Last week a user couldn't find a document in sharepoint. Typed (what he thought) was the exact file name in the search -> no results.

I know how to get 'under the hood', so I looked where I thought the file was, found it, and it was exactly as he searched for it. What the hell? Wasn't a new file, it wasn't moved/renamed, no reason why it couldn't be found.
I 'touched' the file. Waited 5 minutes and searched again, found it. What the frack Microsoft!

A service had/has been logging hundreds of errors in the development environment and I reached out to the owning process mgr that the error was occurring and perhaps a good opportunity to log additional data to help troubleshoot the issue if the problem ever made its way to production. He responded saying the error was related to a new feature they weren't going to implement in the backing dev database (TL;DR), and they know it works in production (my spidey sense goes off).
They deployed the changes to production this morning and immediately starting throwing errors (same error I sent)
Mgr messaged me a little while ago "Did you make any changes to the documentation service? We're getting this error .."

50% sure someone misspelled something in a config, but only thing they are logging is 'Unable to parse document'. Nothing that indicates an issue with the service they're using.

Spent the last half hour helping my wife over text trying to "fix" FireFox. She said any site she tries to go to just "spins and spins". Chrome, Edge, all work fine. Tried the trusty 'ipconfig /flushdns'.

Me: "Open the command line, by selecting Start and start typing cmd. You'll see the Command Prompt application. Right click and run it as an administrator"
<15 seconds later>
Her: "Do I left click or right click to run as adminstrator?"
Me: "Left click. You'll get a pop message, just click yes"
<about 10 seconds later>
Her: "This thing popped up, what do I do?"
Me: "Click yes"
<more waiting>
Her: "Says something about making changes to my computer, what do I do?"
Me: "Click yes"
Her: "Is it going to make changes? Are you sure I should click yes?"
Me: "YES!!"
Her: "Don't yell at me. You're supposed to know how to do this, not me. What do I do now?"
Me: "Type ipconfig /flushdns"
Her: "OK, is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of 'Type ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "No, just ipconfig /flushdns"
Her: "OK, is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of 'ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "Yep, just put a space between ipconfig /flushdns and press enter"
Her: "Is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of ' ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "No, the space goes between ipconfig /flushdns, not before."
Her: "You're not making yourself clear. OK, now what?"
Me: "Press enter"
Her: "It didn't do anything."
Me: "Did you press enter?"
<more waiting>
Her: "OK, it's done. Now what?"
Me: "Restart FireFox"
Her: "Still not working. Just spins and spins."
<not 100% sure restarted FireFox>
Me: "I'll look at it when I get home."

Trying to use authenticate a JWT token from an Azure service, which apparently needs to use Azure AD Identity services (Microsoft Entra ID, Azure AD B2C, pick your poison). I sent a request to our Azure admin. Two days later, I follow up, "Sorry, I forgot...here you go..."
Sends me a (small) screenshot of the some of the properties+GUIDs I need, hoping I don't mess up, still missing a few values.
Me: "I need the instance url, domain, and client secret."
<hour later>
T: "Sorry, I don't understand what those are."
Me: "The login URL. I assume it's the default, but I can't see what you see. Any shot you can give me at least read permissions so I can see the various properties without having to bother you?"
T: "I don't see any URLs, I'll send you the config json, the values you need should be in there."
<10 minutes later, I get a json file, nothing I needed>
<find screenshots of what I'm looking for, send em to T>
Me: "The Endpoints, what URLs do you see when you click Endpoints?"
<20 minutes later, sends me the list of endpoints, exactly what I'm looking for, but still not authenticating the JWT>
Me: "Still not working. Not getting an error, just that the authentication is failing. Don't know if it's the JWT, am I missing a slash, or what. Any way I can get at least read permissions so I don't have to keep bugging you to see certain values?"
T: "What do you need, exactly?"
Me: "I don't know. I don't know if I'm using the right secret key, I can't verify if I'm using the right client id. I feel like I'm guessing trying to make this work."
T: "What exactly are you trying to get working?"
<explain, again, what I'm trying to do>
T: "That's probably not going to work. We don't allow AD authentication from the outside world."
Me: "Yes we do. Microsoft Teams, Outlook, the remote access services. I can log into those services from home using my AD credentials."
T: "Oh yea, I guess we do. I meant what you are trying to do. Azure doesn't allow outside services to authenticate using a JWT. Sorry."

FRACK FRACK FRACK!!

Whew! Putting the flamethrower away.

Thanks devrant for letting me rant.

My favorite famous dev/tech person + why?

Scott Hanselman.

He always takes the human approach to technology. Its easy to forget we're supposed to write software for people.

My wife is a pretty decent artist and we were talking about AI and what affect it can have on folks in the graphic artists industry.
I fire up Microsoft's Designer, enter a prompt and this is what it generated.
She said "Oh good. We're gonna be OK."

Worst coding procrastination story?

Not necessarily coding, but anything that has to do with writing support reports for an application/feature. Good news is we have a dedicated dept for maintaining reports now, but there was a time developers were required to write and maintain reports (Crystal Reports). Starts out as data in grid, but de-evolves into ..
U: "This value here...can you make that red if its a Thursday before a promotion release on Friday and I forget to update the promotional percent?"
<month later>
U: "Why is this value red?"
<explain why it's red>
U: "That is so stupid, I wouldn't ask for such as feature. I never forget."
<month later>
U: "OMG! I FORGOT TO UPDATE THE PERCENT AND WE LOST OVER $100,000!! THE REPORT WAS SUPPOSED TO FLAG THOSE VALUES IN RED!!! I HAVE THE REQUIREMENT DOCUMENT!! ITS ALL YOUR FAULT!!!"

Not to mention the hours...HOURS worth of meetings filled with "Can you move the value a little to the left, a little more..NO! Too far! Now, make it bold...bolder..uggh...I said bolder, I thought you guys knew a lot about computers."

I eventually ignored the report feature with "I'll work on it later". 'Later' never showed up. Users eventually exported the data to Excel to write their own reports and now exporting data to Excel is a standard feature of our apps.

I'll monitor our helpdesk ticket system from time-to-time and HR will send their employee termination request so the accounts are deactivated. I notice an odd name I hadn't seen in a long while (names have been changed)

<thought bubble> "Ketsup? Hmmm...wonder if they're related to ol' Brad Ketsup?"

Brad was a bully who would shove me in the bathroom when I would pee so I would tip over and hit the urinal. He was part of pack of older bullies who enjoyed torturing people in the stalls by throwing wet paper towels over the wall or one time in my case, busted the door open (Brad: "Look everybody! PaperTrail is pooping! Look at his little pee-pee...ha ha ha..") Incidentally, the school didn't fix the door, they removed all the doors so the problem wouldn't happen again, but I digress.

I look at the individual's pic, and it was like going back in time. There he was, the near perfect round face, pinned back ears...not Brad, but I'd bet my paycheck at Vegas it was his son. All the vent up frustrations started to bubble up...then...sadness.

Brad moved away in high school and unless the good Lord moved mountains in Brad's life, this poor kid likely lived the same abusive life as Brad. Brad's dad was a drunk and known to be abusive. Statistically speaking, no reason to believe the the apple wouldn't fall far from the tree.

Makes me wonder what happened to all those guys from back then. I know two of em' ended up in prison, but I wonder what I would say if I came across any of them in the wild?

I'm sure most of you had perfect lives growing up and no feelings of mass carnage when you think of the bullies in your early life.

Most awkward video meeting?

Can a conference call count? This happened several years ago.

Diving into international markets that could potentially make us millions of $$ (no pressure), while the phone was ringing the CEO's number (in Norway), my manager leans over and whispers
DevMgr: "This project will be managed using *proper* software development methodologies, none of this agile shit you want to use."
<CEO picks up>

I had already been in talks with their dev team to get a feel for their tech stack and we had discussed project milestones, potential release cycles (laying the ground work for using agile methodologies) before getting upper mgmt involved.

The partner dev team was listening and kept throwing out agile buzzwords and I could tell my manager was getting pissed. He would blurt out "Those specifications will need to be fully documented before PaperTrail writes one line of code!". No one said anything, but I could tell the other mgrs/VPs in the room were uncomfortable with the hostility towards discussing features.

Playing around with Bard:
Me:Who called me from ...?
Bard: <blah blah blah> Would you like me to run a reverse phone lookup on that number for you?
Me: Yes
Bard: I'm just a language model, so I can't help you with that.
Me: Then why did you ask?
Bard: "I understand that you don't need me to run a reverse phone lookup, and that's perfectly fine. I just wanted to offer the service in case you were interested."

I tweaked the question and Bard responded with a Python script and a phone number regular expression.

Our jobs are safe for now.

#1 life lesson I learned from coding?

Maybe not coding specifically, but I learned the difference between problem solving and solution finding.
Its helped me in a lot of areas of my life. Made friends and made enemies.

Best code performance incr. I made?

Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)

Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.

Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.

Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.

With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.

Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."

After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.

At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.

VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>

A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"

Most awkward work event/parts story?

There was a girl who worked in customer service, very goth. Un-kept hair, baggy cloths, dark lipstick, etc..etc. At a company holiday party there were several+many people (mostly dudes) asking "Who is that! ... She's HOT!!" etc (you could hear it from various tables), and someone said "That's Stefanie.", then the "Noooo...OMG..."
Apparently she cleaned up nicely (dressed like she was going to a movie premier, very classy). She and a female friend (also attractive, dressed like a million bucks) were sitting close to each together and you could hear more (inappropriate) comments "OMG, are they together!?...that's fucking hot!....".
Mind you, this wasn't a very big venue (and before all of today's woke-ness), I could hear it a few tables away (again, all dudes, customer service and warehouse worker folks), I *know* they could hear it from their table.
It was so bad Stefanie's CS manager talked about in the break room the next day. She wasn't at the holiday party, but the rumors were going wild that day.
<she's in her 60's and I wouldn't want to be on her bad side>
D: "I can't believe they made such a scene. I would have smacked those young men in the face! Stefanie has a boyfriend and Laura is married. They have been best friends since kindergarten, its disgusting what went on. And another thing..."

It was talked about for many years afterward.

I need some time off. Just had this convo with a dev-manager about an 'issue' with our system change mgmt calendar (Blazor) app.

K: "In the system drop-down, it's not filtering when I type."
Me: "Let me check <I attempt to reproduce>, yep, not working. Do you get the same error? Looks like duplicate data from the database is causing a problem."
<this is over MS Teams, about 5 minutes go by with no response, then>
K: "No error, its not working."
<I find the bad data, delete it, TADA, the filtering is working again>
Me: "The filtering is working again, at least for me. You sure you didn't see an error?"
<wait 5 minutes again>
K: "No, no error."
Me: "You didn't see a little red banner at the bottom and in all caps..ERROR"
<send him a screen-shot of the error I still had in another tab>
K: "Yes, I saw that one, but no other errors. Filtering is working again. Thanks"

My dad got a new phone over the weekend and asked me to help him set it up (TL;DR his IPhone broke, he likely cussed out someone on the phone and now he's on android).

Setting up his bank app, I asked for his password (I somehow knew asking a 80+ year old man password questions wouldn't end well)

<pulls a card out of his wallet>
Dad: "Here you go."
Me: "This is your business card?"
Dad: "Yep. Password is at the bottom. That way I never forget it."
Me: "Jeez dad, you shouldn't have your bank's password on a business card. You don't give these out to people, do you?"
Dad: "Sometimes. Hell, they won't know what that is. Its just a bunch of nonsense."

Luckily the password didn't work. He had to reset it when his IPhone messed up and didn't remember what he changed the password to.

Fav. thing I've worked on recently?

Blazor and creating our framework around authentication/authorization.

We have an internal nuget package that wraps up the IConfiguration+ConfigurationBuilder for various .net core console/service apps (TL;DR, because people got creative), and it has a dictionary property for the common sections we use. AppSettings (for backward compatibility), ConnectionStrings, and ServiceEndpoints. If the need arises, I can add methods to return any type of object (no one has requested yet, we try to keep configs dead simple)

ex. var myDatabaseConnectionString = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["MyDatabase"];

Code review for someone who updated a .net framework app to .net core and they wrote their own IConfiguration wrapper for accessing the appsettings.json file, so I pointed out that we already had a library for that.
In the reply, he said he couldn't use our library because it had an 'AppSettings' property and since his appsettings.json file didn't have that section, he didn't want to cause a runtime exception.

OK, WTF...I even sent him a link to the documentation (includes explaining the backward compatibility part)...why the frack would you think because a property exists and you don't use it, that would cause some kind of runtime exception?
We have dozens of .net framework apps migrated to .net core with zero code changes and no one ever brought this up as a concern (because, why would they?)

Deep breath...ahhh...I respond that not having an AppSettings section in the appsettings.json file won't cause an exception, if you don't have one, don't need it, you don't have to use it.

He went ahead merged+committed his code anyway with his own IConfiguration+ConfigurationBuilder plumbing.

Code addiction is real kids...it's real.

Goal for my dev career future?

I'll soon be 53, my career goal is to make it to retirement without fired for some random biz-talk excuse for being too old.

Inappropriate experience at work? Here is another one:

After 10 years of service the company gives the employee an anniversary party, complete with cake, drinks, etc.

Preparing for a party, HR set the cake in the break-room and left to get the other supplies, in the mean time the IS department manager 'John' walks in, sees the cake and decides to take a slice.
Not a small corner piece you may not notice by smearing the frosting around, but a big piece from the * middle of the cake *.

'Mary' walks in and catches him.

M: "JOHN! The cake is for Eddie's party! Everyone will be here any minute!"
John: "Oh shit!..sorry, let me put it back..."
M: "NO!, you've already eaten some...the cake is ruined!"
<he had icing all over his hands, so he used the cake knife to cut, but used his hands to dig out the slice, so the cake looked pretty tore up>
J:"How was I supposed to know? All I saw was free cake!"
M: "You are on the invite list for Eddie's party! You have 'Happy Anniversary Eddie' on your plate!"
J: "Party isn't until 2:00...<looks at the breakroom clock> oh shit...it's 2"

About that time, several VPs walk in, notice Mary is upset and after finding out, our IS-VP said "John, I'm not happy about this. I want you in my office after the party. You can leave ...now!"

Our IS-VP is almost always emotionless (mostly just happy and in a good mood), it was the first time anyone had seen him this physically angry in years. We don't know how John kept his job.

Inappropriate experience at work? Here is another one:

The IS department manager 'John' loved shelled peanuts, but hated cleaning them up. By the end of the day his desk and surrounding area were covered in peanut shells (he never bothered trying to put the shells in the trash can). He didn't seem to care because the maintenance crew would clean up the office every night and he would come in to a clean area every day.

That was until the company owner's wife was making the rounds one day and saw his mess. The shells hit the fan. The 'beat down' occurred at EOD, so most didn't witness it, but she lit him up. Almost screaming that he's a grown man and the maintenance crew have enough to do without cleaning up after him...etc..etc.
John never ate peanuts at his desk again.

Inappropriate experience at work? Here is another one:

The IS department manager 'John' bought a drone (when they first started getting popular, paid over $400 for it), flew it around the office, which was kinda fun, then he took it outside and started peeking in (and recording video) various VPs offices.

Needless to say, that behavior wasn't popular because several/most have their back to the window and never saw the drone and the drone was close enough to see/record their monitors (which John did). No one was doing anything wrong (no porn, no secret company plans, etc), but they were rightfully upset.

Later that day he decided to find out how high he could go and because of the technology at the time, it lost signal or battery power, fell from the sky, and before he could gain control, it crashed (styrofoam wings shattered). Can't say I felt sorry for him.

Inappropriate experience at work? Here is another one:

The IS department manager 'John' bought a blowgun and was shooting at a box down the cubical farm hallway. Only a little annoying to hear him puff on the tube, but then someone walked out their cube and almost got hit.
Dev: "Dammit John! What the hell are you doing?!"
John: "Maybe you should pay the hell attention to where you're going. You heard what I was doing. Don't be a baby, those darts wouldn't have hurt you anyway."

I've attached a pic of what the darts looked like.

Inappropriate experience at work? All very old experiences, this is one of many:

The IS department manager 'John' would poke is butt in a cubicle, fart, walk away laughing and/or say "That'll wake you up".

How it is to be a dev in my country?

At bit of an odd question this week.

For me (in the USA), it's being technical support for *every* website my family uses.

Over the weekend my wife visited her aunt and I get a call.

Wife: "How do I create an ebay account?"
Me: "I don't like where this is going. We already have an account."
Wife: "Not for me, dummy, Aunt T. She found some books she wants to buy on ebay."
Me: "You go thru the process to create an account? Email, name, password, etc."
Wife: "We tried that, but it's not working."
<few seconds of silence>
Me: "Oookaaay...why isn't it working? Is there an error?"
Wife: "I don't know, we already clicked off of it. Something about the email."
<few more seconds of silence>
Me: "Can you reproduce the error and tell me?"
Wife: "Uggh..are you serious? We've done it like 10 times, its not working. Just tell me what I need to do."
Me: "If you can't tell me the error, I can't help you. I'm not there and can't see what you see."
Wife: "Stop being an asshole."
<Aunt T takes the phone>
T: "Said something about using another email address. Does that help you?"
Me: "Are you sure you don't already have a ebay account?"
T: "No, I don't think so. I hate ebay. but I really want these books. I don't want the same problems as last time."
Me: "Last time?"
T: "Yes, I bought a coffee cup on ebay from China and it never arrived."
Me: "OK, so you do have an account?"
T: "I don't know, I mean, I never got the cup."
Me: "What email address did you use? I'll send a 'remind me' email so you can reset the password and login"
<go thru the motions, she is able to login>
T: "Ahhh...I do have an account! There are the golf balls I bought for <husband> for Christmas."
<face smack>
Wife: "Why didn't you do this from the start? I thought you knew a lot about computers. We basically figured this out ourselves. Goodbye!"
<click>

Worst code review experience?

Hard to pick just one, but most were in a big meeting room with 4+ other developers not related to the project and with some playing Monday-Morning-Quarterback instead of offering productive feedback.

In one code review, the department mgr reviewed the code from a third party component library.

<brings up the code on the big screen>
Mgr: "I can't read any of this, its a mix of English and something else."
Me: "Its German."
Mgr: "Then why is 'Button' in English? This code is a mess."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how I should respond, I mean, I didn't write any of this code."
Mgr: "Yes, but you are using it, so it's fair game for a code review."
Me: "Its not really open source, but we can make requests if you found something that needs to be addressed."
Mgr: "Oh yes, all this...whatever this is..<pointing again to the German>"
Me: "I don't think they will change their code to English just so you can read it."
Mgr: "We paid good money, you bet your ass they'll change it!"
Me: "I think the components were like $30 for the unlimited license. They'll tell us to go to hell first. Is there something about my code you want to talk about?"
Mgr: "<Ugggh>...I guess not, I couldn't get past all that German. Why didn't we go with an American company? Hell, why didn't we just write these components ourselves!?"
Me: "Because you gave a directive that if we found components that saved us time, to put in a request, and you approved the request. The company is American, they probably outsourced or hired German developers. I don't know and not sure why we care."
Mgr: "Security! What if they are sending keystrokes back to their servers!"
Me: "Did you see any http or any network access?"
Mgr: "How could I? The code is in German!"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback1: "If it were me, I would have written the components myself and moved on"
Me: "No, I don't think you could for less than $30"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback2: "Meh...we get paid anyway. Just add the time to the estimate."
Mgr: "Exactly! Why do we even have developers who can't read this mess."
Me: "Oh good Lord! Did anyone review or even look at my code for this review!?"
<silence>
Mgr: "Oh...ok...I guess we're done here. Thanks everyone."
<everyone starts to leave>
Me: "Whoa!...wait a sec..am I supposed to do something?"
Mgr: "Get that company to write their code in English so we can read it. You have their number, call em'...no...wait...give me their number. You keep working, I'll take care of this personally"

In they nicest way possible, the company did tell him to go to hell.

How to run a productive meeting?

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

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

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

I know folks do their best, but come on Apple, this can't be that hard. Bought an IPhone at an estate sale (elderly individual died suddenly, so no one had knowledge of the apple id, passwords, etc) and I've been trying to convince apple to clear the activation lock. (AS = Apple Support)

<after explaining the situation>
AS: "Have you tried putting the phone in recovery mode? That should clear the lock"
Me: "I've already done that. It prompts for the apple id and password, which I don't have"
AS: "You need to talk to the owner and get the information"
Me: "As I explained, I purchased the phone at an estate sale of someone who died. I have the bill of sale, serial number, the box, obituary. What else do you need?"
AS: "Have you tried contacting a family member? They might have have that information."
Me: "The family members at the sale told us this is all they had. This kind of thing has to happen. I can't believe Apple can't clear the activation lock."
AS: "Yes, we can, but I'm very sorry we take security seriously."
Me: "I understand, what do I do now?"
AS: "Did you log out of the phone? Go to settings ..."
Me: "Yes, I tried all those steps before calling. It prompts for the AppleID and password."
AS: "Did you try entering the password?"
Me: "No, I don't have it. I already explained there is no way to know"
AS: "Yes..yes...sorry...I'm just reading the information in front of me. I found something, have you tried submitting a activation lock removal request?"
Me: "Yes, it was denied, didn't tell me why, which is why I'm calling. What about taking this phone to an Apple store? I have all the paperwork."
AS: "Sure, you can try. You might need the death certificate. The family or the coroner will have a copy."
Me: "What!? Apple requires a death certificate to unlock a phone!? I'm pretty sure not even the family is going to give a total stranger a death certificate"
AS: "Sorry sir, I'm just reading what is in front of me. Without that certificate, there is no way to prove the person died. You can try the Apple store, but they will likely require it."
Me: "That's a lot of drama for unlocking a phone. A *phone*"
AS: "Yes sir, I understand. If there anything else we can do let us know and thank you for being an a apple customer."

Next stop, the Apple Store.

Longest I've worked without rest + why?

Over 24 hours. Why?

In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).

Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.

One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.

January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"

At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)

One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...

VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow."

Useless feature I've built?

Too many to mention. Here's #25.

Modified an existing "Are you sure..?" dialog pop-up (Yes/No buttons) to Yes/No/Cancel. Why? Managers claimed users were "accidentally" clicking 'Yes' when they should have clicked 'No' and causing all kinds of chaos, costing the company money, etc. Managers believed giving the user two chances instead of one would make it easier to avoid the problems they caused.

The meeting:
Me: "Users can click 'No', hit the 'Esc' key, or click the close 'X' button on the window, how will an extra button make it more foolproof?"
Mgr1: "It just will. Andy accidentally deleted inventory and when I asked him if an extra button would have saved them a days worth of re-counts, he said yes."
Mgr2: "Barb accidentally credited a customer $1,500. She promised me she clicked 'No', but the system credited the account anyway. An extra button would have saved us thousands of dollars!"
Me: "Um...these sound like training issues, not an extra button issue."
MyMgr: "PaperTrail, how hard is it to add an extra button?"
Dev1: "Oh yea, adding buttons is easy."
Dev2: "I can do it 5 minutes"
Dev3: "We'll save the company thousands and thousands of dollars!"
<lots of head-knodding and smiles>
MyMgr: "That settles it. PaperTrail, add the extra button!"

Users still screwed things up, but at least they couldn't blame it on not having an extra button.

Worst fight I've had with a co-worker?

Had my share of 'disagreements', but one that seemed like it could have gone to blows was a developer, 'T', that tried to man-splain me how ADO.Net worked with SQLServer.

<T walks into our work area>
T: "Your solution is going to cause a lot of problems in SQLServer"
Me: "No, its not, your solution is worse. For performance, its better to use ADO.Net connection pooling."
T: "NO! Every single transaction is atomic! SQLServer will prioritize the operation thread, making the whole transaction faster than what you're trying to do."
<T goes on and on about threads, made up nonsense about priority queues, on and on>
Me: "No it won't, unless you change something in the connection string, ADO.Net will utilize connection pooling and use the same SPID, even if you explicitly call Close() on the connection. You are just wasting code thinking that works."

T walks over, stands over me (he's about 6.5", 300+ pounds), maybe 6 inches away

T: "I've been doing .net development for over 10 years. I know what I'm doing!"

I turn my chair to face him, look up, cross my arms.

Me: "I know I'm kinda new to this, but let me show you something ..."

<I threw together a C# console app, simple connect, get some data, close the connection>

Me: "I'll fire up SQLProfiler and we can see the actual connection SPID and when sql server closes the SPID....see....the connection to SQLServer is still has an active SPID after I called Close. When I exit the application, SQLServer will drop the SPD....tada...see?"
T: "Wha...what is that...SQLProfiler? Is that some kind of hacking tool? DBAs should know about that!"
Me: "It's part of the SQLServer client tools, its on everyone's machine, including yours."
T: "Doesn't prove a damn thing! I'm going to do my own experiment and prove my solution works."
Me: "Look forward to seeing what you come up with ... and you haven't been doing .net for 10 years. I was part of the team that reviewed your resume when you were hired. You're going to have to try that on someone else."

About 10 seconds later I hear him from across the room slam his keyboard on his desk.

100% sure he would have kicked my ass, but that day I let him know his bully tactics worked on some, but wouldn't work on me.