Details
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Skills.NET, C#, WPF, Xamarin, TS/JS
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LocationUK/Malta
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Website
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Github
Joined devRant on 4/26/2016
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"Build an entire PoS system, from scratch, that will run in hundreds of airports around the world along with an accompanying back office. You have 6 weeks but 4 would be better"
Even for an agency this was an insane ask but they decided to only put myself, mid-level at the time, and a junior dev on the project.
Somehow we just about managed the deadline and the system has been up and running for almost 9 years now.5 -
I hate Facebook messenger! Got a message about a freelance website I built a while ago with some change requests, as I was scrolling through the message I accidentally hit 👎. I tried to remove the reaction but deleted their message, which is only deleted for me so now I can't remove the reaction.8
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I got some work on a new project so I ran the 500, or so, unit tests and it took almost 3 minutes. Everything was mocked and no external dependencies so I got curious as to how on earth they could take so long.
I found some suspicious code doing a while loop over a date range incrementing by 1 day each time. It turned out the tests didn't initialise the start date which defaults to 01/01/0001, and there are 5 scenarios!
I got test execution down to a respectful 10s.5 -
I went for an interview yesterday and everything went fine, today I was asked to complete a technical test. I have done plenty of these in the past but never have I come across something as invasive as interviewzen.
It records every key stroke and plays it back to the interviewer, I assume they are watching on the webcam and recording audio too. I find the whole concept horrendous.
I closed that shit straight away and will tell them I'm no longer interested.
Anyone used that site before?5 -
So a while back I was contacted by a recruiter, I wasn't interested at first but ended up interviewing and eventually took the role. Fast forward 2 months into the role I get a courtesy email asking how things are going and if I would like a call to chat.
I responded saying I didn't like the role and provided a suitable time to call. I never heard anything back until fast forward another 4 months.
Today I got a REPLY to my email where I said was not happy in the role, and what was the email about?
This guy wanted a favour as they had another candidate and wanted me to provide contact details of a manager to skip the usual HR process. -
What idiot uses 0 for a success response!!! Integrating with a 3rd party I found a bug in our code that uses the default value for an int when the external server can't be reached.
As it happens 0 is the default integer in most languages so no surprise when our system accepted the 3rd party as a success when it blew up 😒4 -
When you need a really large date, are unsure of the system culture and have forgotten about `DateTime.Max`
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Very reassuring when your payment gateways XML examples have invalid markup.
I asked for XSD's and even they are invalid (containing missing type references) -
Today I stumbled across one the worst UX's for a filter I have ever seen, and yes it was a legacy system.
So there is a screen to show a data grid of all orders in the system with accompanying filters; date, status, free text etc.
And there is also a drop-down that allows users to filter by order number, but the genius that made it figured the best way to allow users to search for an order was to render all possible order numbers inside a single drop-down :| and they are not even ordered!5 -
Never have I been so furious whilst at work as yesterday, I am still super pissed about going back today but knowing it's only for another few weeks makes it baerable.
I have been the lead developer on a project for the last 3~ months and our CTO is the product owner. So every now and then he decides to just work on a feature he is interested in- fair enough I guess. But everything I have to go and clean up his horrendous code. Everything he writes is an absolute joke, it's like he is constantly in Hackathon mode "let's just copy and paste some code here, hardcoded shit there and forgot about separation of code- it all goes in 1 file".
So yesterday he added a application to the project and instead of reusing a shared data access layer he added an entirely new ORM, which is near identical to the existing ORM in use, for this one application.
Being anal about these things, the first thing I did was delete his shit and simply reference the shared library then refactor a little code to make it compatible.
WELL!! I certainly hit a nerve, he went crazy spamming messages on Slack demanding I revert as it broke ONE SINGLE QUERY that he hadn't checked in (he does 1 huge commit for 10 of everyone else's). I stuck to my principals and explained both ORM's are similar and that we only needed one, the second would cause a fragmented codebase for no benefit whatsoever.
The lead Dev was then forced to come and convince me to revert, again I refused and called out the shit quality of their code. The battle raged on via the public slack group and I could hear colleagues enjoying the heated debate, new users even started joining the group just to get in on mine and the cto's difference of opinion.
I even offered to fix his code for him if he were to commit it, obviously that was not taken well ;).
Once I finally got a luck at the cluster fuck of shit he had written it took me around 5 minutes to fix and I ever improved performance. Regardless he was having none of it. Still the demands to revert continued.
I left the office steaming after long discussions with the lead Dev caught in the middle.
Fortunately my day was salvages with a positive technical discussion that evening at a company with whome I had a job offer from.
I really hate burning bridges and have never left a company under bad terms but this dictator is making me look forward to breaking the news today I will be gone in 4 weeks.4 -
For 2 weeks I was scheduled to work on a project. After tirelessly asking the useless PM for a list of tasks I should work on I gave up and worked on another project.
Fast forward 2 weeks and now that the PM wants me to fill in a form they are more than capable of completing (API request) I am getting endless 'kind reminder' emails. How can someone be such a cunt!
Venting my frustration about this incompetent idiot here is likely stopping me saying something I would otherwise be fired for. -
Random story, I was working on a project a few years ago that had a very tight deadline and a lot of code to write. I had been working late in the office most evenings but one night myself and a colleague had stayed later than usual as we got carried away with supporting peripherals in the epos.
The cleaner came in on evenings and we had seen her that night, but had not heard anything for a while so when it came time to leave we figured we best lockup the 2 offices.
After making a quick pass through the building we couldn't see her so proceeded to lock up. Fortunately before setting the alarm we spotted her motorbike in the adjacent car park and decided to have another look.
I'm not quite sure why I decided to look in the tiny supply room/closet but fortunately I did as I found the cleaner standing in this tiny roomplaying games on her phone 😂2 -
When I was younger I would start ironing a shirt poorly knowing full-well my mother would see me doing it badly and take over to do it properly.
Karma is a bitch. Now my colleagues ask me over for help and I normally end up taking over control of their pc to rewrite shit. I swear they do it on purpose.4 -
Conversion topic: a security feature the PM doesn't like
PM: but WordPress doesn't do this.
Me: yes but WP is hacked every couple weeks and isn't exactly a security standard!
Debate continues for 5 minutes... And I'm forced to remove the feature 😑 -
I was scanning over a dreadful code base I had to work on and found SQL injection vulnerabilities. THE SITE WAS LAUNCHED IN 2017!!!! 😢2
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It makes me so sad to see such vast amounts of copy and pasted code at my new job :(
3 identical classes with only a few strings different 😡1 -
Acumatica, left my last job because of that crap. Their implementation of a query language ('BQL') using generic types is horrendous1
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Developing solely on a VM sucks big time. To last the month with my credits I use a crappy 2 core machine. Atleast half a day every week is spent browsing my phone while waiting for the vm to respond 😣 (right now)2