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Here's to clients who wish to pay "per project" instead of "per month". Man, fuck that.
Back when I was still a novice, I took on a couple of small time projects from clients who contacted me after looking at my GitHub, and they all wanted to pay me a lump-sum for the project. Because I'm an idiot, I thought sure, what difference would that make. Boy was I wrong.
What followed was me finishing the projects well before time but because of the clients' constant reiterations and changes in design and nitpicking every decision I made while creating the websites for them, the projects dragged on for weeks longer than they were originally intended. And I fucking got paid that one-time amount in the beginning. All this maintenance, for free. Even though I had not explicitly agreed to the maintenance part, since they never finalized the specifications of the project, it just never got "done" officially, and all the maintenance part just came under development.
How many different kinds of disgusting does someone have to be to do this? I should've fucking said NO to those terms, but I had to have experience. Well, nice experience that was. Never again. :(1 -
TLDR: crappy api + idiot ex client combo rant // devam si duška
I saw a lot of people bitching about APIs that don't return proper response codes and other stuff..
Well let me tell you a story. I used to work on a project where we had to do something like booking, but better..crossbreed with the Off&Away bidding site (which btw we had to rip off the .js stuff and reverse engineer the whole timer thingy), using free versions of everything..even though money wasn't an issue (what our client said). Same client decided to go with transhotel because it was sooooo gooood... OK? Why did noone heard of them then?
Anyhow, the api was xml based.. we had to send some xml that was validated against a schema, we received another that was supposed to be validated againts another schema.. and so on and so on..
...
...
supposed..
The API docs were nonexistent.. What was there, was broken English or Spanish.. Even had some comments like Add This & that to chapter xy.. Of course that chapter didn't even exist yet. :( And the last documentation they had, was really really old..more than a year, with visible gaps, we got the validation schemas not even listed in the docs, let alone described properly.
Yaaay! And that was not everything.. besides wrong and missing data, the API itself caused the 500 server error whenever you were no longer authenticated.
Of course it didn't tell you that your session was dead.. Just pooof! Unhandled crap everywhere!
And the best part?! We handled that login after inspecting what the hell happened, but sent the notification to the company anyways.. We had a conf call, and sent numerous emails explaining to them what a 'try catch' is and how they should handle the not authenticated error <= BTW they should have had a handled xml response for that, we got the schema for it! But they didn't. Anyhow, after two agonizing days talking back and forth they at least set up the server to be available again after the horrified 500 error. Before, it even stopped responding until reset (don't ask me how they managed to do that).
Oh yeah, did I mention this was a worldwide renown company?! Where everybody spoke/wrote English?! Yup, they have more than 700 people there, of course they speak English! <= another one of my ex clients fabulous statements... making me wanna strangle him with his tie.. I told him I am not talking to them because no-one there understood/spoke English and it would be a waste of my time.. Guess who spent almost 3 hours to talk to someone who sounded like a stereotypical Indian support tech guy with a flue speaking Italian?! // no offence please for the referenced parties!!
So yeah, sadly I don't have SS of the fucked up documentation..and I cannot post more details (not sure if the NDA still holds even though they canceled the project).. Not that I care really.. not after I saw how the client would treat his customers..
Anywayz I found on the interwebz some proof that this shitty api existed..
picture + link: https://programmableweb.com/api/...
SubRant: the client was an idiot! Probably still is, but no longer my client..
Wanted to store the credit card info + cvc and owner info etc.. in our database.. for easier second payment, like on paypal (which he wanted me to totally customize the payment page of paypal, and if that wasn't possible to collect user data on our personalized payment page and then just send it over to paypal api, if possible in plaintext, he just didn't care as long as he got his personalized payment page) or sth.... I told the company owner that they are fucking retards if they think they can pull this off & that they will lose all their (potential) clients if they figure that out.. or god forbid someone hacked us and stole the data.. I think this shit is also against the law..
I think it goes without saying what happened next.. called him ignorant stupid fucktard to his face and told him I ain't doing that since our company didn't even had a certificate to store the last 4 numbers.. They heard my voice over the whole firm.. we had fish-tank like offices, so they could all see me yelling at the director..
Guess who got laid off due to not being needed anymore the next day?! It was the best day of my life..so far!! Never have I been happier to lose my job!!
P.S. all that crap + test + the whole backand for analysis, the whole crm + campaign emails etc.. the client wanted done in 6 months.. O.o
P.P.S. almost shat my pants when devRant notified my I cannot post and wanted to copy the message and then everything disappeard.. thank god I have written this in the n++ xD
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For the last week or so I've been writing a userbot for Telegram. Completely from scratch, plus Telethon to not reinvent the wheel entirely. I'm coming from the codebase of an existing userbot.
That userbot is written by a good friend of mine, who makes 6 figures, and whom I respect greatly. However the code is a steaming pile of shit. Now that is not his fault, he largely inherited that code too, tried to fix it, failed, gave up.
I am reimplementing it entirely. I'm only looking at the modules, trying to understand them, and copying over the necessary bits and changing them where necessary. But I've come across some nasty shit.
Userbots often edit existing messages from real Telegram clients. They're kind of like a login to your account, but with a program rather than a regular client. You send a message from a real client, it sees it and does whatever it needs to, and edits your message to give you feedback. Which is great.
However, there's no need to do simple string edits by importing "re". So why do you? Because you're an idiot, that's why. The old bot is based on Paperplane, which in turn is based on Telethon. Why do I see function calls to Telethon in some places and Paperplane in others? Because you're an idiot, that's why. Why does the dig module fail to even give correct answers? Because you know nothing about the DNS, that's why. And you didn't learn about RRs before implementing it.
And don't you tell me that this code is shit, and this bot is slow only when I run it on a fucking Pentium. I run this shit on an i7 and CPU isn't even the issue - memory, disk and such are. If you had any clue whatsoever about efficiency, you would've known because it's blatantly obvious. There's a reason why my machines rarely go past 5% CPU utilization. It's the fastest component in the entire fucking system.
When users come and say.. hmm this application of yours, it consumes a lot of memory. It takes a long time to do X and Y and I don't quite understand why, it seems illogical. Then maybe you should go look at your code, like you would look at yourself in the mirror. And then you fucking go fix it so that I don't have to. You're an engineer just like I am. And I am not even a dev proper - I'm a sysadmin by trade. Why should I have to fix your shit for you?1
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