Me: *puts small piece of tape over webcam*

NSA: Okay guys, shut it all down. No way we can record from the microphone, log keys, access the file system, USB devices, network data or watch the screen. He did the tape.

My morning:

Me: Why did you just delete the failing unit tests?

Intern: I debugged it for a while and found one of the other developers broke it with his recent changes. I couldn't fix it.

Me: Did you let him know he broke it?

Intern: No.

Me: So you just deleted it and decided to pretend the feature isn't broken?

Intern: ... No ... I mean ... well you told us yesterday we needed to have all the tests passing.

(I NEED a stress ball people)

Wife: I got a Roomba for Christmas!

Dev Husband: oh.

Dev Husband *hours later* : Did you know it has an MQTT interface accessible over IP? I already wrote a NodeJS app to track if we need to empty the bin.

How did I learn how to program?

I didn't. I'm still learning ☺.

We will never be done learning.

That's the beauty of it all.

At my study in the first year we had a Linux course and at the end we would all be graded.

Everyone was nervous as fuck except for me.

We had to go in one by one and everyone came back with this 'well that was damn close' face. Apparently the teacher was quite strict.

Then it was my turn.

It took about half an hour and we did the following:

- talk about Linux and the philosophy behind it
- talk about compiling programs
- talk about Linux servers
- talk about what distro's we'd used
- talk about DE's and which ones we preferred

- actual grading/showing my assignments: 'nah I believe you, you'll get a good mark!'

So I basically got the best mark with hardly showing anything because the teacher knew I could do it and rather just had an interesting convo with me 😁

oooops, we did it again

We were learning to create a login system in mysql and php when one of my classmates showed me and the teacher his code.

He did a select all on the users table and looped through everything with a foreach.

We both tried to explain him why that wasn't the best method but he just refused to accept that.

He turned out a designer.

By the way, please never do it his way 😬

Senior: Why did you refactor those ten files?

Junior: There was a method copy-pasted in every one of them, so I moved it to a utils class.

Senior: Don't you know we will have to test all of those changed classes again? Please, rollback!

Junior: ok.

... two days later ...

Senior: Why did you just copy-paste that method? Don't you know it's bad practice?

User: We have been dealing with this bug for a month now! How come nobody has fixed it?

Dev: Who did notify about this issue?

User: You’re not listening we have been dealing with this for a MONTH!

Dev: When this issue first occurred did you tell anyone?

User: Yes!

Dev: Who?

User: …. Ok I don’t remember but I know I said something to someone. Anyway it doesn’t matter, your job is IT so how come this isn’t fixed?

Dev: Did you have an email? Ticket number? Teams message? Any record of where this was dropped?

User: I think you’re missing the point. We haven’t been able to do out jobs for A MONTH. We’ve just been sitting around completely helpless. We’ve been trying to figure a system using paper and pencil to replace the electronic one but it’s too complicated. How come this wasn’t fixed the second it happened?

Dev: It’s hard to respond to an issue if it’s not brought to out attention.

User: Ok but we are too busy to create a ticket! We have a million things to do and we can’t do any of them because your app doesn’t work! We’ve been sitting here telling each other how terrible this system is AND IT HAS BEEN A MONTH.

Dev: …. Yeah I got that

My company contracted a 3rd party to do an internal system for us...
We only knew about it when it was almost done and we got the code... Oooooo boy.... What a fucking shit they did and got paid for...

They have a encryptPassword() and decryptPassword() functions...

What they do you may ask?
Well...

Encrypt: for loop that reverse the string and base64 it 5 times...

Decrypt: the opposite...

That's how they store passwords....

Our intern snapped at a company meeting when they where talking about maintaining it 😂😂

Person: *glances at my grades*

Me: Here we go again.

Person: I thought you were smart. How did you manage to get a C?!

It was a C (programming language) quiz. 🙄

Me: Hey, my laptop (with stickers on it) is in for repair, can't get any work done.
Friend: Oh, that sucks, we going to be delayed launching our app!
... few days later ...
Friend: Hey, did u get it back yet?
Me: They ended up giving me a brand new one cause they couldn't repair it.
Friend: That's awesome man, you got lucky!
Me: F*@$ that, I LOST MY STICKERS!

FBI: FUCK!! We just lost our connection to all those civilian routers we were monitoring
FBI IT Department: Did you try turning them off and back on?
FBI:

Devs regularly complain that our skills are not valued enough and that people think what we do is easy.

But, we don't really help the cause when we run around casually claiming to be "full stack" and not turning down work that clearly isn't in our area of competence.

We act more like Victorian amateur scientists.

Every seen a "full stack" doctor when you go to hospital? "Brain to feet---I can do it all."

OK, we have general practitioners, but they are really the BAs of the medical world. When it comes to getting into the weed, everyone specializes.

Full stack lawyer? "Hey, you did an excellent job of dealing with my house purchase. I've just been accused of murder. Can you represent me?"

While we continue to say that we can provide a high quality "full stack" experience I think we are signaling that this stuff *is* easy.

Storytime!

Manager: Hey fullstackchris, the maps widget on our app stopped working recently...

Dev: (Skeptical, little did he know) Sigh... probably didn't raise quota or something stupid... Logs on to google cloud console to check it out...

Google Dashboard: Your bill.... $5,197 (!!!!!!) Payment method declined (you think?!)

Dev: 😱 WTF!?!?!! (Calls managers) Uh, we have HUGE problem, charges for $5000+ in our google account, did you guys remove the quota limits or not see any limit reached warnings!?

Managers: Uh, we didn't even know that an API could cost money, besides, we never check that email account!

Dev: 🤦‍♂️ yeah obviously you get charged, especially when there have literally been millions of requests. Anyway, the bigger question is where or how our key got leaked. Somewhat started hammering one of the google APIs with one of our keys (Proceeds to hunt for usages of said API key in the codebase)

Dev: (sweating 😰) did I expose an API key somewhere? Man, I hope it's not my fault...

Terminal: grep results in, CMS codebase!

Dev: ah, what do we have here, app.config, seems fine.... wait, why did they expose it to a PUBLIC endpoint?!

Long story short:

The previous consulting goons put our Angular CMS JSON config on a publicly accessible endpoint.

WITH A GOOGLE MAPS API KEY.

JUST CHILLING IN PLAINTEXT.

Though I'm relieved it wasn't my fault, my faith in humanity is still somewhat diminished. 🤷‍♂️

Oh, and it's only Monday. 😎

Cheers!

There is a group of ladies who work in the accounting department at my job who have made it their mission to decorate the cubicle of whoever has a birthday on a given day. They come in at 6 am on someones birthday and decorate, leaving a mess of balloons and streamers, which is a nice surprise the first time it happens (they do it every year). Well, we in the IT office decided it would be fun to booby trap one of our cubicles so that when our birthday rolled in, they would receive a surprise of their own. So we set up a webcam as a motion detector, and had the computer speakers turned up as loud as possible, so that when motion was detected, the honorable Admiral Akbar would yell "It's A Trap!". We succeeded in scaring the pants off of them, and also annoying them because the sound did not stop until the program was exited, so they had to listen to it the entire time they did their setup. It was priceless xD

Boss: Our customer's data is not syncing with XYZ service anynmore!

Me: Ok let me check. Did the tokens not refresh? Hmm the tokens are refreshing fine but the API still says that we do not have permissions. The scopes are fine too. I'll use our test account... its... cancelled? Hey boss, why is our XYZ account cancelled?

Boss: Oh, "I haven’t paid since I didn’t think we needed it" (ad verbatim)

😐

New boss rant here!

Boss: Can you give me an estimate for a new project that we willbe running?
Dev: Oh yes I have already calculated at approximately three months.
Boss: Thats great start on it!

3 months laters....

Boss: Why did it take so much? I feel like our productivity sucks.

Dev:...

Needed to download all my music from Google music, their download manager is crap (on ubuntu)

Decided to use their API, found a gem that works perfectly. Started downloading it.

Told my GF how I wanted to code something cool but gound someone else did, her response:

So why doesn't google make something ?
Me:They did, but it sucks in linux, and they have their API's which work fine.

And how are normal people supposed to make it work then?
Me: well it works, jut have to install this and run the CLI with.... wait.. am I not normal?

I guess we are not normal in the eyes of some people.

Getting annoyed by the framework made by school which we had to use. We werent allowed to use Laravel or other frameworks.

What did I do with a classmate, we expanded on the schools framework. Added a templating engine, improved routing, made a query builder and a few other things before startimg the real project. 4 weeks of building the framework to build the application in a day.
Where others were still using the schools framework were strugglimg and not able to make it.

*We colleagues were cursing Valentine's week*

Team Lead : Committed?
Me: No, I am single.
TL: *confused look* Did you committed that code?
Me: ohh yes! I raised the merge request as well.
TL: Ok. I will review it. *Moves away smiling inside*
Me: *looking at screen* *crying inside*

Companies can't use free software?

Well, I just forced everyone to use Nextcloud instead of Dropbox and Google Drive. People did not like it as first but the quickly realized how good it was.

We also moved from skype, teams and slack to matrix.
I am glad that matrix-synapse is so easy to install nowadays!

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

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

Yesterday, the whole dev team went out to lunch and we ate a lot and we drank a lot until we all got drunk! Since we are paid for the number of hours we work, we all decided to go back to the office and work.

WE WERE DRUNK WORKING! Drunk coding ftw

Result: The server is down right now because someone fucked it up and I think i ruined my code yesterday because I wasn't really myself. The whole team was crazy as fuck. One of us just came back from Poland so we were drunk and high from all the polish chocolate we ate.

I hope they fix the server so I can check what kind of bullshit the drunken me did yesterday o.O

"Everyone must attend this meeting. It's really important that you all attend".

Me: *walks into meeting with other co-workers

Host: So what should we discuss today?

Co-worker 1: We can discuss how we did on the recently completed project.

Host: We'll save that for next meeting.

Co-worker 2: Any strategic plans for upcoming project?

Host: That too, for next meeting.

Me: Black Panther.

Host: That was actually a great movie. I saw it over the weekend. Who else saw it? ....

Me (in my thoughts): Just wow! 😂

PS: I still haven't seen that movie.

Company: we care about work/life balance (as long as shit gets done)

Company: we care about mental well-being (except when shit has to be done "now!")

Company: we help each other (we push work around until someone finally do it)

Company: management is here to help you do your work (as long as you don't ask them to help you to solve a real problem)

Company: we are agile (except we have more sub-processes than ever)

Company: we only hire best (and then put them in the team of morons)

Company: we are customer centric (that's why we are delivering bugged features)

Company: we constantly rise the bar (deliver more shit in shorter time)

... did I forget about something?

I got my first own office... We did it. We just painted our mini Iranian office in two nights and we about to code it,has 5 min distance to our college and it's a golden opportunity to work and study at the same time.

Project manager, a few months ago: "why did you do this task? It's all wrong. It's a backend task, not a frontend task so you shouldn't have done it. Don't do it again."

PM, today, regarding the same task in a different project: "why didn't you do this task? The project isn't complete without it. It isn't right. You should have done it."

Are you fucking serious? If we do it it's wrong, if we don't do it it's wrong too. So why should I bother? Seriously, fuck you you piece of shit.

So the tax authorities in the Netherlands have this slogan that roughly translates to:
"We can't make it fun, but we can make it easier."

I'm not sure how this is going to be easy for me. This arrived in the mail today.
Even worse this is a fuck up from them. They are saying our company did not do it's taxes but when we log in their online portal we can see that we did them. But they are saying that they don't see it in their system.

Who build that system?

Trying to stay calm when they are claiming I own them more taxes then my company has earned in a year.

I did not have enough sleep for this drama.

By the way how about we save some trees and don't send 30 letters on 1 day.

My very first rant. I will try to make it count!

Recently my company had restructured with new GM who fired those who he didn't like and hired those who he did.

All ok I guess. And then...

We did a project for a big sportswear brand, interactive installation using WebSocket. My team developed the server with game engine and we also developed "shell front-end" with example code how to connect and interact with server.

Then we realized that our company was actually not hired by sportswear brand, rather by GM buddy-from-the-army tech vendor, who was hired by actual client.

Then, we also realized there is another company, that GM hired as freelancers, sitting at our office doing 'something'. And this 'other company' actually has same employees and address as GM's buddy company (meaning they are one entity with two names).

So.. what happened is that we get paid by party A, then we pay exactly the same amount to party B (which is actually same party A), and at the end... all our work was for free.

And then, this GM tells me I have to fire 2 developers from my team because we don't have enough business.

How did this guy even get to a position of this level?

There was this couple who were talking on the phone and neither of them would hang up,asking the other person to hang up.
So we did it for them :)

Awkward Meeting, right ?

*production is down*
Ops: At 5pm? On a Friday? *checks deploy history* God! Who did the deploy
Dev: It was a small patch, a tiny patch. It shouldn't have....
Ops: Deploy on a Friday evening?
Colleague: I didn't think it would...

Ops (on the outside) : *takes a deep breath* Its okay Dev, we can fix this. Don't worry

Me(in my mind) : for fuck sakes! Are you fucking kidding me?*** **** *** god damn it! *****

Pretty new at the job still.

-”Hey, best practice to do X?”

”Just check how we did it in previous code”

*checks whole bloody project, everything done in 500 different ways by 20 people*
*selects what seems as the best solution already used*

”Ya, you should have done X like this instead”

😒

soooo Texas froze before Hell, thought it was never going to happen but it did 🥴

Had a meeting scheduled for today, but since my employees (crucial for the meeting) do not have power I had to reschedule.

VP: I saw that you cancelled the meeting
Me: yes I did sir, my people do not have power at their homes so I decided that we can postpone it for later.

VP: Understandable, I just wanted to see if you guys were ok.

Me: yes sir, we are thank you and yourself?

The rest of the conv was standard pleasantries.

Why can't it be like this for all devs around the world?

We received an urgent email from a client this morning that needed addressed immediately. We knew it was not going to be easy or fun so we did the sensible thing and began a rock paper scissors tournament to see who would work on it.

I lost... But then we see a follow up email from my boss saying he is handling it. Win!

Fast forward 6 hours, he comes out of his office and hands me a piece of paper and says he is too busy to work on it so I need to do it before going home. The paper is the email from 8am this morning... He did absolutely nothing with it for six hours except print it because a digital copy isn't good enough I guess.

I ended up working late, got yelled at by said client, and still haven't finished the fixes.

Worst of all is that I missed part of shark week because I stayed late.

Stakeholder: There’s a bug on the site.

Me: That’s not a bug. The site is supposed to do that. Your team asked for that feature and we implemented it last summer.

SH: They did?

Me: Yes, they did.

SH: You sure it’s been like this since last summer?

Me: YES!!!

Manager: We should do X with the database

Dev: That will cause issue Y

Manager: But I read an article that said that issue Y wasn’t a problem

Dev: It did?

Manager: Well it didn’t mention issue Y

Dev: …

Oh, we don't know why it broke. I know you just did A HUGE FUCKING DATABASE SEVER UPGRADE to the server we're connected to, but no one understands this code, so can't update it to work. Can you roll back 3 VERSIONS so our application that hasn't had a code change in 11 years is optimized?

(Meeting with Client)
Client: The script you sent us is broken... It can't run... We can't test now. (Their supervisor even insinuated that I did that on purpose :/ What?!)
Asked for logs, googled for solutions. Moments later.
Client: Oh it's our server's problem.
:/

Client: "Dear Mr. I still have not received the final version yet. I had planned to send it out to my customers at the end of the week."
-------

Me (1st answer I did not give):
"Ok. I accept your statement as true, since I did not send you anything. Furthermore I respect your wish."

Me (2nd answer I did not give):
"Well I am sorry. Before today you did not once mention that there was a deadline. ASAP is not how I do things. Please do your project management."

Me (answer I gave): "Dear Client, due to a huge demand for our services we are forced to prioritise. We are doing our best to complete the project as fast as possible. Please understand however that we can not reschedule with 3 days notice. Because of technical requirements the product can be send on Friday next week. Please let us know if this works out for you. - Kind regards. Me. "

-__-""""

My team lead force pushed to master. This guys always complains when we merge PRs with wip or fixup commits and he just did it himself and tried to cover it up doing a rebase on the master branch.

Good job fucking up everyone. 👍

We want to improve the portal by making apps for it what can you do or recommend?

Well holy shit this is new you're actually asking the dev team for advice on a future project.

Normally you immediately go to a third party waste a shit ton of money and then tell us we have a week to add whatever it is into our system.

Then when we can't do it or have to delay other projects you're dragging our manager into a meeting with the CEO complaining that IT are refusing to cooperate or are holding up the project etc.

The change of heart is much appreciated but where the fuck did this come from? New year resolution?

Can we talk about changelogs for a second?

Almost every major app in the play store has changelogs like "Improving your experience" or "We did some changes to enhance your experience".
Wtf is this bullshit. Is it that hard to write the actual changes in the changelogs so that I know what got changed, huh?
Guess its kinda hard to write " We are shoving more telemetry crap down your throat" in a changelog.

Fuck sake.

BRAIN_UNCAUGHT_EXCEPTION
Could not execute "sleep()", as main thread was busy thinking about why a beautiful girl would just handle me her number.

Ok we did get on well but it was unexpected nevertheless

Thank you brain for wasting my day 👍

Had a job interview back where I want to move(2300 miles away), doing exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately it was for a senior developer, a bit over my pay grade.

First Interview: "It is above your skill level, but I like you. We will make it fit you."

Second Interview(technical): " You did super well! I will make sure to pass the good news onto the boss! I am excited to work with you soon!"

Response to my thank you email: "We decided to not persue you further for this position. We are going with someone who has more experience."

Why string me along?!?!

That just takes the damn fun out of it.

"In Python, we don't actually use commas unlike many languages. And as I mentioned last time, a tuple is a lot like a list, but it has it's differences. Oh yeeeah! Did I mention the logic behind if/else if/ and else statements?? They're sooo amazing."

I work for a "Visionary" in our org. Motherfucker will use something for five minutes and decided it's the new-hot, and off we go chasing it.

"I did a Python + AWS tutorial last night, I get it. We need to start migrating everything to Lambda today."

A week later he hits his first error message that needs more than five minutes of work to solve and we're moving to a local Haskell stack.

Published a well documented and tested API with project examples for basic use cases

- "Yeah we didn't use yours because we didn't know how to use it"
- "Did you look at the documentation or code examples?"
- "What where?"
- "In the repo you just cloned"
- "Yeah no <random guy> found a hacky way of doing what we want, his thing just works"
- "I..."

I bet some day we'll have robots tell us where bugs in our code are instantly and our kids will say "How did you ever write code without them?" And we will say "We had to use this archaic thing called Google and do research... It took forever!"

So I've been playing some DnD with friends.
And we've been working with some lego characters, whiteboard markers and plastic sheets to draw on.

But that's always a mess:
The ink was old and did not come off again for the most part
The sides of the map curled up and and made the lego character fall over
The lego characters were too big
And more...

So I thought, why not make it digital?

And so I did.
I used UWP to make a master and a client, both using the Windows Ink api to be able to draw.
Some circles with an initial served as characters, and everything was synchronized using a TCP library I wrote half a year ago.

Yesterday we tried it out.
We all (including me) were sceptical if it would work well because the 'analog' clumsy way we did it before does have a certain charm.

But at the end we were all very enthousiastic about it and we'll be using it next time too!
It's awesome to be able to create programs for your own use :D
That's why being able to program is such a great thing!

Now I need to restructure everything, make it more efficient, add a turn order display, make the map zoom- and moveable and more and more....

Well, just remembered a fuck up one of my friends and me did. Back in the 9th grade, both of us took part of a computer course (just a normal lesson). He got me into programming. So after half a year we "hacked" into the school server. Tbh it was quite simple. The server did a backup each week in a specific folder. The problem was, the backup file had no proper rights set. Everyone had access to it. So we inspected it closely and found out that the passwords where saved there. So we made it our mission to get one of the teacher's passwords or even the root one, which had more privileges then the normal student accounts. After about 2 days we managed to crack one of them (using a hash table available for download). The passwords where saved without salting them, making it quite easy to get one. Now we were sitting there, having access to a teacher's account. So we logged in and tried to figure out what to do next. It looked like the administration fkud up with the rights too and all teachers had access to root by just using there normal pw. Well, the Grand final is coming. We put a script into the startup of the server (which restarted at 4:30 AM each Friday). The only line that was written in it was "./$0|./$0&"

We never got caught. And it was a heck of fun ^^

Yesterday I received the API documentation from an external company. Over half of the endpoints are either wrong or send invalid data and even the given test requests are fucking failing.
It's a nightmare. We have to finish a website until friday and that company did nothing for 2 months and now we have 2 days left.
The sheer incompetence is too damn high.
My boss said it would have been much better if we had implemented the API on our own. Damn right.

Everyday I wake up, I just think where did humanity go wrong? What mistakes were made? How the fuck did we end up with IE? And why do people still use it?

## 4 years ago:
- Principal Architect: We are using IO1 storage type. What if we used GP2?
- Perf team: IDK, let's test it!
*we run tests*
- Perf team: results are OK, but we're exhausting Burst IO capacity, effectively hard-limiting number of tests we can run per day
- PArch: ahhh, I see. Then Gp2 is a no-go.

## 3 years ago
*PArch quits. New one is hired*
- PArch2: We are using IO1 storage type. What if we used GP2?
- Perf team: We've already tested that a while ago, results were THIS and THAT
- PArch2: I see. Let's test it again anyway
- Perf team: *wtf???*
*we run the same tests, we get the same results*
- PArch2: I see, so GP2 is a no-go.
- Perf team: *you think....? How did that thought never cross our minds, we wonder...*

## 2 years ago
*new DBA is hired*
- DBA2: We are using IO1 storage type. What if we used GP2?
- Perf team: We've already tested that a while ago, results were THIS and THAT
- PArch2: We've already tested that a while ago, results were THIS and THAT
- DBA2: I see. Let's test it anyways. I've read somewhere that GP2 might be a better bet
- PArch2: you might be right, let's do that
- Perf team: *wtf???*
*we run the same tests, we get the same results*
- DBA2: I see, so GP2 is a no-go.
- Perf team: *you think....? How did that thought never cross our minds, we wonder...*

## 1 year ago
*DBA manager left; new one was hired*
- MGMT_dba2: We are using IO1 storage type. What if we used GP2?
- ........

Should we even bother bringing up the history.....?

I lost my job 😅 tbh did me a favour. I was backend, this guy was frontend and was a typical opinionated JavaScript, magpie dev and I just did not give 2 fucks about what he thought was “amazballs” and we had a small tiff, we’ll he was arguing, I was trying to do my job and I just didn’t care enough about his feelings on the subject, forget what it was about but I think it was trivial. But anyway, I was let go soon after 😅

Telling the customer that they are breaching guidelines.

"This cannot be against the guidelines. We always did it that way"
...
Ehm. You did what?

Client: We want to onboard people with sign-up wizard just like (Massive Industry Leader) so remove the sign-up process from the app.

1 week of development later...

Client: We need to take photos of their information, but we think its easier to take photos on the phone so once they sign-up link then to the phone.
Me: How will they get the apps if it not in the app stores?
Client: Get the apps approved for the app store! duh!

2 weeks later... 4 failed app submissions..

Client: Would it be easier if we just add the sign-up on the app?
Me: Yes... like it was 3 weeks ago?
Client: Yes! Why did we remove it?
Me: You did in an effort to be more like (Major Industry Leader)
Client: ....but we're nothing like them! Change it back!
Me: >•<!!!

I have to fire my client...

I learn programming cause it was in my genes.

My father was a programmer himself but, he died back in 2005 of September when I was 5 years old. So I guess I program to continue what he did. He was in the process of making a game but, failed to do it. He had concept art created and even mad characters. When I get real good, I plan to program that game for him and dedicate it to him.

I started programming on a website called Scratch back in 2010 (in think), which I saw a Ted Talk on, and started from there. I use KhanAcademy as I am home schooled and when they introduced the programming tutorials to that website, I was immediately hooked and it was just the beginning.
I used Scratch for three years and I wanted to know more, so I did research and discovered a program called Stencyl and started making a game I made from scratch into that format.

I used that program and when 2013 hit, moved to a new church and met an old friend and all of sudden we started making games together and we relesed our first game on Scratch called Minecart Chaos.
That took three months to create. He did all the art and I, of course, did the programming. The three months later we were at it again making a new game called EMP Restaurant Rampage. That also took three months to create. one of his friends composed the music. We are now in the process on making a new game and I am now tasked to make the music. So that is my history.

Some days before my graduation me and my roommate were invited for an interview. We arrived at mutually agreed time.
The interviewer asked nothing about our coding knowledge. just some personal questions. after a brief conversation he started to explain the job responsibility to us. It seemed we were both hired. We were happy that we are getting full time jobs before graduation. And then he asked us if we can commit to stay in the company for year. We both agreed if the terms are good.

After that he tried to hire us for
$125 USD per month.
we did not spent another minute bargaining with him. We just left saying that we will let you know.
We were shocked.

Nowhere near my worst co-worker, but still funny.

The Dev team were all in a separate glass walled room with the business & support staff out in a bigger room outside. As is our wont, we wore headphones while working a lot.

One of the non technical folks asked me why and I said it helps me focus by keeping out distracting noises.

"Oh, I thought you were listening to code or something"

😮

It was kind of an eye-opener as to how little clue a person sitting just 4 meters away had of what I did or how I did it. And actually it helped explain some confusing interactions...

>First grade
Teacher: This is a Keyboard, this is a mouse... blah blah blah
Now play Mario!

There was also some space racing game or something installed on the computers. We weren't allowed to play that game, so of course, we did what we weren't allowed to. It was always fun to sneak in a game when the teacher wasn't looking or wasn't around.

We were also taught MS Paint. I "painted" a squirrel in one of the lab sessions, the teacher loved it and showed it to everyone. Everyone applauded and then I became the MS Paint Guru (for them). Fun times..

We have a huge codebase, built during the last 10 years, with a lot of problems caused by legacy dependencies. We are trying to modernize this gradually but it is very challenging because we have a lot of features to maintain and test coverage is low.

Today, a guy hired three days ago just proposed to rebuilt everything from scratch stating that he did the same thing in his personal project, so it wouldn't take too much to develop what we need.

Manager gently invited him having a quick call. I would pay to listen that conversation.

It is once again that time of year when we say farewell to our current interns and say hello to a brand new batch.

The two groups overlap for a few days. During this time the old interns show the new interns the ropes, while the mentors silently weep in the lunchroom having realized that nothing that they've said over the last 12 months has had any effect whatsoever.

Some choice quotes:
---
New Intern: It says 'uncaught exception'.
Old Intern: Oh don't worry that will fix itself on production.
---
OI: Did you pull the code?
NI: Yeah, but I have all these weird brackets everywhere... [merge conflict]
OI: Oh yeah that happens sometimes, just delete them.
---
NI: It says "push to master rejected". [we enforce code reviews]
OI: Ohh that means the server is broken. You should tell someone, they have to reboot it.
---
NI: Where did that file save to? [we use ONLY macOS and Linux]
OI: C:\Users\<your name>\My Documents\...
---
OI: You can use either pgAdmin or MySQL Workbench. I like Workbench better but I couldn't get it to work, it kept giving me errors.
---
And of course...
---
OI: No, we don't use Linux. We use CentOS.
---

I did the math today. Only 35 more years and I can retire.

"The client has reported {some problem}. Do we know what has caused it?"
Dev: "{explanation} is the cause"
"Ok, was that caused by a recent change?"
Dev: "No, the system has been like that since the start"
"Ok, but who did it? Was it some recent work?"
Dev: "The system has been like that since the start"
Constant fucking blame and finger pointing.
Fuck off.

User: Hey, we got a big issue with one of your tools. One of your pages isn't loading.
Me: Ok, so when did this happen?
User: We don't know? Its been like that for a long time though, so we thought it was normal 😃
Me: ....ok. So do you know what data is supposed to appear?
User: Uhhh we're not sure as well. Since, you know, its been like that for a while.

Just great 😑

during code review...
peer: "you should pass this variable, and extract the logger from it"
me: "why? it is a 3 line logging function. why not pass the logger instance?"
peer: "because that is our best practice. It is the way we do things"
me: "why is it a best practice?"
peer: "because it is. We use it everywhere!"
me: "No we don't. And I still don't understand why is this a best practice. can you explain?"
peer: gives ups, did not look at the mr, and was not going to.

mr stays open. probably forever.

Conversation between my husband and myself.

H: I ordered a game for the switch last week. It was delayed by USPS, and it looks like I got a partial refund due to it being late.
Moi: That's your mail privilege at work.
H: Did you really just make a mail pun? *Snerk*
Moi: This is why we work. ♥️

Dealing with other technical professionals who cannot think outside their respective boxes.

Here is an example.

A QA (who is very good at her job) said this...

Her:
“We need to get one customer who is willing to pay us a lot of money to make the features they want!”

Me:
“But you realize we are a SaaS company and that means we need lots of customers and constant growth”

Her:
“No, we need to find a customer who is willing to pay us, like a million, to make the features they want. Then we make them for that customer. Then we do that again.”

Me:
“We sell software to small businesses, none of them have a million dollars to pay us, and even if they did then why wouldn’t they build it themselves?

Her:
“Well, when I worked for my last company this is what we did...”

Me:
“So you worked for a contracting company who built software for individual companies. We are not that type of company. We are a SaaS company.”

Her:
“It’s the same thing”

Me:
~Facepalm~

As a software developer and entrepreneur it frustrates me when everyone think everything is the same.

You’ll here things like...

“All we need is to get lucky with one big hit and then we will ride that wave to success, just like Facebook or Amazon!”

Holy fucking shit balls, how stupid can you be!

FB and AZ run thousands of tests a day to see what works. They do not get “lucky”. They dark launched FB messenger with thousands of messages and then rolled it out to their internal team first, they did not get lucky!

Honestly though, I can’t blame them. Most people just want a good job that pays. They aren’t looking to challenge their assumptions.

Personally I know I will be in situations again where my pride, my assumption, my fears are realized and crushed by the market place and I do not want to live in a world of willful ignorance.

I’d rather get it right than feel good.

"Do the back up later."

Well, I wouldn't be worried about it if we did have any for last 4 years!

20+ years ago we got a contract to replace an old home grown system for managing rented equipment for a company with offices in two countries with a new standard system.

I was tasked with building a few addon modules to handle import and reporting that the standard system lacked.

Over the course of 8 months and multiple trips to their head office for on premises development along side their people that knew how it should work (there was a lot of waiting for info so it was not 8 months of actual work) we finally was ready to present the finished solution.

After about one hour of demonstration their boss questioned why we did not demonstrate the connection to their corporate group accounting system ...

“Corporate group accounting?”

After some confused discussion it turns out that in one of the first meetings the sales person had they had mentioned this accounting system and that all accounting info was to be exported there.

This requirement was never listed in the specifications we got and looking into it it turned out that the standard system did not support such exports at all.

In the end we had to throw it all away as it proved impossible to get that info out of the system (which was not of our design).

We barely avoided having to repay all fees as their people had approved the specification but standing there without a clue to what he was asking for was a very scary experience, thinking “how could we miss this?”

Recruiter story.. hilarious stuff..

I have an interview in next fifteen minutes and was setting up for it.

Recruiter calls me to remind me of the same.

I ask her to tell me who the interviewer would be, because she did not mention in the invite and also did not respond when I asked her over the email.

Her response: sure, wait a minute... Actually we are not allowed to disclose interviewer.

LMAO WTF!!

Had no internet for hours.
Called the support.
"We will fix it!" they said and they actually did. So maybe there are competent people working there as well???

No. Of course not.

Two hours later I receive a call from them. "It was not our fault. There was an update so we had to plug the cables back into the right ports."

Software update
Physical connections

Wat

Me: Brooo, We did it last night!
Friend : Which base did you get to?
Me : Hbase
Friend: Ha, doope!

My boss just came to me and demanded that we drop the first layer of security from our new servers so that the snake oil salesmen he used can open test it. I did try to explain that you don't remove security to test security.

A coworker and me did together a "hackathon by choice" this week to finish a project. We did it only because we thought it would be cool and be able to finish the thing. Well it was surprisingly fun to stay awake 36 hours, coding all through, having a good flow. After that, our boss came and was very proud of our work and he was able to send it for inspection to the client. I stayed a bit longer to fix a few minor bugs, but after 42h I was finally in bed. 😁
Our boss gives us the following Monday off.
But I think on other projects, often deadlines take the fun out of it, if they are not estimated well... I mean you do great, high-professional work but in the end you feel bad, useless, slow and incompetent because of the pressure.

Partner of ours claimed they are going to update their api. No breakage. My hopes were low and they did not disappoint.

Soon after the new version of their api went live, of course, loads of breakage. And the email contact with them is really fun.

Me: "Hello, since your update we get the issue A. Here's the complete communication."

Them: "We did not change the existing behavior. You are doing X wrong. Repeat that one call during the step and you should be fine."

Me: "Thank you, if I repeat the call, it does indeed work, albeit slower, since we are now repeating calls. Furthermore, our application was consuming your api for years and we did not change anything. So why is that step necessary now? Only after your update do our logs show errors from your API. And by the way, we now also have a issue with B. Why is that?"

Them: "Oh that's because your query the endpoint with "Fnord", try "Baz".

Me: "Yes, I do know that we query it with "Fnord" as that is what a previous endpoint of yours is responding to us. Why are we getting "Fnord"? What request do I have to make to get a "Baz" back?"

It feels like a game of wackamole. Squash one issue, ten more will pop up. I am one step away from becoming active-aggressive.

Boss : Did you finish the service app?
Me: Nope, sir you told us to complete the immediate relief website.
Boss: Ok. Did u complete that?
Me: Nope, when it was half you told us to complete the clients web app?
Boss: Oh god. So is that over?
Me: Unfortunately, no sir a month more and we can present the project estimation report if we are free😁😉

After designing the new server architecture for our software and the security to go with it, the boss decides we should ask our provider’s solutions architects to see if it is okay, they came back and said it all looks good apart from one part which my manager did and I always said was bad practice.

What can we do with a boss who urinates in a cup in his office and then dumps it in the kitchen sink even when we (all women) are sitting there eating lunch?

We are certain of what is in the cup because it smells, is yellow, and it sits right on his credenza in plain view. He’s even left it outside the office, forgetting to empty it.

A few weeks ago I was washing my lunch dishes and he dumped it right on top of my stuff. I was pretty much in shock, I just couldn’t believe it.

Is there something wrong here that I’m not getting? He’s the owner, the boss, in his 70’s, and very respected, but I don’t understand this. No one knows what to say. We feel that if we said something, he would deny it and since he’s the boss, who knows what would happen. Is there any way to approach this? The only other males in the office are related to him. Someone did mention it to one of them, but nothing has changed.

I and my mates finally finished the project : a console calculator that manages parenthesis, infinite numbers, the four major operators and also all the bases from 1 to 94
We were not allowed to use stdlib except for malloc, stdio was disallowed too, but we had the unistd write, read and sizeof ahaha
That was a long road of a week but finally we did it :D

Every sprint, the beast grows.
Every sprint, we'll sort it "later".
Every sprint, we suffer more.

We warned them, but they did not listen. The technical debt rapture has begun.

10 PM (after a very busy working day), CTO calls me and tells me: "We decided to hand in the new version to [random client] one week earlier, so they can test it."
Me: "I don't think is a good idea, the app is still unstable, we started working in it yesterday, it *will* crash"
CTO: "Don't you worry, at least they know we are working on it"
20 minutes later
CTO: "WTF why did you make my app crash?! I can't send this to a client!"

Told you. That is why that code is on develop and not on master.

Did I tell you that X third party system needed to be updated due to that pos using flash? Yes

Did you bitch about budget constraints and finding workarounds and stuff like that? Also Yes

Did I mention that X system was crucial for people and that we were not going to be able to do anything about it if we did not allocate the time to modify that before it happened? Also Yes

Did I mentioned this on multiple occasions? Yes

Was my team also pulled out from working on the alternative before this happened? Yes

Did I send multiple emails about this, talks, meetings and documentation of me saying all of the above? You betcha

Oh well 🤡

My first job was when I started my apprenticeship in 2012 - I was really shy, 15 years old and couldn't talk to strangers. So couldn't the guy who started the apprenticeship with me. We've got a simple contact form to program, he did the php part, I did the html part. We were supposed to talk together but we both didn't so it was pretty enerving for our boss lol. After three years we finally started to talk and we are still working together for the same boss, even after the apprenticeship - I think he's happy that we are finally talking lol

bool rant = false

I became my school's computer club president just last year. Although it's a computer club most of them aren't specially good in computer. We learn Photoshop for mostbof the time. So I decided to bring in unity3d and teach it myself.

I did managed to teach them in a slow pace. What came to me as a surprise is that I inspired another student to held unity class in school to teach other students game making .

Sometimes little thing we do may influence people in a big way we don't know.

Ok so to recap, we had shit beginning. We couldn't find client like 3 months and thank god that we agreed that we don't register the firm right away. If we did we would be broke a long time ago.

We found first client and he wanted to build some scrapers with gui. So me being BackEnd developer I created API for scraping (boredom) and my friend created website for that api and I just created gui that displays that site. The project was about 1200$. And since there are 3 of us we splited it into 3x400$.

After that it was again really hard to find clients again. We thought of quitting and just going to uni or something but we really didn't want to and anyways we needed to get money for uni ourselfs if we wanted to go.

So we said that as we are not paying anything and not losing money we will continue as long as we can.

And after we managed to get a hold of it and now we have 2 clients and after we finish them we have 2 more.

So I think the most important thing is that you help your coworkers. My friend who finds clients had a rough time at the beggining as I mentioned. So all 3 of us got together and started spamming people for few weeks. That's how we found our first client.

So now we are running. Not a milion dollar company but we are happy that we are doing what we love and that we have money doing it. We aim higher but we don't want to hurry and screw things up as we are young still.

Also thank you for getting interested after 300 days :)

Me: We did [technical debt] and [next feature] is hard to implement because of it. I suggest we do [actual 5 min solution] before proceeding to implement [next feature].

Colleagues: Agreed

Team Lead: We don't have time for this I dont want to change anything because the way we did [technical debt] already works besides we can [more technical debt] code go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

100% of the credit goes to my dear friend @TheKarlisK

This is our VPN project we did recently and published it as open source to the world.

Cheers to you my man, Karlis.

On the next episode of "when life gives you lemons" we will teach you how to enter a USB correctly on the first go. Yes, you heard me, after 7 years of research, and 2 years of not research, we did it!

Client :
When do you think we can get the website done with?

Me:
Don't worry, I'll get it done in 3 days.

Me after 2 and half days:

<!Doctype Html>
<html>
<head>
<title> Hello, what did you say the website does again? ....

My manager asked me: Did you tested the website on all browsers?
I simply said YES. Then he asked again, Did you test it on IE?
I simply replayed: what that IE? We don't use untrusted application for testing our work.

Worst fight?

Stubborner against stubbornest.

About a focking fact that was trivially true or false. Fun fact: it didn't matter anyway.

Boy, did we raise our voices and attract the attention of everybody in the room. Lesson learned.

True story
Was free at work so applied for a stretch project.
PM: you know mobile dev?
Me: yes, built a few apps
PM: good, we have an old app we want you to take the JAR change everything but the look of it and make it a new hybrid app with the required features.
Me: *kill me please*
PM: and use WordPress as the server.
Me: ...........

Accepted the challenge. Did the entire app in ionic and build a server for it with SpringBoot. Client loves it PM is still doesn't know😂

I know we have a lot of talented people here. Piece of advice, what ever you build, believe in it. See it through. No matter how good of an idea incompleteness won't get you anywhere.
After all every other day we all analyze different successful products and say "huh... that's nothing. Even we can do that".
Well thats the difference "We" can do that, they DID it.

See your ideas through. Stay motivated =)

"this office, that is located 2000 miles from here needs a network because of we decided to renovate the entire office starting today.
Can you fix no later than tomorrow?"

We were not notified about this before.
We did not have the equipment.
It is impossible to get an hotel room atleast two month in advance.

Yeah

We were once tasked to create a 3-part Flash game to advertise the upcoming release of an album by a very famous band. Every part used a different gaming engine which we had to build from scratch (one of which was like a simplified version of the OG GTA game - top down driving with zooming in etc). On top of this we had to deal with user registration and score submission.

We had 4 weeks to do it in. We were 3 people.
We did an illegal number of hours to get as much done as we could, and we still didn't manage it in time because, frankly it was impossible.

Pretty good game though.

!rant

Just had the best moment of my career today. Myself and two of my colleagues have been working on this system (firmware, hardware, web app etc) together and after months of hard work we finally saw it all in action.

My colleague turned on a device on the web site and it updated the db, turned on a light on his board and updated the devices state on the site (we use web sockets so it's real time).

I probably haven't did it justice here but it was flipping awesome!

Using mongodb for one product

A colleague as experimenting with elastic search (I think it was).

It installed a proxy around the collection to get all events for the external search storage.

Worked well, but it was just a test so once done we removed it

But thats where it got scary.

When we removed the proxy through the search dashboard it dropped the underlying collection of live data!!!

A collection it did not create.

Hows that for bad UI.

Always experiment on a separate db server.

Google is amazingly good at using tech to solve problems we did not even know we have...

I mean.. How did we even survive til this day w/o google making restaurant reservation or barbershop calls..? We are cavemen bcz we still do it all ourselves... So inefficient..

/s

!rant
For the second time in a row, one of our customers decided not to pay their server. The server, on which a lot of the work we did for them (online shop) was hosted. Shortly after completion, we specifically told them to backup their stuff on a daily basis, secure their server and regularly update it... Guess who did neither of those things, in addition to not paying their server after more than 5 reminders, and still complains about their shop being offline. Fucking idiots.

Leaving work with no bugs in the code! Everything works flawlessly!
Coming back the next day and all of a sudden nothing works and we need to spend the whole day getting it to work as well as it did yesterday.
There seems to be programming gnomes, ruining our code at nights!

Worst hack/attack?

Probably developing a complex food ordering website and client just stole the website and didn’t pay as it turns out our PM didn’t let the client sign a contract. Can’t sue as we have no legal binding documents.

We did managed to get access to the database and decided to change our passwords manually, but like I don’t get paid much for this

tldr:
first year in college we programmed 24 hrs straight to fix somebody's mess before the deadline. Decided not to screw him over, instead he claimed to have done everything and we failed the assignment.

Long version:
var group= new[]{"Mike", "Gavin", "Gus", "I", "Ben" };
var client = "Jack"';

First year of college we had an assignment to make a web program for somebody.
Ben wanted to join our group and he already knew a client so we let him join.

After joining Ben wanted to be project lead, but we already decided Mike based on his experience.
Ben claimed to be much better in every way than Mike at and kept coming with stuff the following weeks why we should make him project lead. He kept pointing out when Mike did something wrong and he even came with an audio file where he clearly made jack say that he wanted Ben to be project lead .
After that we were all a bit pissed and told him that he should get it in his head that he was not going to be project lead and just start working on his part of the assignment.

We also found out that Ben was a documentation addict, what we could write in a small paragraph, he wrote a whole page about it. No joke, I rewrote a page of his in 5-6 rows with the same information in it.
No problem you thing, wrong! Because of this he kept bothering us arguing and claiming that our documentation was wrong because it was to short.

In the week of the deadline we asked Ben if he was also done, and told us that he was done for a while now.

The day before the deadline we came to school thinking we only had to do some merging and finishing up documentation.
Then we found out that Ben has almost nothing, and what he had the IDE was screaming that it was incorrect, spaces in Id's and css class names for instance. A really good programmer, my ass!
We were so pissed off at this point, but we had 24 hrs and needed to come up with a plan to fix it.

We decided that Mike and I were going to fix Ben his shit in the coming 24 hrs and Ben was going to make our last bit of documentation because we would not have the time for that, Especially if we had to argue with him like we had to do for each bit of documentation. Gus did not have time and Gavin could not program on his own yet, he wanted to help, but helping him help us would cost more time than we had.

We all went home after that and Mike and I started to program 24 hours straight while in a Skype call, making what Ben had 2 months for. Shortly before the deadline Mike looked at our finishing up documentation received from Ben and told me it was "Okay" and zipped everything up and uploaded it to school with a few minutes to spare.

After that we thought everything was good, we made Ben's part work and delivered it in time. We also decided not to throw Ben under the bus, because this would hurt all our grades because we did not work good as a group since we should have noticed it earlier.

A few weeks go by till the assessment.
The assessment start with asking if we want individual grades or as a group when you all think you did equal amount. We choose as a group, because if we chose individual not only Ben but also Gavin would get a lower grade and we did not think that was fair because he tried so hard.

We demo the product and the teachers are positive. When the teachers start about the documentation, the first thing they tell is that they found something interesting in the documentation, and they read it to us:

"I, Ben, have made all the documentation because my group did not want to."

That was so far from the truth, we all did make our documentation about the parts we made. Yes he did do overall a little bit more because every single bit of documentation we had to argue with him, so every time he volunteers to make it, we would all agree. And he made Mike's and i's last bit of documentation.

Telling the teachers on that point would not have mattered, it would only have hurt is in another way, so we did not and all failed the assignment. And we all felt like to strangle him.
This is now a few years back, but i still want too.

How to run a productive meeting?

Have a written agenda (provided before the meeting, of course)

No "Lets talk about the service architecture" nonsense. Provide the exact details of what the outcome of the meeting should be. Even been lucky enough to cancel meetings when the agenda points are answered in a reply email. Its awesome.

As conditioned as we are about agendas, a few mgrs still skip the agenda and it ends up as you would imagine. At the end, everyone is like "Why are we here? What did we decide? Looks like we need another meeting..."

Well we did it in time and it works, is that enough?

Worked for a party supply chain on their e-commerce solution for less than minimum wage and was overworked.

The only reason i did it was so i could visit my girlfriend 3 hours away each weekend.

We are still together 7 years later and have 2 kids.

"Architect"(A) - Hey, StrucN, we have a bit of a problem on the module you are working on (which the previous "developers" seem to have given it roofies)

Me: Okay, what seems to be the problem?

A: There is a need to add some functionality to it, we need you to ...

Me: I see, well it can be done but it wouldn't be so simple - the module is a mess and the change would need to be well tested

A: I fear the clients deadline is for tomorrow

Me: Well he'll have to wait, rushing it is the worst possible option

A: I'll talk to him about it, thanks

After around half an hour A rushes back

A: Hey I passed a ticket to you about the additions we spoke about, it should be ready for tomorrow

Me: It won't be ready, it's too complex to complete is in such a shirt notice (considering it's already the end of the day and all the changes need to be pushed tommorow to prod)

A: I know *programmer from useless team B* did something similar so as it is close to what we need you should copy it.

My inner voice: FUCK YOU YOU USELESS FUCKING CUNT! THERE SHOULDN'T BE ANY COPY PASTE SHIT FROM SOME UNRELATED MODULE! YOU SHIT STAINED MEAT BAG ALREADY DID SUCH A SIN IN THE PAST AND I HAD TO FIX ALL OF IT. THE MODULE SHOULDN'T SUFFER ANY MORE AS IT IS ALREADY A GODDAMN RAPE VICTIM!

WHERE DID PROPER PROFESSIONALISM WENT? WHY IS IT THE INDUSTRY FILLED WITH STUPID WANNA BE "ARCHITECTS" WHILE OTHER MORE COMPETENT FOLK SHOULD ALWAYS BE IGNORED BECAUSE IT'S ALWAYS SHOULD BE READY FOR TOMMOROW?!

For fucks sake I miss my old Architect, he could really understand the essence of program development

In 2010, it was my first client project. Our architect was not from iOS background, we had editable pdfs in our app. Those were pretty rich pdfs with inline HD images. iPads that time were not too fast and couldn't handle big gb pdf loaded into memory. App would crash randomly running out of memory. We fixed it by paginating pdf, it wasn't out of the world but considering it was my first mobile project and no one to guide, I thought it was pretty cool what we did there

This is a follow up to my previous rant where I complained about Lenovo firmware update failing and bricking a relative’s computer.

We bought a chip programmer, got the bios from some forum and the thing fucking worked. I’m actually surprised it did, I’m not used to doing shit like this. I was pretty fucking scared of burning something.

The programmer also came with a clamp so we could hook it to the chip without desoldering it. Thank god.

I’m terribly depressed so good timing with that I guess.

Colleague while reviewing my latest commit.
Him: Hey, RemusWasTaken, why did you leave this debug log in here?
Me: That function won't work unless I leave that line exactly there.
Him: It can't stay, come here so we can fix it.

Three hours of debugging later, this Friday afternoon.

Him: Okay, I give up. Let's leave it there for now.
Me: I did the same thing yesterday. Time well spent.

Nodejs is weird sometimes, or we are incompetent devs.

I’m in a big company now. We have all the resources in the world. We promote best practice. We don’t even seem to have deadlines. We mob on everything so that we get the benefit of all our experience combined.

So if all that is true, why in gods name does the first class I open have shed loads of hard coded settings, IP addresses and GUIDs in it?

FML. How did I end up working in this shit.

So i just saw a post about not pushing to production on Friday's and that reminded me of something.

A team we are working with (we needed help on something so we got another company to send us a team and do it for us) recently push to production on a Friday at around 5pm.

We didn't know that they had done it until a shit ton of errors started happening and we had no idea why (it was working so far, none of us did anything, so what the fuck is going on).

To make things better, one of my colleagues tried calling them and they wouldn't answer the phone. They knew what they did, so they went home before we could notice it and we had to correct their mistake.

We had everyone calling us saying they had gotten an error, and they needed to get home but couldn't because of it (it messed up a process that only happens at the end of the day before people go home. I can explain more in the comments if anyone is confused, or just wants to know).

Eventually everything was solved, but that was a very stressful ending of the week.

So yeah, don't deploy on Friday's please and thank you

"This needs to go into production NOW"

Five hours later...

"That fix is on production now"

"Thanks, did you fix that other bug on production? We need it fixed now"

"OMG WE MISSED SOMETHING WE NEED AN EMAIL SENT TO EVERYONE IF X HAPPENS AND NOBODY DID A THING WITHIN AN HOUR!"

Ok done.

"OMG WE NEED IT SENT IF NOBODY DID A THING EVERY 30 MINUTES"

Um... not sure we're solving this problem right way ... but there you go done.

"OMG SOMEONE GOT AN EMAIL AFTER 45 MINUTES AND NOT 30 MINUTES"

Bro who the fuck knows why that happened, it's email not instant messenger .... that's what I meant by us solving this in the wrong way, email for this is dumb... how about we solve this process problem in some other way or you just fuck off ... this isn't a coding issue this is something else...

If only we could get errors like this, it would make our life so much easier.
I didn't even have to search Google all I did was use the current version and BOOM!

I had used MS Paint for the very first time in school during my computers class when I was 5 (somewhere in 2002) and I loved making sceneries on it :P So I requested my dad to buy me a computer for my 6th birthday and he did!! The old huge bulky boxed system that ran Windows 98!

We owned this system till 2014 when we finally decided to sell it off because it couldn't get modified anymore.

After exhaustive talking to my boss, who always expresses the same concerns, we always end up agreeing that we need to separate development across our coworkers competences ...
We are even gonna hire a full front-end developer this time (as we did with the last 3 hires)..

And what did he do you may ask...
Put our front ender in charge of:
- Build a api in python
- Build the front-end
- 2 months deadline

The front ender is smart and is constantly asking me stuff and learning a lot.

But wtf boss? I could do it in no time...
I literally spent this whole week doing nothing, waiting for some approvals...

He is making everyone unmotivated as fuck ...

I'm starting to wonder pretty fucking every time if he is genuinely retarded.

My mom told me to take the spider out instead of killing it..
So i did. We had a few drinks, pretty cool guy, said he works as a web developer.

We did retrieve the whole list 20 lines ago, didn't we?
Well, who cares... Let's retrieve it again IN A LOOP, im EACH ITERATION.
and then for good measure lets make another query for each item, each time we retrieve the list. Why not?

I have to make an effort not to swear right now. I have been asked to optimize a particular oiece of code...

Ffs

1) Submitted my CV
2) Got an email to schedule a phone interview for the next week, I gave ~5 appiointments on the next week that were good for me
3) Next week passed, no answer to my E-mail, I asked in a mail, what happend
4) Got reply, that we should schedule the phone interview for the next week
5) We aggreed, in the appointment, they did not call me
6) I asked in a mail, what has happened
7) We aggreed in a new appointment
8) This time they called me, after a short conversation I was told, that I they send me task as homework right after the phone call and I will have to do it in one week
9) They did not send it
10) Next day I asked, whats going on
11) They sent me the task, and said that I can ask them, if have queations
12) For me it was not clear, if I was allowed to use frameworks for the task, so I asked it
13) I neveg got reply and did not ping for the 4th time

This was the most annoying and ridiculous recruiting process I had to deal with. It was just a waste of time.

By the way, did anyone ever went to hospital because drinking too much coffee? I drink it, you drink it, we drink it, but I'm seriously worried sometimes about my heart and blood pressure.

WE DID IT BOYS! @dfox @trogus I feel that putting our devRant stickers on our laptops is officially a thing- So I'm prepared to join the dark side 😄

Well... I once accidentally deleted a classmates entire assignment. Basically we were working together on one and we had the code in Github, I had named the repo after the module code.
He was having some weird git issues and I thought it would be easier to just delete and re-clone on his machine. You can probably see where this is going.

Me: rm -rf <DIR NAME> Enter
Him: wait, which folder did you just delete

Turns out he had the repo cloned inside another directory with the EXACT SAME NAME, which also contained his previous assignment, the only copy of it in the entire universe (it was a group project and they did it all on his laptop with no source control, which i found hilarious).
It wasnt so bad since that assignment was already submitted and graded, but a bit of a fail on both our parts.

Just finished an assignment yesterday where we had to code a math problem in assembler in under 20 lines

looking at the task: Hey, we already did this in Python

*building own modulo Operation for that cause we cant use it*

*freaking out when realizing it's just not posibble in 20 lines*

Then scrolling up the wikipedia page to see you've spend hours trying to implement the wrong thing

While attending an internal training session (some joining the meeting online and some present in the room), an online attendee did not mute their microphone and proceed to eat a packet of crisps/chips. And not softly, but like a horse.

We were also recording it, so now we can listen to it over and over ...

Did anyone heard about modular C?
I'm working on it at school, it's like how to do OOP in C with structures and function pointers.

We're developing the String class but next, we will make a basic C++ implementation in C before beginning the real C++

Do you think it's a good path?

So apparantly at the company i work at someone was able to use the remote monitoring a comptetitor set up for their automation stuff they had on the same site as we did. Apparantly they use just as shitty passwords as we do and rely on the network being secured enough by the IT guys. And since our stuff is in the same network as theirs. Well...

so my job at this startup is more of a general manager over all departments, checking in making sure everything is going smooth (basically COO), but we just did a super private beta launch today as our devs went to sleep, i spent most of my night tonight bug fixing and doing some style fixes and man did it feel good to be back and doing that (especially since most of the heavy lifting has already been done 😂)

I DID IT! I got my first co-op job!! I’ll be starting in the fall and I’m super excited 🤩
Finally I’ll get to do real work and I’ll get to see just how far schooling has gotten me.

Gotta admit I’m a tilt bit worried I over sold myself in the interview but we will cross that bridge when we get to it 😅

I’ll also finally have some real rants soon enough 😏😅

Three of us doing a project for free for our web-dev teacher at university. Looking back at that project I think we did a terrible job, we built an ugly, monolithic application with Express, MongoDB, Pug and Vue.

It was a CMS for a local church and the best part of the project was including some hidden easter eggs accessible only by setting some cookies manually in the browser.

Although we did the project for free, I think we all have been learning a lot of valuable things and we also tried out new stuff, like the Kanban board and a few aspects of the scrum way. The most interesting part of this was learning all of it by ourselves, because our web-development teacher couldn't really help in web-development...

Spent a good bit of my time the past few months developing a cool web app for our company.

Was told last week the due to all the layoffs etc that we would no longer have a need for it.

Fuck!

Still proud of the work I did and how it turned out.

I’ve been tasked with finding an experienced Project Manager for ‘a sensible cost’ - no specific budget amount shared.
That sounds like “we want the best, but want to pay very little” right?
It’s a massive project, they said “you developed this, did all the documentation and research, you can PM it right?”
“Can’t we just start making progress and adapt as we go?” They asked.
Sure I said (thinking Agile), but they said I just need to get on with it and let them know when finished! So no stakeholder interaction... this is not going to end well...

We spent a lot of time creating these CSS animated pop-ups that described parts of the product. They looked great, but the client called and said they were "flickering" on her computer. We debugged and could not for the life of us figure out what she meant by flicker. The code was so simple that we couldn't imagine how it could be flickering. It was just a jQuery fadeIn(). It worked fine for us in every browser we tried. So we just gave up. The next day, the client called back and said,"Hey, it looks great. You fixed the flickering. How did you do it?" And our dev replied, "Uh, we set the flicker to 0".

Business: "should we use this technology?"
Developers: " probably not but we will do a full investigation and give you a report on the pros cons and our professional opinion... No we should not use that technology"
Business: "oh yeah why you guys were off seeing if it would work we did the deal so now we have to use it"

My killer PR:
I made a small feature and it was to be merged in my senior's branch.
So I made it, resolved all the conflicts and when it got merged it broke my senior's branch.
This is nothing new and it happens, so me and him sat down and got it working. After two days, his branch got merged and broke it's parent 😂, after investigation my code was the reason, got fixed and merged.
Same thing happened 3 more times, and every time my code was the culprit.
Now for staging we thoroughly tested everything and deployed it, after running for 2 hours the piece of shit broke again 😂😂😂.
A meeting was arranged for scolding the team, and after the meeting the architect comes to me and say "how did you manage to fuck things on so many levels, literally?". I handled it like a pro with an awkward laugh.

We exhaustively checked it for production. Deployed, it did not broke, we were happy. After a month of successful run, I just joked about the above incident while we were working on next release on morning coffee. That cursed thing broke on the same evening. I was like 😮

When java was facing extinction, during the JavaScript, Node, and reactive programming hype. It did what it had always done. just adapt to the hype and maintain backward compatibility. We can all learn a thing or two from the humble java. It never rushes, it's patient. Be calm and wait before you hype yourself.

Few weeks ago: Please write the system design docs for feature X of the new project Y. We need it in two weeks.
Few days later: Stop working on the docs, the customer hasn't yet bought that feature.
Few days later: We found that we included that feature in the main contract already. We need the docs in two days.
Today (docs delivered a month ago): There was a misinterpretation of the requirements and the contract, the customer hasn't bought the feature with the main contract, it has to be sold additionally. You didn't do anything 'til now, did you?

It would be really nice, if sales could finally decide what the customer bought and then tell me about the requirements that are already covered in the docs anyway. But I fear it could end in asking the customer 🤪🔫

I'd say it was when I did a Codereview and the dev said that he doesn't really know how the code works and he doesn't quite know what it's purpose is supposed to be.
We are talking about less then 200 lines, all written by himself, this is not copied code.

*sigh* woke up did a data export for the customer, send it to them then they reply "thanks but it's next weekend we wanted the data export not this one" checked the email and they were correct.

Me: *pushes up code that should stop bad thing from happening*
Bad thing: *doesnt happen for a few hours*

Is..is it good??? Did i fix it????? Or does the thing just randomly not happen right now??????? We will never know.

qa: so yesterday we found some bug, not really related to you but <boss> told me to put it on you
me: yeah, when he doesn't, this dick didn't work since I came

*later this day at ~15:00*
boss: so I'm going home, you **must** deal with this bug today, your algo doesn't work.
me: it did 2 days ago didn't it? did you even check the bug?
boss: yeah
me: did you check for regression or just said to put it on me?
boss: nope
me: did you check the changes of the new guy?
boss: nope
me : so why the fuck blame my code?!

*17:10 I'm going home no regression, new guys code deadlocks, not a single fuck thrown*

Me and the team I manage after fixing bugs,
Me: hey devXY, please send a build to the QA to test it. I am going to a meeting.

*2 hours later

QA guy: hey, we did not receive any build yet.. we are already out of time..

Me to devXY: hello, why didn't you send a build to QA?

devXY: ok, sending it now.

ME LIKE: WTF!!!

Business Continuity / DR 101...
How could GitLab go down? A deleted directory? What!
A tired sysadmin should not be able to cause this much damage.
Did they have a TESTED dr plan? An untested plan is no plan. An untested plan does not count. An untested plan is an invitation to what occurred.
That the backups did not work does not cut it - sorry GitLab. Thorough testing is required before a disruptive event.
Did they do a thorough risk assessment?
We call this a 'lesson learned' in my BC/DR profession. Everyone please learn by it.
I hope GitLab is ok.

Worst experience?
Fourth semester. Programming project.
We were 4 persons, I did almost all the work (including fixing the stuff they broke) but that's not the point.

One of them somehow killed our git repo at least once per weak. It was really annoying, because I had to fix it.

Also he named *all* of his commits 'Pfuschpush' (Pfusch is German for botch). And the code had exactly this quality. I often had to rewrite everything he did (or simply revert the commit).

[Working on some really "urgent" report for an about to publish project]
dev: client, can you explain what this value is? we can't figure it out and we though tha...
client: im gonna stop you right there, DO NOT Analyse! we dont have time for silly questions, if the design says there's a 10, just put that freaking 10 in that place...
dev: but sr, we need to...
Client: what did i say? just stop saying things and build it!

If it weren't for poor documentation I'd be retired by now.

We didn't all write your library. In fact, only you did. So, some helpful documentation would really help us all out. Can't believe the number of times I need to read source code to figure out what the hell you are doing.

Weeks after our partner has been nagging us to release to production because we've been putting it off because their API sucks and wouldn't properly work.... we finally did....

except their production API doesnt even work LMAO

So today a colleague confessed to an attempt to troll my computer by SSHing into it and playing random songs. Thankfully he did not manage but he would just happen to do it the day we have a security audit.

[story of your first dev project] - i really think there should be a headline like that for wk rants

Anyways, it was a while back, le college teacher approached my friend and me asking if we wanted to do a project. We said sure, it was a medium sized data analysis project. We got the specs with a lot of formulas, basically implement them all and make a web frontend, thats it. Took like a year but we did it. Few months later teacher is furious because the calculations didnt give him data that he expected (by expect i mean he thought that a distribution formula would accurately yield 200+ data fields from around 4) and blamed it on us. Not the retard other professor who fucked up half of the formulas. Ok.

Wouldn't call it a software bug but related:

Was developing an order system to expand in the UK. We have been developing it for the last 2 years and always had a one nasty bug in the system... Whatever we do, it still appears... Tried debugging to find the source, tried covering with tests - nothing helped it was still there. We even rewrote the whole system 3 times and it still was there!

One day, we have been given a stupid request from our manager - take a black background and make it even more blacker... That was it and I went to the CEO with letter where I stated that we should remove the manager... As I'm the Senior there, he did ask me why and eventually removed the manager...

Oh my guys, I've never felt so good after removing a bug! Since then - our application went live, we had our first customers and we were happily rolling new updates. And the best part - there was no BUG! Everything we did just had undocumented features or missing links but we haven't really had a single bug that was not caught by our automated tests!

---

Moral of the story:
Not only software can have bugs. People also can be "bugs" while bugging you about every single details they think is not working correctly.

My first experience with computers was in "technology" class at school.
The teacher told us we had to switch off the monitor then turn off the computer.
Once, I forgot about this and did the other thing around, and I got yelled at ... It traumatised me so much that for a few years I always did it that way, thinking that I could break something doing otherwise...

I still feel bad thinking about this and hate that teacher for such a useless trauma about a thing he didn't understand either.

Admit it, we all already did it 😁

One of my most arrogant customers was one that constantly called support because she could not get things to work as she wanted.

We repeatedly told her that she was working against the way the system was built and that was what was causing her problems.

This was not a custom system for that customer but a cloud product we where offering with over a thousand customers on and it was designed with a certain workflow in mind.

Despite this she always complained that the system was wrong and we needed to fix it.

She was also always late for her deadline complaining that she did not get the information from her bosses in time and demanded we help her get it done :)

But I was fortunate that everyone at our company held a unified position that it was not out fault that her bosses gave her info late or that she tried to do things in a way the system was not designed for.

So when she got to aggressive we just offered her to go somewhere else.

I thing they finally did, after about two years.

Today my boss decided that he wanted to manage his project properly. After a year he gave us deadlines (we still had deadlines but usually we did not know them). I open the xlsx file (yeah... xlsx) and I see the date of today as deadline. Well, at least it won't be a surprise this time.

Oh my! This guy is such a dickhead! We have a release tomorrow and he just changed everything a coworker did in the past few weeks because it had some errors and looked not polished enough.

Now it looks quite nice.

*sigh* Sometimes I can be such an asshat.

PO: Is it done yet?
PO: Whats the status?
PO: Any progress??

My brain: Did we have requirements for this, or just a deadline

Spending hours trying to figure out why the stack just won't work with SSL. Nearly lost my mind as we started feeling dumber than ever. I really started to doubt my skills after it did not even work with the most minimal nginx site config I could imagine.
The next day I discovered that we missed the 443 port mapping in the docker-compose file...it only had port 80 mapped.

Yup, stepping back from a problem and getting some sleep is really worth it sometimes.

Last saturday, the CEO forced us to update one of the services that we are dependent out without any tests... The people responsible for it very much advised against it but they still did it.

Now, nearly a week later. The literal core feature is still broken with no fix in sight and rolling back is not possible apparently.

The team leader call us for a serious meeting, and he wants it to be productive,

Leader: "we shall not procrastinate anymore. We don't have time left. We should not just talk random bullshit like we did the last few times. Aight?"

We all agree to be productive.

We also set a few main subjects and decision to be discussed. Then, we all get into the meeting room seriously. In a meeting, we try the idea of the upcoming project. But we suddenly went off topic. Then, My friend talk about L4D2. Then we start playing. And, I say, why not try some GTA5? I proudly reboot my expensive laptop from Ubuntu to Windows and playing GTA. Then, we start spotify and talk about song.

We laid in the sofa and talk sexually. My friend introduce me his favorite AV and we compare our manhood's size.

It was 4am already. One by one the attendee fall asleep.

It is lIke... the survival gamr of sleepiness? xD

Only my best boy friend and I were left awake, talking about ourselves, watching the beautiful midnight city.

Then, 2 of us ourselves start to talk about project idea. It is something cool and crazy to think about, like a friend making app. The 3 hours of brainstorming is gay and romantic.

"Okay, so we have the outline. let's sleep, baby" So we sleep till the noon. We wake up. Some left. Some were still sleeping. The birds twitter in the bequtiful skyline.
I did not forget to upload my idea to discord after going home in the morning. End of the meeting. Barely any goal was met in the meeting.

Those days, we make attempt of productive meeting again and again but end up procrastinating everyday. We had meeting in a small bedroom and it was our meeting room. We played different songs, tasted different wines.

And, finally one day, my friend say "I feel that it is much productive to work alone in a separate room. So we won't get distracted by each other."
Another friend: "yea..I know it is harsh... but yea... true... let's work alone"

I almost eant to cry. But we cannot indulge ourselves in the moments of dreamy romance.

We should start real work and don't be gay.

This is about both worst boss and most annoying co-worker.

Well, this boss didn't care how much code we wrote, or how good it was (well, at least he didn't care that much); only how much commits we do. And this coworker literally did a script to do a commit every 10 minutes. 24/7. Everyone else was completely mad about it and about a week later we achieved that he was kicked from the job. Since then I still get trauma if someone commits something unimportant.

I am currently working as a consultant and I like it. It also makes upset/happy/schadenfroh (not entirely sure how I feel about it) when we tell the client what work needs to be done in which order and why just so they can throw it all overboard and we do it the way they want it and it bites them in the ass a few month down the line.
They hire us for the external professional experience that we bring, so listen to us. We did this before, we know what works, and we know way your way does not work.

Around 7 months ago,me and my friend started working for a startup as interns. it was work from home internship. they first told us to research about CDN and study about RESTapi. when we finished with that they told us to make a personal storage portal ( ) using CDNs which we did. After 3 month of work when we presented the same they then told us to scrap the project. what they wanted was cloud storage space which i am now implementing using amazon s3 FUCK THIS FUCKING STARTUP

I find it funny that, one of the most expected features on Windows, is not even a Windows feature. The teams at Microsoft must be feeling the same way we feel when, after a huge project, the client gets super excited when we implement or change something really, really small, that we did in a couple hours, just for fun.

Several years ago, I interviewed for a popular site and it was the only one of the many interviews I did that suffer that did Google-style whiteboard problems and nobody peppered me. I didn't recall the optional way to reverse a linked list right there and then. I think I came up with the right solution and failed to communicate it well.

When we got done, I could feel their eyes trying to burn holes in me for wasting their time.

Client: I need you to integrate with this API.

Me: ok cool, but what are we doing with it (where does the data go/styling)?

Client: what do think we should do?

Me: well it would be really cool if we did it like this *short and sweet explanation of really cool functionality and design*

Client: I LOVE IT! Let's do it, oh also I need it done by tomorrow...

Me: *GOD DAMNIT, why do you always do this...don't you dare say ok* ok, yeah I can totally do that.

...now at the market stocking up on redbull

3 weeks after the GDPR panic I tought there would be no more annoying mails and stuff. But then I had an appointment at the dentist.

"Hi, I have an appointment"
"Wait a minute. We updated our privacy policy. Did you already signed it?"

Someone: Let's use this XY.
---
Where XY is a new service, like Slack / Jira / ...
---

Yeah. Let's just add another workflow without any planning, thinking etc..

Not that we did that a thousand times already and it always ended in an ever growing pile of shit.

Sheesh 🙄

These pointless discussions...

A dude who was constantly saying "jokes" he found funny, but no one else did. They were incredibly dumb and sometimes borderlin offensive.

That dude is tied with a girl in my internship who had some kind of superiority complex and no matter what the interns did, she did it better in her time and we were a waste of resources, according to her. Once, me and my friend got late 10 minutes after lunch time, she complained. Next day, she was late by more than 45 minutes after lunch. Fucking hypocrite.