Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

This was my first freelancer project. Just dropped out of school, i think i was 17. No money, no proper hardware, i had a very old laptop & stolen wifi from our neighbor. I lived in a very small room at my mom’s flat, she wanted me out as soon as i turn 18. At the time my plan was to work on freelancer stuff and make my own games. “It will be fine, fuck school, who needs school? 😂“ I haven’t really finished anything back then, so i only had a few wip hobby projects to show ppl as my references. I saw a freelancer job posting. The task was to make a simple quiz game for mobile, it paid 350$. Back then that was a lot of money for me so i took it. I met the client, he said “2-3 week tops, i send you everything, you do the code” Cool. I finally had a “job”😃. The 2-3 weeks turned into a 8 month blur of all-nighting and just implement one more thing and its finished. I did not really have any experience on how to deal with clients and i really needed this project to finally have something on my porfolio. I motivated myself with “if i can finish this i can finish anything”. I think the story of my most definitive all-nighting was 3 months into the development. I finally got everything from the client so it was like just put it together and its done. The client wanted 300 levels, beeing a noob i was i started making all the 300 unity scenes by hand, aligning the pictures, the ui, testing each level, making adjustments to the code, etc.. after a really long night and a fuckton of caffeine i was done. I sent it to the client at around 9 am and gone to sleep. When i woke up i checked my emails to saw this: Cool! But can we do hints? (wich needed a fuckton of rework of my code) I think i had my first mental breakdown while working on the project. After that he wanted more modifications and because i made every level by hand i had to remake all of them like 10 times 😂
But in the end it turned out positive, he really helped me to start my carrier, we became sord of friends and the project gave me a lot of confidence and experience on how to deal with stuff when shit goes wrong because everything that can go wrong in a project gone wrong. It was the most valuable developer lesson. Plus it sounds so cool to say “i was born in development hell, b*tch!”🕶
I attached a pic of the laptop i worked on 😂
Thanks for reading 😃

Fucking intern.

While I was working next to her a couple weeks back, she spent half her time on social media, playing Candy Crush, or talking with her friend. She also left early almost every day.

I had given her a project to do (object crud + ui), and helped her through it. She made pretty abysmal progress in a week. I ended up finishing it for her by rewriting basically all of her code (every single line except some function names, lone `end` or `}` statements, a few var declarations, blank lines, plus a couple of comments she copied over from my code).

This week I gave her a super easy project to do. It amounts to copying four files (which I listed), rename a few things to be Y instead of X, and insert two lines of code (which I provided) to hook it up. Everything after that just works. It should have taken her ... okay, maybe a few hours because she's slow and new to the language. but it would have taken me five to ten minutes, plus five minutes of testing.

She has spent THREE FUCKING DAYS ON THIS AND SHE'S STILL NOT DONE. SHE'S BLOODY USELESS!

She has kept not pulling changes and complaining that things are broken. Despite me telling her every time I push changes that affect her work (on. my. branch. ergh!)

She keeps not reading or not understanding even the simplest of things. I feel like MojoJojo every time I talk to her because of how often I repeat myself and say the same things again and again.

Now she's extremely confused about migrations. She keeps trying to revert a drop_table migration that she just wrote so she can re-create the table differently. Instead of, you know, just reverting back to her migration that creates the table. it's one migration further.

Migrations are bloody simple. they're one-step changes to the database, run in order. if you want to make a change to something you did a few steps back, you roll back those migrations, edit your shit, and run them again. so bloody difficult!

`rails db:rollback && rails db:rollback`
Edit file
`rails db:migrate`
So. hard.

I explained this to her very simply, gave her the commands to copy/paste, ... and she still can't figure it out. She's fucking useless.

It took me ten minutes to walk her though it on a screen share. TEN FREAKING MINUTES.

She hasn't finished a damned fucking thing in three weeks. She's also taking interview calls while working on this, so I know she totally doesn't care.

... Just.
Fucking hell.

USELESS FUCKING PEOPLE!

1. I join a company.

2. I get deeply involved in "how to run the company", and get nice compliments from both coworkers & management about my skills in conveying startup/scaleup advice & necessities to upper management.

3. With my ego inflated through all the sweet talk, I think "ah, what the hell, let's do this again", and I accept a Lead/CTO promotion. I have to join board meetings, write reports on quarterly plans and progress.

4. I get unhappy/stressed/burned-out because I really just want to be a developer, not a manager/executive.

5. Upper management understands, I give up my lead position, lock myself back into my coding cave.

6. I get annoyed because the requirements I receive become more and more disconnected from reality, half of the teams seem to have decided to stop using agile/scrum, the testing pipeline breaks all the time, I get an updated labor contract from HR by mail which smells like charred flesh, etc

7. The annoyances become too much to do ANY work. I yell at the other devs outside of the entrance of my cave. There is no answer, only a few painful moans and sighs.

8. I emerge from my cave. The city has turned into a desolate wasteland. The office is a burning ruin, the air sharp and heavy with black soot. Disemboweled corpses of developers litter the poisoned soil.

Product Managers dressed in stained ripped suits scream at each other while they try to reinforce concrete barricades with scotch tape and post-its. *THUMP* Something enormous is trying to break through. "Thank God, bittersweet, you're still alive! The stakeholders! They have mutated! We couldn't meet the promised deadlines! We've lost the whole mobile app department, and that kid there is the last of the backenders and he's only an intern! You're here to save us, right? RIGHT?".

In the corner, between the overflowing coffee machine and a withered cactus, a young boy has collapsed onto the floor. His face is covered in moldy coffee grounds, clasping on to his closed macbook for dear life, wide-open eyes staring into the void, mumbling: "didn't backup the database, and It's all gone" over and over.

A severely dented black Tesla with a dragging loose bumper breaks through the dried up vertical herb garden and the smoothiebar, and comes to a halt against the beanbags in a big cloud of styrofoam balls.

The CEO limps out, leaking blood all over the upholstery. He yells to the COO: "The datacenter is completely flooded with sewage! I saved the backup tapes though", holding a large nest of tangled black magnetic tape mixed with clumps of mud above his head.

9. I collect my outstanding salary and sell any rewarded options/shares for a low dumping price, take a 5 month holiday, and ask a recruiter about opportunities in a different city.

Been lurking here for a while. Finally pissed off enough to post.

Been programming in Ada for nearly a decade now. One of the few younger devs who knows the language well. Have a large collection of libraries and tools written in it, open source. Done contract work. Looking to get out of my current line of work, which is medicine, because fuck this recent legal climate. I'm spending all my time dealing with legal compliance and it rapidly changing.

I see a job posting from a company looking for a programmer to mostly write testing stuff for clients. They mostly work with Ada. I've written a whole unit testing and integration testing framework. Perfect. Apply. "You don't have the required skills." Oh... K then.

Wanna guess what I was just offered as contract work. Same company. I guess i'm fucking qualified if you asswipes sought me out to ask me to fix your fucking bullshit.

What the hell is wrong with management and HR in recent years?

Not so much screaming as staring in disbelief, mumbling profanity in his direction...

When my department lead said "I don't think this unit testing hype or code reviews make much sense, it's more efficient to just make a checklist and test the application yourself"

This was the QA department of an aerospace company, we wrote NDT software to do image recognition on xrays of alloy welds and micrometer laser measurements on fuel tank surfaces. Software which is quite mission critical, a single misrecognized welding fault could literally cost up to half a billion dollars — not to mention that it's a very sabotage & espionage sensitive industry.

After raising some hell he was replaced though.

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

!Story

The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.

I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.

They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...

And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.

So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.

I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.

After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.

I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.

So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.

Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.

So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.

I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.

Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.

We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.

"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"

I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.

My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.

If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.

Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.

Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.

I wrote a database migration to add a column to a table and populated that column upon record creation.
But the code is so freaking convoluted that it took me four days of clawing my eyes out to manage this.
BUT IT'S FINALLY DONE.
FREAKING YAY.

Why so long, you ask? Just how convoluted could this possibly be? Follow my lead ~

There's an API to create a gift. (Possibly more; I have no bloody clue.)
I needed the mobile dev contractor to tell me which APIs he uses because there are lots of unused ones, and no reasoning to their naming, nor comments telling me what they do.

This API takes the supplied gift params, cherry-picks a few bits of useful data out (by passing both hashes by reference to several methods), replaces a couple of them with lookups / class instances (more pass-by-reference nonsense). After all of this, it logs the resulting (and very different) mess, and happily declares it the original supplied params. Utterly useless for basically everything, and so very wrong.

It then uses this data to call GiftSale#create, which returns an instance of GiftSale (that's actually a Gift; more on that soon).

GiftSale inherits from Gift, and redefines three of its methods.

GiftSale#create performs a lot of validations / data massaging, some by reference, some not. It uses `super` to call Gift#create which actually maps to the constructor Gift#initialize.

Gift#initialize calls Gift#pre_init (passing the data by reference again), which does nothing and returns null. But remember: GiftSale inherits from Gift, meaning GiftSale#pre_init supersedes Gift#pre_init, so that one is called instead. GiftSale#pre_init returns a Stripe charge object upon success, or a Gift (and a log entry containing '500 Internal') upon failure. But this is irrelevant because the return value is never actually used. Pass by reference, remember? I didn't.

We're now back at Gift#initialize, Rails finally creates a Gift object using the args modified [mostly] in-place by all of the above.

Another step back and we're at GiftSale#create again. This method returns either the shiny new Gift object or an error string (???), and the API logic branches on its type. For further confusion: not all of the method's returns are explicit, and those implicit return values are nested three levels deep. (In Ruby, a method will return the last executed line's return value automatically, allowing e.g. `def add(a,b); a+b; end`)

So, to summarize: GiftSale#create jumps back and forth between Gift five times before finally creating a Gift instance, and each jump further modifies the supplied params in-place.

Also. There are no rescue/catch blocks, meaning any issue with any of the above results in a 500. (A real 500, not a fake 500 like last time. A real 500, with tragic consequences.)

If you're having trouble following the above... yep! That's why it took FOUR FREAKING DAYS! I had no tests, no documentation, no already-built way of testing the API, and no idea what data to send it. especially considering it requires data from Stripe. It also requires an active session token + user data, and I likewise had no login API tests, documentation, logging, no idea how to create a user ... fucking hell, it's a mess.)

Also, and quite confusingly:
There's a class for GiftSale, but there's no table for it.
Gift and GiftSale are completely interchangeable except for their #create methods.

So, why does GiftSale exist?
I have no bloody idea.
All it seems to do is make everything far more complicated than it needs to be.

Anyway. My total commit?
Six lines.
IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!

AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.

OH MY FUCKING GOD! WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU REWRITE A FUCKING PIECE OF CODE AND DON'T MAINTAIN ITS FUNCTIONALITY?
ARE YOU FUCKING MAD????

JUST SPENT 1 FUCKING HOUR TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHY THE FUCK THE DATA WASN'T BEING PASSED TO REDUX STORE!

YEAH, UNIT TESTING SURE IS A FUCKING WASTE OF TIME YOU DUMB FUCKING IDIOT THAT HAS MASHED POTATOES FOR A BRAIN!

GO ROT IN HELL YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!!

NOW IF I DON'T FIX THIS SHIT MY ASS IS ON THE LINE BECAUSE I MADE THE FUCKING FUNCTIONALITY THAT YOU BROKE?? NO FUCKING WAY!

I DON'T CARE IF YOU ARE MY BOSS, I'M GONNA GIT BLAME THE SHIT OUT OF YOU IF ANYONE PISSES ME OFF!

Client: "We don't want line breaks in that column make it 500px wide!"
Me: Makes the column 500px wide. Sees that the line breaks are still there. Asks if it should be made wider to fit the text.
Client: "Just implement what we send you"
Me: Ok (thinking wtf)
Client after testing: "Why are there still line breaks?!?"
🙄😥😤😭
Why the actual hell can't they get there freaking requirements in order?!? This shit happens with every fourth request!

*wrestling commentator voice*
"In this weeks episode of encoding hell:
The iiiinnnfamous UTF-8 Byte Order Mark veeeersus PHP!"

For an online shop we developed, there is currently a CSV upload feature in review by our client. Before we developed this feature, we created together with the client a very precise specification, including the file format and encoding (UTF-8).

After the first test day, the client informed us, that there were invalid characters after processing the uploaded file.
We checked the code and compared the customer's file with our template.
The file was encoded in ISO-8859-1 and NOT as specified UTF-8.
But what ever, we had to add an encoding check, thus allowing both encodings from now on.

Well well well welly welly fucking well...

Test day 2: We receive an email from said client, that the CSV is not working, again.
This time: UTF-8 encoding, but some fields had more colums with different values than specified.
Fucking hell.
We tell the customer that.
(I was about to write a nice death threat novel to them, but my boss held me back)

Testing day 3, today:
"The uploading feature is not working with our file, please fix it."
I tried to debug it, but only got misleading errors. After about 30 minutes, at 20 stacks of hatered, I finally had an idea to check the file in a hex editor:

God fucking what!?!!?!11?!1!!!?2!!

The encoding was valid UTF-8, all columns and fields were correct, but this time the file contained somthing different.
Something the world does not need.
Something nearly as wasteful as driving a monster truck in first gear from NYC to LA.

It was the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark.
3 bytes of pure hell.
Fucking 0xEFBBBF.
The archenemy of PHP and sane people.

If the devil had sex with the ethernet port of a rusty Mac OS X Server, then 9 microseconds later a UTF-8 BOM would have been born.

OK, maybe if PHP would actually cope with these bytes of death without crashing, that would be great.

Disclaimer: I have a strong hate towards apple for multiple reasons and this will only be temporary. (thank God for that)

My oneplus one is battery dead and the power button quit as well. Repair costs would be as expensive as buying a new phone (200-300 price range) so searching for a new one.

But, I need a temporary phone in the mean time.
A phone with googled-android is absolutely a no-go. I used to do that sometimes but those were wrong decisions.

So, for the sake of trying, I'm going for a second hand iPhone.
Will be testing how it works for me (never been able to form an opinion on it since iOS 4.2 (iPod touch)) and will also be searching my ass off for a smartphone which supports lineage/rooting (TIPS BETWEEN ABOVES PRICE RANGE ARE VERY WELCOME) because I'm fucking hell not planning on using that (the iPhone) fucker any longer than a month.
Even if I love it over android (highly doubt that), I won't continue using it for very specific reasons.

Wish me luck 😅

I'm fixing a security exploit, and it's a goddamn mountain of fuckups.

First, some idiot (read: the legendary dev himself) decided to use a gem to do some basic fucking searching instead of writing a simple fucking query.

Second, security ... didn't just drop the ball, they shit on it and flushed it down the toilet. The gem in question allows users to search by FUCKING EVERYTHING on EVERY FUCKING TABLE IN THE DB using really nice tools, actually, that let you do fancy things like traverse all the internal associations to find the users table, then list all users whose password reset hashes begin with "a" then "ab" then "abc" ... Want to steal an account? Hell, want to automate stealing all accounts? Only takes a few hundred requests apiece! Oooh, there's CC data, too, and its encryption keys!

Third, the gem does actually allow whitelisting associations, methods, etc. but ... well, the documentation actually recommends against it for whatever fucking reason, and that whitelisting is about as fine-grained as a club. You wanna restrict it to accessing the "name" column, but it needs to access both the "site" and "user" tables? Cool, users can now access site.name AND user.name... which is PII and totally leads to hefty fines. Thanks!

Fourth. If the gem can't access something thanks to the whitelist, it doesn't catch the exception and give you a useful error message or anything, no way. It just throws NoMethodErrors because fuck you. Good luck figuring out what they mean, especially if you have no idea you're even using the fucking thing.

Fifth. Thanks to the follower mentality prevalent in this hellhole, this shit is now used in a lot of places (and all indirectly!) so there's no searching for uses. Once I banhammer everything... well, loads of shit is going to break, and I won't have a fucking clue where because very few of these brainless sheep write decent test coverage (or even fucking write view tests), so I'll be doing tons of manual fucking testing. Oh, and I only have a week to finish everything, because fucking of course.

So, in summary. The stupid and lazy (and legendary!) dev fucked up. The stupid gem's author fucked up, and kept fucking up. The stupid devs followed the first fuckup's lead and repeated his fuck up, and fucked up on their own some more. It's fuckups all the fucking way down.

About 2 years ago, our management decided to "try outsourcing". I was in charge for coordinating dev tasks and ensuring code quality. So management came up with 3 potential candidates in India and I had to assess them based on Skype calls and little test tasks. Their CVs looked great and have been full of "I'm a fancy experienced senior developer." ....After first 2 calls I already dismissed two candidates because they had obviously zero experience and the CV must have been fake. ..After talking to the third candidate, I again got sceptical. The management, however, started to think that I'm just an ass trying to protect my own position against outside devs. They forced me to give him a chance by testing him with a small dev task. The task included the following statement

"Search on the filesystem recursively, for folders named 'container'. For example '/some_root_folder/path_segments/container' " The term 'container' was additionally highlighted in red!

We also gave him access to a git repo to do at least daily push. My intention was to look at his progressions, not only the result.
I tried the task on my own and it took me two days, just to have a baseline for comparison. I, however, told him to take as much time as he needs. (We wanted to be fair and also payed him.)

..... 3 weeks went by. 3 weeks full of excuses why he isn't able to use git. All my attempts to help him, just made clear that he has never seen or heard of git before. ...... He sent me his code once a week as zip per email -.- ..... I ignored those mails because I made already my decision not wanting to waste my time. I mean come on?! Is this a joke? But since management wanted me to give him a chance .... I kept waiting for his "final" code version.

In week 5, he finally told me that it's finished and all requirements have been met. So I tried to run his code without looking at it ..... and suprise ... It immediately crashed.

Then I started to look through the code .... and I was ..... mind-blown. But not in a good way. .....

The following is what I remember most:

Do you remember the requirement from above? .... His code implementing it looked something like this:

Go through all folders in root path and return folders where folderName == "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container".

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Alone this little peace of code was on sooooooo many levels wrong!!!!! Let me name a few.

- It's just sooooo wrong :(
- He literally compared the folderName with the string "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container"...... Wtf?!?
- He did not understand the requirement at all.
- He implemented something without thinking a microsecond about it.
- No recursive traversal
- It was Java. And he used == instead of equals().
- He compares a folderName with a whole path?!? Wtf.
- How the hell did he made this code return actual results on his computer?!?

Ok ...now it was time to confront management with my findings and give feedback to the developer. ..... They believed me but asked me to keep it civilized and give him constructive feedback. ...... So I skyped him and told him that this code doesn't meet the requirements. ......... He instantly defended himself . He told me that I he did 'exactly what was written in the requirements document" and that there is nothing wrong. .......He had no understanding at all that the code also needs to have an actual business purpose.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

After that he tried to sell us a few more weeks of development work to implement our "new changed requirements" ......

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Footnote: I know a lot of great Indian Devs. ..... But this is definitely not one of them. -.-

tl;dr
Management wants to outsource to India and gets scammed.

At a certain client, was asked to help them with an "intermediary" solution to stopgap a license renewal on their HR recruiting system.

This is something I was very familiar with, so no big. Did some requirements gathering, told them we could knock it out in 6 weeks.

We start the project, no problems, everything is fine until about 2.5 weeks in. At this point, someone demands that we engage with the testing team early. It grates a little as this client had the typical Indian outsourcing mega-corp pointey-clickey shit show "testing" (automation? Did you mean '10 additional testers?') you get at companies who put business people in charge of technology, but I couldn't really argue with it.

So we're progressing along and the project manager decides now is a great time to bugger the fuck off to India for 3 months, so she's totally gone. This is the point it goes off the rails. Without a PM to control the scope, the "lead tester," we'll call her Shrilldesi, proceeds to sit in a room and start trying to control the design of the system. Rather than testing anything in the specification, she just looked at the existing full HRIS recruiting system they were using and starts submitting bugs for missing features. The fuckwit serfs they'd assigned from HR to oversee this process just allowed it to happen totally losing focus on the fact this was an interim solution to hold them over for 6 months and avoid a contract renewal.

I get real passive aggressive at this point and refuse to deliver anything outside the original scope. We negotiate and end up with about 150% scope bloat and a now untenable timeline that we delivered about 2 weeks late, but in the end that absolute whore made my life a living hell for the duration of the project. She then got the recognition at the project release for her "excellent work," no mention of the people who actually did the work.

Tl;Dr people suck and if you value your sanity, you'll avoid companies that say things like, "we're not in the technology business" as an excuse to have shitty, ignorant staff.

I was just testing the Postfix server on one of my mailers, for the hell of it.. EHLO, STARTTLS, all good. Then comes the mail submission part.

MAIL FROM test@nixmagic.com
Connection closed by foreign host.

Right after I say mail from, it just closes the connection! Is it just me or does this feel like the server says to me "fuck off"? :')

"Who needs a staging server, test suites and continuous integration anyways haha"
-company i just joined

I think my server got hacked, yesterday I made a new server on scaleway for the sake of testing I made a user called dev, with password dev. Forgot to change password before I went to bed.

Logged in today to find that load is 5x.x and this (image) in my crontab

Note to self: You are a disgrace, who the hell uses 'dev' as password for ssh on port 22 -_-

Testing hell.

I'm working on a ticket that touches a lot of areas of the codebase, and impacts everything that creates a ... really common kind of object.

This means changes throughout the codebase and lots of failing specs. Ofc sometimes the code needs changing, and sometimes the specs do. it's tedious.

What makes this incredibly challenging is that different specs fail depend on how i run them. If I use Jenkins, i'm currently at 160 failing tests. If I run the same specs from the terminal, Iget 132. If I run them from RubyMine... well, I can't run them all at once because RubyMine sucks, but I'm guessing it's around 90 failures based on spot-checking some of the files.

But seriously, how can I determine what "fixed" even means if the issues arbitrarily pass or fail in different environments? I don't even know how cli and rubymine *can* differ, if I'm being honest.

I asked my boss about this and he said he's never seen the issue in the ten years he's worked there. so now i'm doubly confused.

Update: I used a copy of his db (the same one Jenkins is using), and now rspec reports 137 failures from the terminal, and a similar ~90 (again, a guess) from rubymine based on more spot-checking. I am so confused. The db dump has the same structure, and rspec clears the actual data between tests, so wtf is even going on? Maybe the encoding differs? but the failing specs are mostly testing logic?

none of this makes any sense.
i'm so confused.

It feels like i'm being asked to build a machine when the laws of physics change with locality. I can make it work here just fine, but it misbehaves a little at my neighbor's house, and outright explodes at the testing ground.

Folks...

I think I need to get away from web development...

Honestly, no grudge held against web/mobile development itsef... But the projects, the teams, the workflows... It's always shitty af.

I'm fed up with the bad architecture, poor management decisions, unmaintained legacy code, broken windows, arrogant juniors, arrogant seniors, code smells left to rot, the freaking red door... Hell! The fucking "we don't have time for that" answer to testing... Damn!

Been there done that.

Feels like it's always the same crap and unfortunately, it's rare to start a professional project from scratch.

Fucking angular, broken piece of shit.
Fucking react (& RN) community modules, broken pieces of shit.
Fucking lazy-ass node developers.
Fucking ES and fucking garbage proposals submitted to the TC39.

I wish I could do Haskell / Rust / Clojure professionally... I could even enjoy Go with a good team... Anything but that huge pile of dogshit JS and its community of brainfucked so-called developers.

Why do people jump from c to python quickly. And all are about machine learning. Free days back my cousin asked me for books to learn python.
Trust me you have to learn c before python. People struggle going from python to c. But no ml, scripting,

And most importantly software engineering wtf?
Software engineering is how to run projects and it is compulsory to learn python and no mention of got it any other vcs, wtf?

What the hell is that type of college. Trust me I am no way saying python is weak, but for learning purpose the depth of language and concepts like pass by reference, memory leaks, pointers.

And learning algorithms, data structures, is more important than machine learning, trust me if you cannot model the data, get proper training data, testing data then you will get screewed up outputs. And then again every one who hype these kinds of stuff also think that ml with 100% accuracy is greater than 90% and overfit the data, test the model on training data. And mostly the will learn in college will be by hearting few formulas, that's it.

Learn a language (concepts in language) like then you will most languages are easy.

Cool cs programmer are born today😖

Had an idea for an app. I started writing the prototype in Node since I just had a simple API in mind. Wanted to have some very basoc crud functionality going and then hook up a nice interface to it. It has to do with logistics and analytics so I just wanted to start sketching something small, and being that i have been successful in doing an API like this in the pass with node and mongo for a local company I said why not.

I have finished a good chunk of it. Gotta love that js productivity. But what tripped me out about it was:

Check how big the folder size is: 387mb

EXCUSE ME??!!

I tripped, there was no way in hell this shit was that heavy. I am basically using Koi(to give it a whirl instead of express, gotta start testing koi sometimes right?) And some joi with morgan and winston. That is it. I am using mongo since legit its the only one i know, even with that there really can't be that much right?

Check node_modules size.....10mb....wtf? What
Wait
Did it?

Sure as shit....forgot that i was storing the mongo data folder inside the app's root folder.

This would have been nothing if it would have taken me 30 seconds to figure it out.

I was losing my mind for 30 mins before i decided to properly verify

I need some sleep

I am an I.T Admin currently responsible for the URS, Validation, oversight of outsourced development and deployment of a new application for our company...

I've been saying once a week now for 2 fucking months that this thing will be ready to deploy at the end of the week.

With enough technical knowledge I know the hell business people put developers through, the lack of contextual understanding of the Job between the two sides is insane.

(I mean holy shit when you tab through various fields, even that ordering needs to be explicitly programmed.)

I refuse to put the pressure on our devs that I am told too, I cant submit a request and phone ten minutes later to ask if itll be done today, people plan their lives, the devs have other clients and projects... what the mother of fuck makes us so special that they must drop everything.

On top of that all the testing I do over and over and over and over reveals some pretty huge operational risks and I keep making changes so as to not blow up the operations of half our company.

I am not saying my boss is horrible or anything but Holy Hell, most people just can't put themselves in someone else's shoes for five short minutes

I try to please my boss while trying to protect my devs from abuse and sadly it results in me being in the middle of two sides playing tug of war and it is ripping me apart...

Why can't people just be more understanding and communicate and understand better... But don't worry all you beautiful game changing, world improving devs... I will always have your back

I was asked to look into a site I haven't actively developed since about 3-4 years. It should be a simple side-gig.
I was told this site has been actively developed by the person who came after me, and this person had a few other people help out as well.
The most daunting task in my head was to go through their changes and see why stuff is broken (I was told functionality had been removed, things were changed for the worse, etc etc).
I ssh into the machine and it works. For SOME reason I still have access, which is a good thing since there's literally nobody to ask for access at the moment.
I cd into the project, do a git remote get-url origin to see if they've changed the repo location. Doesn't work. There is no origin. It's "upstream" now. Ok, no biggie. git remote get-url upstream. Repo is still there. Good.
Just to check, see if there's anything untracked with git status. Nothing. Good.
What was the last thing that was worked on? git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph. Wait... Something about the commit message seems familiar. git log. .... This is *my* last commit message. The hell?
I open the repo in the browser, login with some credentials my browser had saved (again, good because I have no clue about the password). Repo hasn't gotten a commit since mine. That can't be right.
Check branches. Oh....Like a dozen new branches. Lots of commits with text that is really not helpful at all. Looks like they were trying to set up a pipeline and testing it out over and over again.
A lot of other changes including the deletion of a database config and schema changes. 0 tests. Doesn't seem like these changes were ever in production.
...
At least I don't have to rack my head trying to understand someone else's code but.... I might just have to throw everything that was done into the garbage. I'm not gonna be the one to push all these changes I don't know about to prod and see what breaks and what doesn't break
.
I feel bad for whoever worked on the codebase after me, because all their changes are now just a waste of time and space that will never be used.

just saw a contract job "Write tests for existing codebase"....

So, CS student here.
Gave TCS "national" level test.
Quoting from the question:
"if you have 3 bytes of memory, it can be used to represent 2^3=8 values in the memory"

This test is a waste of at least 30000+ human hours and these guys didn't even put 24 hours of effort to make sure questions are correct.
Fuck this fucking IT industry.
Fuck the people who designed this testing process.
Fuck the people who endorsed this process.
Fuck the management for passing it as a test.
The people who wrote the test question can go die in hell.
It's not my problem that their mothers fucked Neanderthals.

Uh! All I want is a job but ended up wasting 200+ hours of time.

Just spent 30 minutes confused as hell because an API call I wrote just randomly stopped working.

Forgot that I hardcoded an ID for testing purposes and then ended up creating a new object with a new ID.

Needless to say... they didn't match. Explains why my query retrieved zero results.

Why am I even in a company with no testers nor QA. Everything's just the dev and the dev alone.

I was asked to fix a critical issue which had high visibility among the higher ups and were blocking QA from testing.

My dev lead (who was more like a dev manager) was having one of his insecure moments of “I need to get credit for helping fix this”, probably because he steals the oxygen from those who actually deserve to be alive and he knows he should be fired, slowly...over a BBQ.

For the next few days, I was bombarded with requests for status updates. Idea after idea of what I could do to fix the issue was hurled at me when all I needed was time to make the fix.

Dev Lead: “Dev X says he knows what the problem is and it’s a simple code fix and should be quick.” (Dev X is in the room as well)

Me: “Tell me, have you actually looked into the issue? Then you know that there are several race conditions causing this issue and the error only manifests itself during a Jenkins build and not locally. In order to know if you’ve fixed it, you have to run the Jenkins job each time which is a lengthy process.”

Dev X: “I don’t know how to access Jenkins.”

And so it continued. Just so you know, I’ve worked at controlling my anger over the years, usually triggered by asinine comments and decisions. I trained for many years with Buddhist monks atop remote mountain ranges, meditated for days under waterfalls, contemplated life in solitude as I crossed the desert, and spent many phone calls talking to Microsoft enterprise support while smiling.

But the next day, I lost my shit.

I had been working out quite a bit too so I could have probably flipped around ten large tables before I got tired. And I’m talking long tables you’d need two people to move.

For context, unresolved comments in our pull request process block the ability to merge. My code was ready and I had two other devs review and approve my code already, but my dev lead, who has never seen the code base, gave up trying to learn how to build the app, and hasn’t coded in years, decided to comment on my pull request that upper management has been waiting on and that he himself has been hounding me about.

Two stood out to me. I read them slowly.

“I think you should name this unit test better” (That unit test existed before my PR)

“This function was deleted and moved to this other file, just so people know”

A devil greeted me when I entered hell. He was quite understanding. It turns out he was also a dev.

Nobody Unit Tests.

So it's already 1:15am late night and I am all tucked up in bed watching Roy Oshrove talk on unit testing and ways to write correct unit test. My friend walk in and finds me in bed watching this. He seems surprised as what are you doing ??
I replied it is an interesting talk on unit testing.

He says are you mad? Who the hell does unit testing ?
People out there are spitting on unit test code base. And they don't write unit tests.

Nobody unit tests.!!

I stay calm. I know there is no point of arguing. I said I'll sleep in some time.

And he works as developer, a job that I applied an never got because of connections.

I am optimistic someday I'll find a job that I deserve. The developer world is in danger. !!!

I'm feeling like writing this down...

So today I got told off by my boss. Why? Because my job bores me.

My current title, "webmaster", is quite similar to "plumber" where I work. I fix holes on our websites, and I tell "qualified" people (external providers) how a project should be made. Nothing exciting, nothing creative, boring.

So I got told off today for being "laid-back" in a newsletter project (GDPR, looking at you) and not being thorough in my procedures of testing and configuration. Fair enough, I didn't care and I admitted it. It's a boring drag-and-drop done in literally 5 minutes, there's no added brain-value here. Plus I got told off by my IT Manager because our Exchange server would not let me receive test emails. Still doesn't work after a day. Yay.

Then she said "we're doing exciting things here, it's not always the case anywhere else you'd work". And I'm like: "really? I love writing code, seeing things coming alive, investigating why things don't run smoothly, writing efficient code (both in performance and in readability)". I hear many friend devs telling me they're doing that and what they do during their "dev-day"... All I'm doing here is "maintenance" (a.k.a boring) stuff that apparently is "exciting". Adding a <script> to handle google tag manager is hell fun, going through compiled CSS and change color values is also thrilling, finding out if a PDF handler application can handle PDF files, re-plugging a computer monitor to make it work...

I think she meant that I'm not at my place here.

Didn't want to tell her that I have no motivation in doing things I don't enjoy making, i.e, my job.

Good thing I have an interview in two weeks

In early 2016 I got a front end web development job.

<1 month later, was fired from thatfront end web development job.

Reason: After several years focused primarily on social media marketing, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and couldn’t catch up fast enough to what their shop was using. My coding skills were way more out of date than I ever anticipated.

In retrospect, the only reason I got the job was that their 3rd party skills testing website repeatedly wouldn’t submit my results and didn’t change up the questions, so by the time it finally did, I had guessed 90% of the answers correctly. I registered as a false positive and that was, apparently, enough for their HR person.

Built a C#/.NET application with support for a serial device. Tested it on systems A, B, C initially, all Windows system, same .NET version, same targeting, same build tool version, same initial connection configuration etc, etc.

Testing - works on A and C, B nopes.
...
OK, let's check the source, is there something about B that makes it impossible to execute that bit? - No, there is not, you checked that already, stop poking around, it definitively should work on B.
...
OK, maybe admin privileges, there is I/O involved, didn't need that on A and C, but who knows - nope, doesn't work on B.
...
OK, maybe something wrong with the connection settings? First try at reinstalling driver - but no, it doesn't work on B.
...
OK let's try with another device - more/less devices on B. Other USB ports. No. Still does not work on B.
...
OK, this is stupid, but, is the cabling alright? It is, of course it is, stupid - but it still does not work on B.
...
OK, at that point I'm just gonna ask a colleague, GrumpySoftwareDev whether he has any clue why it doesn't work on B. GrumpySoftwareDev knows nothing, but discovers that one of his applications doesn't work on Windows 10. You know nothing, Jon Snow, but it doesn't work on B.
...
OK, now I'm just going to ask another colleague TheLastOfHisKind who handed B down to me somewhat bluntly if he ever experienced problems when working with B and its serial configuration. TheLastOfHisKind tells me he does not and kindly offers me some input on the situation. Still no progress to get it working on B but he hinted he might have fucked up B's driver. I already reinstalled the driver but didn't reboot, which comes after reinstall.
...
OK, I'm just gonna remove and re-install the driver, then restart. Hu! Now the UI is gone but another serial device reacted on a general call. Not fully working on B but we're getting there.
...
OK, I don't know, I'm getting frustrated, let's borrow another system D - which has roughly the same configuration as B - from my colleague StrongCurrentGuy. StrongCurrentGuy borrows me his system and cautions me not to break it. I install the driver, plug the device and copy the application from B. It just works on D. Not on B though.
...
OK, you know what. I'm done. For shits and giggles I'm gonna remove that driver again, reinstall it and restart, maybe it'll magically work afterwar- WHAT THE HELL, I JUST OPENED IT AFTER RESTARTING, IT JUST WORKS - ON B!

... seriously, what the fuck. But yeah, at least it works now.

Ever had a day that felt like you're shoveling snow from the driveway? In a blizzard? With thunderstorms & falling unicorns? Like you shovel away one m² & turn around and no footprints visible anymore? And snow built up to your neck?

Today my work day was like that.. xcept shit..shit instead of pretty & puffy snow!!

Working on things a & b, trying to not mess either one up, then comes shit x, coworker was updating production.. ofc something went wrong.. again not testing after the update..then me 'to da rescue'.. :/ hardly patch things up, so it works..in a way.. feature c still missing due to needed workarounds.. going back to a and b.. got disrupted by the same coworker who is nver listening, but always asking too much..

And when I think I finally have the b thing figured out a f-ing blocker from one of our biggest clients.. The whole system is unresponsive.. Needles to say, same guy in support for two companies (their end), so they filed the jira blocker with the wrong customer that doesn't have a SLA so no urgent emails..and then the phone calls.. and then the hell broke loose.. checking what is happening.. After frantic calls from our dba to anyone who even knows that our customer exists if they were doing sth on the db.. noup, not a single one was fucking with the prod db.. The hell! Materialised view created 10 mins ago that blocked everything..set to recreate every 10 minutes..with a query that I am guessing couldn't even select all that data in under 15.. dafaaaq?! Then we kill it..and again it is there.. We found out that customers dbas were testing something on live environment, oblivious that they mamaged to block the entire db..
FML, I'm going pokemon hunting.. :/ codename for ingress n beer..

Need to rant. I am doing programming 2 at university with java and the assessment is to make a card game. The subject is shit and is basically going over loops, variables, conditionals ect which we learned in introduction to programming and programming 1.

This leaves little time for oop principles, design patterns inherentance and all other useful stuff.

I am dedicated to making a career in programming and want to do my assessment the correct oop way. Although the lecturer doesn't care and is instructing the class to do it procedurally and shit.

I could do the program really quickly the shit procedural way and still get full marks but I feel dirty as hell coding like a scrub. So I'm 60 hours in on this assessment and there are so many classes and even more because of unit testing (we don't have to unit test) and I am spending way too much time.

My code is beautiful, my classes are tiny and maintainable, easy to modify and I'm learning so much about how to code oop the correct way with the help of a mentor and someone I look up to. But god does it take forever to code this way. And soo many iterations and redesigns because I'm still learning.

It's almost done but now I have another programming assessment for another class I'll have to do the dirty way because of time restraints and other assessments.

Sorry for wall of text but this is stressing me out 😛

I seriously cannot stress how important it is to build good reliable tests. Especially regression testing.

I am crying inside over the amount of time I've lost in my integration hell.

Seriously stupid shit that should have been tested but never did because I was too fucking lazy. Don't be me. Don't put yourself in the hell I'm in. Be better.

Fuck the managers !! Fucking Fuck Fuck !!!
I am in manual testing for 3 years. Wanted to move in to automation since 2016 January !
They kept delaying.
While waiting I kept autating stuffs and making utilities to use for everyone.
Recently automated a 5 yr old manual process.
Made an utility that can perform a 5 hours manual activity in 5 mins.
Our automation team had a vacancy.
The managers were asked to nominate names who could fill the spot from the current manual team.
They didn't suggested my name.
I am not bragging but I am the only person in the team who nows Selenium , UFT , Java , Python even though being in the manual testers.
The team is going to hire someone from the outside.
I just got to know it all this today.

These bastards should die in hell !!!!
I hate these bastards !!!!

Why won't you just approve my PR???

Whats wrong with you?!

I don't understand your cryptic one-sentence feedback. I'm not even sure you understand what you're asking yourself.

What the hell does "make it a transaction" mean? Don't give me pseudo-code examples that don't even work fucking asshole!

Its a small change that does NOT need a canary build dammit. Don't go testing the ORM, its a goddamn standard library. Why does working with you make everything so complicated?!?!

The code fucking works! There is no need to make it comply to your specific tastes goddamn it. Working with you is like pulling teeth!

/endrant

I started my actual gig as CTO of construction group (Innovation Hub) a year ago. And it was a hell of a ride, implementing kind of a scrum-ban for project management, XP, peer-reviews, a git-flow, git commit message formats, linters, unit testing, integration tests, etc...
And it's the fun part because with the CIO we had to drive the board to do A LOT of changes in their IT/Innovation drive.

But in one year there is a lot of KPI that went up :
* Deployment: When I arrived it took three stressful days to deploy a new version of one application, once a month. Today we do it every week, and it takes three annoying hours.
* We had no test. NOTHING! Today we have 85% code coverage for the unit test, and automatic integration tests run by our CI server every day.
* We had almost no documentation. Today our code is our documentation (it automatically extracted and versioned).
* We had 0 add value in the use of git. With commit messages as "dev", "asked task", inside jokes and a lot of "fix" and "changes". Today we have a useful git, and we even use it to create our deploy changelogs (and it's only mildly annoying!).
* More important, the team is happy! They get their purpose, see betterment in their tech mastery. They started doing conception, applicative architecture, presentations, having fun.

There is still a LOT of bad things we are still working on, and trying to solve (support workflow and betterment). But seeing what they already did, I'm so proud of my TEAM! I'm a fucking asshole, workaholic, "just do it" kind of guy. But they managed to achieve so much. Fucking PROUD!!

Was helping an intern with testing and he was trying to hit a specific branch in the code and just couldn't get there. Spent probably 20 minutes trying to figure out what the hell was going on since by all reasonable logic the code should run. Getting other developers involved trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Then discovering he was using a stub of the class with the method we were trying to reach overwritten to simply return null. Pretty much just wanted to go on a walk at that point.

Think I am going to try out my first stuff for my game engine in 2D. The games I have the most fond memories of were 2D. Sure I like what has happened on the 3D side. But it would be fun to recreate some of my favorite 2D games. Except with one caveat: procedural generation. Never play the same game twice. For testing purposes I will have a seed system to regenerate the same worlds. I would have played these games so much longer if they had been based on a seed for generation of content.

I also like the idea of weapons and armor never being exactly the same. Sure they can look similar, but on close inspection you could see differences. It will be fun to start with base models and then add imperfections and differences.

Another issue I have with fantasy games is always leveling up the weapon by buying something better. Sure we have improvement systems though smithing and magic, but some weapons are always better than others. I wanted to have a game where weapons could be improved by usage and upgrades. Kill 1000 trolls and the weapon gets imbued with trollbane. Kill a dragon and the blood infuses and it deals fire damage. So a player could start out with the family sword and end up with a god tier weapon at the end of the game. Make weapons become legendary. Not because it has more power, but because trolls recognize the blade and the wielder and are scared shitless.

Terrain in 2D should be a lot easier to generate. Weapons, armor, etc should be easier to modify and generate. This should give me the grounding I need to develop the algorithms for a future 3D system. Godot is currently stronger in 2D than 3D. That will change in the next couple of years as more focus is put on the engine. There is no reason I cannot experiment with mixing 2D and 3D as well.

Holy shit, I was just thinking I cannot imagine the amazing shit they could have done with the games I played as a kid with 2D physics!

Haha, something they had in the older games was actual gambling. You could bet on monster fights and slot machines in game. I wonder if that takes a hard hit with ESRB now?

Currently stuck in tutorial hell. Learning how the engine works and seeing what features are available. I get more excited each video I watch. The engine is packed with goodies and the addons are crazy good.

tldr: First project will be short game in 2D. Will explore procedural content.

TIL how time-delay relays are used in circuits with a hell lot of power. For example to power and control the motor of a machine that lifts 20 people up to the sky and back to ground again.
FYI this is a simple circuit. We will hopefully start experimenting with SPS/Speicherprogrammierbare Steuerung (Programmable Logic Controllers). I cannot wait to make use of our predesigned circuits with complex logic gates with the new unit we will get to know.
Unfortunately, we will do practical networking (testing cables for the signal strength and speed, building a network of telephones and call each other - guess this is going to be the funniest part lol, etc.) before the SPS and LOGO software phase.

Btw. I am doing an all-nighter rn and repeating everything we did in our recent signal calculation lesson. We have another exam tomorrow.

Am i whiny or is resilience so glorified in this field?

I am a junior developer. I was assigned with two projects together with a friend and a senior. My friend and I finished our assigned tasks way before the deadline. Fast forward, my senior got reassigned to a different project since we are lacking with manpower. Naturally, his transactions were assigned to me and my friend. And my goodness, his existing codes are a piece of shit! It's all over the place. His variable naming is shit, his codes are all around the place, his codes doesn't even follow our company's coding standards, no try catch, a lot of unsafe practices. In short, cleaning his code is a pain in the ass and my friend and I got really busy with cleaning his mess. The testing of our system is really near but I just thought that maybe he's really busy with the other project that's why the quality of his codes deteriorated.

He's not. One day, I saw his in discord that he's playing during work hours lol. And the worse part is that he is playing with our boss! YES. DURING WORK HOURS. I got mad but I couldn't say anything because he is really tight with the boss.

Later on that day, we had our meeting. I was surprised when my boss told me that she's expecting that the excel part of our system is already finished. A little background here, my boss asked me to study Excel VB. However, I didnt get to study that much because I was so busy fixing bugs and after that came the cleaning of our senior's shit codes.

So I tried to say these things to my boss but I was cut out by the same senior shouting "You can do it!" over and over again. No one listened to what I was trying to say! And to make it even worse, the boss had a very proud look on her face and she even had the audacity to tell me that I'm lucky I have such a good support system. I dont.

Now, the company is planning to put me in a very demanding project. I havent finished cleaning up my senior's codes, I havent started anything with the excel and the deadline is next week!

The boss told me that even if I enter the other project, that I will still be responsible for the Excel part of our system. So fucking shoot me in the face.They were telling me that I should have a good time management system, that I should be flexible, that I should adapt easily, yada yada yada. She just makes you feel bad about yourself if you're not as 'flexible' as her.

The thing is, even if I have the best time management techniques in the world, if you bombard me with a shitload of tasks, then I won't be able to do it properly! I don't even take breaks anymore! I work literally 8 hours a day, even more than that. And I dont understand, why the hell is she overworking me when her friend (the senior dev) is just playing during work hours?

Another funniest thing is that she told us that when we encounter technical problems, we should ask our senior dev. Oh boy, if only she knows how shitty his codes are.

How the hell some devs are releasing to production before passing to QA, Alpha testing, staging at least handle all type of errors and hide your API Keys.

In This Rant: A mildly satisfying piece of mind story.

Using code to prove yourself right is a hell of a drug.

A few weeks ago I whipped up a tiny program that downloads configs from hardware we manage. Since the vendor's API documentation is hidden behind a pay wall, my method of extraction is different. It results in bigger files, but testing showed it to still be valid.

Enter today. Interns at work downloaded a config to load onto a spare machine and it won't work.

"TheCapeGreek, your configs don't work"

I was confused since I tested the files when I built it and it worked. I am also currently fleshing out that download utility's features so the fear that I've been wasting the past 2 weeks on improvements is looming.

Last 15 minutes of the day and nothing else to do so I figured I might as well whip up a string comparer. The smaller file's content is scattered in the big file so a direct diff won't work.

Code it all, quick hardcoded proof of concept code, bit it got the job done. I was right, my bigger file is still correct!

Turns out the issue was with the machine they were configuring. They found this out before I finished my test code, so I'm off the hook already, but it was good to have piece of mind haha!

Best client I have ever experienced. Kappa

So, I got job to recreate one old website, because the old one was incredibly fucked up. She told us, it was made by someone retarded.
The code was fucked up even more than UI. It was definitely written by some kind of idiot. Diacritics, mixed languages, no OOP, no FW, just copy&paste. Yeah copy and paste for every page.
The DB was another level of shit. Inifine is not enough to describe it. Column names with whitespace, diacritics, uppercase, lowercase...pure hell. Yeah and I had to import it.

Whenthe new website was ready for testing I got an email from her that it was her who made the website... HER!! Fucking hell, no more of this please!

So i was working on an android app that communicate with restfull web service. I setup everything , started the web service api at localhost and launched the app on genymotion (virtual machine android) .Nothing seems to work . I checked the code , debugged some stuff and it turns out i couldn't communicate with the api server. I tested the api on my browser and nothing is wrong ,I tried to test on the phone vm browser and voila 404 not found . How the hell it's working on my windows and not on the vm (with localhost url :/ ) .I kept debugging for more then 3 hours with no solution to be found .
The moment I realised wtf I'm doing and how stupid I was => shut down my laptop went to coffee shop and bought a lifeless dark espresso .

In case you didn't understand what the issue is, I was running the api on my windows localhost and testing it with same url on my android vm (I should've changed localhost with my machine IP )

Just implemented a feature using Builder pattern .
State of mind : aaaghh fuck this shit , i am in hell . let's get some rest before integrating and testing this disaster

after some rest , while integrating " Oh you beauty my past self, i love you😍😍😍😍

This was initially a reply to a rant about politics ruining the industry. Most of it is subjective, but this is how I see the situation.

It's not gonna ruin the industry. It's gonna corrupt it completely and fatally, and it will continue developing as a toxic sticky goo of selfishness and a mandatory lack of security until it chokes itself.

Because if something can get corrupted, it will get corrupted. The only way for us as a species to make IT into a worthy industry is to screw it up countless times over the course of a hundred years until it's as stable and reliable as it can possibly be and there are as many paradigms and individually reasonable standards as there can possibly be.

Look around, see the ridiculus amount of stupid javascript frameworks, most of which is just shitcode upon vulnerabilities upon untested dependencies. Does this look to you like an uncorrupted industry?

The entire tech is rotting from the hundreds of thousands of lines of proprietary firmware and drivers through the overgrown startup scene to fucking Node.js, and how technologies created just a few decades ago are unacceptable from a security standpoint. Check your drivers and firmware if you can, I bet you can't even see the build dates of most firmware you run. You can't even know if it was built after any vulnerability regarding that specific microcontroller or whatever.

Would something like this work in chemical engineering? Hell no! This is how fucking garage meth labs work, not factories or research labs. You don't fucking sell people things without mandatory independent testing. That's how a proper industry works. Not today's IT.

Of course it's gonna go down in flames. Greed had corrupted the industry, and there's nothing to be done about it now but working as much as we can, because the faster we move the sooner we'll get stuck and the sooner we can start over on a more reasonable foundation.

Or rely on layers of abstraction and expect our code to be compilable on anything the future holds for us.

When I first started reading about Angular 4 I must admit I was a bit excited. It seemed like it fit the company enterprise requirements. The improvements it offered on paper looked quite good for our use case. HOWEVER... After writing Angular 4 for two weeks I'm seriously doubting I made the right decision. Testing is a dependency hell and there are two ways to build and structure your application. The webpack way and the SystemJS way. The grunt way and the angular-cli way. For fuck sake Google. And the documentation is somewhat half supporting one thing, half supporting another. So when you're using angular-cli with webpack, you're pretty much screwed when we're talking about documentation. It has now taken me almost 50 hours to write a pretty basic Angular app, made it compliant with our staging environment and writing a Makefile for it, since I haven't been able to find any same way to provide custom arguments when building it with the angular-cli --aot option. So fuck you Google. Luckily I've found a way to modularize it so much that I'll be able to reuse the core in the future. So I guess I got that thing going for me, which is nice... -.-' *sigh*

I got assigned to work on a new project a couple of weeks ago. We got the POC code handed off from senior management, since he came up with the idea over the weekend. The project concept is hella exciting, but the dev manager and PO I have to deal with make life unbearable to say the least.

We have only 2 devs (including me) and 1 QA on this supposedly very important project. Of course, management announced the project to the clients already, so now we have to deliver ASAP cause it adds “sizzle”.

The MVP deadline is... no one knows when, either July 30th or September 1st. The MVP requirements are... unknown. I swear if someone saw the list of tasks and issues attached to “MVP” Epic, they would call us nuts trying to fit it all in.

To make things better, each PR requires 2 reviewers, so we end up adding manager as a reviewer just cause we need him to hit that “approve” button. So in attempt to make life easier, we requested to have a third developer. We are getting another developer, but that guy doesn’t know how to unit test a pure function...

Current priorities are... unit testing with coverage of 95% and if we want to refactor code, we have to add area to the list in a Google Doc. As a result, we are not tackling big things like risk of SQL injections not to mention big features like i18n (5-6 languages to support by the way and yes, it’s part of MVP as well as SSR no one knows why). Currently, I spend 2-3 hours a week in calls with the team just to figure out what the hell MVP is, what we have to do and why we have to do it. Last time we spent an hour refining 1 spike and breaking down one story into 3.

Oh, we also don’t have a deployment plan, not even to test environments since DevOps team was not aware of this project at all. Thus, QA cannot create any test suites and have to test everything manually which eats a lot of their time.

This whole project is a big hot mess and I’m considering leaving it all together especially since I’m working on two squads at the same time. I love the project, I love the idea, but management makes it unbearable, so I’m not even motivated to work on that.

Some of you know I'm an amateur programmer (ok, you all do). But recently I decided I'm gonna go for a career in it.

I thought projects to demo what I know were important, but everything I've seen so far says otherwise. Seems like the most important thing to hiring managers is knowing how to solve small, arbitrary problems. Specifics can be learned and a lot of 'requirements' are actually optional to scare off wannabes and tryhards looking for a sweet paycheck.

So I've gone back, dusted off all the areas where I'm rusty (curse you regex!), and am relearning, properly. Flash cards and all. Getting the essentials committed to memory, instead of fumbling through, and having to look at docs every five minutes to remember how to do something because I switch languages, frameworks, and tooling so often. Really committing toward one set of technologies and drilling the fundamentals.

Would you say this is the correct approach to gaining a position in 2020, for a junior dev?
I know for a long time, 'entry level' positions didn't really exist, but from what I'm hearing around the net, thats changing.

Heres what I'm learning (or relearning since I've used em only occasionally):

* Git (small personal projects, only used it a few times)
* SQL
* Backend (Flask, Django)
* Frontend (React)
* Testing with Cypress or Jest

Any of you have further recommendations?

Gulp? Grunt? Are these considered 'matter of course' (simply expected), or learn-as-you for a beginner like myself?

Is knowing the agile 'manifesto' (whatever that means) by heart really considered a big deal?

What about the basics of BDD and XP?

Is knowing how to properly write user-stories worth a damn or considered a waste of time to managers?

Am I going to be tested on obscure minutiae like little-used yarn/npm commands?

Would it be considered a bonus to have all the various HTTP codes memorized? I mean thats probably a great idea, but is that an absolute requirement for newbies, or something you learn as you practice?

During interviews, is there an emphasis on speed or correctness? I'm nitpicky, like to write cleanly commented code, and prefer to have documentation open at all times.
Am I going to, eh, 'lose points' for relying on documentation during an interview?

I'm an average programmer on my good days, and the only thing I really have going for me is a *weird* combination of ADD and autism-like focus that basically neutralize each other. The only other skill I have is talking at people's own level to gauge what they need and understand. Unfortunately, and contrary to the grifter persona I present for lulz, I hate selling, let alone grifting.
Otherwise I would have enjoyed telemarketing way more and wouldn't even be asking this question. But thankfully I escaped that hell and am now here, asking for your timeless nuggets of bitter wisdom.

What are truly *entry level* web developers *expected* to know, *right out the gate*, obviously besides the language they're using?

Also, what is the language they use to program websites? It's like java right? I need to know. I'm in an interview RIGHT now and they left me alone with a PC for 30 minutes. I've been surfing pornhub for the last 25 minutes. I figure the answer should take about 5 minutes, could you help me out and copypasta it?

Okay, okay, I'm kidding, I couldn't help myself. The rest of the questions are serious and I'd love to know what your opinions are on what is important for web developers in 2020, especially entry level developers.

I found out that apache had built-in support ( via a module - mod_md ) for automatic TLS certificate management with Let's Encrypt since October 2017.

Bloody Hell! Why didn't I hear of this sooner?

So, I ran off into my cloud to set up this so-called ManagedDomain ( mod_md ).

Found the module in the package repositories, installed it and started testing it out.
I started writing IfModule conditions under mod_ssl so that I wouldn't have to overwrite my existing TLS configurations ( which was already issued by Let's Encrypt via certbot, by the way ).

After a whole night of twisting and turning with the configurations, it turns out that the module in the package repositories were built for ACMEv1 and that API has been dead for as long as the module has been around.

I had noticed that the module was 'experimental', but I still hoped that they had the packaged the module.

Finally, I cozied back up with certbot. At least, until this so-called mod_md becomes stable and mainstream.
I hope certbot doesn't make a fuss. I'm sure, it got offended that I was trying to cheat it with mod_md.

When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.

Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.

When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.

Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!

Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?

When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:

1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.

Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).

Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.

When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:

(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".

Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.

There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".

It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?

Finally back at the HQ and away from Offsite Hell after 18 months!!!!!!!!!!!! Real internet! Coffee on tap! Community of practice meetings! COOODDDEEEE!!!! Also back to devrant. Goodbye Indian devs from hell, j/k they still suck life out of my day with their deprecated ways.

Side note:
Switched to Unreal Engine from Unity recently and my god it is amazing! I definitely prefer being able to use C# with unity vs c++ with unreal but the blueprint system is a great visual programming system.

Unit testing is my new side chick. She wants me to leave my wife; I'm considering it.

Unrelated: Read Dead Redemption 2 is amazing.

Well, been awhile. The latter half of this is probably gonna be unpopular, but the gist of it is that all of the devs working on camera-centric apps, get your shit together, if possible. As mentioned there may not be a way for you to get your shit together, because Google and the others involved ultimately are a mess. In that case, you're dismissed. I haven't proof-read this, so don't take it exactly verbatim.

Woke up this morning to a need for this, so here goes:

----
OPEN LETTER TO SNAPCHAT
----
Snapchat,

You guys need to get your shit together. This is a tack-on to what Marques Brownlee already stated.

I woke up this morning to a seriously FUCKED UP UI. UX didn't change as much, still looks Snapchat-esque. But holy hell WHAT THE FUCK?

I'm not averse to change, despite the above. HOWEVER, there's an exception to that: You cannot change out UX/UI from under me with no warning. I need to know that within the coming weeks, there will be changes to how I interact/interface within the app. An option to opt into testing would be nice as well, but doesn't look like you guys have that figured out. With that testing should come feedback, and something like Jira, where issues can be reported and triaged. You're a company, unfortunately, so I doubt you'd be willing to even go as far as accepting feedback in the first place, which is a shame.

Seriously, as Marques pointed out, Android Snaps are shitty because the app takes a screenshot of the viewfinder and uses it as a photo. There's no doubt in my mind this is something that others do, but all Android devs need to either not pull this (because it's not clever) or just not make apps (quality over quantity).

I would like to see either Google step in and require a native API that is the same across all devices and leverages all cameras to their full potential (I want to say that Snap's issue stems from an API provided by Google. In this case, Google, get your shit together), or alternatively I'd like to see manufacturers band up to provide a uniform interface to deal with this. Because I don't see the latter happening anytime soon, Google needs to do something about this, although I feel like they probably won't. That said, IDGAF WHO it is, I just want it FIXED.

ATTENTION PLEASE! Important announcement following:

Please check your interface implementations for correct byteorder according specification BEFORE YOU START COMPLAINING ABOUT DATA FAILURES ON EXCHANGING DATA.

Freakin hell, if I'd get some money for every byte order mismatch on testing interfaces, I'd be a be a billionaire.

And why are all those highlevel I-know-every-fucking-framework developer incapable of checking the real memory content of a datatype, and the real data content on the interface even if you tell them that their byte order is obviously wrong?
No, your system is not the centre of the universe and I don't care how you get your less-than-32bit-datatypes-are-for-assembler-usage-frameworks to change byteorder. It's not rocket science, if there's no ready-to-use-function then write those 4 lines yourself.

Next time I get to specify an interface I'll go for mixed-endian, just to make sure everybody involved knows the concepts of endianess afterwards.

Ok, so: I have a macbook for work. And for the most part, I love it. Its a good looking device that has a fast cpu, enough ram to run stuff locally for testing, even multiple services / environments at the same time without getting overly sluggish.

And, the best thing: It isn't Windows. I have a good, working shell (zsh), so I can use all the command line tooling I could wish for, I have a somewhat working package manager and everything.

But there are just some little things I really can't wrap my head around. And since everything is so locked in by Apple, there are no sensible ways to fix those things without having a bunch of extra programs / services running all the time, introducing overhead, configuration for things I neither want nor need, and so on.

First of all, why the hell did you think the normal way of typing "@" on a german iso keyboard is the key combination for closing the currently focused application? I am a daily user of macos for over 2 years now, and I still keep quitting applications regularly, almost every day.

Or, scroll direction: I use a mouse (g pro wireless) and not just the touchpad, but when I am in a meeting or something (or when I take my macbook with me to configure a switch that isn't accessible over the network), I don't want to take the mouse with me, the touchpad is pretty good, it is big, precise and everything. But for some dumb reason, they decided to reverse the scroll direction for the mouse by default, so if you change that to use the mouse like a normal person, it also changes the scroll direction for the touchpad. And, the worst part is: there doesn't seem to be ANY easy way to separate those two settings, or to automatically set the scroll direction when a mouse is connected.

So every time I use my laptop somewhere else, wich also happens regularly, the scroll directions is wrong, which means I have to go into the settings, change it, then change it back when I am at my desk again.

It just doesn't make any sense, stop trying to "know what our customers want", and please, dear Mr. Tim Apple, give your customers the freedom to know for themselves what they want.

Thanks for listening to my TED Talk.

So I was looking into phone app development again (as you do) and I'm working on a simple QoL app for me and my SO that will help us automate some home management and finances stuff. Naturally I delved down the rabbit hole deep and wanted to have push notifications so we don't have to check the app periodically to know when certain things happen... Oh boy... Why is mobile development so convoluted, especially if you don't want to rely on Google Services...

It seems that the most accepted way of doing this is Firebase (FCM). Well me being me, I refuse to use google services for this and I prefer self hosted solutions (for data privacy reasons) which eliminates most products out there.

It also didn't help that my framework of choice is Flutter/Dart, because fuck Android Studio and the insane buggy XML stuff and fuck Android and it's constantly changing APIs...

Well In the end I decided on a rather simple solution and self hosted an AMQP service (RabbitMQ in my case, as I have some experience with it already) and implemented a foreground service in android platform specific code on top of my flutter project to kickstart it and made my phone a queue listener... This now means I can push notifications from my server to the Messaging Queue and it will be pushed into my App automatically!

One thing I found out on this journey was that Android now kills most background services and enforces foreground services to have a visible notification in the status drawer... which I actually approve of. It's a bit annoying that you can start a reliable background service, but I'm absolutely on-board with long running processes started by my apps are constantly visible...

Long story short, I love reinventing all the wheels, especially if it's for free and private... And I also went to sleep at 2AM again because this took longer that I'd like to tune... but it works, and it's google free...

I'm thinking of trying to package this up as a flutter module later, but first I want to do testing on battery life and the general life cycle of the service. RabbitMQ says they have the client library optimized for long-lasting connections and it should be just using a tcp socket, which should pretty much be what all the push notification services are doing anyway. I'm also not completely satisfied with how the permanent notification looks.. it isn't collapsible like some of the other ones from other apps and it's about 2 lines high instead of single line... which is something quite annoying and I'm struggling to find any relevant docs on how this is done other than possible making a custom Notification Style... but I just can't believe that everyone is doing that.. there must be a built-in somewhere -_-... Ugh Android is hell...

Anyway, if any android devs here have some hints, tips and tricks on how to handle this type of background/foreground process stuff and I'm doing something wrong let me know, cause googling this shit is a nightmare too!

My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...

I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.

Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.

In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.

As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.

The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.

It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).

We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.

Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.

This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.

The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.

Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.

And... Fucking and!

Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.

Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.

Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.

What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").

Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.

This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?

If you do not push something (language, education, people, cars, design, medicine ...etc etc) how the hell do you expect to mature, surpass expectations and become better. Java didn't start off as good or as bad as it is today. It was through testing, abuse, use and pushing it harder do more and more amazing things that it wasn't built for. PHP has changed alot since I started using and it's through people efforts that it gets better. Before the javascript wave came it was a nuisance to use and sucked as most browsers had it switched off by default but it's become more secure, fluent and able to do more amazing things and people are loving it right now.

I really wish people would stop with half arsed and uneducated comments.

My brain hurts from trying to figure out this unit testing crap. Is it just me or is it really a struggle to test your front-end code? I'm using jest and enzyme to test our React app but complicated parts of code with multiple state changes or calling props is making my life a living hell. I mean I usually just debug by console logging everything and it works lol...but my fucking boss has forced me into writing this unit testing crap. FML.

Ticket: here's something wrong with the export of transactions, please check.

Very useful description, let me just go over this logic I've written months ago.

Yeah, I went extra sure that everything's right, besides the ones for created during the initial testing that we left. Took me a hell a long time to prove because there's such a vague description but ok.

Of course I have the time to make an eyecandy of an excel spreadsheet for you.

Only for you I'll also go and fix these entries manually. If you want me to do it so badly, I'll gladly do it.

Oh what, you're upset that I wasted 5h for this complete bullshit? Well fucking go and learn the database structure yourself then or get sued idk

Hope it was worth that 1€ difference the customer paid himself.

Not to mention that I also had to do an emergency setup to work from home because those people who are responsible for giving me an appointment for a covid test sure like to wait days after my sick leave is over. ffs, I just had a cold...

Also fuck all this bullshit mac software required to work in this network, half of this shit flat out requires you to use the same software and ofc it's all closed source to the point where I'd be glad to have an electron app for everything.

Report comes in that there is "no purchase confirmation screen" in the app.

Well, yes the hell there is, so I use the test credit card to make a purchase. Sure enough, it works fine on my testing account. Just to be sure, I try a couple other test accounts. Flawless.

"No, try it on *this* account"

I try again on their stupid account. Works fine.

"Well I just tried it in Chrome and it worked, it doesn't work in Firefox"

I was already testing in Firefox...

Wasting my time over a corrupted browser profile.. GTFO, why are you even a tester?

oh my goodness if I dhsfjhsjfhj
i can barely type right now im so frusterated

I've told my manager multiple times that I don't feel comfortable with the task hes trying to give me because it feels way too large (its designing/programming/testing/documenting an entire prototype cloud file sync application and server backend service on my own, replacing one we have had for several years) and he still just ignores me and persists that I should be thankful for the opportunity and challenge.

It pisses me off so much when people say dumb shit like, 'its a great opportunity to learn' at work. No it isn't. Your boss is going to be on your fucking case for taking too long or not delivering enough, and thats exactly what happened. He got upset and said he was expecting more things to have been written down by now, like design notes. I was just fuming. Design notes? I'm not even a freaking designer, I've never designed any type of big software ever, what the fuck do you want from me.

On top of that, I don't know where the hell he expects me to get time for this. I'm apparently also devops so I get yoinked off of anything im doing if some stupid thing breaks in some other environment about something I really don't even care about. Any other random ass task just gets dumped on me too. I'm supposed to be a 'junior developer', and get paid as such (i've wanted to go to the intermediate level but get told the title doesn't actually matter and no pay raise for you) but I get the responsibilties of a whole fucking team dumped on me and its just

do I just quit now? I'm just, for fuck sakes man

Hello, my first time here. I got to know this website/app from my PM because I need to vent it somewhere other than him according to my PM.

So, here goes my first rant. The date is today (Monday). The rant subject is our new tester. Some context on the guy. He started in our office 8 weeks ago and his title is senior tester with some years in testing. Me and my team with the exception of our PM are new hires and for me, this is my first job after graduation.

After a grueling month of pushing for new modules and bug fixes from our monthly UAT from the client (yes, this will be a future rant one day), about 2/3 of the team is on vacation paired with a long weekend. So, a very few ppl in the team including me and my PM came for today.

I usually came quite early, around 8 am as I commute with public transportation. As soon as I have my breakfast and just getting ready to open my dev laptop, he came to me with a bug. This is like under an hour I came to office. I'm ok with anything related to the project as today was deployment day to test server for our monthly UAT. So, I check the bug and it wasn't my module but the PIC is not there and I familiar with the code thus I fixing the module.

Then, not even 15 mins later, while fixing this module, he came to me with another bug. I'm still the only one who in office that can fix it thus have to do it too. Finished the both bugs, pushed and je retested it. Fortunately, my PM and another colleague came. But, for some reason, he only comes to me for the bug fixes.

The annoying thing for me is that he comes to me every time he found an obstacle, bug or glitch. At this rate, by hourly. Thus, this cycle of impromptu going around fixing-on-the-go for the project begins, for me. Then, my PM asks him abt our past issue log given by the client UAT. Another annoying part is he never checks the clients feedback to see if the result can be produced again. The time he checks it is when ppl ask abt it and test it 1 by 1. Then he came to me again with why x person marked it as done. Like hell I know why they marked it done, you the one who need to check with them. Thus, I called/messaged the PIC for x modules abt the issue and then they explain it. I have to explain it again to him abt it and then he makes the summary report for the feedback. This goes until lunch.

I thought the bug fixes is over and I can deploy it after lunch. I thought wrong and I kinda regret coming back early from lunch which I thought I can rest for a while with the debacle over morning. Nope, straight he comes to me after I sit down for 10 mins and until almost work hour is done, he came to me with small bugs and issues like previously, hourly. By then I think I crushed like ~10 bugs/issues and I'm knackered. I complained to the PM many times and the PM also said to him many times but he still does it again and again. Even the PM also ranted to me abt his behavior. The attitude of not compiling an issue log for the day and not testing the system to verify what the client feedbacks are valid or not is grinding my gears more and more. Not hating the guy even though his personality is quite unique but this is totally grinding ppl's gears atm. As of now, it's midnight and I finally deployed the system to the testing server. This totally drains my mental health and it's just Monday. May god have mercy on me.

Owh, the other colleague that come today? He was doing pretty much the same thing but he was resolving a major issue which is why the tester came to me.

So the testing team at my company are a stickler for rules and are somehow bureaucratic as hell. Since I'm new to the project I usually have to make direct contact with them. They are short of me getting in their face and screaming like a madman.

"Dear TitanLannister : You are in the final year. A lot of shit is happening around u. its now time to make a career and take tough decisions. What would you do?"

CHOICE 1: COMPETITIVE
>>>>background : "a lot of super companies like wallmart, fb, amazon, ms, google,.. etc simply takes a straight coding test for fresher placement. They ask tough bad ass level questions, but with right guidance, a hell ton of dedicated hours of coding, and making it to the top of various coding tests could make you a potential candidate"
>>>>+ve points :
- "You got the teachers and professionals with great experience to guide you"
- "a dream job come true.you can go there and join teams that interests you"
- "it was your first exposure to computer world. maybe you would like doing it again, after 4 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You have always been an average 70 percentile guy. The task requires 2000-3000 hours of coding an year. it will be hard and you always grow bored out of this pretty quickly"
- "Even If you did that , you stand a lesser chance because your maths is shitty.There are millions running in this race with brains faster than your IDE"
- "your college will riot with you because they expect 75% attendance"
- "You are virtually out of college placements, in which , even though shitty companies come and offer even shittier 4LPA packages($6000 per annum), would take a tough logical/aptitude based test for which you won't be able to prepare"

CHOICE 2: PROFESSIONAL WORK
>>>>background: "you always wanted to create something , and therefore you started taking android based courses. you have been doing android for over 2 years and today you know a lot of things in android. you might be good in other professional lines like web dev, data analytics, ml,ai, etc too if you give time to that"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will love doing this, you always did"
- "With the support of a good team, you will always be able to complete tasks and build new things quickly"
- "Start ups might offer you the placement, they always need students with some good exposure"
>>>>-ve points :
- "Every established company which provides interesting dev work takes their first round as coding, and do not considers your extra curricular dev work. So you are placing your all hopes in 1 good start up with super offerings that would somehow be amazed by your average profile and offer you a position"
- "start ups are well, startups and may not offer a job security as strong as est. companies"
- "You are probably not as awesome dev as you think you are. for 2 years, you have only learned the concepts , and not launched more than 1 shitty app and a few open source work"

CHOICE 3: NON CODING
>>>>background: "companies coming in college placements have 1-2 rounds of aptitude,logical reasoning , analysis based questions and other non tech tests. There are also online tests available like elitmus,AMCAT, etc which, when cleared with good marks help receive placements from decent established companies like TCS, infosys, accenture,etc"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will eventually get placed from college, or online tests"
- "there will be a job security, as most of these companies bonds the person for 2-3 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You really don't like this. These companies are low profile consultant/services based companies which would put you in any area: from testing to sales, and job offers are again $5000-6000 per annum at max"
- "Since it includes college, the other factors like your average cgpa and 1 backlog will play an opposing role"
- "Again, you are a 70 percentile avg guy. who knows you might not able to crack even these simple tests"

Ugh... I am fucking confused. Please be me, and help.The things that i wrote about myself are true, but the things that i assumed about super companies, start ups or low profile companies might not be correct, these points comes from my limited knowledge ,terrified and confused brain, after all.
:(

I was trying to recover an external hdd, which was not spinning at all.

I started by changing the enclosure, using the SATA port, using another enclosure, now the only possible culprit is pcb.

On testing with multimeter I figured TVS diode was damaged, and since I don't have immediate access to a new pcb, I opened one of my old hdd and desoldered pcb from there and using wires I attached this salvaged TVS diode to the pcb.

It didn't work.

During the research, I came across the fact that different manufacturers make different pcbs, what the hell, I wish there could be some standardisation so people could just swap things easily instead of finding another hdd of the same model just to salvage the pcb.

"I want to play a game"

That shitty moment when you are finally about to release your code, after about one month of developing and testing, and making sure everything is OK, imagining: "Oh we're finally releasing this feature, I have worked so hard on it, it's going to kick some ass!" but surprisingly things get fucked up on production server... I mean seriously? Stupid middleware I killed myself to get to work messed up. Where the hell have you been in staging, you stupid little bug? You happy now? My CTO giving me awkward looks and shit like: "I'm sorry but you have to come fix it, during weekend." The best way to fuck up my mood, today is the last day of week for god's sake!
I hate releasing like this. seriously SAG in this release!

In a sprint planning meeting. Getting frustrated. I guess it's my fault. I guess I assumed that attending the same schedule meeting each week meant that we all knew when everything was due. My bad.

Seriously, I fucking hate systems people sometimes. We have 4 major tasks coming down the pipe, but they are scheduled in such a way in which they are staggered. But they want to punt the 1 of the 4 that is fucking done because it is going to cause a lot of testing, but the other three aren't coming til end of next month AT LEAST. So they want to stick their thumbs up their ass holes and wait to test the other three before testing the one that, again, IS FUCKING DONE!!! Are they worried that a super massive black hole will spontaneously form in earth's orbit and cause time to run backwards and somehow cause December to happen in October!?!?

No wonder systems is so fucking far behind. They can't see the forest for the trees. They're so big picture that months and years are at the same level of granularity. Fucking hell how is scrum better than our current agile process again? Besides the fact that it makes me attend more useless meetings and get more angry.

They are punishing the left hand for the actions of the right. Systems wasn't doing their job so now software has to slow down and miss schedule.

For 2 weeks or more testing our app .. everything is perfect.
Deployment date .. hell break loose 😒😣😫😫😫😫

Went for the iv as senior java developer, they ask me to answer 3 pages of coding question, i need to read the code and state my answer. What's worse is, their coding without main method, and asking do this coding can be execute without error or not? What is the answer for this question.
I read all the questions and all written question without main method 🤣🤣.
Not sure are they really stupid or just testing me tho. But I still state my answer, "executing with error message.."
Later than, the manager did not show up to interview me and others 3 candidate.
Thats really funny. They ask us to leave and for their feedback.
After few month, meet my ex-colleague where he just resign from the that company. Surprisingly I told him about the test, than he inform the company to update the test 🤣🤣🤣.
Lucky me, if i choose to work there its gonna be a lot of hell.
fyi, my friend work as SCM, Software Configuration Manager which he always make a joke about his position as The Manager 🤣. I fucking believe it for month when we first work with same company. Just realized when he need to configure my machine to config as company rule. Dammit dude

Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.

Then... I actually went there.

At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.

Then I started to realize.

All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.

So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.

And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.

Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.

Just joined a new company and can only describe the merge process as madness.....is it or am I the one that is mad?!

They have the following branches:

UAT#_Development branch
UAT#_Branch (this kicks of a build to a machine named UAT#)

Each developer has a branch with the # being a number 1 to 6 except 5 which has been reserved for UAT_Testing branch.

They are working on a massive monolith (73 projects), it has direct references to projects with no nuget packages. To build the solution requires building other solutions in a particular order, in short a total fucking mess.

Developer workflow:

Branch from master with a feature or hotfix branch

Make commits to said branch and test manually as there are no automated tests

Push the commits to their UAT#_Development branch, this branch isn't recreated each time and may have differences to all the other UAT#_Development branches.

Once happy create a pull request to merge from UAT#_Development to UAT#_Branch you can approve your own pull request, this kicks off a build and pushes it to a server that is named UAT#.

Developer reviews changes on the UAT# server.

QA team create a UAT/year/month/day branch. Then tell developers to merge their UAT#_branch branches in to the previously created branch, this has to be done in order and that is done through a flurry of emails.

Once all merges are in it then gets pushed to a UAT_Testing branch which kicks off a build, again not a single automated test, and is manually tested by the QA team. If happy they create a release branch named Release/year/month/day and push the changes into it.

A pull request from the release branch is then made to pre-live environment where upon merge a build is kicked off. If that passes testing then a pull request to live is created and the code goes out into production.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh it's a total mess. I knew when I took on this job it would be a challenge but nothing has prepped me for the scale of the challenge!! My last place it was trunk based development, commit straight to master, build kicks off with automated testing and that just gets pushed through each of the environments, so easy, so simple!

They tell me this all came about because they previously used EntityFramework EDMX models for the database and it caused merge hell.

I saw a thing was already define on the front-end and just went ahead and assigned it to the necessary orgs

Few hours later our process for that thing failed on 3/4 instances. The last I already setup a couple weeks ago for testing. Turns out there's 2 things with really similar names on those instances so when I decided to not fucking check, the wanted thing was never defined so it couldn't process

Welp I'm messaging my boss tomorrow morning to see how bad this is, then unassigning the existing thing before defining the correct one

Fucking hell why did I not verify the definition. Would've taken less than 30 fucking seconds for all instances. Thankfully this is still technically in testing. But fuck I'm pissed at myself

So today was my first time combining mocking, depenancy injection and promises. I thought I had a relatively good understanding of everything until I started writing tests - now my head is spinning.

The actual coding has gone really well - implimented the strategy pattern so I can reuse my code whenever I want to make an API call - and everything is nicely decoupled so it should be easy to test. In theory.

If anyone here happens to write tests for a living, I have a new found respect for you today...

Time for a beer 😅

I swear I touched some weird and complex programming shit in over a decade of programming.
I interfaced myself through C# to C++ Firmware, I wrote Rfid antennas calibration and reading software with a crappy framework called OctaneSDK (seems easy until you have to know how radio signal math and ins and outs work to configure antennas for good performance), I wrote full blown, full stack enterprise web portals and applications.with most weird ass dbs since the era of JDBC, ODBC up to managed data access and entity framework, cloud documental databases and everything.

Please, please, please, PLEASE I BEG YOU, anyone, I don't even have the enough life force to pour into this, explain me why the hell Jest is still a thing in javascript testing.

I read on the site:
"Jest is a delightful JavaScript Testing Framework with a focus on simplicity."

Using jest doesn't feel any delightful and I can't see any spark of focus and simplicity in it.

I tried to configure it in an angular project and it's a clustefuck of your worst nightmares put togheter.

The amount of errors and problems and configurations I had to put up felt like setting up a clunky version of a rube goldberg's machine.

I had to uninstall karma/jasmine, creating config files floating around, configure project files and tell trough them to jest that he has to do path transformations because he can't read his own test files by itself and can't even read file dependencies and now it has a ton of errors importing dependencies.

Sure, it's focused on simplicity.

Moreover, the test are utter trash.

Hey launch this method and verify it's been launched 1 time.
Hey check if the page title is "x"

God, I hate js with passion since years, but every shit for js I put my hands on I always hope it will rehab its reputation to me, instead every fucking time it's worse than before.

So a third-party service that I implemented is going to production and me and the PO were testing that yesterday, didn't see any orders coming in the service backend.. so we send a mail to them.

This morning they respond with saying that they can't have both the test server running and the production server...

What the hell is this... :/

so management implements SDLC. finally. but here is the snag... none of the environments are setup for any developer , integration or uat testing. now all the while business keeps pushing changes knto us and making us try work miracles. anyone else have this hell of communication from the high holy management above not listening to developers concerns ?

What the hell am I!? I wonder if you guys can help me...

I've been programming most of my life but I've never actually been a developer by title or job role. I thought maybe if I list what I do and have done someone here could help? I'm sure there are more of you in a similar boat.

- C# and VB dev for some quick DBMS projects to help me understand and mine databases and create a nice simple view for project teams to show findings from the data to help make certain decisions.
- Automating a lot of my colleagues work with Python and if very restricted then just VBA macros in Excel and MSP. This did also include creating tools to gather data during workshops and converting the data for input into other systems.
- Brought Linux to the office with most team members now moving over to Linux with the peace of mind to know that though they do need to try solve their own problems, I can help if need be.
- Had to learn AWS and then implement an autoscaling and load balanced data center installation of a few Atlassian toolsets.
- Creating the architecture diagrams documentation needed for things like the above point.
- Having said that, also have ended up setting up all the Jira/Confluence etc. servers we use and have implemented so far whether cloud (Azure/AWS) or on prem and set up scripts to automate where possible.
- Implemented an automated workflow view in SharePoint based on SP list data and though in an ASPX page, primarily built in JS.
- Building test systems in PHP/JS with Laravel and Angular to help manage integration between systems. Having quite a time right looking into how to build middleware to connect between SOAP and REST API's, the trouble caused more by the systems and their reliance on frameworks we're trying to cut out of the picture.
- Working on BI and MI and training a team to help on the report creation so that I can do the fun creative stuff and then set them to work on the detail :)

Actually it seems safe to say that it seems that though I've finally moved into a dev office (beforehand being the only developer around) I seem to be the one they go to when a strategic solution is needed ASAP and the normal processes can't be followed (fun for someone with a CompSci degree and a number of project management courses under the belt... though I honestly do enjoy the challenges)

But I always end up Jack of all but master of, well hopefully some at least. let's not even get started on the tech related hobbies from circuit design and IoT to Andoid / iOS and game dev and enjoying a bit of pen testing to make sure we're all safe at work and at home.

As much as I don't like boxes, I'm interested to know if there is in fact a box for me? By the way, the above is just a snapshot of my last two years minus the project management work...

Testing code on a Friday evening is a sidestreet away from git hell

For the last two months, I've been taking online courses in using Selenium (website testing tool) under C# and Java. The courses have you set-up the testing framework in something called Page Object Model. What the hell?? I've been doing this since 2010 under 3 different tools. You mean the industry adopted it as a standard and gave it a name and I never knew this?! ARGH!! Time to update the resume again and say how long I've been using this type of testing framework (since before it had an official industry name).

It is nice to see work I have been doing for years has become an industry standard. Wish I had known that when I was putting my resume together back in March so I could have included that. Damn it, I wonder how many jobs I missed out on by not having that already in my resume.

How do you deal when you are overpromising and underdelivering due to really shitty unpredictable codebase? Im having 2-3 bad sprints in a row now.

For context: Im working on this point of sale app for the past 4 months and for the last 3 sprints I am strugglig with surprises and edgecases. I swear to god each time I want to implement something more complex, I have to create another 4-5 tickets just to fix the constraints or old bugs that prevent my feature implementation just so I could squeeze my feature in. That offsets my original given deadlines and its so fucking draining to explain myself to my teamlead about why feature has to be reverted why it was delayed again and so on.

So last time basically it went like this: Got assigned a feature, estimated 2 weeks to do it. I did the feature in time, got reviewed and approved by devs, got approved by QA and feature got merged to develop.

Then, during regression testing 3 blockers came up so I had to revert the feature from develop. Because QA took a very long time to test the feature and discover the blockers, now its like 3 days left until the end of the sprint. My teamlead instantly started shitting bricks, asked me to fix the blockers asap.

Now to deal with 3 blockers I had to reimplement the whole feature and create like 3 extra tickets to fix existing bugs. Feature refactor got moved to yet another sprint and 3 tickets turned into like 8 tickets. Most of them are done, I created them just to for papertrail purposes so that they would be aware of how complex this is.

It taking me already extra 2 weeks or so and I am almost done with it but Im going into really deep rabbithole here. I would ask for help but out of other 7 devs in the team only one is actually competent and helpful so I tried to avoid going to him and instead chose to do 16 hour days for 2 weeks in a row.

Guess what I cant sustain it anymore. I get it that its my fault maybe I should have asked for help sooner.

But its so fucking frustrating trying to do mental gymnastics over here while majority of my team is picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them but they manage to look good infront of everyone.

Meanwhile Im tryharding here and its no enough, I guess I still look incompetent infront of everyone because my 2 weeks task turned into 6 weeks and I was too stubborn to ask for help. Whats even worse now is that teamlead wants me to lead a new initiative what stresses me even more because I havent finished the current one yet. So basically Im tryharding so much and I will get even extra work on top. Fucking perfect.

My frustration comes from the point that I kinda overpromised and underdelivered. But the thing is, at this point its nearly impossible to predict how much a complex feature implementation might take. I can estimate that for example 2 weeks should be enough to implement a popup, but I cant forsee the weird edgecases that can be discovered only during development.

My frustration comes from devs just reviewing the code and not launching the app on their emulator to test it. Also what frustrates me is that we dont have enough QA resources so sometimes feature stands for extra 1-2 weeks just to be tested. So we run into a situation where long delays for testing causes late bug discovery that causes late refactors which causes late deliveries and for some reason I am the one who takes all the pressure and I have to puloff 16 hour workdays to get something done on time.

I am so fucking tired from last 2 sprints. Basically each day fucking explaining that I am still refactoring/fixing the blocker. I am so tired of feeling behind.

Now I know what you will say: always underpromise and overdeliver. But how? Explain to me how? Ok example. A feature thats add a new popup? Shouldnt take usually more than 2 weeks to do my part. What I cant promise is that devs will do a proper review, that QA wont take 2 extra weeks just to test the feature and I wont need another extra 2 weeks just to fix the blockers.

I see other scrum team devs picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them. Meanwhile Im doing mental gymnastics here and trying to implement something complex (which initially seemed like an easy task). For the last 2 weeks Im working until 4am.

Im fucking done. I need a break and I will start asking other devs for help. I dont care about saving my face anymore. I will start just spamming people if anything takes longer than a day to implement. Fuck it.

I am setting boundaries. 8 hours a day and In out. New blockers and 2 days left till end of the sprint? Sorry teamlead we will move fixes to another sprint.

It doesnt help that my teamlead is pressuring me and asking the same shit over and over. I dont want them to think that I am incompetent. I dont know how to deal with this shit. Im tired of explaining myself again and again. Should I just fucking pick low hanging fruit tasks but deliver them in a steady pace? Fucking hell.

Caching is cool. But damn it! When it comes to testing it's just a hell of a pain to search and disable every caching found to ensure the result is repeatable.
npm cache, /tmp, ~/.cache, and more, and more!