Is it really unreasonable that I wish aws would just name their fucking products after what they are? Why the fuck is dns called route 53? Why the fuck is a vm an elastic cloud compute node? Stop being pretentious dicks and just name things what they are!

Am I being unreasonable?

People who message “I’m getting a error” without any context or even better the actual error message, no one else can see your screen and we can’t magic a fix, and we’re not f***ing psychic, tell us what the f***ing error is. Or better yet, figure it f***ing out like the rest of us, you also have google - go nuts

Got a few
Crystal reports - words cannot describe how much I loathe this

Sybase ASE or IQ - both are just a hot mess to setup properly

Not a service now fan either

Esri map processing - basically entirely undocumented, slow, old fucking hate it

Arc GIS online - ridiculous licensing issues, undocumented APIs are given as official answers from the dev team, massive pain in the arse

It’s a bit of a coin toss for me but probably the first sysadmin I worked with Dave, I was a software engineering graduate and tbh he scared the sh*t out of me when I first met him but when he learned I actually enjoyed doing ops stuff, he really took me under his wing taught me so much and I’ll be forever grateful to him for that

I once had to write an http interceptor for a distributed api. The interceptor needed to use the request context and the user profile to work out if a particular type of content had previously been accessed. Anyway there were two methods to get the user profile getUserC and getUserD, turns out C stood for cache D stood for database. Of course I called getUserD I effectively wrote a database distributed denial of service tool into our app 😬 we got a call from our customer complaining that their exadata servers where grinding to a complete halt

Never be afraid to break something your working on! You’ll gain so much experience from trying to fix it including your own computer!

We’ve started to bolster things like Citrix for increased work load in case we have to shut offices but that’s about it to be honest

On a production server

We support a system we inherited from another company, it’s an online document store for technical specifications of electronic devices used by loads of people.

This thing is the biggest pile of shite I’ve ever seen, it wasn’t written by developers but rather by civil engineers who could write vb...so needless to say it’s classic asp running on iis, but it’s not only written in vbscript oh god no, some of it is vb other parts is jscript (Microsoft’s janky old JavaScript implementation) and the rest is php.

When we first inherited it we spent the best part of 2 months fixing security vulnerabilities before we were willing to put it near the internet - to this day I remain convinced the only reason it was never hacked is that everything scanning it thought it was a honeypot.

We’ve told the client that this thing needs put out of its misery but they insist on keeping it going. Whenever anything goes wrong it falls to me and it ends up taking me days to work out what’s happening with it. So far the only way I’ve worked out how to debug it is to start doing “Response.AddHeader(‘debug’, ‘<thing>’) on the production site and looking at the header responses in the browser.
I feel dirty doing that but it works so I don’t really care at this point

FUCK I hate this thing!

Every year my team have an award ceremony for stupid things we do throughout the year. There is only really one worth highlighting this year
Alzheimer’s award- given to one of our DBAs for this svn commit message: “updated the comment block but forgot to make the code change”

Had a particularly strange one about hose pipes flailing wildly but in a very specific pattern.
I’d been working on a bit of a monolithic multithreaded data pipeline and I couldn’t work out what I wanted to do with the thread pool. When I woke up I had a picture of those hose pipes, that basically how it now works😂

My office at the weekend, it’s quiet so no one annoys me, setup is good and my main side project at the moment involves a modification I want to proof of concept (to try and get funding to do it properly) to our main product so all my resources are there

The most important thing my mentor taught me was “ in an audit if the auditor asks ‘do you have the time?’ And you do simply respond ‘yes’” it done me well so far!

Whoever decided java portlets were a good idea, you were wrong and I don’t like you

Depends on the project:

If it’s just me on the project 1.5x actual estimate which is based on whether or not I can figure it out from looking at the code.

If others are on it 3.5x to include things like getting others up to speed, discussions, design talks etc.

Before an interview prepare a list of questions for them, they expect it!
My list to give inspiration:

Describe your company culture? - if the response is buzzword heavy, avoid.

What’s the oldest technology still in use? - all companies have legacy systems but some are worse than others

Describe your agile process? - a few companies I’ve interviewed with said they are agile but it’s actually kanban

Are developers involved with customers?- if they trust you to talk to customers you can infer trust to do your job ( I’m sure others will disagree)

Describe your development environment?- do they have such a thing as dev, test and prod?

These are the only ones I can remember but should give others a bit of inspiration I hope 😄

Dungeons and dragons, I am the dungeon master for two games and a player in one. Great laugh if you can get everyone in the same room with lots of booze 😁

Seems about right

One for game developers. What do you do with assets to keep track of them ? Do you just store them in guy?

Every year my team runs an award ceremony during which people win “awards” for mistakes throughout the year. This years was quite good.

The integration partner award- one of our sysAdmins was talking with a partner from another company over Skype and was having some issues with azure. He intended to send me a small rant but instead sent “fucking azure can go fuck itself, won’t let me update to managed disks from a vhd built on unmanaged” to our jv partner.

Sysadmin wannabe award (mine)- ran “Sudo chmod -R 700 /“ on one of our dev systems then had to spend the next day trying to fix it 😓

The ain’t no sanity clause award - someone ran a massive update query on a prod database without a where clause

The dba wannabe award - one of our support guys was clearing out a prod dB server to make some disk space and accidentally deleted one of the databases devices bringing it down.

The open source community award - one of the devs had been messing about with an apache proxy on a prod web server and it ended up as part of a botnet

There were others but I can’t remember them all

1. Use all my vacation days
2. Learn something that has nothing to do with computers (seriously I bore myself sometimes in conversation)
3. Drink more rum and learn about it at the same time
4. Make time for friends and family
5. No massive outages!

Mostly I want to step out of work and be more sociable

Before my vacation I’d been chatting with one of our dbas about an etl tool we needed for a customer we’d already signed all the contracts with saying we would provide one for a historical database of old data. They had been looking at one from SAP but in typical fashion a license was worth more than the actual contract.

Anyway long story short on the weekend before I went back to work I rattled together a little python proof of concept using a couple of azure databases and when I went back demo’d it to the pm and dba they loved it and we built on the poc to have a working loader which saved us about £30k by not buying the SAP product and just wrote our own.

Our app server still restarts via cron job every night at 22:30, it’s been 3 years :)

Blizzard.

I’ve been a huge fan of pretty much every blizzard franchise for a long long time.

However recently the companies attitude towards its customers has reached breaking point, insert “you think you do but you don’t “ & “don’t you guys have phones?”.

They’re unfortunately driving many of their franchises into the ground at the moment and at their current trajectory I can see a really bad fall coming.

A lot of gaming companies need to really listen to their communities and stop this micro transaction Armageddon that’s happening just now.

My face when I typed my bash commands into slack for the 8th time today

Much like traditional engineering I can see software engineering suddenly becoming very very regulated around the world. Different systems safety bodies will open up for things like embedded systems development where their is a risk of harm, mandatory security standards will be put in place etc.

Enjoy the cowboy days ladies/gents/others regulatory bodies are on their way!

When I started my current job I fucked up my first deploy ever so slightly but In the end managed to get it going with a quick hack (unpacking our war file modifying some properties and a jsp page before restarting the tomcat server )

One of the senior developers was having a really bad day and decided I was who he was going to take it out on, calling me a cowboy (in the Uk that’s a bad thing) blah blah, being really nasty and condescending to me.

I was about ready to shout at him as it was his dodgy configuration that caused the issue in the first place, but instead I took a deep breath and firmly (but calmly) told him never to speak to me like that again or we would have a problem.

5 years later he’s never spoken to me like that again and is actually a pretty decent guy.

Moral of the story people have bad days but also don’t let people take the piss.

The spring framework, it took a pain in the arse language {java} and turned into something reasonably good again! Props to Rod Johnson on that one

Any of the several hundred (no joke) xss, csrf or sql injection bugs I've fixed in our legacy apps...

root@devweb $ chmod go-rw /*

Not the way to start a Thursday morning