Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "when you fix that bug"
-
Hey everyone,
First off, a Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!
Tim and I are very happy with the year devRant has had, and thinking back, there are a lot of 2017 highlights to recap. Here are just a few of the ones that come to mind (this list is not exhaustive and I'm definitley forgetting stuff!):
- We introduced the devRant supporter program (devRant++)! (https://devrant.com/rants/638594/...). Thank you so much to everyone who has embraced devRant++! This program has helped us significantly and it's made it possible for us to mantain our current infrustructure and not have to cut down on servers/sacrifice app performance and stability.
- We added avatar pets (https://devrant.com/rants/455860/...)
- We finally got the domain devrant.com thanks to @wiardvanrij (https://devrant.com/rants/938509/...)
- The first international devRant meetup (Dutch) with organized by @linuxxx and was a huge success (https://devrant.com/rants/937319/... + https://devrant.com/rants/935713/...)
- We reached 50,000 downloads on Android (https://devrant.com/rants/728421/...)
- We introduced notif tabs (https://devrant.com/rants/1037456/...), which make it easy to filter your in-app notifications by type
- @AlexDeLarge became the first devRant user to hit 50,000++ (https://devrant.com/rants/885432/...), and @linuxxx became the first to hit 75,000++
- We made an April Fools joke that got a lot of people mad at us and hopefully got some laughs too (https://devrant.com/rants/506740/...)
- We launched devDucks!! (https://devducks.com)
- We got rid of the drawer menu in our mobile apps and switched to a tab layout
- We added the ability to subscribe to any user's rants (https://devrant.com/rants/538170/...)
- Introduced the post type selector (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...) (which will be used for filtering - more details below)
- Started a bug/feature tracker GitHub repo (https://github.com/devRant/devRant)
- We did our first ever live stream (https://youtube.com/watch/...)
- Added an awesome all-black theme (devRant++) (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...)
- We created an "active discussions" screen within the app so you can easily find rants with booming discussions!
- Thanks to the suggestion of many community members, we added "scroll to bottom" functionality to rants with long comment threads to make those rants more usable
- We improved our app stability and set our personal record for uptime, and we also cut request times in half with some database cluster upgrades
- Awesome new community projects: https://devrant.com/projects (more will be added to the list soon, sorry for the delay!)
- A new landing page for web (https://devrant.com), that was the first phase of our web overhaul coming soon (see below)
Even after all of this stuff, Tim and I both know there is a ton of work to do going forward and we want to continue to make devRant as good as it can be. We rely on your feedback to make that happen and we encourage everyone to keep submitting and discussing ideas in the bug/feature tracker (https://github.com/devRant/devRant).
We only have a little bit of the roadmap right now, but here's some things 2018 will bring:
- A brand new devRant web app: we've heard the feedback loud and clear. This is our top priority right now, and we're happy to say the completely redesigned/overhauled devRant web experience is almost done and will be released in early 2018. We think everyone will really like it.
- Functionality to filter rants by type: this feature was always planned since we introduced notif types, and it will soon be implemented. The notif type filter will allow you to select the types of rants you want to see for any of the sorting methods.
- App stability and usability: we want to dedicate a little time to making sure we don't forget to fix some long-standing bugs with our iOS/Android apps. This includes UI issues, push notification problems on Android, any many other small but annoying problems. We know the stability and usability of devRant is very important to the community, so it's important for us to give it the attention it deserves.
- Improved profiles/avatars: we can't reveal a ton here yet, but we've got some pretty cool ideas that we think everyone will enjoy.
- Private messaging: we think a PM system can add a lot to the app and make it much more intuitive to reach out to people privately. However, Tim and I believe in only launching carefully developed features, so rest assured that a lot of thought will be going into the system to maximize privacy, provide settings that make it easy to turn off, and provide security features that make it very difficult for abuse to take place. We're also open to any ideas here, so just let us know what you might be thinking.
There will be many more additions, but those are just a few we have in mind right now.
We've had a great year, and we really can't thank every member of the devRant community enough. We've always gotten amazingly positive feedback from the community, and we really do appreciate it. One of the most awesome things is when some compliments the kindness of the devRant community itself, which we hear a lot. It really is such a welcoming community and we love seeing devs of all kind and geographic locations welcomed with open arms.
2018 will be an important year for devRant as we continue to grow and we will need to continue the momentum. We think the ideas we have right now and the ones that will come from community feedback going forward will allow us to make this a big year and continue to improve the devRant community.
Thanks everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community!
Looking forward to 2018,
- David and Tim48 -
One of our web developers reported a bug with my image api that shrunk large images to a thumbnail size. Basically looked like this img = ResizeImage(largeImage, 50); // shrink the image by 50%
The 'bug' was when he was passed in the thumbnail image and requesting a 300% increase, and the image was too pixelated.
I tried to explain that if you need the larger image, use the image from disk (since the images were already sized optimally for display) and the api was just for resizing downward.
Thinking I was done, the next day I was called into a large conference room with the company vice-president, two of the web-dev managers, and several of the web developers.
VP: "I received an alarming email saying you refused to fix that bug in your code. Is that correct?"
Me: "Bug? No, there is no bug. The image api is executing just as it is supposed to."
MGR1: "Uh...no it isn't. Images using *your* code is pixelated and unfit for our site and our customers."
MGR2: "Yes, I looked at your code and don't understand what the big deal is. Looks like a simple fix."
<web developers nodding their heads>
Me: "OK, I'll bite. What is the simple fix?"
<MGR2 looks over at one of the devs>
Dev1: "Well, for example, if we request an image resize of 300, and the image is only 50x50, only increase the size by 10. Maybe 15."
Me: "Wow..OK. So what if the image is, for example, 640x480?"
MGR1: "75. Maybe 80 if it's a picture of boots."
VP: "Oh yes, boots. We need good pictures of boots."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how to break this to you, but my code doesn't do 'maybe'. I mean, you have the image from disk.
You obviously used the api to create the thumbnail, but are trying to use the thumbnail to go back to the regular size. Why not use the original image?"
<Web-Dev managers look awkwardly towards the web devs>
Dev3: "Yea, well uh...um...that would require us to create a variable or something to store the original image. The place in the code where we need the regular image, it's easier to call your method."
Me: "Um, not really. You still have to resolve the product name from the URL path. Deriving the original file name is what you are doing already. Just do the same thing in your part of the code."
Dev2: "But we'd have to change our code"
Mgr2: "I know..I know. How about if we, for example, send you 12345.jpg and request a resize greater than 100, you go to disk and look for that image?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily>
Me: "Um, no that won't work. All I see is the image stream. I have no idea what file is and the api shouldn't be guessing, going to disk or anything like that."
Dev1: "What if we pass you the file name?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily again>
Me: "No, that would break the API contract and ...uh..wait...I'm familiar with your code. How about I make the change? I'm pretty sure I'll only have to change one method"
VP: "What! No...it’s gotta be more than that. Our site is huge."
<Mgrs and devs grumble and shift around in their chairs>
Me: "I'm done talking about this. I can change your code for you or you can do it. There is no bug and I'm not changing the api because you can't use it correctly."
Later I discovered they stopped using the resize api and wrote dynamic html to 'resize' the images on the client (download the 5+ meg images, and use the length and width properties)22 -
Yesterday, in a meeting with project stakeholders and a dev was demoing his software when an un-handled exception occurred, causing the app to crash.
Dev: “Oh..that’s weird. Doesn’t do that on my machine. Better look at the log”
- Dev looks at the log and sees the exception was a divide by zero error.
Dev: “Ohhh…yea…the average price calculation, it’s a bug in the database.”
<I burst out laughing>
Me: “That’s funny.”
<Dev manager was not laughing>
DevMgr: “What’s funny about bugs in the database?”
Me: “Divide by zero exceptions are not an indication of a data error, it’s a bug in the code.”
Dev: “Uhh…how so? The price factor is zero, which comes from a table, so that’s a bug in the database”
Me: “Jim, will you have sales with a price factor of zero?”
StakeholderJim: “Yea, for add-on items that we’re not putting on sale. Hats, gloves, things like that.”
Dev: “Steve, did anyone tell you the factor could be zero?”
DBA-Steve: “Uh...no…just that the value couldn’t be null. You guys can put whatever you want.”
DevMgr: “So, how will you fix this bug?”
DBA-Steve: “Bug? …oh…um…I guess I could default the value to 1.”
Dev: “What if the user types in a zero? Can you switch it to a 1?”
Me: “Or you check the factor value before you try to divide. That will fix the exception and Steve won’t have to do anything.”
<awkward couple of seconds of silence>
DevMgr: “Lets wrap this up. Steve, go ahead and make the necessary database changes to make sure the factor is never zero.”
StakeholderJim: “That doesn’t sound right. Add-on items should never have a factor. A value of 1 could screw up the average.”
Dev: “Don’t worry, we’ll know the difference.”
<everyone seems happy and leaves the meeting>
I completely lost any sort of brain power to say anything after Dev said that. All the little voices kept saying were ‘WTF? WTF just happened? No really…W T F just happened!?’ over and over. I still have no idea on how to articulate to anyone with any sort of sense about what happened. Thanks DevRant for letting me rant.15 -
I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.
So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?
This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:
1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!
2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...
3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.
But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.
4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.
There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.
After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.
So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".
So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".
So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.
So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.
If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>14 -
Me and my team in middle of our first hackathon-
a girl who is our class topper is my team mate, trying to write some Android Code.
I am writing nodejs Api, she calls me saying there's a bug in my code,so for saving time I decided to fix that small thing on her laptop,so when I went to the backend folder to open the js file,I see no default text editor set for it. After searching,I found out she had no atom,sublime,vs etc.
I asked her - "Do you even have notepad++ ?".
She - "I have notepad,but not ++".
That day I had to edit my code in Wordpad. I am still shaking.12 -
string excuses[]={
"it's not a bug it's a feature",
"it worked on my machine",
"i tested it and it worked",
"its production ready",
"your browser must be caching the old content",
"that error means it was successful",
"the client fucked it up",
"the systems crashed and the code got lost" ,
"this code wont go into the final version",
"It's a compiler issue",
"it's only a minor issue",
"this will take two weeks max",
"my code is flawless must be someone else's mistake",
"it worked a minute ago",
"that was not in the original specification",
"i will fix this",
"I was told to stop working on that when something important came up",
"You must have the wrong version",
"that's way beyond my pay grade",
"that's just an unlucky coincidence",
"i saw the new guy screw around with the systems",
"our servers must've been hacked",
"i wasn't given enough time",
"its the designers fault",
"it probably won't happen again",
"your expectations were unrealistic",
"everything's great on my end",
"that's not my code",
"it's a hardware problem",
"it's a firewall issue",
"it's a character encoding issue",
"a third party API isn't responding",
"that was only supposed to be a placeholder",
"The third party documentation is wrong",
"that was just a temporary fix.",
"We outsourced that months ago.","
"that value is only wrong half of the time.",
"the person responsible for that does not work here anymore",
"That was literally a one in a million error",
"our servers couldn't handle the traffic the app was receiving",
"your machines processors must be too slow",
"your pc is too outdated",
"that is a known issue with the programming language",
"it would take too much time and resources to rebuild from scratch",
"this is historically grown",
"users will hardly notice that",
"i will fix it" };11 -
!rant
New job (first CS job).
Day 1: Install Ubuntu
Day 2: Dev said "it was so cute when he asked if he could uninstall windows." Also, first pair programming with engineer of 12 years. First commit (he did all the work, I just tried keeping up."
Day 3: "Here, try this bug " nearly get there. Have to leave early. Team event (Group VR experience, was wicked fun with drinks afterwards. Turns out boss man is a total bad ass. Swam with sharks and giant Wales)
Day 4: Fix bug. Notice odd behaviour. Fix that too. (All on my own). Code review: "This, that but works and is good." Get asked if I want to go to customer to do A, B and C. Tell Boss I only know B. He said "Tell me what you need for A and C."
I'm so God damn happy.8 -
Client: “Hey this thing isn’t working correctly.”
Me: “Hmm, looks like there was a bug in the last update. The team and I are going to work on a fix. In the meantime here’s a tool to help you get what you need.”
Client:”Yay!”
*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey this thing isn’t working.”
Me:”Hey, yeah, it’s the same thing. That bug I told you about? Yeah, we’re still working on it. We’ll let you know when it’s finished I promise but we’re trying to fix it without introducing more bugs.”
Client:”Ok sounds good.”
*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey this thing isn’t working.”
Me:”Bro...we just went over this...”
*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey seems like there’s a bug in our system that was found by -insert random coworker’s name here-. Are we looking into to this?”
Me:”Wtf dude.”
*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey this thing isn’t working.”
Me: -smashes my face against keyboard-7 -
Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.
In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.
Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.
I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.
"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop
"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"
(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)
Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.
During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.
And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.
NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.
Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT
SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE
Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK
"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS
being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.
So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?
You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)
This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS
* gays away into the night53 -
Dear Indian Companies,
Why do you hire for a role and then say: "We dont have that role but then we want you to grow up to be a Generalist"!
6 years as a build, release and SCM guy at Moto and Nokia back then, I shifted to this big Indian IT corp coz Nokia was shutting down...
A week into my orientation (which is a crazy weirdness inducing ritual in and of itself), the new manager I'm supposed to be working with comes up and says- "Here's the code repo, there are 2 open jQuery issues, fix them!"
I'm not really sure what to say at this point because jQuery is nice and all but thats not who I am.. I'm the infra / DevOps guy. And this is circa 2012 when DevOps as a term was just hotting up...
Tell me to setup a multi-stage pipeline and automated test cycles, I'll do it drunk, but oh no! bug fixing on a jQuery script? Noooo!!!!! I just dont have the chops for it.
So long story short, I get reported to HR for insubordination - Yeah, Go Figure!
Cue: HR meeting
HR: You wont work?
Me: I cant work on jQuery. I am a sysadmin / devops guy... Give me a project that involves those skills and I'll work.
HR: But we hired you to work on jQuery.
Me: But you did not mention jQuery / UI / UX in the job description - Pulls up email and shows JD for interview which says Symbian, Build, Release, Configuration Management but NOT jQuery.
HR: ....
Me: :-/
HR: But we want you to be a generalist.
Me: #wtf
HR: We want an engineer to be able to do anything he is tasked with!
Me: Can I know my last working date here?
And thats how my career at a glorious IT corporation just went poof!
When I think back on it, I feel good that I chose to do what I wanted to get better at and what I loved working on...
And this is the problem with IT companies in our country - They play with people's aspirations and passions... To the point that all thats left of a software engineer is the looking forward to pay day so he can start the damn cycle all over again.11 -
At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.
I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.
On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.
So what really pushed my buttons was:
It was not a bug. It was a regression.
Why is that distinction important?
My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/
Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)
At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.
Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.
I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)9 -
A real interaction I just had...
Team Member: "Can you handle this ticket for a bug fix?"
Me: "Whats the problem?"
TM: "We aren't exactly sure..."
Me: "Ok, so can you show it to me?"
TM: "We can't get it to happen again, and when it does the machine freezes and we can't debug it..."
Me: "So, if I find a fix then how do we test to make sure it worked?"
TM: "I'm not sure..."
Then today,
Product Manager: "How's that bug fix going?"
Me: "Well, let's see. The problem still hasn't been defined. I have never been able to recreate the issue. I have a hacky fix in a PR..."
PM: "Great, so we can deploy today?!?"
Me: "No, because we have no way to reproduce or test this issue at all..."
PM: "Do you think your fix will work?"
Me: "Honestly, no. If you're asking for my opinion then you can have it. IMO this is NOT a bug fix but a change to how the system operates altogether. This system was built by someone who didn't know what they are doing. We have done our best with it but it is a house of cards. And now the solution is to replace a card at the bottom layer. It is likely that no matter what fix we do (even when we can fucking test it) that it will topple the house of cards..."
PM: ~Looking at me in disbelief~
Me: "If you ask me for my honest professional opinion then you will get it. Keep that in the future if that honest response was outside what you expected."
PM: "I will do that, thanks for your assessment"
Where do we go from here? God only knows.
Praise Joe Pesci5 -
Hey everyone! Recently there was a bug discovered which caused many (but not all) “user x posted a new rant” subscription notifs (both in-app and push) to not get sent out for the last week or so. It should be fixed now. Unfortunately though, they won’t be backfilled, so make sure you take a look at your favorite ranters’ profiles since you might not have been notified about their most recent rants.
A big thanks to @gitpush for reporting the issue and thanks to @linuxxx for help testing/confirming the fix worked.
For the basic cause: when we overhauled/fixed push notifs on Android in the last build (about a week ago), we had to convert to FCM. When a “user posted rant” notification was getting sent out, the asynchronous worker would process all of the subscription notifs in a loop. So for users who have a lot of subscribers, somewhere in the loop, something was failing, likely having to do with the new FCM send method. This is now fixed and all push notifs in that worker are also done asynchronously.
Let me know if you have any questions and apologies for the loss of subscription notifs!13 -
Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)
First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:
Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).
We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".
1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.
1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"
Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.
CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.
When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!
So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.
I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.
Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.
Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.
Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.
So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off
I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine
.... happy job hunting everyone!10 -
Here's a true story about a "fight" between me and my project manager...
I've been working as a Frontend developer for nearly two years, managed to acquire a decent amount of knowledge, in some cases well above the rest of my coworkers, and one day I got into a bit of a disagreement with my project manager.
Basically he wanted me to copy/paste some feature from another project (needless to say, that... "thing" has more bugs than an ant farm), and against his orders I started doing that feature from scratch, to build a solid foundation from the very start.
I had a lengthy deadline to deliver that feature, they were expecting me to take some time to fix some of the bugs as well, but my idea was to make it bug-free from the moment the feature was released. Both my method and the one I should be copying worked the exact same, but mine was superior in every way, had no bugs, was scalable and upgradeable with little effort, there was no reason not to accept it.
We use scrum as our work methodology, so we have daily meetings. In one of those, the project manager asked me how was the progress on that new feature, and I told him I was just polishing up the code and integrating it with the rest of the project, to make sure everything was working properly. I still had a full day left before the deadline set for that feature, and I was expecting to take about half an hour to finish up a couple lines of code and test everything, no issues so far...
But then he exploded, and demanded to know why wasn't I copying the code from the other project, to which I answered "because this way things will work better".
Right after he said that the feature was working on the other project, copying and pasting it should take a few minutes to do and maybe a couple of extra hours to fix any issues that might have appeared...
The problem here is, the other project was made by trainees, I honestly can't navigate through 3 pages without bumping into an average of 2 errors per page, I was placed into this new project because they know I do quality code, and they wanted this project to be properly made, unlike the previous one, so I was baffled when he said that he preferred me to copy code instead of doing "good" code...
My next reply was "just because something has been made and is working that doesn't mean that it has been properly made nor will work as it should, I could save a few hours copying code (except I wouldn't save any, it would take me more time to adapt the code than to do it from scratch) but then I'll be wasting weeks of work because of new bugs that will be reported over time, because trust me, they will appear... "
I told him this in a very calm manner, but everybody in the meeting room paused and started staring at me, not many dare challenge that specific project manager, and I had just done that...
After a few seconds of silence the PM finally said... "look, if you manage to finish your task inside the set deadline I'll forget we ever had this conversation, but I'll leave a note on my book, just in case..."
I finished that task in about 30 mins, as expected, still had 7 hours till deadline, and I completely forgot about that feature until now because it has never given any issues whatsoever, and is now being used for other projects as well.
It was one of my proudest/rage inducing moments in this project, and honestly, I think I have hit my PM with a very big white glove because some weeks after this event the CEO himself came to the whole team to congratulate us on the outstanding work being made so far, in a project that acted against the PM's orders 90% of the time.11 -
I don't want to write clean code anymore :(
I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...
Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...
That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"
they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.
oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.
and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.
it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------
uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.
well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.
note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.9 -
When you are given a task or bugs to fix and your boss will tell you everytime that, "this is so easy this will be done in just 3 seconds".
WTF! Then don't hire devs and do it yourself! And start fixing all the damn bugs in just 3 seconds yourself! There are 28800 seconds in whole fucking 8 hours, I guess if we divided it by 3 you can finish a task or fix a bug at approximately 9600! (Applause) Now we are silently calling him "The 3 seconds man'.4 -
My code review nightmare part 2
Team responsible for code 'quality' dictated in their 18+ page coding standard document that all the references in the 'using' block be sorted alphabetically. Easy enough in Visual Studio with the right-click -> 'Remove and Sort Usings', so I thought.
Called into a conference room with other devs and the area manager (because 'Toby' needed an audience) focusing on my lack of code quality and not adhering to the coding standard.
The numerous files in question were unit tests files
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
<the rest of the usings>
T: "As you can see, none of these files' usings are in alphabetical order"
Me: "Um, I think they are. M comes before S"
T: "The standards clearly dictate system level references are to be sorted first."
Mgr: "Yes, why didn't you sort before checking this code in? T couldn't have made the standards any easier to follow. All you had to do is right-click and sort."
Me: "I did. M comes before S."
T: "No You Didn't! That is not a system reference!"
Me: "I disagree. MSTest references are considered a system level reference, but whatever, I'll move that one line if it upsets you that much."
Mgr: "OK smartass, that's enough disrespect. Just follow the fucking standard."
T: "And learn to sort. It's easy. You should have learned that in college"
<Mgr and T have a laugh>
Me: "Are all your unit tests up to standard? I mean, are the usings sorted correctly?"
T:"Um..well..of course they are!"
Me: "Lets take a look."
I had no idea, a sorted usings seems like a detail no one cares about that much and something people do when bored. I navigate to project I knew T was working on and found nearly all the file's usings weren't sorted. I pick on one..
using NUnit;
using Microsoft.Something.Other;
using System;
<the rest of the usings>
Me: "These aren't sorted..."
T: "Uh..um...hey...this file is sorted. N comes before M!"
Me: "Say that again. A little louder please."
Mgr: "NUnit is a system level nuget package. It's fine. We're not wasting time fixing some bug in how Visual Studio sorts"
Me: "Bug? What?..wait...and having me update 10 or so files isn't a waste of time?"
Mgr: "No! Coding standards are never a waste of time! We're done here. This meeting is to review your code and not T's. Fix your bugs and re-submit the code for review..today!"17 -
That moment when you make a bug fix on your local dev deployment and keep refreshing PROD web page hoping to reflect the change.1
-
WordPress related, get ready for some disgust.
So today early in the morning my boss forwarded me an email from a client, it was about a bug, and asked me if I can have a look at it and fix it.
"Yaay, WordPress!" I thought and opened the page containing the mentioned bug. She wrote that in the italian version of the page, users can select dates in the calendar, which should be disabled, like in the german version.
So yeah, I opened the code. Everything in the function looked perfect. Really. And the Data was also correctly set in the backend of WP.
The function was only 3 lines of code:
- Get the german post ID of the current post (german or italian) by its ID (using a Polylang function)
- Get an Advanced Custom Fields field by name and from a post with the ID from before
- json_encode its content and echo it to a JS var for initialization and later use in some AngularJS.
No fucking missing semicolon, it was fucking perfect like a sunset with your soulmate.
So I tried to find the bug with my personal way of debugging:
"Shitstream Debugging"
When a creek suddenly is full of water mixed with shit, walk upstream through the turds until you reach clear water. This is where the bug is.
=> So I first looked at the HTML source: Turds.
=> Then the ACF field content: Still turds.
=> Then the ID of the german post: Shit stain and turds (var_dump: null)
=> Please god at least $post->ID? Nope, fart smell and turds.
=> Nothing more to check: Clear fucking water and the flowery smell of 99 devVirgins
So it replaced $post->IT with get_the_ID() and it worked like a charm.
Afterwards I feel stupid, but $post->IT worked all the times before...
Conclusion:
FUCK YOU WORDPRESS YOU UGLY PIECE OF HUMAN-CENTIPEDE-PROCESSED-DOGFART.
Thanks for your patience.
Only one beer was sucked dry during the writing of this fucking rant.2 -
That "fuck yeah!" feeling you get when you finally fix that bug that has been bugging you for the last hour...
..only to find another one hidden around the corner. -
So today, I managed to make one of my colleagues feel like an idiot. In this contract, I work mostly for ui integration, while he build the pages with angular before I add all the html structure and fancy css.
We are building the front-end/ui for an industrial device with a touch screen. For that last 2 days he was blocked on a bug that when you click the confirm button on a delete popup, it would somehow select an input in the page before it was deleted and would lock the ui when showing the virtual keyboard (the poor thing didn't know what to do and wouldn't close).
During those two days, he asked all the other devs for help, trying to find a pattern or anything that could help, while I was focused on writing my css and stuff since it was my priority and I was hired specifically for that (I was aware of the bug and gave my input but I never saw it being reproduced)
So today, he start his new routine of raging at his desk and he decides to show me on my device for some reason. I immediately notice a pattern. It would always select one of the two fields behind the popup, in the click area of the button (it's a big button). Then, I noticed that I could press a random spot on the screen, drag my finger on the button and let go and nothing would happen.
It's at this moment I knew I had found the bug. The button was set to emit an event on mousedown while the inputs behind it were set to emit an event on mouseup (like it should be everywhere). So the popup closed when you placed your finger on the screen and the input was selected immediately after when you removed your finger (which was usually faster than the page code which was not yet optimized)
After that, it was just an easy fix to change the listener and I had a free beer.1 -
So following from this rant:
https://devrant.io/rants/618679/...
Warning long rant ahead
I resigned and my last day is tomorrow, I've released the app updates a week ago, patched a couple bugs for iOS.
My boss and the idiot who can't open an email on his phone go off to use the app as part of some training thing for the company.
I got a call yesterday saying the Android app has issues and I proceeded to ask my boss what type of phone they have:
"Samsung and Huawei"
I thought okay I need more info "what type of phone..." He responds with wouldn't have a clue....
I can't see the phone, didn't get a screenshot or anything like that but I'm expected to just know what the phone is.
My boss goes on to say yeah it's the app (he is literally the most computer illiterate person I could think of aside from guy who can't open emails on phone, how the fuck do you know that?)
Me: "From all the testing I've done the app works"
Look if you want a more robust error free update hire more than one developer I can't test every single fucking use case to determine the app is 100% bug free, I've tested on at least 10 phones before releasing the update just to be absolutely sure I got everything done and okay I missed something.
So I proceed to get my boss to tell the guy who has the issue I'll sign him up to the testing app to find out the cause and hopefully fix the issue, I setup crashlytics send the email and get a call from my boss saying the guy didn't get the email.
Well okay is it my problem that we have two emails for the same person where one of them is a typo? No it's the guy who asked and wrote down the email instead of actually forwarding a blank email from him to be absolutely sure, I sent the email to both just to be on the safe side.
I swear if he is another idiot who can't open emails on his phone well I can't help him, app works on my phone and the phones at work.
I need a phone where it doesn't work so I can get a solution I know works but if I have to deal with these idiots that can't even check an email how the fuck do I do that?
Sorry about the formatting just needed to get this off my chest before I start work.
Oh and I get asked "so who'll fix the bugs when you're gone" well I can't (in reality I'm not working for free, I'm not traveling 1 1/2 commute time to fix one bug for free, go hire someone you think will love to work for minimum wage and let's see if this guy can do what I did)8 -
Hey guys,
this rant will be long again. I'm sorry for any grammar errors or something like that, english isn't my native language. Furthermore I'm actually very sad and not in a good mood.
Why? What happened? Some of you may already know - I'm doing my apprenticeship / education in a smal company.
There I'm learning a lot, I'm developing awesome features directly for the clients, experience of which other in my age (I'm only 19 years old) can only dream.
Working in such a small company is very exhausting, but I love my job, I love programming. I turned my hobby into a profession and I'm very proud of it.
But then there are moments like the last time, when I had to present something for a client - the first presentation was good, the last was a disaster, nothing worked - but I learned from it.
But this time everything is worse than bad - I mean really, really worse than bad.
I've worked the whole week on a cool new feature - I've done everything that it works yesterday, that everything gets done before the deadline of yesterday.
To achieve this I've coded thursday till 10pm ! At home! Friday I tested the whole day everything to ensure that everything is working properly. I fixed several bugs and then at the end of the day everything seems to be working. Even my boss said that it looks good and he thinks that the rollout to all clients will become good and without any issues.
But unfortunately deceived.
Yesterday evening I wrote a long mail to my boss - with a "manual". He was very proud and said that he is confident that everything will work fine. He trusts me completly.
Then, this morning I received a mail from him - nothing works anymore - all clients have issues, everything stays blank - because I've forgotten to ensure that the new feature (a plugin) and its functionality is supported by the device (needs a installation).
First - I was very shoked - but in the same moment I thought - one moment - you've written an if statement, if the plugin is installed - so why the fuck should it broken everything?!
I looked instant to the code via git. This has to be a very bad joke from my boss I thought. But then I saw the fucking bug - I've written:
if(plugin) { // do shit }
but it has to be if(typeof plugin !== 'undefined')
I fucked up everything - due to this fucking mistake. This little piece of shit I've forgotten on one single line fucked up everything. I'm sorry for this mode of expression but I thought - no this can not be true - it must be a bad bad nightmare.
I've tested this so long, every scenario, everything. Worked till the night so it gets finished. No one, no one from my classmates would ever think of working so long. But I did it, because I love my job. I've implemented a check to ensure that the plugin is installed - but implemented it wrong - exactly this line which caused all the errors should prevent exactly this - what an irony of fate.
I've instantly called my boss and apologized for this mistake. The mistake can't be undone. My boss now has to go to all clients to fix it. This will be very expensive...
Oh my goodnes, I just cried.
I'm only working about half a year in this company - they trust me so much - but I'm not perfect - I make mistakes - like everyone else. This time my boss didn't looked over my code, didn't review it, because he trusted me completly - now this happens. I think this destroyed the trust :( I'm so sad.
He only said that we will talk on monday, how we can prevent such things in the feature..
Oh guys, I don't know - I've fucked up everything, we were so overhelmed that everything would work :(
Now I'm the looser who fucked up - because not testing enough - even when I tested it for days, even at home - worked at home - till the night - for free, for nothing - voluntary.
This is the thanks for that.
Thousand good things - but one mistake and you're the little asshole. You - a 19 year old guy, which works since 6 months in a company. A boss which trusts you and don't look over your code. One line which should prevent crashing, crashed everything.
I'm sorry that this rant is so long, I just need to talk to you guys because I'm so sad. Again. This has happend to frequently lately.16 -
Craziest bug, not so much in the sense of what it was (although it was itself wacky too), but in what I went through to fix it.
The year was 1986. I was finishing up coding on a C64 demo that I had promised would be out on a specific weekend. I had invented a new demo effect for it, which was pretty much the thing we all tried to do back then because it would guarantee a modicum of "fame", and we were all hyper-ego driven back then :) So, I knew I wanted to have it perfect when people saw it, to maximize impressiveness!
The problem was that I had this ONE little pixel in the corner of the screen that would cycle through colors as the effect proceeded. A pixel totally apart from the effect itself. A pixel that should have been totally inactive the entire time as part of a black background.
A pixel that REALLY pissed me off because it ruined the utter perfection otherwise on display, and I just couldn't have that!
Now, back then, all demos were coded in straight Assembly. If you've ever done anything of even mild complexity in Assembly, then you know how much of a PITA it can be to find bugs sometimes.
This one was no exception.
This happened on a Friday, and like I said, I promised it for the weekend. Thus began my 53 hours of hell, which to this day is still the single longest stretch of time straight that I've stayed awake.
Yes, I spent literally over 2+ days, sitting in front of my computer, really only ever taking bio breaks and getting snacks (pretty sure I didn't even shower)... all to get one damn pixel to obey me. I would conquer that f'ing pixel even if it killed me in the process!
And, eventually, I did fix it. The problem?
An 'i' instead of an 'l'. I shit you not!
After all these years I really don't remember the details, except for the big one that sticks in my mind, that I had an 'i' character in some line of code where an 'l' should have been. I just kept missing it, over and over and over again. I mean, I kinda understand after many hours, your brain turns to mush. and you make more mistakes, so I get missing it after a while... but missing it early on when I was still fresh just blows my mind.
As I recall, I finally uploaded the demo to the distro sight at around 11:30pm, so at least I made my deadline before practically dropping dead in bed (and then having to get up for school the next morning- D'oh!). And it WAS a pretty impressive demo... though I never did get the fame I expected from it (most likely because it didn't get distributed far and wide enough).
And that's the story of what I'd say was my craziest bug ever, the one that probably came closest to killing me :)5 -
Out of all the bugs, the most annoying are the ones that come out and make me say "WTF?!?!? WHY THE FUCK HAS IT BEEN WORKING FOR THE LAST 2 YEARS??!!?!!??? THERE"S NO WAY IT COULD HAVE!"
When the bug surfaces, you investigate and see that it indeed IS a bug and there's no way it would ever work w/o a fix. But then SOMEHOW it's been working just fine for years....
It's like server elves went on strike and said "no more, it's enough covering that bug - it's time you fix it, lazy-ass idiot!"11 -
You know when somebody complains about a bug in your software at a meeting to everybody, you go to their office, find out that the bug is actually an user problem, and then on the next meeting, when asked about the bug the person reports "we fixed it" and you correct them, explaining in detail how there was nothing to fix because the problem was completely user driven?
I love these moments2 -
Some of the penguin's finest insults (Some are by me, some are by others):
Disclaimer: We all make mistakes and I typically don't give people that kind of treatment, but sometimes, when someone is really thick, arrogant or just plain stupid, the aid of the verbal sledgehammer is neccessary.
"Yeah, you do that. And once you fucked it up, you'll go get me a coffee while I fix your shit again."
"Don't add me on Facebook or anything... Because if any of your shitty code is leaked, ever, I want to be able to plausibly deny knowing you instead of doing Seppuku."
"Yep, and that's the point where some dumbass script kiddie will come, see your fuckup and turn your nice little shop into a less nice but probably rather popular porn/phishing/malware source. I'll keep some of it for you if it's good."
"I really love working with professionals. But what the fuck are YOU doing here?"
"I have NO idea what your code intended to do - but that's the first time I saw RCE and SQLi in the same piece of SHIT! Thanks for saving me the hassle."
"If you think XSS is a feature, maybe you should be cleaning our shitter instead of writing our code?"
"Dude, do I look like I have blue hair, overweight and a tumblr account? If you want someone who'd rather lie to your face than insult you, go see HR or the catholics or something."
"The only reason for me NOT to support you getting fired would be if I was getting paid per bug found!"
"Go fdisk yourself!"
"You know, I doubt the one braincell you have can ping localhost and get a response." (That one's inspired by the BOFH).
"I say we move you to the blockchain. I'd volunteer to do the cutting." (A marketing dweeb suggested to move all our (confidential) customer data to the "blockchain").
"Look, I don't say you suck as a developer, but if you were this competent as a gardener, I'd be the first one to give you a hedgetrimmer and some space and just let evolution do its thing."
"Yeah, go fetch me a unicorn while you're chasing pink elephants."
"Can you please get as high as you were when this time estimate come up? I'd love to see you overdose."
"Fuck you all, I'm a creationist from now on. This guy's so dumb, there's literally no explanation how he could evolve. Sorry Darwin."
"You know, just ignore the bloodstain that I'll put on the wall by banging my head against it once you're gone."2 -
@Apple iPadOS an iOS teams: you puZies.
You release one buggy iOS / iPadOS after another, each piling on features and bugs, without fixing crowd documented long standing defects.
But what really pisses me off is when you don't have the balls to own up to your mistakes. This is at least the 3rd time you have re-released an iOS / iPadOS update under the same version number. This time it is 14.5.1
I have iPadOS 14.5.1 installed and the iPad is now telling me I need to update to 14.5.1. Just own up to it, you released buggy shit and you need to release another bug fix days after... call it 14.5.2. Call it like it is and we respect you. Try to hide it and you lose our respect, you pussies.
If Microsoft did one thing right, they defined the release sequencing:
X.Y.Z
Changing X means rewrite the manual it is so new and improved (🖕🏻 you Adobe and FileMaker)
Changing Y means it is an update with more features than bug fixes but not a generational change that constitutes a rewrite of anything (🖕🏻 you macOS team for bastardizing with 10.X.Y)
Changing Z means you fixed your stuff, we respect you for owning up to your mistakes.
Man-up Apple, grow some balls and stop confusing people with trying to cover up your screw ups. It's all about the Z.3 -
"I want visibility in the sprint", "Information for everyone! When you do even a small refactoring, you should add a card to the sprint, clear?"
Those were the words of the product manager.
That sounds reasonable but when there is a bug to investigate, he just pops to the chat channel throw a request with a bit of information and asks to check/fix that.
So to keep my sanity, I asked him to create a ticket with relevant information and additional observations so we can have visibility as he was advocating for it ;)
It felt just good to see him going silent :D3 -
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.4 -
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!!11 -
I love it when rather than fix the bug that is causing the faulty data you write a bot on a schedule to clean up the faulty data. It's like a bot battle who can mess up / clean up the data the fastest. Unless your clean up bot has a bug then you are just F'ed.2
-
"It works on our end", the sentence that made me lose my shit.
I've been working on a project were we're supposed to integrate an API into our system.
When trying to get some user id's (UUID) from said API, we got a type-error in the response (???), so I called their integration support and asked what the fuck they were doing (not really, i was kinda calm at this point).
The answer I got was following:
Integration guy: "Uh, bro, like, I don't even know, it's probably on your end"
Me: "We literally used this endpoint with the same parameters yesterday, and got a result we expected. I noticed you updated your API this morning, did you make any major changes?"
Integration guy: "Yeah we changed the type of user id from string to number"
Me: "So, you changed the type of a UUID (uuid4) from string to number? How did you not think that would be an issue? I can see in your forums that everyone else is having the same issue."
Integration guy: "Nah, it's probably a bug in your code, it works on our end"
Me in my mind: *IT WORKS ON YOUR END?!? IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IF IT WORKS ON YOUR END, FUCKTARD.*
What I actually said: "Uhm, I'm not sure if works on your end either, I'm not even sure how this change made it to production. But hey, thanks I guess, bye."
WHY AM I NOT ABLE TO YELL AT PEOPLE WHEN THEY ARE BEING RETARDED???
But really though, when you're maintaining an API, you shouldn't fucking care if things work on your end in your dev environment. What matters is how it works in production, for the end user/users.
And I know that 99% of cases it's the users fault by entering the wrong parameters or trying to request with wrongly setup auth and what not, but still.
Don't ASSUME nothing's wrong on your end. It's your fucking job to fix the issues.
And guess what? The problem was on their side.
I'm going fucking bald.2 -
Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer
Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....
Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while
But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...
The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm
He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.
I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.
Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.
My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"
I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)
He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)
Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.
Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.
I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.
Am really Fed up with it all7 -
When your company buys a third party solution and you spend all your time emailing them about bugs in their system.
Seriously, I even sent you the exact line of the bug in your JavaScript with a suggested solution, and deployed a new stack with your latest (broken) fix so you can test out that solution. Then you email back saying it is fixed but it is clearly still broken. If I email you a fixed version of your file will you deploy it? OMG!1 -
The worst part of being a dev
My social dilemma
In a fast paced world where the average human spends at least 6 hours a day with technology, deriving basic entertainment, pleasures and engaging in various activities.
Here we are the developers that have to engage with technology for longer hours for a living , having to keep up with deadlines, immersing our minds in complicated algorithms and then the endless possibilities of entertainment from the machine in so few human hours a day , you wonder how you’d get off, and to top it up, I personally work from home.
And then the dilemma of overcoming different suggestions from various parties in taking a break off, a break off to what you later ask yourself, thus creating the shadow of doubt, splitting the fragile programmer’s mind , trying to solve this imaginary puzzle, “this bug of the mind”.
Then the challenge often arises in creating a balance, telling yourself, just catching up with people with this same technology takes a whole day, or then again quitting my Job, but from my little experience of life, nobody likes a poor visitor, this is actually worse than a “bug” and as I bask in this quagmire, “a little voice in my head keeps singing keep doing what you love doing”.
Like an infinite loop of crazy, spiralling back to these machines, trying the find and fix the balance of normalcy. Always remembered the cool years of college tho, with so much people around and then again that was college.
An then the thought arises, maybe something else might be worth doing, but after so much time spent in building your skills and the enormous joy of programming even typing without looking at the keyboard is a real pleasure, and yeah sure the days are short with the reality of a constant need to survive, remain sane, compete and make the best of life in such short time.
Then how do we know if we have fallen off the so-called “social track”, when we have only lived so little to really comprehend the most parts of life? with such constant stream of unanswered question, you’d realise you shouldn’t have burdened the mind creating such questions in the first place
But then again maybe it gets better, one of the above, the disturbed mind or the situation as whole and yes I try oh I try, I place calls, do some visiting, no relationship tho but with a good perspective in mind.
In this race of life, you sometimes ask yourself would you rather be in a different position, or maybe already put exactly where we belong. For this illusionary fight with self is a fight with reality as a whole and true bliss comes from actually letting go as time and people pass you by.
And my greatest achievement to date aside family and my work is getting into the 1000 club on devRant.2 -
Fuck chromium devs and their hate for linux. Piece of shit
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/...
TL;DR
Screen share with audio is broken under chromium, because some user didn't want the desktop audio appear when asking for input devices, when there's no microphone available.
The thread doesn't mention a specific cause for this besides "for some reason pulseaudio does this"
So what did the gigabrains working on chromium decide to do? Not list monitors (basically recording devices for on desktop audio) at all.
Why?
* UI is hard
* Because we say so
* Fuck standards
And they only do that on linux. Windows, which uses a similar concept works just fine. Mac? Yeah, just hacked it in. Linux? GL won't fix
Meanwhile they decide to add all shits of non standard, bug causing events for shits and giggles, but when you actually want to resolve issues you're met with silence and arrogance.
Once again, what a piece of shit. Chromium devs must love making things worse with every passing version7 -
So my laptop is a Lenovo y50-70 and it's quite good. The keyboard is amazing compared to most other Laptops I've tried the screen is nice, it's durable and it's got some decent specs. With it (and also my desktop) I dual boot Kubuntu and Windows 10.
About three years ago I decided I wanted to reinstall both OS' since they were starting to get cluggered. Lo and behold I wasn't able to do that because, and I quote: "EFI USB Device boot failed".
Hours were spent trying to Google different things to the point where I was even desperate enough to go beyond page 0 on the different searches with (as you might have guessed), no luck. "Fuck that" I thought. It worked and I could clean it manually anyway.
Fast forward to the last part of August this year where I upgraded my Kubuntu from 17.10 to 18.04 and shit got weird. You can read more about it here:
https://reddit.com/r/kde/...
but the TL;DR is in the link. Windows was also quite annoing as well (but don't take my word for it).
As you might understand it made me really frustrated. I couldn't update my BIOS since they were already at the current version, but one way or another I had to fix it. After a while was almost about to give up when I decided to give this:
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/...
a go. It was weird though. Like imagine the conversation:
"Can't boot from USB bro, what do I do?"
"Just update your kernel, bro"
Well IT. FUCKING. WORKED.
So I imideatly installed Linux and have just now bothered installing Windows (since all of the teachers are vacation so I had plenty of time to set it all up).
But got damn.4 -
To everyone who wanted the JS library to do the blur like in one of my other rants, I want you to know that it's close to be finished. I just have some blur position bugs.
I think tomorrow I will finally fix that bug and publish the library on Github.
The linked rant: https://devrant.io/rants/888497/...
I will maybe do another post when the project will be on Github. 😉2 -
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 today6 -
I'm intentionally resigning from my remote software development job to teach my company a lesson. The guy who wrote the codes previously really knew how to cook spaghetti 😀😂.
To add a single line takes minutes, because when you do something else breaks, and you'll keep fixing what breaks when you tried fixing what breaks when you try fixing what..... endless loop of bug-fix cycle.
Now they blame it on me.
They won't understand if they don't get someone new, my reputation will fix itself through that..
My first opinion after sighting the codes was, "re-write the whole project using better patterns and architecture", the reply as you can guess, we'll do that later.
I couldn't even upgrade the server to use even PHP 7.1 because the framework breaks, the guy has editted a lot from the vendors files. Don't ever try composer updates.
Two word to describes the situation. "It sucks".
The previous developer needs to be shot, literally.7 -
When you have a bug that only comes up randomly, try a fix, after 100 tries, appears it is working, push, same bug pops up.
-
that moment when the client reports a bug on the website, and you ask if they cleared the cache, but you fix the bug in the meantime...6
-
Love the feeling of closing all those open tabs when you finally fix that bug and finish that task.1
-
One night, after one very stressful week of production code fixes (I was working on a game with some friends and I created the network infrastructure for P2P and database communication from scratch), I was at my gf's house. After we fell asleep, I stood up and screamed right at her something like "I fucking already told you how X works and how to communicate with Y. Learn to write code properly and after double checking yours then you shall ask me for a non-existing 'bug' fix. Learn how to properly write event based code and use polling you moron!". After that I turned to the other side and fell asleep immediately.
When I saw her the next morning sleeping in the couch, I could not understand why... Only after she described to me the whole incident I started laughing.
After that I just took two weeks off the project and after that period I never actually worked the same way (so hard) in my free time with them.1 -
Deep Thought Rant
It's funny how the world works these days...companies only looking for "senior *something*" developers to work...
Mentorship and internship also do matter. What's happening?...sure you can contribute to open source but having a mentor also helps. Working as an intern allows one to see not only tech bit but workplace environment. How to deal with deadlines, feeling good and wasted at the same time when one bug that took a 3 minutes to fix but 3 hours to find, presenting your work; well what's working only, being bashed when it's your fault or not (even though that sucks), learning from your mentor and so on
Are their companies that still do this?3 -
tl : "hey dotenv, we have a presentation with VP tomorrow, do you want to present any of your achievements in product?"
me: "umm, what achievements ?"
tl : "you know, something that you added in app which made a good impact to various metrics like DAU, MAU, less bad reviews etc"
me: "umm... i coded the tasks and features created by you folks. they got shipped at some point of your liking, and are now being tracked by you for its success failure. So i am not sure what to take credit for"
TL: "no, no.. i mean like any bugs or issues that you fixed outside of your daily jira tasks which you tracked to be a sucess"
me: "well as far as tracking is concerned, then neither i know how to track them nor i did. but yea, i identified a bug where an outdated payload was generating bad request and giving a silent failure instead of success which recently got shipped. maybe its helping users get actual response instead of "we will get back to you in some time" , so this might get considered?
TL : "oh that? that we have already added as one of the team's achievements (=PM+TL's achievement) and have tracked it to be a succes"
me : "what th- okay. then how about that api failure which was identified by AVP as "something is not right" in which the api was intermittently taking a long time to respond. he tagged me and i set up logs to identify which type of users got that issue and the actual cause of that api failure. that was definitely a good fox for app as we ended up with good reviews on playstore for our new release?"
TL : "oh that? how can you take credit for that fix? it was identified by AVP, you just added similar logs that we were using for tracking errors and implemented a fix when it came to you as a sprint task? its a team achievement"
me : "but you guys didn't identified the cause through your logs!? my log was more granular. and even if that's the case, we aren't allowed to pick any task just as is, without getting it added to sprint , right?"
TL : "nah, that was a team win"
*6 months later, during appraisal time"
TL : "Hey dotenv, you haven't displayed any leadership skills and haven't gone put of the box to improve the product. Here's your peanut appraisal 🗑️"
me : 🥲🔫🤯🪦
------------
fuck this stupid neaurocrst structure. i hate being a selfish prick than a team player, but either give credits as well as punishment to the team or gove credits as well as punishment to the single person. but wtf is thos culture of giving reward to team and punishment to individual? fckin communists
------ -
The feeling when you leave work frustrated because of that unfixed bug and in the night you lay on the bed, trying to fix the bug writing code in your mind and getting more frustrated because your imaginary code doesn't fix the bug.1
-
When you just figured out a fix for a bug, your on your way to the fix, but suddenly your co-worker asks everyone in the room "Would you rather be on a helicopter or airplane that lost all power". Then you get into a 10 minute discussion about which and why, and now that bug is permanent.5
-
Back when I used be a junior fresh out of school, my senior used to say, when releasing a first version or a major version of any software, app or website always implement easy to fix bugs.
End users or clients, especially the ones that tasked you with the creation of it, will look for a bug until they find one, if it isn't one you will spent hours trying to figure it out, instead give them one.
You know how to fix it and the client is satisfied they found one.
To this day, i still do that, although mostly not even aware of it. Eg: I know that's a bug but i'll fix that when (not if, when) they complain about it.
I even find myself telling the juniors, i develop with, giving them similar if not the same advice.
And that is what experience means, skill is something they teach you in school.
Experience is what makes you a senior or a junior, not your level of skill or the amount of keywords on your Linked In profile.2 -
Today I found a critical bug to our software and wrote a fix and tested it locally.
Common sense would dictate that especially when it is critical you test said fix on a real release and not with a debugger attached and running onna different device altogether.
I was denied this request because the afflicted machines engineer would not be able to finish the machine before the factory acceptence test.
I stood there with glassed over eyes for a second and then to no avail tried to explain that without this fix he wouldnt even pass the internal acceptance test......12 -
I love one particular old game. It's called Port Royale (the first one). Why? Because the game crashes a lot. Players know that, devs knew that. It's so old and unknown to people who haven't played that devs don't even fix it. But, but... why do you write it here?
This game tought me autosaving! Yeah, they have autosaving in [5, 10, 15] minute intervals, but the game is so fast, that even a little change you do will cripple your whole economy. Not to mention the saving mechanism is partially broken (or that's what the log says, fml). By broken I mean it tries to autosave, but sometimes it crashes the whole thing, just because it can. A game with special effects - crashing in _intervals_!
Because of this lovely game I have a habit of saving and staging (or even commiting). Maybe they should be proud for making such a bug. Saved me once again a minute ago when I managed to crash Emacs with Python. :D1 -
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.1 -
That feeling when you have found an impossible to find bug after digging in and you attempt a fix as soon as you find it and the first 1 fixes everything
-
Fuck Unity.
Every single time I try to use Unity to develop my well-along-in-development video game, it finds some way of fucking itself up.
Be it from somehow failing to compile a DLL - which is something completely out of my control, the inspector failing to update itself when I select a new object every five minutes, to the engine managing to fail to load its UI layout because it somehow managed to lose a file responsible for containing the layout, the Inspector forgetting to include a scrollbar and as such trying to cram a bunch of components into one area, crashing in a certain area because I tried using reflections, crashing because I tried running the game in a place that always works, all the way to the whole thing closing instantaneously when I try selecting a new layout.
My experience with using this god-forsaken configuration of code and imagery has been one of endless torment; I've spent hours lamenting about the pain this piece of utter horseshit has caused me to those who'd listen.
I don't know what I did to this thing to deserve to be shown the absolute worst of this engine for the year I've been working on my game for. I can't even take a look at its source code to see if I can piece together things I'll pick up from alien code to fix obnoxious bugs myself because you cunts have it under lock-and-key for some dumbass reason.
Even updating my install of this engine is a gamble; I remember clear-as-day updating my project from 2019.3.14 to whichever one was most recent at the time, and everything breaking. This time, I got lucky and managed to update to 2020.1.4 with no issue on the surface, except I inadvertently let in a host of other issues that somehow made the editor worse than the older one.
There's little point in even bothering to report a bug because this shit happens so randomly that I could be just working on auto-pilot and the next thing I know Unity's stupid "crash handler" rears its ugly head yet again, or you people are probably too busy adding support for platforms no sane person uses like fucking Chromebooks.
There've been times where it's crashed upwards of three times in the span of 40 minutes of light use.
How is one expected to cough up hundreds of dollars a year to use a "pro" version of this horrid editor when every session of use yields a 50/50 chance that it'll either work like it's supposed to, or break in one way or another?
It's a miracle I even managed to type all of this out in one go, I expected the website to just stop responding entirely once I got past four lines.
Do what you will with my post, I don't care.6 -
i have been working on a web-based game and this is my daily routine (also i listen to rock and metal)
college to home to coding
thinking
coding...
looks like theres a small bug
shouldnt take much time
maybe this can work
*screaming*
i am not the first with this bug *here i come stack*
dont do this to me stack... theres suppose to be a fix for it
*extreme head banging*
F*** it
*changing songs*
nope this not helping
F***
F*** THIS SHIT
*rhythmic head banging*
oh god kill me
F***
am i really that bad
*autistic screaming*
humming song instead of thinking of bug
(8 - 8:30) me: mom i am hungry
this shit is taking toooo much time
*high intensity screaming*
F*** you bug
coding, its not form me
*surfing devrant*
*felling i am normal*
(10 - 10:30) mom: when are you eating
*high pitch screaming*
i am leaving coding for sure now
its too late time to sleep
fml its late again, i am gonna miss the first lecture again
back to coding
A thousand year later...
Bug status: Still not fixed4 -
I am so much stunned i cannot form a sentence on what to say. Lost 3 days trying to fix a bug on why socket.io was connecting to backend TWICE per user. I cannot fucking comprehend this. Backend works fine because via postman it doesnt connect twice. Everything works fine. 72 fucking hours waste d of my life just to find out i had to change
<React.StrictMode>
<App />
</React.StrictMode>
Into
<App />
When i tell you my jaw fucking dropped it fucking did. And it does not drop often or that easily for me. What the FUCK is react strict mode???? FUCK react. I fucking hate this piece of garbage framework. I even like nextjs better. React💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩motberfucker WHY is strict mode fucking my code what use does it have who gives a shit why does it have anything to do with websocket connection FUCK react 💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩 how does this piece of camel turd have anything to do with duplicate connection 💩💩💩💩MFKKCER this garbage doesnt exist in my beautiful angular or nextjs PLS why this cancer has to be so headaching i knew I'll get FUCKED if i dont go over a detailed course learning react from scratch. Now im suffering. Learning this garbage the hard way FUCK off4 -
They've been in a meeting with some clients the whole morning.
12PM, time for me to go. Say Happy New Year and am on my way home.
12:20 Got home, took shirt off, got something to eat from the fridge.
12:22 Bit the first slice of pizza. Phone rings.
- "Yo' we wanted to show them app 2 but I can't log in."
+ "I left the laptop (and the whole dev environment) there, and there's no PC on in my house (and no dev environment whatsoever)."
- "Well check with your phone. [SIC] Tell me when you fix it."
12:32 I had turned my personal computer on; checked the problem was what I imagined (unpkg lib with no version defined on the link had a new major/non-retrocompatible version); grabbed an online FTP tool; remembered IP, user & password; edited the single line that caused the problem; and checked it worked. Calling back.
+ "It's fixed."
- "Thanks!"
12:38 CEO sent me an image of the app not working, due to a known bug.
+ "That happens if you try to access app 1 having accessed app 2 and not logging off." (app 2 isn't being used / sold, as it's still in development) "Try logging off and logging in again from app 1."
- * radio silence *
+ * guess they could get in *
They had the whole freaking morning. 😠
I'm the hero CMMi's level one warns you about. But at what cost.
Happy early New Year's Eve everyone.2 -
When you have a bug in code that you are trying to fix for a century and then when you fix it you, make 15 more bugs by solving that bug like wtf2
-
That moment when you spend hours debugging, only to realize... the bug wasn’t in your code but in your brain. Yup, I initialized the variable outside the loop and wondered why it wasn't updating. Classic me.
Moral of the story: Sleep is not optional, fellow devs. Also, coffee isn’t a fix for stupidity, but hey, it keeps us going! ☕3 -
How surprising is it when a person designs code in a very clear and impressive structure and just when you think about asking them for guidance, they reveal themselves to be complete turds?
I've been working with this person's "infra" code, at work. I've rewritten some classes to use their infra. I had a vague idea of how the classes work. I had no idea of how their code works. Expectedly, there were some issues but now only minor ones remain.
I asked them for a description of what I'm supposed to do for the few bugs I'm facing. They replied in such a condescending tone, it made me want to punch them through the screen.
Almost a month later, we're still going back and forth with emails. I've been swallowing it and responding calmly. I never got direct answers. Always deflections to irrelevant things or veiled insults. I took it because they did correct one silly error of mine that actually my code reviewer should've caught. (What's worse is that it got introduced by me just before my review and commit.)
But does that give them the right to insult me in front of the whole team including my project manager? I got a reply today from them with everyone of note in cc implying very clearly that I have not done any work. They highlighted a line from my code with some todo tag (that was not meant for them) to make their invalid point. A line that's unrelated to the bug I asked them about. This is after I proved them wrong when they insisted that I had done something wrong about a feature related to the bug.
If you don't understand what I asked for fucking ask me to ask again. But do not fucking try establish yourself on higher ground by pointing out irrelevant things in my code.
I was shocked and enraged that they'd do such a thing. I double checked everything like a mad man. Despite knowing that the fix has to come from them, I was instantly transported to the noob stage, grasping at straws. I wanted to send a really scathing reply right away but my manager asked me to wait.
My mind is now a see saw shifting between a panicked noob questioning every fucking thing I ever did in my nada life and a hungry enraged monster looking to maul that fucking shithead for burning me like that.1 -
A dev found a bug I created where I set a SQL parameter name to @OrderID instead of the expected @Order. The standard is @OrderID, there is one stored proc where it's @Order.
Oops...I didn't catch it because the integration test didn't cover that area of the code. My mistake...I should have checked...I take complete responsibility for the screw up.
He let me know by email..
"When refactoring, from now on check the stored procedure parameters, there are a few that don't follow the standard."
I was like "from now on..."? ...wow....bold comment from someone responsible for code that doesn't check for nulls, doesn't log errors, and relies on exceptions for flow control. You wouldn't even have known about the error if I didn't modify your code to log the error (the try..except returned false)
I really wanted to reply ...
"Fixed. From now on, when you come across those easily found bugs, go head and fix it, write a test, and move on. Don't send a condescending email to me, my boss, your boss, all the DBAs, and the entire fracking order processing team. Thanks."
But..I thanked him for finding and letting me know...we're a team..blah blah blah..
Frack..people suck.1 -
Just got off the phone with a csr about a bug they found. No biggie, I said I'd fix it. Basically until it gets fixed I told them that when they do their process to make sure to do "foo" first, then "bar" second. As soon as I got off the phone, had to poop so I went to the bathroom, and as soon as I sat down I get a message from the same CSR, "Hey I did bar first, can I type foo then bar again?"
WTF DID I JUST SAY LITERALLY 2 MINUTES AGO ON THE PHONE. TBH IT WOULD BE BETTER IF YOU JUST DIDNT DO ANYTHING FOR 15 MINUTES BUT NOW I HAVE TO COMB CLOUD FUNCTION LOGS, FIND THE DOC UID YOU CREATED, FIND THE DOC YOU MADE, DELETE IT, DELETE THE ASSIGNMENT IN YOUR TRASH ASS WORKPLACE PORTAL, AND STILL FIX THE SAID BUG3 -
What do you call a developer that fixes bugs or add enhancements?
For example, I have , like two projects, none developed by me, I have to add enhancement/ fix bugs when the issues/change-requests arrive.
Now I am preparing my cv and I am like what do I write for these particular projects?
Don't feel right writing developer for these projects since it gives the impression I developed the entire thing. Co-developed does not sound right either. Maintenance? Now it feels more like server operations than anything to do with code. Bug Fixer? Sure got a nice ring to it, but it does not feel professional.
So guys, any ideas?10 -
So what's up with some devs, QAs and managers that create bug tickets with little to no information on what is the actual bug? I can semi-understand in the case where you document it only for you to read later.
Fuck you if you think that a ticket with only a title saying "fix all the bugs for this release" or "this feature is not working" is an appropriate way of documenting a bug.
Fuck you even more if when you are being asked to provide more info to reproduce the issue so someone else can actually be sure it is fixed or not (environment, steps, expected result, actual result, etc.), you simply say that you don't have the time for it and documenting tickets is a waste of time.
Hiring YOU was a waste of time!4 -
A loooong time ago...
I've started my first serious job as a developer. I was young yet enthusiastic as well as a kind of a greenhorn. First time working in a business, working with a team full of experienced full-lowered ultra-seniors which were waiting to teach me the everything about software engineering.
Kind of.
Beside one senior which was the team lead as well there were two other devs. One of them was very experienced and a pretty nice guy, I could ask him anytime and he would sit down with me a give me advice. I've learned a lot of him.
Fast forward three months (yes, three months).
I was not that full kind of greenhorn anymore and people started to give me serious tasks. I had some experience in doing deployments and stuff from my other job as a sysadmin before so I was soon known as the "deployment guy", setting up deployments for our projects the right way and monitoring as well as executing them. But as it should be in every good team we had to share our knowledge so one can be on vacation or something and another colleague was able to do the task as well.
So now we come to the other teammate. The one I was not talking about till now. And that for a reason.
He was very nice too and had a couple of years as a dev on his CV, but...yeah...like...
When I switched some production systems to Linux he had to learn something about Linux. Everytime he encountered an error message he turned around and asked me how to fix it. Even. For. The. Simplest. Error. He. Could. Google. Up.
I mean okay, when one's new to a system it's not that easy, but when you have an error message which prints out THE SOLUTION FOR THE ERROR and he asks me how to fix it...excuse me?
This happened over 30 times.
A. Week.
Later on I had to introduce him to the deployment workflow for a project, so he could eventually deploy the staging environment and the production environment by hisself.
I introduced him. Not for 10 minutes. I explained him the whole workflow and the very main techniques and tools used for like two hours. Every then and when I stopped and asked him if he had any questions. He had'nt! Wonderful!
Haha. Oh no.
So he had to do his first production deployment. I sat by his side to monitor everything. He did well. One or two questions but he did well.
The same when he did his second prod deploy. Everythings fine.
And then. It. Frikkin. Begins.
I was working on the project, did some changes to the code. Okay, deploy it to dev, time for testing.
Hm.
Error checking out git. Okay, awkward. Got to investigate...
On the dev server were some files changed. Strange. The repo was all up to date. But these changes seemed newer because they were fixing at least one bug I was working on.
This doubles the strangeness.
I want over to my colleague's desk.
I asked him about any recent changes to the codebase.
"Yeah, there was a bug you were working on right? But the ticket was open like two days so I thought I'll fix it"
What the Heck dude, this bug was not critical at all and I had other tasks which were more important. Okay, but what about the changed files?
"Oh yeah, I could not remember the exact deployment steps (hint from the author: I wrote them down into our internal Wiki, he wrote them done by hisself when introducing him and after all it's two frikkin commands), so I uploaded them via FTP"
"Uhm... that's not how we do it buddy. We have to follow the procedure to avoid..."
"The boss said it was fine so I uploaded the changes directly to the production servers. It's so much easier via FTP and not this deployment crap, sorry to say that"
You. Did. What?
I could not resist and asked the boss about this. But this had not Effect at all, was the long-time best-buddy-schmuddy-friend of the boss colleague's father.
So in the end I sat there reverting, committing and deploying.
Yep
It's soooo much harder this deployment crap.
Years later, a long time after I quit the job and moved to another company, I get to know that the colleague now is responsible for technical project management.
Hm.
Project Management.
Karma's a bitch, right? -
Open source is poison, hoax and source of much troubles.
Even as I love OSS, and I use it a lot, when things go south, they go south terribly.
There was "security" updates in one OSS program I have been using, that accidentally prevented use cases which specifically affected me. I raised bug report, made issue and gave small repro for it.
One of the core developers acknowledges that yes, this is problem, and could be handled with few added options, which users of similar use case could use to keep things working. He then tags issue "needs help" and disappears.
After I have waited some time, I ask help how I could fix it myself, like how to setup proper dev environment for that tool. Asked it in their forums few days later, as issue didn't get any response. Then asked help in their slack, as forums didn't get any help.
Figured out how to get dev environment up, fix done (~4 lines changed, adding simple check for option enabled or not) and figured out how to test that this works.
I create pull request to project, checking their CONTRIBUTING and following instructions there. Then I wait. I wait two weeks, and then one of the core develors goes to add label "needs response from maintainer". That is now almost two weeks ago...
So, bug that appeared in October, and issue that was created October 8th, is still not fixed, even as there is fix in PR for 28 days this far.
And what really ticks me off? People who make statements like: "it is OSS, have you thought of contributing and fixing things yourself?" when we run into problems with open source software.
Making fix yourself ain't biggest problem... but getting it actually applied seems to be biggest roadblock. This kind of experiences doesn't really encourage me to spend time fixing bugs in OSS, time is often better spend changing to different tool, or making changes in my own workflow or going around problem some kludge way.
I try to get business starting, and based on OSS tools. But my decision is staggering, as I had also made decision to contribute back to OSS... but first experiences ain't that encouraging.
Currently, OSS feels like cancer.17 -
Hello all,
I am an apprentice, 19. I joined this software developer apprenticeship to leave college as it was not particularly great for my mental health, and programming is the only thing I can do reasonably well.
The company that I find myself in is a strange one. It has about twenty or so employees, but we all instructed to operate as if we are a giant company—our sales person, for example, will tell our clients that we have hundreds.
The development team is a collection of software developers. There is no database administrator, network administrator, software engineer (not in name only), test engineer, requirements engineer, etc. There are just several software developers. Of these developers, one has left by now. When he joined, he was promised to be working on a new system: he left after spending seven years on an old system. A new developer has just arrived to replace him: he was told he would be working with Raspberry Pis; it was interesting to see his face after we informed him that we do not use Raspberry Pis.
The codebase is fourty-years-old and written in Delphi, which is some kind of cousin of pascal, from what I understand. Code is not peer-reviewed. Instead, it is self-reviewed, and you just push whatever changes you make. The code is very much spaghetti, and there is a whole array of bugs that, at least to me, look impossible to track down and fix. I have a bug assigned to me at the moment were someone appears somewhere when they are not supposed to. After asking seniors about this, I learn of this huge checking mechanism and all of its flaws: a huge, flawed checking mechanism... for toggling a single boolean value. This isn't a complicated boolean value, by the way, this is just a value to say whether someone has clocked in or clocked out of a building, via a button.
In terms of versioning, we have several releases, and we often do development work in older releases (or new releases and then write them into older releases) because our clients are larger than us and often refuse to upgrade, and the boss does not want to lose any contracts. We also essentially have multiple master branches.
With the lack of testers, bizarre version control, what appears to be unfiffled promises to staff, etc. I must ask that, since this is my first gig as a software developer, is any of this normal?2 -
I'm a developer, member of the A-Team. Actually I'm the leader of the A-Team.
We are incredibly skilled. Our problem solving capabilities is amazing, almost 100 times more effective than the rest of people. We produce code 10 times faster and better than anybody else. We have THE knowledge.
We can save the company in case of emergency.
For that reason, it's of paramount importance to nurture and protect the A-Team.
- When there is a bug, A-Team will not correct it. Because, if A-Team is busy, and bad shit happens, the company could be destroyed and we couldn't help
- When there is some important features to develop with a deadline, A-Team will not participate: A-Team must stay alert and ready in case of emergency
- If huge catastrophe happens and long hours, night and weekend are needed to fix it, A-Team will not risk burning the A-Team because it's the only high skilled team we have. The company cannot afford to have an A-Team member exhausted, underpaid, unhappy leaving or sleepy. Therefore, the company will sacrifice other less important people.
A-Team is company biggest asset and must be protected in any kind of situations.
The company should also pay training for them in order to increase their skills and make them unreplaceable.
These are my conditions. I'm the leader of the A-Team. You can't afford to loose me.7 -
So... concerning the rant on here: https://devrant.com/rants/4299469/...
I'm making my comment as a separate rant because the thread from the original rant was too long and also slowly deviated outside context.
"Why has the rate of female developers reduced overtime?".
Here is my take:
It's natural and I'll explain why I think so...
During my computer science school days we had seventy two (72) males compared to just twelve females (12) in class. The girls could compete in theoretical grounds but when it comes to real coding they were no where near.
This boils down to the passion for programming as a real world subject. In programming you feel rewarded when you "fix a bug" and you're filled with pride when you "learn a new language". This reminds us of the scientific research of boys being more attached to reward engaging activities, most times for bragging rights while for the girls they'd prefer compassionate activities where they can easily be noticed, but unfortunately enough in programming "you only notice yourself".
We can clearly see the mode of career options in our world today...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interfering with people (Compassionate reward)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Front desk officer... Female populated
* Support personnel... Female populated
* Nurse... Female populated
* Flight attendant... Female populated
* Childcare workers... Female populated
* Preschool/KG Teachers... Female populated
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interfering with things (Intrinsic reward)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Engineer... Male populated
* Electrician... Male populated
* Welder... Male populated
* Carpenter... Male populated
* Programmer... Male populated
From the list you'd notice females prefer jobs that are compassionate in reward, require minimal physical activities and also able to make them easily recognisable.
On the other list, male populated jobs are intrinsic in reward, physically inclined, working more with things than with people.
Now seeing the clearer picture, we could sincerely say this is nature at its finest because we have here a balance. Females are kid bearers and we shouldn't be surprised that they are more compassionate to people than with things. Males have more pride than compassion which is needed to protect a family and this indirectly affects their choice of selection.
In reality...
Females are more attracted to Males with pride.
Males are more attracted to Females with compassion.
I would say, it's all the doings of nature affecting our unconscious career options while we seek to find our purpose in life.29 -
When working through a 3rd party over the last 3 weeks to fix a bug when you know that you could fix it in half the time if they gave you access.1
-
So there is a mall here that idk how but has little currents pass through it's supporting rails. And every time you touch it, it gives you a little shock.
I have been waiting for about 3 months now expecting a patch fix when I realized that physical production bugs have no patch fixes. More than 3/4th of the population is unaware of a whole different level of bug fixing frustration. Damn1 -
!RANT
We all have that one colleague who asks for help with his code and when you try and talk about it, he acts like he's got everything figured out.
These guys are so frustrating,if you know it already why'd you call me in the middle of the night to fix an important bug.1 -
I don't know if our QA is good enough. We were developing an app for both ios and android. I, an ios developer, told the QA guy that it will take long before uploading the app in the testflight (convert swift2 to swift3). After a week the app is now uploaded in the test flight and at the same time my partner, an android developer, uploaded the android version of the app in the play store beta. The QA guy started to raise bug issues about the android version. He wanted to fix the bugs immediately since our boss needed to upload it in the play store and appstore. The QA guy kept on complaining to my partner why the android version is buggy. Then he said something we, me and my partner, facepalm.
The QA guy said " You shouldn't convert the app to swift 3. The ios version is fine when converted why the android version is buggy. You need to revert it back to swift 2"
We sit there in silence, thinking if we pity the QA guy or laugh at him. -
That feeling when you fix a bug after you've been working on it for an hour or two.... Ahhh.. Sweet relief.
-
I once worked at a really messy project that is best described as one gigant big bug. The CEO asked me how long it would take to fix it. At that point nobody knew since the code was a mess and new directives came all the time. So I answered that I sincerely didn't know. He responded angered with "How couldn't you know. When I read a book I know exactly how long it takes."... I quit3
-
Don't you love when there's a teeny tiny little bug in your code that's not very important but you want to get fixed because you're a perfectionist so you start inserting log statements and it magically fixes itself and stays fixed even after removing the log statements? So now you have to live in constant fear that the bug will appear again and you will never be able to fix it.
Abfjancnancnamxhajd fuck this, fuck js, fuck webpack. It was probably a fucking cache issue but who knows, fuck everything.8 -
So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.
And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).
And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.
First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.
Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.
Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.
Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉
What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆. -
Why are OSS maintainers so fucking incompetent and cocky? A documentation clearly says to use "use_parent_assets: true" when creating a child theme. Yet not a single fucking line of code actually checks that value. The fix is literary a single if(value) assets = deepMerge(parentAssets, assets). But because some contributor somewhere didn't write that line to the maintainer's liking, it's been hanging in the air for months.
Take your head of of your ass, there's thousands of people paying for support & addons for your product, and you can't add one fucking line to fix a rather critical bug.6 -
I HATE the idea of only releasing on pre-determined schedules despite work being completed and just waiting for that day to arrive.
I'm a co-founder of a small software company. We have partnered with another particular company that also writes software. Some of our clients have access to paid content of that company's services through our application.
Every once in a while, our clients will report issues with that company's service to us, because they access it through our application. They think it's our issue.
We then pass the report on to the partner company, telling them that their stuff is broken. Their reply goes like this:
"Ok. We'll get the bug fix scheduled, and we'll release it next Thursday."
"Next Thursday? The issue is now, they can't use the service."
"That's our scheduled release date."
O.M.G.
We voluntarily walked away from our safe, cushy jobs working for other people, taking enormous pay cuts to start this company. Now, we're 6+ years in, disrupting established fat-and-happy competitors in this space. I GUARANTEE you that if we had that same attitude, we would have been absolutely obliterated early on.
We are quick. Guided by kanban boards, our suite of unit tests and integration tests is vast and kick-ass. With continuous integration and the click of a button we know if we broke something or if the piece we're working on is ready to be pushed to production, IMMEDIATELY. Our "release schedule" is when the damn thing is complete.
It isn't all bad. Our integration with them has been beneficial for both of us. I just loathe their snail's pace which negatively affects our mutual customers. It can make us look bad, and we can do nothing about it.
Blah.3 -
I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell5 -
Sometimes i cant fix a bug for days. Like 3 days of brainwreck. Then on the 4th day i wake up. So whatever i love. Take some time for a rest. And then begin working whenever i feel like it. I start working at 2 pm. Try to solve the same bug again. The first thing that comes to my mind is Hold on, why dont i try to change this? I did and it worked. My first thought has solved a 3 day old bug.
Can someone explain this phenomenon. This is proof that a man is unproductive and cant work good if he doesnt feel like it.
You know all of those bullshit andrew tate quotes "i work even when I don't feel like it because that's what men are supposed to do. I train when im happy and i train exactly the same when im unhappy" but thats bullshit. I can not be productive if i am unhappy. I tried so hard and the harder i tried the more i failed. And now when im no longer unhappy i solved it on the first try.
Nobody cares when a man is unhappy. No one gives a shit. It's not fair1 -
Fuck this shit! We had bug on website when tinymce was showing broken tables and could not save them correctly. So, the first thing you think about is tinymce is fucked up and you have to either upgrade, downgrade or fix it fucking yourself. Well, I spend more than hour tryingto figure this out. Then I found out that some fucker set column length in DB where data are stored to varchar 800!!! WTF, are you fucking serious?
-
When you hate every fucking thing on earth and want to kill everyone on this fucked up planet.
That bug didnt fix. Fuck you.
The client needs answer now. Fuck you.
Stackoverflow user marked it as duplicate. Fuck you in particular.
Fuuuuuuuccckkkkkkkkkk every fucking asshole. -
Can somebody explain to me why developers (especially web) have to micromanage every single thing into it's own f*ing component.
Story time: I have an input form with some tabs. I discovered that the UI Library (Devextreme) has a nice little component that handles forms, (including tabs, groups, etc.). So I make a page, configure tabs, inputs and whatnot.
Now, I already knew that my coworkers can't handle html that is bigger than a page. So instead of putting the configs in the frontend, I made nice files where I store those, to keep them nicely clean and seperated.
Me feeling very good, went off to have a nice lunch break.
I come back read the message from my coworker, asking me to make every tab it's own component and form and load them into a separate Tab-Component, instead of using the built in configuration
......
WHAT?
Like seriously. I have a f*ing library that handles that, why the f*ck do I need to reinvent the wheel here!?
Supposedly it's to make it more maintainable, easier to find bugs, flatten the hierarchy.
Here's a little wake up call you morons: Nesting hundreds of components into each other does *not* help you with that.
It just creates a rabbit-hole of confusing containers that you have to navigate and dissect every time you try to find something.
"Can I fix the bug in the detail Page? Sure I'll tell you tomorrow when I find out which fucking component the bug results from".
Components are there to be *reused*. It's using inheritance for reusing code all over again, but worse.
But maybe I'm just old fashioned, and conservative. Maybe I'm just a really bad software engineer, because nowadays everything seems to result in architectures spreading hundreds of folders, thousands of files with nothing but arbitrary cut-offs with no real benefit, that I don't see the value in.6 -
When your bug fix corrects an issue that is a year old and customers freak out because they do not not how the feature is actually suppose to work. Management: you should of wrote a test to detect the reverse effects of your bug correction. I told them what the effects would be and to have customer support on stand by with the corrective actions to take if they were concerned.1
-
When you have to fix a bug that's just happening in IE11 on Windows 7... 😧😩 well, nobody should even be using that shit!!!4
-
When was the last time you fix a difficult bug and you make a crazy lunar laugh that makes you lost control of your saliva?
~ I can tell, you code fiercely.2 -
The best part about working on Someone else's UI bug fixes is that you get to look like a hero when you fix the bugs and make all their work look like a sham - asshole 101
-
Getting absolut frustrated when the bug fix you implemented does not work no matter what you do and how many times you do it, making sure its done correctly.
- Rebooted the machine.
it works.
great, and that was that day at the office.1 -
That LOL feeling when incompetent backend wants you to fix their bug on the frontend!
How about NO!?
And why tf I know more about how backend works on this system than devs that are actually working on it???6 -
My favourite bug fix was actually IT based and it was the first time my Eastern European, critical of my skills, family not only praised me but claimed that I was smarter than them.
My grandfather had changed from a telecom to a VOIP device for his landline. For some reason after installation, he could hear the other person on the line but they couldn't hear him. Me and my mother were away during this time so they called in the other family IT guy. This guy is no joke, he's one of the top in his company and makes a sweet six figures and lives in a mansion.
So he started looking things up, googling forum, etc. Couldn't find anything. Started calling the tech support and tried to deduce what it was and their tech support had never heard of such a problem. He takes his lunch breaks to help out my gramps. Keeps escalating, escalating and nothing. His conclusion is that they need to send him a new VoIP stick and they're not giving it to him. At this point, he's so frustrated that he screams at my grandfather to go back to paying 60 bucks a month for landline and to stop bothering him.
At this time me and my mother return and they have concluded that they need a new stick. My mom is great at intimidating people into free stuff so she and I go over to do so. At this point everyone is convinced of the problem and even I don't think I could fix it. But I decide to check if that's the case because I don't want my gramps to get a new stick and it still doesn't work.
I go through the typical forum hunting and there's Nada on the problem. I look at the stick and all the lights seem to be working, no error lights. And I wonder maybe the problem is not the stick, because usually you can't do anything at all if the hardware is broken. So I start thinking, maybe my gramps accidentally muted his handset while talking or something dumb like that. That wasn't it.
Then I decided to see if the problem was recreated on the other handsets. I tried one out and my mom could hear me but I couldn't hear her. What?! That's different! It was the opposite with the other phone. I conclude that it's working and there's something up with the handsets. So I go and do a reset on all of the handsets to make sure.
Lo and behold, the problem is fixed. It took me 25 minutes to solve. That guy gave up after a week of trying. My mom who assumed my IT skills were on par with other kids and nothing special had finally seen me up against an opponent, and not any opponent, a six figure high ranking IT specialist. And I didn't even use any secret, complex software knowledge that wasn't accessible to her or any other normal user.
That's when she finally said that I was smarter than her, that I just used my common sense. She would've needed some kind of prompting, hint or direction to solve the issue but I did it without any.
It was a very satisfying bug to fix. -
So 3 devs spent all of yesterday investigating a bug. Tracked it down to field validation handled by a 3rd party product. We decide the easiest fix is to remove that validation and implement it ourselves (its a really odd bug and a terrible product). Then today the tech lead comes along and says "there could be another way, hang on while i download the latest Xcode and waste half the day fighting with it when you could be fixing it". I dunno why we bother doing the work in the first place. Clearly we should just leave it to him to save the day.1
-
Is there anything worse than bugs that you can reproduce easy but lack exception/error messages so you can't fix it?
I'm working on a hobby project for Android and I can't solve a bug and it's killing me (the whole project depend on it). I went through all phases:
1. I notice the bug early but couldnt reproduce it so I let it be.
2. I notice it happen a lot when I started to use the framework for real. Decided now that I need to fix it.
3. Found the exact way to reproduce it.
4. Trying different ways to fix it, nothing works.
5. Write question on stack overflow, no answers.
6. ???
It feels like if you can reproduce the bug 100% of the time it should be easy to fix right? Well hell no - no exceptions, no error message and adb hangs until I stop the procedur. The last kick in the balls? When I stop the procedur I get all logcat messages back and everything look like normal. Just give me a damn error message! Tell me what you're doing or what I'm doing wrong!3 -
Me: Hey I'm pushing the changes up
Marketing: okay.
*5 mins later*
Marketing: WTF what did you do! Everything's broken now! It was so embarrasing to show that bug to the client!
Me: *panik* *checks website* ....
Yeah, it is under maintenance... because the changes are getting pushed. It takes about 15 mins to do so. Like when you update an app.
Marketing: fix it ASAP please, and tell me as soon as you do
Me: There's nothing to fix. Just wait until it finishes updating.
And no, next time, I will definitely not tell you as soon as I push the changes. I'll wait about an hour so you don't have to see that mainenance page.3 -
When you spend hours in a messy codebase to fix a bug properly and add an integration spec to cover that specific case.
And even you do a round of testing on staging + providing screenshots, there is always someone on the team that will write in your PR, "It works, I tested the change on my machine".
I understand that some people are skeptical but to the point of not trusting integration tests + screeshots/recordings then please test it on staging or production next time because if it works on your machine doesn't mean it will work there ;)2 -
iPhone alarm clock suddenly stopped playing sounds this week (again), fortunately my wake up time is not critical.
After every major osx upgrade I feel that I need to restart macbook more and more often cause system suddenly hangs.
Yesterday I spotted that after each restart there is information that if system hangs on login screen for a while I should restart computer again ( well thanks for advice that I don’t have to wait till I die ).
Cursor randomly disappears after I connected microsoft usb mouse ( microsoft mouse eating cursor from apple windows ).
Why I use microsoft mouse you ask ? That’s the best thing microsoft made, it’s literally indestructible. I dropped and kicked that mouse hundred times, still works perfectly fine.
I think also somehow osx forced minor bug fix upgrade once without my permission so they’re slowly going the forgotten microsoft path that is always forcing updates you don’t want to install in this particular moment.
Because their engineers know better when and why I want to update.
Looks like Apple engineering is slowly degrading or QA care less about older hardware users.
I am not used to buy new shit when old works just fine, those shiny little things are my work tools not something I show around to impress people how cool I am.
That’s all disappointing but still better then windows experience cause didn’t reinstalled osx from scratch since almost 5 years and it’s working at the same speed like it was new ( not impressed linux users here but from my previous experience with windows “registry” that means something and this hardware already paid for itself).6 -
That shitty moment when you are finally about to release your code, after about one month of developing and testing, and making sure everything is OK, imagining: "Oh we're finally releasing this feature, I have worked so hard on it, it's going to kick some ass!" but surprisingly things get fucked up on production server... I mean seriously? Stupid middleware I killed myself to get to work messed up. Where the hell have you been in staging, you stupid little bug? You happy now? My CTO giving me awkward looks and shit like: "I'm sorry but you have to come fix it, during weekend." The best way to fuck up my mood, today is the last day of week for god's sake!
I hate releasing like this. seriously SAG in this release!1 -
I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks? -
The concept and execution of inter-cluster SSL along with keystores, truststores, signing, and similar just clicked in my head today. I feel the burden of undiagnosable https errors just melt off my shoulders. Any other environment tips I should know for kubernetes?
-
Dude in my Calc 2 class just bitched about iPhones having "shitty software" referencing that bug from around ~6 years ago, when a specific iMessage text would reboot your phone. IMO, 99% of what Apple does well is software. UI is subjective, but final cut pro is unbelievable in terms of functionality for its price, their software is so well optimized that iPhones have been able to use comparably tiny batteries and still compete. They are consistent throughout their company with software design, while companies like Google are so stratified it took years before their material design had been implemented in all their services, there are still a few that aren't (not to mention the meme of Google killing off all their projects). I hate tablets, but the iPad pro has the best software/hardware implementation of any I've ever seen. Apple's interconnectivity between devices is unbelievable, whether it's Continuity features or the setup process just recognizing group devices around and pulling data to create consistent account info and saving you taps. Siri is shit, but apart from that their software isn't bad enough that you should complain about that instead of...
Their Macs are fucking pressure-cookers, and their fuckin marketing department is like a different company all-together, and their anti-fix-it-yourself policies are so user hostile that they're toe-to-toe with being as abusive to customers as Oracle.
TL;DR the biggest scam Apple has pulled off is not that the sheep still think Android and PC users are living in 2010, but they've convinced the sheep that they know what shitty software is. At that point they're too many levels deep and there is no red-pill strong enough for them.2 -
Hello, my first time here. I got to know this website/app from my PM because I need to vent it somewhere other than him according to my PM.
So, here goes my first rant. The date is today (Monday). The rant subject is our new tester. Some context on the guy. He started in our office 8 weeks ago and his title is senior tester with some years in testing. Me and my team with the exception of our PM are new hires and for me, this is my first job after graduation.
After a grueling month of pushing for new modules and bug fixes from our monthly UAT from the client (yes, this will be a future rant one day), about 2/3 of the team is on vacation paired with a long weekend. So, a very few ppl in the team including me and my PM came for today.
I usually came quite early, around 8 am as I commute with public transportation. As soon as I have my breakfast and just getting ready to open my dev laptop, he came to me with a bug. This is like under an hour I came to office. I'm ok with anything related to the project as today was deployment day to test server for our monthly UAT. So, I check the bug and it wasn't my module but the PIC is not there and I familiar with the code thus I fixing the module.
Then, not even 15 mins later, while fixing this module, he came to me with another bug. I'm still the only one who in office that can fix it thus have to do it too. Finished the both bugs, pushed and je retested it. Fortunately, my PM and another colleague came. But, for some reason, he only comes to me for the bug fixes.
The annoying thing for me is that he comes to me every time he found an obstacle, bug or glitch. At this rate, by hourly. Thus, this cycle of impromptu going around fixing-on-the-go for the project begins, for me. Then, my PM asks him abt our past issue log given by the client UAT. Another annoying part is he never checks the clients feedback to see if the result can be produced again. The time he checks it is when ppl ask abt it and test it 1 by 1. Then he came to me again with why x person marked it as done. Like hell I know why they marked it done, you the one who need to check with them. Thus, I called/messaged the PIC for x modules abt the issue and then they explain it. I have to explain it again to him abt it and then he makes the summary report for the feedback. This goes until lunch.
I thought the bug fixes is over and I can deploy it after lunch. I thought wrong and I kinda regret coming back early from lunch which I thought I can rest for a while with the debacle over morning. Nope, straight he comes to me after I sit down for 10 mins and until almost work hour is done, he came to me with small bugs and issues like previously, hourly. By then I think I crushed like ~10 bugs/issues and I'm knackered. I complained to the PM many times and the PM also said to him many times but he still does it again and again. Even the PM also ranted to me abt his behavior. The attitude of not compiling an issue log for the day and not testing the system to verify what the client feedbacks are valid or not is grinding my gears more and more. Not hating the guy even though his personality is quite unique but this is totally grinding ppl's gears atm. As of now, it's midnight and I finally deployed the system to the testing server. This totally drains my mental health and it's just Monday. May god have mercy on me.
Owh, the other colleague that come today? He was doing pretty much the same thing but he was resolving a major issue which is why the tester came to me.2 -
Just started doing my project for Java Class, a Polynomial Calculator App.
Get it done, get a dozen errors. Fix every bug. Find other bugs when inputting.
Brainstorm 5 minutes and realize I could change the way I write the polynomial at input.
Change 20 lines of code that do String, Split, Run through the split and check for coefficient and power, parse them to float in an array to specific positiona - to 5 simple lines.
Program works fine. No more previous errors.
Have the great idea to add the following:
-If you divide the Polynomial by 0 output "Are you retarded?"
P.s. I'm happy about my first project even if I hate Java.4 -
This is the sequel to my previous rant, if you don't know about it, go check my profile.
So, for some reason, when I opened YouTube Vanced, I am trapped into a loop of loading animation. And I thought "Hmm... Maybe my Internet sucks, let's try again.".
Then I switched my Internet on and off, go back to YouTube Vanced, the same loading animation loop.
Then I do switching the Internet for about 30 minutes, go back to YouTube Vanced, no progression.
Then I thought "What about YouTube?", I open Youtube, and you know what, YouTube loads it PERFECTLY. The loading animation takes longer than usual, but at the end, it still loads my recommendation and anything!
I thought "Wait, do they have an update?", then I go to Vanced Manager, and no, there is no new update for both Vanced and Vanced microG. There is a new update for Vanced Manager, though.
I decided to report a bug, but then I realized that the problem I am facing is too ambiguous for the developer to fix, so I decided not to do it.
So yeah, now I am sticking with YouTube, since I cannot find a solution better than it, and if you ask me, YouTube Vanced is still trapped in the loading animation loop.3 -
got employed as web developer, had to make an app for test, so i made simple PWA, you can search videos and you have related videos on the side, basically search videos and watch them with simple list of related videos on the side.
idk how i ended up being tester and bug hunter in this huge ass pile of spaghetti extravaganza.
all i do is wasting my talent on hunting and resolving bugs on a legacy-code apps, don't remember when was last time i actually wrote some feature, oh yeah i do, last month but that was refactoring/fixing.
so i am stuck on weird tech stack someone build with shovel, feels like they were having that famous golden hammer.
what interests me is something i will never do at this company and still i am trying to help them to fix the app to have better product.
It is hard when you feel like you are third and last person in whole company that cares about actual product, rest of devs just fixing things with quick workarounds, hacks and lousy patches.
I really tried, I did, I was excited as I saw opportunity to one up the product but got stuck with the rest of the devs fixing bugs instead of fixing the whole codebase, I tried to introduced improvements but we don't have time cause fixing bugs means happy customers, better codebase takes more time and means impatient customers are unhappy!
I think it is time to sail away.
So folks, any thoughts or feelings?1 -
The bug: Some string values for an identifier property in the data objects are being sent from our frontend prefixed with a '0'. Sometimes. When it happens, it usually gets stripped away again by the time it's passed to our backend. But not always.
This 0 is never explicitly set anywhere. I even searched for a few variants of " = 0" in both the frontend and backend projects without receiving any results. You might already be suspecting where this is going.
So it turns out.
The data object which holds this value is being initialized in the aspnet (don't ask) backend and passed to the frontend, which then hydrates it. This value is always an integer number, albeit incidentally so which is why string is used as the actual type. When this object is initialized, it's hardcoded with an anonymous type where this property is set as int because I guess someone figured "it's always an int though". Being a typed language, primitive scalars can't be null objects which means the property's value becomes the concrete int 0.
Okay weird. I can think of better ways of doing this but let's just set it to string as I can't start overhauling things right now. Let's just go find where this value is somehow concatenated into the incoming parameter.
You see, this happens because at the point where the frontend sets this value, it may be an int or string depending on where it came from, and I guess someone figured that in order to cast it to string you just go prop += arg seeing as the prop is empty string and all. Because explicitly casting it or - as much as I get a rash whenever I see it - going prop = "" + arg would be too verbose and unoriginal.
Bonus round: How come the 0 only sometimes made it all the way to our backend? The thing is that this bug has been fixed before. The fix is that because this string is "always" an int, you can parse it to int before passing it to the backend in case it has leading zeroes. This path is only taken in certain views because someone forgot to copypaste their fix into all the places this is repeated.
Sometimes you find a bug and you are just somehow more grumpy after fixing it.1 -
when you're burnt out and you question whether or not you really did fix that bug or your mind is playing tricks on you.
-
That random moment when you want to just fix that one fucking bug and those issues you've been having on a project but you also want to be a responsible young adult and get an adequate amount of sleep at night for internship tomorrow
-
When your boss asks what you're working on and you say "Fixing a bug that causes new subscriptions to be prorated to line up with old ones." and he says "Terrible. Needs immediate fix."
"I know! That's what I'm doing!!"1 -
When you come across the generated script of a H5 banner from client's production house, you are tempted to rewrite the whole thing instead of fixing the bug.
If you really decided to fix it, in the end you found out you spent nearly 100x more time on this piece of shit, and that makes you feel really bad.1 -
That feeling you get when you enter in a piece of code for a bug fix...#aweekofbangingmyheadonakeyboard
-
When training course planned couple months ago gets canceled because you are the only One that can fix a bug before upcoming release. Sad and happy at the same time.
-
The Code Abyss Beckons! 🤯
Hey fellow devs, brace yourselves for a wild ride into the chaotic realm of code confessions and debugging dramas! 🎢💻
So, here I am, standing at the precipice of my latest coding adventure, armed with a keyboard and a questionable amount of caffeine. 🚨☕
Today's quest involves unraveling the mysteries of a legacy code that seems to have been written in a language only decipherable by ancient coding sages. 😱📜
As I navigate through the nested loops of confusion and dance with the dragons of runtime errors, I can't help but wonder: Is this what the Matrix feels like for developers? 🕵️♂️💊
In the midst of my debugging odyssey, I stumbled upon a comment in the code that simply said, "// Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." 🏴☠️📛 Well, isn't that reassuring?
And then there's the moment when you finally fix that elusive bug, and you feel like you've just tamed a mythical creature. 🦄✨ Victory dance, anyone? 💃🕺
But let's not forget the rubber duck sitting on my desk, patiently listening to my monologues about algorithms and existential coding crises. 🦆🗣️
So, dear coding comrades, how's your journey through the code abyss going? Any epic wins or facepalming fails to share? Let the rants flow like a river of improperly closed tags! 🌊🚫
May your semicolons be where they should and your documentation be ever truthful. Happy coding, and may your merge conflicts be swift and painless! 🌈🤞
#CodeOdyssey #DebuggingDrama #DevRantChronicles9 -
My new boss has such a sensitive ego. The latest is he asked me not to make big changes to 'his' code so whilst attempting to fix a bug in 'his' code I realised a big change was needed. I tell him at standup that he might want to take a look first and he agrees. A few days later he emails me to ask why I haven't finished work on the bug. When I reply he ccs other members of management to ensure he is deflecting any blame from himself (I dont even play the blame game to begin with).
The next day I email him that some tests are broken (he broke them but I just emailed him to bring his attention to it since he doesn't want me touching his code. And because it means he isn't testing properly - not that I would say that).
His reply - "are you going to fix them?"
Me - "ok"
The next morning be brings me into a meeting to ensure I agreed he wasn't to blame and that it was my fault and that he didn't understand my email response as it just said "ok".
I really can't stand such petty bs...2 -
Tl;Dr: Would my salary sugesstion be alright? Will get a promotion. Currently salary 115k $. I would suggest between 135k - 150k $ annual salary
So I work at a large Corpo and was asked by my department Boss, if I want to take a Promotion in our Applications team as Technical Lead. I would have the same Job, but will be the Service Owner and lead the team on a functional base. Would be 5 People. Personal Leadership would still be trough my superior.
Im alright with that, I currently dont want to lead people, but teaching them how to do it like I do right now is fine with me. Also most of the time when Shit hits the Fan Im on the call already to fix a critical Bug.
I trust my boss alot and was always treated fair by her. My currently salary is at 115k annual and Im 29 years old.
Currently Im studying on my Science BSc and work fulltime. I will take the promotion, because its like already now too my Job, I get payd better and not some random pen pusher will be set infront of me.
Also I could deny now all the fuck ups our Business People decide in Projects. I would have a lever more to challenge. (Parry this Peasant 🤣)
Just jumping from 115k up is my mental Challenge. I first thought about just 124k, but the responsibility is alot (Business Critical Applications). Also on the Job Market the Peers are ranging from 140k - 160k.
Im always thinking about the say, you need to be greedy sometimes yourself if its justified. Else some Manager gonna cash in the slip.
Should I suggest 135k or by your experience would you advertise higher like 145k-150k?7 -
I'm starting to gain a dislike for OOP.
I think classes make it easy for me to think of the entities of a problem and translate them into code.
But when you to attempt to test classes, that's when shit hits the fan.
In my opinion, it is pointless to test classes. If you ever seen test code for a class, you'll notice that it's usually horrible and long.
The reason for this is that usually some methods depend on other methods to be called first.
This results in the usual monolithic test that calls every goddamn method on the class.
You might say "ok, break the test into smaller parts". Ok. But the result of that attempt is even worse, because you end up with several big tests cases and a lot of duplicate code, because of the dependency of some methods on others.
The real solution to this is to make the classes be just glue: they should delegate arguments onto functions that reside on its own file, and, maybe afterwards emit events if you are using events.
But they shouldn't have too much test code classes though. The test code for classes should be running a simple example flow, but never doing any assertions other than expecting no exceptions.
For the most part, you'd be relying on the unit testing that is done for each delegated function.
If you take any single function you'll see that it's extremely easy to write tests for it. In fact, you can have the test right next to the fuction, like <module>.xyz <module>.test.xyz
So I don't think classes shouldn't be used at all, they should just be glue.
As you do normal usage of this software this way, when a bug is discovered you'll notice that the fix and testing code for this bug is very usually applied to the delegated functions instead of being a problem of classes.
I think classes by themselves sound sane in paper, but in practice they turn into a huge fucking messes that become impossible to understand or test.
How can something like traditional classes not get chaotic when a single class can have x attributes and y methods. The complexity grows exponentially. And sometimes more attributes and methods are added.
Someone might say "well, it's just the nature of problems. Problems can have a lot of variables".
Yeah, but cramming all of that complexity into a single 200 lines class is insanity.12 -
That feeling when you're applying for your first programming job.
And the knife stabs of nerves in your gut fearfully remind the coiled muscles in your sweaty brow of the singular possibility: what if I bullshit my way by the HR filter into this job and it turns out I was completely wrong, and I encounter a bug that my meager coding abilities really can't fix?
"Writing an interpreter in some community college you dropped out of ten years ago" doesn't mean you're a programmer.
"Figuring out where the bug was in a broken bat file that was pages long, for a language and framework you've never used, for a library nobody uses anymore", doesn't count as debugging.
"Writing a tweening library in an obscure tool" doesn't mean you're an expert. This is childs play.
What if they ask about big O? Do you admit that logarithms confuse the fuck out of you because you dropped out in 8th grade and got your GED later on due to being kicked out by your meth head dad?
What if being able to write a few measly cobbled together half-arsed estimate tools in python doesn't really mean you're qualified to do anything?
What if being able to look at code in languages you've never seen and grok it doesn't mean shit?
What if you've used more languages than you can remember?
What if you once lost a job offer casually given because the guy you built rapport with over months made a joke about browsers, and you joked about using internet explorer?
What if you got a job offer from a consultant friend one time and he asked you to write validation and testing code in javascript for amazon's cloud, and you completely screwed the pooch because you spent the entire time thinking you had to make it *work* and not just *look* correct, when all along he just wanted what amounted to *correct looking* code, and your gut had told you the same, but you ignored it, because the world can't possibly work like that, where people give anyone a chance or the benefit of the doubt, and any slip up or shortcoming means you were never really worthy to begin with.
What if you thought you could, but you'd been raised your entire life to *believe* you couldn't?3 -
It's 3AM and here I am trying to fix the mess that I made last night when I was drunk and the deadline is 12PM (only 9 hours left).. You don't but if you do know how do I kill my boss so that I would look like a bug from a software made by our company killed him to take revenge of killing the bugs?1
-
How do you deal when you are overpromising and underdelivering due to really shitty unpredictable codebase? Im having 2-3 bad sprints in a row now.
For context: Im working on this point of sale app for the past 4 months and for the last 3 sprints I am strugglig with surprises and edgecases. I swear to god each time I want to implement something more complex, I have to create another 4-5 tickets just to fix the constraints or old bugs that prevent my feature implementation just so I could squeeze my feature in. That offsets my original given deadlines and its so fucking draining to explain myself to my teamlead about why feature has to be reverted why it was delayed again and so on.
So last time basically it went like this: Got assigned a feature, estimated 2 weeks to do it. I did the feature in time, got reviewed and approved by devs, got approved by QA and feature got merged to develop.
Then, during regression testing 3 blockers came up so I had to revert the feature from develop. Because QA took a very long time to test the feature and discover the blockers, now its like 3 days left until the end of the sprint. My teamlead instantly started shitting bricks, asked me to fix the blockers asap.
Now to deal with 3 blockers I had to reimplement the whole feature and create like 3 extra tickets to fix existing bugs. Feature refactor got moved to yet another sprint and 3 tickets turned into like 8 tickets. Most of them are done, I created them just to for papertrail purposes so that they would be aware of how complex this is.
It taking me already extra 2 weeks or so and I am almost done with it but Im going into really deep rabbithole here. I would ask for help but out of other 7 devs in the team only one is actually competent and helpful so I tried to avoid going to him and instead chose to do 16 hour days for 2 weeks in a row.
Guess what I cant sustain it anymore. I get it that its my fault maybe I should have asked for help sooner.
But its so fucking frustrating trying to do mental gymnastics over here while majority of my team is picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them but they manage to look good infront of everyone.
Meanwhile Im tryharding here and its no enough, I guess I still look incompetent infront of everyone because my 2 weeks task turned into 6 weeks and I was too stubborn to ask for help. Whats even worse now is that teamlead wants me to lead a new initiative what stresses me even more because I havent finished the current one yet. So basically Im tryharding so much and I will get even extra work on top. Fucking perfect.
My frustration comes from the point that I kinda overpromised and underdelivered. But the thing is, at this point its nearly impossible to predict how much a complex feature implementation might take. I can estimate that for example 2 weeks should be enough to implement a popup, but I cant forsee the weird edgecases that can be discovered only during development.
My frustration comes from devs just reviewing the code and not launching the app on their emulator to test it. Also what frustrates me is that we dont have enough QA resources so sometimes feature stands for extra 1-2 weeks just to be tested. So we run into a situation where long delays for testing causes late bug discovery that causes late refactors which causes late deliveries and for some reason I am the one who takes all the pressure and I have to puloff 16 hour workdays to get something done on time.
I am so fucking tired from last 2 sprints. Basically each day fucking explaining that I am still refactoring/fixing the blocker. I am so tired of feeling behind.
Now I know what you will say: always underpromise and overdeliver. But how? Explain to me how? Ok example. A feature thats add a new popup? Shouldnt take usually more than 2 weeks to do my part. What I cant promise is that devs will do a proper review, that QA wont take 2 extra weeks just to test the feature and I wont need another extra 2 weeks just to fix the blockers.
I see other scrum team devs picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them. Meanwhile Im doing mental gymnastics here and trying to implement something complex (which initially seemed like an easy task). For the last 2 weeks Im working until 4am.
Im fucking done. I need a break and I will start asking other devs for help. I dont care about saving my face anymore. I will start just spamming people if anything takes longer than a day to implement. Fuck it.
I am setting boundaries. 8 hours a day and In out. New blockers and 2 days left till end of the sprint? Sorry teamlead we will move fixes to another sprint.
It doesnt help that my teamlead is pressuring me and asking the same shit over and over. I dont want them to think that I am incompetent. I dont know how to deal with this shit. Im tired of explaining myself again and again. Should I just fucking pick low hanging fruit tasks but deliver them in a steady pace? Fucking hell.4 -
If there's one thing that gets my goat it's "voodoo debuggers."
There's no actual need to dig into the root cause of a problem if you can blame the new thing you don't understand. Especially when later, after someone competent actually looks into it, the bug turns out to be a change in the old stuff that did it.
If there's two things that get my goat, it's people who fix something caused by human error or negligence and then don't write an automated test to catch it the next time it happens. -
First time would be when I had two teachers working of a bug that resultet in the CSS not loading / updating properly. It took me around 1 hour as well to realize that the text file was encoded with some obscure windows encoding, that doesn't load chrome (and maybe other browsers) can't load properly.
Thanks notepad++, will never use you again for web development.
Second time would be when I presented an app I made too the same teachers in order to boost my mark. Bugs that never appeared before every where and the basic functionality of the app was questionable. I hadn't worked on that app for half a year and had to fix as much as possible in a short amount of time, which might have made it worse.
Don't ask why but thanks to my knowledge about the france language I got a better mark, even though it was spanish1