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Search - "sql developer"
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A guy named Valter couldn't register on this website because the developer blacklisted *ALTER*, amongst other words, to prevent SQL injection.11
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I had just started my new job and deleted 3 years of data that the client had spent over £450,000 collecting 😱
another developer used my PC to quickly access the clients database while I was out the room as I had sql management studio open. I went back to my PC thinking I was connected to my local database, did a few truncate tables to test my software and :0 minutes later I get a call asking why there was no data on the server!
Thank god for backups 😓7 -
I worked on a greenfield project a couple of years ago. The company had an old solution written in Omnis (heard of it? Yeah, me neither) with an SQL database. My team was to create a completely new web based system... on top of the old database, so the customers could keep their existing stuff.
The dba was an intelligent man, one of the nicest people I've met, and over the course of fifteen years he had made a remarkably terrifying monstrosity of a database. Some years before me they wanted to "future proof" the system and make it "easier to switch to new technologies". So they moved the entire business logic into the database...
I used a tool to create a visualization of said database when we started. It had no views, only tables and sprocs. Look at it! Tables and sprocs are rectangles (well, dots) and any connections are drawn in grey lines. There were no foreign keys, so a tables only visualization only yielded a collection of independent rectangles without a single line.
Now, the stored procedures were bloody MASSIVE. A single procedure that only registered a new interested party and attached them to a property had 2500+ lines and over 150 parameters.
Also, this dba added features and fixed bugs by logging into the respective customers production server and writing SQL.
That database is the stupidest thing I've ever seen a developer do.35 -
I accidentally open eclipse (Java code) during a demo.
The same smart ass Einstein's cousin business guy : Oh that is SQL, I have learnt it.. it was too simple for me that is why I decided not to be a developer
Me : You are lucky it's Friday4 -
*Interview*
Interviewer: We have an opening. Are you interested to work?
Me: What is that I'll be doing?
I: What technologies and languages do you know?
Me: I know Scala, Java, Spark, Angular, Typescript, blah blah. What is your tech stack?
I: Any experience working on frontend?
Me: Yes. But what do you use for it?
I: Can you work with databases?
Me: I can, on SQL based. What are yours?
I: Can you do big data processing?
Me: I know Spark, if that's what you are asking for. What is it that you actually do?
I: Any experience in cloud development?
Me: Yes. AWS? Azure? GCP?
I: Do you know CI CD?
Me: Excuse me.. I've been asking a lot of questions but you're not paying attention to what I'm asking. Can you please answer the questions I asked.
I: Yes. Go ahead.
Me: What will be my position?
I: A full stack developer.
Me: What technologies do you use in your project?
I: We use all the latest tech.
Me: Like?
I: All latest tech.
Me: You mentioned big data processing?
I: Yes. Processing data from DB and generating reports.
Me: what do you use for that?
I: Java.
Me: Are you planning to rebuild it using Spark or something and deploy in the cloud?
I: No we're not rebuilding it. Just some additions to the existing.
Me: Then what's with cloud? Why did you ask for that?
I: Just to know if you're familiar.
Me: So I'll be working with Java. Okay. What do you use for UI?
I: Flash
Me: 🙄
I sat for a couple of minutes contemplating life.
I: Are you willing to join?
Me: No. Not at all. Thankyou for the offer.5 -
Best: "If an AI could replace your job at this company but we would keep you on the payroll, what would you do with your time?"
Worst: "So, you are here for the position of front-end SQL developer?"6 -
I was hired as a senior software engineer. During handover I found out I'm actually replacing the CTO.
I queried why he was leaving and got a simple "just want a break from working" which I found odd.
Fast forward and now I also just want a break from work, permanently. This place has followed every bad practise and big no-no out there. Every bit of software is a built in house knockoff janky piece of crap that doesn't work and makes people's jobs 5000 times harder.
The UI looks worse than Windows 3.1, absolutely horrendous code formatting, worst database structure I've ever seen.
The mere mention of using a team communication tool results in being yelled at from the CEO whom communicates purely via email, who then gets annoyed when you don't reply because they sent the email to a client instead of you.
We get handed printed out "tickets" to work instead of the so called "amazing in house ticket system" built using PHP 5 and is literally crammed into an 800x600 IFrame. Yes a F$*#ing IFRAME!
It's not like we have an outdated TFS server that has work items we can use...
Why not push for changes you say. I have, many times, tried to suggest better tools. The only approval I've gotten is using PhpStorm. Everything else is shutdown immediately and you get the silent treatment.
The CEO hired me to do a job, then micromanages like crazy. I can't make UI changes, I can't make database changes, why? They insists they know best, but has admitted multiple times to not knowing SQL and literally uses a drag and drop database table builder.
Every page in the webapps we make are crammed into 800x600 iframes with more iframes inside iframes. And every time it's pointed out we need to do something, be it from internal staff or client suggestions, the CEO goes off about how the UI is industry leading and follows standards.. what in the actual f....
Literally holding on by a thread here. Why hire a CTO under the guise of being a senior developer but then reduce the work that can be done down to the level of a junior?
Sure the paycheck is really nice but no job is worth the stress, harassment and incompetent leadership from the CEO.
They've verbally abused people to the point they resign, best part is that was simply because the CEO made serious legal mistakes, was told about it by the employee then blamed it on others.21 -
Developer: Can you upgrade my machine to Windows 10? I need it for SQL server 2019.
IT Guy: Sure.
Some time later...
IT Guy: Good news, Windows 10 is loaded. Bad news, I need to update TPM to enable Bitlocker but the firewall is blocking me from downloading the update. I will need to download it from home tonight.
Developer: But you're the IT administrator...
IT Guy: Yes...
Developer: ...7 -
Attended one of the best meetups ever. To give you an idea how awesome it was..
Speaker took the first ~20 minutes introducing himself.
His intro card deck kept referring to himself in the third person (he is the only employee in consulting 'company'). Ex. "Mr. Smith began his humble career .."
The powerpoint presentation began with him clicking each page, not executing the slideshow (ex. pressing F5).
Finally someone asked "Can you make slide bigger?"
S:"You can't read that?..um..sure...I guess .."
Starts fumbling around the zoom ...
Dev: "No, can you start the slideshow?"
S: "I don't know what you mean...there...I zoomed it, is that better? Now I can't see my notes..just sec.."
<fumbles again with the zoom>
Dev: "No, not zoom, start the slide show, press F5"
S: "Oh...you want me to F5 it...OK..."
<he *clicks* the slide show button>
Finally getting into code, trying to get out of powerpoint ...
S: "How do I get out of this fullscreen?.."
Dev: "Hit escape"
S:"No..um.."
<keeps trying to click on 'something'>
S:"I see visual studio, but its not on the big screen... "
<keeps click on 'something', no one is sure whats going on>
Dev: "Hit Escape to stop the slideshow"
<finally hits escape, then able to put Visual Studio on the big screen>
S: "Ahh...there, I figured it out."
Speaker had no end of making wild/random statements like:
".Net Core is the future of Microsoft, if you're using .Net 4.5...forget it, its not even supported anymore."
"When I was at Microsoft Build, I asked them why not put all the required .Net assemblies in one directory. Looks like with .Net Core, they listened to me" (he was serious)
"I don't use SQL Server Mgmt Studio. Its free and it sucks. I use <insert a very expensive SSMS clone>, its great, you guys should check it out", then proceeds to struggle to open a query window to write some SQL.
"When you use .Net Core and EntityFramework, you have to write your own stored procedures. If a developer can't write stored procedures, he shouldn't be in this business."
I was on the edge of my seat, hungry for the next crazy bat-shit thing to come out of his mouth. He did not disappoint. BEST MEETUP EVER!9 -
Worst dev team failure I've experienced?
One of several.
Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.
I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.
The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.
3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.
3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.
4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).
About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.
3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.
About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.
Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.
A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.
Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."11 -
I have this guy who screams and keeps on slamming the table in a meeting room (there is only the project developer inside), about how important to LTRIM RTRIM in sql, combining multiple insert into 1 stored procedure, making a big deals of small feature since we’re on a tight schedule, bla bla bla
Worse retard ever
I almost punched him12 -
How did I start:
It was 1994. I had been kicked out of school on academic behavior. I was working at as a telemarketer to pay the bills. I got drunk on St. Patrick's day and over slept my shift. My boss was going to fire me but said he wanted to give me a second chance. He asked if I knew anything about computers. I said no. He said if I was willing to learn, our IT guy was burning out and needed help. I said ok. Next thing I know I'm learning how to write SQL and importing data to print call cards. I read the manual for Foxpro and started building small desktop apps as labor saving devices. 6months later in knew more than our IT guy. Later a friend showed me "the Internet". I went back to our IT guy in amazement. He said it was just a fad. He called it the CB Radio of the 90s. Our network we ran was called Lantastic.
I immediately quit went back to school and changed my major. I have been a full stack Java Web developer will the heavy emphasis on UI since 1999.3 -
Our website once had it’s config file (“old” .cgi app) open and available if you knew the file name. It was ‘obfuscated’ with the file name “Name of the cgi executable”.txt. So browsing, browsing.cgi, config file was browsing.txt.
After discovering the sql server admin password in plain text and reporting it to the VP, he called a meeting.
VP: “I have a report that you are storing the server admin password in plain text.”
WebMgr: “No, that is not correct.”
Me: “Um, yes it is, or we wouldn’t be here.”
WebMgr: “It’s not a network server administrator, it’s SQL Server’s SA account. Completely secure since that login has no access to the network.”
<VP looks over at me>
VP: “Oh..I was not told *that* detail.”
Me: “Um, that doesn’t matter, we shouldn’t have any login password in plain text, anywhere. Besides, the SA account has full access to the entire database. Someone could drop tables, get customer data, even access credit card data.”
WebMgr: “You are blowing all this out of proportion. There is no way anyone could do that.”
Me: “Uh, two weeks ago I discovered the catalog page was sending raw SQL from javascript. All anyone had to do was inject a semicolon and add whatever they wanted.”
WebMgr: “Who would do that? They would have to know a lot about our systems in order to do any real damage.”
VP: “Yes, it would have to be someone in our department looking to do some damage.”
<both the VP and WebMgr look at me>
Me: “Open your browser and search on SQL Injection.”
<VP searches on SQL Injection..few seconds pass>
VP: “Oh my, this is disturbing. I did not know SQL injection was such a problem. I want all SQL removed from javascript and passwords removed from the text files.”
WebMgr: “Our team is already removing the SQL, but our apps need to read the SQL server login and password from a config file. I don’t know why this is such a big deal. The file is read-only and protected by IIS. You can’t even read it from a browser.”
VP: “Well, if it’s secured, I suppose it is OK.”
Me: “Open your browser and navigate to … browse.txt”
VP: “Oh my, there it is.”
WebMgr: “You can only see it because your laptop had administrative privileges. Anyone outside our network cannot access the file.”
VP: “OK, that makes sense. As long as IIS is securing the file …”
Me: “No..no..no.. I can’t believe this. The screen shot I sent yesterday was from my home laptop showing the file is publicly available.”
WebMgr: “But you are probably an admin on the laptop.”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence…then the light comes on>
VP: “OK, I’m stopping this meeting. I want all admin users and passwords removed from the site by the end of the day.”
Took a little longer than a day, but after reviewing what the web team changed:
- They did remove the SQL Server SA account, but replaced it with another account with full admin privileges.
- Replaced the “App Name”.txt with centrally located config file at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\config.txt (hard-coded in the app)
When I brought this up again with my manager..
Mgr: “Yea, I know, it sucks. WebMgr showed the VP the config file was not accessible by the web site and it wasn’t using the SA password. He was satisfied by that. Web site is looking to beat projections again by 15%, so WebMgr told the other VPs that another disruption from a developer could jeopardize the quarterly numbers. I’d keep my head down for a while.”8 -
Sooooo me and the lead dev got placed in the wrong job classification at work.
Without sounding too mean, we are placed under the same descriptor and pay scale reserved for secretaries, janitors and the people that do maintenance at work(we work for a college as developers) whilst our cowormer who manages the cms got the correct classification.
The manager went apeshit because the guidelines state that:
Making software products
Administration of dbs
Server maintenance and troubleshooting
Security (network)
And a lot of shit is covered on the exemption list and it is things that we do by a wide fucking margin. The classification would technically prohibit us from developing software and the whole it dptmnt went apeshit over it since he(lead developer) refuses (rightfully so) to touch anything and do basically nothing other than generate reports.
Its a fun situation. While we both got a substantial raise in salary(go figure) we also got demoted at the same time.
There is a department in IT which deals with the databases for other major applications, their title is "programmers" yet for some reason me and the lead end up writing all the sql code that they ever need. They make waaaaay more money than me and the lead do, even in the correct classification.
Resolution: manager is working with the head of the department to correct this blasphemy WHILE asking for a higher pay than even the "programmers"
I love this woman. She has balls man. When the president of the school paraded around the office asking for an update on a high priority app she said that I am being gracious enough to work on it even though i am not supposed to. The fucking prick asked if i could speed it up to where she said that most of my work I do it on my off time, which by law is now something that I cannot do for the school and that she does not expect any of her devs to do jack shit unless shit gets fixed quick. With the correct pay.
Naturally, the president did not like such predicament and thus urged the HR department(which is globally hated now since they fucked up everyone's classification) to fix it.
Dunno if I will get above the pay that she requested. But seeing that royal ammount of LADY BALLS really means something to me. Which is why i would not trade that woman for a job at any of my dream workplaces.
Meanwhile, the level of stress placed my 12 years of service diabetic lead dev at the hospital. Fuck the hr department for real, fuck the vps of the school that fucked this up royally and fuck people in this city in general. I really care for my team, and the lead dev is one of my best friends and a good developer, this shit will not fucking go unnoticed and the HR department is now in low priority level for the software that we build for them
Still. I am amazed to have a manager that actually looks out for us instead of putting a nice face for the pricks that screwed us over.
I have been working since I was 16, went through the Army, am 27 now and it is the first time that I have seen such manager.
She can't read this, but she knows how much I appreciate her.3 -
Worst thing you've seen another dev do? So many things. Here is one...
Lead web developer had in the root of their web application config.txt (ex. http://OurPublicSite/config.txt) that contained passwords because they felt the web.config was not secure enough. Any/all applications off of the root could access the file to retrieve their credentials (sql server logins, network share passwords, etc)
When I pointed out the security flaw, the developer accused me of 'hacking' the site.
I get called into the vice-president's office which he was 'deeply concerned' about my ethical behavior and if we needed to make any personnel adjustments (grown-up speak for "Do I need to fire you over this?")
Me:"I didn't hack anything. You can navigate directly to the text file using any browser."
Dev: "Directory browsing is denied on the root folder, so you hacked something to get there."
Me: "No, I knew the name of the file so I was able to access it just like any other file."
Dev: "That is only because you have admin permissions. Normal people wouldn't have access"
Me: "I could access it from my home computer"
Dev:"BECAUSE YOU HAVE ADMIN PERMISSIONS!"
Me: "On my personal laptop where I never had to login?"
VP: "What? You mean ...no....please tell me I heard that wrong."
Dev: "No..no...its secure....no one can access that file."
<click..click>
VP: "Hmmm...I can see the system administration password right here. This is unacceptable."
Dev: "Only because your an admin too."
VP: "I'll head home over lunch and try this out on my laptop...oh wait...I left it on...I can remote into it from here"
<click..click..click..click>
VP: "OMG...there it is. That account has access to everything."
<in an almost panic>
Dev: "Only because it's you...you are an admin...that's what I'm trying to say."
Me: "That is not how our public web site works."
VP: "Thank you, but Adam and I need to discuss the next course of action. You two may go."
<Adam is her boss>
Not even 5 minutes later a company wide email was sent from Adam..
"I would like to thank <Dev> for finding and fixing the security flaw that was exposed on our site. She did a great job in securing our customer data and a great asset to our team. If you see <Dev> in the hallway, be sure to give her a big thank you!"
The "fix"? She moved the text file from the root to the bin directory, where technically, the file was no longer publicly visible.
That 'pattern' was used heavily until she was promoted to upper management and the younger webdev bucks (and does) felt storing admin-level passwords was unethical and found more secure ways to authenticate.5 -
#2 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?
Back before we utilized stored procedures (and had an official/credentialed DBA), we used embedded/in-line SQL to fetch data from the database.
var sql = @"Select
FieldsToSelect
From
dbo.Whatever
Where
Id = @ID"
In attempts to fix database performance issues, a developer, T, started putting all the SQL on one line of code (some sql was formatted on 10+ lines to make it readable and easily copy+paste-able with SSMS)
var sql = "Select ... From...Where...etc";
His justification was putting all the SQL on one line make the code run faster.
T: "Fewer lines of code runs faster, everyone knows that."
Mgmt bought it.
This process took him a few months to complete.
When none of the effort proved to increase performance, T blamed the in-house developed ORM we were using (I wrote it, it was a simple wrapper around ADO.Net with extension methods for creating/setting parameters)
T: "Adding extra layers causes performance problems, everyone knows that."
Mgmt bought it again.
Removing the ORM, again took several months to complete.
By this time, we hired a real DBA and his focus was removing all the in-line SQL to use stored procedures, creating optimization plans, etc (stuff a real DBA does).
In the planning meetings (I was not apart of), T was selected to lead because of his coding optimization skills.
DBA: "I've been reviewing the execution plans, are all the SQL code on one line? What a mess. That has to be worst thing I ever saw."
T: "Yes, the previous developer, PaperTrail, is incompetent. If the code was written correctly the first time using stored procedures, or even formatted so people could read it, we wouldn't have all these performance problems."
DBA didn't know me (yet) and I didn't know about T's shenanigans (aka = lies) until nearly all the database perf issues were resolved and T received a recognition award for all his hard work (which also equaled a nice raise).7 -
We had issues with lack of disk space on our production SQL server. Another developer decided to delete the databases he thought weren't in use to clear some space.
Ever think about checking first?!
Production chaos!7 -
I am a back-end developer, never suggested otherwise. My company is a firm of 50 people and owner hired a web designer to code our website. And it got hacked. Badly. So boss tells me to check if I can fix it. I take a look at the PHP and boy, written in PHP3, copy paste code from all over the place, hell the admin panel is a clone from a 2012 tutorial, nothing that remotely stares at the DB is checked for SQL, and now he wants me to design a new website, rewrite everything in PHP7 and had the balls to say "I know it's not your job, but it's a job, so do it"5
-
(I wrote most of this as a comment in reply about Microsoft buying GitHub on another rant but decided to move it here because it is rant worthy. Also, no, I'm not a Microsoft employee nor do I have any Microsoft stock).
Microsoft buying GitHub makes sense. They contribute more to the open source community on GitHub than any other company. (Side note, they also contribute/have contributed to the Linux Kernel).
Steve Ballmer isn't running the show anymore. Because of that, we have awesome things like:
* Visual Studio Code - Completely free and powerful light weight IDE for coding in just about any script or language. This IDE is also open source, hosted on GitHub. It can be installed on Win/Mac/Linux.
* Visual Studio Community Edition: fully featured flagship IDE free for solo developers and students, can be installed on Win/Mac.
* Fully featured Sql Server running in a Docker container.
* .Net Core, which can be compiled to native binaries of Windows, MacOS AND Linux. You can't even do that with Java, you have to first have the JVM installed in order to run any kind of Java code on any of those operating systems. .Net Core is also an absolutely beautiful framework with so many features at your disposal.
...and more.
Yes, they've done bonehead things in the past but who/which company hasn't. Yes, they have Cortana. Yes, they force Bing on you when searching with Cortana (does anyone actually regularly use Cortana? Or Bing?). Yes, their operating system costs money. Yes, their malware-style Upgrade-to-Windows-10 tactics were evil and they admitted such. Yes, they brought ads and other unfortunate things to Skype. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned about that Skype bit translating over into GitHub. BUT, the fact that so many of their employees use GitHub daily means they are dogfooding the platform, which is a positive thing.
Despite the flaws, from the perspective of a software engineer they really should be given a lot of credit for all these new directions they are moving in now. They directly aim to help and contribute to the developer community. Plus, Windows 10 is finally getting a dark theme! haha.
I think Microsoft buying GitHub makes a lot of sense. Of course do what you want about it, feel how you want about it, but casting the same ol' shade at them for anything they do seems a bit like automatic reflex more than anything else.
I'm bracing myself for the impending wave of angry hornets from the nest I just kicked. In all seriousness though, I welcome discussion on the topic even if you feel differently than I do. I'm not saying there's no reason to dislike them, just saying there are lots of new reasons to hate them less and/or appreciate what they are doing now.19 -
This fucking stupid asshole developer, wrote every single SQL execution with string formatting. Made me a full sleepless night fixing this shit. Isn’t this a classical SQL injection sample?15
-
So my marketing dept request us to perform a SQL injection to someone's bank account. I refuse to do it.
1. Most bank no longer use Relational Database , they use something like NoSQL Database.
2. Even if the bank Use Relational Database system, I assume their security must be high, validating my session maybe...
3. I am not going to do shit like this for illegal purposes, well this task sounds super illegal to me
4. Hacking is not a part of my job description. I was hired to be a Senior Fullstack Mobile App Developer.
This is screwed up !24 -
Worst fight I've had with a co-worker?
Had my share of 'disagreements', but one that seemed like it could have gone to blows was a developer, 'T', that tried to man-splain me how ADO.Net worked with SQLServer.
<T walks into our work area>
T: "Your solution is going to cause a lot of problems in SQLServer"
Me: "No, its not, your solution is worse. For performance, its better to use ADO.Net connection pooling."
T: "NO! Every single transaction is atomic! SQLServer will prioritize the operation thread, making the whole transaction faster than what you're trying to do."
<T goes on and on about threads, made up nonsense about priority queues, on and on>
Me: "No it won't, unless you change something in the connection string, ADO.Net will utilize connection pooling and use the same SPID, even if you explicitly call Close() on the connection. You are just wasting code thinking that works."
T walks over, stands over me (he's about 6.5", 300+ pounds), maybe 6 inches away
T: "I've been doing .net development for over 10 years. I know what I'm doing!"
I turn my chair to face him, look up, cross my arms.
Me: "I know I'm kinda new to this, but let me show you something ..."
<I threw together a C# console app, simple connect, get some data, close the connection>
Me: "I'll fire up SQLProfiler and we can see the actual connection SPID and when sql server closes the SPID....see....the connection to SQLServer is still has an active SPID after I called Close. When I exit the application, SQLServer will drop the SPD....tada...see?"
T: "Wha...what is that...SQLProfiler? Is that some kind of hacking tool? DBAs should know about that!"
Me: "It's part of the SQLServer client tools, its on everyone's machine, including yours."
T: "Doesn't prove a damn thing! I'm going to do my own experiment and prove my solution works."
Me: "Look forward to seeing what you come up with ... and you haven't been doing .net for 10 years. I was part of the team that reviewed your resume when you were hired. You're going to have to try that on someone else."
About 10 seconds later I hear him from across the room slam his keyboard on his desk.
100% sure he would have kicked my ass, but that day I let him know his bully tactics worked on some, but wouldn't work on me.7 -
I didn’t realise that SQL Developer was actually secret code for data entry monkey.
I’m sick to the back teeth doing data entry work and not getting any actually fucking development to do7 -
TL;DR :
"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"
STORY TIME
Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.
As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.
The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.
Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.
It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.
Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.
Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).
The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.
So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.
Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.
So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.
We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.
Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.1 -
Arts and crafts: developer version.
Context: spent all day making an ER diagram from an awful SQL query I was handed. Got sick of asking for it from the contractor who made the DB.
Yes, that's one query.25 -
About 18 months ago my non-technical Manager of Applications Development asked me to do the technical interviews for a .NET web developer position that needed to be filled. Because I don't believe in white board interviewing (that's another rant), but I do need to see if the prospective dev can actually code, for the initial interview I prepare a couple of coding problems on paper and ask that they solve them using any language or pseudo code they want. I tell them that after they're done we'll discuss their thought process. While they work the other interviewing dev and I silently do our own stuff.
About half way through the first round of technical interviews the aforementioned manager insisted we interview a dev from his previous company. This guy was top notch. Excellent. Will fit right in.
The manager's applicant comes in to interview and after some initial questions about his resume and experience I give him the first programming problem: a straightforward fizzbuzz (http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest). He looked as if the gamesters of Triskelion had dropped him into the arena. He demurs. Comments on the unexpectedness of the request. Explains that he has a little book he usually refers to to help him with such problems (can't make this stuff up). I again offer that he could use any language or pseudo code. We just want to see how he thinks. He decides he will do the fizzbuzz problem in SQL. My co-interviewer and I are surprised at this choice, but recover quickly and tell him to go ahead. Twenty minutes later he hands me a blank piece of paper. Of the 18 or so candidates we interview, he is the only one who cannot write a single line of code or pseudo code.
I receive an email from this applicant a couple of weeks after his interview. He has given the fizzbuzz problem some more thought. He writes that it occurs to him that the code could be placed into a function. That is the culmination of his cogitation over two weeks. We shake our heads and shortly thereafter attend the scheduled meeting to discuss the applicants.
At the meeting the manager asks about his former co-worker. I inartfully, though accurately, tell him that his candidate does not know how to code. He calls me irrational. After the requisite shocked silence of five people not knowing how to respond to this outburst we all sing Kumbaya and elect to hire someone else.
Interviews are fraught for both sides of the table. I use Fizzbuzz because if the applicant knows how to code it's an early win in the process and we all need that. And if the applicant can't solve it, cut bait and go home.
Fizzbuzz. Best. Interview. Question. Ever.6 -
Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.
From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.
Fast forward to today...
Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.
If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.8 -
Browsing job postings, and some of these requirements are just crazy, and/or wtf. Here's an example:
Front End developer wanted, junior to mid-level. An ideal candidate will be an expert in PHP, C#, and Java. Minimum experience of 10 years. Estimated compensation 30,000 per year.
Entry level full stack developer. Must be an expert in SQL. 5 years experience, BS in computer science required.
Web Developer intern - must have 3 years of experience. Must be an expert in x, y, z. This position is unpaid.
Sheeit.6 -
I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.
I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.
We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.
The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.
We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.
It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.
Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.
But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.
I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.
But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.
Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.
They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.
I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this
Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.
I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.
But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.
... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.rant code application bad project management annoying as hell bad code c++ bad client bad design application development16 -
I’m back for a fucking rant.
My previous post I was happy, I’ve had an interview today and I felt the interviewer acted with integrity and made the role seem worthwhile. Fuck it, here’s the link:
https://www.devrant.io/rants/889363
So, since then; the recruiter got in touch: “smashed it son, sending the tech demo your way, if you can get it done this evening that would be amazing”
Obviously I said based on the exact brief I think that’s possible, I’ll take a look and let them know if it isn’t.
Having done loads of these, I know I can usually knock them out and impress in an evening with no trouble.
Here’s where shit gets fucked up; i opened the brief.
I was met with a brief for an MVP using best practice patterns and flexing every muscle with the tech available...
Then I see the requirements, these fucking dicks are after 10 functional requirements averaging an hour a piece.
+TDD so * 1.25,
+DI and dependency inversion principle * 1.1
+CI setup (1h on this platform)
+One ill requirement to use a stored proc in SQL server to return a view (1h)
+UX/UI design consideration using an old tech (1-2h)
+unobtrusive jquery form post validation (2h)
+AES-256 encryption in the db... add 2h for proper testing.
These cunts want me to knock 15-20h of Work into their interview tech demo.
I’ve done a lot of these recently, all of them topped out at 3h max.
The job is middling: average package, old tech, not the most exciting or decent work.
The interviewer alluded to his lead being a bit of a dick; one of those “the code comes first” devs.
Here’s where shit gets realer:
They’ve included mock ups in the tech demo brief’s zip... I looked at them to confirm I wasn’t over estimating the job... I wasn’t.
Then I looked at the other files in the fucking zip.
I found 3 of the images they wanted to use were copyright withheld... there’s no way these guys have the right to distribute these.
Then I look in the font folder, it’s a single ttf, downloaded from fucking DA Font... it was published less than 2mo ago, the license file had been removed: free for Personal, anything else; contact me.
There’s no way these guys have any rights to this font, and I’ve never seen a font redistributed legally without it’s accompanying licence files.
This fucking company is constantly talking about its ethical behaviours.
Given that I know what I’m doing; I know it would have taken less time to find free-for-commercial images and use a google font... this sloppy bullshit is beyond me.
Anyway, I said I’d get back to the recruiter, he wasn’t to know and he’s a good guy. I let him know I’d complete the tech demo over the weekend, he’s looked after me and I don’t want him having trouble with his client...
I’ll substitute the copyright fuckery with images I have a license for because there’s no way I’m pushing copyright stolen material to a public github repo.
I’ll also be substituting the topic and leaving a few js bombs in there to ensure they don’t just steal my shit.
Here’s my hypotheses, anyone with any more would be greatly welcomed...
1: the lead dev is just a stuck up arsehole, with no real care for his work and a relaxed view on stealing other people’s.
2: they are looking for 15-20h free work on an MVP they can modify and take to market
3: they are looking for people to turn down this job so they can support someone’s fucking visa.
In any case, it’s a shit show and I’ll just be seeing this as box checking and interview practice...
Arguments for 1: the head told me about his lead’s problems within 20mn of the interview.
2: he said his biggest problem was getting products out quickly enough.
3: the recruiter told me they’d been “picky”, and they’re making themselves people who can’t be worked for.
I’m going to knock out the demo, keep it private and protect my work well. It’s going to smash their tits off because I’m a fucking great developer... I’ll make sure I get the offer to keep the recruiter looked after.
Then fuck those guys, I’m fucking livid.
After a wonderful interview experience and a nice introduction to the company I’ve been completely put off...
So here’s the update: if you’re interviewing for a shitty middle level dev position, amongst difficult people, on an out of date stack... you need people to want you, don’t fuck them off.
If they want my time to rush out MVPs, they can pay my day rate.
Fuuuuuuuuck... I typed this out whilst listening to the podcast, I’m glad I’m not the only one dealing with shit.
Oh also; I had a lovely discriminatory as fuck application, personality test and disability request email sent to me from a company that seems like it’s still in the 90s. Fuck those guys too, I reported them to the relevant authorities and hope they’re made to look at how morally reprehensible their recruitment process is. The law is you don’t ask if the job can be done by anyone.6 -
Worst one I’ve seen so far is when I was working for my previous community another developer joined to help me, without the permission of me or the other lead developer he pushed a client-side update. We didn’t think it was a big deal, but once we began reviewing the code it became a big deal... he had placed our SQL credentials into that file that every client downloads. All the person had to do was open the file and could connect to our SQL which contained 50k+ players info, primarily all in-game stuff except IPs which we want to protect at all costs.
Issue becomes, what he was trying to do required the games local database on the client-side, but instead he tried connecting to it as an external database so he decided to copy server-side code and used on the client.
Anyways, the database had a firewall that blocked all connections except the server and the other lead dev and myself. We managed to change the credentials and pull the file away before any harm was done to it, about 300 people had downloaded the file within an hours period, but nothing happened luckily. IP to the DB, username, password, etc, were all changed just to keep it protected.
So far this is the worst, hopefully it doesn’t get worse than this :/1 -
I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.
They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.
The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.
It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.
This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.
Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.
I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.
In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.
He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.
Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.
When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.
At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?
It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?
The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.
I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.9 -
update of after i got fired: after the fuck developers company llc was left with no developers, there was a girl there that i didn't mention earlier because as i said: the story is more complex. she came there with good intentions but after she knew the cruel nature of fuck and shit she became notoriously mad, we're still in contact with her so it's nice to hear from her some of the gags that happen there, one of which my really intelligent ex-boss the wordpress DEVELOPER himself told her to finish one of the projects i was working on, and a friend of mine who is infamous of his coding shenanigans left it in my hands before he left as well a couple of months prior (well he was fed up before us, and when i told him to stay with us he said "dude just listen to the motherfucker's voice, i can't do this anymore", my lovely ex-boss has this equally lovely screechy high pitched voice that caused me tinnitus), it's an asp.net project, uses web forms, and a lot of apis, the database is sql server, standard shit but there's no original creation script and i fucked up the only existing database which was in a local computer he used to like calling a SERVER, now to the point: this girl is not a developer, she was however working as a reporter?? kind of like jaspersoft the human or sap crystal woman and she claims that she's pretty good at it, and she's a genuinely good person who was dragged to hell just because she wanted to be close to her daddy (she was working in a different city with more than double the salary she's given now), but she's rich and her dada convinced her to come. she's currently learning java ee on her own so she'd probably leave in the next two months, in her resume she wrote that she know php, well i know php you know php we all know php (the syntax) kind of like mr. shit who passed the sololearn php CERTIFICATE and couldn't stop telling his boss and his boss a.k.a my ex-boss goes "sweet!". going back to the punchline of this rant: she told us that he came to her and asked her to finish the project with php.12
-
Three months into a new job, as a senior developer (12+ years experience) and updated an import application.
With one small update query that didn't account for a possible NULL value for a parameter, so it updated all 65 million records instead of the 15 that belonged to that user.
Took 3 people and 4 days to put all the data back to it's original state.
Went right back to using the old version of the apllication, still running 2 years later. It's spaghetti code from hell with sql jobs and multiple stored procedures creating dynamic SQL, but I'm never touching it again.5 -
Tl;DR; version:
French designer, Mexican PSD -> HTML converter, Indian VueJS developer, Spanish project manager and a Taiwanese back-end developer. Application was made like an tower of pizza from bullcrap held by boogers and constantly licked by an orangutang to keep it standing.
Longer version:
We had to take a "half-finished" project from one of our clients, received the code for full-stack project. The css/design was so unbearable that it mostly broke on anything that had higher than 720px wide screen, structure was full of tables/divs and no fucking flexbox/grid... Then the fun part - we saw it's conversion to vueJS - a single fucken App.vue file that had shitton of conditions for pages.... yea, not even multi-component/routed app, just conditions!!!! And then... A back-end (in which I mainly specify myself) - it was made by a developer that had to mainly use Java/C# as their daily driver while all being build on php and Laravel. 0 Fucken laravel functions used, 0 of models, logic and so on.... Most of the page was running on RAW sql queries. Names... Oh my god the function names....
`getTheUsersThatHasAtLeastOneSpaceAssignedToThemByGivenCompanyId(int $id)`
And it held an RAW sql that was coming from a model....
All of this was managed by a random spanish manager who couldn't really understand what our client needed and what he actually wanted so from 100% of the site, only 20% was correct in logic....
And yet, according to the whole "package" (team) - they did everything correctly, saw no issues and our client was ungrateful fucker that refused to pay 10x the amount that we asked in order to completely re-do the application....
Morale: Remote teams are great... As long as all of them can work remote in TEAM.5 -
> Young dev apprentice me pair programming with another developer
> Dude checks bug report of a customer, saying something about a "Blind SQL Injection"
> Young me asking what that "Blind" part means
> "Dunno man, maybe u gotta close your eyes when hacking this"
Guess what, the issue was never fixed -
After months of development, testing, testing and even more testing the app was ready for deployment to production. Happy days, the end was in sight!
I had a week's leave so I handed over the preparation for deployment to my Senior Developer and left it in his capable hands while I enjoyed the sun and many beers.
I came back on the day of deployment and proudly pressed the deploy button. Hurrah!
Not long after I got loads of phone calls from around the country as the app wasn't working. What madness is this?! We tested this for months!
Turns out my Senior didn't like the way I'd written the SQL queries so he changed them. Which is obviously both annoying and unprofessional, but even worse he got a join wrong so the memory usage was a billion times more and it drained the network bandwidth for the whole site when I tried to debug it.
I got all the grief for the app not working and for causing many other incidents by running queries that killed the network.
So...much... rage!!!3 -
Did some updates to an older Web Forms website built by a previous SENIOR developer who is a notoriously horrible developer.
Now before I start, you have to understand this guy studied at a University and had been working for at least two years before I even started working. He is supposed to know the basic shit mentioned below.
This also happened a couple of days ago, so I have calmed down since then so I apologise for the relaxed tone. My next rant will contain a lot more swearing.
This fucking guy did the stupidest shit imaginable.
On the details view of a post|page|article|product|anything that would require a details view this jackass would load the data from the DB.
Using an OleDbConnection, OleDbDataAdapter, DataTable and the poorest writter fucking sql statements you have ever seen. All of these declared in the Page_Load method.
There was literally no reason for him to use OleDb instead of Sql, but he simply did not know any better.
He especially liked: "select * from tbl where id = " & Request("T") & ""
ZERO fucking checks to see if the value is even passed or valid, nothing. He did not even check whether the DataTable had any rows.
He then proceeded to use only the Heading column of the returned row to change the page's title.
Stupidly I assumed the aspx page will be in a better state. Fuck NO!
This fucktard went, added server tags to the opening of the asp:Content tag, copied that shit he used to fetch the data and pasted it between the server tags.
He did not know how to access the DataTable mentioned above from the aspx page!
He did this on every fucking project he worked on. Any place that required <%= %> to display data instead of using asp server controls, this cunt copied whatever was written in the code behind and pasted everything between server tags.
Fuck I could go on forever, but I think this is enough for my first rant.2 -
I was working on a very database heavy PHP app about six months ago. All database access was done directly, with hardcoded SQL strings.
I'd suggested switching over to an ORM during the upcoming major verson's rewrite, and FINALLY got approval to start integrating one.
The next week I'm told that I need to trash all the code I'd just written, since the decision to use an orm has been reversed.
The rationale? According to management, ORMs aren't "scalable enough for our application" and would "reduce developer productivity". I pointed out that we would be processing ~10 concurrent operations, maximum; I was told that the technically details didn't matter and the person I was working under had the final say because they'd worked at IBM, briefly, as an intern.
I stopped working on that project about two weeks later, thankfully.15 -
FUUUU!!!!!! 3h of colleagues work gone in sconds.. & yes, actually it is all my fault, even though I was not aware of being a totall ass at that time..
What happened?! You know the ctrl+s shortcut?! Yes? Weeeell...doesn't go well with oracle sql developer and packages.. o.O
I was totally unavare that I was typing in ctrl+s ctrl+s all the time. I know I do that with c# code.. Anyhow, when I first moved to sql developer from other tool I noticed that compile thingy.. Oooops, ok, let's remove that shortcut to not stab yourself absentmindenly and overwrite other peoples work.. OK that's taken care of, shortcuts removed and I go back to work..
It's been almost 6 months since the move & first incident and today I guess I did the same.. ctrl+s.. But this time I wasn't so lucky.
Coworker pissed off, that is not my procedure. When did you compile?! Someone overwrote my code..
Wasn't me.. Then I started thinking about ctrl+s.. OMFG!! I check this on another package, it compiled. O.o I almost died. I check the shortcuts. They are back! And even after removing them the package still compiled.. FML!! 😭😭😭😭
I removed them again & closed the tool. Reopended.. BACK!! We're back to fuck your life up!! Fuuuuuuu!!
Now I worry wtf else I fucked up without notice.. o.O hopefully not much.. I hope.. O.O boss will kill me...
BTW anyone knows how to really get rid of this feature?! Cuz for me its a bug (since I am buggy and press ctrl+s all the time.. )6 -
Dear Microsoft Kusto Query Language (KQL)
Screw you. You suck like more than a sudden depressurization event in an airplane. Creating your own freaking query language is bad, the people who invented SQL based it on a the principles of mathematical relational algebra, which although confusing, and not suited for all use cases is at least consistent.
You were invented by a bunch of oxygen deprived halfwits based on the principles of sadism and incompetence.
The only situation in which I would voluntarily use KQL as my tool of choice is if my purpose was to extract a Dantesque style revenge on someone who had committed grievous harm to myself and my family members. In that case forcing them to work with you day in and day out would still border on cruel and unusual punishment.
Sincerely, A developer who has spent the past 2 hours dealing with your Lovecraftian madness.
P.S. I hope you choke on a raw chicken bone and no one gives you CPR.3 -
Why dont people trust you?
I was hired to be an SQL developer, I don't actually get to do much development, normally doing something involving copying and pasting in Excel.
Some of our databases were running slow and we noticed some (a few hundred) indexes were in shit state.
I knocked up a couple of scripts, one to reorganise indexes that were up to a certain amount of fragmentation and one to rebuild the indexes
My boss wants them tested (they were several times in dev) we've had these for over 3 weeks, but she doesn't want to run them.
Instead of fixing hundred of indexes she decided I should contrate on fixing some historic data issues that are preventing 10 indexes from being rebuilt.
Now there are serious issues and the CTO is asking why the indexes haven't been fixed.
I could have done this nearly a month ago, but now it's turned into a huge fucki g deal, and no doubt they'll try and push it back on me3 -
Hired a new BI developer. She tested reasonably ok in SQL, and certainly showed good strengths in visualising data, plus had a good attitude in the interview. We hired her. She broke her laptop the first day. We got her another then she complained the camera didn't work but didn't realise the lever in front of the camera was to move the privacy shutter off and on.
Assigned her some work of taking queries that are used in a BI tool that targets the transactional database directly, and re-jigging them for Snowflake which we're using as a data warehouse now, aggregating all our data into one place. Yet, she's struggling to understand why the SQL query she's pasted in doesn't work as-is.
I go over it again; the source schemas and tables are this, but in Snowflake we've named them this. She then bemoans how much work that is to change them all - I say use find and replace. She then struggles with Snowflake syntax errors and asks for a guide on T-SQL to Snowflake. I show her Google and say "this is what I did when I hit these problems - search for 'Snowflake equivalent to T-SQL getdate()' or 'how to get current date in Snowflake' but she still doesn't understand. I ask if she's every had to work between T-SQL and MySQL or MySQL and PostgreSQL or Oracle and so on and she says yes. I say the syntax isn't the same, is it? And she goes oh, now I understand.
She scored reasonably in her SQL test but I'm now concerned there's something fundamental missing in her grasp of SQL. I gave her a detailed demo of the tools, I explained in the interview and on her start about our move to a data warehouse for all our apps, and put her through some training plus gave her time to work through our Confluence pages - not expecting she'll remember everything, but more to ensure she recalls they exist and what the general contents are.
Anyhow, that's my rant.6 -
I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.
Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')7 -
Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.
Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.
Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.
One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.
Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)
VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).
Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.
Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.
The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.
Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.
About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.
MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"
Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.
WTF!
I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.
She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)
MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."8 -
Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.
Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.
Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.
Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.
I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.
Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.
Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.
Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.
All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.
So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.
In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.
These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.
The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.
This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.
I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.
I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.
Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.10 -
How can you be called a senior developer when you edit a giant SQL stored without first making a backup....4
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Just saw a role advertised for a front end developer. Skills required amongst other things·
· Integrating with middle-tier microservices such as NodeJS
· .NET Core (2.1+), C# 7.0+ and JAVA
· SQL Server, T-SQL, MySQL
· Azure Dev-ops
There are other standard and expected front end requirements but want someone with 4+ years experience
Salary £19,000 - less than two thirds of the national average salary for non UK folks.
Applications: 0
Hmm I wonder why6 -
Last Sunday, we deployed 300 major application/service configuration changes, 60+ load balancer changes, DNS cutovers, changes to mission critical SQL servers, and informatica connection changes. This impacted every line of business, all customer facing apps, and all internal apps.
6 days from DEV to PROD, which includes all developer effort.
Deployment succesful!3 -
rant & question
Last year I had to collaborate to a project written by an old man; let's call him Bob. Bob started working in the punch cards era, he worked as a sysadmin for ages and now he is being "recycled" as a web developer. He will retire in 2 years.
The boss (that is not a programmer) loves Bob and trusts him on everything he says.
Here my problems with Bob and his code:
- he refuses learning git (or any other kind of version control system);
- he knows only procedural PHP (not OO);
- he mixes the presentation layer with business logic;
- he writes layout using tables;
- he uses deprecated HTML tags;
- he uses a random indentation;
- most of the code is vulnerable to SQL injection;
- and, of course, there are no tests.
- Ah, yes, he develops directly on the server, through a SSH connection, using vi without syntax highlighting.
In the beginning I tried to be nice, pointing out just the vulnerabilities and insisting on using git, but he ignored all my suggestions.
So, since I would have managed the production server, I decided to cheat: I completely rewrote the whole application, keeping the same UI, and I said the boss that I created a little fork in order to adapt the code to our infrastructure. He doesn't imagine that the 95% of the code is completely different from the original.
Now it's time to do some changes and another colleague is helping. She noticed what I did and said that I've been disrespectful in throwing away the old man clusterfuck, because in any case the code was working. Moreover he will retire in 2 years and I shouldn't force him to learn new things [tbh, he missed at least last 15 years of web development].
What would you have done in my place?10 -
Angular is still a pile of steaming donkey shit in 2023 and whoever thinks the opposite is either a damn js hipster (you know, those types that put js in everything they do and that run like a fly on a lot of turds form one js framework to the next saying "hey you tried this cool framework, this will solve everything" everytime), or you don't understand anything about software developement.
I am a 14 year developer so don't even try to tell me you don't understand this so you complain.
I build every fucking thing imaginable. from firmware interfaces for high level languaces from C++, to RFID low level reading code, to full blown business level web apps (yes, unluckily even with js, and yes, even with Angular up to Angular15, Vue, React etc etc), barcode scanning and windows ce embedded systems, every flavour of sql and documental db, vectorial db code, tech assistance and help desk on every OS, every kind of .NET/C# flavour (Xamarin, CE, WPF, Net framework, net core, .NET 5-8 etc etc) and many more
Everytime, since I've put my hands on angularJs, up from angular 2, angular 8, and now angular 15 (the only 3 version I've touched) I'm always baffled on how bad and stupid that dumpster fire shit excuse of a framework is.
They added observables everywhere to look cool and it's not necessary.
They care about making it look "hey we use observables, we are coo, up to date and reactive!!11!!1!" and they can't even fix their shit with the change detection mechanism, a notorious shitty patchwork of bugs since earlier angular version.
They literally built a whole ecosystem of shitty hacks around it to make it work and it's 100x times complex than anything else comparable around. except maybe for vanilla js (fucking js).
I don't event want todig in in the shit pool that is their whole ecosystem of tooling (webpack, npm, ng-something, angular.json, package.json), they are just too ridiculous to even be mentioned.
Countless time I dwelled the humongous mazes of those unstable, unrealiable shitty files/tools that give more troubles than those that solve.
I am here again, building the nth business critical web portal in angular 16 (latest sack of purtrid shit they put out) and like Pink Floyd says "What we found, same old fears".
Nothing changed, it's the same unintelligible product of the mind of a total dumbass.
Fuck off js, I will not find peace until Brendan Eich dies of some agonizing illness or by my hands
I don't write many rants but this, I've been keeping it inside my chest for too long.
I fucking hate js and I want to open the head of js creator like the doom marine on berserk19 -
I'm starting to have suicidal thoughts though the Javascript and the whole frontend.
Is anyone looking for a Ruby Developer with 2 years of experience with Ruby, 2 years with pure SQL databases and half year with React?
I don't want to see only Javascript for 8 hours per day for the rest of my life.9 -
I decided to quit my job. I was supposedly hired as an Android developer, but during the past few months I found myself doing everything except Android development: SQL scritps, frontend web development, backend web development, RESTful API's, DBA, release engineering... There's nothig wrong about being versatile, it's actually fun, but I wasn't doing what I really wanted to do and, most importantly, the manager didn't appreciate the fact that I was doing things that I'm not supposed to do, and not only that, I was doing it just as good as some full time web devs who do nothing but web development in the company. I'm pissed off. They probably believe the next Android dev they hire will do all the shit I was doing, accepting the same pay. Fuck them.2
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My Favorite Senior Dev: Hmm, I don't understand this error.
Neighboring, Competent SQL Developer Coworker: What does it say?
Senior Dev: It says, "Cannot insert the value NULL into column 'person', table 'PEOPLE'; column does not allow nulls..."
*5 minute silence*4 -
I have quite a few of these so I'm doing a series.
(2 of 3) Flexi Lexi
A backend developer was tired of building data for the templates. So he created a macro/filter for our in house template lexer. This filter allowed the web designers (didn't really call them frond end devs yet back then) could just at an SQL statement in the templates.
The macro had no safe argument parsing and the designers knew basic SQL but did not know about SQL Injection and used string concatination to insert all kinds of user and request data in the queries.
Two months after this novel feature was introduced we had SQL injections all over the place when some piece of input was missing but worse the whole product was riddled with SQLi vulnerabilities.2 -
Rant time of 'Derp & Co.'
Today I decided that I am going to find another job, I just can't keep with this shit.
They said that use Agile: FALSE.
• Daily (best scenario) take like 1 hour and a half.
• New task enter the sprint and "Fuck you, more task in the same time". This is something regular done.
• "Oh, dev, we need you to check this other project" I am in the middle of my sprint on this project. "But you have to fix this bug here". (3 fucking days the bloody bug) "You are late again with tasks".
• Meeting for fresh sprint: 6 BLOODY hours... nonstop
The workflow is garbage:
• SOMEONE should did all the devops shit on the first sprint, guess what? They did nothing!, guess now who is being blamed for it (not only me, but a few coworkers).
• Nothing is well designed/defined:
~ task are explained like shit
~ times measured wrongly
~ We are in the last fucking SPRINT and still doing de ER of the DataBase cause Oh, apparently no one has work before with SQL (damn you MongoDB! (Not really)) so I am doing my best, but "jezz dev, this is so hard... maybe we can do it WRONG and easy".
~ No one is capable of take responsability of their mess, they just try to push down the problems. (Remember the devops situatuion? Why is.my fault? I came at the 3 or 4 sprint and I am doing backend tasks, I know nothing about devops).
But the big prize, the last one:
• Apparently you can't send whatever you want to the boss, it has to pass a filter previously of coordinators and managers, hell yeah!
And I am an idiot too!
because I see that we can't reach our schedule and do hours on my spare time!
This is because there are a few good coworkers who probably ended with my unfinished tasks... and they are equaly fucked as me...
This is just the tip of the iceberg. I am not a pro, I am not a full stack developer and still need to learn a lot, but this is just not normal, eight months like this...3 -
Sent a fully constructed sql statement to someone expecting at least 4 rows however received reply "the result is empty" with a screenshot of empty result set from sql-developer. I kept cross-checking the where clause thinking I mixed something up.
After a few back and forth emails suddenly noticed the screenshot I received initially and I see all of the strings in where clause are lowercase. I reference my version and it is correct. When I asked her why are the strings in sql lowercase and that if she has tried the exact sql I sent in the email, the response "I didn't think it mattered what case the sql was in".
I am lost for words. The worse part is, this is someone who is supposed to go on site as part of their job and help clients setup, explain and train how the software works. This includes explaining how software intreacts with database tables 🤐8 -
I remember the first time I was experimenting with Linux and decided to install Kali Linux (was still version 1 at the time) and in the process cleaned my hard drive. I was in first year and I hadn't been introduced to git, so you can imagine what happened to my code.
Or when I dumped all my databases into one SQL file (the feature looked tasty in phpmyadmin) and then after reinstalling everything, I couldn't import back the files.
Or last year, where I was on industrial attachment. So we were to delete some data from DHIS2 manually. So as a developer I grouped all organisation units to be deleted under one parent and wrote a python script to recursively delete anything in that group. Just when I was about to show my supervisor how efficiently my script was deleting stuff, he said, "Don't delete anything yet". I hope he doesn't read this *wink*
Fast forward, last week on Friday I dropped my external hard drive. It just works on one USB port now, no idea how and why. -
Ah, developers, the unsung heroes of caffeine-fueled coding marathons and keyboard clacking symphonies! These mystical beings have a way of turning coffee and pizza into lines of code that somehow make the world go 'round.
Have you ever seen a developer in their natural habitat? They huddle in dimly lit rooms, surrounded by monitors glowing like magic crystals. Their battle cries of "It works on my machine!" echo through the corridors, as they summon the mighty powers of Stack Overflow and Google to conquer bugs and errors.
And let's talk about the coffee addiction – it's like they believe caffeine is the elixir of code immortality. The way they guard their mugs, you'd think it's the Holy Grail. In fact, a developer without coffee is like a computer without RAM – it just doesn't function properly.
But don't let their nerdy exteriors fool you. Deep down, they're dreamers. They dream of a world where every line of code is bug-free and every user is happy. A world where the boss understands what "just one more line of code" really means.
Speaking of bosses, developers have a unique ability to turn simple requests into complex projects. "Can you make a small tweak?" the boss asks innocently. And the developer replies, "Sure, it's just a minor change," while mentally calculating the time it'll take and the potential for scope creep.
Let's not forget their passion for acronyms. TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) is their second language. API, CSS, HTML, PHP, SQL... it's like they're playing a never-ending game of Scrabble with abbreviations.
And documentation? Well, that's their arch-nemesis. It's as if writing clear instructions is harder than debugging quantum mechanics. "The code is self-explanatory," they claim, leaving everyone else scratching their heads.
In the end, developers are a quirky bunch, but we love them for it. Their quirks and peculiarities are what make them the creative, brilliant minds that power our digital world. So here's to developers, the masters of logic and the wizards of the virtual realm!13 -
What To Learn?
I'm a beginner in web development and have knowledge about html, css, JavaScript, jQuery, Sass, NodeJS, Express, MongoDB, Passport. You can consider me to be a beginner full stack developer, but I'm confused about what to learn further. There are so many front end frameworks that one can spend his entire life learning them. React, Vue, Angular, Backbone, etc. But I always want to learn backend properly, then there's Rails, PHP, SQL, Python. Can anyone atleast tell me what to learn and why exactly? This thing's making me mad and anxious.24 -
Lead developer wants to put SQL statements in to records of the database for the code to execute (in Rails). This smells really bad to me, am I over reacting?8
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# Retrospective as Backend engineer
Once upon a time, I was rejected by a startup who tries to snag me from another company that I was working with.
They are looking for Senior / Supervisor level backend engineer and my profile looks like a fit for them.
So they contacted me, arranged a technical test, system design test, and interview with their lead backend engineer who also happens to be co-founder of the startup.
## The Interview
As usual, they asked me what are my contribution to previous workplace.
I answered them with achievements that I think are the best for each company that I worked with, and how to technologically achieve them.
One of it includes designing and implementing a `CQRS+ES` system in the backend.
With complete capability of what I `brag` as `Time Machine` through replaying event.
## The Rejection
And of course I was rejected by the startup, maybe specifically by the co-founder. As I asked around on the reason of rejection from an insider.
They insisted I am a guy who overengineer thing that are not needed, by doing `CQRS+ES`, and only suitable for RND, non-production stuffs.
Nobody needs that kind of `Time Machine`.
## Ironically
After switching jobs (to another company), becoming fullstack developer, learning about react and redux.
I can reflect back on this past experience and say this:
The same company that says `CQRS+ES` is an over engineering, also uses `React+Redux`.
Never did they realize the concept behind `React+Redux` is very similar to `CQRS+ES`.
- Separation of concern
- CQRS: `Command` is separated from `Query`
- Redux: Side effect / `Action` in `Thunk` separated from the presentation
- Managing State of Application
- ES: Through sequence of `Event` produced by `Command`
- Redux: Through action data produced / dispatched by `Action`
- Replayability
- ES: Through replaying `Event` into the `Applier`
- Redux: Through replay `Action` which trigger dispatch to `Reducer`
---
The same company that says `CQRS` is an over engineering also uses `ElasticSearch+MySQL`.
Never did they realize they are separating `WRITE` database into `MySQL` as their `Single Source Of Truth`, and `READ` database into `ElasticSearch` is also inline with `CQRS` principle.
## Value as Backend Engineer
It's a sad days as Backend Engineer these days. At least in the country I live in.
Seems like being a backend engineer is often under-appreciated.
Company (or people) seems to think of backend engineer is the guy who ONLY makes `CRUD` API endpoint to database.
- I've heard from Fullstack engineer who comes from React background complains about Backend engineers have it easy by only doing CRUD without having to worry about application.
- The same guy fails when given task in Backend to make a simple round-robin ticketing system.
- I've seen company who only hires Fullstack engineer with strong Frontend experience, fails to have basic understanding of how SQL Transaction and Connection Pool works.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer relies on ORM to do super complex query instead of writing proper SQL, and prefer to translate SQL into ORM query language.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer with strong React background brags about Uncle Bob clean code but fail to know on how to do basic dependency injection.
- I've heard company who made webapp criticize my way of handling `session` through http secure cookie. Saying it's a bad practice and better to use local storage. Despite my argument of `secure` in the cookie and ability to control cookie via backend.18 -
I’ve been a solo frontend developer for a couple of weeks now with critical enormous features and some bugs to get out the door by the end of next week.
On top of that, I got a backend bug to fix which is fine since I know the stack. The SQL that’s causing a bug is an obvious fix but as a FE dev I have no damn idea about DB structure.
I decide to setup local DB to see it for myself. So as a reasonable developer I look for docs to set it up since it sounds like quite a process after confirming with colleagues.
ANNNND... SURPRISE, the docs ARE NON EXISTENT unless you wanna call an outdated diagram a sufficient doc. Just so you understand the pain, we have 9 micro services, a weird db structure and only 5% is documented.
I requested help from my colleagues, but their answers were similar to docs with a follow up of “maybe you can document it after you set this up”. Barely stopped myself from asking “do I look like I have time for this crap? Why don’t you document it SINCE YOUR SETUP IS READY TO GO?”
So I’ve been at it for a couple of hours and I gave up. Will go back to frontend development since still a ton of shit to do anyway. Tomorrow I will attempt this again.3 -
How many of you have started a job and ended up doing something totally different, and how did deal with it?
I was hired to be an SQL Developer, writing reports, views, stored procedures etc, but knew I would be asked to do some work on some internal c# apps.
Roll on almost 2 years and I'm pretty much a DBA in all but name, and the C# app I was supposed to be doing a little work on is now mine, so as well as being the sole programmer, I'm also the product owner, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd line support.
All of this and I've not even had a change in title, let alone a pay rise that reflect the new roles and responsibilities I've taken on.9 -
I run update without where on mysql console on production database Today.
CLASSIC
Just because I needed to fix database after bug fix on the backend of the application.
I thought I wrote good sql statement after executing it on my local machine and then everything got bad.
Luckily it was only one column with some cached statistics data and I checked that it was not important data before I actually started fixing stuff but still ...
Almost got hard attack afterwards.
Made a script to fix this column and it took me only 15 minutes but still...
Bug was caused in part I got no unit tests and application grow after 3 years of development from simple one for one customer and volumes of documents around 50k to over 40 customers and volumes over 2mil per month, don’t know how many pages each, just in one year after we completed all needed features.
I have daily backups and logs of every api operation but still.
I think this got to far for one backend developer.
I got scared that I will loose money cause I am contractor and the only backend developer working on it.
I am so tired of this right now I think I need a break from work.
Responsibility is killing me so hard right now.
It will take a week to get back to normal.2 -
Colleague asked me to look at his eCommerce search filtering system as the customer was complaining it was slow taking 5-6 seconds to find results.
Delving into the code deeper, I discovered he was querying the results, sticking them in an array and then sub querying the results looking at all the combinations.
On top of that each sub query looked at the database fields using "DESCRIBE" to then search them each time it found a pair!
The total query count for one page search was 14,512!!!
Why oh Why? One SQL query could of done all that in one go.
I look at other code bits he's done and he's very good in other areas. I just don't get how sometimes a good developer can make such a weird decision? It's almost as if he wanted to make it as complex as possible.6 -
I'm a .Net developer from Morocco, i'm currently working on an accounting software for this fucking company owned by an American boss. And i'm handling every single aspect of the project including the back-end (C#), Database (Sql Server), Reports (crystal reports, ABAP, VSTO), and design (UI, logos, animation...). For a salary of 300 USD/month, with no insurance, no transportation fees, and no fuck given about my health or my coworkers'. Not mentioning the shitty working hours and condition.
This is my first (job)9 -
Welp, this made my night and sorta ruined my night at the same time.
He decided to work on a new gaming community but has limited programming knowledge, but has enough to patch and repair minor issues. He's waiting for an old friend of his to come back to start helping him again, so this leads to me. He needed a custom backend made for his server, which required pulling data from an SQL/API and syncing with the server, and he was falling behind pace and asked for my help. He's a good friend that I've known for a while, and I knew it wouldn't take to long to create this, so I decided to help him. Which lead to an interesting find, and sorta made my night.
It wasn't really difficult, got it done within an hour, took some time to test and fix any bugs with his SQL database. But this is where it get's interesting, at least for me. He had roughly a few hundred people that did beta testing of the server, anyways, once the new backend was hooked in and working, I realized that the other developer he works with had created a 'custom' script to make sure there are no leaks of the database. Well, that 'custom' script actually begins wiping rows/tables (Depends on the sub-table, some get wiped row by row, some just get completely dropped), I just couldn't comprehend what had happened, as rows/tables just slowly started disappearing. It took me a while of checking, before checking his SQL query logs (At least the custom script did that properly and logged every query), to realize it just basically wiped the database.
Welp, after that, it began to restrict the API I was using, and due to this it identified the server as foreign access (Since it wasn't using the same key as his plugin, even though I had an API key created just so it could only access ranks and such, to prevent abuse) and begin responding not with denied, but with a lovely "Fuck you hacker!" This really made my night, I don't know why, but I was genuinely laughing pretty hard at this response.
God, I love his developer. Luckily, I had created a backup earlier, so I patched it and just worked around the plugin/API to get it working. (Hopefully, it's not a clusterfuck to read, writing this at 2 am with less than an hour of sleep, bedtime! Goodnight everyone.)7 -
Starting out as a developer: I don't know why people are so stingy about tags on Stack overflow
Now: This guy tagged this question with SQL Server but is asking about Postgres I don't know how to help this guy out2 -
Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:
So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.
Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.
Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.
Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂 -
Well after having a major sense of humour failure last week https://devrant.com/rants/1365062/...
My company has an internal application that is used for billing clients and customers. There are several versions.
Starting next week the consultant who wrote this and I will be sitting down together for about 2 hours or so twice a week to start going through the code stuff etc.
I already have a job to start testing a new version this program, and this version is going to be handed over to me and will be my baby.
Things are starting to look up, I’m still trying to get them to swap my PC for a laptop though, so I can do work from home etc. -
Reporting is not fun..
Scenario 1:
* A user says they need to export certain data from our system..
* Developer W makes report called "Foo detail report"
Scenario 2:
* A user says they need this report to also show some extra fields
* Developer X makes a new report called "Foo detail report (extra fields)"
Scenario 3:
* A user says they need this report to be run with a different search criteria
* Developer Y makes a new report called "Foo detail report (extra fields) by bar"
Scenario 4:
* A user says they need this report show data grouped in a different way
* Developer Z makes a new report called "Foo detail report (extra fields) by bar- new grouping"
The above scenarios happened over and over for several years in no particular order...
Current Day:
* Some users have certain reports they use and rely on but we don't know which ones
* Nobody really knows what all of the reports do or what is the difference between them without looking at the sql
* If we want to change data structures we have many reports to update
* I have a request from a user to add an extra column to one of the reports1 -
TLDR;
How much do you earn for your skill set in your country vs your cost of living?
BONUS;
See how much I & others earn.
Recently I became aware of just how massive the gap in developers earnings are between countries. I'd love to calculate a fixed score for income vs cost of living.
I know this stuff is sensitive to some so if you prefer just post your score (avg income p/m after tax / cost of living).
I'm not shy so I'll go first:
MY RATES
Normal Rate (Long term): $23
Consulting / Short term: $30-$74
Pen Test: $1500 once off.
Pen Test Fixes: consulting rate.
Simple work/websites: min $400+
Family & Friends: Dev friends are usually free (when mutually beneficial). Family and others can fuck off, even if they can pay (I pass their info to dev friends with fair warning).
GENERAL INFO
Experience: 9 years
Country: South Africa
Developer rareness in country: Very Rare (+-90 job openings per job seeker).
Middle class wage in country: $1550 p/m (can afford a new car, decent apartment & some luxuries like beer/eating out).
Employment type: Permanent though I can and do freelance occasionally.
Client Locality: Mostly local.
Developer Type: Web Developer (True web dev - I do anything web related from custom HTTP servers to sockets, services, advanced browser api's, apps & more).
STACKS / SKILLSETS
I'M PROFICIENT IN:
python, JavaScript, ASP classic, bash, php, html, css, sql, msql, elastic search, REST, SOAP, DOM, IIS, apache
I DABBLE WITH:
ASP.net, C++, ruby, GO, nginx, tesseract
MY SPECIALTIES:
application architecture, automation, integrations, db's, real time data, advanced browser apps/extensions (webRTC, canvas etc).
SUMMARY
Avg income p/m after tax: $2250
Cost of living (car+rent+food): $1200
Score: 1.85
*Note: For integrity when calculating my cost of living I excluded debt repayments and only kept my necessities which are transport, food & shelter.
I really hope you guy's post your results, it would be great to get an idea of which is really the worst / best country to be a developer in.20 -
> be me
> studying 1.5 years liberal arts stuff and general education class at community college
> transfer to a 4 year university.
> realize I need a major
> Realize I also I wanted to 9ne day have a family.
> realize family would need money
> "struggling actor" not a great choice
> pray about what I should be doing
> get distinct impression that instead of attending the session on majors at the college of fine and performance arts to go to session with the college of Science and engineering.
> hear pitch for computer science.
> signup for introduction to programming taught with c++.
> A couple semesters down the line take 3 classes all at once Discrete Math 1, Linear Algebra, and database design and administration.
> around week 6 realize that all 3 classes revolved around sets and set logic and set math.
> realize rdbs's are "applied" set math and that Each class a little more "applied" than the former.
> Be genius at SQL and set math
> havereally smart database teacher mentored me
> get introduced to the recruiter at the career fair.
> get interviews
> get flown out for 2md interview
> get internship
> do work, and get project back under budget
> a job offer
> finish senior year
> start as a "real" developer supporting business data and analytics.
> ???
> profit.3 -
Worst architecture I've seen?
The worst (working here) follow the academic pattern of trying to be perfect when the only measure of 'perfect' should be the user saying "Thank you" or one that no one knows about (the 'it just works' architectural pattern).
A senior developer with a masters degree in software engineering developed a class/object architecture for representing an Invoice in our system. Took almost 3 months to come up with ..
- Contained over 50 interfaces (IInvoice, IOrder, IProduct, etc. mostly just data bags)
- Abstract classes that implemented the interfaces
- Concrete classes that injected behavior via the abstract classes (constructors, Copy methods, converter functions, etc)
- Various data access (SQL server/WCF services) factories
During code reviews I kept saying this design was too complex and too brittle for the changes everyone knew were coming. The web team that would ultimately be using the framework had, at best, vague requirements. Because he had a masters degree, he knew best.
He was proud of nearly perfect academic design (almost 100% test code coverage, very nice class diagrams, lines and boxes, auto-generated documentation, etc), until the DBAs changed table relationships (1:1 turned into 1:M and M:M), field names, etc, and users changed business requirements (ex. concept of an invoice fee changed the total amount due calculation, which broke nearly everything).
That change caused a ripple affect that resulted in a major delay in the web site feature release.
By the time the developer fixed all the issues, the web team wrote their framework and hit the database directly (Dapper+simple DTOs) and his library was never used.1 -
So my first dev job has ended up as fucking dat entry after one of the contractors got bored and left.
I’m an SQL Developer (at least that is my job title) and all I do is fuck around with exchange rates in spreadsheets.
The only “proper” development work they gave me hasn’t even been applied to the test server yet (should have been done over a month ago)
And the project they gave me to look into migrating from sourcesafe to GitLab has ground to a halt.
I’ve been here 4 months and I want to quit already, that must be a record (for me at least)
I was keen an full of energy, willing to do some work from home etc. But a little piece of me dies every time i open Excel3 -
Little bit of background I've been a front end developer for the past eight years not a good one but I get by. Last 4 working with consulting firms for fortune 500 clients. Big projects big plans big structure, following someone else's lead and just knowing the basics of code reviewing, git flow, code deployment and everything else... life happens and i end up as a front end developer for a big company not tech related that wants to depend less from consultants and do more in house dev. Seems a pretty straightforward project front in angular. Back on python doing queries to a database with sql server. I finish the on-boarding and after two weeks finally get access to the repos. Worst spaghetti code I've ever seen. Seems like someone took a vanilla script project from 10 years ago and push it into an angular tutorial project. Commented code, no comments for the code, deprecated functions still there, no use of typescript nested ifs hell. I try to do my job doing new features do comments clean up a bit. Senior developers get annoyed6
-
So, my job title is sql Developer, but recently I’ve been balls deep in A .Net application, not an issue, but there is a huge learning curve.
Anyway, earlier in the year I spent about 2-3 months manually entering price list and exchange rates into our ERP system. I proposed an app to help make this process easier, boss was happy so I knocked up a 20+ page software design document, covered everything, and laid out a road map I.e v1 would just be MVP, and additional nice to have features would be added incrementally.
Boss didn’t read the document, and didn’t mention it again.
5 months later I get an invite to a meeting to discuss my progress, which is this afternoon.
It was always going to be something I worked on in my spare time, so I currently have 5 models to show her.
Why not mention something for months and then ask for a progress update out of the blue?
My boss isn’t a dev so will just bury them in technical details which she doesn’t really need to know1 -
Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.
Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.
Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.
I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.
Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.10 -
It's been a while DevRant!
Straight back into it with a rant that no doubt many of us have experienced.
I've been in my current job for a year and a half & accepted the role on lower pay than I normally would as it's in my home town, and jobs in development are scarce.
My background is in Full Stack Development & have a wealth of AWS experience, secure SaaS stacks etc.
My current role is a PHP Systems Developer, a step down from a senior role I was in, but a much bigger company, closer to home, with seemingly a lot more career progression.
My job role/descriptions states the following as desired:
PHP, T-SQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, XML
I am also well versed in various JS frameworks, PHP Frameworks, JAVA, C# as well as other things such as:
Xamarin, Unity3D, Vue, React, Ionic, S3, Cognito, ECS, EBS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB etc etc.
A couple of months in, I took on all of the external web sites/apps, which historically sit with our Marketing department.
This was all over the place, and I brought it into some sort of control. The previous marketing developer hadn't left and AWS access key, so our GitLabs instance was buggered... that's one example of many many many that I had to work out and piece together, above and beyond my job role.
Done with a smile.
Did a handover to the new Marketing Dev, who still avoid certain work, meaning it gets put onto me. I have had a many a conversation with my line manager about how this is above and beyond what I was hired for and he agrees.
For the last 9 months, I have been working on a JAVA application with ML on the back end, completely separate from what the colleagues in my team do daily (tickets, reports, BI, MI etc.) and in a multi-threaded languages doing much more complicated work.
This is a prototype, been in development for 2 years before I go my hands on it. I needed to redo the entire UI, as well as add in soo many new features it was untrue (in 2 years there was no proper requirements gathering).
I was tasked initially with optimising the original code which utilised a single model & controller :o then after the first discussion with the product owner, it was clear they wanted a lot more features adding in, and that no requirement gathering had every been done effectively.
Throughout the last 9 month, arbitrary deadlines have been set, and I have pulled out all the stops, often doing work in my own time without compensation to meet deadlines set by our director (who is under the C-Suite, CEO, CTO etc.)
During this time, it became apparent that they want to take this product to market, and make it as a SaaS solution, so, given my experience, I was excited for this, and have developed quite a robust but high level view of the infrastructure we need, the Lambda / serverless functions/services we would want to set up, how we would use an API gateway and Cognito with custom claims etc etc etc.
Tomorrow, I go to London to speak with a major cloud company (one of the big ones) to discuss potential approaches & ways to stream the data we require etc.
I love this type of work, however, it is 100% so far above my current job role, and the current level (junior/mid level PHP dev at best) of pay we are given is no where near suitable for what I am doing, and have been doing for all this time, proven, consistent work.
Every conversation I have had with my line manager he tells me how I'm his best employee and how he doesn't want to lose me, and how I am worth the pay rise, (carrot dangling maybe?).
Generally I do believe him, as I too have lived in the culture of this company and there is ALOT of technical debt. Especially so with our Director who has no technical background at all.
Appraisal/review time comes around, I put in a request for a pay rise, along with market rates, lots of details, rates sources from multiple places.
As well that, I also had a job offer, and I rejected it despite it being on a lot more money for the same role as my job description (I rejected due to certain things that didn't sit well with me during the interview).
I used this in my review, and stated I had already rejected it as this is where I want to be, but wanted to use this offer as part of my research for market rates for the role I am employed to do, not the one I am doing.
My pay rise, which was only a small one really (5k, we bring in millions) to bring me in line with what is more suitable for my skills in the job I was employed to do alone.
This was rejected due to a period of sickness, despite, having made up ALL that time without compensation as mentioned.
I'm now unsure what to do, as this was rejected by my director, after my line manager agreed it, before it got to the COO etc.
Even though he sits behind me, sees all the work I put in, creates the arbitrary deadlines that I do work without compensation for, because I was sick, I'm not allowed a pay rise (doctors notes etc supplied).
What would you do in this situation?4 -
Working at a local seo sweat-shop as "whatever the lead dev does't feel like doing" guy.
Inherit their linux "server".
- Over 500 security updates
- Everything in /var/www is chmod to 777
- Everything in /var/www is owned by a random user that isn't apache
- Every single database is owned by root sql user
- Password for sudo user and mysql root user same as wifi password given to everyone at company.
- Custom spaghetti code dashboard with over 400 files in one directory, db/ api logins spread throughout these files, passwords in plain text.
- Dashboard doesn't have passwords, just usernames to login
- Dashboard database has all customer information including credit card stored in plain text
- Company wifi is shared by other businesses in the area
I suggest that I should try to fix some of these things.
Lead Developer / Tech Director : We're an SEO company, not a security company . . .7 -
Okay, it's FUCKing rant time.
FUCK single-file *cough* page.tpl.php *cough* drupal-sites
I FUCKing hate sites without any FUCKing structure, where all logic is built into the overall wrapping pageview file.
Spend more FUCKing time than healthy finding this golden nugget.
In a FUCKing 2000+ lines long file, in a FUCKing mix of inline CSS/JS, PHP/SQL and FUCKing exec(); calls.
Definetily the best FUCKing way to destroy a FUCKing lightbox, for people who are not logged in...
- Why would you even do that in the first FUCKing place ?!??! The customer didn't ask for this..
All this FUCKing mess because the previous developer decided to quit, and did not FUCKing care for the next maintainer to come.
Fellow drupal developers will know the struggle.3 -
I heard MS doesn't provide employees with a developer special image, meaning once you get / format a pc, you've to install every damn piece of sw from VS to SQL to node... on your own.
Why ??????????????3 -
A famous quote attributed to Jamie Zawinski:
"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems."
I am living this nightmare. Joined a project where schmucks are parsing SQL using regular expressions. Talked to a friend, a compiler developer expert. He told me that regexes can't be used for checking if braces are matched. Pumping Lemma. Those fuckers should have used ANTLR or something. Anyways planning to leave this project.2 -
I fucking suck at SQL and that's hurting my performance as a supposed backend developer :D
All the cool nested queries and whatnot, it just flies over my head, I need to learn it better, any tips on study resources?6 -
Has anyone ever had the joy of dragging their employer kicking and screaming into the 20th century?
I've been here a little over a year, and slowly but surely I'm moving us forward.
We implemented git via GitLab (our it department already had an on premise installation), I've got us up and running with basic pipelines, I'm pushing TDD, im leading the move towards APIs for new development, and I'm implementing new projects to streamline our work, mainly by automating tasks which currently can take hours with hundreds of manual changes.
It's slow going, and there's lots of legacy business critical apps which we won't be able to change, but we're getting there.
If things keep going smoothly then I might even ask for a ride to reflect my benefit to the business, and extra responsibilities I've taken on which are far beyond my official job as an SQL Developer5 -
I got assigned to work on a new project a couple of weeks ago. We got the POC code handed off from senior management, since he came up with the idea over the weekend. The project concept is hella exciting, but the dev manager and PO I have to deal with make life unbearable to say the least.
We have only 2 devs (including me) and 1 QA on this supposedly very important project. Of course, management announced the project to the clients already, so now we have to deliver ASAP cause it adds “sizzle”.
The MVP deadline is... no one knows when, either July 30th or September 1st. The MVP requirements are... unknown. I swear if someone saw the list of tasks and issues attached to “MVP” Epic, they would call us nuts trying to fit it all in.
To make things better, each PR requires 2 reviewers, so we end up adding manager as a reviewer just cause we need him to hit that “approve” button. So in attempt to make life easier, we requested to have a third developer. We are getting another developer, but that guy doesn’t know how to unit test a pure function...
Current priorities are... unit testing with coverage of 95% and if we want to refactor code, we have to add area to the list in a Google Doc. As a result, we are not tackling big things like risk of SQL injections not to mention big features like i18n (5-6 languages to support by the way and yes, it’s part of MVP as well as SSR no one knows why). Currently, I spend 2-3 hours a week in calls with the team just to figure out what the hell MVP is, what we have to do and why we have to do it. Last time we spent an hour refining 1 spike and breaking down one story into 3.
Oh, we also don’t have a deployment plan, not even to test environments since DevOps team was not aware of this project at all. Thus, QA cannot create any test suites and have to test everything manually which eats a lot of their time.
This whole project is a big hot mess and I’m considering leaving it all together especially since I’m working on two squads at the same time. I love the project, I love the idea, but management makes it unbearable, so I’m not even motivated to work on that.3 -
Life of an Oracle Developer ... Day {I've lost bloody count now}
Task: Optimise a 236 line cursor consisting of 7 SQL SELECTS and unions, 39 joins and nested sub queries galore.
"YAYYY" said no one ever ...3 -
I have a few projects on the go at work at the moment which could be successful, but only time will tell:
1. We have a requirement to monitor or SQL servers for any long running queries (anything that runs longer than 3 minutes). Company didn’t want to pay for enterprise grade solution so as the only SQL Developer I created a small system that involves a database, 2 tables a stored procedure and scheduled job. It goes off every 10 minutes queries some system tables etc and write the results to the tables. Still waiting for it to be deployed to one of the test servers. I have plans for a web front end in the future.
2. My company currently use source safe for version control. They’ve lost the admin password so only 1 person can log in. I’m running he project to plan the migration to GitLab. It’s getting close to completion and soon someone is going to be tasked with creating 100s or projects etc.
3. We use an ERP system which is huge with thousands of tables, but no FKs or anything like that. The current data dictionary is a spreadsheet, as a side project I’m creating a web app so that this information is easily available and searchable.
All 3 projects have the potential to be successful, for my team at least, but stuck waiting for other people to do their stuff first. -
Junior Software Developer Job( $37k-$42k USD)
-1 year experience
- J2EE, Javascript, HTML, XML, SQL
- object oriented design and implementation
- management of relational and non-relational such as Oracle, PostGreSQL and Cassandra
- Lifecycle and Agile methods
- Familiarity with the Eclipse development environment and with tools such as Hibernate, JMS, ,TomCat/Gemini/Jetty, OSGi.
• UNIX skills, including Bash or other scripting language
• Experience installing and configuring software packages
• ActiveMQ troubleshooting/knowledge
• Experience in scientific data processing and analytical science in general
• Automated testing tools and procedures, including JUnit testing, Selenium, etc.
• Experience in interfacing with scientific instrumentation, potentially over IP networks
• Familiarity with modern web development, user interface and other ever-evolving front-end
technologies, such as React, TypeScript, Material, Jest, etc.
I am betting they don't get many people applying.8 -
I think mine had to be when I was working with SQL and Lua. I was attempting to store some ints into the database but kept having it fail randomly. It was a 50/50 chance that it would succeed or fail. I tried reading errors (Limited on what I could see) after a while (Almost 3 days, since everything I could think of didn’t have issues and was completely lost) I realized the system another developer setup returned either string or int, thus it causing it to error out when I gave it a string. Once I added a tonumber statement, all my headaches went away.
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I once had to fix a webservice endpoint another developer added that accepted any file from the public internet and loaded it directly onto an NFS file mount with the rest of the site's image assets and then inserted a record of the file into SQL via a hand-stitched query with parameters from the endpoint.
I was working for a large enterprise company at the time... I was very disappoint. -
I’m not a web programmer; I’m an application and SQL developer. So when I’m tasked with scrapping a web site for an ETL feed, I thought it would just be a ton of substring and Post/Get calls.
Nope! There is this garbage called JBOSS.A4J where the page isn’t a page but a bunch of files that are merged together and then it isn’t “real” but like a bunch of Photoshop layers that “look” like a page. JavaScript functions based on key press and things like Select/Option that looks like an element but Selenium/PhantomJS (C#) can’t find it. Or my Google-Fu isn’t working. -
Is there a reddit for silly job ads? There are so many! What Jr. developer knows Java, JS, .NET, has a solid 'foundation in SQL' - etc.5
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Got accepted as a part-time FE developer in a well-known company.
Reality check: all I do is maintain a horribly formatted spaghetti code (20k+ lines in a file) using ancient tech like PL/SQL, prototypeJS and IE11.
Buy hey, at least I know some SQL magic now.. Right?!7 -
Today I had to explay to a new developer, gradueated in Informatic, that our 15 year old php application uses global variables and strings as sql commands.
It seem to force someone to prostitution.
It's just like to drive a ferrari using a double-clutching because the gear is not syncronized.
I was shamed.3 -
Welcome to post 2 of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363374 It's title is: "Oh, you can post only every 2h. Didn't know that". I also didn't know that the rest of my rant would be put into a comment. For consistency tho, this time I am still splitting the story.
A wise person once wrote in their book: "People judge other people by two things: Empathy and competence." This may not be an accurate quote, but it carries the same message. Also, I don't really remember who was the author. I only know they were probably quite wise. Anyway, I just wanted to share that sentence. Have a moment and think about it. Or don't. Here's my story:
A was a software house that looked pretty promising. They were elegant, their page and offer looked nice. Well, unless you consider the fact that they offered me internship. Unpaid. But I decided to meet with them anyway, since I had hope that I could negotiate some sort of paid internship or a job contract even. I did my homework after all, and I was confident I am able to keep up with their requirements. I arrived a little bit... no, way to early. One damn hour. Whatever, I waited. I was greeted by a woman. We had a cultural conversation, she had a list of 12 questions I needed to answer, as a form of a test. We begun. First question: How do you change a value in Oracle Database? "Wait a minute", I thought, "What kind of question is that?". Why in seven hells would you want your frontend developer to know how to handle oracle db? Well, I gave my answer, I did lick some of that SQL in my life. Next question: Java stuff. The bloody gal didn't even care to check what position I am applying to before the interview! At this point I didn't really have very high hopes. A shame on them forever.
The story of B and C is connected and a little bit more complicated. More on that in part 2. B stands for Bank. A big corporation then, by definition. A person I know decided called me that day and told me they're hiring, that he referred me and that they would like to arrange a meeting. And so we did. It was couple of days before Christmas. C was a software house again. Or a startup. Idk really. Their website wasn't finished so I couldn't read anything useful up on them. They didn't tell me much about themselves either. They also started with "unpaid internship".
In C, they would greet me and instantly sit me down next to a mac laptop and told me, "hey, do this stuff in python". What the fuck, not again... I told them that I am frontend dev, they guy said "it's no problem, you said you know python, it's a simple task". And yeah, I did host some apps in Flask and I did use psycopg2. It was in my CV. But never, ever, have I mentioned knowing heuristics nor statistics. I'm no data scientist, monsieur. Whatever, I tried, I failed a little bit, I told them that maybe if I did want to spend half of my day there I would finish this task, but back then I was way too nervous to focus and code. I told them what should be done in code and that I just was unable to code this at the very moment. They nodded, we said goodbye and I was sure not to hear from them ever again.
In B, I was greeted by a senior frontend dev. He told me the recruiter is sick and he couldn't come, so we're talking alone. I can buy it. We sat down in said meeting room, and he asked me if I wanted a drink. No thx, I had digested so much caffeine during last 24h, next dose could be an overdose. And then, he took out my resume printed in paper. With notes on it. With some stuff encircled. That bloody bastard did his homework. We spent over an hour, just talking in friendly atmosphere. It was an interview, but it was a conversation also. We shared our experiences, opinions and it went just perfect.
On December 20, I was heading home for Christmas. My situation looked like this: A called me they could offer me only unpaid internship. I was getting kinda bored of rice and debts, tbh. I gracefully rejected their generous offer. B didn't give me feedback yet(it was a most recent interview, so I didn't expect any message until after Christmas anyway). C told me that they could give me internship, but I managed to convince them to make it paid internship. After three months of very bad times, things were starting to get better.
On part III we will explore further events of my very recent past. That post will be same amount of storytelling and possibly a lesson for those who seek an employer and for those who seek an employee.6 -
!rant
I'm a rather young developer, self-learned everything and started when I was 13 (now 20) but I still feel like I'm a total beginner since I have not yet mastered the things I am OK at.
Php (laravel, since it makes things much easier), js (jquery, bad at vanilla, have used angular and ember but not mastered), node, linux, html, css, photoshop, illustrator, sql, mongo and windows servers
I know little about many things, can create things that are asked of me but the methods I use are rather bad imo.. ex: I finish coding a section of a site, but when I need to add a new feature I find myself rewriting most of the stuff to add the new feature and in the end still feeling like the code could be optimized further, even though I have no idea how.
TL;DR I write bad code, but things work as long as I am monitoring them. I know little about alot of stuff but mastered none of them.
What should I do? Go to school for programming?8 -
One of the DB guys at work writes DB packages like this:
- open package in PL/SQL developer
- copy code to notepad
- edit PL/SQL code in notepad (yes, fucking windows notepad)
- copy and paste back from notepad to PL/SQL developer
- commit
Everytime I see him edit DB packages I can feel my brain mass shrinking.5 -
Hello guys. A newbie to the app. I would like to ask - start a conversation with you about adopting new technologies, if should we follow or just wait? I am a PHP developer. I would set myself around mid to senior level. Since I graduated and I start working on a Marketing/Development Company, I have been develop a lot of websites, platforms with pure PHP, JavaScript, SQL. Later I start using framework like laravel. Now I am thinking about JS frameworks such as node, vue, react, angular and maybe later noSQL. The problem is that there are many new technologies that companies required when you apply. I want to learn new technologies but I don't know if that would be helpful than focus on LAMP and get better and better to that. Many orgs have implemented their own technologies and each company is getting mad to it. You see each company adapt these new technologies even if they don't want em or projects required it. So my question is: are we talking about dramatically speed and light use to server when we use new frameworks like these, previous mentione + etc? Or companies are just trying to look cool by mentioning many techologies while projects could never ask for em? (Nothing serious, I am just trying to make conversation and clear my thoughts by getting others opinion)17
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Wow...a talented developer created a 3 via SQL execution plan. The query runs like crap but the execution plan art is pretty.
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Im a new self taught programmer and i need some advice on where i should go next to become a web developer.
I already know python and c#.
I learned html, css, js, php, sql.
What else can i learn?19 -
I want to know the name of the evil mastermind who once conceived the "literal" function in Sequelize.
- You design a method to insert pieces of raw SQL exactly the way they are written, no further processing
- You release this method, you call it LITERAL to make sure people know its intended purpose: it is used to insert LITERALLY everything you write, nothing more and nothing less
- Then make sure this "literal" method changes the fucking case of column names. Because that's what "literal" means in the head of this rabid animal: you arbitrarily change the code written by the developer
WHY
WHY ARE ALL AR ORM DESIGNED BY FUCKING ANIMALS
ELOQUENT IS TRASH, SEQUELIZE IS TRASH, TENS OF DEVELOPERS AT WORK TO ALCHEMICALLY CREATE THE MOST ROTTEN CODE THEY POSSIBLY CAN, BECAUSE YOU MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO WRITE ANY QUERY MORE ADVANCED THAN "SELECT * FROM users WHERE id =1", NOT A FUCKING SHRED OF DOCUMENTATION AND 16 MILLION LAYERS OF ABSTRACTION TO MAKE SURE EVERY BUG FUCKING STAYS THERE, DON'T YOU DARE TO USE A JOIN, DON'T YOU DARE TO TREAT A DMBS LIKE AN ACTUAL FUCKING DBMS INSTEAD OF A HOT STEAMING PILE OF METHODS IMPLEMENTED BY MONKEYS.6 -
Recruiter: Hi I have a position I feel you would love! My client wants a graduate developer with a couple of years experience in full stack development, javascript, sql and the whole .Net package.
Me: And this is a graduate position?
Recruiter: yes but I have put some people forward and they haven't had enough experience.
... Good luck to that company trying to find a developer who can do everything and pay them almost nothing. -
How should you approach someone and tell them they have been an victim of social engineering without being mean?
I was at an security conference today and watched a lot of speaks, and I must say that the atmosphere and the people around made it even better.
Here is one takeaway:
Does the security of IT has to be this depressing most of the time, like there is so many IoT devices, services, websites and critical infrastructure that has security flaws and all we can do is watch for now and say we are all fucked. Then try to lead the industry to better practices, like owasp (duck it) . Stop accepting and using shitty answers from SO that has security flaws (why learn something a way that is wrong in the first place?).
We need more awareness about IT security overall, how can one developer know that certain technologies can have certain vulnerabilities such as XSS, XSRF and even SQL injection if there is no information about it in among all shitton tutorials, guides and SO answers in the first place?
Lighten up! Being sad and depressing about these issues is not the best way to approach this! We need to embrace all steps taken towards better security, even the smallest ones.
Check out OWASP if you are not familiar :
https://owasp.org/index.php/...
Thanks for reading. -
Well here I go my first rant.
A little bit of background:
So I started working my first job a little over a month ago. found devrant about a week in. I was lucky that at a very young age I found programming and liked it (about 6 or 7). I went to college just to get a degree (bachelors of game development).
The job that was a "Great" opportunity that would be bad to let slip by (not a game dev job sadly). Well during the interview they asked me simple thing like what programming languages I know and some simple stuff like that, they never did ask me to demonstrate my knowledge though. Then they went to the weirder questions.
Do you know SQL? yeah at a very base level.
Do you know Excel? I mean I used is a bit, but not very much.
Etc.
A few of the questions felt a little out of place for the field, But it was the only "programming job" that would hire an experienced junior developer, so I took it. Guess I should have asked more questions.
Now I'm here at a job to help replace someone who is retiring. He wasn't a programmer really, but he wrote some code out of necessity well his platform of choice was VBA in Excel. Oh, and that's not the best part, he also dealt with mistakes that happen in the lab (electronics shit). So when ever there is a fuck up I have to go figure out how to search a poorly designed database (that is constantly changing), and today is the day he leaves, so no more help after today. My biggest fear currently is that I wont be able to fill a request that someone makes and I'll be the reason the company is losing money. And with all the stress/burn out that's building up I haven't been working on personal projects, which being my main source of entertainment might be making me depressed. Even when I do work up the effort to work on my projects I don't get very much entertainment. (If anyone has a suggestion for this that would be helpful.)
TIL: Even if the job is a great opportunity don't stop searching and ask a lot of questions.2 -
My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...
I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.
Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.
In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.
As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.
The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.
It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).
We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.
Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.
This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.
The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.
Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.
And... Fucking and!
Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.
Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.
Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.
What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").
Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.
This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?2 -
I'm a self-taught frontend developer with 1,5 - 2 years of experience in JavaScript / Vue.js development. Pretty cliche in 2023 and I can actually feel this now when it comes to the job market. It's brutal at the moment.I moved to Germany for a specific job but got laid off a few weeks ago due to a lack of projects and actual things to do. And here I am right now: tons of job applications, 4-5 interviews a week, zero success.
I'm thinking about getting some warehouse job or anything for the time being, and start freelancing in my spare time. Instead of this oversaturated JavaScript landscape, I would get into PHP (not as "hip" so less competition, backend, no new tools every 6 months), SQL, or hyper-specialize in CSS - something I like quite a bit but have seemingly zero value to employers.
I actually made a simple website for a small business when I was getting started with frontend, and he was super happy with the end result. I also did some language tutoring, that was quite rewarding as well. So freelancing is definitely fun, I enjoyed it much more than fearing layoffs or trying to force a fake-ambitious attitude on my 30th interview that most probably won't lead me anywhere. :D
Is the frontend job market really this oversaturated? (I know, I know... It's not difficult for competent, skilled, and experienced devs with CS degrees) Is being a CSS specialist, PHP-developer, or SQL-magician on fiverr/upwork/etc. a viable freelancing path? I've heard good and bad about these platforms, the competition there, etc. If not, where should I start?
What do you think? Any input is much appreciated. :)4 -
Budding Developer here...
I've tried to teach myself Web Dev over the past 10 yrs on/off... Sad. But now I'm actually in a developer role moved up from IT helpdesk a year ago.
In the past year I've learned SQL, SSRS, SSIS, database concepts, and.... VB6. I am a master at none due to having to cram so much in a year while taking on various projects, issues, and learning the organizations software infrastructure and processes. I also taught myself current HTML, CSS, and basic Javascript. Learning the different basic concepts with each.
Over the past couple months I've been given a new project and now learning ASP.NET and C#. Actually trying really hard to get adept at these as I'm finally doing Web Developing in my role...
I am also dealing with multiple major family issues and a near 2 yr old that we cosleep with that still doesn't sleep through the night.
Why the crap is it so easy to convert an enum to a string but takes 50 functions to convert a string to an enum???
Cast, convert, parse... Why so much logic???
When the online teacher says type why do I have to rifle through 7 different meanings in my head before I know what kind of type he's referring to??4 -
There have been a few :)
If say it's a videos utter project I initially though was good. Apart from loading a view the controllers didn't do anything - my initial thought was some magic was happening behind the scenes.
However, when I opened up the view things changed.
ALL the business logic happened in the view. Everything. Form processing, consuming an app, file uploads, validation, crud ... You name it, it happened in view. The developer created a raw MySQL connection and build his queries by concatenation g strings, the whole system was wide open to sql injection.
Even more annoying was the "source control" he invented. Every file had several copies. I.e. "User(working).php", "user_v3.php" and even "user(working_no_profile_fields_1.php". It wasn't even like there was any consistency in what file was actually used either. A complete mess. The system had around 69 screens too. No idea how the developer got that gig.2 -
No proper normalization and database structure practices seems to continue to be the bane of my fucking existence at work.
One would think that it would be the quirks carried through by the language stacks in question, those are fucking absolutely ridiculously horrible by the way, y'all think you've seen bad Javascript and PHP? these would make you cry, laugh, wonder in amazement and then fucking pity me and eventually buy me a beer NO JOKE.
Y'all think you have seen some obscenely unoptimized SQL code? think of the worst fucking possible output from the shitty-est most error prone boundary checking inefficient ORM out there and multiply it by 10k. Then refer to my other point, and do the same thing for me which culminates in alcoholic consumption.
Worst thing? the developer that wrote most of this is a college level TEACHER rn....i've met the smug piece of shit, he acted severely condescending to everyone around him and I just smiled because I know how much of a piece of shit he is.
The other dude in question (it was two of them that I am talking about) left for another city and currently holds a senior developer position....i-fucking-magine that.
Fuck I hate these mfkers and I really wish they gave me a chance to fucking blow up on them.2 -
Disclaimer: I should know what I'm doing but I don't. 😢
I'm a very experienced full stack dev (15+ years), but I don't know the more modern JS frameworks. I'm trying to learn React and I have a little project I'd like to do.
I have database (in both SQLite form and JSON form). I'd like to read from it, parse it and run various displays in a shared hosting environment (that doesn't have node). So webpack. And either an API to get the data or a React compatible SQL component.
But dagnamit, I cannot find a tutorial or example with this kind of set up and I can't figure it out. What packages do I need and what kind of config?
I genuinely thought this would be a traditional and simple architecture but I'm obviously mistaken. And I'm about to turn in my developer card because I'm clearly a stupid twonk.
Has anyone done this? Do you know of any tutorials or examples of this kind of thing? Is there somewhere else I should ask this question? Thanks anyway...5 -
To be a Java (or other business popular language) developer
* Java 6, 8 and features up to 14
* SQL + nosql
* Caching
* Logging eg log4j2,
* Searching eg elastic stack
* Reactive
* Framework (at least 1, but hey, knowing 1 is lame..)
* Networking or at least base http knowledge
* Tomcat, jboss or other shit
* Aws, heroku, GCE or other SAAS/paas
* Rest, RPC, soap
* Business Hello World example
* Hexagonal Architecture
* TDD
* Ddd
* Cqrs
* 12 app factor
* Solid
* Patterns
* docket
* Kubernetes
* Microservices
* Security, oauth2
* concurrency
* AMPQ
* Cloud
* Eureka or consul as service Discovery
* Config server
* Hazel cast
*
*
* Endless story ...
Then we can start hello word app2 -
Darn you to Heck, Oracle! I installed their JDeveloper environment, to see how it's database functionality compared to DBArtisan and PL SQL Developer. It is Eclipse based, and it rendered DBArtisan non-functional. Uninstalled, and balance has been restored to the Universe.4
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Serious question.
I’m trying to start my career as an entry level developer. I have had an internship for a short period of time before the company fell apart and had to go back to my retail job to pay the bills. My question is, where are you guys applying to entry level jobs at? Like I have tried LinkedIn. But I looked for entry level and it came up with a 7+ year experience description in my area. Or 2-3 years experience. I’m just trying to find an entry level job man. Like how hard is it to find that? I’m a boot camp grad as well. But even with recruiters it’s so hard to find a job in my area that would take someone on that is so green in tech.
400+ applications and like 50 interviews. Decided to put my specialization in sql and c# and focus more on those because that’s what’s more popular in my area (tulsa, ok). I’m not 100% the best programmer or developer. But man I have the drive to learn and I guess that’s not good enough without experience. I’m at a mental breaking point right now.4 -
Funny, I just said to myself "Of course, the developer does it right. anyone else doing it differently is simply wrong" on how to pronounce SQL.
Yet, when it comes to gif, I totally disregard the developer.
I guess I have to either start saying "djiff" or stop thinking that whoever invented something gets to decide it's pronunciation :D2 -
Not really a backend developer but I give my best with node.js. The way I did it was just raw SQL everywhere, and now trying to figure out Sequelize. Holly shit its to complicated to me.
Anyone knows some good tutorials?1 -
I like the people I work with although they are very shit, I get paid a lot and I mostly enjoy the company but..
Our scrum implementation is incredibly fucked so much so that it is not even close to scrum but our scrum master doesn't know scrum and no one else cares so we do everything fucked.
Our prs are roughly 60 file hangers at a time, we only complete 50% of our work each sprint because the stories are so fucked up, we have no testers at all, team lead insists on creating sql table designs but doesn't understand normalisation so our tables often hold 3 or 4 sets of data types just jammed in.
Our software sits broken for months on end until someone notices (pre release), our architecture is garbage or practically non existent. Our front end apps that only I know the technology have approaches dictated by team lead that has no clue of the language or framework.
Our front end app is now about 50% tech debt because project management is so ineffectual and approaches are constantly changing. For instance we used to use view models for domain transfer objects... Now we use database entities, so there is no commonality between models but the system used to have shared features relying on that..sour roles and permissions are fucked since a role is a page regardless of the pages functionality so there is no ability to toggle features, but even though I know the design is fucked I still had to implement after hours of trying to convince team lead of it. Fast forward a few months and it's a huge cluster fuck to enforce.
We have no automated testing of any sort or manual testing in place.
I know of a few security vulnerabilities I can nuke our databases with but it got ignored.
Pr reviews are obviously a nightmare since they're so big.
I just tried to talk to scrum master again about story creation since any story involving front end ui as an aspect of it is crammed in under one pointed story as sub tasks, essentially throwing away any ability to calculate velocity. Been here a year now and the scrum master doesn't know what I mean by velocity... Her entire job is scrum master.
So anyway I am thinking about leaving because I like being a developer and it is slowly making me give up on doing things to a high standard and I have no chance of improving things, but at the same time the pay is great and I like the people. -
Hey guys I've a question that's been on my mind for a little bit. I recently got my first full time dev job as a junior developer. Overall I'm really happy with the opportunity to work in the industry, but in the company we're using old technology ext js and PL/SQL. I'm wondering will this make things harder when looking for other jobs in the future that use more modern frameworks, or is it that the actual industry experience is more important?8
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I hope people who store data in unstructured binary format without documenting what the the actual logic is have a separate room in hell.
I hate this legacy s***pile of visual basic code that has this abbreviated function names everywhere and the 'developer' (really should be name jack***) instead of documenting his custom solutions just thought out some custom data formats and wrote really long and bad code around it to transform and decode it. Clr sql makes it impossible to debug so wherever you are my dear predecessor I hipe you rot in hell2 -
I have a non-dev colleague that created a report in our pseudo-self service viz tool. Shortly after creating and forwarding said report, he submits a ticket stating "the data, in the db is wrong. Every time I run my report, the sum (of a numeric column) is five time more than (and here is the funny part) when I run the SQL in developer!" My response, after reading this ticket: "it is the same data, from the same db, and the same tables! CHECK YOUR JOINS!!!!" His response: " found the issue. My bad! The report used outer joins vs' inner joins." Then he resolved the ticket!
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Coolest project.... SharePoint sucks, so I wrote an app to extend it into something that is useful.
The app consists of:
- a custom SharePoint event receiver to maintain a custom retention setup
- a custom feature to enable users to tag documents as related to each other
- a custom search experience with custom views and previews
- a .Net windows service to sync the data into a SQL database
- a .Net MVC application to manage the reporting and notifications system
- a notifications system in .Net
- custom SharePoint approval workflow
- a PHP site that maintains a full backup of every document in the event that SharePoint goes down
I was the only developer on the entire project and while I asked for backup they never provided it. So if anything happens to me... And since I am a good dev, my code is self documenting and someone will need to telepathically link to me to find out the multiple places that all of this is running (like five different servers including both windows and Linux).
The whole thing, I have about 18 months invested into it ;) -
- "Two months" training upon hire, with all the other hires too.
- Entire thing takes place in a hotel's larger room meant for small conventions or whatever.
- Brought on as Java developers, told there was Java work for all of us
- By the end of it, there wasn't
- Sit at our company's office for a month doing nothing, waiting for work
- It's summer time, 90F+ heat, and the A/C not only wasn't on most of the time, when it was on it was actually heating the building instead of cooling
- Get on a project, join the client site, takes at least a week to get a laptop, takes a month to get most of the needed accesses
- Was brought on because they needed a SQL Developer, I do not know more than basic syntax which I told them
- Project is 3 months behind already
- Really no development since Offshore handles it (poorly)
- For the first year+ of my time here I am doing nothing but manual quality assurance testing, and no development
It's hard to leave when you aren't learning -
As a follow-up to my last rant, I figured out the SQL (well, WQL) query that would get me what I wanted: a collection of machines that had an error on a deployment.
I also figured out how to automate fixing the error'd machines and turning all of my possible fixes into one script that would also auto-deploy to the collection that was made with the query.
My senior coworker is impressed. He has been doing it manually for years and I was hired partially to take the load off of him. They're putting me on some more challenging projects and it's nice to be a better part of the team.
Not much of a rant, or even much of a developer thing, but I hope this bit of positivity makes for a lighter read in your Algo. -
What have you suggested at work which sounded like a good idea at the time, but now sounds like a nightmare?
I inherited a nasty old legacy c# desktop app a few years ago, I was a sql developer so it was a steep learning curve, but I’ve tried to make it better, fixing things as I go.
I had the bright idea of mentioning that I would look at starting to add unit tests etc.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I’m not so sure.3 -
Question to the freelancers here.
How long did it take you to make a living with freelancing and did you start freelancing fulltime right away or 20-40% besides another job?
I'm thinking about freelancing for a while now, but I guess in the beginning the money coming in will be really unpredictable, right?
About me, I'd call myself a senior level developer (Java, JS, SQL and stuff like that). -
Inherited a legacy system from a previous "developer" who wrote code to sanitize input from sql injection in the front end and then called an web method called execSql which accepts am sql statement in a string value!
Obviously the app ran under admin privileges.2 -
So I'm a Java Dev used to work develop products on Google Clpud Platform. Technology stack used was Java, REST API/Webservices, Firebase, Google Cloud Datastore. Now that I've resigned from there (because of limoted opportunities) and joined a new company in another city.
And in new company I've been assigned to a project which is developed using Java Swing, SQL Server only.
So my question is:
Is it worth working on Java Swing which is a fairly old tech or should I look for another job: a webapp developer using Google Cloud Platform or AWS technology stack. What can be the wise move here in my case?
Really need a direction here guys. :) -
Hello Guys... Just wanted to have some opinions:
Considering long-term career stability, how does a Machine Learning engineer compare with a Software Developer ( C, C++, Java, Python, etc. ) & a Web Developer ( Java, JavaScript, SQL, CSS, Python ) ?9 -
I'm completly hating having to work with databases at college.
I have to use my department's Oracle server to which I must connect using a VPN that fails constantly and I must use SQL Developer that hangs every single time I want to do more than a single Select with it.
Maybe next year I finish this course unit.5 -
If you edit a column in a table in SQL Developer GUI you can loose your primary key in that table, even if you didnt touch the primary key column.
How fun is that?2 -
need to work on any open source projects. I am a Java developer and have knowledge of Android, HTML5,CSS3 and SQL as well. Anyone willing to onboard me shout out.6
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I got hired today. The company uses .Net in those stack and SQL. Which I need to learn a little bit within a week any advice for a junior developer?10
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I got a report of a relatively simple WinForms app created by a senior (!!) developer who left just as it was released taking 3 minutes to load.
Step through it.. Narrow it down to one stored procedure.
Open said query, every join is a left join.
None needed to be a left join.
Change them all to inners, app now loads in 5 seconds.
Left Joins: For when people can't be assed to learn SQL basics. -
I have 2 server that run in production that using SQL Server Developer Edition and SQL Server Standard Edition.This was setup by shit people before they all resigned from the company.
I need to upgrade both server to Enterprise Edition.It give me a real pain since both server is on production side now.
Is it possible to upgrade it without any error or long downtime?3 -
TechBA: (adter solving a really simple sql change) *yeah right, we really need devs* (implies sarcasm).
A real issue occurs that needs deep dive code analysis.
TechBA: thats not really our responsibility. thats entirely to the developer.
wow.1 -
Hi guys !
I start "studies" to become Web Developer and after 1 month and a half of studies, my teacher asks us to create our first project in groups of 3 or 4. Do you have any ideas of what kind of project we could build? I was thinking of an e-commerce site with our knowledge (HTML5, CS3, a bit of JavaScript, SQL, a little PHP ($ _SESSION, $ _POST and $ _GET) and CRUD).
Is it a good idea?9 -
In the last days, my developer was working with different kinds of databases.
He uses a database, named TimeScale DB (Timescale). This is the plugin of a famous SQL database PostgreSQL.
He imports the same data in PostgreSQL and timescale DB.
Size in Timescale DB is = 24KB
Size in Simple PostgreSQL = 166MB
This is the record of 1000000 rows, 12 columns.
Data fetching is the same on both databases, But if we fetch time-based data, (e.g 2 days, 24 hours, From Date to Date) we have a 50% to 200% difference depending on the query. python3 & elixir is also working fine with DB.
Results are also nearly the same with InfluxDB.
For a specific use-case, we have software that is handling Simple and time-series data at the same time. If anyone wants to suggest something new, Also tell us. -
That Moment when you write something in an editor that provides a font where some stuff lookes almost the same.
When col1 becomes coll
:|6 -
SQL Developer imports. Fucking SQL Developer imports!
"insert failed for rows 800-899"
y u no tell which row specifically and why, you goddamn hateful son of a bitch!?!?! -
The application I work on starts throwing timeout errors for about every third user. Lead developer cannot figure out what happened. DBA is out of town and cannot be reached. I do a quick Google search and run the stored procedure sp_updatestats. Timeouts stop and there is a big performance boost on the application. Everyone congratulates me on fixing the problem, and now I'm reading up on MS SQL Server Statistics and wondering about what other magical tools everyone else knows about that me and my team are clueless on...
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So... Saying im an intermediate-beginner coder who had programming in highschool learning only Pascal, VB, VB+SQL and PHP coding something that i'll barely use in my developer career (programs like Fibonacci sequence and other math related stuff), can anyone give me some challenges in PHP/C#/Javascript simulating the "real programmers" actually code? Sorry for bad english3