Friend asked me, "How does it feel being the CTO of a startup?"

Me: "I feel like the main character in one of those cartoons where train, going full speed, is running out of rail road, so he takes rails from behind the train and puts them in front. And the entire thing is on fire. And everyone you hire is trying to put it out with gasoline."

Friend: "Doesn't your CEO help?"

Me: "Well... He had never seen a train before, and he thought they operate on magic and wishful thinking. And he never realized they need rail track to even run. So... not really"

Friend: "So, it's pretty bad, ha?"

Me: "It's great actually. We just closed our seed round. We're about to launch beta. I might even get 5-6 hours of sleep this weekend 😅"

At a certain client, was asked to help them with an "intermediary" solution to stopgap a license renewal on their HR recruiting system.

This is something I was very familiar with, so no big. Did some requirements gathering, told them we could knock it out in 6 weeks.

We start the project, no problems, everything is fine until about 2.5 weeks in. At this point, someone demands that we engage with the testing team early. It grates a little as this client had the typical Indian outsourcing mega-corp pointey-clickey shit show "testing" (automation? Did you mean '10 additional testers?') you get at companies who put business people in charge of technology, but I couldn't really argue with it.

So we're progressing along and the project manager decides now is a great time to bugger the fuck off to India for 3 months, so she's totally gone. This is the point it goes off the rails. Without a PM to control the scope, the "lead tester," we'll call her Shrilldesi, proceeds to sit in a room and start trying to control the design of the system. Rather than testing anything in the specification, she just looked at the existing full HRIS recruiting system they were using and starts submitting bugs for missing features. The fuckwit serfs they'd assigned from HR to oversee this process just allowed it to happen totally losing focus on the fact this was an interim solution to hold them over for 6 months and avoid a contract renewal.

I get real passive aggressive at this point and refuse to deliver anything outside the original scope. We negotiate and end up with about 150% scope bloat and a now untenable timeline that we delivered about 2 weeks late, but in the end that absolute whore made my life a living hell for the duration of the project. She then got the recognition at the project release for her "excellent work," no mention of the people who actually did the work.

Tl;Dr people suck and if you value your sanity, you'll avoid companies that say things like, "we're not in the technology business" as an excuse to have shitty, ignorant staff.

Out of necessity (or rather: lack of support) I've been neglecting my test suite for the past ~month. Now that one of the beta versions of RSpec has better Rails 6 support, I can finally get back to writing tests. Yay!

I just merged staging into my testing branch, and it's now 344 commits ahead of origin! eep.

So, I've got lots of tests to write. yay.

One day browsing the internet, I find a website that is hiring web developers. I was curious, so I decided to see the requirements.

Job : To manage this website
Skills Required

6+ years Experience of
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
Node.js
Vue.js
TypeScript
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Ruby on Rails
ASP.NET
Perl
C
C++
Advanced C++
C#
Assembly
RUST
R
Django
Bash
SQL

Built at least 17 stand alone desktop apps without any dependencies with pure C++

Built at least 7 websites alone.
3+ years Hacking experience
built 5 stand-alone mobile with Java, Dart and Flutter
7800+ reputations on stack overflow.
Answered at least 560 questions on stack overflow
Have at least 300 repositories on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket.
Written 1000+ lines of code on each single repository.

Salary: $600 per month.

If he learnt all languages one by one at age 0, he will be 138 now!

So I just recently had the pleasure to set up a Rails environment for a friend on Windows. I haven't used Windows in about 5 or 6 years, and the person I had to set it up for doesn't know much about programming at all.

I all went fine at first, install database, devkit thingy and git. Then set up the project itself. And there is where the problems started.

First windows would refuse to use SSL, because of some weird bug in the Windows version of rubygems. The suggested upgrade did not work so I had to switch some gem sources to insecure connections, but at least it did install everything correctly.

Alright, I thought, that's not _that_ bad, everything is running now.

He sent me a screenshot some time later. Something was wrong with the JavaScript runtime, and I could not figure out for the life of me what the issue was.

Later again he sent me another screenshot.
His Antivirus spyware was messing with the asset pipeline. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

This was the point where I just said "FUCK IT, i'll just put everything into a fucking VM and let him use that".
I should have done that in the first place.

Long story short:
Setting up a development under Windows is painful.
Do yourself a favor and just use a VM.

Legacy code that has a really long and convoluted way of integrating Dropbox authorisation to save files etc.

This happened in a meeting discussing where I’m at with the upgrade.

Me: This upgrade is going to take a while because of how outdated the app is. Also for assets uploaded by the user why don’t we just use active storage for this now as we have rails 6 now. Plus it will reduce a lot of code.

Other Dev: why would we do that? It’s a big change and will need testing.

Me: A lot of stuff is broken after the upgrade anyway and if we have a more built in simple way to do it why wouldn’t we? Also simplifying the code base is always good. The PR is already 1000+ files and we’re going to have to retest the app anyways.

Other Dev: *crickets*

I’m trying to make the app more smooth and streamlined and overall a better codebase as currently it’s shocking there and security holes galore, its like they don’t trust me with changing anything big haha honestly I think I’m the only one who wants to actually improve the application.

Rails, React, React-Native, Docker, Kubernetes, Openstack, Jenkins, AWS, Microservices, Realm, MongoDB, PostgresQL, GraphQL (list goes on...), and I'm not even done yet.

6 months was spent learning all of the above because I found a Rails-only monolith on Heroku unsettling. My first batch of containers was just deployed and I couldn't be happier. Love my job.

Finding a Ruby on Rails developer job here in North Carolina fucking sucks. I got through three sets of interviews and they told my recruiter I aced them and answered their questions flawlessly but instead of hiring a ruby developer to 1-3 years of experience they now want to hire a software architect with 4-6 years of experience. This company wasted both of our times.

Finding Ruby developer jobs is hard and I’m looking into whether I should switch to another tech stack to make my job search easier.

Thoughts?

Upgrading a legacy rails app for work to rails 6 (help my sanity), just came across this...

Day 6: Using webpacker for rails and react, still cant fucking figure out why am I getting one freaking STYLED COMPONENT error. As the great @AlexDeLarge said "Fuck you, Webpack, I hope your inventor dies in a fucking hotel fire!"

Rails 6 needs Webpacker needs Yarn, Needs NodeJS, needs Blah Blah Blah. Hello folks. Web dev in 2020 is crappier than it was in 2017!

I am a bit of a kit whore, and I’m perfectly happy with that.

But, I am experiencing a dilemma, I have a PC, nothing spectacular, about 5-6 years old, Windows 10 and a Linux VM.

I also have an iMac.

My problem is that I can’t make my mind up about which to use and so spend a lot of time switching between the two.

I know I should really get off the fence, nail my colours to the mast and make a choice, but I just can’t seem to do it.

In Work I am very much Microsoft oriented, which is fine, although I’m trying to move towards .Net core for future development where I can.

At home I’m very much into Ruby on Rails, Nodejs, Laravel etc.

I think it’s getting to the point where I’ll just have to toss a coin

Woke up yesterday morning from a dream where I was explaining what needed to be done to upgrade a Drupal 6 site. It hasn't been supported officially for years and I was explaining how there isn't a decent port of the main module we use Audio. And even the guy I was explaining this too seemed somewhat exasperated. So yeah, this is reality.

I could probably write a real upgrade path for the Drupal module and take all of our content into a new version of Drupal. But it would involve a fair amount of learning and outdated syntax and then learning Drupal 8. This would be all volunteer and take away from my time working on my other open source radio automation project.

All the while I've been learning Ruby on Rails for a class and I could just upgrade the app right out of Drupal, but this would require me to support the site into perpetuity. Which I already more or less do.

Drupal at this point is like an ex- girlfriend who I've grown away from, we did cool things but always got into fights about stupid things. Now I have to revisit my past mistakes and decide what to clean up and what to take into the future. I'm a better programmer now but I'm still not sure if it is worth my time to rekindle my romance with Drupal or it would just distract me from my current pursuits. Anyone who has been through the transition of a Drupal site from one major version to the next should feel my pain. At least it's not Word Press.