Well, it happened. The stupidest request, no demand, I have ever, and most likely will ever receive...

Me: So what is it you're looking to do with your website.

Client: We're not showing up Facebook's home page. We need you to fix that. We have a budget of $10,000 to make this happen right now.

Me: As much as I'd love to take your money, that isn't something I can control. Every "home page" is profile-based, which technically isn't a homepage, but a "feed" that changes constantly. So say you create a profile on Facebook, only those you follow, and paid posts show up on your feed. What I can do however is use your budget to create and promote posts from your company page to show on users' feeds. If you're serious about marketing, we can start slow at $250/week, then work our way up or down based on results until your budget is exhausted, then re-evaluate the budget at that time. I can tailor a retainer for you based on the number of ads per week that you'd like to make.

Client: No, this is not what we're asking for at all.

Me: Okay...what is it you're looking for exactly? Run through this in as much detail as possible so I can get on the same page.

Client: We want to be on the main home page of facebook.com. We want our logo on that page when people sign up to make an account, linking to our website.

Me: That's simply not possible. That's Facebook's own home page. Nobody has a right to edit that other than Facebook itself.

Client: Bullshit. There's a Facebook developers section with APIs to edit and view Facebook's entire website. We would do it ourselves, but we signed up and don't understand how to change it in Chrome. That's why we need you and [referring client] said you were the best guy for our needs.

Me: That API has no control over Facebook's corporate data, including their own home page. That API designed ONLY for sections in which you are authorized to access or modify, such as your personal profile or created page for your business.

Client: We know that it can be done. If you don't do it, we'll find someone else who can.

Me: Well good luck with that, because the only way it would be remotely possible to do that WILL involve prison time, since that would be illegal. The only legal way to do it would be to buy Facebook, and they'll laugh you out of the building with that offer. But I'm done with this conversation because I have work to complete from clients that aren't delusional. Have a nice day! [hang up]

----

What. The. Fuck.

Holy fucking shit. I just went to my first Java class at uni (3 1/2 hour long one at that) and I havent felt so damn irritated in a while.

Some background:
So first, I only had about an hour of sleep last night and a full day of work before this class so I was more cranky than normal.
Theres only 7 students in the class, 6 others plus me. I am the only one with any resemblence of programming experience. The teacher also claims to be a linux developer.
This is a three part course series. Java 1, 2, and 3. All taught by the same teacher.

The fuckery:
-teacher spends 48 minutes talking about text editors. Not even IDEs. Just talking in depth as fuck about notepad (notepad. Not notepad++ )and atom and textpad. Those three only though, nothing on vim or emacs or ACTUAL IDEs. 48 minutes.
- I briefly mentioned learning node.js on the side and am now the "javascript girl" to my teacher. I'm probably less experienced with js than any other thing i ever practised or studied.
-professor saw linux on laptop and asked what distro. When I said arch he said "oh no you shouldnt be using that Its not really for beginners" ... Uhh what makes you think I'm a beginner to linux? Or does he not think I should be using arch while learning java? Either way its really ridiculous and irritates me that he would discourage anyone from using any software/OS/anything, regardless of what it is or skill level.
-teacher moved a bunch of content out of the course because theyre either "concepts that are never implemented anymore" or "arent critical to know to master the language". These particular topics that were removed? Multi-dimensional arrays, scopes, and exception handling. EXCEPTION HANDLING.
-he writes a hello world program and displays it on the board, proof of it working and everything. He tells the class to write the same program, compile and run it. Never did I guess we would spend the remaining hour and ten minutes of class struggling with fucking hello world programs. Especially when the correct code is on the fucking projector.

And I get it guys, everyone starts somewhere. People have to learn from square one. But these kids have no fucking interest in this. One of them literally admitted to pursuing this degree for the "lavish life" that comes with the salary. Others just picked programming because they didnt know what else to choose to get into the school. It fucking saddens me. I hope that one or some of them end up caring and finding a passion in this field, otherwise I feel fucking sorry for them having to spaghetti code their way through life to get a paycheck cause they couldnt be bothered to put in the effort. I feel even more sorry for any devs they work with in the future too.

The other annoying bit is that I can't test out of this class!! so it looks like for either 7 hours a week ill be bored out of my fucking mind with these beginner concepts or ill be helping others fix really stupid shit in their code (like putting quotes around hello world so it would actually print the string).

Fucking hell. Waste of a semester class.

After listening to two of our senior devs play ping pong with a new member of our team for TWO DAYS!
DevA: "Try this.."
Junior: "Didn't work"
DevB: "Try that .."
Junior: "Still not working"

I ask..
Me:"What is the problem?"
Few ums...uhs..awkward seconds of silence

Junior: "App is really slow. Takes several seconds to launch and searching either crashes or takes a really long time."
DevA: "We've isolated the issue with Entity Framework. That application was written back when we used VS2010. Since that application isn't used very often, no one has had to update it since."
DevB: "Weird part is the app takes up over 3 gigs of ram. Its obviously a caching issue. We might have to open up a ticket with Microsoft."
Me: "Or remove EF and use ADO."
DevB: "That would be way too much work. The app is supposed to be fully deprecated and replaced this year."
Me: "Three of you for the past two days seems like a lot of work. If EF is the problem, you remove EF."
DevA: "The solution is way too complicated for that. There are 5 projects and 3 of those have circular dependencies. Its a mess."
DevB: "No fracking kidding...if it were written correctly the first time. There aren't even any fracking tests."
Me:"Pretty sure there are only two tables involved, maybe 3 stored procedures. A simple CRUD app like this should be fairly straight forward."
DevB: "Can't re-write the application, company won't allow it. A redesign of this magnitute could take months. If we can't fix the LINQ query, we'll going to have the DBAs change the structures to make the application faster. I don't see any other way."

Holy frack...he didn't just say that.

Over my lunch hour, I strip down the WPF application to the basics (too much to write about, but the included projects only had one or two files), and created an integration test for refactoring the data access to use ADO. After all the tests and EF removed, the app starts up instantly and searches are also instant. Didn't click through all the UI, but the basics worked.

Sat with Junior, pointed out my changes (the 'why' behind the 'what') ...and he how he could write unit tests around the ViewModel behavior in the UI (and making any changes to the data access as needed).

Today's standup:
Junior: "Employee app is fixed. Had some help removing Entity Framework and how it starts up fast and and searches are instant. Going to write unit tests today to verify the UI behaivor. I'll be able to deploy the application tomorrow."
DevA: "What?! No way! You did all that yesterday?"
Me: "I removed the Entity Framework over my lunch hour. Like I said, its basic CRUD and mostly in stored procedures. All the data points are covered by integration tests, but didn't have time for the unit tests. It's likely I broke some UI behavior, but the unit tests should catch those."
DevB: "I was going to do that today. I knew taking out Entity Framework wouldn't be a big deal."

Holy fracking frack. You fracking lying SOB. Deeeep breath...ahhh...thanks devRant. Flame thrower event diverted.

Finally did it. Quit my job.

The full story:
Just came back from vacation to find out that pretty much all the work I put at place has been either destroyed by "temporary fixes" or wiped clean in favour of buggy older versions. The reason, and this is a direct quote "Ari left the code riddled with bugs prior to leaving".

Oh no. Oh no I did not you fucker.

Some background:

My boss wrote a piece of major software with another coder (over the course of month and a balf). This software was very fragile as its intention was to demo specific features we want to adopt for a version 2 of it.

I was then handed over this software (which was vanilajs with angular) and was told to "clean it up" introduce a typing system, introduce a build system, add webpack for better module and dependency management, learn cordova (because its essential and I had no idea of how it works). As well as fix the billion of issues with data storage in the software. Add a webgui and setup multiple databses for data exports from the app. Ensure that transmission of the data is clean and valid.

What else. This software had ZERO documentation. And I had to sit my boss for a solid 3hrs plus some occasional questions as I was developing to get a clear idea of whats going on.

Took a bit over 3 weeks. But I had the damn thing ported over. Cleaned up. And partially documented.

During this period, I was suppose to work with another 2 other coders "my team". But they were always pulled into other things by my Boss.

During this period, I kept asking for code reviews (as I was handling a very large code base on my own).

During this period, I was asking for help from my boss to make sure that the visual aspect of the software meets the requirements (there are LOTS of windows, screens, panels etc, which I just could not possibly get to checking on my own).

At the end of this period. I went on vacation (booked by my brothers for my bday <3 ).

I come back. My work is null. The Boss only looked at it on the friday night leading up to my return. And decided to go back to v1 and fix whatever he didnt like there.

So this guy calls me. Calls me on a friggin SUNDAY. I like just got off the plane. Was heading to dinner with my family.
He and another coder have basically nuked my work. And in an extremely hacky way tied some things together to sort of work. Moreever, the webguis that I setup for the database viewing. They were EDITED ON THE PRODUCTION SERVER without git tracking!!

So monday. I get bombarded with over 20 emails. Claiming that I left things in an usuable state with no documentation. As well as I get yelled at by my boss for introducing "unnecessary complicated shit".

For fuck sakes. I was the one to bring the word documentation into the vocabulary of this company. There are literally ZERO documentated projects here. While all of mine are at least partially documented (due to lack of time).

For fuck sakes, during my time here I have been basically begging to pull the coder who made the admin views for our software and clean up some of the views so that no one will ever have to touch any database directly.

To say this story is the only reason I am done is so not true.

I dedicated over a year to this company. During this time I saw aspects of this behaviour attacking other coders as well as me. But never to this level.

I am so friggin happy that I quit. Never gonna look back.

You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

C: application not working
Me: k. What changed?
C: we didn't make changes
Me: k... *gets a tech team (W) on the phone*
W: Hey, what's broken?
Me: C's application. How do things look?
W: running healthy. I'll check logs.
Me: thanks. *gets tech team (S) on the line*
S: hey, everything clear on our end, will check logs.
Me: thanks *gets tech team (U)*
U: hey! They asked us to deploy their new version today during normal deployment time. Is it acting up?
Me: C, what did you change?
C: nothing major, just how we connect to W and S...
W&S: are you shitting me???
Me: U, will you please roll it back?
C: no! Must stay on this version, you need to fix your side!!
Me: nope. *calls U boss (UG)*
UG: U, you have my permission to roll back, they need to fix. C, if your boss doesn't like it, have them call me.
*rollback fixes problem*

IF I FUCKING ASK YOU WHAT THE FUCK YOU CHANGED, YOU BETTER TELL ME THE TRUTH, OR I WILL STRIP YOUR CODE OFF OUR FUCKING SYSTEMS AND SHOVE IT DOWN YOUR THROAT. MY JOB IS TO HELP YOU AND YOU NEED TO BACK TO FUCK UP AND NOT GET IN THE WAY OF MY JOB OR YOU WON'T HAVE ONE ANYMORE.

I'm really down.
I spent 10 years building on an application worth 800K$ revenue per year.

I tried to build a technical team. All left, because of fights with stupid account managers, CEO, business managers.

I was left alone for almost one year alone, working like 60-70 hours per week to keep the things going and adapt to more customers.

And looking for potential partners to outsource things.

Now out of the blue, 3 weeks before my summer holiday, investors introduce me to a "partner" that will rent to us a "developer" for 2 months. from tomorrow.
What the fuck I'm gonna do with him in 2 weeks I don't know.
Actually I understand that this "partner" will take over the whole project.

They used the word "to help me", but actually during the meeting they said to fix things that are not working, and to develop new features because the project is blocked.

Of course there are bugs, I have no developers with me and hundred of features and integrations to maintain. And of course everything is blocked because I have to think hard about priorities.

I feel humiliated in the worst way.
I don't know what will be my future position.
I wasted time contacting potential partners and the answer was always "there are no money".

The business strategist, entered one year ago and said "no more IT investment".

Basically as cofounder and cto (of myself), they will not fire me, if I stay silent. If I accept to be a puppet. And eat, eat eat a lot of shit. I'll grow fat from the shit I'll eat.
I feel I've lost all my hard work, and I'm alone.

So there is this girl who was trying to be cute and wrote a mock C code for me :

She wrote :

If(existence=disapointment)
printf("kill self");
else
printf("what else??");

And without hesitating I told her that her code had a fault in it and it would always print "kill self" no matter what the level of disappointment is. And asked her to fix it.
The way she fixed it was probably best described as the situation when you have no idea what you are doing and you don't try to understand either. (or was simply passive aggressive) :

If(existence=disapointment)
printf("kill self");
else
printf("kill self");

Honestly though I hope she was being passive aggressive because boy do I pity people who confuse between '=' and '=='

My mentor/guider at my last internship.

He was great at guiding, only 1-2 years older than me, brought criticism in a constructive way (only had a very tiny thing once in half a year though) and although they were forced to use windows in a few production environments, when it came to handling very sensitive data and they asked me for an opinion before him and I answered that closed source software wasn't a good idea and they'd all go against me, this guy quit his nice-guy mode and went straight to dead-serious backing me up.
I remember a specific occurrence:
Programmers in room (under him technically): so linuxxx, why not just use windows servers for this data storage?
Me: because it's closed source, you know why I'd say that that's bad for handling sensitive data
Programmers: oh come on not that again...
Me: no but really look at it from my si.....
Programmers: no stop it. You're only an intern, don't act like you know a lot about thi....
Mentor: no you shut the fuck up. We. Are. Not. Using. Proprietary. Bullshit. For. Storing. Sensitive. Data.
Linuxxx seems to know a lot more about security and privacy than you guys so you fucking listen to what he has to say.
Windows is out of the fucking question here, am I clear?

Yeah that felt awesome.

Also that time when a mysql db in prod went bad and they didn't really know what to do. Didn't have much experience but knew how to run a repair.
He called me in and asked me to have a look.
Me: *fixed it in a few minutes* so how many visitors does this thing get, few hundred a day?
Him: few million.
Me: 😵 I'm only an intern! Why did you let me access this?!
Him: because you're the one with the most Linux knowledge here and I trust you to fix it or give a shout when you simply can't.

Lastly he asked me to help out with iptables rules. I wasn't of much help but it was fun to sit there debugging iptables shit with two seniors 😊

He always gave good feedback, knew my qualities and put them to good use and kept my motivation high.

Awesome guy!

A wild Darwin Award nominee appears.

Background: Admins report that a legacy nightly update process isn't working. Ticket actually states problem is obviously in "the codes."

Scene: Meeting with about 20 people to triage the issue (blamestorming)

"Senior" Admin: "update process not working, the file is not present"
Moi: "which file?"
SAdmin: "file that is in ticket, EPN-1003"
Moi: "..." *grumbles, plans murder, opens ticket*
...
Moi: "The config dotfile is missing?"
SAdmin: "Yes, file no there. Can you fix?"
Moi: "Engineers don't have access to the production system. Please share your screen"
SAdmin: "ok"
*time passes, screen appears*
Moi: "ls the configuration dir"
SAdmin: *fails in bash* > ls

*computer prints*
> ls
_.legacyjobrc

Moi: *sees issues, blood pressure rises* "Please run list all long"
SAdmin: *fails in bash, again* > ls ?
Moi: *shakes* "ls -la"
SAdmin: *shonorable mention* > ls -la

*computer prints*
> ls -la
total 1300
drwxrwxrwx- 18 SAdmin {Today} -- _.legacyjobrc

Moi: "Why did you rename the config file?"
SAdmin: "Nothing changed"
Moi: "... are you sure?"
SAdmin: "No, changed nothing."
Moi: "Is the job running as your account for some reason?"
SAdmin: "No, job is root"
Moi: *shares screenshot of previous ls* This suggests your account was likely used to rename the dotfile, did you share your account with anyone?
SAdmin: "No, I rename file because could not see"
Moi: *heavy seething* so, just to make sure I understand, you renamed a dotfile because you couldn't see it in the terminal with ls?
SAdmin: "No, I rename file because it was not visible, now is visible"
Moi: "and then you filed a ticket because the application stopped working after you renamed the configuration file? You didn't think there might be a correlation between those two things?"
SAdmin: "yes, it no work"
Interjecting Director: "How did no one catch this? Why were there no checks, and why is there no user interface to configure this application? When I was writing applications I cared about quality"
Moi: *heavy seething*
IDjit: "Well? Anyone? How are we going to fix this"
Moi: "The administrative team will need to rename the file back to its original name"
IDjit: "can't the engineering team do this?!"
Moi: "We could, but it's corporate policy that we have no access to those environments"
IDjit: "Ok, what caused this issue in the first place? How did it get this way?!"

TFW you think you've hit the bottom of idiocy barrel, and the director says, "hold my mango lassi."

Prospective client: “I have a website through which I sell music, both physical copies and downloads, but am having all kinds of issues with it”.

Me: “Like what? Tell me more.”

Client: “Go to www... I’ll go through them with you”.

So I go, and client proceeds to rattle off a list of totally random shit for the next 26 and a half minutes without even stopping for breath, telling me what he’d prefer, talking through how easy other “similar” websites are and comparing his own website to them, as well as all the things that flat out just don’t work. He ended with the line “I just paid my developer who told me it was all good, but now he’s telling me he’s too busy to work on it”.

Meanwhile I’ve had a gander at “view source” and can see it’s been “built” with Wordpress, and with a fuck ton of plugins and shit to boot... you can only imagine the sense of euphoria I’m feeling at this point.

Me: “Did you have a contract with your developer?”

Client: “Nah”.

Me: “Do you have a budget in mind, either for just making right or for ongoing development?”

Client: “Yes, but minimal”.

Me: “So what do you want from me?”

Client: “I want to know how much it’s going to cost to fix!!!!” (apparently irritated by my question).

Me: “Oooook... Is there any way I can have access to your website to investigate, or clone it so I can recreate what’s going on?”

Client: “Yes” (gives me details of how to log in to his hosting, and WP admin).

Turns out, he had over 50 active plugins for literally EVERY. SINGLE. FUCKING. PIECE of functionality on his website. Furthermore, it was pretty clear that some plugin functionality overlapped, because... well, if you don’t know how to do something, install a plugin or seven to get it done, right?

Me: “So can I ask, what exactly is your budget? Just to give me ballpark as to how best move forward?”

Client: After going into how he’s already spent a lot of money on it already, “If we could we agree on below £200?”

Me: “...what, a month?”

Client: “No! In total. To make it right. Once it’s done it’s done, surely?!?!”

*a long silence*

Client: “So... what do you think?”

Me: “Burn it. Burn it all down”.

Family reaction story to me being a dev?

- My dad still refers to my profession as 'something in computers'.
- My older sister goes to her weirdo friends for technical advice because she thinks all I do is fill paper in printers (that's a long TL;DR story about a phone upgrade)
- My brother, a car mechanical genius thinks what I do is near God-like. He also races cars and can blabber on about the physics, aero-dynamics, weight ratios, etc and says "Oh, no way. I'm too stupid to do what you do." Then I'm like, "Dude, shut up, I can barely change my oil and you could replace an engine blindfolded", then he just laughs "Yea, probably."
- Baby sister just wants me to fix her phone. "Can you make <insert some random app> do <insert a random behavior the app was never designed to do>?". I'm like "Uh no, I didn't write Instagram", then she's like "I thought you went to school for computers?".
- My mom passed way (long battle with cancer). I'm sure she'd be proud, but still asking me to how to switch the channel so she could watch a movie on the VCR.
I can clearly see having this conversation with my mom.
Me: "Mom, why are you still using a VCR? I bought you a subscription to Netflix"
Mom: "Net what? Do I turn the dial to channel 2 or 3?"
Me: "No, its the Netflix button on the remote."
Mom: "Can't you come over and do this? I just want to watch my shows. Didn't you go to school to learn these things?"
Me: "No mom, that's not...um...never mind. I'll be right over."

I'm so fucking pissed at my PM right now.

He insisted that we use a third party library that his friend wrote for simple functionality. We all disagree, because it's overcomplicated for what we need to do. PM insists that we use it anyways.

Fast forward to now. The third party code is breaking, and it's way overcomplicated, so we have no idea how to fix it. Deadlines are long gone.

We're all pissed because we don't want to deal with this bullshit code, and because basically nothing is working properly.

Had a conversation with the PM today, where he complained about our "attitude issues" and said that "clearly [the library we're using] is above your skill level".

Maybe we would have better morale if you didn't force us to use this shit code.

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

Not my mom, but my wife's whole family. I'm a software developer.

So we're invited to her grandmother's 85th birthday celebration with pretty much every family member they could think to invite. 100+ people, and we all sit down in a circle in a huge room to watch a video that my wife's father and aunts/uncles put together.

They start the video and there's no sound. I'm a software developer, so I'm not an expert in hardware issues. I try to turn invisible, because every tech person knows what comes next, and this is in the center of a room of people I don't know.

After about 15 minutes of people struggling to get the audio working, one of the people remembers I "work with computer". Soon I have a dozen people calling me to the center of the room.

I begrudgingly make my way to the computer and projector. Upon inspection, I find that the computer is connected via VGA to the projector.

Me: "This cable only carries video. You need a different kind of cable, or you can hook up an AUX cable--the kind you use for headphones."
Other Guy: "I used this cable earlier and the audio was working."
Me: "...that's weird. Well, can we try plugging in an AUX cable?"
Yet Another Guy: "Will this help?" Holds up an HDMI cable
Me: "Oh, yeah! That should do it."
Other Guy: "I tried plugging that in, but it didn't change anything."
Me: "Hmmm..." Quickly unplug VGA and plug in HDMI, then click play.

The sound comes out in its full cheesy music glory. Everybody cheers, and I walk back to my seat. Throughout the rest of party, I'm approached by various other family members who ask me if I can fix X since I'm a "computer guy". Isn't it great to work in tech?

I turned 40 yesterday. Here are some lessons I've learned, without fluff or BS.

1) Stop waiting for exceptional things to just happen. They rarely do, and they can't be counted on. Greatness is cultivated; it's a gradual process and it won't come without effort.

2) Jealousy is a monster that destroys everything in it's path. It's absolutely useless, except to remind us there's a better way. We can't always control how we feel, but we can choose how we react to those feelings.

When I was younger, jealousy in relationships always led to shit turning out worse than it probably would have otherwise. Even when it was justified, even when a relationship was over, jealousy led me to burn bridges that I wished I hadn't.

3) College isn't for everyone, but you'll rarely be put square in the middle of so much potential experience. You'll meet people you probably wouldn't have otherwise, and as you eventually pursue your major, you'll get to know people who share your passions and dreams. Despite all the bullshit ways in which college sucks, it's still a pretty unique path on the way to adulthood. But on that note...

4) Learn to manage your money. It's way too easy to get into unsustainable debt. It only gets worse, and it makes everything harder. We don't always see the consequence of credit cards and loans when we're young, because the future seems so distant and undecided. But that debt isn't going anywhere... Try not to borrow money that you can't imagine yourself paying back now.

5) Floss every day, not just a couple times per week when you remember, or when you've got something stuck in your teeth. It matters, even if you're in your 20s and you've never had a cavity.

6) You'll always hear about living in the moment, seizing the day... It's tough to actually do. But there's something to be said for looking inward, and trying to recognize when too much of our attention is focused elsewhere. Constantly serving the future won't always pay off, at least not in the ways we think it will when we're young.

This sentiment doesn't have much value when it's put in abstract, existential terms, like it usually is. The best you can do is try to be aware of your own willingness and ability to be open to experiences. Think about ways in which you might be rejecting the here and now, even if it's as seemingly-benign as not going out with some friends because you just saw them, or you already went to that place they're going to. We won't recognize the good old days for what they were until they're already gone. The trick is having as many good days as possible.

7) Don't start smoking; you'll never quit as soon as you'll think you can. If you do start, make yourself quit after a couple years, no matter what. Keep your vices in check; drugs and alcohol in moderation. Use condoms, use birth control.

8) Don't make love wait. Tell your friends and family you love them often, and show them when you can. You're going to lose people, so it's important. Statistically, some of you will die young, yourselves.

When it comes to relationships, don't settle if you can't tell yourself you're in love, and totally believe it. Don't let complacency and familiarity get in the way of pursuing love. Don't be afraid to end relationships because they're comfortable, or because you've already invested so much into them.

Being young is a gift, and it won't last forever. You need to use that gift to experience all the love that you can, at least as a means to finding the person you really want to grow old with, if that's what you want. Regardless, you don't want to miss out on loving someone, and being loved, because of fear. Don't be reckless; just be honest with yourself.

9) Take care of your body. Neglecting it makes everything tougher. That doesn't mean you have to work out every day and eat like a nutritionist, but if you're overweight or you have health issues, do what you can to fix it. Losing weight isn't easy, but it's not as hard as people make it out to be. And it's one of the most important things you can do to invest in a healthy adulthood.

Don't put off nagging health issues because you think you'll be fine, or you don't think you'll be able to afford it, or you're scared of the outcome. There will always be options, until there aren't. Most people never get to the no-options part. Or, they get there because all the other options expired.

10) Few things will haunt you like regret. Making the wrong choice, for example, usually won't hurt as much. I guess you can regret making the wrong choice, but my deepest regrets come from inaction, complacency and indifference.

So how can we avoid regret? I don't know, lol. I don't think it's as simple as just commiting to choices... Choosing to do nothing is still a choice, after all. I think it's more about listening to your gut, as cliche as that sounds.

To thine own self be true, I guess. It's worth a shot, even if you fail. Almost anything is better than regret.

Me: Oh I see were using a non-standard architecture on this app. I like this bit but what is this doing? never seen it before.

Him: Ah we use that to abstract the navigation layer.

Me: oh ok, interesting idea, but that means we need an extra file per screen + 1 per module. We also can't use this inbuilt control, which I really like, and we've to write a tonne of code to avoid that.

Him: Yeah we wanted to take a new approach to fix X, this is what we came up with. Were not 100% happy with it. Do you have any ideas?

**
Queue really long, multi-day architecture discussion. Lots of interesting points, neither side being precious or childish in anyway. Was honestly fantastic.
**

Me: So after researching your last email a bit, I think I found a happy middle ground. If we turn X into a singleton, we can store the state its generating inside itself. We can go back to using the in-built navigation control and have the data being fetched like Y. If you want to keep your dependency injection stuff, we can copy the Angular services approach and inject the singletons instead of all of these things. That means we can delete the entire layer Z.

Even with the app only having 25% of the screens, we could delete like 30+ files, and still have the architecture, at a high level, identical and textbook MVVM.

Him: singleton? no I don't like those, best off keeping it the way it is.

... are you fucking kidding me? You've reinvented probably 3 wheels, doubled the code in the app and forced us to take ownership of something the system handles ... but a singleton is a bad idea? ... based off no concrete evidence or facts, but a personal opinion.

... your face is a bad idea

Doot doot.

My day: Eight lines of refactoring around a 10-character fix for a minor production issue. Some tests. Lots of bloody phone calls and conference calls filled with me laughing and getting talked over. Why? Read on.

My boss's day: Trying very very hard to pin random shit on me (and failing because I'm awesome and fuck him). Six hours of drama and freaking out and chewing and yelling that the whole system is broken because of that minor issue. No reading, lots of misunderstanding, lots of panic. Three-way called me specifically to bitch out another coworker in front of me. (Coworker wasn't really in the wrong.) Called a contractor to his house for testing. Finally learned that everything works perfectly in QA (duh, I fixed it hours ago). Desperately waited for me to push to prod. Didn't care enough to do production tests afterwards.

My day afterwards: hey, this Cloudinary transform feature sounds fun! Oh look, I'm done already. Boo. Ask boss for update. Tests still aren't finished. Okay, whatever. Time for bed.

what a joke.

Oh, I talked to the accountant after all of this bullshit happened. Apparently everyone that has quit in the last six years has done so specifically because of the boss. Every. single. person.

I told him it was going to happen again.

I also told him the boss is a druggie with a taste for psychedelics. (It came up in conversation. Absolutely true, too.) It's hilarious because the company lawyer is the accountant's brother.

So stupid.

This one colleague at my work.

I'm pretty new to a lot stuff and I stress out about some stuff a lot more than the other guys, mostly because I'm scared I might not be able to fix it.

But whenever that happens, I explain this guy what's going on and then, while making jokes, talking in a very calming way, he always knows to fix it in no time!

For everyone who does this, thanks for being there for the little/new guys :)

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

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.

If the below is you, please stop. I'm starting a revolution called #AnswerTheQuestion

A: Hey, just checked your code, you have a huge security issue in XYZ, you should really address that.

B: Oh god I had no idea, how do I fix it?

A: Well it depends on how you *want* to fix it, no one solution is always the right one.

B: ... Ok, well could you give me some advice?

A: Well, there are many ways to approach this kind of work, but all I can say is that this way, is definitely not the correct one.

B: ... Ok, well how would you do it?

A: That would depend on the customer requirements.

B: ... the requirements is to have a website that isn't easily hackable, what do I do?

A: Nowadays, its pretty hard to make a website completely not hackable.

B: ALL THE SERVERS ARE SHOWING RED, PLEASE HELP ME!!!

A: ........ you really shouldn't prejudge colours. The colour red doesn't always mean danger, depends purely on the use case.

Never in my life I was scared as today.
I recently left a big company to work for a small one as the first internal developer.
Had a small issue in the production server. The fix was easy, just remove a single table entry. And... *drum roll*... I forgot to add a where clause. All orders were lost.
No idea if we had backups or anything, I quickly called the one other IT dude in the company.
He had no clue where are the backups and how to find them.
Having some experience with Nmap, I quickly scanned our network and found a Nas device.
There was a backup, whole VHD backup. 300GB of it, the download speed is around 512kb/s. No way I can fix it before management finds out, but then an idea came to mind. Old glorious 7zip. Managed to extract only the database files, sent them to the server and quickly swapped them. Everything was fine... The manager connected 5 minutes later. Scariest 45 minutes of my life...

A real interaction I just had...

Team Member: "Can you handle this ticket for a bug fix?"

Me: "Whats the problem?"

TM: "We aren't exactly sure..."

Me: "Ok, so can you show it to me?"

TM: "We can't get it to happen again, and when it does the machine freezes and we can't debug it..."

Me: "So, if I find a fix then how do we test to make sure it worked?"

TM: "I'm not sure..."

Then today,

Product Manager: "How's that bug fix going?"

Me: "Well, let's see. The problem still hasn't been defined. I have never been able to recreate the issue. I have a hacky fix in a PR..."

PM: "Great, so we can deploy today?!?"

Me: "No, because we have no way to reproduce or test this issue at all..."

PM: "Do you think your fix will work?"

Me: "Honestly, no. If you're asking for my opinion then you can have it. IMO this is NOT a bug fix but a change to how the system operates altogether. This system was built by someone who didn't know what they are doing. We have done our best with it but it is a house of cards. And now the solution is to replace a card at the bottom layer. It is likely that no matter what fix we do (even when we can fucking test it) that it will topple the house of cards..."

PM: ~Looking at me in disbelief~

Me: "If you ask me for my honest professional opinion then you will get it. Keep that in the future if that honest response was outside what you expected."

PM: "I will do that, thanks for your assessment"

Where do we go from here? God only knows.

Praise Joe Pesci

Today after 1 year of taking shit I sat down with my manager and completely tore the whole fucking company apart.

I absolutely slammed my colleagues, obliterated my team lead, went on and on about how no one understands the basics and how everything we have is copy paste procedural code and the only way to fix what we have is to delete it. I then insinuated I want to quit because I cba with the struggle anymore.

Result? Fat promotion. Not sure what just happened here lmao.

Actual rant time. And oh boy, is it pissy.

If you've read my posts, you've caught glimpses of this struggle. And it's come to quite a head.

First off, let it be known that WINDOWS Boot Manager ate GRUB, not the other way around. Windows was the instigator here. And when I reinstalled GRUB, Windows threw a tantrum and won't boot anymore. I went through every obvious fix, everything tech support would ever think of, before I called them. I just got this laptop this week, so it must be in warranty, right? Wrong. The reseller only accepts it unopened, and the manufacturer only covers hardware issues. I found this after screaming past a pretty idiotic 'customer representative' ("Thank you for answering basic questions. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for repeating obvious information I didn't catch the first three times you said it. Thank you for letting me follow my script." For real. Are you tech support, or emotional support? You sound like a middle school counselor.) to an xkcd-shibboleth type 'advanced support'. All of this only to be told, "No, you can't fix it yourself, because we won't give you the license key YOU already bought with the computer." And we already know there's no way Microsoft is going to swoop in and save the day. It's their product that's so faulty in the first place. (Debian is perfectly fine.)

So I found a hidden partition with a single file called 'Image' and I'm currently researching how to reverse-engineer WIM and SWM files to basically replicate Dell's manufacturing process because they won't take it back even to do a simple factory reset and send it right back.

What the fuck, Dell.

As for you, Microsoft, you're going to make it so difficult to use your shit product that I have to choose between an arduous, dangerous, and likely illegal process to reclaim what I ALREADY BOUGHT, or just _not use_ a license key? (Which, there's no penalty for that.) Why am I going so far out of my way to legitimize myself to you, when you're probably selling backdoors and private data of mine anyway? Why do I owe you anything?

Oh, right. Because I couldn't get Fallout 3 to run in Wine. Because the game industry follows money, not common sense. Because you marketed upon idiocy and cheapness and won a global share.

Fuck you. Fuck everything. Gah.

VS Code is pretty good, though.

A huge project came my way at work. Old spaghetti code, no source control, no test env and every other possible challenge you could think of. Based on my initial quote a deadline of June 19th was approved. Two days ago the president of the company tells my boss it needs to be done by Friday, no excuses. Horrible timing since I'm moving tomorrow and am off all next week. Not to mention I'm the only dev at the company that understands/knows how to work on this code. We also don't have a budget to contract out. Literally not possible to do in 2 days. I proposed a "quick fix" solution and new design which was approved. I Spent 2 straight days working on it with overtime, no lunch hour, and the president checking on me every hour for status updates. Managed to implement my "quick fix" and just put it live 2 hours ago. President approved, and said "thanks". He then sent an email to the company and all our agents across the country anouncing the change. In the email he directly thanks the Marketing dept and the "senior leadership team" for "making the quick turnaround of this request possible". He proceeds to name specific people responsible for making this happen. No where does he mention my name or my department. Not that I'm actually surprised but it would have been nice to get some recognition considering this literally wouldn't have worked without me. Guess I should be used to it by now. I'm also now on call during my week off in case anything breaks.

I would absolutely love it if people would write their own stupid code instead of blindly mixing everyone else's mental diarrhea together and pouring the resulting mess into their bloody stupid IDE. At least then I could insult them properly. As it is, they're outsourcing their fucking stupidity to the lowest fucking bidder and then bragging about how quickly they get everything done. And management eats it up! No wonder everything is a slow, tangled, unmaintanable mess.

I can't fix much of anything because almost none of it is in my control. It's all autogenerated bullshit glued together with laziness and poor taste. "But Root, why is fixing this taking so long?" Gee, I wonder why. Maybe if someone had built it somewhere in realm of correctly the first time, it wouldn't have all fallen apart when someone looked at it the wrong way!

Seriously, there's no way this pile of stale fertilizer could have passed QA.

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.

No, MD5 hash is not a safe way to store our users' passwords. I don't care if its been written in the past and still works. I've demonstrated how easy it is to reverse engineer and rainbow attack. I've told you your own password for the site! Now please let me fix it before someone else forces you to. We're too busy with other projects right now? Oh, ok then, I'll just be quiet and ignore our poor security. Whilst I'm busy getting on with my other work, could you figure out what we're gonna do with the tatters of our client's business (in which our company owns a stake) in the aftermath of the attack?

So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)

Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.

Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.

Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.

It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.

I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.

So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.

I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.

Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.

An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:

"please reenter card number to validate."

Bupkiss. Dead end.

OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.

One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:

"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"

One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:

With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.

So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.

OH MY FUCKING GOD! WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU REWRITE A FUCKING PIECE OF CODE AND DON'T MAINTAIN ITS FUNCTIONALITY?
ARE YOU FUCKING MAD????

JUST SPENT 1 FUCKING HOUR TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHY THE FUCK THE DATA WASN'T BEING PASSED TO REDUX STORE!

YEAH, UNIT TESTING SURE IS A FUCKING WASTE OF TIME YOU DUMB FUCKING IDIOT THAT HAS MASHED POTATOES FOR A BRAIN!

GO ROT IN HELL YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!!

NOW IF I DON'T FIX THIS SHIT MY ASS IS ON THE LINE BECAUSE I MADE THE FUCKING FUNCTIONALITY THAT YOU BROKE?? NO FUCKING WAY!

I DON'T CARE IF YOU ARE MY BOSS, I'M GONNA GIT BLAME THE SHIT OUT OF YOU IF ANYONE PISSES ME OFF!

This rant means YOU if you are one of those people that "fix" their family's computers.

I was visiting my family over the holidays and while I managed to stay away from fixing their computers for the most time, I offered to help my grandfather to update the Garmin navigation device he wanted to gift my father. (They do not use smartphones for navigation, and my father doesn't want "these modern shitty phones".)

When booting up my grandfather's laptop, I realized something odd: Linux Mint boot screen. Wut?

And immediately I said: "It could be impossible to update your navigation device on this laptop."

As true enough, the Garmin Express update software requires either a Windows PC or a Mac; and even though I vaguely hoped it might be possible to upgrade through Linux, I just could not be bothered to find out that day.

What I wondered though is why did my grandfather of all people ran Linux!?

Don't get me wrong, I use Linux myself on my work machine and I never want to work with something else when coding; yet my grandfather is an end user of the show-me-where-and-what-and-how-often-to-click-kind.

What could he gain by it?

As it turns out, the computer nerd's friend of my uncle managed his PC. And my uncle and he decided unanimously my grandfather should better run Linux. Is it something my grandfather needs? No. BUT IT'S RIGHT! Suck it up! (My father's laptop therefore also runs Linux Mint. So he can't upgrade his new device either.)

This is the ugly kind of entitled nerd-dom I truly detest.

When discussing things further, my grandfather told me that he had problems ever since with his printer. Under Windows, he knew how to print on the special photo paper. Under Linux, all he can barely manage is to print on normal papers. Shame, printing photos was the only thing he liked doing on that device. What did my uncle's friend tell him?

"Get a decent printer!"

Fuck that guy.

It's fine if Linux works for you, but before you install it on a PC of a relative, you better make sure it fits their needs! If you have that odd member that only wants to write letters, read emails, use facebook, and wants to play that browser game, feel free to introduce them to Linux.

Yet if they have any special wish, don't stand in their way.

If they want to do something that requires a certain OS, don't just decide for them that their desire is wrong, but help them achieve their goal. If you can't align that with your ideology, then get the fuck out of my way and stop "helping".

For some people, a computer is a device to achieve a certain goal, a work. They only get hindered by your ill-advised attempts at virtue signalling.

Just the other day I got back from getting an extra monitor.. and just when I came back home, some older lady that also lives in this residence came to me, all panicked because her left car lights wouldn't turn off. So she asked me whether I could fix it, because I'm a man and therefore technical... Yeah.

Told her I don't know anything about cars (I don't even have a driver's license), and she should ask someone else.. but she kept clinging on to me and eventually I figured.. screw it, how hard can it be?

Got to her car, yada yada yada.. lady opens the door, and it's full of fucking buttons everywhere! No fucking way that I'm gonna dabble with those. So, do the easiest thing first.

"Ma'm, could you please turn on the car?"
*Turns car on, all lights light up*
🤔 Fair enough...
"Hmm.. and what happens if you turn it off now?"
*Turns car off, all lights go off*

Lady: "I've got no idea how you've done it but thank you so much, you're an angel!! 😊"
Me: "Well.. 😅 let's just say that turning it on, off and back on again works at least 90% of the time..."

TL;DR, employers are often penny wise and pound foolish.

One morning, my vehicle had a potentially life-threatening condition that I needed fixed before I could drive to work. I was 3 hours late but made a productive day of it. Plus I had stayed late after work, for no pay, a couple of nights because I have the kind of work ethic that compels me to do weird stuff like that occasionally.

When the time clock report came out it showed I was 3 hours short for the pay period. I brought up that I had "paid it forward" a few weeks prior and asked for an exception based on that. I was told that a) all "extra" work had to have been approved prior to doing it and b) that pay period had already passed, so no, I'd need to make up the hours. Being pretty miffed at being so nickled-and-dimed, and for being expected to drive to work in spite of the possibility of losing my life, I just had them take it out of my time off.

Fast forward to my latest monthly review: After another potentially life-threatening vehicle breakdown and fix, I decided to ask whether I could have a couple of telecommute days per week to offset fuel and mileage to recover the repair cost for the wear and tear on my vehicle. The answer was "No, because then everyone will want to work from home and then we'd have no way to know if they're really working."

On that same day I got an offer for doing the same job at another company for 100% telecommute and at nearly twice the salary. I turned in my resignation two days later. Now they're scrambling to try to replace me.

(Written March 13th at 2am.)

This morning (yesterday), my computer decided not to boot again: it halts on "cannot find firmware rtl-whatever" every time. (it has booted just fine several times since removing the firmware.) I've had quite the ordeal today trying to fix it, and every freaking step along the way has thrown errors and/or required workarounds and a lot of research.

Let's make a list of everything that went wrong!

1) Live CD: 2yo had been playing with it, and lost it. Not easy to find, and super smudgy.

2) Unencrypt volume: Dolphin reports errors when decrypting the volume. Research reveals the Live CD doesn't incude the cryptsetup packages. First attempts at installing them mysteriously fail.

3) Break for Lunch: automatic powersaving features turned off the displays, and also killed my session.

4) Live CD redux: 25min phonecall from work! yay, more things added to my six-month backlog.

5) Mount encrypted volume: Dolphin doesn't know how, and neither do I. Research ensues. Missing LVM2 package; lvmetad connection failure ad nauseam; had to look up commands to unlock, clone, open, and mount encrypted Luks volume, and how to perform these actions on Debian instead of Ubuntu/Kali. This group of steps took four hours.

6) Chroot into mounted volume group: No DNS! Research reveals how to share the host's resolv with the chroot.

7) `# apt install firmware-realtek`: /boot/initrd.img does not exist. Cannot update.

8) Find and mount /boot, then reinstall firmware: Apt cannot write to its log (minor), listed three install warnings, and initially refused to write to /boot/initrd.img-[...]

9) Reboot!: Volume group not found. Cannot process volume group. Dropping to a shell! oh no..

(Not listed: much research, many repeated attempts with various changes.)

At this point it's been 9 hours. I'm exhausted and frustrated and running out of ideas, so I ask @perfectasshole for help.
He walks me through some debugging steps (most of which i've already done), and we both get frustrated because everything looks correct but isn't working.

10) Thirteenth coming of the Live CD: `update-initramfs -u` within chroot throws warnings about /etc/crypttab and fsck, but everything looks fine with both. Still won't boot. Editing grub config manually to use the new volume group name likewise produces no boots. Nothing is making sense.

11) Rename volume group: doubles -'s for whatever reason; Rebooting gives the same dreaded "dropping to a shell" result.

A huge thank-you to @perfectasshole for spending three hours fighting with this issue with me! I finally fixed it about half an hour after he went to bed.

After renaming the volume group to what it was originally, one of the three recovery modes managed to actually boot and load the volume. From there I was able to run `update-initramfs -u` from the system proper (which completed without issue) and was able to boot normally thereafter.

I've run updates and rebooted twice now.
After twelve+ hours... yay, I have my Debian back!

oof.

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!

i was asked to start a new project, and another dev was brought onto the team shortly after. as soon as he joined, straight away he started an entirely new project and worked on it through the whole weekend, then came back on monday and just sort of pasted his files into/over the code i had already started and was working on, with no regard for folder structure or naming conventions or anything. his work was even split between 2 almost identically named namespaces (both of which were completely different to the existing project namespace) and his shit broke everything i did in the first place. the cherry on top is that none of his work was even functional, it was purely dummy/mockup web pages that weren't linked to any sort of backend.

when i asked him wtf he thought he was doing, he kept saying "i didnt touch your code" and refused to acknowledge that pasting a project over a different project can break stuff, then said it "wasn't his fault that i'm slow and not keeping up". and just kept saying vague bullshit about how i have to do it his way because he "has more experience"

he had no idea what my previous experience was, he had never asked and i had never told him, he just decided that he had more experience than me.

i dug through the shit and found out that he didn't just break my work, he had actually purposely deleted it when he realised it was getting in the way of his spaghetti. i showed him the commit and confronted him with it and all the cunt said was "well the good news is, you know the fix" and kept trying to dismiss me in the most disrespectful ways he could think of. i eventually snapped at him (long overdue at this point) and told him that any experienced developer would not commit code that didn't even fucking compile, especially when they're the one who broke it, and that he needs to grow up. of course he then complained that i was being unprofessional.

our manager decided we should go with fuckfaces """code""" without even looking at the work either of us had done, purely because fuckface is older than me and that's how the world works.

in the end i just told my manager that i refuse to work with the guy and he could either take him or me off the project (guess who he picked) or i quit.

after a few months of the guy failing to deliver any of even the basic functionality that was asked for, the entire project got scrapped, and the dude just quit once everyone realised he was literally just larping as an experienced dev but couldn't accomplish simple tasks.

i never received an apology from anybody involved.

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

5 years ago, in my first week of starting this particular job, the CTO casually mentioned they'd been struggling with a bug for years. Basically, in the last few days of the year, it seemed that records were jumping a year ahead, with no rhyme nor reason why. Happened every year, and wasn't linked with them deploying new code. (Their code was a mess with no sane way to unit test it, but that was a separate issue.)

I happened to know immediately what might be causing it - so I ran a case-sensitive search in the codebase for "YYYY", pointed out the issue, explained it, then committed a fix all in about 2 minutes.

I was told I'd officially passed my probation.

(Search for "week year vs year" if you're curious & the above doesn't ring any bells.)

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.

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

I'm one of those people who have literally no value of education and skills between family members, yes as soon they hear I'm doing bachelors in computers they all come too me with *Can you please fix my phone*

But today a letter came it was from devRant and it had stickers for me, my uncle received the letter and you can't imagine how surprised he was and asked me who sent me letter from NY, I explained him that we are an awesome community and this letter is just a way to motivate us. It's the first time something come for me and even tho it's just some stickers but meant alot to me.

Thankyou devRant and the community for making me feel this awesome 😊

Story time:

At a precious employer.
Hire shit-hot contractor.
No technical test at interview stage because he’s so shit-hot.
Is a uni lecturer.
PhD in mathematics.

Me: Shit, this guy must be good!

6 months later and a tragedy of errors and clearly misspent company funds later:

Manager: can you look at what x did and merge it into the product?

Me: Sure. *looks* *yells fuck very loudly*

*walks over to manager*

“Soooo... you know those 6 months and thousands and thousands you spent? It’s all for nought. There’s barely anything there, and none of it works.”

Manager: “Shit. What are we going to do? Can you fix it?”

Me: “To be honest, it would be quicker to just do it from scratch than try to work out what he’s done and failed to do.”

Manager: “Fuck. Ok. Go for it.”

I then had to build this entire new lot of systems, a workflow system, a user management and permissions system.

I got it done inside a month or so.

For context, we (the devs) knew something was afoot when the contractor couldn’t work out why his keyboard wasn’t working (it wasn’t plugged in), and he also *really* struggled to find his way around visual studio and git.

The moral of this tale? *always always* screen your candidates. Even if they seem amazing on paper.

Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.

The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.

1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).

Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).

I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).

What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.

My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.

Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.

Team quarterly capacity planning:

- Confluence document created with a big table (+100 rows) by product / business. Each row is something that needs to be worked on for the coming quarter.

- Row 1 could be an Epic with 15 tickets attached. Row 2 could be adding a single log to our analytics. No consistency.

- For each row, we create a separate confluence document with the "technical details". 75% of the time these remain blank. 1% of the time there is something useful, the rest its a slightly longer version of the description from the bigger document.

- Each row gets a high level estimate by the leads. 50% of the time without sufficient background info to actually do get it accurate.

- These are then copied into the teams excel spreadsheet, where it will calculate if we are over/under capacity.

- We will go backwards and forwards between confluence and excel until we are "close enough" to under capacity without being too much.

- Once done, we then need to copy them into the org/division's excel spreadsheet. This document is huge, has every team on it and massive 50pt text saying "Do not put a filter on this document".

- Jira tickets + Epics will now be created for each one, with all the data be copied over by hand, bit by bit, by product. Often missing something.

- Last week, at the end of this process for Q2 (2 weeks late), 6 of the leads were asked to attend a 30 minute meeting to discuss how to group the line items together because we had too many for the bigger excel spreadsheet.

- This morning I was told business weren't happy with one of our decisions to delay one line item. Although they were all top priority (P0), one of them was actually higher than that again (P-1?) and we need to work it back in.

... so back to step 1

- Mid way through Q2, a new document will be created for Q3. Work items that didn't make the cut will be manually copied from one to the other. 50/50 whether anything that didn't get done on time in Q2 will make its way to the Q3 doc.

- "Tech excellence" / "Tech debt" items (unit/UI tests, documentation, logging, performance, stability etc) will never be copied over. Because product doesn't understand them and assumes therefore that they are unimportant.

==================

PS: I'd like to say this was a rare event for Q2, but no. Q4 and Q1 were so bad, we were made assurances from the director of engineering that he would fix this process for Q2. This is the new and improved process (I shit you not) that has resulted in nothing tangible.

I coded for a whole day (uninterrupted, literally woke up, grabbed my laptop and headphones and started) and suddenly, let wild parent shows up.
"Aren't you going to go out? You need to see some friends"
My response: As stated before, I have no friends, now leave
**Leaves**
**Comes back 2 hours later**
"Hey can you help me with my computer?"
Me: you didn't state the issue, what computer, what os, what you have done to fix it, have you even tried rebooting?
"Don't talk like that to me! Now come and help me!"
Me: nope, hint, answer the questions about your issue
"You rude piece of..."
**Starts screaming bla bla bla**

Wow, it has happened before that I treat people wanting help like me trying to debug, but I usually correct myself. I took it way to fucking far this time...

When your primary Android app (with over 1/2 million total downloads) gets banned...

And all the email says is read these [links to] policies!

Back story: this happened to me back in 2011, no matter what I did there was no way to get in touch with a human at Google, I sure hope this process has gotten better! Having my app suspended with no way to fix and get it back is ridiculous!! This could ruin a business.

Over two years later, on a Google+ hangout with Google Android devs out of the Google London office, I said to them how silly it is that this happened....one of them asked me for the app ID, I provided, he looked it up in a system which then had a reference code which then related to SEO violation....wow I finally found the answer, how silly that an SEO violation (too many keywords in the app description) can get your app permanently suspended. What a shame. I wouldn't wish this on any solo developer trying to self learn and make something...

Sometimes I really just have to say "Fuck you, Google" out loud a few times.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

OK.
1. So i tindered.
2. I got a really nice girl.
3. We chatted really long and good.
4. We tried to meetup it did not work because of our schedule. New
job on my end, she is a student.
5. I thought its over. Fine whatever.
6. She gives me her number.
7. We continue chat on whatsapp
8. Blablabla 3 days long, she gets bored and tries to friendzone me
9. I revert the shit and state i wanna be serious and there wont be a
friendzone/nice guy comin from me.
10. She happy and continues to chat.
11. I get emtionally invested in her.
12. We exchange thoughts dreams and music.
13 We want to meetup at weekend. I cant. Got a family wedding all
weekend.
14. We want to meetup the second week.
I cant. Im off on a company trip. Again new job here.
15. So we say in the week after I get back.
15a. Before the weekend we need to deliver an rc and go all out to hold
the deadline.
15b. We deliver, but shit happens on the customer side. His fault but we
get the blame.
15c I go onto the company trip.
16. We chat and i send her pictures of the trip over the weekend so she
sees I care.
17. She seems fine. And happy.
18. I come back from the trip late night and need to work the next day
jetlag style.
19. I work jetlag style. And try to fix the shit from last week.
20. I come home really tired and looking forward to date day tomorrow.
21. I cant do anything. My home looks like shit and the bag still
unpacked. I just eat and fall asleep.
I feel bad bcs my home will turn her down instantly if we make it to my
place.
Need to hope that it does not come to this.
22. Date day comes. Today.
23. I wake up at 6 early to plan ahead to make sure my clothes are fine
and i arrive on time in the office to exit early.
24. I expect to check what goes on today in the city and give her the
location to meet and time.
25. I enter office and immeadetly get caught up in meeting planning, dev
questions and the meeting itself because the project is on edge.
26. We have a 5hours long meeting where people go on and on and on.
27. 3h later in the meeting:
my brain was fried and around 12 i go to lunch with some people.
28. Meanwhile the city is turning into a rainy mess of a shitty day. No
way I can have a nice walk with her like that. Bars and coffeshops are
just to boring.
29. So i eat to regain some sense and we go back to the office.
Meanwhile I am thinking all kinds of locations and stuff in my head.
30. Havent given her any update since a good morning in the morning.
31. We reenter the meeting. Things continue like before. The project is
on impossible demands and impossible timelines. Still we try to do our
best.
32 3h later on 3pm I tell her i am in a long meeting and working on a
meetingspot.
33. shes not happy.
34. I get a call from a relative
35. i need to go out and take the call. not good for the collegues.
again new job here.
36. family trouble,  money trouble, goverment demands. I promise to
handle that tomorrow. Before work.
37. i get back into the meeting.
38. still super slow and no results.
39. need to focus but start to check for locations on my phone.
40. she asks me where i am
41. I send her my location.
42. she thinks i am saying she should pick me up!
43 i joke and say no definitly not.
44. shes pissed.
45.  I decide for a coffeeshop. after work. and send her the location
46. She says to call it off.
47. I go all in and go romance style. I say ill wait there even if she
does not come to show her how much i care.
U know to avoid the lets do it some other time fuckery and then it never
happens.
47. She goes quiet.
48. 2h later we finish the meeting. Meanwhile QA foudn a bug we need to
fix because why not.
49. I got 30 minutes to find the bug and fix it before I need to go to
uphold my word.
50. I find out what to do, but it might break a lot of other things
without careful test and implementation. Collegues says he takes it.
51 I feel bad but I need to go. I even leave earlier because otherwise I
would not be on time.
52. I arrive 15 minutes early. I grab two coffee2go and wait outside,
53. Shitty weather, sometimes rain, sometimes sunny, cant decide what it
wants.
54. The weather is just like how I feel.
55. I wait 1 1/2h
56. I think I should feel stupid, For gods sake its tinder. People dont
give a crap, Enough people around why should I Invest so much into this?
But I dont feel stupid. Because this is how I want it. I dont want
appointments, I dont want safety. I decided for her and I went all in.
57. I send her pics from the sceneray as proof that I waited,
58. I think I blew it. She is still quiet.
59. Friends are asking me for plans for the weekend. I wish I could say
I already have some with her.
60. I feel lost right now. But my head says I put too much stress on
her, And i fucked up with the planning. I should have been more precise.
My head also says that i am putting myself into the victim role, which
is wrong always. Should I continue to reach out to her? Is there
something I could do still?

WordPress related, get ready for some disgust.

So today early in the morning my boss forwarded me an email from a client, it was about a bug, and asked me if I can have a look at it and fix it.
"Yaay, WordPress!" I thought and opened the page containing the mentioned bug. She wrote that in the italian version of the page, users can select dates in the calendar, which should be disabled, like in the german version.

So yeah, I opened the code. Everything in the function looked perfect. Really. And the Data was also correctly set in the backend of WP.

The function was only 3 lines of code:

- Get the german post ID of the current post (german or italian) by its ID (using a Polylang function)

- Get an Advanced Custom Fields field by name and from a post with the ID from before

- json_encode its content and echo it to a JS var for initialization and later use in some AngularJS.

No fucking missing semicolon, it was fucking perfect like a sunset with your soulmate.

So I tried to find the bug with my personal way of debugging:

"Shitstream Debugging"
When a creek suddenly is full of water mixed with shit, walk upstream through the turds until you reach clear water. This is where the bug is.

=> So I first looked at the HTML source: Turds.
=> Then the ACF field content: Still turds.
=> Then the ID of the german post: Shit stain and turds (var_dump: null)
=> Please god at least $post->ID? Nope, fart smell and turds.
=> Nothing more to check: Clear fucking water and the flowery smell of 99 devVirgins

So it replaced $post->IT with get_the_ID() and it worked like a charm.

Afterwards I feel stupid, but $post->IT worked all the times before...

Conclusion:
FUCK YOU WORDPRESS YOU UGLY PIECE OF HUMAN-CENTIPEDE-PROCESSED-DOGFART.

Thanks for your patience.
Only one beer was sucked dry during the writing of this fucking rant.

This is something that happened 2 years ago.

1st year at uni, comp sci.

Already got project to make some app for the univ that runs in android, along with the server

I thought, omg, this is awesome! First year and already got something to offer for the university 😅
(it's a new university, at the time I was the 2nd batch)

Team of 12, we know our stuffs, from the programming POV, at least, but we know nothing about dealing with client.

We got a decent pay, we got our computers upgraded for free, and we even got phones of different screen sizes to test out our apps on.

No user requirement, just 2-3 meetings. We were very naive back then.

2 weeks into development, Project manager issues requirement changes

we have a meeting again, discussing the important detail regarding the business model. Apparently even the univ side hadn't figure it out.

1 month in the development, the project manager left to middle east to pursue doctoral degree

we were left with "just do what you want, as long as it works"

Our projects are due to be done in 3 months. We had issues with the payment, we don't get paid until after everything's done. Yet the worse thing is, we complied.

Month 3, turns out we need to present our app to some other guy in the management who apparently owns all the money. He's pleased, but yet, issued some more changes. We didn't even know that we needed to make dashboard at that time.

The project was extended by one month. We did all the things required, but only got the payment for 3 months.

Couldn't really ask for the payment of the fourth month since apparently now the univ is having some 'financial issues'.

And above all: Our program weren't even tested, let alone being used, since they haven't even 'upgraded' the university such that people would need to use our program as previously planned.

Well, there's nothing to be done right now, but at least I've learned some REALLY valuable lesson:

1. User Requirement is a MUST! Have them sign it afterwards, and never do any work until then. This way, change of requirements could be rejected, or at least postponed

2. Code convention is a MUST! We have our code, in the end, written in English and Indonesian, which causes confusion. Furthermore, some settle to underscore when naming things, while other chooses camel case.

3. Don't give everyone write access to repository. Have them pull their own, and make PR later on. At least this way, they are forced to fix their changes when it doesn't meet the code convention.

4. Yell at EVERYONE who use cryptic git commit message. Some of my team uses JUST EMOTICONS for the commit message. At this point, even "fixes stuffs" sound better.

Well, that's for my rant. Thanks for reading through it. I wish some of you could actually benefit from it, especially if you're about to take on your first project.

Life as a homeless developer.

I'm a lil brainsick but homelessness makes you that way.
I started writing software as a hedge against an old injury i had from my teen years. I have a unique condition leaving me with limited use of my hand as such any jobs like cashier call center and they like are of limits to me, i can't hold change because my hands don't bend flat, and to much typing is excruciating. Therefore being adev should get the most bang for the buck that I have left. Ive been doing this for 12 years. Well it's all bullshit and unicorns. I can't get a job to save my life. All i get is calls from recruiters wanting a full stack retard. I'm an erlang developer for about 5 years, c# php no i can't do Photoshop or frontend gay as colors because it's a different skillet. Oh but trumpy says we're at the lowest unemployment ever, ya because we're all homeless and companies are still looking for unicorns, they don't exist just like the fake jobs which is the real fake news. In reality if a company wants you its because their dev left and you are to fix their broken shit, which never worked in the first place thus cannot be fixed besides I'm not a plumber. In my opinion many companies nowadays are run by liberal sjw children who don't value your time but want the product now, spoilt. Recruiters are the worst, gimme money because i touched your resume. I'd rather just kill myself than try to appease some fucking retarded children. Its so awesome to live in a tunnel while my skills entropy while i have 160 self published github repos, know many programming languages and be told your have no value. its those same children that dont understand the flow of money or value loyalty, claim we have all these jobs but no skillid employees, so they can bring in more visa overstayers, underpay them and claim record profits, the more you pay forieners my countries money the less there is to go around in the society leading to disenfranchised people like me, and you wonder why there's so many shootings in il. How long can i endure homelessness before i start becoming a criminal? Soon i will have no other option. You employers had a choice but I'm going out with a bang.

Inner Me: Where the fuck is this bug coming from
> Set a breakpoint in every single place where the method I'm using is being called.
> Try calling the method before every function call
Inner Me: FUCKING DAMNIT! It's been hours now
Inner Me: No way it's the library I'm using.
Inner Me: That couldn't possibly be the problem
> Try running it again and delete some more shit
Inner Me: FUCK MEEEEEEEE
> Getting delirious
> Begin to look at some stupid memes.
> Come back to it.
> Have an Ah-ha moment
> Try running it again but rearrange the order of the method calls
> Still no luck
> try git stashing a bunch of my changes
> git stash apply them back
> erase the method call entirely
Inner Me: well that sort of worked, but now all my numbers are incomplete
Inner Me: FUCKING FINE!!! I'LL LOOK IN THE GODDAMN LIBRARY
Inner Me: FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCKKKKK a stupid integer casting was occuring to my floats!!!

Now Talking to my girlfriend.

Me: The problem was in the library I was using
Girlfriend: How are you going to fix it if it's in the library?
Me: ... I can, because I wrote the library...
Me: FUCK ME RIGHT?
Me: I guess moral of the story; sometimes the problems starts with ourselves
GF: Hahaha. Thats Deeep

I’m adding some fucking commas.
It should be trivial, right?
They’re fucking commas. Displayed on a fucking webpage. So fucking hard.

What the fuck is this even? Specifically, what fucking looney morons can write something so fucking complicated it requires following the code path through ten fucking files to see where something gets fucking defined!?

There are seriously so fucking many layers of abstraction that I can’t even tell where the bloody fucking amount transforms from a currency into a string. I’m digging so deep in the codebase now that any change here will break countless other areas. There’s no excuse for this shit.

I have two options:
A) I convert the resulting magically conjured string into a currency again (and of course lose the actual currency, e.g. usd, peso, etc.), or

B) Refactor the code to actually pass around the currency like it’s fucking intended to be, and convert to a string only when displaying. Like it’s fucking intended to be.

Impossible decision here.

If I pick (A) I get yelled at because it’s bloody wrong. “it’s already for display” they’ll say. Except it isn’t. And on top of that, the “legendary” devs who wrote this monstrosity just assumed the currency will always be in USD. If I’m the last person to touch this, I take the blame. Doesn’t matter that “legendary Mr. Apple dev” wrote it this way. (How do I know? It’s not the first time this shit has happened.) So invariably it’ll be up to me to fix anyway.

But if I pick (B) and fix it now, I’ll get yelled at for refactoring their wonderful code, for making this into too big of a problem (again), and for taking on something that’s “just too much for me.” Assholes. My après Taco Bell bathroom experiences look and smell better than this codebase. But seriously, only those two “legendary” devs get to do any real refactoring or make any architecture decisions — despite many of them being horribly flawed. No one else is even close to qualified… and “qualified” apparently means circle jerking it in Silicon Valley with the other better-than-everyone snobs, bragging about themselves and about one another. MojoJojo. “It was terrible, but it fucking worked! It fucking worked!” And “I can’t believe <blah> wanted to fix that thing. No way, this is a piece of history!” Go fuck yourselves.

So sorry I don’t fit in your stupid club.

Oh, and as an pointed, close-at-hand example of their wonderful code? This API call I’m adding commas to (it’s only used by the frontend) uses a json instance variable to store the total, errors, displayed versions of fees/charges (yes they differ because of course they do), etc. … except that variable isn’t even defined anywhere in the class. It’s defined three. fucking. abstraction. layers. in. THREE! AND. That wonderful piece of smelly garbage they’re so proud of can situationally modify all of the other related instance variables like the various charges and fees, so I can’t just keep the original currency around, or even expect the types to remain the same. It’s global variable hell all over again.

Such fucking wonderful code.

I fucking hate this codebase and I hate this fucking company. And I fucking. hate. them.

PM: Ok Android, i've reviewed the latest build, you are good to release. Waiting on iOS's build to test.

Me: ... are we not holding all builds until we hear back from backend about that bug?, as we likely have to change something on our side?

PM: Which bug?

Me: ... the only one we discussed yesterday in the team meeting.

PM: How many customers is it affecting?

Me: that we know of, one ... the CEO of our company

PM: oh that one, yeah were not doing that anymore.

Me: WHAT? i've been waiting all day / night to hear back. Why are we not doing this?

PM: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... Everything is too messy at the minute anyway, the release plan is changing every day. Need to keep it back in line.

Me: ... the plan has changed exactly once. We had a plan at the start of last week for the last release, we changed it YESTERDAY to include 2 critical bug fixes. The only issue with the plan changing is nobody telling us these aren't bugs anymore

PM: We can discuss tomorrow in the team meeting.

CEO: oh hey guys, yeah we pulled that bug fix. Its not really a bug, more like a missing feature. No way it will get done before xmas. Going to live with the way it works for now and fix it properly next year.

Me: Ok, fair enough, but we really need to be told these decisions.

CEO: sure, sorry, didn't think anyone was blocked by this. What was the blocker?

Me: ..... you asked me yesterday to get this bug fix in the build ... you asked for the final build to be made today so we can go through the app store review. As we all discussed yesterday, today is kind of the last day we can really do this.

CEO: ok, its late, we can discuss this tomorrow in the team meeting.

Me: ..... ..... ..... ..... sure

At a meeting:

"We don't know why <past developer, they all know who this motherfucker is> did it this way but we have to..."

Me: *slams table* no, stop. I am tired of this. Y'all must've really liked this guy. But he did it this way because he was a fucking idiot.
A
Fucking
Idiot
There is no other reason for this amount of fuckery that I have to be bothered to fix and mess with on A DAILY BASIS so I am gonna go ahead and call it as it is. The dude was a damn moron and no one here stopped him. I know he was a janitor here that got his cute lil associates and y'all wanted some good will hunting shit to happen, but <said dumbass developer is no matt damon"

Them: "YOU CaNt JusT UsE ThaT lanGUAGE"

"Am i gonna fix this shit?"

"Well......no one else kno...."

Me: "exactly"

Legit man i am sick and tired of this shit. I did not earn a B.S in comp sci. Graduated in the top percentage of my class, am suffering through my MCS to fix php like a fucking moron all day.The rest of my web devs backed me up.

Aaaand btw..no, it is not my job. I am a fucking analyst, i provide data reports, i program said reports, i am tasked with this shit because i used to work for then as a web tech.....got a different position cuz i was tired of it...fuck me right?

As much as I love opensource I hate really hate some of its actvie community members (read this as "freetards" <-- see urbandictonary). As a .Net + web devloper with minimal C experience (I just started learning it) and literally no Python experience its not really easy to contribute for me to many (most) opensource software for linux. I am using some <unnamed software> and I found a <critical bug>, it was easy to reproduce and I wrote for list of possible solutions, found it in a code and linked and basically wrote a docummentation longer than any other I ever wrote for every single project I did ever, combined. This <software> was critical for my server and since owner of github repo and few other people there were really active, I hoped that this bug with pretty good documentation will be solved fast, I went to my bed with a heroic feeling of an open source community contributor that helped saving world. I was horribly wrong. Tomorrow, I got 3 passively agressive responses from owner and other 2 freetards that summed up said <other1>:"oh thats nice, fix i yourself and commit it", <other2>:"have a sex with yourself" in a nice way, and <owner>: "fix my softwate and create mrege request". After replying that I have no experience my Python skills are not on a level requied for such an action, he messaged me on twitter I have linked to my GitHub profile saying even less nicely that I am a "retarded c*nt" and that I should learn Python and fix it myself. This makes me stay with my Windows based Server for some time now, fuck this. I googled his github nickname and guess what. Our main freetard is admin on an <unnamed linux forum> and mebmber of many other "computer help" with literally half of his posts just slightly toxic posts about how everyone should use linux and how supreme it is ober anything other, the other hals was crying why linux has only 1% of market share. Oh boi I am not sure why but ITS MAYBE BECAUSE OF FREETARDS LIKE YOU.
And the funnies thing is, hes not only freetard, he is just fullstack retard. One of his posts is "helping" to some <noob windows user> installing Linux. tl:dr for this las part: Freetard basically wiped all data of that <noob>.

PS: Bless everyone who do not respond "oh nice, now you can do it yourself"

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

Making an Android app for a group project. Of course, no one besides me in the team knows anything about Java, or Android, or life, apparently.

A guy "worked" on some small feature for 90 minutes last night before calling me for help. He can't comprehend git so he sends me a message containing his spaghetti code. I proceed to bang it out quickly the right way with him on a Skype call watching my screen but he isn't asking any questions or contributing at all. We have an approaching deadline so I am beyond coaching this guy.

We go to test it out and I had forgotten a line. Simple fix, but it prevents the feature from working as intended. Rather than being remotely helpful the guy gets an attitude about how I write buggy code and that the feature should be robust. I fix it and he slinks back to silence.

Cool. Thanks for the help bro. Glad you could contribute.

Had 2 days of vacation. Theoretically (plus weekend, plus 2 days) 6 days.

Worked today… At Saturday.

Some administrators forgot to properly check bandwidth limitations....

*rolls eyes*

We had a major version upgrade of some server software at Monday.

Guess why I got called...

Of course it MUST be the software upgrade.

It couldn't be the new hardware that was setup 2 weeks ago and on which a lot of "important" VMs were migrated.

*eyes roll inside till only white is visible*

The even more annoying thing is that it wasn't that hard to figure out.

Looking at monitoring, we had spikes on 20 Gbit/s (roughly 2.x Gigabyte/sec - Ethernet) connection of some server at roughly 1.9 plus Gigabyte/sec.

IO latency spikes that made the graph look like a heartbeat EKG with severe tachycardia...

*additionally to white eyes starts cursing in reverse latin*

Incompetent admin answer: Booboo that can only be your fault - the developers must investigate.

Me (just a tad more polite): Meep Meep mother fucker, get your shit together. If the software would eat that much, the network would be a niece chunk of charcoal. Plus the time (sending instead of links to monitoring pictures… guess the lazy fucktard who's brain is a vacuum didn't even bother to check it)...

NOTICE SOMETHING?!

Incompetent admin: It starts at the same time. Always.

After wasting roughly another hour of time discussing with him, I just hanged up the video call.

Called someone I knew from the admin department and turns out that - drumrolls please - the incompetent admin was someone who got recruited 3 months ago…

*turning into antichrist*

I then had a not so polite discussion about how the only competent people could take days off (all except incompetent admin were on vacation) and the seemingly incompetent fresh recruit - who by the way NEVER mentioned this - was the only one left of the admin department. Which would be bad alone, but no - he even got the 24/7 emergency support role for the whole weekend.

Sometimes this company and HR especially notoriously drive me insane...

Guess next week there will be some HR barbecue.

But yeah. After a lot of raging around we nailed it down to the traffic of backups and could fix it.

Roughly 4 hours of analysis, communication, raging and hatred.

Just one hour implementing shit.

*goozfraba*

Why does CSS never work the way you'd expect? All I want to do is align something to the bottom of a div. No. Will not happen. You'd think it might be something simple as 'v-align' or 'align: bottom' or 'fucking put it at the bottom: now;'

No, it's never that simple. I try every result I can find from googling. Nothing. Simply does not work.

How about trying to keep a div to a square when you resize the page? That should be simple? height = width right? Fuck you. Ha hahah, no you have to implement some horrendous arcane hack involving fake elements and other bullshit.

You finally fix one thing and everything else you had working is now broken.

...and then some fuckwit comes along and goes "Oh, CSS isn't hard..." and it takes everything you have not to beat them to death with your rubber duck.

What the hell is wrong with CSS? It's not even programming! It's just pure, sadistic hell! FUCK CSS!!!!

Today on forgotten games – Ballance.

The game is absolutely outstanding. Graphics is absolutely amazing even though the game was developed in 2004. The sound effects are perfect, I can literally feel the wooden ball rolling on steel rails. The background music is also amazing, we're talking Alexander Brandon level here.

The game is about rolling the ball through the levels trying not to fall off. There are three balls: the stone one, the wooden one and the paper one, different in weight, velocity and momentum.

I admire the clever level design. It uses in-game map features in multi-purpose way, for example some levels use ball transformers (the things that transform the ball from one kind to another) as a trap for your ball to lose momentum. It even seems like that levels were designed by some crazy modders for advanced players, but they weren't, and traveling through them feels like you're a pro gamer playing custom levels.

Even though levels seem simple at first glance, they allow non-linear gameplay and different gaming styles.

The gameplay itself is pure meditation. But even though the concept seem straightforward – just follow the level and don't fall – it's not. You have to use all three ball types: there are air vents to fly above upon, which only paper ball can do, there are obstacles to push, which only stone ball can do, and so on.

For additional sonic satisfaction the levels even feature some metal domes that serve no purpose but to be bumped into just for making amazing gong sound.

I like it that when you get cocky and think like that's easy, I got this, the game quickly puts you into place. It basically says nigga you ain't shit, you got nothing on me.

Overall it's basically a mesmerizing travel through cleverly designed levels surrounded by relaxing music and outstanding graphics.

Definitely a must-have for mechanical keyboard gamers, it's a pure satisfaction playing this game with a great level of precision and control mechanical keyboard allows.

Search for "ballance widescreen fix" for modern displays support.

I had a coworker that was an Air Force pilot (99% certain he was telling the truth as I was working for a government contractor and he had security clearance so I'd be a little surprised if he fooled HR and our whole team). Thing is... He genuinely believed the earth is flat. Whenever anybody would ask "haven't you seen the curvature of the earth? Like... More than once?" He'd respond with "yes I have, what's your point?". Uh.... Okay.

Didn't help that he also was convinced cpp is the only language you ever need for any project. Like, "what if instead of building a web API and two separate native mobile app frontends (Swift/Java)... We instead build our own proprietary C++ framework that somehow runs on IOS and Android and we can also use it for our Backend instead of .Net?"

I'm not saying I love Java or Swift or that at some point I haven't thought about why we can't just use cpp in both, but you're supposed to grow out of that kind of thinking. I think every noobie or college students thinks "oh there's got to be a way". But at some point in your career you realize even if you could, it wouldn't be any easier to use and the performance gain would crazy small compared to amount of effort and you'd be playing catch up with both IOS/Android forever.

But no matter how many times we'd shoot it down, he'd keep bringing it up. And he wasn't straight out of school or something. He had like 20 years of programming experience.

I don't have a lot of memorable co-workers that were positive but honestly I think that's because usually if they're good at what they do I don't have to interact with them a bunch or spend time thinking "Jesus what am I going to have to fix next from this guy". I definitely have worked with good/great programmers, they just don't stand out as much as the shitty ones.

Hey Root, remember that super high-priority ticket that we ignored for five months before demanding you rewrite it a specific way in one day?

Yeah, the new approach we made you use broke the expected usecases, and now the page is completely useless to the support team and they're freaking out. Drop everything you're doing and go fix it! Code-complete for this release is tonight! -- This right after "impacting our business flow" while being collapsed on the fucking floor.

Jesus FUCKING christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

If I dropped the ball on a high-priority ticket for two weeks, I'd get fired, let alone for five fucking months.

If I was a manager and demanded a one-day rewrite I can only imagine the amount of chewing out I'd receive, especially on something high-priority.

And let's not forget product ownership: imagine if I screwed up feature planning for someone so badly I made them break a support tool in production. I'd never hear the end of it.

Fucking double standards.

And while I'm at it. Some of the code I've seen in this codebase is awful. Uncommented spaghetti, or an unreadable mess with single-letter variables, super-tightly coupled modules so updates are nearly impossible, typos in freaking constants added across sixty+ files, obviously-incorrect comments, ... . I'll have to start posting snippets to show them off. But could I get away with any of it? ha. Hell no. My code must be absolutely perfect. I hear about any and every flaw, doesn't matter how minor, and nothing can go out until everything is just so.

Hell, I even hear about flaws in other peoples' code during my code reviews. Why? Because I should have fixed it, that's why. But if I do, I get yelled at for "muddying the waters."

Just. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

It's like playing a shell game where no matter which shell I pick (or point to their goddamn sleeve where they're clearly hiding it), I get insulted for being so consistently useless, and god damn, how can I never find the fucking pea or follow the damned rules? I'm so terrible and this is why "nobody trusts me." Fuck you.

I'll tell you why I can't find your damned pea: IT'S RATTLING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HEADS, you ASSHOLE FUCKING IMBECILES.

That's right: one pea among the lot of them.

goddamn I am fucking pissed off.

I am DONE with this woman.

Background: we're a team of 3 developers and I'm the junior in this team and I've been in this shit for a year now. 2 months ago the team leader left for another project and I had to stand in for him in every responsibility against the PM and other teams.

Now I not only had to endure this insecure woman but I was also supposed to work with her! Fast-forward to today, the team leader is back and I thought I could put my headphones on and work peacefully at last.

But no!

I've found out she's sent a faulty code to production - no big deal - and said that over chat (although she's sitting right behind me):

Me: We need to fix this.
Her: What?

Me: *giving some details about the issue*
Her: Your attitude is important when you ask me to do something. Whenever you're writing to me you're typing on your keyboard like you're going to break it on my head.

*me not knowing what to say at this point because we had something stupid like this before*

Me: So you're offended by the sound my keyboard makes? (I have mx brown switches by the way and they're not even loud)
Her: No you're typing too fast when you're writing to me. The sound echoes in the office.
...

Can you fucking believe this shit? I hate people that think they can educate me but have no idea how to rationally respond to situations and take responsibility! I didn't even say anything!

And she's been saying to me she hadn't had a problem with any other people for gazillion years who knows how long and why would she cause a problem now! And thinks I am the problem, fuck YOU!

Since you don't like receiving orders why hadn't you taken the place when the fucking guy went for another project but I had to take all the responsibility? I know why you fucking entitled bitch.

Because you HAD NO IDEA AND YOU STILL DON'T.

So shut the fuck up and do as I say.

Kind regards

I suddenly realized all the technical debt shit I told my boss would happen years ago given the way things were done/heading then... Just occurred pretty much all at once last week in the form of critical production issues...

The teams like:
-we need real time server process monitoring
-structured logging for apps
-containerization so one app didn't affect others

Me thinking: yes.... I told you so like 3/4 years ago when I first joined the team and kept repeating so much I got tired of saying at every annual review...

This is exactly what happens when you let technical debt grow and have no free time for developers to look into and fix then while they were small and not critical production processes... Or properly document and peer review them... (Got a shit pile of projects that no one knows how to use or even exists because the devs left the team) and they'll have a lot more when I finally leave... Hopefully this year.... If I can find another role and not need another medical procedure... (Doubtful)

I'm investigating PRs for a super legacy codebase. Someone else already approved the PRs -- somebody who has never even run the code or had the project set up before.

The codebase hasn't been touched in two years, and it hasn't been updated in four. It's using CoffeeScript, Node v0, Electron v0.30, and Angular 1.x. I obviously don't have a dev environment anymore, either, and my previous dev env was on Windows, so I'll have to translate my custom build utilities from batch to bash (or much more likely: node).

To make matters worse: the PRs break both the initial project setup and the project itself (NPM can no longer find some installed packages, among other problems). And. someone already merged them into master. So: fuck.

I'm going to yell at the author and tell him to fix his shit. Why? Because when I check out my last commit prior to his PRs, everything works perfectly. Surprise!

I was so done with this project two and a half years ago. I'm still so done with it. I just don't want to maintain this anymore, or honestly even look at it. I would happily rebuild the project from scratch, but updating it from the days of IE8? No way.

@netikras since when does proprietary mean bad?

Lemme tell you 3 stories.

CISCO AnyConnect:
- come in to the office
- use internal resources (company newsletter, jira, etc.)
- connect to client's VPN using Cisco AnyConnect
- lose access to my company resources, because AnyConnect overwrites routing table (rather normal for VPN clients)
- issue a route command updating routing table so you could reach confluence page in the intranet
- route command executes successfully, `route -n` shows nothing has changed
- google this whole WTF case
- Cisco AnyConnect constantly overwrites OS routing table to ENFORCE you to use VPN settings and nothing else.

Sooo basically if you want to check your company's email, you have to disconnect from client's VPN, check email and reconnect again. Neat!

Can be easily resolved by using opensource VPN client -- openconnect

CISCO AnyConnect:
- get a server in your company
- connect it to client's VPN and keep the VPN running for data sync. VPN has to be UP at all times
- network glitch [uh-oh]
- VPN is no longer working, AnyConnect still believes everything is peachy. No reconnect attempts.
- service is unable to sync data w/ client's systems. Data gets outdated and eventually corrupted

OpenConnect (OSS alternative to AnyConnect) detects all network glitches, reports them to the log and attempts reconnect immediatelly. Subsequent reconnect attempts getting triggered with longer delays to not to spam network.

SYMANTEC VIP (alleged 2FA?):
- client's portal requires Sym VIP otp code to log in
- open up a browser in your laptop
- navigate to the portal
- enter your credentials
- click on a Sym VIP icon in the systray
- write down the shown otp number
- log in

umm... in what fucking way is that a secure 2FA? Everything is IN the same fucking device, a single click away.

Can be easily solved by opensource alternatives to Sym VIP app: they make HTTP calls to Symantec to register a new token and return you the whole totp url. You can convert that url to a qr code and scan it w/ your phone (e.g. Google's Authenticator). Now you have a true 2FA.

Proprietary is not always bad. There are good propr sw too. But the ones that are core to your BAU and are doing shit -- well these ARE bad. and w/o an oppurtunity to workaround/fix it yourself.

Found a bug, reported it to the maintainer.
He then tells me to ignore it since no one noticed it (besides me).
I tell him i can't do it since it's just wrong and he can simply fix it.
Turns out he's just lazy as hell and got mad at me, so i go and fix it.
Next day boss is mad at me because i'm wasting time on tasks that it's not of my concern even knowing all my tasks were completed.
Not even a "thank you by the way".
What did i miss here?

I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).

summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations

summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!

Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy

Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.

Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.

Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.

Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?

Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.

But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.

Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.

I got my first programming job half a year ago, the lead developer there is really fucked up... he is old fashioned and stubborn as hell. He developed a platform that is a mess, his comment: “it works”... but now I have to fix it... I argued with my boss and convinced him to put more time in making it more scalable and feature proof. But the lead developer back then... he didn’t agree it seems like he want to do everything as quickly as possible... now half a year later he stopped working for us and I’m the lead developer now.

And I’m discovering more and more bad decisions... HOWWWW

WHAT DID THIS GUY DO???

At one time I was arguing with him and he backfired a comment: “I’m doing it like this for 10 years”... so I guess that’s the problem... he didn’t put effort in keeping up with the latest developments...

There is literally no structure in his work, every file is different... HOW DO I FIX THIS IN A NICE WAY??? I’m thinking to just start over again...

Recently started at a new job. Things were going fine, getting along with everyone, everything seems good and running smoothly, a few odd things here and there but for the most part fine.

Then I decided to take a look at our (public facing) website... What's this? Outdated plugins from 2013? Okay, that's an easy fix I guess? All of these are free and the way we're using them wouldn't require a lot of refactoring...

Apparently not. Apparently, we can't even update them ourselves, we have to request that an external company does it (which we pay, by the way, SHITELOADS of money to). A week goes past, and we finally get a response.

No, we won't update it, you'll have to pay for it. Doesn't matter that there's a CVE list a bloody mile long and straight up no input validation in several areas, doesn't matter that tens of thousands of users are at risk, pay us or it stays broken. Boggles the fuckin' mind.

I dug into it a bit more than I probably should have (didn't break no laws though I'm not a complete dumbass, I just work for em) and it turns out it's not just us getting fucked over, it's literally EVERYONE using their service which is the vast majority of people within the industry in my country. It also turns out that the entirety of our region is running off a single bloody IP which if you do a quick search on shodan for, you guessed it, also has a CVE list pop up a fuckin' mile long. Don't get me started on password security (there is none). I hate this, there's fucking nothing I can do and everyone else is just fine sitting on their hands because "nobody would target us because we're not a bank!!", as if it bloody matters and as if peoples names, addresses, phone numbers and assuming someone got into our actual database, which wouldn't be a fuckin' stretch of the imagination let me tell you, far more personal details, that these aren't enticing to anyone.

What would you do in my situation?
What can I even do?
I don't want to piss anyone senior off but honestly, I'm thinkin' they might deserve it. I mean yeah there's nothing we can do but at least make a fuss 'cause they ain't gunna listen to my green ass.

Fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

There was a project where we had to implement third-party system for government agency processes management. For some reason, probably because my work is cheap for my boss, the task was assigned to me. Just as a reminder, I'm a .NET Dev. Zero experience in server management. Zero experience in external services implementation.

Anyway, system producent, also an government agency, got angry, becasue they can only earn money on implementation. They have to give the software to other agencies for free. Because of that I've got client program, incomplete documentation and broken scripts for database creation. It took me 2 months to get it all to work but at the end client was happy, my boss got paid and I've got 500 PLN (~130 USD) bonus.

Everything was fine for a while, but after a month server has started freezing everyday, some time before 7 am. The only way I found to make it work again was to restore snapshot made everyday at 10 pm. For a month I was waking up earlier and restored snapshot, and after that my boss took it upon himself. I tried few times to find a bug and fix it, but to no effect. Even person with much more experience with it tried to help but also couldn't find anything.

My solution? Copy all the data and configuration, create new machine, copy everything and check if the problem persists. If not, kill old server. Client won't even notice. But nooooooooo... It would cost my boss a bit of money and I'd need to work on it and he can't let it be, because I'm the only developer working on his flagship product. He'd rather wake up everyday and restore snapshot. Okay, as you wish.

And today, finally, everything went downhill. Snapshot wasn't created, server froze, backup can't be created. Nothing can be done. Client is furious, because they have had reported this problem and a few times restoration was too late and they couldn't work. No one knows how to fix it, I'm not working today (I'm still studying and am available only 2 days) and situation is really shitty.

BUT SURE. ITS BETTER TO RESTORE SERVER EVERYDAY THAN JUST FUCKING FIX IT.

Oh, also, there's no staging or any other real backup. We have snapshots for each day and that's that. Boss' order. Why do I even care...

I wish there was a way to pay for devRant++ yearly. Since I have no card of my own that work outside of Sweden I have to pay my mom and use her card, which is a bit annoying to do once a month.

dfox pls fix.

Ok friends let's try to compile Flownet2 with Torch. It's made by NVIDIA themselves so there won't be any problem at all with dependencies right?????? /s

Let's use Deep Learning AMI with a K80 on AWS, totally updated and ready to go super great always works with everything else.

> CUDA error
> CuDNN version mismatch
> CUDA versions overwrite
> Library paths not updated ever
> Torch 0.4.1 doesn't work so have to go back to Torch 0.4
> Flownet doesn't compile, get bunch of CUDA errors piece of shit code
> online forums have lots of questions and 0 answers
> Decide to skip straight to vid2vid
> More cuda errors
> Can't compile the fucking 2d kernel
> Through some act of God reinstalling cuda and CuDNN, manage to finally compile Flownet2
> Try running
> "Kernel image" error
> excusemewhatthefuck.jpg
> Try without a label map because fuck it the instructions and flags they gave are basically guaranteed not to work, it's fucking Nvidia amirite
> Enormous fucking CUDA error and Torch error, makes no sense, online no one agrees and 0 answers again
> Try again but this time on a clean machine
> Still no go
> Last resort, use the docker image they themselves provided of flownet
> Same fucking error
> While in the process of debugging, realize my training image set is also bound to have bad results because "directly concatenating" images together as they claim in the paper actually has horrible results, and the network doesn't accept 6 channel input no matter what, so the only way to get around this is to make 2 images (3 * 2 = 6 quick maths)
> Fix my training data, fuck Nvidia dude who gave me wrong info
> Try again
> Same fucking errors
> Doesn't give nay helpful information, just spits out a bunch of fucking memory addresses and long function names from the CUDA core
> Try reinstalling and then making a basic torch network, works perfectly fine
> FINALLY.png
> Setup vid2vid and flownet again
> SAME FUCKING ERROR

> Try to build the entire network in tensorflow
> CUDA error
> CuDNN version mismatch
> Doesn't work with TF
> HAVE TO FUCKING DOWNGEADE DRIVERS TOO
> TF doesn't support latest cuda because no one in the ML community can be bothered to support anything other than their own machine
> After setting up everything again, realize have no space left on 75gb machine
> Try torch again, hoping that the entire change will fix things

At this point I'll leave a space so you can try to guess what happened next before seeing the result.

Ready?

3

2

1

> SAME FUCKING ERROR

In conclusion, NVIDIA is a fucking piece of shit that can't make their own libraries compatible with themselves, and can't be fucked to write instructions that actually work.

If anyone has vid2vid working or has gotten around the kernel image error for AWS K80s please throw me a lifeline, in exchange you can have my soul or what little is left of it

Red flags in your first week of your software engineering job 🚩

You do the first few days not speaking to anyone.
You can't get into the building and no one turns up until mid day.
The receptionist thinks you're too well dressed to work in this building, thinks you're a spy and calls security on you.
You are eating alone during lunch time in the cafeteria
You have bring your own material for making coffee for yourself

When you try to read the onboarding docs and there aren't any.
You have to write the onboarding docs.

You don't have team mates.
When you ask another team how things are going and they just laugh and cry.😂😭

There's no computer for you, and not even an "it's delayed" excuse. They weren't expecting you.
Your are given a TI PC, because "that's all we have", even though there's no software for it, and it's not quite IBM compatible.
You don't have local admin rights on your computer.💀
You have to buy a laptop yourself to be able to do your job.

It's the end of the week and you still don't have your environment set up and running.
You look at the codebase and there are no automated tests.
You have to request access every time you need to install something through a company tool that looks like it was made in 2001.

Various tasks can only be performed by one single person and they are either out sick or on vacation.
You have to keep track of your time in 6 minute increments, assigned to projects you don't know, by project numbers everyone has memorised (and therefore aren't written down).
You have to fill in timesheets and it takes you 30 minutes each day to fill them in because the system is so clunky.🤮

Your first email is a phishing test from the IT department in another country and timezone, but it has useful information in it, like how to login to the VPN.
Your second email is not a phishing test, but has similar information as the first one. (You ignore it.)
Your name is spelled wrong in every system, in a different way. 2 departments decide that it's too much trouble, and they never fix the spelling as long as you work there. One of them fixes it after you leave, and annoys you for a month because you haven't filled out the customer survey.

Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.

I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".

People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..

So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...

I really want to.
I want to get away from Windows.
But I have yet to find a distro that works.

Today I tried again again.
I found out Linux Mint released version 19.
Snapshots integrated. Cool. I will try it.

Installed with Cinnamon. Looks nice. Everything is running fast.

Aaaaand I hate the mouse movement...
Why is there no 1:1 movement? Is acceleration on? Does not feel like it.
Ok. We can fix this right?
Opened the Mouse settings.
There is no way of deactivating mouse acceleration. Only customizing the amount of acceleration. What?

Ok customize it. No change at all.
Try extreme settings. Nothing.

Google for a solution. Says I should install dconf-editor and change settings there.

Install it, change the settings. Hey it works!
It is far from perfect but I can live with that.

Now the scroll wheel is so slow...
But there is no setting at all? Not even in dconf-editor.

Google the solution. Need to install imwheel and configure it. Really?
Okay will do. I wanna use this.

Finally. Mouse works as it should.

After all that, why is my lap so hot? Fucking hell the cpu seems to be burning.

Fuck that!
I am out! Back to Windows!

In an unexpected turn of events, it appears as if years of choosing fancy bullshit over code maintainability will cause said fancy bullshit to eventually break and no obvious way to fix it. There's no way anyone would have seen this one coming.

When I was a graduate I often had to do proof of concepts and one had to be done by the weekend, I'd only been given it on the Wednesday. After a few sleepless nights I had it working or so I thought. On the Friday afternoon the CTO had a look at it and spotted a bug, he told me about it and I stayed in the office until about 10 when I finally managed to get some kind of fix in place. I emailed him told him I thought but was working and shouldn't happen again.

A few hours later no response I get a phone call from him screaming, shouting and swearing calling me useless and a waste of space etc. Etc. To the point I logged in desperately trying to fix the issue in a very hastily written integration and ended up having quite a major panic attack woke up on the floor and immediately went back to work. On the Saturday morning one of the senior Devs logged in and managed to fix it in the database and everything went fine in the end.

I went into work on Monday fully expecting to be fired from the way the CTO was speaking to me, I went to my line manager at the time and he just said don't worry. I left it in his
hands and things went back to normal. That call put a pretty serious dent in my confidence for years, but I learned a few valuable lessons which I stick to today.

Never work on serious shit after 6, use a second mobile for work which is turned off at 5 o'clock, properly test all fixes and always ALWAYS have someone in between graduates and senior management because honestly they can't handle the shit that's flung from above.

Manager: Hey software engineer, how's the project going?

Software Engineer: Good, just debugging my code.

Manager: Debugging? What kind of bug are you trying to fix?

Software Engineer: The ones that make my computer turn into a lava lamp.

Manager: Ha ha, very funny. But seriously, how can I help?

Software Engineer: Well, I need a bigger monitor. My current one doesn't have enough real estate to display all the errors.

Manager: How about a second monitor?

Software Engineer: No, I need a bigger universe.

Manager: I'll see what I can do. In the meantime, keep coding. We have a deadline to meet.

Software Engineer: No problem, I have all the time in the world. I just need to find a way to slow down time.

Manager: I wish I had your optimism. Just let me know if you need anything else.

Software Engineer: How about a unicorn? I heard they're good at coding.

Manager: I'll see what I can do, but in the meantime, stick to using a keyboard.

dear api author at my company pt. 2:

If you're gonna create an api method that takes some arguments.

And one of those arguments is an array.

THEN MAKE THE FUCKING ARGUMENT'S NAME PLURAL YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT.

REPEAT WITH ME, MOTHERFUCKER.
ARRAY, PLURAL, NON-ARRAY, SINGULAR.

I need to pass a shitload of filters for the data for this table, and for every suckin fuckin filter I need to singularize this shit. Thank god for es6.

I know this sounds like nitpick, but I swear to fucking alpha omega this guy is inconsistent as fuck.

Every time it feels like he makes up a new rule.

Sometimes I need to send arrays of ids, other times arrays of objects with an id property on each.

He uses synonyms too, sometimes it's remove, other times erase.

PICK ONE MOTHERFUCKER.

If you can't do the basic things well, then what is to expect of more advanced stuff?

Naming conventions you fucking idiot, follow them. It's programming 101.

You're already sending them as plural in the fucking response. Why change them for the request?

And that's just style, conventions.

This idiot asshole also RARELY DOES ANY FUCKING CHECK ON THE ARGUMENTS.

"Oh, you sent a required argument as null? 500"

We get exceptions on sentry UP THE ASS thanks to this useless bone container.

YOU'RE SEEING THE EXCEPTIONS TOO!!!!! 500'S ARE BUGS YOU NEED TO FIX, YOU CUMCHUGGER

And sometimes he does send 400, you know what the messages usually are?
"Validation failed".

WHYYYYYY YOU GODDAMN APATHETIC TASTELESS FUCK???
WHAT EXACTLY CAUSED THE FUCKING VALIDATION TO FAIL????

EXCEPTIONS HAPPEN AND THANKS TO YOU I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.

The worst of all... the worst of fucking all is that everytime I make a suggestion to change shit, every time, you act like you care.
You act like the api is the way it is because you designed it in a calculated manner.

MOTHERFUCKER. IF A USER HAS ONLY PRODUCT A, THEN HE SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO ACCESS DATA FOR PRODUCT B. IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO JUST RESTRICT SHIT WITH ADMIN ROLES. IDIOT!!!!!

This is the work of someone who has no passion for programming.

WTF!!!!! I officially have someone trying to extort me just had this in my email box this morning!

--------

Hello,

My name is [name removed], I'm an IT security expert and I found a security issue on your website.
This email is personal and in no way related to any of my employers.

I was able to access to a lot of files which contains sensitive data.
I attached a screenshot of the files I found to this email.

I would be happy to give you the method I used to access these files in order to let you fix it.
Would be a monetary compensation possible?

Please forward this email to the right person, if your are not responsible for the security of the website.

Best Regards,
[name removed]

---

He can basically see the contents of my wp-config.php. How has he managed this?

Some of y'all post some retarded quotes man no lie.

"A programmer does not fix computers" ~Some Indian dude

Really??!!

Does that need to be made into a quote? And do you honestly believe something soooo mundane should be attributed to one person only?

"Drink a glass of water every morning, best way to start your day" ~ Alecx(read with Indian accent even though I am Mexican American)

"Sleeping in your own bed is always the best" ~ Alecx

See how stupid that shit is? Quoting shit that is sooooo fucking generic and that literally anyone can think off?

I dunno why it pisses me off soooo fucking much. Ffs. The same thing about "dev jokes" do you have any idea how fucking cringey that shit is? And half the fucking time y'all post that shit in some of the most broken ass English I've ever seen man wtf.

The quality of rants has been going down in spirals and with a dogon YEEEE HAW and darling trust this motherfucker....I know a lil something about yeee haws.....this is a prime example.

Look, people can rant and post whatever the fuck they want. I ain't gonna hold you back on it. Just know that a lot of us think you are a moron.

A cringey moron at that.

No, I'm not going to approve your one-line fix. It will introduce more problems in the future. Fix it the way we agreed on this morning!

TL;DR: My devices all hate me and I needed to fix them all.

My Devices really love me.

I rooted my smartphone (LG G5) just yesterday. Everything went fine. Installed TWRP, SuperSU and some nice Apps that utilize root.

Today I was on the go (at CeBIT) and already had the Xposed Installer App on my phone, but didn't attempt installing it yet because I needed my phone for Maps and Messaging and the app had given clear warning about the bricking-potential.

So to the end of the day I get bored, send my last important Messages, installed the Xposed Framework...
... aaaand got stuck in a boot loop.

So I got on my way back home (thanks God I remembered all the trains I needed to take). On the way I had a lot of fun in the Recovery-Terminal and figured that I should be able to fix my phone with no problem at home because the installer made backups (unlike myself).

Coming back home and my pc was still running (should've shut down after installing updates).
The pc behaved odd and I couldn't shut it down properly, which led to cutting the power.
And upon booting my pc I got a ... give it a guess ...
...a bootloop (technically the animation just never ended).

So after I fixed my phone with my spare laptop (just transferred and executed the uninstaller for xposed) I fixed my PC too, which had an old broken dkms-driver.

The odd thing about this is, that this isn't technically a rant. I guess you can confirm that you can't find any swear words.
Because I ENJOYED fixing the devices. I already fixed my pc a couple of times was well as unbricking my rooted phones, so there was fairly little research involved.
I guess I'm now offically twisted.

Now, after my smartphone backups are transferred, I'Ll take my device apart and replace the camera glass which arrived today (and hope, no pray, that my sim card does still work after that)...
... after I blatendly copied a meme to get more attention. 😉

I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.