Biggest hurdle? Probably other people telling me no.

- My parents wouldn't let me go to college to study CS because 'this computer thing is just a fad and you won't be able to make a living off it'. Instead they pulled me out of school early and made me go study automotive so I could be a mechanic like my dad.

- At 22, my boss at my first tech company job heard I was taking Java classes in the evenings. Told me to stop wasting my money because I'd never be a programmer.

- Got a job at a game development company as a document writer. I could code by then. When I was done with my work I'd look for bugs and send the solutions to the programmers so they could submit them. Tech lead found out and flipped out. Said I wasn't allowed to look at the code because I 'hadn't been hired as a programmer'.

Today I'm a senior developer and pretty happy with my career.

When people tell you that you can't do something, that should be all the motivation you need to work your ass off to prove them wrong.

Me: Let's use some framework to make things easier and faster!

Boss: No, we will do everything on our own, because when you quit your job I won't find anyone who knows that framework to replace you.

Me: But you won't find anyone who knows our custom solutions even more...

One year ago, I quit my job in order to "make life easier". And by that I mean work+home in the same city. I went from 40 minutes commute - to 3 minutes. I had a blast the first week.

Then I realized that it was actually a mistake. I did not like working with "that kind of systems" and "that kind of tasks". It was tedious, stupid, and I was angry every, single day because the previous ones had built a system on 10-15 year old hardware because "it is cheaper".

That continued for a year. I discovered new stupid "solutions" every week that was potentially dangerous for the company. It built up a huge pile of shit and I started to feel that my mental health was disappearing, fast.

And equipment such as servers, switches, routers, storage started to fail because of age. Despite my warnings from day 0 to the CEO who only kinda laughed it off and said "you can to solve that", but I never got the approval to actually buy the equipment that was needed. Because "the company did'nt have the money for it". Somehow, the company had the money to buy expensive cars for the CEO - I can't really figure out that equation.

So today, one VERY old UPS died at our office. It caused some powerspike that killed off some switches and a NAS.
"Whatever" I thought, I just have to find the backup of the files and get a new one.

Then I discovered, that the NAS that acted as a iSCSI target for VM's and document storage was backed up using VEEAM on another server - that was configured to backup everything to the same NAS. I just wanted to cry, because I could not take anymore shit.

So I picked up my phone, called my old employer and asked if I could start working for them again. My old boss got insanely happy and gave me a great offer which I immediately accepted.

So tomorrow, is the day that I am going to walk into my current boss and say that I will quit. My last day will be on Christmas day. And I will start my new year with a few weeks off, and then back to the job that I actually loved.

Life is to short to work with something you hate.

Former Boss: "We need a messaging framework!"
Me: "What do we need a messaging framework for?"
Former Boss: "To send out messages to the App and by Email!"
Me: "We already have everything in place for that."
Former Boss: "But it must be _one_ generic solution, not _two_ solutions."
Me: "Both content and form are totally different for those messages. They have nothing in common besides being 'messages'."
Former Boss: "But it's better to have a messaging framework!"

We had that discussion in every fucking weekly team meeting. So I decided to put a concept together that was so overdesigned, generic and complicated, so my boss wasn't able to understand it at all, and of course didn't read it entirely.

He never mentioned the term "messaging framework" again.

The past 2 years where I work:

Me: hey let's use git instead of ftp!
Boss: should we?
Some time later: he is loving it...

Me: hey let's use trello instead of excell!!??!
Boss: huumm.. Dunno... Should we?
After much convincing: whole departments are using and loving it....

Me: hey let's move from rackspace to DO!
Boss: huumm... Convince me...
Year latter: everything smooth and muuuch lower prices... Managing 6 servers instead of one...

Me: UNIT TESTS!!!
Boss: nah, this but a waste of time...

For real? Get a grip man, I only encourage solutions tested ( no pun intended, or is it ) by me for a long time...

Fuck stupid client.

Sorry:

Boss: client want to white label the solution.

Me: ok. They just need to create A record and send as SSL certificate and I will do it.

Client : here is your SSL certificate.

Me: spend whole night to make the transfer and setup server and check whole solutions one by one for reference to our company.

Next day wake around 2 pm to 100 whatsapp message, call from client and noss.

Turns out client IT team revoked the certificate without informing and the product stop working for all people.

Me: go to back to sleep.

Yesterday I fucked up big time.
First time in my career (I’m 23).

I just started working this week at a new company startup that had no programmers before me. They have a bunch of websites under their control that were on all different hosting solutions, and we decided to move them all to AWS.
I moved a few and was managing the folder rights on the server.
What happened next made my heart skip a few beats.
Bear in mind I’m not an expert in Linux.
I wanted to chmod to the folder I was currently in, and typed ‘sudo chmod -R 770 /‘ thinking for a while that the ‘/‘ would do it on my current dir.

Fuck. As I saw what was happening I pressed ctrl + c as fast as I could. But the damage had been done.

Fast forward a couple hours I deleted the broken instance, and created a new one from scratch. Had to do everything again but managed to do it in just a couple hours, moving as fast as I could without making such stupid mistakes again.

I was honest about it from the first minute it happened, and told my boss right away that I fucked up and had to start over, with a couple of hours of downtime.
Luckily not much was lost and I took a snapshot right after I was finished and will look into auto backups next week.

Insecure... My laptop disk is encrypted, but I'm using a fairly weak password. 🤔

Oh, you mean psychological.

Working at a startup in crisis time. Might lose my job if the company goes under.

I'm a Tech lead, Senior Backender, DB admin, Debugger, Solutions Architect, PR reviewer.

In practice, that means zero portfolio. Truth be told, I can sniff out issues with your code, but can't code features for shit. I really just don't have the patience to actually BUILD things.

I'm pretty much the town fool who angrily yells at managers for being dumb, rolls his eyes when he finds hacky code, then disappears into his cave to repair and refactor the mess other people made.

I totally suck at interviews, unless the interviewer really loves comparing Haskell's & Rust's type systems, or something equally useless.

I'm grumpy, hedonistic and brutally straight forward. Some coworkers call me "refreshing" and "direct but reasonable", others "barely tolerable" or even "fundamentally unlikable".

I'm not sure if they actually mean it, or are just messing with me, but by noon I'm either too deep into code, or too much under influence of cognac & LSD, wearing too little clothing, having interesting conversations WITH instead of AT the coffee machine, to still care about what other humans think.

There have been moments where I coded for 72 hours straight to fix a severe issue, and I would take a bullet to save this company from going under... But there have also been days where I called my boss a "A malicious tumor, slowly infecting all departments and draining the life out of the company with his cancerous ideas" — to his face.

I count myself lucky to still have a very well paying job, where many others are struggling to pay bills or have lost their income completely.

But I realize I'm really not that easy to work with... Over time, I've recruited a team of compatible psychopaths and misfits, from a Ukranian ex-military explosives expert & brilliant DB admin to a Nigerian crossfitting gay autist devops weeb, to a tiny alcoholic French machine learning fanatic, to the paranoid "how much keef is there in my beard" architecture lead who is convinced covid-19 is linked to the disappearance of MH370 and looks like he bathes in pig manure.

So... I would really hate to ever have to look for a new employer.

I would really hate to ever lose my protective human meat shield... I mean, my "team".

I feel like, despite having worked to get my Karma deep into the red by calling people all kinds of rude things, things are really quite sweet for me.

I'm fucking terrified that this peak could be temporary, that there's a giant ravine waiting for me, to remind me that life is a ruthless bitch and that all the good things were totally undeserved.

Ah well, might as well stay in character...

*taunts fate with a raised middlefinger*

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.

The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.

I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.

At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.

I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.

Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.

However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.

Just need to get this off my chest. Started a new job 3 weeks ago at a company that has been around ~18 years, it is only recently that they have started to grow more rapidly. I was brought in under the guise that they wanted to embrace change and better practices and so said I was up for the challenge.

In my 2nd week I was asked to produce a document on tackling the technical debt and an approach to software development in the future for 3 consultants who were coming in to review the development practices of the company on behalf of the private equity firm who has taken a major stake in the company. I wrote the document trying to be factual about the current state and where I wanted to go, key points being:

Currently a tightly coupled monolith with little separation of concerns (73 projects in one solution but you have to build two other solutions to get it to build because there are direct references.).

Little to no adherence to SOLID principles.

No automated testing whatsoever.

Libraries all directly referenced using the file system rather than Nuget.

I set out a plan which said we needed to introduce TDD, breaking dependencies, splitting libraries into separate projects with nuget packages. Start adhering to SOLID principles, looking at breaking the project down into smaller services using the strangler pattern etc. After submitting what I had written to be part of a larger document I was told that it had been tweaked as they felt it was too negative. I asked to see the master document and it turns out they had completely excluded it.

I’ve had open and frank discussions with the dev team who to me have espoused that previously they have tried to do better, tackle technical debt etc but have struggled to get management to allow them. All in all a fairly poor culture. They seem almost resigned to their fate.

In my first 2 weeks I was told to get myself acquainted and to settle myself in. I started looking at the code and was quite shocked at how poorly written a lot of it was and in discussions with my manager have been critical of the code base and quite passionate and opinionated about the changes I want to see.

Then on Friday, the end of my third week, I was invited to a meeting for a catch up. The first thing I was told was that they felt I was being too openly critical in the office and whether I was a good fit for the company, essentially a stay or go ultimatum. I’ve asked for the weekend to think about it.

I’ve been a little rocked by it being so quickly asked if I was a good fit for the company and it got my back up. I told them that I was a good fit but for me to stay I want to see a commitment to changes, they told me that they had commitments to deliver new features and that we might be able to do it at some point in the future but for now I just needed to crack on.

Ordinarily I would just walk but I’ve recently started the process to adopt kids and changing jobs right now would blow that out the water. At the same time I’m passionate about what I do and having a high standards, I’m not going to be silenced for being critical but maybe I will try and tackle it in a different way. I think my biggest issue is that my boss who was previously a Senior Developer (my current position) has worked at the company for 12 years and it is his only job, so when I’m being critical it’s most likely criticising code he wrote. I find it hard to have the respect of a boss who I had to teach what a unit test was and how to write one. It makes it hard to preach good standards when by all accounts they don’t see the problems.

Just wondering if anyone has suggestions or experience that might help me tackle this situation?

I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).

He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.

I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.

I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?

Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.

He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.

I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.

[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.

Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)

It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)

First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.

The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target

All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...

Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.

"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.

---

I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.

Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.

I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )

The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.

---

It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.

The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.

The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.

---

Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.

Cheers!

!rant

Updating PHP from 5 to 7.2 on windows server at work the other day... Thought it would be easy, but I really find software management for windows a pain in the ass compared to package based solutions like apt, brew or pacman. It ended up taking way too long due to dependcies with the website, that weren't really documented, and setting up all the software that depended on PHP over again... I ended up writing 10 pages of documentation about how to updated PHP on windows, so the next programmer would have some idea of how to approach the problem.

Of course I suggested switching over to Chocolatey for windows, but my boss is skeptical since it's not the traditional way, and it seems like it will take too many resources. So now I have to make a presentation for her to convince her that package managers are superior to downloading stuff from phps website.

Wish me luck.

After designing the new server architecture for our software and the security to go with it, the boss decides we should ask our provider’s solutions architects to see if it is okay, they came back and said it all looks good apart from one part which my manager did and I always said was bad practice.

"We're promoting you to be a Team Leader, since you proved your skills to handle tough tasks and bring good solutions, and we're raising your salary by 25%."

That sounded good for me, until I realized that all they need is an interface between them (the boss) and other employees to force their style and monitor every fucking thing that could be different from a dev to another. But since the boss is a sEnIoR with mOrE tHaN 10 years of experience but he does not have any clue about good practices and how to make a code that does not push you to be humiliated by the client, he still thinks that he's the fucking programming God.

That's a shit

I can't get any work done at work... The potatoe they gave me for a laptop is 5 years old, Every day I was approx 2 hours (no joke) for it to power up, open up my visual studio solutions, connect to the VPN, and open my browsers.

Then my fucking shit computer loses connectivity with one of my 2 monitors every 15 min so I need close the lid, reopen it again so it "picks up the monitor" then wait another 5 min for my windows to respond.

Agh!!!!!

It's frustrating too cuz my boss ordered me a new computer 2 months ago. But cuz I work for corporate bozos it took them 2 months just to process/place the order for a new computer. So now I have to wait even longer just to have a functioning computer.

FUCKING FUCK ANGULAR!!!!
LIKE FUCK IT IN THE ARSE AND BURN THE MOTHERFUCKER WHILE LAUNCHING A MISSILE ON IT TO BE SURE!

(ﾉ≧∇≦)ﾉ ﾐ ┸━┸

So I am making something on angular and I got everything running in ng serve(development environment) , after handling all issues and showing it to my boss man he approves and asked to put it up on prod for a demo , doesn’t sound like an issue , I make the prod build on cli and BAM! 16 errors ? No issues right?, I’ll just google the issue. Googles.... there aren’t no clear solutions to it as the angular version keeps changing and nobody knows what broke it, I mean people have the issue,but like 100 reasons that can cause it,
HOLY LORD RELEASE A NEWER VERSION AFTER MENDING THE OLD ONE
But nooooooo!

Angular Dev:We fucked this one, lol what should we do boss man?
Angular boss man: lol just leave it, we need to build the new version with newer bugs,

P.S. I like angular, but it’s like a underdeveloped framework, too many issues and too many changes

Boss: we need to standardize the CMS we use.

Me: well 90% of what we build are custom Wordpress deployments...

Boss: yeah but Wordpress is best suited for all our clients.

Me: well yeah, I know...we could use Django or Rails and give the clients more customized solutions...

Boss: yeah but not all of our developers know those frameworks, and they require maintenance...

Me: -_- we could really use Jekyll for most sites we build

Boss: yeah, but what about our clients that want a blog?

Me: ...we can build a blog with anything...

Boss: ...we just need to standardize what we use.

a very polite recruiter in linkedin after our connection asked me why i choose this kind of career. I answered this and i hope i did not ranted a lot :)

i was trying to figure out what profession would make me more happy than others. I was always felt comfortable with computers, i was installing cracked games, exploring folders to paste the cracks etc. later in school when i learned the first algorithms like bubblesort i was knowing that i liked it. I also like working in silence while searching for solutions. That is the first part, the second is that i made a search about what industries would give me a safer future and international opportunities without having to be stuck in my country only. By working and getting more experience i felt in love with my job and trying to learn everything i missed and give to my boss or customers professional results with quality. I like it as a lifestyle, it combines a magic feeling of spells with the logical procedures of science. So why not? it combines all my loves together: creative thinking, technology, mental work, internet, music at the workflow, job demand, opportunities, and money! I hope i helped you my friend i am at your service for every question you have :)

We have to use a 20 year old API that is half assed and doesn't even work right every time.
Every three months the same discussion comes up why something doesn't work that relies on that API. I have to explain the situation over and over again... And then my boss starts to give 'solutions' which we already use or are utterly stupid... >.<

In case someone is wondering: SOAP API on a Windows Server 2003 with timeouts every few minutes and XML output in a language that is not English (even the tags!).

Not really a rant but more of a fact kinda thing. Noticed a post earlier about someone ranting about why they code figured I'd do the same...

I code not because I wanted to for say but because my after my uncle's death I needed something that I could feel in complete control of. Coding gave me that ability to control the computer however I want and tell it to do whatever however. At the same time it taught me so much more about myself and the people around me in the process. Today I don't code because I need to control something m today I do it because I can't live with out. It forces me to think critically of everything and everyone. It forces me to learn something new everyday and every night. It requires me to solve complex problems with limited solutions. It allows me to create solutions when everything else has failed and it gives me a drive to complete things. It's the reason I live technology and it's the reason I have the job I do. It's the reason my boss loves my work and it's the reason other people on my team envy me. Code transformed my life into what it is today. And it will forever be my greatest peice of education.

The company I work for uses Coldfusion which is a dead technology in my opinion. I was tasked with using a data grid for our data from our mssql databases. This data grid I was trying out uses ajax to make a call to the server and expects the data transfered back in Json format. well coldfusion sucks balls because it's serializeJson function returns a outdated JSON structure and I can't use it. So obviously this datagrid throws errors and when I try looking up coldfusion solutions online or scope out stack overflow, the posts are dated like 6 years back because no one fucking uses CF anymore. My boss loves to jerk to it, it seems because he refuses to change languages cause its all they have ever used. -_- this is 2016 bitch lol

So the company decided to go agile. I am now a scrum master. And we have the local product owners and all. They made us do daily stand-ups.

I don't know what is a scrum master. Nobody knows what the hell is a stand-up. It seems to be an akward 30 minutes every day, when local product owner asks questions and demands status reports.

I did some googling and it seems that the scrum master is supposed to just support the team and solve problems. In our version the scrum master finds out the system architecture and requirements, fills the backlog, does the system design and reports to the project manager(s). Also reports to the clients about the general project status in an executive meetings. I also do the sprint planning, in which we fit the vague features that we are told into time tables with ready told dates.

Oh yeah, the team is just 2 guys. One of them is me. And the other guy relies completely on me to daily tell what to do, review the work and also answer all the project and company level questions that pop into his mind. He gets angry if he doesn't receive ready-thought solutions to all problems, since "you're the boss and it's your job to tell us what to do".

This is going to be a great year.

Just slept in front of coding.
*Boss tap my back*
Me: Hi sir, Im just thinking of the solutions. 😏

We use at our company one of the largest Python ORM and dont code ourselfs on it, event tough I can code. Its some special contract which our General Manager made, before we as Devs where in the Project and everything is provided from the external Company as Service. The Servers are in our own Datacenter, but we dont have access.

We have our Consultants (Project Manager) as payd hires and they got their own Devs.

Im in lead of Code Reviews and Interfaces. Also Im in the "Run" Team, which observes, debuggs and keeps the System alive as 3rd-Level (Application Managers).

What Im trying to achieve is going away from legacy .csv/sftp connections to RestAPI and on large Datasets GraphQL. Before I was on the Project, they build really crappy Interfaces.

Before I joined the Project in my Company, I was a Dev for a couple of Finance Applications and Webservices, where I also did coding on Business critical Applications with high demand Scaling.

So forth, I was moved by my Boss over to the Project because it wasn't doing so well and they needed our own Devs on it.

Alot of Issues/Mistakes I identified in the Software:
- Lots of Code Bugs
- Missing Process Logic
- No Lifecycle
- Very fast growing Database
- A lot of Bad Practices

Since my switch I fixed alot of bugs, was the man of the hour for fixing major Incidents and so on so forth. A lot of improvements have been made. Also the Team Spirit of 15+ People inside the Project became better, because they could consult me for solutions/problems.

But damn I hate our Consultants. We pay them and I need to sketch the concepts, they are to dumb for it. They dont understand Rest or APIs in general, I need to teach them alot about Best Practices and how to Code an API. Then they question everything and bring out a crooked flawed prototype back to me.

WE F* PAY THEM FOR BULLCRAP! THEY DONT EVEN WRITE DOCUMENTATION, THEY ARE SO LAZY!

I even had a Meeting with the main Consultant about Performance Problems and how we should approach it from a technical side and Process side. The Software is Core Business relevant and its running over 3 Years. He just argumented around the Problem and didnt provide solutions.

I confronted our General Manager a couple of times with this, but since 3 Years its going on and on.

Im happy with my Team and Boss, they have my back and I love my Job, but dealing with these Nutjobs of Consultants is draining my nerves/energy.

Im really am at my wits end how to deal with this anymore? Been pulling trough since 1 year. I wanna stay at my company because everything else besides the Nutjob Consultants is great.

I told my Boss about it a couple of times and she agrees with me, but the General Manager doesnt let go of these Consultants.

Even when they fuck up hard and crash production, they fucking Bill us... It's their fault :(

I need to performance monitor our web app. I have been working on some speed improvments since some of our customers have complained. My boss wants me to be able to produce stats which he can use (and abuse) to highlight to customers that we have got quicker. I am currently looking at blackfire for PHP profiling to help with speeding things up but I need a top site overview for everything. Our stack is PHP (no framework), JS (jquery + vanilla), MySQL on Windows mainly. On premise solutions would be good since we don't traditionally run in the Cloud. Our system isn't SaaS and is installed on dedicated data centre servers or on premise

My boss' solution to whatever problem comes from a plugin:

spam emails to the plugin creator until they dont desperately give up and either block you or they solve your problem, 2 emails a day should do for first day, then increment every day.

I mean, if I ever get to make a good plugin and my boss will ever download it and can't make it work, I much rather remove the plugin from Earth than solve the issue of a spammer

Ever feel like your boss is playing buzzword bingo with your project?
We have new project. Buzzword bingo words for us: microservices and cloud. We're moving our old, big, monolithic app to microservices.
And very strong demand that we keep all nasty solutions gathered in there for the last 10+ years working.

Oh god i have been fighting with exoplayer library and ima sdk for past month and yet i haven't been able to figure out how to play multiple VAST tags without using a vmap.. if anyone knows this( or find this relevent and want more info regarding this) please, let's chat.

I am sometimes so irritated with open source. We are grateful that you made a great video player , but please for the love of god , document it nicely. No one can skimm through your 800 fucking classes, especially when a quarter of them are core c++ classes that an android dev never even touches.

Plus no replies on issues! My god, you know after SO, the second tab that's almost always open on my PC is that of some github library or issue. And am sure that must be the case of most of the devs. Then why can't you fucking reply?????

You see, this is typical google.. i am beleive they see everything and ignore it until the right moment comes... Android dev summit is coming, and they won't make any replies now, but would make big changes on the day of their on stage presentations like a boss, recieving lots of applauses, like " yay, they fixed it!! Yess more documentation " bull fucking shit.
My boss knows this and he is on my ass to find solutions before google releases solutions coz he wanna stay ahead of the competition
Thanks for fucking me, open source

//long rant ahead!

I need to plan a Wiki with SharePoint for not connected Sites.
Im now in dispute with my CoWorker since 3 Months, this is how the conversation goes. My two bosses are involved in this and also unhappy about SharePoint.

[C refers to CoWorker, M for me]
C: Hey, we finished SharePoint with Selfservice Storage Rooms. They even have a Wiki.

M: Okay cool, will check it out

C: Well we need to also plan the Wiki inside, I already asked our Department Head and he agreed, that you will be the one.

M: Okkkkaaayy, normaly it's your job to do such things, but welp, I will look into it, if we can work with it.

(2 Weeks pass)
M: I checked SharePoint out and tested everything. The Wiki is a Nogo, we need a other solution or programm for ourself a Wiki Integration/Engine. Did you maybe check out Confluence? It has also a SharePoint integration plugin.

C: We wont do Confluence, too expensive (already overspent the budget for SharePoint in six digits 🤬). Also we wont add to SharePoint Custom Code, it needs to stay standard.

M: Thats impossible, SharePoint Wiki is shit and also handels sites just like documents, no brain behind! Also you overspent the Budget and now it's my Problem?!

C: You need to do the best out of it.

(3 weeks passes and we get a meeting with the department heads)

M: Alright I made a UseCase and documented where the essential flaws are in SharePoint Wiki and why we cant use it.

Boss: Ok if it's impossible to use, then we will stay on our Fileserver for Documents and wont use SharePoint.

M: Thats not my Point, my statement is, as status today, SharePoint Wiki is not the right solution, code or buy software to it.

Boss: We will do a Prove of Concept, if it doesnt work then we will aboard it.

M: Well it is only some missing essentials, like hierarchy and Groups for the Pages, Example Confluence has this. If we could built in this features in SharePoint, everything would work out.

C: (angry) I told you that we wont use Confluence!

M: (calm) I said we need Features, not Confluence. Please mind the consent.

(3 weeks passes, and one more meating with bosses)

M: alright here again is a analyses, why already in Theory the current SharePoint Wiki wont work. It's already flawed in the core.

Boss: Yea SharePoint is crap, I checked out confluence and thats a real Wiki.

C: Well I dont know anything about Confluence and never looked at it. But if SharePoint is a fail we need the Proof of Concept.

M: Why do we need to do a Proof of Concept, when it already doesnt work in Theory! Thats nonsence and unlogical.

Next meeting will be in 4 weeks and I will give him the FUCKING PROOF OF CONCEPT. I will be a Bastard and build behind CoWorkers back a Confluence Wiki to show the Departmentheads how to built it right.

I hate CoWorker now, he makes a part of my loved Job a hell, I will goddamn cuk Coworker to space, that fucking Cukatron of lazyness and shit 🤬. I provide the Solutions and you just say no, how dafuq will the project advance, if you always say NO! Are you so unflexible and fixed on your Castle of Ignorancy!

I need some advice to avoid stressing myself out. I'm in a situation where I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place at work, and it feels like there's no one to turn to. This is a long one, because context is needed.

I've been working on a fairly big CMS based website for a few years that's turned into multiple solutions that I'm more or less responsible for. During that time I've been optimizing the code base with proper design patterns, setting up continuous delivery, updating packaging etc. because I care that the next developer can quickly grasp what's going on, should they take over the project in the future. During that time I've been accused of over-engineering, which to an extent is true. It's something I've gotten a lot better at over the years, but I'm only human and error prone, so sometimes that's just how it is.

Anyways, after a few years of working on the project I get a new colleague that's going to help me on my CMS projects. It doesn't take long for me to realize that their code style is a mess. Inconsistent line breaks and naming conventions, really god awful anti-pattern code. There's no attempt to mimic the code style I've been using throughout the project, it's just complete chaos. The code "works", although it's not something I'd call production code. But they're new and learning, so I just sort of deal with it and remain patient, pointing out where they could optimize their code, teaching them basic object oriented design patterns like... just using freaking objects once in a while.

Fast forward a few years until now. They've learned nothing. Every time I read their code it's the same mess it's always been.

Concrete example: a part of the project uses Vue to render some common components in the frontend. Looking through the code, there is currently *no* attempt to include any air between functions, or any part of the code for that matter. Everything gets transpiled and minified so there's absolutely NO REASON to "compress" the code like this. Furthermore, they have often directly manipulated the DOM from the JavaScript code rather than rendering the component based on the model state. Completely rendering the use of Vue pointless.

And this is just the frontend part of the code. The backend is often orders of magnitude worse. They will - COMPLETELY RANDOMLY - sometimes leave in 5-10 lines of whitespace for no discernable reason. It frustrates me to no end. I keep asking them to verify their staged changes before every commit, but nothing changes. They also blatantly copy/paste bits of my code to other components without thinking about what they do. So I'll have this random bit of backend code that injects 3-5 dependencies there's simply no reason for and aren't being used. When I ask why they put them there I simply get a “I don't know, I just did it like you did it”.

I simply cannot trust this person to write production code, and the more I let them take over things, the more the technical debt we accumulate. I have talked to my boss about this, and things have improved, but nowhere near where I need it to be.

On the other side of this are my project manager and my boss. They, of course, both want me to implement solutions with low estimates, and as fast and simply as possible. Which would be fine if I wasn't the only person fighting against this technical debt on my team. Add in the fact that specs are oftentimes VERY implicit, so I'm stuck guessing what we actually need and having to constantly ask if this or that feature should exist.

And then, out of nowhere, I get assigned a another project after some colleague quits, during a time I’m already overbooked. The project is very complex and I'm expected to give estimates on tasks that would take me several hours just to research.

I'm super stressed and have no one I can turn to for help, hence this post. I haven't put the people in this post in the best light, but they're honestly good people that I genuinely like. I just want to write good code, but it's like I have to fight for my right to do it.

<rant>
Sat for most of the day with the work experience kid trying to explain how to debug, I couldn't even find how to make it error we tried a bunch of solutions. Different ways to get to the certain page and even tried older browsers. Still nothing! Trying to explain something to someone when u kinda just do it or don't really understand how it all works yourself is quite a task. Boss found the fix in 15 minutes
</rant>

One time a has some task to optimize an images on mobile application so it can swipe on list without lags (to this time it works fine, there was microseconds lags, but it was my code and I don't like to leave like this). I takes me a long time trying a lot of solutions but everytime was the same. I leave this task because I thought it can't be done. Everyday I was thinking about it, one time I have even a dream about programing XD. One morning I wake up and it came to me, one simple solution (I think there was 2-3 lines of code to change). I go to computer and try it, it works, it was a weight off my mind. Of course I go to boss say now we have faster, better etc. and he also was happy :)

Sooo, today someone who is not my manager or anywhere in the hierarchy leading to me threatened me and told me that I need to prove either one of 2 software solutions providers they're working with to be at fault about an issue or "I will be at risk"... I just kept it to myself and took my things and left.
I didn't want to inform my boss cuz he just took a vacation today and he'd probably break the consulting contract with them.
What would you do in such case?