an average-sized Wikipedia article (30 KB wikitext) appears on screen in roughly two seconds, since MediaWiki uses static HTML. Everipedia, in comparison, is a ReactJS app. Guess how long that one needs. Upwards of three times as long!

Making a page JavaScript-based also makes it fragile. If an exception occurs in the JavaScript, the user might end up with a blank page or an endless splash screen, whereas static HTML-based pages still show useful content.

The legacy (2014-2020) HTML-based Twitter.com loaded a user profile in under four seconds. The new react-based web app not only takes twice as long, but sometimes fails to load at all, showing the error "Oops something went wrong! But don't fret – it's not your fault." to be displayed. This could not happen on a static HTML page.

The new JavaScript-based "polymer" YouTube front end that is default since August 2017 also loads slower. While the earlier HTML-based one was already playing the video, the new one has just reached its oh-so-fancy skeleton screen.

It would once have been unthinkable to have a website that does not work at all without JavaScript, but now, pretty much all popular social media sites are JavaScript-dependent. The last time one could view Twitter without JavaScript and tweet from devices with non-sophisticated browsers like Nintendo 3DS was December 2020, when they got rid of the lightweight "M2" mobile website.

Sometimes, web developers break a site in older browser versions by using a JavaScript feature that they do not support, or using a dependency (like Plyr.js) that breaks the site. Static HTML is immune against this failure.

Static HTML pages also let users maximize speed and battery life by deactivating JavaScript. This obviously will disable more sophisticated site features, but the core part, the text, is ready for consumption.

Not to mention, single-page sites and fancy animations can be implemented with JavaScript on top of static HTML, as GitHub.com and the 2018 Reddit redesign do, and Twitter's 2014-2020 desktop front end did.

From the beginning, JavaScript was intended as a tool to complement, not to replace HTML and CSS. It appears to me that the sole "benefit" of having a "web app" is that it appears slightly more "modern" and distinguished from classic web sites due to use of splash screens and lack of the browser's loading animation when navigating, while having oh-so-fancy loading animations and skeleton screens inside the website. Sorry, I prefer seeing content quickly over the app-like appearance of fancy loading screens.

Arguably, another supposed benefit of "web apps" is that there is no blank page when navigating between pages, but in pretty much all major browsers of the last five years, the last page observably remains on screen until the next navigated page is rendered sufficiently for viewing. This is also known as "paint holding".

On any site, whenever I am greeted with content, I feel pleased. Whenever I am greeted with a loading animation, splash screen, or skeleton screen, be it ever so fancy (e.g. fading in an out, moving gradient waves), I think "do they really believe they make me like their site more due to their fancy loading screens?! I am not here for the loading screens!".

To make a page dependent on JavaScript and sacrifice lots of performance for a slight visual benefit does not seem worthed it.

Quote:

> "Yeah, but I'm building a webapp, not a website" - I hear this a lot and it isn't an excuse. I challenge you to define the difference between a webapp and a website that isn't just a vague list of best practices that "apps" are for some reason allowed to disregard. Jeremy Keith makes this point brilliantly.
>
> For example, is Wikipedia an app? What about when I edit an article? What about when I search for an article?
>
> Whether you label your web page as a "site", "app", "microsite", whatever, it doesn't make it exempt from accessibility, performance, browser support and so on.
>
> If you need to excuse yourself from progressive enhancement, you need a better excuse.

– Jake Archibald, 2013

devRant is nice.
If you move rant feed to "Recent" and saw a bunch of rant u already read but you keep scrolling down hoping to see new rant but u fail cause rant policy keep people from posting new rant for 2 hour and not many new rant has been post.
This is a nice feature. It make u self aware that "crap, maybe too much time on devRant". Even if you addict to devRant but by this policy -> It force you to really close its app and checking it on another free time. (more healthy than another social media I guess 😂)

Me: Im testing a new feature that is not on production yet for 30m and can not make it work. (I asked the developer for any idea why is not working)
Dev: i just tested, works fine.
Me: i just tested again with no luck. I’m i missing anything?
Dev: (Developer comes to my desk). Lets see what you doing wrong here. (After 5seconds). You're not on UAT. You have been redirected to the production and you've been testing there all this time.
Me: 😩

Me and my developer friend worked with my ex-colleague with this fitness directory website because he promised to give us {{ thisAmount }} upon the {{ completionDate }}.

He was my friend and I trusted him.

It took me weeks of sleepless nights building the project. I had a full-time job that time, and I worked on the project during evenings. All went well, and as we reach the {{ completionDate }}, the demo site is already up and running.

A week before the {{ completionDate }}, he hired his new wife as the COO of the startup. It was cool, she keep noticing things on the site which shouldn't be there, and keeps on suggesting sections that has to be there. I was okay with it, until I realized that we are already a month late with the deadline.

Every single hour, I get a message from them like, "it's not working", "when can you finish this feature?", blah blah blah.. and so on.

I got frustrated.

"I want my fucking life back", I told them. No one cared about the {{ completionDate }}, the sleepless zombies they are working with and our payment. They keep on coming up with this "amazing" ass features, and now they are not paying because they said "it's not complete".

Idiot enough to trust a friend. I was unprotected, there was no legal-binding document that states their obligation to pay.

My dev friend and I handed over the project to this web development company which they prefer, and kept a backdoor on the application.

I kind of moved on with the payment issue after a month. But without their knowledge, I kept an eye on the progress and made sure that I still have the access to their server, DNS, etc..

BUT when they announced the official launch on social media, I realized that I was on the wrong train the whole time.

They switched to a different server.

They thanked all the people involved with the project via social media, EXCEPT me and my coding partner who originally built the site from ground up. A little "thank you" note from them will make us feel a little better. But, never happened.

I checked up the site and it was rewritten from originally Laravel 5 to CodeIgniter 1. That is like shifting from a luxury yacht where you can bang some hot chicks, to a row boat where your left hand is holding the paddle whilst your right hand is wanking yourself.

I almost ran out of bullets.

Luckily, CodeIgniter 1 was prone to SQLi by default.

I was able to get the administrator password in plain text and fucked with their data. But that didn't make me feel better because other people's info are involved.

So, I looked for something else to screw with. What I found? A message with the credit card details.

Finally, a chance to do something good for humanity. I just donated a few thousand dollars to different charity websites.

This week I learned:

a.) Always quadruple check new feature before pushing a new update - otherwise it will end with one to three hotfixes
b.) Never do the last minute changes to the features - that ends with two to four hotfixes
c.) Always make sure that the update system works - otherwise no one will get your hotfixes

Rant r = new Rant(Rant.TEAM_PROBLEM);

Three months ago, a senior, one year older than me, decided to join me in doing startups. He said he's good at finance stuff (his parents are fund managers), and he is interested in startups just like I am. He treated me very nicely, so I gladly accepted him.

I'm currently working on many projects, and some of them won me quite a few awards, most notably on the national competition. I also got invited into startup incubator programs, met some awesome people and offered free scholarships at universities in my country.

He frankly said he joined because he wanted to learn about startups and have those "privileges" too, and I'm cool with that.

Anyway, the problem is that I'm the one doing all the work. He's really nice, doesn't claim anything whatsoever, but the thing is he doesn't have any skills whatsoever except soft skills like communicating. So, I'm horribly tired from working alone.

My tasks mostly involves full-stack development, such as planning the specs, designing and developing frontend for mobile apps and progressive webapps, developing microservices for the backend, up to deploying and maintaining the servers. It's a lot of work for a single person to handle in such a short timeframe.

Not only that, but I'm also the one handling the business/marketing part, albeit I'm still learning. From doing paperworks, pitches, business models, up to creating advertising materials for the product.

I'm obviously not the smart ones like the people out there, but I keep focusing on improving my skills.

So, he said he could help me, and I let him try. What did you think he did?

He made pitch decks using default fucking PowerPoint themes, shooted a demo video with his phone cam in 320p potato resolution and expect me to "add some effects", gives me loads of requirements when all we needed was a simple feature, copying and pasting prior documents in my paperworks which doesn't make any fucking sense at all, and quite a lot more.

Also, he said I should stay in the developer zone only while he maintains the business, whilist he obviously can't do much in the business part either. Seriously...?

I'm okay with his lack of experience, considering he's nice and all, unlike the other business guys I've met in the previous rants. However, I keep questioning myself why he is here in the first place when I'm the one doing everything anyway.

What should I do? Maybe just keep him and recruit more experienced people to join us, as he's not that much of a burden? What do you devRanters think?

Thanks for reading, fellow devRanters! 😀

It wasn't exactly a meeting, just boss' boss coming into our office to ask about a feature. Went something like this (BB - boss' boss (or Big Bitch, whichever you prefer, Me, SP - second programmer) :

BB: Hey guys, I've got a question.

Me (without turning around since I was focused on whatever I was doing at the time) : Sure, go ahead.

BB: Could we do a country map where you would be able to click a region and get to a page with posts for that region?

Me (without pausing what I was doing) : Sure, easy. Html imagemap, or embedded flash if it's supposed to be fancy and animated.

BB: ...how would we do it?

Me (in exactly the same tone of voice, trying to mimic the same sound sample being played again) : Html imagemap, or embedded flash if it's supposed to be fancy and animated... Links leading to the same address as the filtering form for regions already goes. All that's needed is the map graphic.

BB: ...but how would we link to the correct results? Would we need to make new page for those?

Me: *sigh*

At this point SP stops doing whatever he was doing, proceeds to sit next to her by the whiteboard, and they proceed to talk about this for about 45 minutes, which to this day, I have no idea how they managed. I had no idea how they managed to stretch it for this long even as I was listening to them talking and drawing stuff on the whiteboard about it.

Afterwards, I've been reprimanded for not paying proper attention when important stuff was being solved, and a month later when I was being fired, I had been reprimanded for it once again.

Fuck that company. Fuck those people.
I have no idea how they managed to still not go bankrupt.

Fucking facebook researcher that make underfitted neural nets and fuck Mark that it's a marketing genius, the only idiot that can make news from a failure. The CEO of Tesla knows it and said Mark is not an AI expert. Bug not feature, it's only a poorly trained and poorly designed neural network having a bad representation of concepts, not a new language and not the fucking apocalypse. Google faced and solved the same issue when start ed using neural nets for zero-shot translations without using english as a translation bridge.

My sister's laptop ate shit the other day and she ordered a new one. She got me thinking about my five year old rig, and how it was starting to show its age, so started half-heartedly pricing the stats I would want in a new machine on newegg and Amazon for fully assembled machines, and was always getting gouged or having to make some kind of sacrifice for another feature.

So after my wife responded to me trying to sound offhanded about buying a new computer by only rolling her eyes, but not actually raising any actual objection, I committed to the idea and started searching in earnest.

I realized that a fully assembled machine would always cost more, be underpowered for its price, be basically impossible to upgrade, be made of shitty parts, and always require some kind of compromise on my part.

Normally in the past, i would go to the barebones section on Pricewatch, order the basic stats I wanted, and fill it in myself after that. But it appears that Pricewatch might be dead. So, for the first time since probably 2002 or so, I'm building a computer in its entirety.

I'm really excited. Everything should be here by the middle of next week.

I'm so done with flutter.

I wanted to give it a little try by rewriting a small android project I wrote a few years back. It brings some nice concepts especially when it comes to UI related programming but that's all I can really compliment it for. It's nothing more than something to play with as it is right now.

Also I think this text will be hidden behind the read more. Did I successfully bait you with that cat?

The things I truly hate about it:

The ide integration makes me wanna use eclipse again. At least most nonsensical error messages disappear after saving the document on eclipse.
.
Wanna generate a new function? Yeah, let me just place it RIGHT INSIDE THIS FUCKING IMPORT STATEMENT

Over at Google: Let's just rename everything from java slightly different and put it in nonsensical context so that you have to learn all of it again. Also why don't we make it so that the code suggestions only suggest things you already imported, so that you have to look up every little piece shit feature.

When it comes to databases, I must say, I had more fun working with PHP and mysql than with sqFUCKlite. Throwing away the Room components for that? What a joke...

I already said what i think about the syntax here an devrant but I'm more than happy to repeat it here:
The syntax looks like someone looked at C#, Java and JavaScript and then decided to vomit the worst parts of it into a programming language. I can't really classify anything original about it. There are clear inspirations, but they are confusingly mashed together with the other languages making this one nuts of a language.

Android SDK documentation is a blessing in comparison to whatever the fuck flutter tries to do.

I don't think I'll want top touch that Google side project again within the next few years, if it hasn't been replaced with a new side project like billiard by then.

I'm getting really tired of those dumbass programmers that do not understand shit and then come to me when production breaks. (I am also a programmer, not really a DevOps engineer, but I'm the least worst at DevOps stuff, so it's my job...).

We're programming some kind of document management tool. Today we had a release, and one of the new features is to download all of your documents as a zip file, which is asynchronuously generated. When it's done, the user gets a mail with the download link to the zip file.

The feature works basically, but today it broke our production service, as somebody was running a test of it.

Turns out all the documents are loaded into memory to be zipped. So if you have 2 gigs of documents, a container with memory restrictions in that area will crash.

I asked the programmer who reported this «ops problem» to me, why he didn't just shit the files into a temp foler in order to zip them in there.

He told me that he wanted to do so, but did not know how to mock this for a unit test, and therefore went to the in-memory «solution», which was easier for him to mock.

For fuck's sake, unit tests and mocks are fucking tools, not ends in itself! I don't give a fuck about your pointless mocking code when the application crashes!

When I got to deal with such dumbasses, I'd prefer to mock those motherfuckers with a leaky bucket of liquid shit, which basically accomplishes the same task from my perspective: dripping shit all over the place and make everything suck as fuck.

Github 101 (many of these things pertain to other places, but Github is what I'll focus on)

- Even the best still get their shit closed - PRs, issues, whatever. It's a part of the process; learn from it and move on.

- Not every maintainer is nice. Not every maintainer wants X feature. Not every maintainer will give you the time of day. You will never change this, so don't take it personally.

- Asking questions is okay. The trackers aren't just for bug reports/feature requests/PRs. Some maintainers will point you toward StackOverflow but that's usually code for "I don't have time to help you", not "you did something wrong".

- If you open an issue (or ask a question) and it receives a response and then it's closed, don't be upset - that's just how that works. An open issue means something actionable can still happen. If your question has been answered or issue has been resolved, the issue being closed helps maintainers keep things un-cluttered. It's not a middle finger to the face.

- Further, on especially noisy or popular repositories, locking the issue might happen when it's closed. Again, while it might feel like it, it's not a middle finger. It just prevents certain types of wrongdoing from the less... courteous or common-sense-having users.

- Never assume anything about who you're talking to, ever. Even recently, I made this mistake when correcting someone about calling what I thought was "powerpc" just "power". I told them "hey, it's called powerpc by the way" and they (kindly) let me know it's "power" and why, and also that they're on the Power team. Needless to say, they had the authority in that situation. Some people aren't as nice, but the best way to avoid heated discussion is....

- ... don't assume malice. Often I've come across what I perceived to be a rude or pushy comment. Sometimes, it feels as though the person is demanding something. As a native English speaker, I naturally tried to read between the lines as English speakers love to tuck away hidden meanings and emotions into finely crafted sentences. However, in many cases, it turns out that the other person didn't speak English well enough at all and that the easiest and most accurate way for them to convey something was bluntly and directly in English (since, of course, that's the easiest way). Cultures differ, priorities differ, patience tolerances differ. We're all people after all - so don't assume someone is being mean or is trying to start a fight. Insinuating such might actually make things worse.

- Please, PLEASE, search issues first before you open a new one. Explaining why one of my packages will not be re-written as an ESM module is almost muscle memory at this point.

- If you put in the effort, so will I (as a maintainer). Oftentimes, when you're opening an issue on a repository, the owner hasn't looked at the code in a while. If you give them a lot of hints as to how to solve a problem or answer your question, you're going to make them super, duper happy. Provide stack traces, reproduction cases, links to the source code - even open a PR if you can. I can respond to issues and approve PRs from anywhere, but can't always investigate an issue on a computer as readily. This is especially true when filing bugs - if you don't help me solve it, it simply won't be solved.

- [warning: controversial] Emojis dillute your content. It's not often I see it, but sometimes I see someone use emojis every few words to "accent" the word before it. It's annoying, counterproductive, and makes you look like an idiot. It also makes me want to help you way less.

- Github's code search is awful. If you're really looking for something, clone (--depth=1) the repository into /tmp or something and [rip]grep it yourself. Believe me, it will save you time looking for things that clearly exist but don't show up in the search results (or is buried behind an ocean of test files).

- Thanking a maintainer goes a very long way in making connections, especially when you're interacting somewhat heavily with a repository. It almost never happens and having talked with several very famous OSSers about this in the past it really makes our week when it happens. If you ever feel as though you're being noisy or anxious about interacting with a repository, remember that ending your comment with a quick "btw thanks for a cool repo, it's really helpful" always sets things off on a Good Note.

- If you open an issue or a PR, don't close it if it doesn't receive attention. It's really annoying, causes ambiguity in licensing, and doesn't solve anything. It also makes you look overdramatic. OSS is by and large supported by peoples' free time. Life gets in the way a LOT, especially right now, so it's not unusual for an issue (or even a PR) to go untouched for a few weeks, months, or (in some cases) a year or so. If it's urgent, fork :)

I'll leave it at that. I hear about a lot of people too anxious to contribute or interact on Github, but it really isn't so bad!

Me: Im testing a new feature that is not on production yet for 30m and can not make it work. (I asked the developer for any idea why is not working)
Dev: i just tested, works fine.
Me: i just tested again with no luck. I’m i missing anything?
Dev: (Developer comes to my desk). Lets see what you doing wrong here. (After 5seconds). You have been redirected to the production site and you've been testing there all this time.
Me: 😩

Lots of questions going on about devRant. Just want to make devRant better.

1. Please tell the update intervals of upvotes and downvotes. Is there a delay? Doesnt really matter but i see many times i got a upvote notif but my score didnt increased...

2. Duplicate image algo is so poor. I know it is only in beta, but i see so many reposts which has the same pic but only with the resolution different or the image with the devrant watermark.

3. Minor, tags should be also saved when exitting the post rant activity.

4. Feature request : go to top, bottom in rant

5. Please make web app accessible in mobile. I think you check the user agent for the web app, but can you make it available to mobile users who cant download the app?

6. When accessing the web app in mobile, i type devrant.io/feed
Then, by the wonderful intent you made, it opens the app automatically. I was writing a rant, but it was all deleted.

7. Any new podcasts and cartoons planned?

8. Still bug not fixed.
Write a comment in a long rant.
Delete the comment you just wrote.
You cant reply to the last person comment.

Thanks.

I just have to rant...

7 months ago, I was still a pretty new iOS developer, but finally coming into my own. My boss gave me my first feature ever... a fully custom backend tweaker for our development builds, complete with text fields that devs and testers alike could fill in themselves for whatever they needed to test. I worked harder on that than I’ve ever worked on anything... and I got to make all the decisions on how it looked, behaved, what exactly the user saw/read... everything.

A month ago the most senior dev on my team was asked to update the tool to prepare for a backend migration to a new server. He was then hired to work for Apple, hurried to finish this task, and left forever. (He deserves it, we probably were slowing him down realistically. But that doesn’t forgive the following...)

Unfortunately, he thought it’d be a good idea to remove my entire custom backend tool in the process. Not sure why— maybe he thought it was legacy code or something. He must not have tested either, because the entire backend selector stopped working after that. But that was no problem— I could fix the pre-filled environment buttons just by updating a few values.

It’s the fact that he removed 100+ lines of my custom code from 3 separate classes (including entirely removing one of those classes), for no known reason, and now I have to completely rebuild the feature. Since it was entirely custom, it required no change for our migration in the first place. But he rewrote how the entire view works by writing an entirely new VC, so there is no chance I can just restore my work as it was written.

And in the shared class, he erased every line with the word “custom.” So, so many lines of hard work, now irrelevant and only visible in old defunct versions. And my boss has asked me to “just make it look how it did before the migration.”

I know it’s useless to be angry at a guy who’s long gone, but damn. I am having a real hard time convincing myself to redo all this work. He removed every trace, and all I can think is WHY DID YOU DO THAT YOU FUCKING MONSTER? IT WAS MY GREATEST WORK, AND NOBODY ASKED YOU TO DESTROY IT. THIS WAS NOT EVEN RELATED TO THE TASK YOU WERE GIVEN, AND NOW A SIMPLE TICKET TO RESTRUCTURE A TOOL HAS BECOME A MANDATE TO REBUILD IT FROM SCRATCH.

Thank you for being here, devRant. I would’ve gotten myself into deep trouble long ago if I didn’t have this safe place to blow off steam 🙏

Just checked my work email to see what's coming in today....

And see someone on the London scheduled a 9AM meeting with me at 5:30AM my time.

Yes thanks for the advance notice...

Not going to be in the morning though and well the whole thing is BS based on some stupid new requirement that doesn't make sense.

Basically asking to migrate a while application to a new platform that no one understands yet.... Just to add a completely unrelated be feature...

Feature: 1month
Migration: 1 year based on the pre-reqs needed

So last week I really fucked up

I had this new implementation that was supposedly to be integrating smoothly into the rest of the service. It depended on a serialized model made by a data scientist. I test it in local, in QA environment: no problem.

So, Friday, 4pm, I decide to deploy to production. I check once from the app: the service throw an error. Panic attack, my chief is at my desk, we triy to understand what went wrong. I make calls with cUrls: no problem. Everything seems fine. I recheck from the app again: no problem.
We dedice to let it in prod, as the feature work. I go get some beers with the guys, to celebrate the deploy.

Fast-forward the next morning, 11am, my phone ring: it's a colleague of my chief. "Please check Slack, a client is trying to use the feature, it's broken"

FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!

Panic attack again. I go to the computer, check the errors: two types of errors. One I can fix, the other from a missing package on the machine that the data guy used.

Needless to say, I had a fairly good weekend.

Lessons learned:
- make sure Dev, QA and Prod are exactly the same (use Ansible or Container)
- never deploy on a Friday afternoon if you don't have a quick way to revert

In today's episode of kidding on SystemD, we have a surprise guest star appearance - Apache Foundation HTTPD server, or as we in the Debian ecosystem call it, the Apache webserver!

So, imagine a situation like this - Its friday afternoon, you have just migrated a bunch of web domains under a new, up to date, system. Everything works just fine, until... You try to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.

Such a mundane task, done more than a thousand times already... Yet... No matter what you do, nothing works. Apache just returns a HTTP status code 403 - Forbidden.

Of course, what many folk would think of first when it came to a 403 error is - Ooooh, a permission issue somewhere in the directory structure!

So you check it... And re-check it to make sure... And even switch over to the user the webserver runs under, yet... You can access the challenge just fine, what the hell!

So you go deeper... And enable the most verbose level of logging apache is capable of - Trace8. That tells you... Not a whole lot more... Apparently, the webserver was unable to find file specified? But... Its right there, you can see it!

So you go another step deeper and start tracing the process' system calls to see exactly where it calls stat/lstat on the file, and you see that it... Calls lstat and... It... Returns -1? What the hell#2!

So, you compile a custom binary that calls lstat on the first argument given and prints out everything it returns... And... It works fine!

Until now, I chose to omit one important detail that might have given away the issue to the more knowledgeable right away. Our webservers have the URL /.well-known/acme-challenge/, used for ACME challenges, aliased somewhere else on the filesystem - To /tmp/challenges.

See the issue already?

Some *bleep* over at the Debian Package Maintainer group decided that Apache could save very sensitive data into /tmp, so, it would be for the best if they changed something that worked for decades, and enabled a SystemD service unit option "PrivateTmp" for the webserver, by default.

What it does is that, anytime a process started with this option enabled writes to /tmp/*, the call gets hijacked or something, and actually makes the write to a private /tmp/something/tmp/ directory, where something... Appeared as a completely random name, with the "apache2.service" glued at the end.

That was also the only reason why I managed fix this issue - On the umpteenth time of checking the directory structure, I noticed a "systemd-private-foobarbas-apache2.service-cookie42" directory there... That contained nothing but a "tmp" directory with 777 as its permission, owned by the process' user and group.

Overriding that unit file option finally fixed the issue completely.

I have just one question - Why? Why change something that worked for decades? I understand that, in case you save something into /tmp, it may be read by 3rd parties or programs, but I am of the opinion that, if you did that, its only and only your fault if you wrote sensitive data into the temporary directory.

And as far as I am aware, by default, Apache does not actually write anything even remotely sensitive into /tmp, so...

Why. WHY!
I wasted 4 hours of my life debugging this! Only to find out its just another SystemD-enabled "feature" now!

And as much as I love kidding on SystemD, this time, I see it more as a fault of the package maintainers, because... I found no default apache2/httpd service file in the apache repo mirror... So...

Hey Code-tards,

We're announcing a new update to our software `FUCK YOU` to include a new 'feature' no one asked and would give a FLYING FUCK about, but we were sitting on our MOTHERFUCKING ASSES and had to justify our salaries somehow.

So this new feature really just makes your life horrible by taking away or breaking all useful features you were PERFECTLY HAPPY with before, but FUCK YOU if you aren't happy with it and don't throw half of your salary our way every month.

Remember our library you were perfectly OK with, that u integrated in your codebase? DEPRECATED from this second onwards. WHY? BECAUSE FUCK YOU ! That's WHY.

Oh yeah, and one last thing before we make your life a living hellhole, give us your SSN, credit card(s) and mortgage payments to us, you money-hungry CUNT. Haven't you heard the phrase already? YOU WILL OWN NOTHING AND YOU WILL BE HAPPY.

The face you make when you see the code of the personal application you made but want to add new feature.

My foolishness of giving into an almost impossible dream seems to be finally setting in.

So the client, who is also my relative is launching an hotel. He wanted a website for the hotel with booking facility. The budget was plenty for that requirement and I was okay. In my calculations 20% of the proposed budget seemed fair to charge.

Few months in, it turns out he now wants a hotel booking platform where other hotels can also be listed. The reasoning was he wants to avoid the commissions charged by popular booking sites and also feature his own hotel in the booking platform that was about to be build.

I was skeptical about his intentions and my skills in developing it. I was also concerned whether he understood the responsibilities and overhead costs of running such a platform. He talked like it'll be fine. I calculated my billing to about 50% of the budget. I left the other 50% intentionally because I knew it would need for keeping up the site.

Time goes by, i am now 90% into completion of the new requirement.

Few weeks ago, i had informed about server pricing and I quoted a starting price of $15 per month. He seemed quite shocked. His reaction shocked me too and I got concerned whether I would even get rest of the payment ( already got 10% of proposed budget ) as advance.

Just few days ago, he now has a new requirement. He wants to show the hotel pricing from the booking site in Google Maps search. I tried to understand him that those are Ads and I was pretty sure price of running those ads are beyond his budget and probably negate any savings he is trying to make by competing popular booking platforms. Signing up for Hotel Ads as a booking platform is quite challenging. I don't think it'll happen.

I am now concerned he might bail on the project, so I have not informed yet. I just hope I get paid for the work I done and I'll inform then. :P

Anyways, the journey of it's development was quite insightful and challenging experience. I fell in love with a language I knew existed but never really bothered about and a framework whose only thing I knew was that it's name sounded cool to say.

Right.. I spent the hours leading up to the year change by adding a YouTube to MP3 downloader into my Telegram bot. After a bit of fiddling it turned out okay, and the commit for it was mentioned to the last for the year 2020.

I mentioned this in one of my chats, and users came in with more issues. Told them it's the last commit for the year and I'll keep myself to it. I did adjust the code a bit though to fix those issues, awaiting a commit after midnight.

Midnight passes and 2020 turns into 2021.

I commit the new features, and quickly implemented another one I already thought of as well, but needed its own commit.

Quickly afterwards it turns out that the /mp3 feature actually breaks the bot somewhat, especially on long tracks. Users add a slew of 10h songs into what essentially became a long queue of single-threaded bot action (or rather lack thereof).

I made the /mp3 command accessible to myself only like I did with some other administrative commands already. Still no dice, the bot rejected the commands but executed part of the /mp3 command anyway.

I look a bit further into the code and it turns out that while I was restructuring some functions, I forgot to make the admin() function exit the script after it sends the rejection onwards. This was a serious security issue and meant that all authentication was void. Fortunately the chat did not realize this - one of the commands that became available as a result was literally a terminal on the bot's system.

I fix the issue in 7 commits after midnight total, 3 of which were related to /mp3 and admin(). We're now 1 hour after midnight.

Happy New Year everyone... :')

sales-managers: How long do you need to implement feature X ?
software-dev: Hmmm, that's nothing we have in our default-packages ... could be nasty, because it won't work without feature Y, which also does not exist in the current version 3 of our system.
I need to investigate this issue.
... 2 days later:
software-dev: This is really a nasty problem - to make X work, we've to reimplement Y for our system version 3, but this won't work with feature Z.
If we do this, it may take several weeks.
sales-manager: we need to go live in 2 months.
software-dev: might work.
------
1 week before go-live:
sales-manager: The customer saw us testing feature X. He does not like it. Could we just do it in ... blabla ... this way?
software-dev: This would work out of the box with feature Z, yes - we've to remove feature Y and X for that. But be warned - this might work next week without testing only.
sales-mamanger: do it now!
day of go live:
The customer tried the new feature X - it won't work.
software-dev: But it's not there, was removed, instead he has to use feature Z.
...
sales-guy comes back: He does not like it.
software-dev: why not? its working!
sales-guy: Yes, but he still wants it to work like feature X as he ordered.
software-dev: according to the specs, its exactly what he ordered. look at that: (showing the general specifications of project, showing feature Z).
...
sales-guy: The customer did not review this new document since last week.... Its still feature X
...
dev: really? why? I sent that version to you the day, he said, he doesn't like feature X, and you said I've to change that just urgently.
sales-guy: Please switch back to the version with X of last week. - could you. please ?
me: This won't work, because the other colleagues already finished their stuff on that currently running system - we'll lose all the optimations we've done to make this and other stuff work.
----- FAIL ------- NEVER DO ANYTHING WITHOUT SIGNATURE OF THE CUSTOMER !!!
One week onsite and rescheduled go-live is just so-what expensive.
Today (some weeks later) ... I saw someone else sitting in sales-guys office.

What time do you get up on work days? I'm starting to think I should have me time in morning (reading, learning, coding my own things) before going to work.

I've think I've come the the conclusion that this job/team is sorta chaotic and tedious and there's no skill growth. Not learning anything new. Usually just something broken, integrate some new feature, build something that I've already built before but differently for this specific case. Nothing fun or challenging, or new.

And also tired of trying to be a "role model", make things right. I tend to like to keep things orderly, documented, well tested and clean but everyone else seems to just bulldoze their way to get whatever they need, leaving a mess behind... It's been like 2yrs already but the technical debt seems to be growing not shrinking...

I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.

So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.

I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.

Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.

This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?

And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...

I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?

I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.

And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?

This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.

There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.

I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.

Man, I don't want to go to work today.

A service had/has been logging hundreds of errors in the development environment and I reached out to the owning process mgr that the error was occurring and perhaps a good opportunity to log additional data to help troubleshoot the issue if the problem ever made its way to production. He responded saying the error was related to a new feature they weren't going to implement in the backing dev database (TL;DR), and they know it works in production (my spidey sense goes off).
They deployed the changes to production this morning and immediately starting throwing errors (same error I sent)
Mgr messaged me a little while ago "Did you make any changes to the documentation service? We're getting this error .."

50% sure someone misspelled something in a config, but only thing they are logging is 'Unable to parse document'. Nothing that indicates an issue with the service they're using.

So it's friday and I'm almost done with all my work and suddenly manager comes in and asks me that client wants to talk to you. I agree and we move into meeting room here is how conversation goes
(C)lient-There is some new feature we want to add -/Describes his feature which is somewhat like an existing feature we have. The feature needs many images which area already present/-
(M)e-Ohkay this can be done. How much time is allotted.
C- You can take a month or two -/I have fucking happy fucking over the moon beacuse i knew it wouldn't take more than 2 days-/
M-Sure
C- Yeah make sure the images are rotated manually.
M-*In Shock* Manually? You mean like i have to right click and then select rotate -/in which ever direction you mother is getting fucked?-/
C-Yeah..
M- But there is a tool which can do the same thing!
C-No the tool maybe wrong we want 100 percent accuracy.
M-*For a while like this -_-* I can start the tool and then manually check if any image is wrongly rotated.
C-No you can be wrong sometimes. .
-/Meanwhile the manager is giving me a stern look like/-
M-If i can be wrong after running tool why i can't BE WRONG WHEN I HAVE TO ROTATE THE IMAGE 10000 TIMESSSSS
C- do it manually.
*He cuts the call!*
I have no fucking option now! THESE FUCKING CLIENT'S AND THEIR BALL LICKING MANAGER FUCK MY LIFE FUCK MY JOB
I'LL DO IT BY SCRIPT ONLY FIRE ME YOU FUCKING MORONS
ASSHOLLESSS

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's been two months since I've left my previous job, after 1.5 years. I never had the feeling my boss trusted his dev team, since he was checking up on us regularly, even though we had planned out a sprint and work for us was "clear". I say "clear", because every single feature on this project was pretty much half-baked, since they were just ideas our boss/PO (same person) on the spot and were labeled as "the next big thing" without every properly writing them out as user stories. Every demo came with a bunch of criticism, because features weren't implemented "as he imagined", because what do you know, the user stories weren't properly described anyway. Bringing that up as counter-argument also made him angry every time, so that didn't help much either. The launch of the platform was also postponed every time because of vague reasons, so that didn't make the project any more interesting either.
It took a while before I got sick of this of this pretty hopeless situation and toxic environment. Mind you, it was my first job since I graduated, so I was a bit naive thinking the working environment would improve and aforementioned company issues would be resolved over time. Eventually, I ran out of patience and motivation, so I finally bit the bullet and handed in my resignation letter.
From that moment, I at least had an end in sight, since I was still obliged to do my four-week notice period, which felt like an eternity. The borderline childish and sociopathic behaviour of my boss didn't make it any better (e.g. checking up on me even more, more mistrust, randomly accusing me of ruining the working atmosphere because I shared a meme with a colleague of mine and didn't involve him, going lunching with all of my colleagues but explicitly asking me to stay at work, ...). Being forced to work from home the last 2 weeks as part of the country's lockdown measures at least helped my sanity a bit, since I had the comfort of my home office and not the frequent "looking over your shoulders to check if you're still working".
By the last day of my notice period, I was bitter, exhausted, lost confidence in my skills and had completely lost my joy of being a developer. I had to physically meet with my boss one more time to hand in the company laptop. He thanked me for my service and said that we'd keep in touch. I hope I won't keep that promise (he made a lot of false promises before, too), because I'd rather never encounter him ever again. It felt like a huge relief to finally close the door of this bad experience behind me for good.

Now, 2 months later, I've got a new job and rediscovered my joy for coding, mostly thanks to the complete opposite of a toxic environment here, management which actually has respect and faith in me and a challenging but fun project. My mental state has made a complete turnaround compared to two months ago. I have absolutely no regrets of switching jobs. If only I had made that decision sooner.

This post is kinda late. For those who haven't read my previous rants, a marketing coworker bragged about a feature that we hadn't yet finished. (I'm thinking that they perhaps did it to put extra pressure on the dev team 🤔.) Of course it backfired pretty bad, because this feature was a plug-in for another service, and even though the dev team was on time with the feature, the other service we were writing a plug-in for took _sooo_ long to approve of our code, and it made this marketing guy look so bad in front of these clients because the feature was a few weeks late.

A part of the new feature was that some of their data would be synced with this service. These customers were so important that we couldn't afford to disappoint them, and the solution was... *drumroll please* ... that this marketing guy would have to manually copy the customer's data from the service into our platform to make the customer think this feature is ready. Row by row. I'm hearing it takes about one hour of their day 🤣

I mean I'm good friends with the guy but... they kinda deserved it

Got a new job at a fairly large IT firm which deals with large scale business software for customers like the government's various agencies.

The very first job I'm assigned to: we have to strip down this software and make it more general, go ahead and delete everything related to <feature>.

I haven't had time to get to know the product and I've deleted hundreds of files and lines of code from related files...

I have a feeling this will bite me somehow

Windows 10 Action Center yesterday alerted me to set a PIN for my laptop.

Turned on PC this morning and typed in my regular password then realized it wanted the PIN.

Thinking how this feature came to be....

1. Windows wants you to link your login to your Microsoft/Hotmail Account and it makes it a pain in the ass to set a seperate one (Windows 8)
2. 2018 arrived an logins are a pain, everything is autologin or PIN/code based (aka short 'unsecure' passwords)
3. MS backtracks and realizes email logins are too long so they make a partial fix which basically reverts back to the pre-Win8 days of a seperate system login.. except now its called a new feature!

I realized now under enter a PIN the reason for the checkbox that says: Allow symbols and letters. It's a nice way of saying: please type in your old password again.

**Also rant #2: cuz i dont feel like waiting 1hr**
I felt great yesterday when my boss told me apparantly I have like an Expert designation at the company.

Feel like crap today cuz some user is complaining about some report:
- they asked us to create months ago
- now complaining its all wrong but never gave any formal requirements and actually did sign off on it during testing
- FIXED ASAP

HELLO!!!!!!!!!!! STOP MAKING IT SOUND LIKE IT'S MY FAULT U CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO PROVIDE CLEAR REQUIREMENTS AND THEN TAKING FOREVER TO COME BACK WITH UR PROBLEMS AND NOW NEED IT FIXED ASAP BY USING A NEW DATA SOURCE THAT I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK IS SINCE U USED A RANDOM ABBREVIATION LIKE I CAN MIND READ.

IF I COULD MINDREAD, ID BE WORKING ON A PLAN TO GET UR ASS FIRED.....

Happy friday and long weekend... Got 3 days to relax before i need to deal with this shit again...

When I realized that programming is the greatest way to make one's living, that I will never love anything more than programming, and that every feature and quirk in a new language is like a new friend.

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.

!rant
So on the last day before launch our latest feature I'm informed that a requirement was missed and it had to be implemented before go live otherwise the business didn't want the feature. The feature in question was pretty drastic and basically required a scheme rewrite, new tables, etc. So I spent the entire day making the change.

Thankfully I pushed the whole project for good code coverage. Therefore, all I had to do when I was done was run all of our tests and make sure they passed. *warm fuzzy feelings*

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

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

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

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

2 lessons to take away from this story:

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

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

Argh! (I feel like I start a fair amount of my rants with a shout of fustration)

Tl;Dr How long do we need to wait for a new version of xorg!?

I've recently discovered that Nvidia driver 435.17 (for Linux of course) supports PRIME GPU offloading, which -for the unfamiliar- is where you're able render only specific things on a laptops discreet GPU (vs. all or nothing). This makes it significantly easier (and power efficient) to use the GPU in practice.

There used to be something called bumblebee (which was actually more power efficient), but it became so slow that one could actually get better performance out of Intel's integrated GPU than that of the Nvidia GPU.

This feature is also already included in the nouveau graphics driver, but (at least to my understanding) it doesn't have very good (or none) support for Turing GPUs, so here I am.

Now, being very excited for this feature, I wanted to use it. I have Arch, so I installed the nvidia-beta drivers, and compiled xorg-server from master, because there are certain commits that are necessary to make use of this feature.

But after following the Nvidia instructions, it doesn't work. Oops I realize, xrog probably didn't pick up the Nvidia card, let's restart xorg. and boom! Xorg doesn't boot, because obviously the modesetting driver isn't meant for the Nvidia card it's meant for the Intel one, but xorg is to stupid for that...

So here I am back to using optimus-manager and the ordinary versions of Nvidia and xorg because of some crap...

If you have some (good idea) of what to do to make it work, I'm welcome to hear it.

so i am on notice period and suddenly my manager has realised that there are a lot of tasks that i have to pickup. well fuck this guy.

i was initially dumb enough to think that i leaving is a bad thing,and i should be doing everything to make the transition easier. the task was also interesting enough , as we were trying to add a new and complex feature and i was the main dev there.

so i started at full pace. i would work on my tasks for hours , even missing on my personal projects. but since last week he would keep adding new tickets in my jira boards every few days , followed by a quick huddle telling how this is a very small and high priority ticlet and i should look at that first.

and me being me, i would not only just finish those small tickets in time, but have a progress on my major feature, as well as answer doubts of other team mates and attend meetings.

--------

i always forget how hypnotising this work culture usually get. the above scenario that i explained? i have no problem with that in a general day. i love to work, solve problems and help others. but these are no normal days, this is my fuckin notice period.

And i am here coz of a reason. if they rely on me so much, why did they forced me to relocate when i just can't? why don't they gove me a lucrative salary + worthy relocation benefits ? fuck them. i even have to serve for a fucking 60 days coz they are not willing to reduce my notice period .

fake promises everytime.
"you don't worry about different office mentioned in your offer letter. we will always keep the environment remote" ~ lie

"even if we go wfo, our company will open an office in your city too, your city is the capital and we had an office there before" ~ lie

"your notice period will get reduced, dont worry about the 60 days" - another fucking lie

______

notice period experts, i need some devil advice to not get exploited by a lier corp. how to utilise my notice period and what should he the excuses to not attend any nloody meetings?

A dev life in Queen songs:

„A Kind of Magic“ - Build successful
„A Winter’s Tale“ - Key Account Manager visits customer
„Action This Day“ - Release day
„All Dead, All Dead“ - System down
„Another One Bites the Dust“ - kill -9 4711
„Breakthru“ - 10 hour debuging session
„Chinese Torture“ - Microsft Office
„Coming Soon“ - Client asks for delivery date
„Dead on Time“ - shutdown -t 10
„Doing All Right“ - How's the progress on the new feature?
„Don’t Lose Your Head“ - git push -f
„Don’t Stop Me Now“ - In the zone
„Escape from the Swamp“ - Hand in resignation letter
„Forever“ - while(1)
„Friends Will Be Friends“ - friend class Vector;
„Get Down, Make Love“ - No rule to make target "Love"
„Hammer to Fall“ - Release day
„Hang on in There“ - 2 weeks until release
„I Can’t Live With You“- Microsoft
„I Go Crazy“ - Microsoft
„I Want It All“ - Google
„I Want to Break Free“ - free( (void*) 0xDEADBEEF );
„I’m Going Slightly Mad“ - Impossible feature requested
„If You Can’t Beat Them“ - Impossible feature promised by sales
„In Only Seven Days“ - Impossible feature ordered
„Is This the World We Created...?“ - Philosphic moments
„It’s a Beautiful Day“ - Weekend
„It’s a Hard Life“ - Weekday
„It’s Late“ - Deadline was last week
„Jesus“ - WTF?
„Keep Passing the Open Windows“ - Interprocess communication
„Keep Yourself Alive“ - Daily struggle
„Leaving Home Ain’t Easy“ - Time to get up and go to work
„Let Me Entertain You“ - Sales meets customer
„Liar“ - Sales
„Long Away“ - Project start
„Loser in the End“ - Dev
„Lost Opportunity“ - Job ad
„Love of My Life“ - emacs/vim
„Machines“ - Computer
„Made in Heaven“ - git
„Misfire“ - Unhandled exception at Memory location 0xDEADBEEF
„My Life Has Been Saved“ - Google drive/Facebook
„New York, New York“ - Meeting at customer
„No-One But You“ - Bus factor = 1
„Now I’m Here“ - Morning rush hour
„One Vision“ - Management goals
„Pain Is So Close to Pleasure“ - NullPointerExcption
„Party“ - Delivery completed
„Play the Game“ - Customer meeting inhous -
„Put Out the Fire“ - Support hotline
„Radio Ga Ga“ - GSM/GPRS/UMTS/LTE/5G
„Ride the Wild Wind“ - Arch Linux
„Rock It“ - Linux
„Save Me“ - CTRL-S/CTRL-Z
„See What a Fool I’ve Been“ - git blame
„Sheer Heart Attack“ - rm -rf /
„Staying Power“- UPS
„Stealin’“ - Stack Overflow
„The Miracle“ - It works
„The Night Comes Down“ - It doesn't work
„The Show Must Go On“ - Project cancelled
„There Must Be More to Life Than This“ - Philosophic moments
„These Are the Days of Our Lives“ - Daily routine
„Under Pressure“ - 1 day until release
„Was It All Worth It“ - Controlling
„We Are the Champions“ - Release finished
„We Will Rock You“ - Sales at customer
„Who Needs You“ - HR
„You Don’t Fool Me“ - Debugging session
„You Take My Breath Away“ - rm -rf /
„You’re My Best Friend“ - emacs/vim

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

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

Perhaps, the cache? Nope.

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

Perhaps the front side is pointing to dev? Nope.

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

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

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

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

TLDR;
I remissness about Yahoo site builder and talk about finding the record of the Google search that changed my life a long time ago and I think it's fucking great.

Earlier I re-installed google chrome but unlike every other time, this time I forgot to turn off the auto-sync feature. I only realized this when I opened gmail and it pre-populated my login info with the info of my very first, long forgotten gmail account.

So naturally I went exploring... after going through the mails I decided to check out the actual Google account to see if there was anything of interest there and lo and behold I found around 7 years of browsing history that I had no idea Google stored at the time.

As scary as it was to see I'm kinda glad about it now because aside from finding out that I was going through an Asian porn phase in 2008 I also found the one Google search record that changed my life.

It was a search to download Yahoo site builder followed by a bunch more on how to use it.

I had stumbled across a random article about it and it caught my eye because I needed a website for the grocery store I was a manager of back then.

Thankfully it was a fucking horrible WYSIWYG editor. I recall it acting almost identical to Word at the time - I would save and back up my site constantly because moving something 1px would fuck the layout up and burn everything to the ground, cntrl+z would try and do something, reversing only my last action while leaving the rest of the site in tatters and I didn't have the skills to understand or fix it...

Ultimately my frustration led me learn a bit of html & css and a week or so later It became apparent it would be easier to scratch code the damn thing so I uninstalled Yahoo site builder and started all over again.

Learning & building that site in notepad ignited my passion for coding and less than a year later I left my shitty dead end job to join a brand new tech company created with the help of a like minded investor officially employed as a developer. Let help you understand just how big this achievement was for me - I had been trying to find a job, ANY job in I.T even at a call center level without success for 6 years because I dropped out of school.

In 6 years as an active job seeker I only received one phone call about a job opportunity which ended very quickly once they realised they had misread my CV. In all those years I never even got a single job interview.

After that I spent the next 3 years rolling out and improving the cloud based loyalty card system I had written for my store out on a national scale and the rest is history. Since then I have never been judged by a crappy piece of paper, hated my job or struggled to find a new one.

What a beautiful search result that was to find.

I dedicate this rant to Yahoo, with my sincere gratitude for making a shitty WYSIWYG editor that was so bad it pissed me off enough to make me actually learn something.

Backend : *breaks feature in prod by changing api*

Me: Feature is broken in prod. Please fix. I was told that the API will not deprecate the old use case.

Backend: ... Fixing it in the backend will take time. Add support for it in the frontend.

Me: I'm not done with the new feature just yet. And it will take some time to have it reviewed and fully tested. Please fix the API.

Backend: .... Well, make a new PR and add support for it first. The new feature can come later.

Me. (-_-) Okay

Sometimes it feels like I'm a code janitor rather than a frontend intern

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not 1 Business Unit in Company: We need this feature immediately.

My Team: Anyone object to this 2 hour old merge request?

Me: Well, yeah, I found a couple things that we should probably go ahead and address.

My Team: we'll fix that in a future release

Me: But you said that last release...

My Boss: MR Accepted

Also My Boss: Can you make a new user story to fix this?

How do you make up new cool features for your platform?

well you don't because UX and PM think it best to look at competitors and implement whatever shit they come up with.

once, someone came up with a cool feature and some basic prototype for it and they ignored it. the competitor thought of it years later and did it. when they did it, suddenly its a priority at our company to do it as well.

sure, why be the first to do the feature. im sure being unique and creative is overrated not like our profit comes from user subscriptions.

Some recent PM decisions similar to the one above are driving me crazy, its not like u dont know what to do we literally have a ton of ideas so stop ignoring them and prioritizing being a knock off app of someone else. FUCK YOU.

I don't care about market cap. Stick your hype-driven business practices up your ass. Infinite growth doesn't exist. I won't read your fucking books and attend your fucking bootcamps and MBAs. You don't have a business model. Selling data is not a business model. Fuck your quick-flip venture capital schemes, and especially fuck your “ethics”.

I will be the first alt-tech CEO. I only care about revenue. The real money, not capitalization bubble vaporware. You don't need a huge fleet of engineers if you're smart about your technology, know how to do architecture, and you're not a feature creep. You don't need venture capital if you don't need a huge fleet of engineers. You don't need to sell data if you don't need venture capital. See? See the pattern here?

My experience allows me to build products on entirely my own. I am fully aware of the limitations of being alone, and they only inspire lean thinking and great architectural decisions. If you know throwing capacity at a problem is not an option, you start thinking differently. And if you don't need to hire anyone, it is very easy to turn a profit and make it sustainable.

If you don't follow the path of tech vaporware, you won't have the problems of tech vaporware, namely distrust of your user base, shitty updates that break everything, and of course “oops, they raised capital, time to leave before things go south”.

A friend of mine went the path I'm talking about, developed a product over the course of four years all alone, reached $10k MRR and sold for $0.8M. But I won't sell. I only care about revenue. If I get to $10k MRR, I will most likely stop doing new features and focus on fixing all the bugs there are and improving performance. This and security patches. Maybe an occasional facelift. That's it. Some products are valued because they don't change, like Sublime Text. The utility tool you can rely on. This is my scheme, this is what I want to do in life. A best-kept secret.

Imagine 100 million users that hate my product but use it because there are no alternatives, 100 people in data enrichment department alone, a billion dollars of evaluation (without being profitable), 10 million twitter followers, and ten VC firms telling me what to do and what data to sell.

Fuck that. I'd rather have one thousand loyal customers and $10k MRR. I'm different, some call it a mental illness, but the bottom line is, my goals are beyond their understanding. They call me crazy. I won't say it was never about the money, of course it was, but inflating your evaluation is not “money”. But the only thing they have is their terrible hustle culture lives and some VC street wisdom, meanwhile I HAVE products, it is on record on my PH. I have POTDs, I have a fucking Golden Kitty nomination on health and fitness for a product I made in one day. Fuck you.

GitHub has launched Codespaces : A feature that lets you code directly on the web {as a virtual Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on the cloud}.

According to the Github Blog: Earlier, to contribute to a project you would need to make a pull request and set up the environment on your local machine according to the requirements of a project. With Codespaces, you don't need to do that anymore. As soon as you click on the code button, the website sets up the environment in seconds.

In addition to Codespaces, GitHub is also launching Discussions : A forum-like feature that lives under your project that allows others to engage with you and other contributors.

Code scanning : With code scanning enabled, every git push is scanned for new potential security vulnerabilities, and results are displayed directly in your pull request.

I've done it! I've implemented a new feature. I call it, wheal. its just like the wheel you know and love, in every way, shape, and form. But now, you can take comfort in knowing the state of the art has surely progressed, every time you go to reference, "wheal". This has the added benefit that others who may already be familiar with wheels, will have no trouble at all coming to terms with wheals. Just please, do not make reference to wheels, or your software will not compile. And also be sure to annotate all instances of wheals *wheals are just like wheels!* until all devs have been on-boarded.

Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?

A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.

If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.

But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?

And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.

In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.

By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.

In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.

For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?

One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.

Mechanics might include

1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.

2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.

3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.

4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.

And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.

Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.

If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.

How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.

The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.

And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.

"Reflective" programming...

In almost every other language:
1. obj.GetType().GetProperties()
or
for k, v in pairs(obj) do something end
or
fieldnames(typeof(obj))
or
Object.entries(obj)

2. Enjoy.

In C++: 💀
1. Use the extern keyword to trick compilers into believing some fake objects of your chosen type actually exist.

2. Use the famous C++ type loophole or structured binding to extract fields from your fake objects.

3. Figure out a way to suppress those annoying compiler warnings that were generated because of your how much of a bad practice your code is.

4. Extract type and field names from strings generated by compiler magic (__PRETTY_FUNCTION__, __FUNCSIG__) or from the extremely new feature std::source_location (people hate you because their Windows XP compilers can't handle your code)

5. Realize your code still does not work for classes that have private or protected fields.

6. Decide it's time to become a language lawyer and make OOPers angry by breaking encapsulation and stealing private fields from their classes using explicit template instantiation

7. Realize your code will never work outside of MSVC, GCC or CLANG and will always be reliant on undefined behaviors.

8. Live forever in doubt and fear that new changes to the compiler magic you abused will one day break your code.

9. SUFFER IN HELL as you start getting 5000 lines worth of template errors after switching to a new compiler.

When Icriticize a paid service for taking away or not providing functionality for all users equally but then a user comes back defending them with some BS reason...

Ok... I'll just continue helping myself only...

@nnee

Me:

1. Can you put the New books tab with back in the bottom, scrolling down into the New section in the front page is annoying. At least make it a setting?

2. Where's the # of books read stat in Android?

Blinkist: Hi thanks for your message! The best way to view the newest titles on Android is to do just as you mention – scroll down to reveal the New section. As for BiB stats on Android, we're working on releasing this feature (it's only live on iOS at the moment).

Me: Hm... I liked the older way better. Faster and can tell when it was added. The problem is sometimes still new books don't refresh and I need to login out to get it to update. Also I notice sometimes the list changes randomly I think. One day a new book is there. The next day it's gone.

BiB stats have been in iOS for a year now? How hard is it to put it in Android. Personally it only took me a day to find out what my total is as I can write a program to do it so to me I don't understand how this could be taking so

Some user: Priorities and often it’s strategy for future features...

Me: you take away useful functionality and and can't release a feature that's been on the iOS version for a year already... fine,,, I'll just take it as a challenge... that I've mostly solved... for myself...

To you, who use Windows 11. Is there at least one feature that makes you glad you switched from 10 to 11? Or maybe not necessarily glad, but it would make you appreciate the new OS? One thing that would make the upgrade worth it... I myself can not think of a single fucking thing. (Please don't say better HDR support, that's the one most often mentioned feature. Definitely not good enough reason to have a new OS)

I cannot remember having seen a more unethical and pushy user interface than the one of viagogo.

I'm a frustrated to close the entire tab within the first 10 seconds. It's a sad story on on how it tries to instill a sense of urgency to BOOK NOW!

100 people are looking RIGHT NOW at the YOUR offer! Stop thinking, act fast! BUY IT, YOU FOOL OR IT IS GONE!

Here, see all those other options are already sold out m( Oh look, that option over there? Just sold out in this very instant you lazy ass.

I have seen something similar on booking.com and airbnb, yet this egregious implementation truly gets my blood boiling and sets a new low.

I'll take my business elsewhere.

If you develop a web shop, treat your customers as actual adults. Let them breathe. Let them make an informed decision.

If you need to rush them, your business model is broken.

If my employer would ask me to develop something like that, I'd escalate hard. If that wouldn't suffice, I'd reject implementing that anti-feature and would look for a new job out of principle.

!rant

So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.

To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).

I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/

I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.

I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.

But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).

I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.

What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!

Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.

I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.

Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.

What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/

Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.

To Summarize a bit.

It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.

So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.

I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..

When you are new to a technology and language, but have to make full use of its feature.
You know, make tests, implement production code, planning deployment, build a CI. All by myself.
No regrets, though. Challenge accepted!

Android Studio upgrade

Over the weekend I upgraded my android studio and the project files of my current project and all went smoothly (as far as I thought).
I did not touch the project till today as was implementing some few features only for some few unexpected bugs to creap in.Been implementing that feature for some time and thought would be done in a flash only to my disappointment.
Turns after upgrading my SDK they were some conflicting dependencies that had no idea of.
To make it worse my fall to branch was way behind the active one and had to create a new project from scratch and copy paste files.
All this after spending hours in Stack
Overflow and scratching my head.

Lesson learnt to commit more frequently.

make some projects that keep me going so I can quit job and really focus on them without weird pressure from outside. If its not my day, it happenes. If I have **that** idea at 2AM Im not bothered to wake to job and just write it, than refactor it so it's more of "proper" thing and release new feature/thingy

I have so much ideas piled up and so little time ;-;

E: forgotten to add wk176 tag :/

I work at company that uses Drupal for everything. And i mean EVERYTHING. Our dumb CTO once even wanted us to join tender for flight data collection system... of course it would run on fucking drupal...

Yeah i can see its advantages but it has learning curve the shape of the snail shell and if you want it to do something new you either find module for it or drupal will start crying, shits itself and tell you to go fuck yourself.. also it is full of surprises to make your day as miserable as possible, like you send variable as $content['varname'] to user template and it returns as $user_profile['varname']['value']... and yes user template has $content array for content but why use it for storing content that i want to render.. it is used for other content to render... because in drupal content != content...

I started using laravel for my freelance projects and it took my less than 2 week to get up to speed and start working and is incredible fast to work in... You know.. its fun when you want to just add feature you just code that feature into your app.. and not spend 2 fucking years crawling through retarded preprocess functions...

Whenever i try to suggest we use other frameworks.. "Muh drupal has MODULES".. yeah because drupal is the only thing in universe that has modules.. When client has only need for simple site with simple template why use wordpress and have it done in 2 days when you can use drupal have 10 000 unnecessary DB queries that drupal does on every page load to load page title and make that site in a week.. or why use laravel for e-shop with specific functionality requested by client that would take 2 weeks to add in laravel when you can spend 2 months modifing uber-cart or drupal commerce modules only to hit some Drupal core surprise that wont allow for that feature to be implemented...

I've got a decent developer job with decent people. It pays well enough. I work from home. There's a lot to be grateful for, and I am grateful. That being said...

I work for a consulting company with Agile in the name. It's the sort where they hire you and tell you that you'll work with an Agile team on exciting stuff and that they want to make sure you're learning and doing what interests you.

The reality is starting yet another engagement which is really just staff augmentation, joining another organization that's made a mess of what they're building. It works, but the code is all over the place. They've got tons of defects and work is slowing.

The idea is always that if we show them what great work we can do they'll let us do more. That sounds like an okay plan for the company but not so much for me.

My motivation is drained. I'm not going to fix your machine. I'm just going to become part of it. Show me what you want me to work on and I'll write the code. Then I'll spend several days trying to get a local environment to work so I can test what I did through the UI because you don't have enough tests. I'll spend more time debugging the environment than anything else. I won't really know if it works and it doesn't matter because without tests the next change someone commits will break it anyway. The next person can't manually test every scenario any more than I can.

While I'm doing this, someone somewhere is building the next application that I'll work on after they're done screwing it up.

If you're about to start building some new application, pretend it's done but it doesn't work very well, it's slow, it's buggy, and every new feature you want takes months. Pretend that you need to hire someone to fix it for you. And then hire them to build it for you in the first place.

I thought I found a place where I could work for 5-10 years. Maybe I have. Maybe when I explain (in the most positive way possible - this isn't how I normally talk) how utterly depressing this is they'll put me on something else.

Once I'm out of this depression I'll go back to trying to make this better for myself and everyone else. We can do better. It doesn't have to suck like this.

Well fuck. I am experiencing over-engineering first hand.

I am the single dev responsible for developing a small feature but which is an identity to our whole product(feel free to guess it here). This is quite simple I thought, I can just modify the constants which are being used in the source code and I can finish it off in a week tops. I asked all the relevant teams over which this feature would have dependencies and they gave me a green signal. Setup Jenkins configuration and everything for this new feature. With a wide grin on my face, I sent out a pull request. Now the architect of our product declined the pr saying to change everything from the bottom up giving the reason that it would be configurable sometime later in the future. Now mind you, I get it if this feature could change over time and needs customability. But it has been the same since last seven years and would probably not change again for a couple of years ahead [you have to take my word for it.]. Its not that the guy is a douche or anything, he is one of the best dev I have ever personally came across and I highly respect and admire him. But there has to be a trade off between the effort you are putting in versus the benefit you get. Now I have to touch almost every file, super carefully look in the whole product if a bug creeps out from anywhere and change the existing code to a point where it doesn't even make sense to me anymore, and write tests ofcourse.

wubba lubba dub dub!

Spent most of this week busting my ass working on a hotfix that came out of nowhere with mega high priority. This annoys me greatly because the hotfix wasn't even fixing a bug, it was adding new functionality because certain customers were being blocked from testing without this specific feature. In my humble opinion, given that we release every weekend, hotfixes should be reserved for actual critical bugs. But anyway, as I probably could have predicted, the code got to QA and exploded. Literally nothing works.
This is what happens when you try to rush out features to satisfy customers. If you try to rush something that is late, you WILL make it later.
Meanwhile there's an issue I'm supposed to be fixing for our next release which goes out this weekend and I've had no time to even look because of this hotfix. And now it's the end of the day and I just feel worn out from stress, tomorrow will no doubt be similar.

I used to fucking love VSCode it visually was great, it was simple, had an integrated terminal that wasn't shit, supported many languages well (while not forcing every extension down your throat), and was straightforward to configure. I also had problems with it, mainly I felt it was way too bloated for an editor.

That good impression I had is gone now. It seems like every time I'm actually using the editor I have to fight with it. Whether that's an update that fucked up my config, or a reinstall and now I have to **convince** my fucking editor to use tabs instead of spaces automatically and I have to specify because holy shit it will not just listen after I set every possible fucking indentation setting to disable spaces or enable/prefer tabs and they keep adding shit like this that I give no shits about that make me sift through the damn settings finding the settings that turn off whatever new visual effect or quirky little automation they've implemented. I can't tell you how much I actively don't want my braces to be matched up by a color that doesn't even have anything to do with my color scheme.

Ive tried switching but holy shit intellisense is such a great feature that helps me so much so I'm not always bouncing between docs and my editor. Which ATM I'm learning go and intellisense has more fucking information on the functions than the docs do. I've seen Neovim (which is what I'm probably switching to) has language servers that are similar to intellisense so I'm intrigued to try that.

I'm just tired of constantly having to avoid all this shit I don't give a fuck about. I just want to get in, do my thing.

I won't be surprised if I'm the only one on this train 🤣

I just started a new job last week. Old-school sysadmin role for a pretty old-school company, but the pay is nice and the kids've gotta eat.

They gave me a windows laptop. I haven't used windows for work or as a daily driver since 2016, and now, a week into trying to make this machine work for me, I have the following observations to report.

WSL is nice. It's nice to have it installed(though actually installing it was an adventure unto itself), and to set alacritty to open my default user prompt straight into that is very nice. As terminal emulators are by far my most used piece of software, that's nice to have.

Command-line software management through powershell, winget, and chocolatey are also very nice.

I like the accessibility offered by autohotkey, though there is something of a learning curve on it. Once I get better with it, I suspect that what follows will be largely mitigated.

The Bad:
In general, Windows is janky. It feels like it's all kinda taped together without any particular cohesion in mind. As a desktop, it feels decidedly amateur, compared to the feature-mountain polish of MacOS, and especially compared to the flexibility and infinite possibilities of Linux.

Lots of screen real estate is wasted, with window decorations, and fonts that look terrible at smaller sizes, because the antialiasing of fonts is just terrible. Almost all the features I depend on in other desktops: ad-hoc searches and launches(alfred, rofi) are-- again --janky. They work, but they typically require more typing than alfred or rofi. I admit I haven't spent weeks on this problem yet, but I haven't found a workable solution yet with wox, hain, and keypirinha. Quick searches like what you get with alfred, alfred workflows, and the swiss army knife that is rofi, just aren't possible or reliable with the tools I've used so far, and most require some kind of indexing agent to fully function.

It beggars imagination that a desktop in which users are subjected to "default apps" that is purported to be acceptable for enterprise, professional use, does not have a default entry for text editor. I installed nvim-qt, and I want to use it to edit anything and everything I ever edit with text, but all too often, apps have hard-coded instructions to open text files with notepad.

I want to open certain URLs with firefox, certain ones with firefox developer edition, and others with vivaldi, and yet there is not an app available that I have seen yet in my searches that allows me to set this kind of configuration. I found one that's supposed to, but it just ignores everything I put into its config, and just opens MS Edge for everything. Jank.

Simple things take too long. Like the delay between when I laboriously hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up the login and when the actual text field appears, and the delay between that and when I want to start using the computer.

Changing some settings requires a reboot. Updating some software requires a reboot. Updating permissions on something sometimes requires a reboot. And those are all on top of the frequent requests to reboot for updates.

I would have thought Windows would have overcome most of the issues that create these problems, but it's just, as I said, amateur.

This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.

Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.

With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.

All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.

I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.

System architect make feature to print password, when you create new client. It was architecture for backend server. Just why and how?!

I need to add new feature into the program which I wrote years ago so I start digging up the source code. The project is written in a language which I no longer code in.

That code is really poorly written with most of them don't have tests. I also find out that previous self is really a genius since he can keep track of huge project with almost no documentation.

To make matter worst, there are unused components (class,feature) in the source code. "Current me" have a policy of "just adding only a feature you need and remove unused feature" but it seem the "previous me" don't agree with the "current me".

The previous me also have the habit of using writing insane logic. I can remember what particular class and methods is doing but I can't figure out the details.

For example one method only have 5 line of code but it is very hard to figure out what those do.

The saving grace is that he know the important for method signature and using immutable data structure everywhere.

I was under the influence of caffeine and have a constant sleep deprivation at the time (only sleeping about 4 hour every day) so I can't blame him too hard.

I can't blame him too hard, right?

Could someone invent a time machine already? Invent time machine not to save the world but to save the developers from himself.

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

For our product there is a common type of bug we get reported. It is not really a bug, also it is not a feature - instead it is a missing or incomplete feature.

For example to help users we add a search feature on one screen, but there is no search on some other screen. Now the absence of search on that screen is apparently a bug.

To make things worse to report the bug users try to trick us. They say something like:
"Hey can you help me? How can I find things in the abc screen?"

So I explain how to browse for the item or whatever.

Then they say:
"Ok now how do you do that on the xyz screen?"

Slightly suspiciously I now tell them how you can browse for the item like before or we have this new feature eg. search you can use if that is quicker.

Now they say:
"Don't you think it would be better to have that search on the first screen?"

OK now I realize this is just a trick and the person doesn't actually need help using the software. So I tell him how we only added the feature on one screen and if he thinks there is value adding it on other screens he can put enhancement request in and if wants he can talk to my boss about making it a priority.

Then they go on asking other rhetorical questions like:
"why was it designed like this?"
"Are you guys deliberately trying to make life harder for people by making them learn different ways to do things?"

I now want to delete the new search feature but luckily it is close to lunch time so I have a good excuse to escape the conversation.

Need to add a feature to an academic C/C++ QT project. I literally couldn't find a line of comment in the whole project, except for multiple // TODO: make this better.

Made a fast prototype of the new functionality with Python: 1 library, <100 LoC, about 30 minutes. Success!

Trying to get the same functionality to run in plain C/C++: after two hours the third library I tried finally compiles (and works cross-platform). ~250LoC and three hours later I have similar functionality as in the Python code. Can't wait to get this running in the QT application. See you on Monday...

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

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

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

Let me just say that I've been playing whack a mole with a new feature for while now. And it's becoming very tiring.

TLDR; CTO is changing the way we're going to implement this, every other day.

June 1st,
CEO: let's implement feature AAA,
CTO: we're going to have a call with Andy to tell us all about his product that will make this super easy, call will be June 4th.

Days before June 4th,
Me: Researchs product X, makes demo works flawlessly.

June 4th,
Call all good, few tips from Andy. We come to the pricing section of Product X

CTO: this will not work, pricing doesn't fit on our budget, fair enough.

June 7th -11th
Me: research altenative approach. Makes second demo.

CTO: Works good, seems to have too many moving parts, let's have call with Bob to check Product Y. It should make our lifes easier.

ME: Geee, ok let's check it out.

June 14th,

Call with Bob, all good, product has a fair price, stuff is experimental.

CTO: let's use Product Y, and just use what we get from their api now, and worry about changes later.

Me: Hmmm, that's a bit risky, but ok, you the boss, right?, starts again new demo. API doesn't work as documented.

Lots of trial and error to figure out how the api is working now, finally demo works well,

June 17th,

API changed, now it works as documented, (expected as it is experimental), previous demo doesn't work anymore.

June 18th,

Redoing research. inputs are completely different from Product Y now, need to redo all that is working and do and a lot more of research.

Go live is scheduled for end of next week, I hope that the API is stable now, and that I get to go live on schedule.

It is funny to see, that it would probably been the same if we just waited on the API to stabilize, and check the pricing section before choosing a product? Who knows.

Anyways, I actually feel happy that over the years I developed the patience to work with ever changing situations like this one.

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

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

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

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

God I hate slow burn in projects.

Trying to do something with a feature that's still in beta for the language. No docs so I asked for this.

Seems like a cycle of days where I'd be trying random ass solutions to no avail when suddenly one time I mistype the Google search and it brings me to this obscure ass blog with a potential solution that raises some new issue all over again.

It's been modification/addition/removal of over 10000 lines in different local branches and commits and only 200 of them actually are going to make it into the final code.

If I need 2 weeks to implement a new feature, I need at least one more week to find better solutions which make the code easier to read. Then I would like to spend yet another week to think about other solutions to make sure I can't find one that is even better..

I hardly ever get that time but when I do, I create something beautiful..

The last time I was able to reduce > 2000 lines of code to a about 50 lines generic service which is easily extendable and understandable.

Do you include stuff like this in your estimations?