Finally, honest release notes!

Hey, Root? How do you test your slow query ticket, again? I didn't bother reading the giant green "Testing notes:" box on the ticket. Yeah, could you explain it while I don't bother to listen and talk over you? Thanks.

And later:
Hey Root. I'm the DBA. Could you explain exactly what you're doing in this ticket, because i can't understand it. What are these new columns? Where is the new query? What are you doing? And why? Oh, the ticket? Yeah, I didn't bother to read it. There was too much text filled with things like implementation details, query optimization findings, overall benchmarking results, the purpose of the new columns, and i just couldn't care enough to read any of that. Yeah, I also don't know how to find the query it's running now. Yep, have complete access to the console and DB and query log. Still can't figure it out.

And later:

Hey Root. We pulled your urgent fix ticket from the release. You know, the one that SysOps and Data and even execs have been demanding? The one you finished three months ago? Yep, the problem is still taking down production every week or so, but we just can't verify that your fix is good enough. Even though the changes are pretty minimal, you've said it's 8x faster, and provided benchmark findings, we just ... don't know how to get the query it's running out of the code. or how check the query logs to find it. So. we just don't know if it's good enough.

Also, we goofed up when deploying and the testing database is gone, so now we can't test it since there are no records. Nevermind that you provided snippets to remedy exactly scenario in the ticket description you wrote three months ago.

And later:

Hey Root: Why did you take so long on this ticket? It has sat for so long now that someone else filed a ticket for it, with investigation findings. You know it's bringing down production, and it's kind of urgent. Maybe you should have prioritized it more, or written up better notes. You really need to communicate better. This is why we can't trust you to get things out.

*twitchy smile*

When you get paid for every commit or release to your app repo.

Them: Root, you take too long to get tickets out. You only have a few simple ones. You really need to rebuild your reputation.

Also them: Hey, could you revisit this ticket? Could you help ____ with this other ticket? Hey Root, how do you do this? Root, someone had a suggestion on one of your tickets; could you implement that by EoD? Hey Root, i didn't read your ticket notes; how do you test it? Hey, could you revisit this ticket for the fourth time and remove some whitespace? Hey Root, someone has non-blocking code review comments you need to address before we can release the ticket. Hey Root, we want to expand that ticket scope by 5-6 times; still labeled a trivial feature though.

Also them: Super easy ticket for you. Make sure you talk with teams A, B, C, D, E and get their input on the ticket, talk with ____ and ____ and ____ about it, find a solution that makes them all happy and solves the problem too, then be sure to demo it with everyone afterward. Super easy; shouldn't take you more than a couple days. Oh, and half of them are on vacation.

Also them: Hey, that high-priority ticket you finished months ago that we ignored? Yeah, you need to rewrite it by tomorrow. Also, you need to demo it with our guy in India, who's also on vacation. Yes, tomorrow is the last day. (The next day:) You rewrote it, but weren't able to schedule the demo? Now you've missed the release! It's even later! This reflects very poorly on you.

Also them: Perfect is the enemy of good; be more like the seniors who release partially-broken code quickly.

Also them: Here's an non-trivial extreme edgecase you might not have covered. Oh, it would have taken too much time and that's why you didn't do it? Jeez, how can you release such incomplete code?

Also them: Yeah, that ticket sat in code review for five months because we didn't know it was high-priority, despite you telling us. It's still kinda your fault, though.

Also them: You need to analyze traffic data to find patterns and figure out why this problem is happening. I know you pushed the fix for it 8 months ago, and I said it was really solid, but the code is too complex so I won't release it. Yeah I know it's just a debounce with status polling and retrying. Too complex for me to understand. Figure out what the problem is, see if another company has this same problem, and how they fixed it.

-------------

Yep. I'm so terrible for not getting these tickets out, like wow. Worst dev ever. Much shame.

LF work, PST.

So this chick has been super nice to me for the past few months, and has been trying to push me towards a role in security. She said nothing but wonderful things about it. It’s easy, it’s not much work, it’s relaxing, etc.

I eventually decided I’m burned out enough that something, anything different would be good, and went for it. I’m now officially doing both dev and security. The day I started, she announced that she was leaving the security team and wouldn’t join any other calls. Just flat-out left.

She trained me on doing a security review of this release, which basically amounted to a zoom call where I did all of the work and she directed me on what to do next, ignored everything I said, and treated me like an idiot. It’s apparently an easy release. The work itself? Not difficult, but it’s very involved, very time consuming, and requires a lot of paper trail — copying the same crap to three different places, tagging lots of people, copying their responses and pasting them elsewhere, filing tickets, linking tickets, copying info back and forth to slack, signing off on things, tagging tickets in a specific way, writing up security notes in a very specific format etc. etc. etc. It’s apparently usually very hectic with lots of last-minute changes, devs who simply ignore security requests, etc.

I asked her at the end for a quick writeup because I’m not going to remember everything and we didn’t cover everything that might happen.

Her response: Just remember what you did here, and do it again!

I asked again for her to write up some notes. She said “I would recommend.. you watch the new release’s channel starting Thursday, and then review what we did here, and just do all that again. Oh, and if you have any questions, talk to <security boss> so you get in the habit of asking him instead of me. Okay, bye!”

Fucking what.
No handoff doc?
Not willing to answer questions after a day and a half of training?

A recap
• She was friendly.
• She pushed me towards security.
• She said the security role was easy and laid-back.
• I eventually accepted.
• She quit the same day.
• The “easy release” took a day and a half of work with her watching, and it has a two-day deadline.
• She treated (and still treats) me like a burden and ignores everything I said or asked.
• The work is anything but laid-back.
• She refuses to spend any extra time on this or write up any notes.
• She refuses to answer any further questions because (quote) “I should get in the habit of asking <security boss> instead of her”

So she smiled, lied, and stabbed me in the back. Now she’s treating me like an annoyance she just wants to go away.

I get that she’s burned out from this, but still, what a fucking bitch. I almost can’t believe she’s acting this way, but I’ve grown to expect it from everyone.

But hey, at least I’m doing something different now, which is what I wanted. The speed at which she showed her true colors, though, holy shit.

“I’m more of a personal motivator than anything,” she says, “and I’m first and foremost a supporter of women developers!” Exactly wrong, every single word of it.

God I hate people like this.

One of the better filler release notes I guess. Not as good as Slack or Discord but still better than Google.

Some great release notes!

Oh, well, of course ...

I thoroughly enjoy that both Google apps have different bullet point styles.

Another funny release note.

Nice try Trello....

some inspiration to ignite your inner spark.

#Amazon release notes #killer note

Loving Shifty Jelly for their release notes 😁

You know it's going to be an interesting day when you see a release note containing "migration" and "cross your fingers" in the same sentence 😅

I just had a chat with the CEO (I'll call him John) of the company I work at. I was trying to get a real alignment on what I need to do to be a valuable resource to this company. They promoted me (without a raise in pay) to a different (management) role, and I do not know what I need to do to be the best in this role.

During the discussion, the CEO failed to provide any usable metrics, or a way to track those, except for phrases like "higher productivity" and "higher quality". How to track? No idea.

So, at this point, me being the idiot I am, wanted to make things explicit:
*Me: Okay, so what if I request for a 20% raise six months from now, what metrics will you look at to decide whether to give me the raise.

(My last raise was a big one, more than 100% or so, more than a year ago. That was a dev role, and I was paid 2 cents earlier, so the doubling to 4 cents wasn't really a big deal.)

John went on a long rant on how people just expect raises every year, inflation, etc. All good and fine.
But then he mentioned something strange.

*John: ...and you know, for the last three years, there has been a race to retain resources. During this race, many companies, including us, had to pay people WAY MORE THAN THEIR VALUE to retain them. These people are going to be the first to be fired during cost-cutting as they are the most expensive resources at the company without any proven value. These people should not expect raises to come soon, and if they do expect that, they need to prove the value themselves.

Now, I, being a simpleton, am wondering how is it fair for an organization to pay someone "more than their value" to retain them once so that they can just be fired two years later. How did the company decide the value of such employees to begin with?

And all this is ignoring the fact that in the company there are no metrics, no KPIs, and performance of a person is how much the CEO likes that guy. How TF the people who joined a year ago and never interacted with the CEO prove their worth?

Developers are building PowerPoints and configuring JIRA/Confluence/Laptops of Sales team, project managers are delegating management to developers and decision-making to the CEO, Technical architect is building requirements documents, Business Analyst is the same person as the QA team lead (and badly stretched), and the Release Manager is the Product Technical Admin that cannot write one sentence in English. And then we got 3.8 hours in meetings every DAY. Why TF are Dev Managers in "QA KPI Meeting"? Why are "developers" writing documentation on "How to create meeting notes at <company>"?
And, in this hell-storm, how does one really demonstrate one's value?

Information not provided by devRanter

When your users are this dumb, it's hard to decide between making things obvious (but inviting potential errors) vs. adding a step to reduce the chance of errors (but potentially confusing people).

It would be easier if people actually read release notes...

Project manager, who i've complained in the past is neglecting critical things that he doesn't want to do, decided today to cancel our weekly planning meeting, to have the below conversation with me 1:1. Its very long, but anyone who has the will to get through it ... please tell me it's not just me. I'm so bewildered and angry.

Side note: His solution to the planning meeting not taking place ... to just not have one and asked everyone to figure it out themselves offline, with no guidance on priorities.

Conversation:

PM: I need to talk to you about some of phrasing you use during collaboration. It's coming across slightly offensive, or angry or something like that.

Me: ok, can you give me an example?

PM: The ticket I opened yesterday, where you closed it with a comment something along the lines of "as discussed several times before, this is an issue with library X, can't be fixed until Y ...".

"As discussed several times" comes across aggressive.

Me: Ok, fair enough, I get quite frustrated when we are under a crunch, working long hours, and I have to keep debugging or responding to the same tickets over and over. I mean, like we do need to solve this problem, I don't think its fair that we just keep ignoring this.

PM: See this is the problem, you never told me.

Me: ... told you what?

PM: That this is a known issue and not to test it.

Me: ..... i'm sorry ..... I did, that was the comment, this is the 4th ticket i've closed about it.

PM: Right but when you sent me this app, you never said "don't test this".

Me: But I told you that, the last 3 times that it won't be in until feature X, which you know is next month.

PM: No, you need to tell me on each internal release what not to test.

Me: But we release multiple times per week internally. Do you really need me to write a big list of "still broken, still broken, still broken, still broken"?

PM: Yes, how else will I know?

Me: This is documented, the last QA contractor we had work for us, wrote a lot of this down. Its in other tickets that are still open, or notes on test cases etc. You were tagged in all of these too. Can you not read those? and not test them unless I say I've fixed them?

PM: No, i'm only filling for QA until we hire a full time. Thats QA's job to read those and maintain those documents.

Me: So you want me to document for you every single release, whats already documented in a different place?

PM: ok we'll come back to this. Speaking of hiring QA. You left a comment on the excel spreadsheet questioning my decision, publicly, thats not ok.

Me: When I asked why my top pick was rejected?

PM: Yes. Its great that you are involved in this, but I have to work closely with this person and I said no, is that not enough?

Me: Well you asked me to participate, reviewing resumes's and interviewing people. And I also have to work extremely close with this person.

PM: Are you doubting my ability to interview or filter people?

Me: ..... well a little bit yeah. You asked me to interview your top pick after you interviewed her and thought she was great. She was very under qualified. And the second resume you picked was missing 50% of the requirements we asked for ... given those two didn't go well, I do think its fair to ask why my top pick was rejected? ... even just to know the reason?

PM: Could you not have asked publicly? face to face?

Me: you tagged me on a google sheet, asking me to review a resume, and rather than tag you back on 2 rows below ... you want me to wait 4 days to ask you at our next face to face? (which you just cancelled for this meeting)

PM: That would have been more appropriate

Me: ..... i'm sorry, i don't want to be rude but thats ridiculous and very nit pick-y. You asked my opinion on one row, I asked yours on another. To say theres anything wrong with that is ridiculous

PM: Well we are going to call another team meeting and discuss all this face to face then, because this isn't working. We need to jump to this other call now, lets leave it here.

Let's share information! Communicate! How do we do it? Via email!

You got question? Send an emai!
You want to share some excel? Send an email!
Not sure who to ask? Send the email to everyone!
Have a 100 message long email thread and then need some help? Send the whole fucking thread to me and just add "what do'ya think?"!
Send some attachment in email and then 2 weeks later refer to it saying "but I sent the file to you!"? Well surely I can remember your special email from the hundreds of email I get every week.

I did complain to the mangers that why the hell do we have these mega-email-threads? Why do you send all the meaningles release notes to the whole company? The anwer is simple: all information needes to be transparent and if you don't need the info, then just don't read the email!

And fuck you, you CEO wanna-be who sends seasonal greetings through his secretary and thinks anyone gives a shit.

Dat moment when your contact person phones you and ask If you delete the whole Release Folder...

YEAH SURE I WAS IT BECAUSE I LIKE TO WORK ON WEEKEND

Fyi: FTP with one user for everyone - harhar stupid bricks

Damn! So many changes!

Maybe when you release an update, the release notes should match the updated version?

Reading through the VSCode 1.32.0 release notes like a kid in a candy store.

androidx.activity 1.0.0-alpha01 release notes:

"Pending input events (such as clicks) are now canceled in onStop()."

Welcome in 2018! It just took 10 years to fix this ... better late than never 👍

I have a 1yr old and have seen Moana about 1k times. These release notes are gold! 🤣

Kinda sad when 'Google Play Games' has better update notes than the rest of the G Suite....

anyone excited about .NET 8?
Release notes uptill RC2 didnt give me a boner, so I guess it'll be 'ok'

Funny how I can go all day not being able to think of anyone that bad, but then when I remember THAT ONE GUY from a group project in college, I can't stop ranting.

highlights:
- He micromanaged our group without adding any value on his end
- Scheduled 2 hour meetings on Friday evenings to show us his work so we could "learn and take notes"
- when the group finally reached out and asked if we could work differently, he completely shut down. like stopped replying and working completely.
- last night we were putting together our presentation, he bailed because he had an 8-HOUR date with someone he just met....nevermind that we had our calendar set a month prior
- prior to that date, he submitted code to our final release that was riddled with bugs, so I stayed up all night debugging and rewriting his parts

</rant>

I don't think it should take "years" to develop a card sorting mechanism.
Android devs do you agree?
( This is picked up from the release notes of Trello. )

When the update schedule for a service you rely on involves sending release notes for major (sometimes breaking) updates on Saturday...in preparation for a release first thing on Monday morning.

South Africa Release notes version v3.0.2

In 1994 SA underwent one of the biggest system upgrades since 1948. In this new rolling release since the system update called apartheid the system has been annexing resources, locking it down, making it closed source, closing it off community updates and from global updates and minimizing services across the board. On 27 April 1994, the new democratic system update was released with a new system monitor, release resources and balancing efficiency in the system. Though there were remnants of the old code in the system, it was being rewritten by a new generation of users, open source resources were established, giving users the right to choose among themselves how to grow the system , and how to better the experience for all.

In 1999 a new system monitor was created by the users, it wasnt as popular as the ground breaking Madiba release but it was a choice by the community to move forward and grow. The system was stable for a few years, new users were able to develop more on the system, making it more lucrative monetary wise. There were still remnants of the apartheid code but the new generation of developers worked with it making it there own, though they had not yet had admin rights to help change the system, they created a developer culture of their own. A new system resources balancer was introduced called BBEE, that allowed previous disadvantage users more admin rights to other system resources, helping the user base to grow. Though the balancer was biased, and flawed it has helped the system overall to grow and move forward. It has major holes in security and may flood some aspects of the system with more outdated software patches, users have kept it in its system releases until the resource balancer moved the system into a more stable position.

The next interim system monitor release was unexpected, a quiet release that most users did not contribute towards. The system monitor after that nearly brought the system down to a halt, as it was stealing resources from users, using resources for its own gain, and hasn't released any of it back to the system.

The latest user release has been stable. It has brought more interest from users from other countries, it had more monetary advantages than all other releases before. Though it still has flaws, it has tried to balance the system thus far.

Bug report as of 16 Feb 2018
*User experience has been unbalanced since the 1994 release, still leaving some users at a disadvantage.
*The three tier user base that the 1948 release established, creating three main user groups, created a hierarchy of users that are still in effect today, thought the 1994 release tried to balance it out, the user based reversed in its hierarchy, leaving the middle group of users where they were.
*System instability has been at an all time low, allowing users to disable each others accounts, effectively
killing" them off
*Though the infrastructure of the system has been upgraded to global standards ( in some aspects ) expansions are still at an all time low
*Rogue groups of users have been taking most of the infrastructure from established users
*Security services have been heightened among user groups though admins were still able to do as they pleased without being reprimanded
*Female users have been kicked off the system at an alarming rate, the security services have only kicked in recently, but the system admins and system monitor has not done anything about it yet

Bug fixes for a future release:
*Recreating the overall sysadmin team. Removing some admins and bringing others in
*Opening the system more globally to stabilize it more
*Removing and revamping the BBEE system, replacing it with more user documentation, equalizing the user base
*Giving more resources to users that were at a disadvantage during the first release
*Giving the middle group of users more support, documentation and advantages in the system, after removing the security protocols from the user base
*Giving new users who grew up with the post 1994 release more opportunities to help grow the system on a level playing field.
*Establishing the Madiba release principles more efficiently in the current system

Always enjoy some good release notes.

So I just noticed while looking at our release notes, we got some new members of our Shanghai team. Their English names are:

Paul, Jonas, and ....
...
...
...
...
Elvis

Every time I see his name I sort of chuckle...

🚨 EMERGENCY ALTRANT UPDATE 🚨

Release Notes:

- Fixed critical UI hangs when scrolling up a rant's comments on slow networks
- Fixed critical UI hangs when loading the profile screen on slow networks

Today, I discovered that there is a huge issue with UI responsiveness when the device is connected to a slow (or subpar) network connection. I deemed this absolutely unacceptable and not in the standard I strive to achieve and scrambled to make a fix. The fix is now *live* and available.

In a week from now, I will expire the update I released yesterday (build 2070) in favor of this new one (build 2084). The schedule for expiring the build before yesterday's update (build 1607) is still scheduled to be expired on Wednesday, 11/23/2022, 6 days from the upload of this post.

So here I am coming to the end of the week after getting The Porcupines big web project into production. Pulled a 38 hour straight from Sunday to Monday chopping wood to make the thing fly. Pulled in other programmers and content creators to get the site full of something we did not have a week before. The fun part was having the account manager right there for 30 plus hours and actually seeing what it take to save a project when the client just thinks "it's just code". Now the boss has is asking for a list of all the work out of spec as they are bitching about the extra cost. These were the clients who did not read the functional spec and raked me over the coals after release that the home page did not match the design (the home page matched the design). I warned my team this would happen. They get all swept up in the hype and We can win! frame of mind and you can bet when the bitching starts it will come back to the paperwork you did at the beginning and the change requests and productions systems reports so you can wave it in front of ungrateful clients and not end up sad. Make sure you keep notes and document all of the requests and changes from internal and external even if you do not have to. one day it will save your ass and you will be able to whip it out and be a smiling motherfucker.

Release Notes:

This change *shouldn’t* break anything. Please keep your eyes open for strangeness.

Every. Release. Ever.

Please share your thoughts on Dependabot security alerts on Github, more specifically for NPM packages in package-lock.json.

In 99% of cases I've found them useless as:
- package-lock.json is in the repo, but not in the NPM package (=no value to users)
- most of the updates relate to devDependencies (=no value to users)
- it clutters the git history (and changelog if it is auto-generated) with a batch of patch updates (updated depx to .1, .2, .3) while the only important thing in the next release notes is the delta (updated depx from .1 to .3) (=no value to users)

If you give a mouse a cookie is all too real. Started sending out release notes to those who benefit from the changes and they're now asking for access to our ticket system 'just because'

Is it normal for "enterprise" software to have 14+ pages of known issues in the release notes, including issue descriptions that use phrases like "may lead to data corruption" and "may cause the cluster to crash"??

I really enjoy reading slack release notes, informative and fun is always good!

New AltRant release!

Release Notes:

- Transitioned to URLCache-based caching solution for attached images for much faster loading times
- Fixed many layout issues
- Finally added "more info" button in profile screen after 2 years of the feature being absent from the app
- Fixed many different crashes
- Added rant refreshing
- Added double tap to upvote on rants and comments
- Added creation date/time indicators on rants and comments
- Added comment count indicator in post cells in feeds

All users are required to test every aspect of the app.

I worked really hard on all of this to improve every single aspect of this app - from responsiveness to crashes and layout glitches, while also adding many features that were absent for a crazy amount of time! Please enjoy!

The last build will expire in a week from now.

What do you think, does Google just have really good code structure that allows re-use at this level, or are they just coordinating release notes?

Why do I feel like if you don't serve everything up on a pladder for the product owner / product management types, that they'll never find something as simple as a build executable the pipeline produces? Just more busywork for the competant ones to do...

haha flashback to the startup days when _i_ was the one acting as scrum master for the clowns who couldn't even do something as simple as set the release notes in apple and google stores. they truly need to be spoon fed everything. fucking incredible.

Having to explain for the umpteenth time what the difference is between App Release Notes & App Description right before a release.

such releases, much wow! 😅 :doge:

"The best way to get rid of all the bugs is to get rid of all the code"
- Son of Anton