A story about how a busy programmer became responsible for training interns.

So I was put in charge of a team of interns and had to teach them to work with Linux, coding (Bash, Python and JS) and networking overall.
None of the interns had any technical experience, skills, knowledge or talent.
Furthermore the task came to me as a surprise and I didn't have any training plan nor the time.

Case 0:
Intern is asked to connect to a VM, see which interfaces there are and bring up the one that's down (eth1). He shuts eth0 down and is immediately disconnected from the machine, being unable to connect remotely.

Case 1:
Intern researches Bash scripting via a weird android app and after a hour or so creates and runs this function: test(){test|test&}
He fork-bombed the VM all other interns used.

Case 2:
All interns used the same VM despite the fact that I created one for each.
They saved the same ssh address in Putty while giving it different names.

Case 3:
After explicitly explaining and demonstrating to the interns how to connect to their own VMs they all connect to the same machine and attempt to create file systems, map them and etc. One intern keeps running "shutdown -r" in order to test the delay flag, which he never even included.

Case 4:
All of the interns still somehow connect to the same VM despite me manually configuring their Putty "favorites". Apparently they copy-paste a dns that one of them sent to the entire team via mail. He also learned about the wall command and keeps scaring his team members with fake warnings. A female intern actually asked me "how does the screen knows what I look like?!". This after she got a wall message telling her to eat less because she gained weight.

Case 5:
The most motivated intern ran "rm -rf" from his /etc directory.
P.S. All other interns got disconnected because they still keep using his VM.

Case 6:
While giving them a presentation about cryptography and explaining how SSH (that they've been using for the past two weeks) works an intern asked "So is this like Gmail?".
I gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked if he meant the authorization process. He replied with a stupid smile "No! I mean that it can send things!".

FML. I have a huge project to finish and have to babysit these art majors who decided to earn "ezy cash many" in hightech.

Adventures will be continued.

Friend: *deletes something from the internet*
"Thank god, now it's gone forever!"

Me: *Laughs in French*
"Hahahaha!"

Friend: "What?"

Me: "No, I'm pretty sure almost everything you put on the internet stays on the internet."

Friend: "ARE YOU STUPID??! The button says fucking DELETE. What else would it to do? Please use your brain for once."

Me: "You realize that text in the button is just a string right?"

Friend: *Looks confused*
"Stop trying to be such a smartass. Why would it be called 'delete' if it doesn't delete? Your logic make no sense whatsoever."

Me: *Makes quick simple app in order to prove my point*

App has 4 buttons:

-Play Music: Shows a picture of a dog

-Stop Music: Starts playing music video of Never gonna give you up

-Close App: Changes the interface to a random color

-Delete App: Pop up that says "The app has been deleted"

Friend: *Installs and tries the app*
"Dude! Did you even test your app before sending me?? Your buttons are broken as hell. None of them works. They all do things they're not supposed to do. How do you even call yourself a programmer? Sorry dude, nothing personal but this app sucks."

Me: *I need a new friend*
*sigh*

I worked with a good dev at one of my previous jobs, but one of his faults was that he was a bit scattered and would sometimes forget things.

The story goes that one day we had this massive bug on our web app and we had a large portion of our dev team trying to figure it out. We thought we narrowed down the issue to a very specific part of the code, but something weird happened. No matter how often we looked at the piece of code where we all knew the problem had to be, no one could see any problem with it. And there want anything close to explaining how we could be seeing the issue we were in production.

We spent hours going through this. It was driving everyone crazy. All of a sudden, my co-worker (one referenced above) gasps “oh shit.” And we’re all like, what’s up? He proceeds to tell us that he thinks he might have been testing a line of code on one of our prod servers and left it in there by accident and never committed it into the actual codebase. Just to explain this - we had a great deploy process at this company but every so often a dev would need to test something quickly on a prod machine so we’d allow it as long as they did it and removed it quickly. It was meant for being for a select few tasks that required a prod server and was just going to be a single line to test something. Bad practice, but was fine because everyone had been extremely careful with it.

Until this guy came along. After he said he thought he might have left a line change in the code on a prod server, we had to manually go in to 12 web servers and check. Eventually, we found the one that had the change and finally, the issue at hand made sense. We never thought for a second that the committed code in the git repo that we were looking at would be inaccurate.

Needless to say, he was never allowed to touch code on a prod server ever again.

Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

The programmer and the interns part 3.

Many of you asked me to keep posting about the interns that I'm responsible for.

I had the intention but never had the time or the energy. Since the interns only kept doing stupid, unthinkable things and just filtering out the good ones is a task of its own.

Time has passed, some interns left us by their choice, others were fired (for obvious reasons). Some stayed loyal and were given permanent positions. New ones joined. I no longer am directly responsible for their wellbeing, yet, somehow I am still their tech-lead and the developer of their tools.

Without further delay,

Case 0:
New guy get's into the internship, has his LinkedIn title set to ‘HTML Technician’.
Didn’t know about the existence of HTML5.
Been building static web pages in the early 2000s. The kind with embedded, inline CSS.
Claims that he is about to finish an engineering degree (sadly I believe him).
Fails the entry level Linux test. Complains about the similarity of the answer options.
Fails the basic web-standars test because "they change so fast, but the foundation is HTML and it's rock-solid!".
Get's caught taking home onions and milk from the kitchen.
Is spotted eating in a restaurant under our offices in his day off. Thrice. He lives a 30 minute drive away and comes here on a bicycle or by bus.
Apparently didn't know that the scrolling wheel on the mouse is clickable.
Said that his PC experience is mostly from his PlayStation (PC = PlayCtation apparently).
Get's fired, says that he'll go to the press. Never does.

Case 1:
Yet another new intern. He seems very eager to learn and work, capable, even charismatic. Has an impressive CV.
Does nothing.
Learns from the "case 0" guy and spends time with him until he is fired.
Comes to work at 8:00 AM and immediately goes to sleep on an office puff. In front of everyone.
Keeps dining alone, without a notice, at different times, for hours. Sometimes brings food into the office and loudly eats it there.
On his evening shifts keeps disappearing for long periods of time. Apparently drinking in the nearby bars and hitting on girls.
Keeps bragging about his success with getting their numbers and rants about those who reject him.
For over a year he fails his final training test and remains a trainee, without the ability to work on a real case.
Not fired yet.

Case 2:
Company retreat. Beautiful, exotic views, warm sun beams, all inclusive package for everyone on a huge half-island.
Simon (he's still with us, now as a true engineer!) brings his MacBook to the beach in order to work and impress all others.
Everybody get's drunk and start throwing huge inflatable balls at each other. One hits his laptop and it immediately is flattened.
Upset Simon is going in circles and ranting about the situation, looking for a solution.
Loses his phone on the beach.
Takes his broken laptop with him while searching for the phone.
Dips the laptop in the river while drunkenly ducking in order to pick a clam.

Case 3:
Still company retreat.
Drunk intern makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Huge verbal fight. The husband says that he files for a divorce. Intern get's fired.

Case 4:
Still company retreat.
Three interns each take an inflatable swimming mattress and drift with the current. Get found on the other side of the resort three hours later, with red skin and severely dehydrated.

Case 5:
Still company retreat.
The 'informally fired' intern gets drunk again, climbs through a window into a room and makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Again, gets caught when the husband returns to find a locked door but can see them though the window.

Case 6:
Still company retreat.
We all get ferociously drunk and wander off to the unknown in search of more booze.
Everybody does something stupid and somebody finds Simon's phone.
Simon is lost.
Frenzied horde of drunks is roaming the half-island in search of ethanol and the lost comrade.
Simon's phone get's permanently lost.
Five people step on sea urchins but find that out only hours later and then are unable to walk.
The mob, now including more drunk people who joined voluntarily, finds the sexually active intern making out with the enraged employee's wife yet again.
Surprisingly Simon is found sleeping in a room nearby.

!rant

This was over a year ago now, but my first PR at my current job was +6,249/-1,545,334 loc. Here is how that happened... When I joined the company and saw the code I was supposed to work on I kind of freaked out. The project was set up in the most ass-backward way with some sort of bootstrap boilerplate sample app thing with its own build process inside a subfolder of the main angular project. The angular app used all the CSS, fonts, icons, etc. from the boilerplate app and referenced the assets directly. If you needed to make changes to the CSS, fonts, icons, etc you would need to cd into the boilerplate app directory, make the changes, run a Gulp build that compiled things there, then cd back to the main directory and run Grunt build (thats right, both grunt and gulp) that then built the angular app and referenced the compiled assets inside the boilerplate directory. One simple CSS change would take 2 minutes to test at minimum.

I told them I needed at least a week to overhaul the app before I felt like I could do any real work. Here were the horrors I found along the way.

- All compiled (unminified) assets (both CSS and JS) were committed to git, including vendor code such as jQuery and Bootstrap.
- All bower components were committed to git (ALL their source code, documentation, etc, not just the one dist/minified JS file we referenced).
- The Grunt build was set up by someone who had no idea what they were doing. Every SINGLE file or dependency that needed to be copied to the build folder was listed one by one in a HUGE config.json file instead of using pattern matching like `assets/images/*`.
- All the example code from the boilerplate and multiple jQuery spaghetti sample apps from the boilerplate were committed to git, as well as ALL the documentation too. There was literally a `git clone` of the boilerplate repo inside a folder in the app.
- There were two separate copies of Bootstrap 3 being compiled from source. One inside the boilerplate folder and one at the angular app level. They were both included on the page, so literally every single CSS rule was overridden by the second copy of bootstrap. Oh, and because bootstrap source was included and commited and built from source, the actual bootstrap source files had been edited by developers to change styles (instead of overriding them) so there was no replacing it with an OOTB minified version.
- It is an angular app but there were multiple jQuery libraries included and relied upon and used for actual in-app functionality behavior. And, beyond that, even though angular includes many native ways to do XHR requests (using $resource or $http), there were numerous places in the app where there were `XMLHttpRequest`s intermixed with angular code.
- There was no live reloading for local development, meaning if I wanted to make one CSS change I had to stop my server, run a build, start again (about 2 minutes total). They seemed to think this was fine.
- All this monstrosity was handled by a single massive Gruntfile that was over 2000loc. When all my hacking and slashing was done, I reduced this to ~140loc.
- There were developer's (I use that term loosely) *PERSONAL AWS ACCESS KEYS* hardcoded into the source code (remember, this is a web end app, so this was in every user's browser) in order to do file uploads. Of course when I checked in AWS, those keys had full admin access to absolutely everything in AWS.
- The entire unminified AWS Javascript SDK was included on the page and not used or referenced (~1.5mb)
- There was no error handling or reporting. An API error would just result in nothing happening on the front end, so the user would usually just click and click again, re-triggering the same error. There was also no error reporting software installed (NewRelic, Rollbar, etc) so we had no idea when our users encountered errors on the front end. The previous developers would literally guide users who were experiencing issues through opening their console in dev tools and have them screenshot the error and send it to them.
- I could go on and on...

This is why you hire a real front-end engineer to build your web app instead of the cheapest contractors you can find from Ukraine.

|￣￣￣￣￣￣|
| backup + |
| encrypt all |
| the things |
|＿＿＿＿＿＿|
(\__/) ||
(•ㅅ•) ||
/ 　 づ

|￣￣￣￣￣￣|
| also test all |
| ur backups |
| so u don't |
| lose all ur |
| things |
|＿＿＿＿＿＿|
(\__/) ||
(•ㅅ•) ||
/ 　 づ

I. FUCKING. HATE. MOBILE. DEVELOPMENT.

I already manage the data, devops, infra, and most of the backend dev.

We had a mobile guy. He was great. I never had to think about it and kept moving quickly on my work. #SpecializationOfLaborFTW

He left. Why? Because they wouldn't give him a small raise despite being one of the best mobile engineers in the firm. WTF.

I made the mistake of picking up just enough slack on this workflow in the interim such that I'm, apparently, the fucking god-damned release manager, fixer of pipelines, fixer of build configs, fixer of anything where someone just needs to RTFM for a half-hour to not fucking break things.

Now, 8 months later...and, apparently, Fortune 500 companies are too fucking god-damned cheap to pay for someone who actually knows WTF they're doing for a very reasonable thing to have at least one dedicated set of eyes for.

I never wanted to be a mobile dev.
I never will want to be a mobile dev.
And I certainly don't want to manage your HALF-FACE-FUCKED detached expo configs.

There's a reason I never intentionally involved myself in mobile. All the way down, it's just shitty cross-compilation, transpilation, dependency-hell, brittle-as-fuck build processes so we can foot-gun and mouth-gun react-native and expo and babel and whatever the fuck else cargo-culted horseshit into the wild.

And why? What's the actual fucking root cause? The biggest white elephant that ever fucking elephant-ed? It's because Apple and Google decided to never collaborate on a truly-native cross-platform SDK--where engineers could write native code that compiles to native binaries that's simply write-once, run-everywhere. They know they could have done that, and they didn't. So what'd they get back? Expo--a too-cleverly-designed backdoor/hack--more-or-less a way to circumvent the sane release process software has usually followed: code -> executable -> deploy. Or code -> deploy (for interpreted langs). Expo's like "keep your same executable, we're just gonna to do updates by injecting new code into it whenever we want". Didn't we learn anything with web? Shit gets messy real quick? Not to mention: HEY EXPO, WE WERE ALREADY BUILDING NATIVE APPS, YOU SHORT-SIGHTED FUCKS. THANKS FOR LURING OUR CTOs INTO FORCING EXPO DOWN OUR THROATS W/ THE IMPLICIT (BUT INCORRECT) TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE PROMISE THAT WE CAN HAVE WRITE-ONCE, RUN-ANYWHERE WITHOUT ANY BUY-IN OR COOPERATION FROM THE ACTUAL TARGET PLATFORMS.

And, we just, like, accept this? We all know it's garbage engineering. The principles we learned in the classroom aren't just academic abstractions--they actually yield real-world results--and eschewing them yields real-world failures. Expo is tightly-coupled to high-heaven, with leaky abstractions six-ways-to-christmas, chock-full of foot-guns, and fails the most basic test of quality: does it, "just work?"

Expo is fucking shameful and it should fucking die. Its promises are too bold, its land-mines too many, its future-proof-ness is alway, always, always questionable as fuck and a risk to every project that uses it.

You want a rant? This is my fucking venue, 'tis not? Well, then this is a piss and vinegar rant straight from my blood-red, beating fucking heart:

EXPO FUCKING SUCKS. AND IF YOU'RE A FAN, YOU FUCKING SUCK TOO.

My employer has a dev studio in Cali.
The office is gigantic.
It has amenities.
It has a stocked fridge full of iced coffee, energy drinks, and apparently wine.
All the devs have totally enviable hardware.
And they probably earn twice what I do, or at least 50% more.

Yet they write absolute shit, never test their code, and push broken updates every day, often marked as "ready for final testing." Their codebase is full of hacks and guesses and stale cruft and worst practices. I wrote a rant recently about one of their fuckups, which involved 18 million Facebook errors per. day. So that should give you some idea as to the quality of their code, and their level of can't-be-bothered.

Again, they make 50%-100% more than I do.

Their whiny lead dev is bloody lazy when it comes to building things correctly, and totally prefers to half-ass everything and complain instead. He probably makes 150% of what I do, doing like 25% as much work, and maybe 10% as well. Doesn't quite compare though, as he's a Unity dev, not a backend dev. So his work isn't as critical.

akagdkdafavskakeuxbfh.
Bloody pisses me off.

"But their cost of living is higher!"
THEY SHOULDN'T EVEN BE EMPLOYED.

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

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

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

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

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

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

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

So lets look at some example of their work:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thats all the time we have for today,

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

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

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

I actually had the strangest nightmare last night.

So I was working on a program for someone and lots of things went wrong. First of all, the semicolon button wasn't working, so I panicked and grabbed another keyboard but there was no semicolon button.

I had to copy and paste the semicolon instead. Next, there was a bug, and I couldn't figure out what caused it, so I went on stack overflow... Guess what? Stack overflow was shutdown. Unable to fix the error, I somehow caused more.

I decided to take a break and leave, but upon my return, I forgot what the program did. It was as if someone else had written it. I was simply ignorant enough to forget the comments.

After a hellish day of working on it, the person who wanted me to create the program decided to test it out. They tested it on an old version of IE.

Strangest nightmare I had this week.

Looks like I'm getting fired on Wednesday :)

Long story:

*I add first unit tests to project.

*Boss adds new functionality and breaks all the tests so I can't compile and write more for what I'm working on.

*Boss is very fragile and cannot handle any comment that can possibly be taken as a slight against him.

Me: "I wanted to ask what our policy on unit tests is please? Because we haven't really said how we are treating unit tests, and everyone myself included is not thinking about them. I also haven't added tests when I fixed bugs and this time your changes broke the tests"

Boss 10 minutes later: "I want to speak to you in private".

Boss: "you are too forceful and direct. You said I should have added tests."

Me: "yeah but I didn't mean in a nasty way"

Boss getting louder and more aggressive: "You are too forceful"

Me: "I didn't mean it in a bad way"

Boss: "I didn't want to add tests for that!"

Me: "then why add any tests?"

Boss: "Fine we are not having this conversation now!"

*Boss storms out

I decided I can't speak to the guy about anything without upsetting him spoke to the manager before I quit because I can't work like this.

That resulted in a meeting with my boss, his boss and the head of HR where I ended up savaging him and told them I can't bring up anything as I can never tell if it will offend him and that I spend ages writing emails and trying to document communications because I just can never tell if I will upset him. Also that I cannot bring up any ideas because I can't tell if he will somehow get offended and that I can't even write code because if I change something he wrote at some point he will get angry.

My boss claims that I am extremely forceful and disrespectful and that I am constantly insulting him and his decisions.

We go back over a ton of shit and I refute everything he says. In the end I have to have a meeting with him on Wednesday where we either get things straight, he fires me or I quit.

I think at this point that our relationship is too fucked for him to be my team lead on a 6 man team.

Side note I keep bringing forth ideas because we have one database shared between 6 Devs, no pull requests (apart from mine and another new guy), no test driven development, no backlog, no team driven story pointing, no running tests before merging, no continuous integration setup, no integration tests, no build step on merge, no idea of if we are on track to our deadline other than his gut feeling, no actual unit tests backend - just integration with a test db, no enthusiasm to learn in the team and no hope.

Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:

- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div

and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software

have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.

but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?

recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.

Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.

There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD

why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well

i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.

How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life

we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!

BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!

Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.

rant? rant!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..

She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.

The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.

AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...

A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me

Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"

She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.

And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...

Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.

He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.

Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!

Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.

all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.

the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:

Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.

Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.

Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?

Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends

Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.

After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.

Had a meeting with my boss earlier. Got yelled at for:
a) Working on a high-priority, externally-committed ticket (digit separators) that i was 85% done with on the Friday afternoon before my vacation instead of jumping to a lower-priority screwdriver ticket that just came in. Even though my boss agreed with me that what I did was exactly what I should have done, it's still bad because I was apparently rude to product by not doing as they asked?
b) Taking too long on that digit separator ticket that amounts to following a gigantic mess of convoluted spaghetti and making a few small changes, and making sure it doesn't break the world because it's all so fucking convoluted and fragile as hell. Let's not even mention my 4-10 hours of mandatory useless meetings every week.
c) Missing something that wasn't even listed in that same ticket -- somehow my fault? -- so I very obviously didn't test my work. Even though specs all passed and QA also tested and signed off on it as working and complete. Clearly half-assed and untested. Product keeps promising/planning UATs and then skipping them, and then has the audacity to complain about it.
d) Not recovering fast enough from burnout and daily mental breakdowns. I can still barely get out of bed and you want me to be super productive? Got it. Guess what? I'm being amazingly productive for my mental health. But my boss, Mr. Happy-go-lucky, thinks depression is dropping your icecream cone on your clean kitchen table, and this three-ton pile of spaghetti is "maybe a little messy, I guess."

So I need to somehow "regain the confidence" of both him and product because I'm taking awhile on difficult tickets (surprise), while having these ridiculous breakdowns (surprise), and because I don't fix things that aren't even listed in the fucking tickets (fucking surprise) -- and worse, that the lack of information is somehow entirely. my. fault. (surprise fucking surprise)

GOD I HATE THESE PEOPLE.

Designer: Need to file a bug, I'm not getting an option to login with FaceID

Me: Oh weird bug. Is it setup on the phone you are testing with?

Designer: yes, use it in all other apps

Me: Did you get an error during onboarding on the FaceID screen?

Designer: nope no error

Me: ..... hhhmm, can you show me your settings?

Me: ... eh, says you have FaceID disabled for this app ... did you click "No" to FaceID during onboarding?

Designer: Yes, to test edge cases

Me: ................ ok ........ if you setup the app and told it to not allow FaceID to login ......... you won't get the ability to use FaceID to login .......... like .... by design .... on purpose ...... cause .... you told it to do that

Designer: No no, it needs to have a setting on the login screen to allow me to turn that back on incase I forget my passcode

Me: the fuck it does. Yeah we can't have anything on the login page that says, without authorization, change my settings

*Deep breath*

Me: Remember we had this conversation previously, where you didn't want the user to create a passcode during onboarding as it was too much friction, and wanted to do FaceID only. With your backup plan being to allow the user to create a NEW passcode on the login screen if FaceID failed .... remember that discussion we had about security? ... and how its important? ... and that we like having any? Ok so its the same reason as that, just with a different setting this time

Designer: ... hhmm i'm not sure I like this

Me: ... tough luck then, not happening

Me: oh and btw, remember we had that other talk about reproduction steps for bugs? Like when the app crashed and you told me it was because its in light mode, and nothing else at all? So disabling FaceID, is very relevant info to the problem of "I can't login with FaceID", please tell me these things first

!!rant
!!ANGER

Micromanager: "Hey, Root!

Since you're back, and still not feeling well, we have an easy ticket for you: Rewrite the slack integration gem! Oh, you don't have to re-implement all of it, just make sure it all works the same way it does now. That bitch you worked with once over a year ago who kept throwing you under the bus to management and stealing credit for your work? Yeah, she wrote the original code like four years ago. It's perfect, so don't touch it. but she can fill you in on all the details you need and get you up to speed on how to test it.

But yep! It should be simple. and I just knew you would love this ticket, so I saved it just for you. Nice and quick, too, to get you an easy win.

You know, since you have to repair your reputation with product. and management. and the execs. and the rest of the team. and me. Yeah, product doesn't trust you so they don't want to give you any tickets. They just can't trust you to get them out and have them work. So you have a lot of hard work to do."

Spoiler: The bus-thrower wasn't much help. (Surprise.)
Spoiler: The ticket was already in my backlog -- one of a grand total of two tickets.
Spoiler: I don't find the ticket fun. Maybe if I was to write the entire implementation with a nice DSL? but no, "don't touch the perfect code." Fuck you.
Spoiler: It isn't going to be nice or quick. But, she (micromanager) is looking to lose me, so that really is an easy win. for her.

And. just. argh. fuck you. i've been exhausted and dying for well over a year, but you've kept ignoring that (and still are, despite me providing goddamn legal forms from fucking doctors stating it in plain fucking english, which you also fucking ignore), and you just keep piling on the work and demanding the ridiculous of me despite it. Yeah I can pull it off sometimes. No, I really shouldn't, and I'm surprised I can. (also, "Time off? What, and lower your productivity even more? ____ doesn't even take vacations. And how are you doing on that ticket?") And no, none of my tickets have ever had any fucking problems. Not even when there are upstream service outages. Not. a. single. fucking. one. Ever. And the only things I've ever missed were things that bloody product never put in the fucking ticket, so fuck you with your "repair your reputation" bullshit.

god, i fuckiNG HATE THESESTUPOID ANWETLJAF SAJEWTKW BITCHFACEDUCKFUCKERS

Why the FUCK am I still fucking working here?
Right, because I've been burned out and dying so much I can't pass a fucking interview so I can fucking leave.

jasdkl;fk

ugh. Anyway. If you ever find yourself starting work at a Cali fintech company whose internal mascot is a very fine duck? Just run. I absolutely guarantee you will be miserable.

Story time. My first story ever on devRant.

To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)

My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!

My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!

I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!

At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!

Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.

Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...

Thanks for reading ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"please reenter card number to validate."

Bupkiss. Dead end.

OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man, I think we've all gotten way too many of these.

Normally most interactions that I have are through email. Eventually some would try to contact me via phone. These are some:

"Hey! We are calling you from <whatever company name> solutions! (most of them always seem to end on solutions or some shit like that) concerning the Ruby on Rails senior dev opportunity we were talking about via email"
<niceties, how are you doing, similar shit goes here...eventually>

So tell us! how good/comfortable would you say you are with C++?"

Me: I have never done anything serious with c++ and did just use it at school, but because I am not a professional in it I did not list it in my CV, what does it have to do with Rails?

Them: "Oh the applications of this position must be ready to take in additional duties which sometimes happen to be C or C++"

Me: Well that was not anywhere in the offer you sent, it specifically requested a full stack Rails developer that could work with 3 different frontend stacks already and like 4 different databases plus bla bla bla, I did not see c++ anywhere in it. Matter of fact I find it funny, one of the things that I was curious about was the salary, for what you are asking and specifically in the city in which you are asking it for 75k is way too low, you are seriously expecting a senior level rails dev to do all that AND take additional duties with c++? cpp could mean a billion different things"

Them: "well this is a big opportunity that will increase your level to senior position"

Me: the add ALREADY asks for a senior position, why are you making it sound that I will get build towards that level if you are already off the bat asking for seniors only to begin with?

Them: You are not getting it, it is an opportunity to grow into a senior, applicants right now are junior to mid-level

ME: You are all not making any sense, please don't contact me again.

=======

Them: We are looking for someone with 15 years experience with Swift development for mobile and web

Me: What is up with your people not making these requirements in paper? if I knew from the beginning that you people think that Swift is 15 years old I would have never agreed to this "interview"

Them: If you are not interested in that then might we offer this one for someone with 10 years experience as a full stack TypeScript developer.

Me: No, again, check your dates, this is insulting.

===

* For another Rails position

Them: How good are you with Ruby on Rails in terms of Python?

Me: excuse me? Python has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.

Her (recruiter was a woman) * with a tone of superiority: I have it here that Python is the primary technology that accompanies Rails development.

Me (thinking this was a joke) : What do you think the RUBY part of Ruby on Rails is for? and what does "accompanies Rails development" even means?

Her: Well if you are not interested in using Rails with Python then maybe you can tell us about your experience in using Javascript as the main scripting platform for Rails.

Me: This is a joke, goodbye.

====

To be fair this was years ago when I still didn't know better and test the recruiters during the email part of being contacted. Now a days I feel sorry for everyone since I just say no without even bothering. This is a meme all on itself which no one has ever bothered to review and correct in years for now. I don't know why recruiters don't google themselves to see what people think of their "profession" in order to become better.

I've even had the Java/Javascript stupidity thrown at me by a local company. For that one it was someone from their very same HR department doing the rectuiter, their shop foreman was a friend of the family, did him the service of calling him to let him know that his HR was never going to land the kind of developer they were looking for with the retarded questions they had and sent him a detailed email concerning the correct information they needed for their JAVAscript job which they kept confusing with Java (for some reason in the context of Spring, they literally wanted nothing with Spring, they wanted some junior to do animations and shit like that on their company's website, which was in php, Java was nowhere in this equation)

I think people in web development get the short end of the stick when it comes to retarded recruiters more than anywhere else.

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.

The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.

At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...

So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!

Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.

'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'

Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!

I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.

So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.

Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!

My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.

My college organised some interview with a company, with the whole demn class. We went there, it was quite far away (50km) and the CEO invites us to a meeting room.

Where he bores me for 2 hours talking about their projects in argiculture and NSA like spying systems at tankstations.

They were caputuring license plates at gas stations and with that information gather data about the person, such as salary (by looking at their car), house adres ect. All without people knowing. And than targeting them with specific ads and offers.

The class of sheep were super excited but it pissed me off. Because he told it like it was some awesome advancement in technology that none of us could probably ever do.

He was demeaning us, saying we would do some simple wordpress sites there and other things. We are probably not good enough forc te big stuff.

Asking him some really hard questions about his projects made him so pissed he almost wanted to kick me out.

When it was finally over, there was some test that you have to do if you want to work there. If you were good enough at the test, you could!!!! (YEEY)

Uhm, I said; no thank you I dont want to work here.

Later I talked to my classmate and friend who always thinks he's better then everyone in class even tho he barely understands OOP programming. He was asking me if he should try to get the internship. I told him; dont. They have no value for us and they think they are the greatest company on the planet.

The fucking idiot go so pissed, he stopped talking to me alltogether and blocked me everywere. I AM NOT EVEN JOKING. Just because I gave my FUCKING opinon about a company he likes for no reason.

So this idiot does the test (which was fucking simple btw, I did it too and compared the results and I had 95%) He gets invited for another interview and gets told he will be paid 200 euro's per month 😂. and a free meal everyday!! 😪 hahaha . That doesnt even cover commuting costs!

My "friend" told him that the train costs more every day. You know what the CEO said? "Yeah but you can learn so much here the also brings value and you're just a last year student. But I think you are really brave for asking more"

So in the end, he couldnt take the internship and I was fucking right. Really I hate these kinds of companies thinking they are heaven on earth when they are clearly not.

I am happy I told them no before putting my dignity on thd line.

Forget about Internet explorer compatibility, EMAIL TEMPLATES are the actual worst. Outlook uses the same html rendering engine as MS WORD. It's sooo painful. All the bad practices you had to do 15 years ago, you have to do when you write email templates.

YOU WILL NOT KNOW PAIN until you have to make an email template, that works in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, OUTLOOK, outlook.com, outlook for mac, MOBILE, Android, the gmail app, IOS, apple mail, and so on. And after you make an unholy abomination of table garbage, then having to make it responsive/mobile friendly after all that!

If something is broken in one client, fixing it will break something in a different client! And then having to take a stab in the dark to try to fix it and then sending yet another test email (which costs $ per test)

I must have slashed decades off my life having to build email templates. It really is horrendous. There are frameworks like Zurb for email that at least let you feel like you're using a modern workflow. But things break just as often.

Honestly if you have the option, use a wysiwyg editor for building emails. At least when it does break (and they all will) you can at least blame the software.

Which is better than spending 4 hours on why that table cell doesn't line up correctly in outlook.

The other day, I had a talk with my dad and he asked me about why YouTube is recommending him videos that he saw in the past or that type of ads. He is a non-techie btw.
I told him about personalized ads and so on.
Told him the "advantages" and the disadvantages of it. I even explained the advantages like if they would be so good that they are on the same level as holy things that happened to humanity. That was just to test him though.
And guess what?
He was completely against it. He said that it just brings disadvantages and no advantages at all. He was pissed that YouTube was recording his search history and so on to make a profile of him. He cares for his privacy. And I'm proud to have such a dad. :)

Client: please be sure to let us know with enough notice if you plan on taking any time off so we can anticipate how to operate during your absence.

Me to client 4 months before vacation: "I’m going to be on vacation in July for such amount of time".
Client: OK thanks

Client 3 months before vacation: are you taking any time off this summer?
Me: yeah I’m taking such amount of time in July.
Client: Ok

Client 2 months before vacation: are you taking any time off this summer.
Me: yeah I’m taking such amount of time in July.
Client: Ok

Client a month before vacation: wait you’re taking time off this summer?
Me: yeah, in July.
Client: oh, we need to start figuring out how to manage your absence.

…client has enough time to figure things out.
——-

Client two weeks ago: we’re switching you to a another project where you’ll be replacing someone who’s leaving; and you’ll be developing alone. You’ll be working closely with our software architect. He’ll be the one who can answer all your questions.
Me totally lost on new project as it’s barely documented, sql tables are a mess with barely any relations between them and data structures are totally inconsistent. Supposed to be getting info from partner APIs but I can’t test them and don’t know exactly what data to expect. Only the software architect has the necessary knowledge.

Client a week ago: hey don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions. We can’t afford to fall behind from schedule.
Me: oh don’t worry, I’m already flooding your guy with questions.

Me last Monday to client: hey do you know what’s up with your architect? I’ve been waiting for him to answer some important questions and it’s going to be hard to move forward without him getting back to me.
Client: you’re telling us you’re not going to be able to move forward efficiently until our architect gets back from vacation in two weeks?
Me: wait, he’s on vacation?
(on the inside: when the fuck were you guys planning on telling me he would be gone???)

Some years back I was working in a project that essentially dealt with all things related to foreigners and foreign affairs in Switzerland. You could manage entry visas, work permits, citizenship, international warrants, Interpol requests, etc.

One of the test managers (from client side - i.e. the government) was once manually "testing" and mixed up the production and test instance, to both of which he was logged in at the time.
The test case then ended up setting up an entry ban against himself, as he used his own name for testing...

Next time he returned from vacation the border control at the airport were like "Uhm, Sir, we can't let you into the country. Please come with us." :D :D

(He managed to clear that up in end, I dare say, though, that he learned his lesson.)

I am fed up working with unskilled software developers. Or to be more specific, working with people who have no idea of sofware architecture.

Most people I've worked with have simply no idea what they are doing in the broad picture, they can only follow patterns they see and implement their feature in the same way. They can't think about the abstract concepts which should be the foundation of the project.

They fail to write unit tests which are maintainable. They write one fucking test per method which is testing 50 things at the same time, making it often impossible to understand what is being tested.

They think putting stuff in private methods makes their class better and is some kind of separation of concerns.

They write classes and afterwards create interfaces for these classes named {Class}Interface, shoving all the methods into that interface. They think it's good design to do so.

They are unable to think about the reasons why things are done the way they are done and that you don't do stuff for the sake of doing stuff, but to achieve certain goals like interchangeability.

They don't undestand how to separate business logic from the application code.

They have no sense for naming things beautifully. They don't see how naming things is a major part of good software architecture.

They get layer concepts wrong and then create godlike {EntityName}Service classes, which do everything related to a particular entity.

They fail to shape the boundaries within a software project, entangling stuff which should live in individual modules.

All I want is to work in a team with professionals.

Please. Hear me out.

I've been doing frontend for six years already. I've been a junior dev, then in was all up to the CTO. I've worked for very small companies. Also, for the very large ones. Then, for huge enterprises. And also for startups. I've been developing for IE5.5, just for fun. I've done all kinds of stuff — accessibility, responsive design (with or without breakpoints), web components, workers, PWA, I've used frameworks from Backbone to React. My favourite language is CSS, and you probably know it. The bottom line is, you name it — I did it.

And, I want to say that Safari is a very good browser.

It's very fast. Especially on M1 Macs. Yes, it lacks customization and flexibility of Firefox, but general people, not developers, like to use it. Also, Safari is very important — Apple is a huge opposing force to Google when it comes to web standards. When Google pushes their BS like banning ad blockers, Apple never moves an inch. If we lose Safari, you'll notice.

As for the Safari-specific bugs situation, well… To me, Safari serves as a very good indicator: if your website breaks in Safari, chances are you used some hacks that are no good. Safari is a good litmus test I use to find the parts of my code that could've been better.

The only Safari-specific BUG I encountered was a blurry black segment in linear gradients that go from opaque to transparent. So, instead of linear-gradient(#f00, transparent), just do linear-gradient(#f00f, #f000).

This is the ONLY bug I encountered. Every single time my website broke in Safari other than that, was for some ugly hack I used.

You don't have to love it. I don't even use it, my browser of choice is Firefox. But, I'm grateful to Safari, just because it exists. Why? Well, if Safari ceases to exist, Google will just leave both W3C and WhatWG, and declare they'll be doing things their way from now on. Obey or die.

Firefox alone is just not big enough. But, together with Safari, they oppose Google's tyranny in web standards game.

Google will declare the victory and will turn the web into an authoritarian dictatorship. No ad blockers will be allowed. You won't be able to block Google's trackers. Google already owns the internet, well, almost, and this will be their final, devastating victory.

But Safari is the atlas that keeps the web from destruction.

Boss insisted that verification link needs to be clicked from same IP address as account registration. Many arguments later, decision is final, we will ignore the numerous ways that this will be a burden to our users.

*Code code, test test, deploy*

We're getting a lot of traffic, we need this bitch to scale! *auto-scale and load balance all the things*

Account creation begins breaking at random, some people receiving the "Your IP address doesn't match" error. Look at login history table, what the shit... All recent logins coming from internal IP addressohfuckmylife need to look at X-Forwarded-For header for actual IP behind load balancer.

IP address matching feature stays. I am sad, drink away sadness.

From my last job interview (which I got hired btw)

Lead developer: "so we see quite a lot of frameworks that you listed for php, Laravel,cakephp, codeigniter, we really like the idea of them but have not had the opportunity to use them since as you might know by know our pages run over basic and small scripts, you also listed some cool front end frameworks, react looks amazing and I do have somr experience. Tell me, if given the choice, which framework would you use for php?"

Me: Really depends on the project, but the ones that you have described previously seem that they would not really benefit from them, we should not use them if they are overkill or will not expand to anything else on the future"

Him: "But given the choice?"

Me: my own framework, completed it a couple of days ago, it has its own routing system and everything made by yours truly, used it before on some projects in which the developers work with it with no need to ask me about stuff, the documentation is sound and the code rather simple. Php is and can really be all you need depending on what we are talking about."

Him: **stands up, moves closer to me and fist bumps**
"All right now moving on, i was wondering abouy redux, what are the benefits of..."

Walked out of there like a boss, it got interesting when we started talking about Lisp, apparently they are interested in putting some Clojure to test in small things since they want to learn new things and apply them. Yup, this gon b good!!

I'm fixing a security exploit, and it's a goddamn mountain of fuckups.

First, some idiot (read: the legendary dev himself) decided to use a gem to do some basic fucking searching instead of writing a simple fucking query.

Second, security ... didn't just drop the ball, they shit on it and flushed it down the toilet. The gem in question allows users to search by FUCKING EVERYTHING on EVERY FUCKING TABLE IN THE DB using really nice tools, actually, that let you do fancy things like traverse all the internal associations to find the users table, then list all users whose password reset hashes begin with "a" then "ab" then "abc" ... Want to steal an account? Hell, want to automate stealing all accounts? Only takes a few hundred requests apiece! Oooh, there's CC data, too, and its encryption keys!

Third, the gem does actually allow whitelisting associations, methods, etc. but ... well, the documentation actually recommends against it for whatever fucking reason, and that whitelisting is about as fine-grained as a club. You wanna restrict it to accessing the "name" column, but it needs to access both the "site" and "user" tables? Cool, users can now access site.name AND user.name... which is PII and totally leads to hefty fines. Thanks!

Fourth. If the gem can't access something thanks to the whitelist, it doesn't catch the exception and give you a useful error message or anything, no way. It just throws NoMethodErrors because fuck you. Good luck figuring out what they mean, especially if you have no idea you're even using the fucking thing.

Fifth. Thanks to the follower mentality prevalent in this hellhole, this shit is now used in a lot of places (and all indirectly!) so there's no searching for uses. Once I banhammer everything... well, loads of shit is going to break, and I won't have a fucking clue where because very few of these brainless sheep write decent test coverage (or even fucking write view tests), so I'll be doing tons of manual fucking testing. Oh, and I only have a week to finish everything, because fucking of course.

So, in summary. The stupid and lazy (and legendary!) dev fucked up. The stupid gem's author fucked up, and kept fucking up. The stupid devs followed the first fuckup's lead and repeated his fuck up, and fucked up on their own some more. It's fuckups all the fucking way down.

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

I sometimes remember the time when I wrote a Email-inbox-exporter-PHP-script-type of application that collects all the emails from an inbox, "copied" it to a database with the attachements and stuff and moves it to a folder..

I just started at the company for like a couple of months, had no privileges to create mailboxes and such and I didn't want to interrupt our programmer to do this for me, so... I decided.. to save time and resources.. to test run it on our global, live 'support' mailbox.. :D Well.. You might guess what happened.. Apparently I mistyped the name of the move-destination folder (because imap-weird-things) that resulted in a completly empty mailbox and an empty database because the inserts failed due to bad encoding and mime-type issues..

The moment I refreshed my Outlook and noticed that all our mails where gone.. I swear, I can't describe that feeling of fear, cold sweat, intense heartbeat... I just stood up, asked if anyone wanted coffee, and just walked out of the office.. When in the hallway, I heard my collegues ask to one another "do you have any issues with outlook, all my mails are gone?". Everyone was stressing out, the chief was stressing out "what happened?!", nobody knew what happened.. :D

They could partially resolve it via one collegue who hadn't refreshed the mailbox and he could forward all the mails back to our support mailbox..

I dropped the project idea and learned to work with dev environments :D A couple of months later, I accidentially forgot a where condition in my SQL UPDATE statement, but that was the last time I seriously f*cked up.. :D Got to learn the hard way I guess.. Now everything I do runs in dev environments, I test everything before publishing,.. When I look back.. I don't even recognize the (inexperienced) guy I was back then ! :D

Ps. No one still knows what happened that day and they blamed it on server issues :D

Interviewer: So which university are you from?

Me: I am from "foo" university.

Interviewer: So why did you not go to "bar" university?

Inner Me: Wtf kind of a question is that. Why the fuck aren't you a unicorn with pigs flying out of your ass and a globally reknowned researcher at Stanford?
We all end up where destiny takes us. Some of us try very hard but things don't magically happen for us. We keep trying but at the end of the day you end up where you end up.

Real Me: I just finished my High School and had the entry test the next day. I was not prepared at all.

Indian web dev companies suck ( for developers )

when I finished 3 year grad program in computer application here in my country (India), I thought life's gonna be fun working as a developer. Oh boy, I was so wrong.

I started out working for a small service based IT company, followed by 2 more. I realized really quickly that they're nothing short of a scam. If your company's only agenda to somehow survive in the market and showing no signs of growth in 8 fucking years, then I'm sorry you're working for scamsters.

Now I'm not saying that all of them are alike. But most of them sorta are.

They don't give a shit about quality, not one bit. Quality means no money in the short run. And they haven't been able to develop any strategy to deal with that. Hence, no growth.

They promise 100 things on their website but only provide shitty services in 10.

There is no pair programming, no code review, no code quality check, no architect, no database designer. They won't give you extra time to write test cases. They use git as a storage device.

They don't put their developers (especially the ones who are learning) under any sort of managed development framework to ensure smooth work.

At the end of the day, their main objective is to somehow NOT deliver a project but finish a milestone and make money out of it.

After cashing out for a milestone, they want you to put your current project on hold and start working on a new project until you have like 10-15 projects in the pipeline and you're severely overwhelmed and you just wanna fucking QUIT.

They would say YES to literally every fucking thing, only to disappoint the client later.

I can't believe someone in the US, or UK thought it'd be a good idea to approach these companies
for their brand new app ideas. They're so fucked.

They're rarely finishing any project.

I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I had to get it out of my system.

Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.

It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.

Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.

This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.

Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.

I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)

Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.

By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.

Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.

Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.

It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.

I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.

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

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

The documentation does not exist.

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

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

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

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

The new type has practically zero test coverage.

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

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

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

This is something that happened 2 years ago.

1st year at uni, comp sci.

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

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

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

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

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

2 weeks into development, Project manager issues requirement changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do I don’t over complicate things?

Background: I’m currently working for a game with some base project. It alr has pretty complicated ai and some other system.

Today, I was asked by boss to help him set up a test environment for testing taking damage of a character.

First I tried to read up how the battle system and ai works in the base project. Figured, it’s overkill for this testing purpose.

Then, tried to use some plugin to automate the ai and movement. Make the enemy follow the target and stuff.

Alr spending half day, then suddenly realised all I need is just to make one script that takes damage on collision.

Why am I still a programmer? 😭

I did a job interview recently for a company and the test was something like this.

In ruby, write a web server that will serve a specific line number from a text file.

I thought up a simple solution and a more advanced solution, but I opted to go with the simple solution and submit my work quickly. I made a nice web server with tests and everything and it used the sed command to get the line number from the file.

Now, they had various instructions, like it had to perform. They asked how it'd perform with 10G, 100G files. I thought "Eh... it'll be alright."

The solution they were looking for was the "advanced" solution that I thought up, which involved storing a binary file of 32/64 bit integers that reference the byte-offset of the line they're looking for. Basically a binary index file.

This violates all of my sensibilities, because I would never build a database indexer like this using ruby, of all things.

I thought it was a stupid test, and how do these companies honestly expect me to spend hours coding and then tell me I didn't go far enough? It's unethical.

I actually followed-up with the "advanced" solution a couple hours after hearing I was out, just to show them that their process is flawed.

I just cant fucking believe this bullshit!

THE PRODUCT YOU'RE ASKING FOR NOW ITS NOT THE PRODUCT WE AGREED ON MAKING. ALL THE ADDITIONAL FUNCTIONALITY AND CHANGES YOU WANT TAKE TIME!

I can't believe how rude can people be! We were supposed to stop working in this product MONTHS ago but you keep asking for changes, for additional things and then you yell at us just because we dont have it ready for yesterday?! You got some fucking balls man just fuck off. You have to understand the development process, every change you ask for can have consecuences that make us rewrite a bunch of code and we also need to test everything again and again to make sure it works! Gimme a break!

2018 was a dumpster fuck for me. I was looking for 2019.

Oh boy, I was wrong.

I had a flight booked for 3rd Jan. I was supposed to go to Delhi, back to my job.

On 2nd Jan evening, I got a high fever. 103 F and my heartbeat were around 140. My brother took me to Hospital and after the doctor checked me.

There were no other symptoms. Only high fever. The doctor told me to do some blood test and give me a dose of Antibiotic.

Next day all the result came back negative. Doctor give me 3 days of antibiotic course and told eat light.

After 3 days of getting the 4g antibiotic in my body, Nothing changed. The fever was there and no symptoms.

on the 3rd day, the doctor increases the course to 2 days and told me to get more blood test. I also had to get 4D sonography and Heart ECG and its sonography.

on the 5th day, nothing changed. I still had a high fever. All the blood test were negative.

On the 6th day, I was admitted to the hospital and my medicine was changed to high does of broad-spectrum antibiotics and lots of new blood test.

There were taking blood from one hand and giving antibiotics to another.

After the broad-spectrum antibiotics, my fever went down to normal but all the 17 blood test I did came completely negative.

On the 8th day, we went to an infection specialist. He checked all the report and ask us to do a very details sonography. After all those things he said it most likely staphylococcus infection.

So here I am, making a chart of my temperature every 2 hours and taking two tablets every day.

This last 10 was very hard. There was a point where I was thinking "this is it. I am gonna die".

I am still waiting for a very detailed blood report which takes 5 days to create. I will get it after 2 days.

So after lots of medicine and over 15+ reports, Here I am working from home.

What a wonderful start of 2019.

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

1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.

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

2. Not being asked about estimates.

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

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

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

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

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

Never EVER buy a Mac as your primary PC if you're a developer.

Back in 2014 I bought an iMac because I already had an iPhone, and being able to code on xCode and also have a Windows partition seemed perfect. It wasn't.

Soon enough, I started encountering issues. My storage was randomly filling up, my computer started getting slow despite me having a small number of start apps and still a lot of storage available, it was all a mess.

So - I installed Windows 10 using Bootcamp to use it as my main OS. All was great until I wanted a new partition of Windows so I can test some things out without damaging my stuff. I try multiple methods, none of which work because my disk is not in the right partition format, and I don't want to change it because I'd have to format the whole thing.

Whatever - I give up, and try going back to my normal partition, disappointed. Guess fucking what?! My Windows Boot was damaged! Yes, I shit you not!

So - not only was this absolute piece of shit not able to add just one more fucking partition with an OS on it, but it BROKE my main partition, and now I'm trying to recover it.

I've said it once and I'll say it again: Never EVER get a Mac as your primary computer, unless you only work on Mac/iPhone apps.

For paying 1300$, I was expecting a seamless experience with little to no issues - yet all I got is a computer that's fucking broken from it's very core.

Fuck you, Apple.

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

Watch out for these fucking bug bounty idiots.

Some time back I got an email from one shortly after making a website live. Didn't find anything major and just ran a simple tool that can suggest security improvements simply loading the landing page for the site.

Might be useful for some people but not so much for me.

It's the same kind of security tool you can search for, run it and it mostly just checks things like HTTP headers. A harmless surface test. Was nice, polite and didn't demand anything but linked to their profile where you can give them some rep on a system that gamifies security bug hunting.

It's rendering services without being asked like when someone washes your windscreen while stopped at traffic but no demands and no real harm done. Spammed.

I had another one recently though that was a total disgrace.

"I'm a web security Analyst. My Job is to do penetration testing in websites to make them secure."
"While testing your site I found some critical vulnerabilities (bugs) in your site which need to be mitigated."
"If you have a bug bounty program, kindly let me know where I should report those issues."
"Waiting for response."

It immediately stands out that this person is asking for pay before disclosing vulnerabilities but this ends up being stupid on so many other levels.

The second thing that stands out is that he says he's doing a penetration test. This is illegal in most major countries. Even attempting to penetrate a system without consent is illegal.

In many cases if it's trivial or safe no harm no foul but in this case I take a look at what he's sending and he's really trying to hack the site. Sending all kinds of junk data and sending things to try to inject that if they did get through could cause damage or provide sensitive data such as trying SQL injects to get user data.

It doesn't matter the intent it's breaking criminal law and when there's the potential for damages that's serious.

It cannot be understated how unprofessional this is. Irrespective of intent, being a self proclaimed "whitehat" or "ethical hacker" if they test this on a site and some of the commands they sent my way had worked then that would have been a data breach.

These weren't commands to see if something was possible, they were commands to extract data. If some random person from Pakistan extracts sensitive data then that's a breach that has to be reported and disclosed to users with the potential for fines and other consequences.

The sad thing is looking at the logs he's doing it all manually. Copying and pasting extremely specific snippets into all the input boxes of hacked with nothing to do with the stack in use. He can't get that many hits that way.

[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.

Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)

It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)

First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.

The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target

All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...

Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.

"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.

---

I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.

Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.

I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )

The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.

---

It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.

The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.

The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.

---

Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.

Cheers!

I wrote a prototype for a program to do some basic data cleaning tasks in Go. The idea is to just distribute the files with the executable on our shared network to our team (since it is small enough, no github bullshit needed for this) and they can go from there.

Felt experimental, so I decided to try out F# since I have always been interested with it and for some reason Microsoft adopted it into their core net framework.

I shit you not, from 185 lines of Go code, separated into proper modules etc not to mention the additional packages I downloaded (simple things for CSV reading bla bla)

To fucking 30 lines of F# that could probably be condensed more if I knew how to do PROPER functional programming. The actual code is very much procedural with very basic functional composition, so it could probably be even less, just more "dense"

I am amazed really. I do not like that namespace pollution happens all over F# since importing System.IO gives you a bunch of shit that you wouldn't know where it is coming from unless you fuck enough with Ionide and the docs. But man.....

No need for dotnet run to test this bitch, just highlight it on the IDE, alt enter and WHAM you have the repl in front of you, incremental quasi like Lisp changes on the code can be REPL changed this way, plethora of .NET BCL wonders in it, and a single point of documentation as long as you stay in standard .net

I am amazed and in love, plus finding what I wanted to do was a fucking cakewalk.

Downside: I work in a place in which Python is seen as magic and PHP, VB.NEt and C# is the end all be all of languages. If me goes away or dies there will be no one else in this side of the state to fuck with F#

This language needs to be studied more. Shit can be so compact, but I do feel that one needs to really know enough of functional programming to be good at it. It is really not a pure language like Haskell (then again, haskell is the only "mainstream" pure functional language ain't it not?) but still, shit is really nice and I really dig what Microhard is doing in terms of the .net framework.

Will provide later findings. My entire team is on the Microsoft space, we do have Linux servers, but porting the code to generate the necessary executables for those servers if needed should be a walk in the park. I am just really intrigued by how many lines of code I was able to cut down from the Go application.

Please note that this could also mean that I am a shit Golang dev, but the cut down of nil err checkings do come somewhere.

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.

Man, most memorable has to be the lead devops engineer from the first startup I worked at. My immediate team/friends called him Mr. DW - DW being short for Done and Working.

You see, Mr. DW was a brilliant devops engineer. He came up with excellent solutions to a lot of release, deployment, and data storage problems faced at the company (small genetics firm that ships servers with our analysis software on them). I am still very impressed by some of the solutions he came up with, and wish I had more time to study and learn about them before I left that company.

BUT - despite his brilliance, Mr. DW ALWAYS shipped broken stuff. For some reason this guy thinks that only testing a single happiest of happy path scenarios for whatever he is developing constitutes "everything will work as expected!" As soon as he said it was "done", but golly for him was it "done". By fucking God was that never the truth.

So, let me provide a basic example of how things would go:
my team: "Hey DW, we have a problem with X, can you fix this?"
DW: "Oh, sure. I bet it's a problem with <insert long explanations we don't care about we just want it fixed>"
my team: "....uhh, cool! Looking forward to the fix!"
... however long later...
DW: "OK, it's done. Here you go!"
my team: "Thanks! We'll get the fix into the processing pipelines"
... another short time later...
my team: "DW, this thing is broken. Look at all these failures"
DW: "How can that be? It was done! I tested it and it worked!"
my team: "Well, the failures say otherwise. How did you test?"
DW: "I just did <insert super basic thing>"
my team: "...... you know that's, like, not how things actually work for this part of the pipeline. right?"
DW: "..... But I thought it was XYZ?"
my team: "uhhhh, no, not even close. Can you please fix and let us know when it's done and working?"
DW: "... I'll fix it..."

And rinse and repeat the "it's done.. oh wait, it's broken" a good half dozen times on average. But, anyways, the birth of Mr. Done and Working - very often stuff was done, but rarely did it ever work!

I'm still friends with my team mates, and whenever we're talking and someone says something is done, we just have to ask if it's done AND working. We always get a laugh, sadly at the excuse of Mr. DW, but he dug his own hole in this regard.

Little cherry on top: So, the above happened with one of my friends. Mr. DW created installation media for one of our servers that was deployed in China. He tested it and "it was done!" Well, my friend flies out to China for on-site installation. He plugs the install medium in and goes for the install and it crashes and burns in a fire. Thankfully my friend knew the system well enough to be able to get everything installed and configured correctly minus the broken install media, but definitely the most insane example of "it's done!" but sure as he'll "it doesn't work!" we had from Mr. DW.

Working in the embedded systems industry for most of my life, I can tell you methodical testing by the software engineers is significantly lacking. Compared to the higher level language development with unit tests and etc, something i think the higher level abstracted industry actually hit out the of park successfully.

The culture around unit testing and testing in general is far superior in java and the rest.

Down here in embedded all too often I hear “well it worked on my setup... it worked at my desk”.. or Oh I forgot to test that part.. or I didn’t think that perticular value could get passed in... etc I’ve heard it all. Then I’ve also heard, you can’t do TTD or unit tests like high level on embedded... HORSESHIT!

You most definitely can! This book is a great book to prove a point or use as confirmation you are doing things correctly. My history with this book was I gonna as doing my own technique of unit testing based on my experience in the high level. Was it perfect no but I caught much more than if I hadn’t done the testing. THEN I found this book, and was like ohh cool I’m glad I’m on the right thought process because essentially what they were doing in the book is what I was doing just slightly less structured and missing a few things.

I’ve seen coworkers immediately think it’s impossible to utilize host testing .. wrong.

Come to find out most the of problems actually are related to lack of abstraction or for thought out into software system design by many lone wolf embedded developers.. either being alone, or not having to think about repercussions of writing direct register writes in application or creating 1500 line “main functions” because their perception is “main = application”. (Not everyone is like this) but it seems to be related to the EEs writing code ( they don’t know wha the CS knows) and CS writing over abstraction and won’t fit on Embedded... then you have CEs that either get both sides or don’t.. the ones to understand the low level need but also get high level concepts and pariadigms and adapt them to low level requirements BOOM those are the special folks.

ANYway..the book is great because it’s a great beginner book for those embedded folks who don’t understand what TDD is or Unit testing and think they can’t do it because they are embedded. So all they do is AdHoc testing on the fly no recording results no concluding data very quick spot check and done....

If your embedded software engineers say they can’t unit test or do TDD or anything other than AdHoc Testing...Throw the book at them and say you want the unit test results report by next week Friday and walk away.

Lol

boss: we should map all the possible ways to do things in the system so we can test them and make sure we fix the bugs.

Me: yeah, well, that is exactly what automated tests are for, every time we find a non-mapped way that breaks this we make a test out of it and fix, this ways we end up mapping the majority of ways.

Boss: yeah,yeah ... Let's sit down latter and map everything on a document.

I bet my ass we are never gonna have tests as a part of our workflow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First time in years that I've hugged my best friend. Felt weird and we got really confused looks from the others (class full of boys n shit), but we were so happy because we both got a really good grade on an important test!

Why isn't this a common things men do!? We should all hug more 🤗

Everyone was a noob once. I am the first to tell that to everyone. But there are limits.

Where I work we got new colleagues, fresh from college, claims to have extensive knowledge about Ansible and knows his way around a Linux system.... Or so he claims.

I desperately need some automation reinforcements since the project requires a lot of work to be done.

I have given a half day training on how to develop, starting from ssh keys setup and local machine, the project directory layout, the components the designs, the scripts, everything...
I ask "Do you understand this?"
"Yes, I understand. " Was the reply.

I give a very simple task really. Just adapt get_url tasks in such a way that it accepts headers, of any kind.
It's literally a one line job.

A week passes by, today is "deadline".

Nothing works, guy confuses roles with playbooks, sets secrets in roles hardcodes, does not create inventory files for specifications, no playbooks, does everything on the testing machine itself, abuses SSH Keys from the Controller node.... It's a fucking ga-mess.

Clearly he does not understand at all what he is doing.

Today he comes "sorry but I cannot finish it"
"Why not?" I ask.
"I get this error" sends a fucking screenshot. I see the fucking disaster setup in one shot ...

"You totally have not done the things like I taught you. Where are your commits and what are.your branch names?"
"Euuuh I don't have any"
Saywhatnow.jpeg

I get frustrated, but nonetheless I re-explain everything from too to bottom! I actually give him a working example of what he should do!

Me: "Do you understand now?"
Colleague: "Yes, I do understand now?"
Me: "Are you sure you understand now?"
C: "yes I do"

Proceeds to do fucking shit all...

WHY FUCKING LIE ABOUT THE THINGS YOU DONT UNDERSTAND??? WHAT KIND OF COGNITIVE MALFUNCTION IA HAPPENING IN YOUR HEAD THAT EVEN GIVEN A WORKING EXAMPLE YOU CANT REPLICATE???
WHY APPLY FOR A FUCKING JOB AND LIE ABOUT YOUR COMPETENCES WHEN YOU DO T EVEN GET THE FUCKING BASICS!?!?

WHY WASTE MY FUCKING TIME?!?!?!

Told my "dear team leader" (see previous rants) that it's not okay to lie about that, we desperately need capable people and he does not seem to be one of them.

"Sorry about that NeatNerdPrime but be patient, he is still a junior"

YOU FUCKING HIRED THAT PERSON WITH FULL KNOWLEDGE ABOUT HAI RESUME AND ACCEPTED HIS WORDS AT FACE VALUE WITHOUT EVEN A PROPER TECHNICAL TEST. YOU PROMISED HE WAS CAPABLE AND HE IS FUCKING NOT, FUCK YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE MANAGEMENT SKILLS, YOU ALREADY FAIL AT THE START.

FUCK THIS. I WILL SLACK OFF TODAY BECAUSE WITHOUT ME THIS TEAM AND THIS PROJECT JUST CRUMBLES DOWN DUE TO SHEER INCOMPETENCE.

In the before time (late 90s) I worked for a company that worked for a company that worked for a company that provided software engineering services for NRC regulatory compliance. Fallout radius simulation, security access and checks, operational reporting, that sort of thing. Given that, I spent a lot of time around/at/in nuclear reactors.

One day, we're working on this system that uses RFID (before it was cool) and various physical sensors to do a few things, one of which is to determine if people exist at the intersection of hazardous particles, gasses, etc.

This also happens to be a system which, at that moment, is reporting hazardous conditions and people at the top of the outer containment shell. We know this is probably a red herring or faulty sensor because no one is present in the system vs the access logs and cameras, but we have to check anyways. A few building engineers climb the ladders up there and find that nothing is really visibly wrong and we have an all clear. They did not however know how to check the sensor.

Enter me, the only person from our firm on site that day. So in the next few minutes I am also in a monkey suit (bc protocol), climbing a 150 foot ladder that leads to another 150 foot ladder, all 110lbs of me + a 30lb diag "laptop" slung over my shoulder by a strap. At the top, I walk about a quarter of the way out, open the casing on the sensor module and find that someone had hooked up the line feed, but not the activity connection wire so it was sending a false signal. I open the diag laptop, plug it into the unit, write a simple firmware extension to intermediate the condition, flash, reload. I verify the error has cleared and an appropriate message was sent to the diagnostic system over the radio, run through an error test cycle, radio again, close it up. Once I returned to the ground, sweating my ass off, I also send a not at all passive aggressive email letting the boss know that the next shift will need to push the update to the other 600 air-gapped, unidirectional sensors around the facility.

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

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

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

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

I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.

This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.

First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.

I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.

A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.

So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.

At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.

Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...

So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.

Never a single word from the community about me.

Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).

I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.

A discussion about writing tests for frontend applications.

Context: my frontend coworkers don't write tests, at all. Yeah, really. Our testing process is very manual. We test manually when developing. We test manually when reviewing code. After merging, the application is deployed to a staging server and the design team does a QA Sprint. Lots of manual testing and some bugs still crawl by.

So I decided to start pushing my coworkers to start writing tests. One of the reasons I constantly hear them say to not write tests in the frontend is: "It's not worth the time, because design keeps changing, which means we have to take time to fix the tests. Time that we usually don't have."

I've been thinking about this a lot and it seems to me that this is more related to bad tests than to tests in general.

Tests should not break with design changes (small changes at least). They should test funcionality, not how things look. A form should not break if the submit button's style changes, so why should its tests fail? I also think that tests help save time, as they prevent some back and forth because of bugs.

Writing good tests is the hard part. Tests that cover what's really important and aren't frail and break with things that shouldn't break them. What (and how) should we test? And what shouldn't be tested?

Writing them fast is another hard thing. Are you doing it right if they take more time to write than the actual code?

What do you think about this? Do you write tests for your frontend applications? What do you test? How much time do you spend writing tests? What are your testing tools/frameworks?

Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.

So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.

So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.

First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.

Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).

This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.

So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).

And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).

They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.

I hate white boarding sessions. They feel unnatural to me. I simply don't work well when put on the spot and I have 3 ogres staring at me waiting for me to fuck up in front of them. Fight or flight engages, the adrenaline rush, my mind freezes. Suddenly it's like I forget how to code at all and I'm expected to solve a problem at once, correctly the right time, or I'm out.

I can't work like that. I need time to process a problem on my own, with my coffee in my one hand and a pencil and scratch paper in the other, not with some demanding employer standing over my shoulder the whole time scrutinizing my every key stroke. I get things wrong the first time sometimes, and more often than not have to google things I can't recall spontaneously. But I always figure it out, test it, make sure it's right before putting it into use.

I've been through several "probationary" periods when first starting a job. They just tell you, they're giving you a month to see if you can handle the job. If not, sayonara. I don't see what's so hard about evaluating candidates in a real world scenario.

So many employers have totally unrealistic expectations.

Most ignorant ask from a PM or client?

Migrated to SharePoint 2016 which included Reporting Services, and trying to fix a bug in the reporting services scheduler, I created a report (aka, copied an existing one) 'A Klingon Walks Into a Bar', so it would first in the list and distinct enough so the QA testers would (hopefully) leave it alone.

The PM for the project calls me.
PM: "What is this Klingon report? It looks like a copy of the daily inventory report"
Me: "It is. The reporting service job keeps crashing on certain reports that have daily execution schedules."
PM: "I need you to delete it"
Me: "What? Why? The report is on the dev sharepoint site. I named the report so it was unique and be at the top of the list so I can find it easily."
PM: "The name doesn't conform to our standards and it's confusing the testers."
Me: "The testers? You mean Dan, you, and Heather?"
PM: "Yes, smartass. Can you name the report something like daily inventory report 2, or something else?"
Me: "I could, but since this is in development, no. You've already proofed out the upgrade. You're waiting on me to fix this sharepoint bug. Why do you care what I do on this server? It's going away after the upgrade."
PM: "Yea, about that. We like having the server. It gives us a place to test reports. Would really appreciate it if you would rename or delete that report."
Me: "A test sharepoint reporting services server out of scope, so no, we're not keeping it."
PM: "Having a server just for us would be nice."
Me: "$10,000 nice? We're kinda fudging on the licensing now. If we're keeping it, we will be required to be in compliance. That's a server license, sharepoint license, sql server license, and the dedicated hardware. We talked about that, remember?"
PM: "Why is keeping that report so important to you? I don't want to explain to a VP what a Klingon is."
Me: "I'm not keeping the report or moving it to production. When I figure out the problem, I'll delete the report. OK?"
PM: "I would prefer you delete the report before a VP sees it."
Me: "Why would a VP be looking? They probably have better things to do."
PM: "Jeff wants to see our progress, I'll have to him the site, and he'll see the report."
Me: "OK? You tell Jeff it's a report I'm working on, I'll explain what a Klingon is, Jeff will call me a nerd, and we all move on."
PM: "I'm not comfortable with this upgrade."
Me: "What does that mean?"
PM: "I asked for something simple and I can't be responsible for the consequences. I'll be documenting this situation as a 'no-go' for deployment"
Me: "Oookaayyy?"

I figured out the bug, deleted the 'Klingon' report, and the PM couldn't do anything to delay the deployment.

When will I fuckin learn that
a) customers lie
b) customers are sloppy
c) customers are wrong
d) customers do not do their work (properly)
e) customers want us to do their (dirty) work
f) possibly all of the freakinly above?! + khm....

They will fuckin aaaalwaaaays say sth is not working after the update..
And I will alwaaaays assume I fucked up something..even if I didn't touch that part of the code/data..
And almost aaaaalways it turns out that the bug they complain about is how the system worked (or didn't work) before the update and/or some fuckup from their side..

Anyhow, I rushed over, grabbed the files went testing in dev..wtf, output is different, mine is ok, theirs is..wtf is that shit?!

Transfer newly built dll to test..same shit as on prod..wtf?! How?!

I assumed they have thing A correctly linked to thing B.. ofc thing A was linked to thing C in their case and in another case (our test) to correct thing B..
I got chillies when grabbing files, that
I should have tripple checked that they didn't fuck up something on the link part, but I just assumed they know what they were doing & that they checked they linked correct files with correct content already, before being pissy that the update fucked up things.. riiiight!! :/

I wanted to find solutions to this fuckup asap so I disregarded my gut feeling..yet again!! Fuuuck!
I've spent too much time trying to find ways to fix a bug that wasn't even a real bug to begin with.. :/

Fuuuuuck!!

So yeah, always treat the customers like they are 3yrs old & have no clue what they are doing & check exactly wtf they were indeed trying to do..it will save you time & nerves..

And note to self: reread this shit daily!! And imprint it in your brain that everything is not always your fault!!

Me and my manager throughout 2020

January:
Me: So umm, we can release the new app version
Manager: No we promised client X app first go build that
Me: umm, ok.

February:
Me: so the app is done, but client hasn't setup area L so there is no data there
Manager: ok, I'll have them setup area L soon ™️

March:
Manager: area L is too much work to setup, use workaround L thats way better
Me: ok ...

April:
Manager: client is nitpicking on design and layout please make this mess even greater
Me: ok, anything else?
Manager: yeah also start on app for client Z!
Me: and our app update?
Manager: later son! Risk tooo muchos!

May:
Me: the mess for client X is done, and first version for client Z is also ready for test
Manager: ok good work, here is a new set of things to mess up
Me: but... Seriously, wtf?!
Manager: clients want quality
Me: ah ok, not nitpicking, cool

June:
Manager: client X went MIA, but client Z will send you a weekly list of things they don't understand and want to change
Me: ah great, truly worth postponing my February holiday to release nothing

July:
Manager: so, how we doing on all them changes
Me: well, I am a loyal custodian with alot of pleasure in my work!
Manager: ah ok good!
Me: any news from client X??
Manager: who
Me: mkay ... n.v.m

August:
Me: can we release yet?
Manager: change, we can!!!
Me: are you Obama?
Manager: ambitions
Me: fuck you pay me

September:
Me: I am confident we can now release all 3 apps as promised mid september
Manager: great!! Good work

Also manager: you know that immensely complex area within the app? That needs a complete rewrite because we have bad ux there!!!
Me: ok... To which requirements?
Manager: good ux, we must have standards
Me: but the layout of page R id generic as page F so then we need to align there as well
Manager: go! Do!
Me: ok I'll come up with my own requirements then
Manager: we also need documentation
Me: really!!!! How clever of you to fire colleagues T & P and we now have zero workforce for that
Manager: things will get better someday
Me: ah, great! Put it on my calendar

October:
Me: I need a sabbatical biatch
Manager: a what?

Finally finished the screwdriver followup ticket. I think.

I spent almost two full days (14 hours) on a seemingly simple bug on Friday, and then another four hours yesterday. Worse yet: I can’t test this locally due to how Apple notifications work, so I can only debug this on one particular server that lives outside of our VPN — which is ofc in high demand. And the servers are unreliable, often have incorrect configuration, missing data, random 504s, and ssh likes to disconnect. Especially while running setup scripts, hence the above. So it’s difficult to know if things are failing because there’s a bug or the server is just a piece of shit, or just doesn’t like you that day.

But the worst fucking part of all? The bug appeared different on Monday than it did on Friday. Like, significantly different.

On Friday, a particular event killed all notifications for all subsequent events thereafter, even unrelated ones, and nothing would cause them to work again. This had me diving through the bowels of several systems, scouring the application logs, replicating the issue across multiple devices, etc. I verified the exact same behavior several times over, and it made absolutely no sense. I wrote specs to verify the screwdriver code worked as expected, and it always did. But an integration test that used consumer-facing controller actions exhibited the behavior, so it wasn’t in my code.

On Monday while someone else was watching: That particular event killed all notifications but ONLY FOR RELATED EVENTS, AND THEY RESUMED AFTER ANOTHER EVENT. All other events and their notifications worked perfectly.

AKL;SJF;LSF

I think I fixed it — waiting on verification — and if it is indeed fixed, it was because two fucking push event records were treated as unique and silently failing to save, run callbacks, etc.

BUT THIS DOESN’T MATCH WHAT I VERIFIED MULTIPLE TIMES! ASDFJ;AKLSDF

I’m so fucking done with this bs.

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

IF YOU UPDATE AN ADM PLATTFORM FOR FUCKS SAKE DON'T DO THE FOLLOWING THINGS:

1. ONLY DOCUMENTATE IT IN A POWERPOINT

2. WRITE DOWN IPs AND PORTS ONLY ON A WHITE-BORD

3. MOVE TOOLS TO OTHER SUBNETS OR DOMAINS WITHOUT PROPERLY KNOWING THE WAYS OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THEM

4. USE YOUR PERSONAL EMAIL ADDRESS AS RESET OPTION FOR LICENCE-MANAGEMENT ACCESS IF NO ONE KNOWS THE PW

5. LEAVE THE COMPANY THE DAY AFTER THE UPGRADE IS DONE

Because the guy who has to take care of the upcoming problems is not going to like you!

BUT having to deal with all of this at once would not be a problem if your, so called team (30 People who work with those applications e.g. as test-engineers) would actually work together instead of having that "not my daily business, I am going to drink coffee" attitude.

Apparently I am the only one who has enough balls to see, admit, and report a problem to our leadership.
This always leads to Me fixing the issue...
....that's alright I am learning a lot...
...BUT IF A TEAM-MATE, WHO HAS THE SAME DEGREE AS I AM GOING TO GET, LEAVES EARY BECAUSE: "HE DOES NOT KNOW WHATS WRONG", IT TRIGGERS ME!!!

- The apprenticeship guy

PS Needless to say hundreds of clients have access to those systems and I worked through a shittload of official tool docs just to get to know the tools first...

Rant!

Been working on 'MVP' features of a new product for the past 14 months. Customer has no f**king clue on how to design for performance. An uncomfortable amount of faith was placed on the ORM (ORMs are not bad as long as you know what you are doing) and the magic that the current framework provides. (Again, magic is good so long as you understand what happens behind the smoke and mirrors - but f**k all that... coz hey, productivity, right?). Customer was so focussed on features that no one ever thought of giving any attention to subtler things like 'hey, my transaction is doing a gazillion joins across trizillion tables while making a million calls to the db - maybe I should put more f**king thought into my design.' We foresaw performance and concurrency issues and raised them way ahead of the release. How did the customer respond? By hiring a performance tester. Fair enough - but what did that translate into? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Hiring a perf tester doesn't automagically fix issues. The perf tester did not have a stable environment, a stable build or anything that is required to do a test with meaningful results. As the release date approached, the customer launched a pilot and things started failing spectacularly with the system not able to support more than 15 concurrent users. WTF! (My 'I told you so' moment) Emails started flying in all directions and the hunt for the scapegoat was on (I'm a sucker for CYA so I was covered). People started pointing in all directions but no one bothered to take a step back and understand what was causing the issues. Numero uno reason for transaction failure was deadlocks. We were using a proprietary DB with kickass tooling. No one bothered to use the tooling to understand what was the resource in contention let alone how to fix the contention. Absolute panic - its like they just froze. Debugging shit and doing the same thing again and again just so that management knew they were upto something. Most of the indexes had a fragmentation of 99.8% - I shit you not. Anywho, we now have a 'war room' where the perf tester needs to script the entire project by tonight and come up with some numbers that will amount to nothing while we stay up and keep profiling the shit out of the application under load.

Lessons learnt - When you foresee a problem make a LOT of noise to get people to act upon it and not wait till it comes back and bites you in the ass. Better yet, try not to get into a team where people can't understand the implications of shitty design choices. War room my ass!

I used to work on a production management team, whose job was, among other things, safeguarding access to production. Dev teams would send us requests all the time to, "run a quick SQL script."

Invariably, the SQL would include, "SELECT * FROM db_config."

We would push the tickets back, and the devs would call us, enraged. I learned pretty quickly that they didn't have any real interest in dev, test, or staging environments, and just wanted to do everything in prod, and see if it works.

But they would give up their protests pretty fast when I offered to let them speak to a manager when they were upset I wouldn't run their SQL.

"So Alecx, how did you solve the issues with the data provided to you by hr for <X> application?"

Said the VP of my institution in charge of my department.

"It was complex sir, I could not figure out much of the general ideas of the data schema since it came from a bunch of people not trained in I.T (HR) and as such I had to do some experiments in the data to find the relationships with the data, this brought about 4 different relations in the data, the program determined them for me based on the most common type of data, the model deemed it a "user", from that I just extracted the information that I needed, and generated the tables through Golang's gorm"

VP nodding and listening intently...."how did you make those relationships?" me "I started a simple pattern recognition module through supervised mach..." VP: Machine learning, that sounds like A.I

Me: "Yes sir, it was, but the problem was fairly easy for the schema to determ.." VP: A.I, at our institution, back in my day it was a dream to have such technology, you are the director of web tech, what is it to you to know of this?"

Me: "I just like to experiment with new stuff, it was the easiest rout to determine these things, I just felt that i should use it if I can"

VP: "This is amazing, I'll go by your office later"

Dude speaks wonders of me. The idea was simple, read through the CSV that was provided to me, have the parsing done in a notebook, make it determine the relationships in the data and spout out a bunch of JSON that I could use. Hook it up to a simple gorm golang script and generate the tables for that. Much simpler than the bullshit that we have in php. I used this to create a new database since the previous application had issues. The app will still have a php frontend and backend, but now I don't leave the parsing of the data to php, which quite frankly, php sucks for imho. The Python codebase will then create the json files through the predictive modeling (98% accuaracy) and then the go program will populate the db for me.

There are also some node scripts that help test the data since the data is json.

All in all a good day of work. The VP seems scared since he knows no one on this side of town knows about this kind of tech. Me? I am just happy I get to experiment. Y'all should have seen his face when I showed him a rather large app written in Clojure, the man just went 0.0 when he saw Lisp code.

I think I scare him.

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

Hi all, first rant.

I work on an app on the Shopify platform, which requires me to look at the front end of people’s Shopify stores about half the day.

Can we PLEASE get the Shopify devs together and convince them to put a hard limit on the number of pop ups and slide ins and modal apps a single store can have running??? When a user (or app developer) can’t click on a product to buy it (or test installation) because ‘spin the wheel’ and ‘join the mailing list’ and ‘Karen in Ohio just bought a toaster’ won’t stop popping into the view, your UX is shit.

I realize people could still actually go in and build these things into their store code - but I’m willing to bet VERY few would.

Thanks - rant over.

So I found this consulting job a while ago thinking that some extra cash while studying would be nice to have.

I meet with the guy, a researcher trying to start a business up, good for him I think, maybe we'll hit it off, continue working, why not? Except he has no clue how to write working code, all he ever did was writing matlab scripts he says, thats why he hired me he says.
Okay, fine, you do your job I do mine.

He hands me the contract, its about comparing two libraries, finding out which one is better suited for his job, cool, plots and graphs everywhere.

Except this is an unpaid job. YOU WHAT?! It's a test job. FINE. At least it'll look good on my resume.

We talk about the paid part where I'm supposed to scale the two libraries, looks good, as expected from an ML engineering perspective. It comes to payment. The dude has no idea how taxes work, says he has a set amount to pay and not a penny more. I explain with examples how taxes are paid, how you get reimbursed for them and so on. Won't budge. Screws me over.

Opens the door for other jobs I think, he'll learn next time I think and take the job.

Fast forward a month, 90% of the job done, he adds a third thing to compare. Gives a github link to a repo with 2 authors, last commit a year ago. There are links to a 404, claiming compiled jars. Fuck.

Not my first rodeo, git clone that shit, make compile, the works. The thing uses libs that ain't in no repo, that would be too easy. Run, error, find lib, remake all the things, rinse repeat.

The scripts they got have hardcoded paths and filenames for 2 year old binaries, remake that shit.

It works, at least I get a prompt now. Try the example files they got, no luck, some missing unlinked binary somewhere, but not a name mentioned. Cross reference the shit outta the libs mentioned on readme, find the missing shit, down it.

Available versions are too new, THE MOLDING NUTCRACKER uses some bug in an old version of the lib.

I give up. Fuck this. This ain't worth the money OR time. Wanker...

Project manager, who i've complained in the past is neglecting critical things that he doesn't want to do, decided today to cancel our weekly planning meeting, to have the below conversation with me 1:1. Its very long, but anyone who has the will to get through it ... please tell me it's not just me. I'm so bewildered and angry.

Side note: His solution to the planning meeting not taking place ... to just not have one and asked everyone to figure it out themselves offline, with no guidance on priorities.

Conversation:

PM: I need to talk to you about some of phrasing you use during collaboration. It's coming across slightly offensive, or angry or something like that.

Me: ok, can you give me an example?

PM: The ticket I opened yesterday, where you closed it with a comment something along the lines of "as discussed several times before, this is an issue with library X, can't be fixed until Y ...".

"As discussed several times" comes across aggressive.

Me: Ok, fair enough, I get quite frustrated when we are under a crunch, working long hours, and I have to keep debugging or responding to the same tickets over and over. I mean, like we do need to solve this problem, I don't think its fair that we just keep ignoring this.

PM: See this is the problem, you never told me.

Me: ... told you what?

PM: That this is a known issue and not to test it.

Me: ..... i'm sorry ..... I did, that was the comment, this is the 4th ticket i've closed about it.

PM: Right but when you sent me this app, you never said "don't test this".

Me: But I told you that, the last 3 times that it won't be in until feature X, which you know is next month.

PM: No, you need to tell me on each internal release what not to test.

Me: But we release multiple times per week internally. Do you really need me to write a big list of "still broken, still broken, still broken, still broken"?

PM: Yes, how else will I know?

Me: This is documented, the last QA contractor we had work for us, wrote a lot of this down. Its in other tickets that are still open, or notes on test cases etc. You were tagged in all of these too. Can you not read those? and not test them unless I say I've fixed them?

PM: No, i'm only filling for QA until we hire a full time. Thats QA's job to read those and maintain those documents.

Me: So you want me to document for you every single release, whats already documented in a different place?

PM: ok we'll come back to this. Speaking of hiring QA. You left a comment on the excel spreadsheet questioning my decision, publicly, thats not ok.

Me: When I asked why my top pick was rejected?

PM: Yes. Its great that you are involved in this, but I have to work closely with this person and I said no, is that not enough?

Me: Well you asked me to participate, reviewing resumes's and interviewing people. And I also have to work extremely close with this person.

PM: Are you doubting my ability to interview or filter people?

Me: ..... well a little bit yeah. You asked me to interview your top pick after you interviewed her and thought she was great. She was very under qualified. And the second resume you picked was missing 50% of the requirements we asked for ... given those two didn't go well, I do think its fair to ask why my top pick was rejected? ... even just to know the reason?

PM: Could you not have asked publicly? face to face?

Me: you tagged me on a google sheet, asking me to review a resume, and rather than tag you back on 2 rows below ... you want me to wait 4 days to ask you at our next face to face? (which you just cancelled for this meeting)

PM: That would have been more appropriate

Me: ..... i'm sorry, i don't want to be rude but thats ridiculous and very nit pick-y. You asked my opinion on one row, I asked yours on another. To say theres anything wrong with that is ridiculous

PM: Well we are going to call another team meeting and discuss all this face to face then, because this isn't working. We need to jump to this other call now, lets leave it here.

I just want to share this:

When I start working at my last job, I have little idea of what a unit test was.

My boss on one meeting said that unit testing will be mandatory (wich is ok and umderstandable).

Almost a *year* after that, no one still care about them. I see myself doing them the best I can, but I saw things like wrap the assertion line with "try / catch" to lie to the coverage and unit test percentage. Or in other cases directly uploading *manually* the code on the server without test at all.

And then, as the only developer who do the unit test ok I have to do the missing ones and repair the fake ones.

Then when something explodes the question all the managers love to ask "Did we had the testing?"

At least I quit... that job was some crazy shit, this is just one story of many.

Like that other time that my co-workers did not understand why I needed to do POJOs on an android app because the big bad JSON that the app used was working fine....

Slowly getting better with RegEx problems! Warning, lots of non-computer linguistic geekiness ahead.

Been working on some functions recently to replicate the furigana (Chinese character annotation) functions available over at JP.SE in PHP for a project.

Managed to get the basic cases down fairly quick:

[Chinese character][reading] => <ruby><rb>Chinese Character</rb><rt>Reading</rt></ruby>

However I realized this evening that there are patterns where this repeats twice for one word, such as the following:

[Chinese Character][helper Japanese character(s)][Chinese Character][possibly optional word ending][reading for the whole thing]

Managed to get it working for both cases initially, but then I found out that adding a Japanese character to either of my test strings (see graphic) would cause the annotations to fall grossly out of sync. The next two hours disappeared pretty fast before discovering that the issue was that I was removing the wrong string length from the annotation string, and just happened to luck out with a test case where it worked the first time.

Probably going to do a code review of it with the intern next time he's in. One of the things I've been stressing to him lately is that however easy a task may be for a human, there are all kinds of extra things that need to be tracked in order for a computer to be able to follow your logic.

As you can see from the screenshot, its working.
The system is actually learning the associations between the digit sequence of semiprime hidden variables and known variables.

Training loss and value loss are super high at the moment and I'm using an absurdly small training set (10k sequence pairs). I'm running on the assumption that there is a very strong correlation between the structures (and that it isn't just all ephemeral).

This initial run is just to see if training an machine learning model is a viable approach.

Won't know for a while. Training loss could get very low (thats a good thing, indicating actual learning), only for it to spike later on, and if it does, I won't know if the sample size is too small, or if I need to do more training, or if the problem is actually intractable.

If or when that happens I'll experiment with different configurations like batch sizes, and more epochs, as well as upping the training set incrementally.

Either case, once the initial model is trained, I need to test it on samples never seen before (products I want to factor) and see if it generates some or all of the digits needed for rapid factorization.

Even partial digits would be a success here.
And I expect to create multiple training sets for each semiprime product and its unknown internal variables versus deriable known variables. The intersections of the sets, and what digits they have in common might be the best shot available for factorizing very large numbers in this approach.

Regardless, once I see that the model works at the small scale, the next step will be to increase the scope of the training data, and begin building out the distributed training platform so I can cut down the training time on a larger model.

I also want to train on random products of very large primes, just for variety and see what happens with that. But everything appears to be working. Working way better than I expected.

The model is running and learning to factorize primes from the set of identities I've been exploring for the last three fucking years.

Feels like things are paying off finally.

Will post updates specifically to this rant as they come. Probably once a day.

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

So one of my clients had a different company do a penetrationtest on one of my older projects.

So before hand I checked the old project and upgraded a few things on the server. And I thought to myself lets leave something open and see if they will find it.

So I left jquery 1.11.3 in it with a known xss vulnerability in it. Even chrome gives a warning about this issue if you open the audit tab.

Well first round they found that the site was not using a csrf token. And yeah when I build it 8 years ago to my knowledge that was not really a thing yet.

And who is going to make a fake version of this questionair with 200 questions about their farm and then send it to our server again. That's not going to help any hacker because everything that is entered gets checked on the farm again by an inspector. But well csrf is indeed considered the norm so I took an hour out of my day to build one. Because all the ones I found where to complicated for my taste. And added a little extra love by banning any ip that fails the csrf check.

Submitted the new version and asked if I could get a report on what they checked on. Now today few weeks later after hearing nothing yet. I send my client an email asking for the status.

I get a reaction. Everything is perfect now, good job!

In Dutch they said "goed gedaan" but that's like what I say to my puppy when he pisses outside and not in the house. But that might just be me. Not knowing what to do with remarks like that. I'm doing what I'm getting paid for. Saying, good job, your so great, keep up the good work. Are not things I need to hear. It's my job to do it right. I think it feels a bit like somebody clapping for you because you can walk. I'm getting off topic xD

But the xss vulnerability is still there unnoticed, and I still have no report on what they checked. So I have like zero trust in this penetration test.

And after the first round I already mentioned to the security guy in my clients company and my daily contact that they missed things. But they do not seem to care.

Another thing to check of their to do list and reducing their workload. Who cares if it's done well it's no longer their responsibility.

2018 disclaimer: if you can't walk not trying to offend you and I would applaud for you if you could suddenly walk again.

The company considers the project manager I work with to be the best. After working with him, I consider him to be everything that is wrong with project management.

This PM injects himself into everything and has a way of completely over-complicating the smallest of things. I will give an example:

We needed to receive around 1000 rows of data from our vendor, process each row, and host an endpoint with the data in json. This was a pretty simple task until the PM got involved and over complicated the shit out of it. He asks me what file format I need to receive the data. I say it doesnt really matter, if the vendor has the data in Excel, I can use that. After an hour long conversation about his concerns using Excel he decides CSV is better. I tell him not a problem for me, CSV works just as good. The PM then has multiple conversations with the Vendor about the specific format he wants it in. Everything seems good. The he calls me and asks how am I going to host the JSON endpoints. I tell him because its static data, I was probably going to simply convert each record into its own file and use `nginx`. He is concerned about how I would process each record into its own file. I then suggest I could use a database that stores the data and have an API endpoint that will retrieve and convert into JSON. He is concerned about the complexities of adding a database and unnecessary overhead of re-processing records every time someone hits the endpoint. No decision is made and two hours are wasted. Next day he tells me he figured out a solution, we should process each record into its own JSON file and host with `nginx`. Literally the first thing I said. I tell him great, I will do that.

Fast forward a few days and its time to receive the payload of 1000 records from the Vendor. I receive the file open it up. While they sent it in CSV format the headers and column order are different. I quietly without telling the PM, adjust my code to fit what I received, ran my unit test to make sure it processed correctly, and outputted each record into its own json file. Job is now done and the project manager gets credit for getting everything to work on the first try.

This is absolutely ridiculous, the PM has an absurd 120 hours to this task! Because of all the meetings, constant interruptions, and changing of his mind, I have 35 hours to this task. In reality the actual time I spent writing code was probably 2-3 hours and all the rest was dealing with this PM's meetings and questions and indecisiveness. From a higher level, he appears to be a great PM because of all the hours he logs but in reality he takes the easiest of tasks and turns them into a nightmare. This project could have easily been worked out between me and vendor in a 30 min conversation but this PM makes it his business to insert himself into everything. And then he has the nerve to complain that he is so overwhelmed with all the stuff going on. It drives me crazy because this inefficacy and unwanted help makes everything he touches turn into a logistical nightmare but yet he is viewed as one of the companies top Project Managers.

There are a lot... I am going to pick the interview dialogue (incl. test) with the government.

Following situation:
-5 recruiters
-3 candidates (including me) who have all passed an online test that did last for 3 hours
The online test was for the government to see how every candidate is good at math, English, situation adaptation, historical questions, a little bit of techy questions like "What does fps stand for?" and basic questions like that.

Even tho I did apply for a job as a software developer, there was not a single fucking question about programming. I shit you not. Anyways...

After everyone did introduce themselves. I was given the following question by one of the recruiters:"How do you think will the regular work look like to you, if you were to schedule it? We will be starting with you, <myName>"
Me:"Since this is hopefully going to be my first job in software development, I can only assume it for now. Based on my knowledge about this specific topic that I have made by reading other software developers' work experiences in form of textual content, I guess that I am going to do this [...] and that [...]. Oh and after this comes the planning phase (I had mentioned the sprints and agile "frameworks") and meetings of how the projects are doing so far.
After this comes the phase of sitting down and getting to work on the project I am assigned to.
At the end comes the "see you tomorrow, xyz" phase and everyone leaves."
Somebody else from the 5 recruiters:"I am sorry to interrupt you right here, but we are not offering you a dev job. It rather is a mixture of dev and sysadmin. You will be working most of the time fixing someone's problem with their PC and not sitting in a dark and empty corner of a warm room."
This was such a disrespect that I could not give an answer to. I was deeply shocked. Developers need more respect. Most of the fucking things you use, are created by developers, you asshole.
"We will be very happy, if you can call us by tomorrow to let us now if you are still interested."
Me does not even bother anymore and blacklists that government as a "trust me. You do not want to work there" type of job offering place.
Since I did not sign any NDA. It is the government of Germany.

PS: I did apply for a *dev* job. But somehow they did decide to create a new job and assign me to it. That is not professional.

So I have been a fly on the "wall" for last couple of months and never signed up, but now here I am!

Rant is about a serious topic - gender gap in tech industry!!
Couple of months ago Stackoverflow announced developer survey results! I was shocked by demographics results! It was disappointing to see biggest gender gap in general tech industry!
I believe tech industry can be the first one to have equal pay for women!

However.... (bad part)
I was going through my twitter feeds and saw this! Many of you have seen this tweet too.

(ohh!fuck I cant attach multiple images here, I should have created Medium post, fuck it!)

"They" continue, quoting from the tweet.
1)"....bias in society is reflected in AI"
2) "However, I do think it is our responsibility as designers/developers/users to be aware of this bias and do our best to correct it."

I want to rant about 2nd one. Some of you may not like it including grammar naziz!
As a developer/programmer I take 2nd one personally! I am currently at denial phase though!
And I have an OCD so gonna make points here!

1) Seriously tell me please, how the fuck you can write gender bias algorithm which can pass a big crazy amount of test suite?

2) Google has done many things for last decade to overcome gender gap related issues. I have met some of the nicest people from Google, and this is really hard for me to believe that google AI or that team has anything to do with the results!

3) Someone suggests use "they" in google translated result, can you fucking imagine how wrong that would be??? If I am developer working on that algo or even in that team and I see this ticket in jira with highest priority where it says, "make all translated results gender neutral using only they" - I would fucking like to die and may be in my next life ask me to do that, when I am a toddler!

4) I am an advocate for equal pay, equal rights and equal opportunities for everyone to "minify" this gender gap in tech, but showing google translate results of a gender natural language to make a point is wrong, it is simply undermining the efforts of something really helpful thing.

5) Moving on to the core point - What can be done to lower down the gender gap? I have seen amazing women who can code/manage far far far better than what I ever could imagine, and they are at really good place and deserve to be there. Are they doing enough to inspire other women to join tech industry?
Collective efforts are very much required. And need to keep in consideration that tech industry is highly competitive roles are also changing rapidly.

6) Many big companies have women at higher positions(CEO, CFO,....) what are their efforts to bring more women in tech industry?
(Some of you may not like this, as this is implying that it isn't only men's job. )

7) Going slightly political here, everyday we see really disappointing news related to women and their rights and health, I strongly believe women don't have to ask for or even have to mention about "equal rights" about anything. Everyone is equal!!!
This is 2017 and still fucked up!

Thats all for today! Heading for breakfast!

Haven't had such joy as with developing the devrant client in a while. (when things work of course haha)

The js plugin system works now with barely any time added to just loading the rants and in proper order too! (thanks asyncjs) now just need to add a way for the user to download and manage external ones.

The screenshot shows the test plugin linkify, which fetches from the API if there's any links and linkifies them even on the feed (which devrant web doesn't do and always annoyed me) - though since html gets stripped by handlebars I'll have to find a way for them to properly render with other tags to still be stripped (maybe handlebars has that inbuilt already? didn't check yet), plugins currently have access to all values the template would get too, so one could fuck around with e.g. the usernames too lol.

btw: the app is fully responsive even on desktop, which will be handy for me personally, iirc all the other clients I've tried always had some sort of size limit, without which it'd also better fit all our i3 archers out there.

Today I told 3 devs that they either get their shit together or they can pack their things and look for a job.

I can get easily pissed, but it's rather rare for me to get to that point easily.

Now my dear friends, can you guess what they did?

I give you a hint...

They made a test suite validating a network library.

So we have roughly 200 plus lovely splitted tests, neatly put in a directory structure - lovely organization.

(I might have written in the ticket that as a requirement... Cause I know my lil hellspawns)

But as I started looking at some tests, there was always something missing...

Network library...

So we needed to create an endpoint... And handle of course the tests communication with the endpoint *somewhere*.

I'd guess you know already what these mofos did...

Yeah. We have one class.... That handles all tests endpoints... Via different methods... Plus additional methods like utility functions....

The ticket was easy they said.

Me chewing their heads off was easy too.

Jesus Christ, I really doubt sometimes that some devs are able to go to a toilet.

Maybe thats the reason some wear baggy pants - easier to hide the pampers.

*rolls eyes*

I'm feeling like writing this down...

So today I got told off by my boss. Why? Because my job bores me.

My current title, "webmaster", is quite similar to "plumber" where I work. I fix holes on our websites, and I tell "qualified" people (external providers) how a project should be made. Nothing exciting, nothing creative, boring.

So I got told off today for being "laid-back" in a newsletter project (GDPR, looking at you) and not being thorough in my procedures of testing and configuration. Fair enough, I didn't care and I admitted it. It's a boring drag-and-drop done in literally 5 minutes, there's no added brain-value here. Plus I got told off by my IT Manager because our Exchange server would not let me receive test emails. Still doesn't work after a day. Yay.

Then she said "we're doing exciting things here, it's not always the case anywhere else you'd work". And I'm like: "really? I love writing code, seeing things coming alive, investigating why things don't run smoothly, writing efficient code (both in performance and in readability)". I hear many friend devs telling me they're doing that and what they do during their "dev-day"... All I'm doing here is "maintenance" (a.k.a boring) stuff that apparently is "exciting". Adding a <script> to handle google tag manager is hell fun, going through compiled CSS and change color values is also thrilling, finding out if a PDF handler application can handle PDF files, re-plugging a computer monitor to make it work...

I think she meant that I'm not at my place here.

Didn't want to tell her that I have no motivation in doing things I don't enjoy making, i.e, my job.

Good thing I have an interview in two weeks

So first of all I'm not a dev.

I'm a software tester and my test manager is a douche, but this is not it.

Today I went to the end user place along with him to teach them how to test properly and how to manage the software test cycle in JIRA.

I did a demo and showed the users the software the dev team developed and of course there were a lot of rants about it.
Users noted down a list of things to be changed and we kept going.

By the end of the demo, my test manager started discussing the fact that I told these guys to open Bugs without test objects on Jira.

I mean, we don't have a test cycle or test cased yet but these guys found issues already, what's the point?

So here's the funny part.

He then starts telling users (which ignore testing fundaments) to create a test cycle called 'meeting of today dd/mm/yyyy" and create tests below it which were named with the names of who created them.
All of that without a logic and ignoring the fact that these tests were not tests.

I was laughing my ass off while assisting this total mess and I almost lost control.

And this is my manager.

Luckily, tomorrow is Saturday.

Our project at work goes live in 3 weeks.

The code base has no automated tests, breaks very often, has never had any level of manual testing

will not be releasing with any form of enforced roles or permissions in our first release now due to no time to enforce, however there is a whole admin api where you can literally change anything in our database including roles.

We also have teams in various countries all working separately on the same solution using microservices with shared nuget packages and they aren't using them properly.

Our pull requests are so big - as much as, 75 file changes - in our fe app that I can't keep up with it and I honestly have no idea if it even works or not due to no automated tests and no time to manually test.

We have no testing team, or qa team of any sort.

Every request into the system has to hit a minimum of 3 different databases via 3 different microservices so 1 request = 4 requests with the load on the servers.

We don't use any file streams so everything is just shoved in the buffer on the server.

Most of the people working on the angular apps cba to learn angular, no one across 2 teams cba to learn git. We use git so they constantly face problems. The guy in charge has 0 experience in angular but makes me do things how he wants architecturally so half the patterns make no sense.

No one looks at the pull requests, they just click approve so they may as well push directly to master.

Unfinished work gets put in for pull request so we don't know if the app is in a release state since aall teams are working independently, but on the same code base.

I sat down and tested the app myself for an hour and found 25 fe only issues, and 5 breaking cross browser issues.

Most of our databases are not normalised. Most of our databases make no sense. 99% of our tables have no indexing since there is no expertise with free time to do it.

No one there understands css properly. Or javascript.

Our. Net core microservices all directly use ef in the controller actions so there is no shared code there.

Our customer facing fe app is not dry because no tests so it was decided it was better this way.

Management has no idea on code state, it seems team lead is lieing to them about things like having any level of tests.

Management hire devs that claim to be experts but then it turns out they have basically no knowledge of what they were hired to do, even don't know what json is or the framework or language they are hired for, but we just leave them to get on with it and again make prs too big to review.

Honestly I have no hope that this will go well now but I am morbidly curious to watch. I've never seen anything like the train wreck that we are about to get experience.

TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.

Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.

But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).

Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.

Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.

So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.

I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.

How do you cope with something like this?

Client: Hey new iOS 11 is coming soon, is out app compatible?
Me: Not sure, let me shift the development to new Xcode 9 and test it out.
Client: So, how was it?
Me: pretty straight forward. all seems fine a couple of bugs.

But then when trying to fold a big function to make things easier to read, you discover that Xcode 9 beta 1,2,3 & 4 DOESN'T FUCKING SUPPORT THAT YET. How on earth is this not yet implemented?

i honestly hate the ap computer science principles curriculum. we're taking an ap test soon, so for the past few weeks, we've been constantly taking practice tests.

it pisses me off so much. the questions, the criteria, it's all bs.

we have questions like "what will reduce the digital divide?" with choices like "education for low income families on computers." like, I DONT FUCKING KNOW.

frankly, I DONT FUCKING CARE. giving electronics to people who cant afford it is great and all, BUT IT DOESNT INVOLVE ANYTHING ABOUT COMPUTING.

HEY, COLLEGE BOARD, KNOWING IF AN ALGORITHM IS TECHNICALLY AN "ABSTRACTION" DOESNT FUCKING MATTER. WHAT MATTERS IS THAT I CAN IDENTIFY WHATS MORE EFFICIENT, WHERE A BUG IS, CONCEPTS INVOLVED IN PROGRAMS, THINGS LIKE THAT.

NOT IF DNS IS SIMILAR IN STRUCTURE TO THE US POSTAL SYSTEM.

god i hope whoever wrote this gets hit in the head by a github server that was dropped from the 2^8th floor.

Developing a notification API, sends emails to subscribers, email API can take only 100 IDs at once, so partitioned the email list and send mails in blocks of 100.

Forgot to reset the list after every block, so each new partition got appended to the existing list and kept going on.

Ran it against a test DB, which was recently refreshed with near-prod data !!! Thousands of emails went out of the app server in one shot and everybody receiving numerous duplicate emails. Especially the ones in the very first partition.

Got an incident raised by the CEO himself reg the flurry of emails. But, things were out of our hands, quite literally. All emails are queued up in the exchange server.

Called up the exchange server team, purged​ the queued emails. No other emails were sent/received during this whole episode.

Thanks to Iterables.partition in the present day.

(I'll give some context before the rant: I'm part if the IT department of a manufacturing company (actually I'm 1/2 of the department), and all the applications (old an new - except the ones used on production line) used in the company are my responsibility, that including most of databases too... Also, English isn't my native language so there will be some words or phrases that I'll probably write wrong... Sorry for that, if there are any corrections, I'll be glad to hear them)

So...

There will be an implementation of new "control point" on the "shipping department" which consists on a electromechanical equipment controlled by a PLC. And despite the original concept was a collaboration between 2 departments (we, IT, and Production Control), I was never taken in consideration about anything of the project... To be fair, I forget about its existence until two weeks ago.

So, a few days I learned that there are a huge delay regarding the original deadline (mainly because the supplier was delayed with the delivery of their system), and since two weeks (less, actually, because some holydays in between) I'm learning how to integrate that "P.o.S" into an existing application on a PC using a serial communication (not the main problem, as I've done that before... With another brand of PLC's) while avoiding buying any additional software (to get the communication done and in a easy way) and that sort of things... But discovering in the process that it will be necessary to acquire such additional SW in order to finish the job ASAP.

When suddenly I get the "news" that it's almost all my duty (and responsibility) to meet the original deadline, because it doesn't matter how the other departments screw all the schedule, it's the job of IT to get the shit done in time... And what is worst: they didn't said that in such straight manner, no, the implied it while making a quick test with the general manager.

I mean, WTF? Besides doing a "respectable" number of "user support" activities in a dialy basis, I also need to manage the activities of other departments? And also fix their screw ups on a schedule that I just learned days before?

And also there is a coworker (one of whom screwed up) that, almost every time she see me, is asking "how much until you'll finish?"

As I read on a meme years ago: "please, give patience, because if you give strength, I'll need bail money too..."

Damn... I don't know of the benefits of this work are worth all this nonsense

What is it with devs (not all, by any means!) who don't understand networks or basic computer operation? I'm not talking about anything complex, but things like the dev who asked if his IP address could be whitelisted so he could remote in from home. We asked what his public IP address is and he said 10.0.0.27.

Or the new dev who started and said her laptop camera didn't work and logged a ticket, only to be asked if she had the camera cover open or closed and said, "oh, that's what that lever is for."

Don't get me wrong - many devs and sysadmins and IT people of all fields are excellent. And there are some who are crap in every field. This is no rant about devs in general, just *these* crap devs that I can only throw my hands in the air and think, well, they scored ok in the SQL test.

SCStudentRant?

I have a subj called "Fundaments of Operative Systems" (or something along those lines), and I have 2 crappy teachers, one for the theory classes, the other for the exercise classes.
The exercise classes teacher is said to be the worst in uni and every time I think about that class I get a bit anxious because I can never do anything in it. Basically we don't get taught code in theory classes and he just comes and says "do this exercise" without explaining anything first. And when he does I still don't understand it.
I bet like 90% of us have no idea how to program in C and we need that for those classes. I hate C with a passion because of this.
In the theory classes, the teacher explains most of the things without powerpoints, and when we don't understand something (either ask about something he said or what's written in the board), he REFUSES to explain or say what's written, because he has "explained it before". He even chuckles as if it was really funny that we can't read his handwriting or just didn't listen because we were writting things down OH MY GOD. So most of the times when I copy things from the boards and then look at them at home I'm like "what the hell is this, this doesn't make any sense, what did he even write" (has some word that looks like what he wrote with ?? around it)
I think they wanna watch us fail. I really do.
I kinda understand the theory classes, but half the test is writing code. How am I gonna write code if I don't understand it? I have a work for that subj to deliver until monday but I can't make it work because I don't know the code I have to write. Damn it all to hell jesus christ

Additional note: they're both in their 60s and should be retiring not long from now so maybe that's why they act so carelessly.
Love the uni, not so much some of the teachers

The "unit" in unit test does not mean your ENTIRE APPLICATION. Ever heard of scope!?

I am amazed how often people write overblown test setups, mock hundreds of unrelated services, just to test one tiny bit of logic.

That bit of logic could have been a pure function.

For that pure function you could write a dead simple unit test. Given that input, I expect that output. Nothing more, nothing less. (It helps even more if the pure functions only accepts primitives, like string and numbers, or very simple immutable value objects).

No I don't care that the service is used by another service, as your mocked interaction also doesn't test the service as a whole but you just assume the happy case most of the time anyway. You want to test the entire application? Let's not use unit tests for that but let's use a different kind of test for that (integration test, functional tests, e2e-tests).

If you write code in a way that easily allows for unit testing, your need to mock goes away.

I'm finally writing unit tests consistently thanks to a simple file organization decision.

I'm not doing pure TDD, but at least I'm writing the tests immediately after writing a module, and I make sure they run ok.

What I'm doing is Instead of putting the test files in a "tests" dir at the root of the project, I have the tests right next to the source code.

So if I have a dog.x file, I also have a dog.test.x file next to it.

I'm not inventing gunpowder here. I've seen several people do this.
But it's something that is not generally made a default or advised to do.
Like I said; test frameworks in general go with the classic "tests" dir.

But for me this is day and night in whether I write the tests or not.

Which makes sense. Imagine the classic scenario of the "tests" dir, and you just created a file deep into a hierarchy, let's say src/lib/console/windows/dog.x

This means that if you want to write tests for that, you need to make sure the hierarchy tests/lib/console/windows/dog.test.x exists

If the test file already exists, but you want to access both files, you need to traverse deep for each.

Also, it's actually harder to keep track which files have unit tests and which do not.

Meanwhile, if the test files are next to the source, all these problems disappear.

That doesn't mean there are no other challenges with testing, like testing untestable things, like system calls or http requests, but there are ways to deal with that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

So I am finally plunging into continuous integration. If I make one more deploy script mistake, I've lost enough time to merit having learned a better solution than bash scripting calling git and rhc and py files I wrote. I have failing tests that are failing because they weren't updated after the million and a half urgent changes in the past 2 months, so it's time to act like I am a TDD fanatic and write the tests correctly. So much work. All from me listening to the constant req changes, listening to the urgency, letting non-devs get under my skin if you will. I'm optimistic in all the wrong places - I think I can write that by end of day let's try it. I'm lazy in the wrong places - I think that I can write that test later, because all I changed was XYZ (which took all night but I said I'd get it as close as possible didn't I?). And I think these handful of bash scripts are good enough to make sure I run tests? But remember, I didn't write the tests or I didn't go back and update them. Or the tests that fail, I'm too lazy. And so much of the tests, I would need to use, idk selenium for, and damnit if I really don't want to dig for element IDs to wait for every time I need an AJAX call.

Okay wow, I really did rant here. And discredited myself a bit lol I need to ignore the wrong lazy and embrace the right lazy. Protect myself from myself and from contributors. It really is, up to me now, to rescue myself from my bad habits. Bad habits perpetuated by clients urgency every day, to change things, that should have been finalized in November if we wanted a stable flipping system in January. It feels like the blind (client) leading the blind (me, when I do dumb shit like rush features out the door half tested).

Anyway all this came out, because I have been reading about continuous integration and stumbled upon this quote. And thought someone might laugh at the anachronism like I did

A bug is born
... and it's sneaky and slimy. Mr. Senior-been-doing-it-for-ears commits some half-assed shitty code, blames failed tests on availability of CI licenses. I decided to check what's causing this shit nevertheless, turns out he forgot to flag parts of the code consistently using his new compiler defines, and some parts would get compiled while others needed wouldn't .. Not a big deal, we all make mistakes, but he rushes to Teams chat directing a message to me (after some earlier non-sensible argument about merits of cherry picking vs re-base):
Now all tests pass, except ones that need CI license. The PR is done, you can use your preferred way to take my changes.

So after I spot those missing checks causing the tests to fail, as well as another bug in yet another test case, and yet another disastrous memory related bug, which weren't detected by the tests of course .. I ponder my options .. especially based on our history .. if I say anything he will get offended, or at best the PR will get delayed while he is in denial arguing back even longer and dependent tasks will get delayed and the rest of the team will be forced to watch this show in agony, he also just created a bottleneck putting so many things at stake in one PR ..

I am in a pickle here .. should I just put review comments and risk opening a can of worms, or should I just mention the very obvious bugs, or even should I do nothing .. I end up reaching for the PM and explained the situation. In complete denial, he still believes it's a license problem and goes on ranting about how another project suffering the same fate .. bla bla bla chipset ... bla bla bla project .. bla bla bla back in whatever team .. then only when I started telling him:
These issues are even spotted by "Bob" earlier, since for some reason you just dismissed whatever I just said ..
("Bob" is another more sane senior developer in the team, and speaks the same language as the PM)
Only now I get his attention! He then starts going through the issues with me (for some reason he thinks he is technical enough to get them) .. He now to some extent believes the first few obvious bugs .. now the more disastrous bug he is having really hard time wrapping his head around it .. Then the desperate I became, I suggest let's just get this PR merged for the sake of the other tasks after may be fixing the obvious issues and meanwhile we create another task to fix the bug later .. here he chips in:
You know what, that memory bug seems like a corner case, if it won't cause issues down the road after merging let's see if we need even to open an internal fix or defect for it later. Only customers can report bugs.

I am in awe how low the bar can get, I try again and suggest let's at least leave a comment for the next poor soul running into that bug so they won't be banging their heads in the wall 2hrs straight trying to figure out why store X isn't there unless you call something last or never call it or shit like that (the sneaky slimy nature of that memory bug) .. He even dismissed that and rather went on saying (almost literally again): It is just that Mr. Senior had to rush things and communication can be problematic sometimes .. (bla bla bla) back in "Sunken Ship Co." days, we had a team from open source community .. then he makes a very weird statement:
Stuff like what Richard Stallman writes in Linux kernel code reviews can offend people ..

Feeling too grossed and having weird taste in my mouth I only get in a bad hangover day, all sorts of swear words and profanity running in my head like a wild hungry squirrel on hot asphalt chasing a leaky chestnut transport ... I tell him whatever floats your boat but I just feel really sorry for whoever might have to deal with this bug in the future ..

I just witnessed the team giving birth to a sneaky slimy bug .. heard it screaming and saw it kicking .. and I might live enough to see it a grown up having a feast with other bug buddies in this stinky swamp of Uruk-hai piss and Orcs feces.

We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.

Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.

Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:

Day 1:

We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?

Day 2:

We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.

Day 3:

We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.

Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.

Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)

I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.

Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.

Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and wants to delegate all project management to this new guy.

Day 5:

End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.

Day 6:

Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

Day 7 (Today):

Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.

What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.

Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.

You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.

When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.

Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.

!rant
if you're someone who grades code, fuck you, you probably suck. Turned in a final project for this gis software construction class as a part of my master's degree (this class was fuck all easy, I had two weeks for each project, each of them took me two days). We had to pick the last project, so I submitted final project proposal that performs a two-sample KS test on some point data. Not complex, but it sounds fancy, project accepted. Easy money.

I write the thing and finish it, it works, but it doesn't have a visualization and that makes the results seem pretty lame, even though its fully functional. SO I GO OUT OF MY FUCKING WAY to add a matplotlib chart of the distribution. To do that, at the very bottom of the workflow, I define a function to chart it out because it made the code way more readable. Reminder, I didn't have to do this, it was extra work to make my code more functional.

Then, this motherfucker takes points off because I didn't define the function at the very beginning of the code... THE FUCK, DUDE? But, noobrants, it's "considered best prac--" nope, fuck you, okay? This class was so shit, not once was code style addressed in a lesson or put on any rubric - they didn't give a shit what it looked like - in fact, the whole class only used arcpy (and the csv mod once), they didn't teach us shit about anything except how to write geoprocessing scripts (in other words, how to read arcGIS docs about arcpy) and encouraged us to write in fucking pythonwin. And now, when the class is fucking over, you decide to just randomly toss this shit in, like it was a specific expectation this whole time? AND you do this when someone has gone out of their way to add functionality? Why punish someone who does extra work because that extra work isn't perfect? Literally, my grade would have been better without the visualization.

I'm not even mad at my grade - it was fine - I just hate inconsistency in grading practices and the random raising and lowering of expectations depending on how some grader's coffee tasted that morning. I also hate punishing people for doing more - it's this kind of shit that makes people A) wanna rip their eyeballs out, and B) never do anything more than the basic minimum expectation to avoid extra unwanted attention. If you want your coders to step up and actually put work in to make things the best they can be, yell at a grader to reward extra work and not punish it.

Another day, another company that doesn’t live up to its own hype.

This time interviewing for a company that only want people who are willing to start with the language they currently know but learn other programming languages and not shy away from new things.

Brilliant, I’m up for that. I love learning and want to be at a place that values learning. I’ve got 20+ years of experience and I’ve learnt all sorts in that time to stay relevant. Currently I’m a c# dev, but I’ve worked on projects using JavaScript & Typescript, Angular, React etc. Done front end and back end, taught myself mongo and architecture. Point is that I have a proven track record of learning.

To cut a long story short, they give me a .net test. Nothing special about it. I have a 4 hour chat. And a week later I’m rejected because I don’t do Python. WTF?!

I thought this place was all about allowing people to learn if they were willing, not about what they know right now. I’m calling bullshit.

So, rant!

So, global-huge-paradigm-shift project moving forward. Lots and lots of architects of multiple sites world-wide, stakeholders and business peeps and sub-corp manager and head-of-fucking-everything-of-multi-billion-dollar-CEO involved with different amounts of energy and passion.

Huge amount of money involved. Not only for the multi-year project endeavour but also in licensing costs for the years and years to come.

It's a big deal for the corporation.

And it's clowns everywhere. Leadership, project leads, technical project leads, architects. Am I one of them? I don't think so because everyone is mad at me. Since I cause trouble. Since I tend to say that I don't give a FUCK about the product being a Gartner Visionary player if you can't test the fucker properly...

Last week I attended a workshop in USA (I live in Europe) regarding this change which left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I am so far away from my comfort zone.

To these people (me?) get payed for this work? Is this really relevant? Why the FUCK did I need to go to a different continent? "The "Core team" need to be on site". Yeah, right. Fuck you Mr Project Leader, I can tell you are far, far away of being on-top of this thing...

Pointless.

It's pointless.

But I guess this is why you get payed.

Work.

Tomorrow is Tuesday and I think I will raise my hand yet again and explain to all I meet that I see HUGE risks with this project as it goes along right now. We kind of make things and that has to, you know, work. NOT making things for 1 hour is... well, that is really, really bad.

I give this project ten percent chance of succeeding above the set thresholds for all different areas/functionality. (I am sure the fuckers will alter the thresholds to show off a "successful project". Fuckers.

FUUCCKKKK!! I need to hit smth. Or rant..

So that flaky ec2 issue.. These ec2s act as a shared environment for multiple apps. Our app is one of them. I have no access to those ec2s at all.

What I have access to is my app and some monitoring. Now the app randomly starts lagging while nearly idling. At the same random times monitoring stops completely and doesn't come back up. This happens to random app instances at random times.

Reached out to infra support, managed to get attention from the big boys [mgmt]. Today we got the fix deployed. I test it out -- problem persists.

I find this behaviour somewhat familiar. Managed to get some server stats from infra folks. Apparently cpu% is high as well as load avg [cpu queue]. Bingo! I know how to fix it!

So I write a long comment w/ all the commands and all the 'if that, do this'. Send it to one of the infra technitians

and I get a reply: 'we will apply cpu usage limitations to fix the issue'

wait... Cpu% limitations will do nothing but highlight the underlying problem...

'no, instances have high cpu utilisation which is causing those lags. We will limit cpu resources and it will be fixed'

oh ffs... Cpu utilization and cpu queue are VERY different things.. I tried explaining that to them like 7-9 times. And all I get is:

'yes, cpu utilization is the problem. We will limit it and solve the problem'

I would surely escalate all of this through higher channels if only I could get my hands on those ec2s and have a proof. But that is not happening and I'm forced to sit back and watch them break things even worse until they are out of options and mark my query as 'wont fix'....

Fuck that's frustrating....

*thinking to myself* so I've read about that new vulnerability 2 days ago that allows one to escape from docker container to the host... What if <...>

Trying to switch my job. Applied for a well known company. Gave an interview today. I don't fucking get the obsession of these developer recruiters so fixated on data structures and algorithms. I know it's a massive part of computer science but guess there is no fucking room left to innovate in there. There are legitimate researcher teams working for implementation of these barebones inside system foundations. No general software developer gives a fuck about this piece of shit discipline of study. You wanna know why they propagate this as the panacea to test people because it's fucking easy. Give a project to somebody as interview procedure, it'll take time to bring out an interesting problem and an interesting solution to that. Sorry to say but all these data structure enthusiasts are nothing better than board game enthusiasts.

Also why can't you refer existing solutions to create your solution. I've seen some good problems which actually require you to think. But again those are heavy and can't be tested so you're left with reversing a fucking linked list with O(1) auxillary space. Fuck me ig.

Moreover, what the fuck is wrong with the moral policing internet crowd. Its so sad. I've hardly seen anybody rant about this piece of shit system put in place to push the absolute dead-end nutcases up the ladder. Every other search for it returns a Quora link with some Indian guy complaining about his interviews and in the comments you have the same scholars sitting in their data structure throne imparting knowledge about how data structure holds the fabric of reality together.

I don't hate data structures and algorithms as a subject. It is cool and quite extensive but once you try to make that as a metric of all the knowledge in the world, you've lost my drift. Maybe I'm just angry with the state of things. Maybe I'm just angry with token Quora crowd.

i was hired to join a team of old devs (40+) in an unnamed European country "yay goodbye 3rd world it's time to enjoy the quality of life" assist with enhancing already existing software and creating new solutions.
prior to my arrival most things were slow and super buggy, looking at the code base it shouldn't be a surprise, amateur hour everyone, logic implemented that is not needed, comment driven development, last time code review was done back in 1996. lots of anti patterns.
i swear there is a for loop that does nothing but it loops through a 100+ elements list, trunk based development with tfs since git is "not really needed"
test projects are not there.
>enter me an educated fool, with genuine passion for the craft and somehow a decent amount of knowledge.
>spent the last year fixing stuff educating people on principles and qualities.
> countless hours of training and explaining. team is showing cooperation, a new requirement comes in to develop with react.
> tear my ass creating reusable shit and self explanatory code with proper naming etc using git with feature branching, monday is first deployment day.
> today a colleague was working on an item submit a pull request and self approve it
> look at the code..... WTF the dumb fuck copied and pasted the whole code from different kendo components but somehow managed to refractor the name to test component, commented out all the code that he didn't use did the api call directly from the component, has 2 useeffects that depends on the a fucking text box changes for no reason, no redux implementation, the acceptance criteria is not achieved, and it doesn't work it just look right.
> first world country shit cannot scold, cannot complain, lead by example.
>asked him why you did this, the response was yeah probably i shouldn't have done that, i really didn't understand anything in the training but didn't want to waste time!!!!
> rest of the team created a different styled disaster with different flavors they don't even name their shit the same way.

fellow developers I'm stuck in a spaceship with a bunch of imposters, seriously i never cried in my entire life now I'm teary and on the verge of a break down.
talk with management "improving needs time" and offers me to join a yoga session to release the stress as if reaching nirvana would deliver shit on monday.
i really don't know what do is this a rant, is this a cry for help, I'm not sure, any advice is welcomed.

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

The agency I own built a WordPress plugin for a client using a freelancer developer. The client, out of ambivalence, withheld information that would have drastically changed the design of the plugin, but by the time we found out it was much to late to start over. The developer moved overseas in the middle of it all and from then on was not very responsive to communications about the project which delayed things by months. I tried to find a replacement developer but nobody else had experience with the third-party API. The live version of the API ended up not being able to support what we were trying to get it to do with the plugin even though the test version of the API was fine and the vendor was unhelpful. And because we spent so much time and money on the plugin, we weren’t able to even begin on another part of the project. The client complained of over $30,000 in lost revenue due to these issues. Complete fail all around. I’m never doing another custom software project again. It’s all just website design from here.

Working on an Android app for a client who has a dev team that is developing a web app in with ember js / rails. These folks are "in charge" of the endpoints our app needs to function. Now as a native developer, I'm not a hater of a web apps way of doing things but with this particular app their dev teams seems to think that all programming languages can parse json as dynamically as javascript...

Exhibit A:

- Sample Endpoint Documentation
* GetImportantInfo
* Params: $id // id of info to get details of
* Endpoint: get-info/$id
* Method: GET
* Entity Return {SampleInfoModel}

- Example API calls in desktop REST client
* get-info/1
- response
{
"a" : 0,
"b" : false,
"c" : null
}
* get-info/2
- response
{
"a" : [null, "random date stamp"],
"b" : 3.14,
"c" : {
"z" : false,
"y" : 0.5
}
}
* get-info/3
- response
{
"a" : "false" // yes as a string
"b" : "yellow"
"c" : 1.75
}

Look, I get that js and ruby have dynamic types and a string can become a float can become a Boolean can become a cat can become an anvil. But that mess is very difficult to parse and make sense of in a stack that relies on static types.

After writing a million switch statements with cases like "is Float" or "is String" from kotlin's Any type // alias for java.Object, I throw my hands in the air and tell my boss we need to get on the phone with these folks. He agrees and we schedules a day that their main developer can come to our shop to "show us the ropes".

So the day comes and this guy shows up with his mac book pro and skinny jeans. We begin showing him the different data types coming back and explain how its bad for performance and can lead to bugs in the future if the model structure changes between different call params. He matter of factually has an epiphany and exclaims "OHHHHHH! I got you covered dawg!" and begins click clacking on his laptop to make sense of it all. We decide not to disturb him any more so he can keep working.

3 hours goes by...

He burst out of our conference room shouting "I am the greatest coder in the world! There's no problem I can't solve! Test it now!"

Weary, we begin testing the endpoints in our REST clients....

His magic fix, every single response is a quoted string of json:

example:
- old response
{
"foo" : "bar"
}
- new "improved" response
"{ \"foo\" : \"bar\" }"

smh....