Request from a senior backend dev in a previous company:

Talking to the team thats responsible for the auth API's is such a pain. For this new API can we just not add any auth to it? Its only going to return details about who the email address belongs too. Like name, address, date of birth, car registration etc. No one will care about that, and it will be easier for mobile to integrate right?

Dev: Ok issue fixed, you just need to log out and back in again on your end to receive the fix

User: It’s still not working

Dev: Did you log out and in again?

User: No why would I want to do that?

Dev: It’ll reset your locally saved login information which is causing the issue

User: I thought you said the issue was fixed?

Dev: On our end yes, we just need you to reset your end in order to receive the fixed version

User: Look I have been dealing with this issue for 6 months. Fixing bugs are your responsibility. I have too much to do, you have to get this fixed. *click*.

Dev: Yeah you submitted the bug ticket yesterday night though

Email from users manager later that day: <User> is saying you are refusing to fix this bug. This is unacceptable. Fix it or else I will escalate this. Also there are other bugs we noticed today too, fixing them is absolutely critical!

Dev: …

Dev: What other bugs did you notice?

*no response for 2 weeks and then:

User: Hey you can close this ticket, the issue seems to have resolved itself.

Dev: ….muppet.

*Achievement unlocked*

The award of:
Asking “Can you please fucking enable some way for me to mock the networking requests?” A record number of times to unique third party libraries in a week

Awarded to:
practiseSafeHex

"years of experience" basically means nothing, both for people and organisations. You can work with someone who has 30 years experience who knows nothing, and someone with 1-2 years who's practically an expert.

Joined a large multi-national fresh out of college, that had been around for +90 years. I expected them to know software development inside and out. Didn't expect to see so many failed projects for stupid reasons, so many over sights, so many .... morons, to be honest.

Worked for a startup company where most only had 1 or 2 years more experience than me and learned so much.

Worked for a small company where everyone had 1.5 - 2 times my experience, where I learned the meaning of "bewilderment".

Never feel small, or less valuable because of a number. Theres a good chance you are working with jackasses - practiseSafeHex

CEO "If you make costs to build a home office for covid, please be aware that you can fully declare your bills, and you'll retain ownership over the ordered goods. Please all buy some good desk chairs and keyboards, so you can work ergonomically"

6 months later, CFO: "Bittersweet, why did you try to declare €35000? What are these invoices even? Concrete rebar?"

Me: "CEO told us to build a home office. I got permits from the town to dig a souterrain layer under my house. This is just for the foundation, the bills for drainage pumps, sheetpiling, geothermal heat exchangers, insulation, flooring, electricity and of course desk & chair will follow later"

CFO: 😳

(To be fair, I really did make those costs, but was just trolling by uploading all the material bills)

Random dev online: Any chance you could help me figure out how to use something the company you worked for wrote? I need to do XYZ

Me: I didn't write it but sure. Theres a doc here about the full process of doing XYZ <link>

Random dev 5 seconds later: But how do I actually do it? The link doesn't show how to do it via code.

Me: You'll find if you actually read it, that it does. Because I checked. Good day

QA: When I open the app I get this strange error message that includes "No data connection could be established" near the start of it.

Me: I'll clean up how thats displayed, but the error means your phone doesn't have internet connection.

QA: No that can't be it, I do.

Me: You screenshot shows no WiFi or 3g / 4g symbols.

QA: No those are never there, please investigate.

Me: I have investigated and found that every other one of your screenshots had a WiFi or a 3g symbol. Example: <link>. Please check your connection and try again, i'll clean up the error display.

PM: Oh i've had an issue something like this before. We really need to show users an error screen. We can't just leave them on this screen with no error message at all.

Me: ... we have an error, thats what QA is complaining about, its not loading the text and displaying the error object.

Anyone else want to not pay attention and complain about something else that doesn't make sense? ... no? ... ok good, back to work then

QA: When I start the onboarding process, kill the app and reopen it, I return to where I left off with no way to go back to the previous screen.

Me: Please click the back button in the top left corner

Nothing but the best for little bittersweet jr., so I mask up and bike out through the rain to buy the tiny girl the most expensive pacifier I can find.

When I hand it to baby, she giggles, grabs the nipple end in her fist, and passionately starts slobbering on the back of this luxury mouthhole-plug, sucking the edge, biting on the ring. Angry grunt, yeets the plastic object out of the crib.

Apparently, it doesn't meet her specs at all. When I fall to my knees asking what else I can do for her, she just pouts, groans, whines, and then falls asleep.

That's when I realized.

When my little monster grows up, she's going to be a product manager.

password.trim()

They told me Xamarin Forms could create an app for many platforms
They didn't tell me that the Forms extensions for APIs would not work at all with the Android extensions, iOS extensions and I would need to reinstall them for each platform
They didn't tell me that at the end, I have to write individual code for each platform.
I was promised an all-in-one toolkit. I'm just writing code for Android and iOS apps, PLUS forms
I can't even find a reliable PDF generator for this. Documentations are outdated and don't work, either that, for it takes a million steps to generate a PDF file

Wanna mess with users? Take

“OK” and “Cancel”.

You know what looks visually the same but means the opposite?

“NO” and “Confirm”.

Deploy that little ui update overnight and watch the world burn.

Dumbest arrow key design ever.

practiseSafeHex:

software engineer, iOS developer, mobile developer, professional "here is the answer I gave you the last time you asked me the same question" responder

Product manager: ah ok I understand. So is the plan still to do xyz?

Me: .... STILL?? ... when was that ever the plan? .... ok when you said “I understand” what did you mean?

This being the view from my desk

I’ve been told my rants are being missed, since I left my hellhole of a job. So here’s a filler until something major goes wrong.

Right so here’s what my life is like at the minute. I’m working remotely from home. So this morning, instead of spending 2 hours in traffic, I got up at a reasonable hour and brought the dog for a walk. I don’t know who these people think they are, fucking up my routine like this. The audacity of them thinking it’s no big deal really pisses me off.

I’m the only iOS developer in the company. Normally I get bombarded with “why not use react-native” or “RxSwift is the future” and other shitty tools. Last week I said “i’d like to do X this way”. Do you know what those absolute bastards said to me? You ready? Hope you are sitting down ... they said ... “ok, sounds good” .... the fucking c***s.

Oh oh and the big one, wait for this now. Fridays are demo days, last Friday I showed what I was working on. Afterwards the CEO comes along, stares me in the eyes and without a care in the world what his comments might do to my self-esteem the fucker says “wow great job”. He fucking makes me SICK!!!

Feels good to get all that off my chest. I’ve missed venting. At this rate, I’ll be back very soon!

Did someone say "debug the code"?

Forgot FAT32 had a file count limit.

Turns out Linux won't stop you from writing too many files to a FAT32 drive.

Turns out this makes FAT32 do *really weird shit.*

Boss: if I could put together a counter offer, is that something you might be interested in?

Me: eh, no. I’ve accepted an offer for slightly less money than I’m on

Boss: oh ... oh ok. Right so there’s nothing I can do?

Me: afraid not. You can’t offer me a role not dealing with those people in the states, having to use their shitty custom tools or having to follow their bad practises all day.

Boss: ok ..... shit

I did a simple bar graph to show the status of a db migration. Each bar is a computer with a db file. As I was bored waiting, I added a King Kong hanging from the longest bar.

Personal Project:
Code lives in gitrepo, commits to master are automatically unit tested and if all tests work it will be published to production
At Work:
"If you're done put this .bat in the project folder, it will copy everything in it per ftp to production"

Will Always Remember

"The tool to push new releases to the data centre blocked us last night. Saying all the nodes are 'unhealthy', resolve the issue(s) first. But then the remote team said 'we have a way around that' so we managed to get it deployed in time. We need to document the process as there were many ... 'shady' processes and steps involved lol"

- Manager explaining how the first production release on our new team went last night

... he called it a success

HR: Hi we got your application. We'd like to schedule a call. Can you fill this out to pick a time?

Me: Sure, sorry first I'd like to ask a question. You are based on the other side of the country and i'm not able to relocate. Are you open to remote workers? Your job spec didn't mention either way.

HR: GREAT question! At this moment no we are not. We need people here on site. If you'd like, we can have a call to discuss if you fill out the form.

Me: ..... take time out of my day so you can tell me "No" again? ..... i'm alright thanks

Me: Requirements changed a lot since we first started. If we re-write a few sections of the app we can drastically reduce bugs, crashes, improve debug-ability etc.

PM: sure let me push back this unnecessary feature and you can do that next.

*woke up*

*cried at the thought of how amazing life would be*

Was Good talking with him. Didn't get his name though.

TIL that you have to run Arch on everything including servers in order to be considered a competent system administrator

Starting to work with a new senior designer in the remote office (red). Spent 4 days explaining to him that we need .png's in multiple sizes for the app, trying to teach him to use Zeplin to let us export them. Everything failed, his manager told him to just send us the .png's via slack ..... has he seen a computer before?

Today I discovered by myself that...

...in a shell...

...when entering a password (e.g. ssh)...

...and you make a typo... 🤦‍♂️

...you don't need to smack that backspace key like a maniac! You can just use the clear line shortcut: control+U (^U). This clears all input to the left of your cursor and this also works for passwords.