Long rant ahead, but it's worth it.

I used to work with a professor (let's call him Dr. X) and developed a backend + acted as sysadmin for our team's research project. Two semesters ago, they wanted to revamp the front end + do some data visualization, so a girl (let's call her W) joined the team and did all that. We wanted to merge the two sites and host on azure, but due to issues and impeding conferences that require our data to be online, we kept postponing. I graduate this semester and haven't worked with the team for a while, so they have a new guy in charge of the azure server (let's call him H), and yesterday my professor sends me (let's call me M), H and W an email telling us to coordinate to have the merge up on azure in 2-3 days, max. The following convo was what I had with H:

M: Hi, if you just give me access to azure I'll be able to set everything up myself, also I'll need a db set up, and just send me the connection string.
H: Hi, we won't have dbs because that is extra costs involved since we don't have dynamic content. Also I can't give you access, instead push everything on git and set up the site on a test azure server and I will take it from there.
M: There is proprietary data on the site...
H: Oh really? I don't know what's on it.
<and yet he knows we have no dynamic data>
M: Fine, I'll load the data some other way, but I have access to all the data anyway, just talk to Dr. X and you'll see you can give me access. Delete my access after if you want.
H: No, just do what I said: git then upload to test azure account.

Fine, he's a complete tool, but I like Dr. X, so I message W and tell her we have to merge, she tells me that it's not that easy to set it up on github as she's using wordpress. She sends me instructions on what to do, and, lo and behold, there's a db in her solution. Ok, I go back to talking to H:

M: W is using a db. Talk to her so we can figure out whether we need a database or not.
H: We can't use a database because we want to decrease costs.
M: Yes I know that, so talk to her because that probably means she has to re-do some stuff, which might take some time. Also there might be dynamic content in what she's doing.
H: This is your project, you talk to her.
<I'm starting to get mad right now>
M: I don't know what they had her do apart from how it interfaces with what I've done.
H: We still can't have databases.
M: Listen, I don't do wordpress, and I'm not gonna mess with it, you talk to her
H: I won't do any development
<So you won't do any dev, but you won't give me access to do it either?>
M: Man, the bottleneck isn't the merging right now, it's the fact that W needs a db
H: I know, so talk to her
M: THE RESTRICTION TO NOT HAVE DATABASES IS NOT MINE, IT'S YOURS, YOU TALK TO HER. I can't evaluate whether it's a reasonable enough reason or not since I don't know the requirements or what they're willing to spend.
H: It's your project.
M: Then give me fucking access to azure and I'll handle it, you know you'll have to set up wordpress again regardless whether we set it up the first time.
H: Man just do your job.

At this point I lost it. WHAT A FUCKING TOOL. He doesn't wanna do dev work, wants me to go through the trouble of setting up on a test subscription first, and doesn't want to give me access to azure. What's more, he did shit all and doesn't want to anything else. Well fuck you. I googled him, to see if he's anyone important, if he's done anything notable which is why he's being so God damn condescending. MY INTERNSHIP ALONE ECLIPSES HIS ENTIRE CV. Then what the fuck?

There's also this that happened sometime during our talk:

M: You'll have to take to Dr. Y so he'll change the DNS to point to the azure subscription instead of my server.
H: Yea don't worry, too early for that.
M: DNS propagation takes 24 hours...
H: Yea don't worry.

DNS propagation allows the entire web to know that your website is hosted on a different server so it can change where it's pointing to. We have to do this in 2-3 days. Why do work in parallel? Nah let's wait.

I went over his head and talked to the professor directly, and despite wanting to tell him that he was both drunk and high the day he hired that guy, I kept it professional. He hasn't replied yet, but this fucker's pompous attitude is just too much for me alone, so I had to share.

PS: I named his contact as Annoying Prick 4 minutes into our chat. Gonna rename him cz that seems tooooooo soft a name right now.

I work in a company where I'm the only developer, with everyone being designers or marketing or sales. Typically like the scene from Silicon Valley.

Moto was to create a ticket selling website for their products, and make sure they worked as well. It was all fine, until deadlines were discussed. They wanted it done within 2 weeks, the entire backend dashboard, API and front end.

I told them it's almost impossible to do it, but they insisted on it. So, I made a minimal dashboard and told them, I haven't completed a few things, such as if you edit data in one place, it won't reflect in other tables. So, be careful while editing the data.

They nodded their head for everything, yesterday was site launch and 2 hours before that one bastard decided to changed the product names to something "catchy" but failed to change the same in other places.

I had used the name as foreign key, so querying other DBs became a fuck all issue, and eventually API stopped giving any response to front end calls.

I got extremely pissed, and shouted at that dude, for fucking everything up. He said, you're the tech guy and you should've taken all this into account.

I sat and hardcoded all the data into database again, made sure site is live. Once it was live, these guys call a company meeting and fire me saying I was incompetent in handling the stressful situation.

At that moment, I lost my shit and blasted each of those people. The designer started crying since her absurd designs(though great) couldn't be realised in CSS that too within 2 weeks time.

One of the worst experience for working for a company. I could've taken the website down, and told them to buzz off if they'd called, I couldn't get myself to do it, hence ranting here.

I seriously feel, all these tech noob HRs need to get a primer course on how to deal with problems of a programmer before they get to hire one, most of these guys don't know what we're trying to tell in itself.

I find devRant to be the only place where I can get someone to understand the issues that I face, hence ranted.

TL;DR: Coded ticket selling site in 2 weeks. 3 hours to launch, data entry dude fucks up. I clean all the mess, get the site online. Get fired as soon as that happens.

Live long and prosper. Peace.

I’m surrounded by idiots.

I’m continually reminded of that fact, but today I found something that really drives that point home.

Gather ‘round, everybody, it’s story time!

While working on a slow query ticket, I perused the code, finding several causes, and decided to run git blame on the files to see what dummy authored the mental diarrhea currently befouling my screen. As it turns out, the entire feature was written by mister legendary Apple golden boy “Finder’s Keeper” dev himself.

To give you the full scope of this mess, let me start at the frontend and work my way backward.

He wrote a javascript method that tracks whatever row was/is under the mouse in a table and dynamically removes/adds a “.row_selected” class on it. At least the js uses events (jQuery…) instead of a `setTimeout()` so it could be worse. But still, has he never heard of :hover? The function literally does nothing else, and the `selectedRow` var he stores the element reference in isn’t used elsewhere.

This function allows the user to better see the rows in the API Calls table, for which there is a also search feature — the very thing I’m tasked with fixing.

It’s worth noting that above the search feature are two inputs for a date range, with some helpful links like “last week” and “last month” … and “All”. It’s also worth noting that this table is for displaying search results of all the API requests and their responses for a given merchant… this table is enormous.

This search field for this table queries the backend on every character the user types. There’s no debouncing, no submit event, etc., so it triggers on every keystroke. The actual request runs through a layer of abstraction to parse out and log the user-entered date range, figure out where the request came from, and to map out some column names or add additional ones. It also does some hard to follow (and amazingly not injectable) orm condition building. It’s a mess of functional ugly.

The important columns in the table this query ultimately searches are not indexed, despite it only looking for “create_order” records — the largest of twenty-some types in the table. It also uses partial text matching (again: on. every. single. keystroke.) across two varchar(255)s that only ever hold <16 chars — and of which users only ever care about one at a time. After all of this, it filters the results based on some uncommented regexes, and worst of all: instead of fetching only one page’s worth of results like you’d expect, it fetches all of them at once and then discards what isn’t included by the paginator. So not only is this a guaranteed full table scan with partial text matching for every query (over millions to hundreds of millions of records), it’s that same full table scan for every single keystroke while the user types, and all but 25 records (user-selectable) get discarded — and then requeried when the user looks at the next page of results.

What the bloody fucking hell? I’d swear this idiot is an intern, but his code does (amazingly) actually work.

No wonder this search field nearly crashed one of the servers when someone actually tried using it.

Asdfajsdfk.

First time dealing with front and backend web programming. Any advice or tutorials that can help me get on the track with good MVC? I hate having a giant discombobulated mess of an index.php file

In my current work, I have two systems to work on (let's name em Systems A and B). Both basically do the same thing; both allow users to book facilities available to them.

System A is already in production. My job is to fix any bugs that come up on said system. System B is an improved version that they wanted me to develop. This would follow a different framework etc. I am already halfway through this system.

Now, here's the fucked up part. The code for system A is a massive clusterfuck. It has unused commented code dated back to ancient times where men had the brain of an ape.

And don't get me started on the fucking logic. One part of the code was to retrieve and display the timeslots available for a chosen facility. The code to do that alone takes up 500++ fucking lines, filled with ajax commands, html manipulation and commented, unused codes..AND THAT'S JUST THE FRONTEND!

The fucking backend was not a problem of smelly code anymore. Nope. It was like a programmer had code diarrhea and shat his backend code all over the project. If I had a pin board, I would have made a crazy wall just to understand what some fucknut was trying to achieve.

Anyway, my supervisor told me to fix some bugs on System A. Knowing how the code was, I told her that I could refactor the code. Since I've already achieved that function on System B, with a shorter and cleaner code, I could just copy that and use on System A. But nope. She SPECIFICALLY told me to just "do whatever to fix the bugs. I don't want to waste time on System A." Okay. Makes sense to me. Whatever. I didn't wanna fuck my head up looking through that mess of a cesspool. So, I came up with a few hacks, not thinking of clean code and fixed whatever bugs there was. I then just pushed to the repo (after testing of course).

This bloody morning, supervisor came in and gave me more bugs to fix. When I thought she was done, she said "Hey. I saw the fix you made to the system. The bugs are fixed but the retrieval of the timeslots is now pretty slow. Could you see what is the problem?"

Slow.. She said that it was slow. And asked if I could fix it. I already told her what the problem was and she did not want me to waste time on it. But she wants me to fix it. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG IN HER BLOODY HEAD! I SWEAR TO GOD... UGHHHHH I swear I was already waterboarding her in my head. YOU WANT FAST?? How bout fucking allowing me to refactor the code?? Fucking shit head. I think I should take up yoga.

The bossman asked if our signup service sends an automated email after we successfully process someone's payment or when we promote them to full customer.

That sounds like a simple query, yeah?

Well.

Here's some background:

We have four applications; one in React, three in Rails. I'll replace their names to retain some anonymity.
1) "IceSkate" is the React app, and it's a glorified signup form. (I wrote this one.)
2) "Bogan" is the main application, and is API-only; its frontend has been long since deprecated by the following two:
3) "Bum" is a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains admin-only tools.
4) "Kulkuri" is also a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains tools specifically for customers, which they can access.

All but IceSkate (obv) share a database.

Here's how signups happen:

Signups come in from IceSkate, which hits a backend API on Bogan. Bogan writes the data to the database, charges the card immediately, and leaves the signup for moderation.

And here's how promotion from signup to customer happens:

Bum has a view allowing admins to validate, modify, and "promote" a signup to a full customer. Upon successful promotion, Bum calls "ServerWrap", a module which calls actions on the other applications; in this case: Bogan.

Bogan routes execution through three separate models before calling "ServerWrap" again, this time calling KulKuri.

Finally, KulKuri actually creates the customer!

After KulKuri finishes creating the customer, execution resumes on Bogan, which then returns, causing execution to resume on Bum. Bum then runs through several other models, references the newly-created customer object (as all three share a database), and ... updates the customer with its current data, and then updates the signup object. After all of this, it finally shows the admin the "new customer" view.

It took me 25 minutes to follow the chain of calls, and I still don't know quite what's going on. I have no idea if any of it sends an email or not -- I didn't see any signs of this, but I very easily could have overlooked something.

So, to answer bossman's question... I asked the accounting people if they send the email manually. If they don't, it's automatic, which means I missed something and get to burrow through that mess all over again!

I really hope I missed something; otherwise I need to figure out how and where (and when!) to send the email...

just...
errrrgghh

Help.

I'm a hardware guy. If I do software, it's bare-metal (almost always). I need to fully understand my build system and tweak it exactly to my needs. I'm the sorta guy that needs memory alignment and bitwise operations on a daily basis. I'm always cautious about processor cycles, memory allocation, and power consumption. I think twice if I really need to use a float there and I consider exactly what cost the abstraction layers I build come at.

I had done some web design and development, but that was back in the day when you knew all the workarounds for IE 5-7 by heart and when people were disappointed there wasn't going to be a XHTML 2.0. I didn't build anything large until recently.

Since that time, a lot has happened. Web development has evolved in a way I didn't really fancy, to say the least. Client-side rendering for everything the server could easily do? Of course. Wasting precious energy on mobile devices because it works well enough? Naturally. Solving the simplest problems with a gigantic mess of dependencies you don't even bother to inspect? Well, how else are you going to handle all your sensitive data?

I was going to compare this to the Arduino culture of using modules you don't understand in code you don't understand. But then again, you don't see consumer products or customer-specific electronics powered by an Arduino (at least not that I'm aware of).

I'm just not fit for that shooting-drills-at-walls methodology for getting holes. I'm not against neither easy nor pretty-to-look-at solutions, but it just comes across as wasteful for me nowadays.

So, after my hiatus from web development, I've now been in a sort of internet platform project for a few months. I'm now directly confronted with all that you guys love and hate, frontend frameworks and Node for the backend and whatever. I deliberately didn't voice my opinion when the stack was chosen, because I didn't want to interfere with the modern ways and instead get some experience out of it (and I am).

And now, I'm slowly starting to feel like it was OKAY to work like this.

Backend colleague : the API is online. It's tested and working, you can start the dev.

Me trying to manually call the API with all the fields pre validated : "error : invalid fields"

EVERY. FUCKING. TIME !

To all the backend developers : we are NOT your personal testers, and we are NOT supposed to clean your mess because you're too lazy to FUCKING TEST THE HAPPY PATH!!!

Thank you for your consideration.

So I left this company I was working for for about 6 years and then eventually came back earlier this year. It was basically 2 backend devs, 2 frontend, and a designer, with me being one of the frontend devs, and the other operating as the owner/alpha of the group. And our coding styles couldn’t have been more different. I wrote code with purpose that could scale, while he wrote garbage that I affectionally labelled "brute force code"; meaning it eventually got the job done, but was always a complete nightmare to work with. Think the windiest piece of shit you’ve ever seen and then times it by 10. Edit the simplest thing at your peril. And if you think you fixed something, all you’ve ever really done is create another 10 problems. And because the code was such shit, it relied on certain things to be broken in order for other things to work. Anyway, you get the drift.

In the beginning we used jQuery and so we just continued to use it throughout the years. But then when I finally left I realized we were operating in a bit of a bubble, where we didn’t really care much to ever try anything else, and mostly because we were arrogant. But eventually my boss started to notice the trend of moving away from jQuery, so he converted everything to vanilla JavaScript. Thing is, he hadn’t learned ES6 yet or any of the other tools that came along with it. And so it was a mess, and I was quite shocked at how many lengths he’d gone to create the full conversion. Granted, it was faster. But overall, still a nightmare to work with, as the files were still thousands of lines long. And when I dug deeper, I realized that he’d started to pluck things out of the DOM manually on-demand. And so it dawned on me: he’d been looking at sites built with React and other dif-engines, and then instead of just using one, he decided to reinvent the wheel. And the funny thing is, he thought it was just a matter of always replacing the entire HTML for whatever was needed. And so he thought what he was doing was somehow clever. And why not? He’s a badass mathematician who created an empire with jQuery. And so he obviously didn’t need input from anyone, and especially not from the shitty devs over there at Facebook. Anyway, while I was gone I learned quite a bit of React, and so it was just comical to me when I came back and saw this. Because it would have been a million times more efficient had he just used the proper tool. In short, he’d re-written the entire codebase for two full years and then ended up with another round of brute-force garbage.

So that’s my story. The lesson is, when you work for someone who’s a dumbass piece of shit, sometimes he’ll be so stupid the only recourse is uncontrollable laughter. I became a digital nomad somewhere in between and fucked off to Asia where I barely worked for 2 years. And I’d definitely recommend the same for anyone else with an asshole boss where the work is unfulfilling. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is when you’re living like a millionaire in Asia working 15 hours a week.

That I am not good enough for this shit.

Recently left my job because anxiety, a lot of it.

Tbh, I should not burntout myself, because:
- salary was a shit
- the scrum was a lie, there was no end of the sprint, so no retrospective meeting ever done.
- They change the """sprint""" task pile at any moment, usually adding more tasks for the same sprint.
- previous project manager was an idiot who said "yes" at EVERYTHING the client asked, even if the request was outside tje scope of the project.

The project was heavily delayed, and I was the only developer left on the most hideous backend you can imagine (the code was just tje very definition of "what not to do"). NO UNIT TESTING at all.

My task: clean the mess so we have a """stable""" release (with the tests), add the new features and re-do the backend again, but this time properly.

8 months of develop for this shit and they wanted the stable-shit-backend in a month and the new backend in other month "because everithing was already done in the shitty one". Do not forget the new features too.

So, I was doing the imposible to try to do tje task, overdoing hours and reading the docs of the project (because I was new in it), but it take me.a lot of effort to simply correct bugs because of complexity of the code and not understanding fully some parts of the project.

Then the comments like "why this is not finished yet?" Or "I do not understand why this is taking so long"

So, I had poor sleep, I was anxious because my inhability to do the imposible and in the end, a feeling kind of defeated because I quit.

So... that.

Sorry if something is wrong typed or so, english is not my native language.

(As a freelancer I was asked to do a couple of tasks on legacy code)

Let’s check this code, how bad can it be?

- all of the following: unreadable mess, no auto linting

- tests: some are there cause there’s not enough automation, others are poorly named
- frontend: somehow a genius made a react component for every variable in the store which only passes the variable to the child (wtf)
- backend: death by best practices
- ci/cd: “we have it but it’s broken”

Let’s fucking goooo 😎

Diagnosis: my therapist is getting rich
Chances to not cry tonight: close to zero

At least they pay well 🤷‍♂️

Worst recruiter experience:
Recruiter sets up interview with a company. I get to their office - the most packed place I have ever seen - devs practically sitting on each other, and the QA guys are being used as chairs....

So I wait for 15 minutes near the doot till the interviewer gets to me through the incredibley noisy openspace, and shakes hands. We go into a mess of a meeting room - and he explains that they will be moving to a bigger office soon. I say - looks like you should have moved by now....

Anyways - he askes me to tell him about myself - and I explain my background, Focusing on Android dev experience - The recruiter told me this was a senior Android dev position. The interviewer has a huge question mark above his head, but waits for me to finish. Then he tells me: so... no backend experience? so Now I have a huge question mark above my head...

turns out he is looking for BackEnd devs - Not android devs.

Today I explained to my wife why my night stand is a mess, and hers is clean and ordered by using the backend/frontend metaphor.

I am the backend, handling bills, bank accounts, taxes, warranties and all the paperwork.
She is my frontend, handling my social interactions.

Now she hates me, but she admitted I'm right.
She still want me to clean my night stand though.

Rant time of 'Derp & Co.'

Today I decided that I am going to find another job, I just can't keep with this shit.

They said that use Agile: FALSE.
• Daily (best scenario) take like 1 hour and a half.
• New task enter the sprint and "Fuck you, more task in the same time". This is something regular done.

• "Oh, dev, we need you to check this other project" I am in the middle of my sprint on this project. "But you have to fix this bug here". (3 fucking days the bloody bug) "You are late again with tasks".

• Meeting for fresh sprint: 6 BLOODY hours... nonstop

The workflow is garbage:
• SOMEONE should did all the devops shit on the first sprint, guess what? They did nothing!, guess now who is being blamed for it (not only me, but a few coworkers).

• Nothing is well designed/defined:
~ task are explained like shit
~ times measured wrongly
~ We are in the last fucking SPRINT and still doing de ER of the DataBase cause Oh, apparently no one has work before with SQL (damn you MongoDB! (Not really)) so I am doing my best, but "jezz dev, this is so hard... maybe we can do it WRONG and easy".
~ No one is capable of take responsability of their mess, they just try to push down the problems. (Remember the devops situatuion? Why is.my fault? I came at the 3 or 4 sprint and I am doing backend tasks, I know nothing about devops).

But the big prize, the last one:
• Apparently you can't send whatever you want to the boss, it has to pass a filter previously of coordinators and managers, hell yeah!

And I am an idiot too!
because I see that we can't reach our schedule and do hours on my spare time!
This is because there are a few good coworkers who probably ended with my unfinished tasks... and they are equaly fucked as me...

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I am not a pro, I am not a full stack developer and still need to learn a lot, but this is just not normal, eight months like this...

Just had an interview with our new potential product manager. I companioned our CEO, if technical questions arise...

First, he came to our office, to the interview, and never..never looked at our application. Neither he saw some screenshots, review's or anything related to the product. As a potential product manager...gasp

And he really tried to impress me, by mentioning what a great full stack developer he also is (LOL), with years of experience in frontend and backend.
But, since I am an android software developer, he mentioned he don't like java. But he loves java script...

Me: ehhh what? So you compare apples to oranges. Why do you don't like java? (And I could image a lot things ...)

Him: because unlike JavaScript, java is a mess when writing code.

Me: ok Iam done.

To my frontend devs, dont you just love it when backend suddenly ruins the server?

I regret moving to backend. I loved the days when I used to write lines of code and refresh my browser for the changes to be displayed on the screen. I loved seeing the output of my code, the code flow, the light weight text editor, the visual satisfaction and the chrome debugger.

Now I am fucked up, I am working on creating microservices for restful api. I am hating everything about it. The fact that I should compile the entire war, manually copy them to a webapp folder, restart my tomcat and wait for 5 minutes just to see my code, and the text editors are just a pain in the ass, the debugger sucks too.

I was so looking forward to being a backend Dev because I thought Java was cool and I also was fedup with cross browser optimizations on the front end. Now I would gladly write a streaming service foe ie6. Spring has fucked me up so hard

God save me from this mess.

Has any of you reached a point that you want to resign from work because of a client?

We are dealing with a client at work that uses the app for prototyping instead of making designers create wireframe, imagine the amount of code to write,edit, remove, write it again and yet there is always something isn't right from the client point of view.

What is even worse backend guys screw the server and I am the one to be blamed for errors: 5xx
I even get blamed for error 400 (bad request) when that request passes tests but out of a sudden server returns 400, when you hit refresh the exact same moment of error and server decides to return data and stop throwing error 400.

I also get blamed for server fails to return data from a search endpoint, and if server throws 403 for a public endpoint.

This isn't a rant or getting out of my system but I need opinions, I've been working on this project for a year, with complete mess from either client or backend team, if any of you is instead of me, what would you do?

I'm not a complete guy either, but that situation is just beyond my abilities to handle.

I have co workers who laugh at me everytime I discuss to them how we should create clean code. (create functions for repeating code, naming conventions, generic code).

They would brag instead how they make another javascript ui library/plugin work(we are web developers by the way). Looks good in the front end but a mess in the backend.

I already created generic classes, generic database views that can be used by them if they want. But they create a new one with the same functionality.

I am a bit of a shy guy, and they are bit of loud, and I don't want to look like a know-it-all-guy, so I just let them do what they want.

I am just concerned how we can work easier by easily reading each others code.

So after school i was kinda roaming around, taking the odd paid programming job for clients, not really making any money, but also quite struggling because I was walking around with undiagnosed ADHD, for about the last 2ish years, not really making any money.

Since this February friends told me I might have ADHD, so I had it checked. Turns out I have been walking around with severe ADHD all my life :P That explained a fuckload... and now I got medication that works, yay!

Flash forward to 3 weeks ago, still not doing any work, all of sudden I get poked on linkedIn "hey we need a developer, wanna work for us?"

I wasnt really looking and since it was a message on linkedIn I figured it was just another of those overpromising recruiters, but it was very close to where I live so I decided to call them directly to check it out, expecting literally nothing, nor was I looking for work.

Roughly a week after that call I got a job as team lead backend developer...

Wait I was a total mess in the last 2 years, how did I end up as lead over an intern and 2 contracted freelancers?!?! HOW DID THAT HAPPEN!?

Sofar I am enjoying it.

!rant

So, when I was young, I wanted to be a freelancing nomad. You know, live the live, work remote and travel.

But I didn't have the bones to pursue that. After 10 years of struggling as a normal "programmer", I did a little of everything. I did normal boring "erp maintenance" in C#, Oracle and some legacy stuff called Visual WEB GUI , which was fun, but required a full 9,5 hours work day, 8:00 am to 6:30pm, and the bosses where squares, and I was young and wanted to try something out of the corporate world.

Then I did some work for a newly funded consulting company that used python, Django, and postgresql, but the bosses promised a lot and delivered none, (I was supposed to work backend and have frontend support, which I did not have, and that hurt my productivity and bosses instead of looking at what they promised but did not deliver, they just discounted my salary 3 months in a row, so Bye bye MFs!!

Then I did some remote work for some guys, that, I managed to sustain for a whole year, the pay was good, the stack was simple, just node.js and pug templates, that gig was good, but communication with the bosses was hard, and eventually things started to get hard for them and me, and we had to say farewell to each other, I miss those guys. This is the only time I remember having fun working, I could work whenever I wanted, I only had to reach the weekly goals, and then my time was mine, I could work from home in the odd hours, or rent a chair in a co working space if I wanted to socialize.

Then fate got me one big gig with a multinational company, and I could hire some people, but I delegated too much and was asking too little of myself, and that project eventually died because I did not know how to negotiate.

So, I quit the whole entrepreneur idea, and got a public job at my University, I was a public employee with all the perks, but none of the fun, I just had to clock-in, work, and clock-out. That experience led me to discover a lot of myself, I worked as a public employee for a year and a half, and in that time, I discovered more about myself than what I learnt in 27 years of previous life experience.

Then, I grew bored of that life, and wanted some action, and I found more than enough fun in a VC funded startup ran by young narcissists that did not have a clue of what they were doing, I helped them organize themselves into "closing stuff", you know, finish the things you say you have finished. Just to give you an idea of what it was like before I got there, the were working for 3 months already on this project, they had on paper 50% of the system done and working, when I tried to use the app, I couldn't even sign-up without hacking some database commands, (this was supposedly done). So I spent a month there teaching these guys how to finish stuff, they got, Sign Up, (their sign up was a mess, it is one of those KYC rich things, that financial apps have), Login, and some core functionality working in a month, while in the previous 4 months they only did parallel work, writing endpoints that were not tried, and an app that did not communicate with the backend. But the bosses weren't happy with me, because I told them time and time again that we were not going to reach the goal they needed to reach to keep receiving funds from the investors, and I had to quit before it became a mayhem of toxic employer/employee relationship.

So now I decided to re-engage with life, I have funds to survive about a month and half, I have a good line of credit in case I need some more funds, and the time of the world.

So wish me luck!!! And I'll be posting often, because I would like opinions, hear from people with similar life experiences and share anecdotes.

Next post, it's going to be about how I discovered taskwarrior, and how implemented my first weekend following some of the aspects of GTD to do all my housekeeping chores, because, I think that organizing myself will be key to survive as a freelancer nomad.

Started a new role as a front end developer working with React, happy that i finaly won't have to work with wordpress anymore, having a great hope that I will learn from the best with my team, and then ... COVID-19 ... I have to work from home

first task, implement a feature on a react front end build with react boilerplate, first time seeing this repo and dispair quickly took over, there is no documentation except for clone and install, the code is a mess, the console is filled with errors and warnings ...

I did what I could, but it was not enought, my n+1 didn't complain but if I was him i'd fire my ass with no regret, now I understood why almost all my collegues are working as a backend devs.

I don't fear being fired, I fear the feeling of being not good, feeling useless, each morning I stare at the code and I become illiterate, I can't even touch a keyboard, now I don't know what to do, fixing this shitty app, trying to build something with react boilerplate and try to understand how the data flow, or continue my endless tutorial hell .

When freelancing, do you charge for estimations?

Situation is that I'm a sole android developer (4 years experience) and each time I encounter some agency or a client I feel like I'm between a rock and hard place.

Some of the clients come with ready with list of requirements and ready backend/design sketch and they want me to give them a rough estimate.

It's as if they expect me to take only 2-3 hours for estimation and that's it. But actually this was the second time where I had to spend around 10 hours investigating everything so I would be able to give a half decent estimation at least.

This particular client's project turned out to be a mess and I had to spend 10+ hours to estimate only 70% of his project. I asked him if he would be able to pay under a reduced tarrif and the client was shocked, started doubting my competence level and so on.

In the end I gave him a rough 400 hours estimate and he started complaining that others estimated only 200 hours for his project. So in the end I just wasted my time.

Now it's my bad that I voluntarely invested too much time in this estimate without notifying client prior that I might ask to pay for estimation, next time I will try to do this ahead of time.

It feels like only big agencies who have free resources have a competetive edge against sole freelancers, it really sucks wasting so much time to estimate half baked requirements and assets. Also most of these clients and agencies are purely lazy and most of the time they don't even plan signing, all they need is someone to estimate their work for them.

I'm thinking of starting to charge for estimations and communications in a form of consultations. Is that a good idea?

Need some advice here.

So hello everyone! I recently moved abroad for work, for the sake of the experience and the excitement of learning how developers in Latin America tackle specific problems. To my surprise, the dev team is actually composed solely of Europeans and Americans.

I work for a relatively new startup with an ambitious goal. I love the drive everyone has, but my major gripe is with my team lead. He's adverse to any change, and any and all proposals made to improve quality of throughput are shot down in flames. Our stack is a horrendous mess patched together with band-aids, nothing is documented, there are NO unit tests for our backend and the same goes for our frontend. The team has been working on a database/application migration for about a month now, which I find ridiculous because the entire situation could have been avoided by following very rudimentary DevOps practices (which I'm shunned for mentioning). I should also add that for whatever reason containerization and microservices are also taboo, which I find hillarious because of our currently convoluted setup with elastic beanstalk and the the constant complaints between our development environment and production environments differing too much.

I've been tasked with managing a Wordpress site for the past 3 weeks, hardly what I would consider exciting. I've written 6 pages in the past two weeks so our marketing team can move off of squarespace to save some money and allow us more control. Due to the shit show that is our "custom theme" I had to write these pages in a manner that completely disregard existing style rules by disabling them entirely on these pages. Now, ironically they would like to change the blog's base theme but this would invertedly cause other pages created before I arrived to simply not work, which means I would have to rewrite them.

Before I took the role of writing an entire theme from scratch and updating these existing pages to work adequately, I proposed moving to a headless wordpress setup. In which case we could share assets in a much more streamline manner between our application and wordpress site and unify our styles. I was shot down almost immediately. Due to a grave misunderstanding of how wordpress works, no one else on the team seems to understand just how easy it is to fetch data from wordpress's api.

In any event, I also had a tech meeting today with developers from partner companies and realized no one knew what the fuck they were talking about. The greater majority of these self proclaimed senior developers are actually considered junior developers in the United States. I actually recoiled at the thought that I may have made a great mistake leaving the United States to look a great tech gig.

I mean no disrespect to Latin America, or any European countries, I've met some really incredible developers from Russia, the Ukraine, Italy, etc. in the past and I'm certainly not trying to make any blanket statements. I just want to know what everyone thinks, if I should maybe move back to the states and header over to the bay/NY. I'm from the greater Boston area, where some really great stuff is going on but I guess I also wanted a change of scenery.

I have a few side project ideas. I started one of them a few months ago (project setup, dependencies, git repo, index page, very basic API and client functionality). But I cannot get myself to work on it or even think about it (for months now). The reason? I do not want to work on the client/frontend! I do not want to deal with React or Vue or Svelte or fuckjs or even jquery. It's a fucking mess.

For the backend, the requests are stateless: you get a request, handle it, and respond back. Need to update state? Database. That's it!
For the frontend, there's just tooo many states I can't keep up with! When the user checks or unchecks this checkbox, I need to maintain the state of the checkbox and maintain the all effects of changing the checkbox while syncing with the backend and making sure the elements are still styled correctly with the applied effects. Multiply that with all the expected interactive elements on the page. It's exhausting!

>start new job, not very professionally experienced dev
>spend couple of months working on a feature that is supposed to be an MVP kind of thing, be rushed to finish and told to cut corners because it's "just an MVP", still lose sleep and have relationship suffer (and ultimately ruined) as I try to not lose deadlines created by the boss with questions like "you can have this done by <very soon>, right?"
>frontend created by fellow developer is a garbled mess of repeated code and questionably implemented subpages, frontend dev apparently copies CSS from Figma and pastes it into new non-reusable React components as envisioned by designer, I am tasked with making sense of the mess and adding in API consumption, when questioning boss what to do with the mess I am often told to discard stuff that the frontend dev has made and just reuse his styling; all of this on top of implementing the backend feature that a previous developer wasn't able to do
>specs change along the way, I had been using a library as a helper in some part of the original feature, now the boss sees that and (without further testing the library) promises CEO that we'll add that as a separate subfeature, but the performance of the library is garbage for larger inputs and causes problems, is basically shit that might not have been shit if we had implemented it ourselves, however at this point CEO has promised new feature to some customers, all the actual sense of responsibility falls upon my hands
>marketing folk see halfway done application and ask for more changes
>everything is rushed to launch, plenty of things aren't implemented or are done halfway
>while I'm waiting for boss to deploy, I'm called up to company office by CEO, and get new task that is pretty cool and will actually involve assessing various algorithms and experiment with them, rather than just stitching API calls and endpoints together, it involves delving into a whole new field of CS that I never had the opportunity to delve into before
>start working on cool task, doing research, making good progress
>boss finally deploys feature I had been originally implementing
>cut corners of original boring insane feature start showing up, now I have to start fixing them instead of working on cool task, however the cool task also has a deadline which is likely expected to be met

I'm not sure if I'm having it bad or not, is this what a whole career in software development will look like?

Trying to add money to a prepaid SIM card today. Their website is a mess. Plus and minus buttons were not functioning, so my only option was to add 15 euro. Checked the console, no errors. Tried triggering the buttons jQuery, no luck. Found a data value attached to the submit button set to 15. Changed to 10, clicked submit, and BOOM, it worked! You just got engineered!

After I paid, I was curious, went back and set it to -15, and tried it again. Unfortunately, they know about backend validation.

Waiting to merge the rest of the team’s new code because you don’t want to deal with migrating your test account to a new backend until your feature’s ready, finally finishing your feature (!) and then seeing 100+ merge conflicts and realizing you‘re better off just re-implementing all your feature code into a new branch, & deleting every trace of your old branch so nobody sees the 1000+ merged commit mess you’ve made -_- today was supposed to be easy...

WHY WOULD ANYONE NEED THREE DEPENDENT SUBMODULES ANYWAY?!?! 😩

Token for App -> backend authentication is generated one time when the user signs up. Sniff it once and you've got access to the user account forever.

Passwords are hashed with one round of SHA1, no salt.

Everything including login data is sent over plain HTTP.

Luckily I got permission to fix that mess

2014
I did some cool projects with node JS.
We had this project where we had several embedded sensor box components communicating via a node js server backend with some fancy visualization.
And one of the guys was a total idiot. His part was to write some embedded code for a sensor box. He also wrote some data receiver in C# which was a totally over patterned mess and nothing worked.
For some unknown reason this guy made me his arch nemesis. He also never liked the team. While the rest of the team actually was super cool.
So in the final presentation out of a sudden in his part of the presentation (He had a Mac and had his slides done in some nasty whatever incompatible format) he pulled out some slides with code metrics. The best part was where he compared the embedded C code with my js code in terms of cyclomatic complexity. I will never forget this moment. Some nice bar chart.

Good I loved that guy for this moment.
And that made my year!

The chief came with a new idea.. something that runs ‘a side’ of our main project as some sort of manager. The database wasn’t designed with that in mind..

Now I’m wondering if I’m having issues because I could’ve designed the database better so that this wouldn’t be an issue or if I shouldn’t “blame” myself, because that wasn’t the initial idea. 🤷🏻‍♂️

We had to do a lot of migrations to keep adding and changing for the “new ideas” and now the database is a mess.. but it’s like.. too “big” to just start a new clean database structure, but it could optimize everything and make the backend easier/cleaner instead of dirty hacks/queries to combine all the different features.

As a ‘bad’ example, but the idea started as a todo list, migrated to a social network and is now migrating to something like smartschool to be able to manage users and groups, but with different features than the ‘social network’ had... I’m wondering what’s next..

Horror story and rant time I guess...

I haven't seen the main developer of this MVC project that I've been working on but I can totally assure that his seniority isn't in frontend development 😠 and I doubt the backend too... Fucking DataTables converted to IDictionaries<string,object>

Guess who need to build on top of the pile of shit!

Anyway, I wasn't really careful about what kind of template I was given to work on a new SPA page, so I'm doing the job given the time, but it's fucking gory:
- matrioska style layers (n.3) without documentation
- partials everywhere
- too much inline styling
- too many <style> sections (n per layer or partial)
- too many <script> sections (n per layer or partial)
- poor CSS styling or no styling at all! (classes without any style nor js association)😠

He's just been lucky that the browser is capable of handling his shit

Now that at the end of this year I'll leave this project (solo fullstack) and need to provide documentation for the next poor souls I was thinking to leave behind something at par of my skills and capabilities but analysing the current mess ticks my brain in a bad way, fuck you Marco!
Fuck you
and your seniority
and the Italian way of perceiving seniority that gives you a higher living in the wrong side of the field 🤬🤬🤬

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Been stuck a week with JSON serializer struggles on the backend I'm working on... First of all, this project has source code dating back to 2013, and the dudes back then decided to use three versions of json. So you have your usual application/json and then two custom ones.

Not happy with that, they decide on using two serializers, XStream and Jackson. One custom and application/json run through XStream, and the other more legacy custom JSON runs through Jackson. So this is a bloody mess.

But now they want application/json running through Jackson, and this is breaking all the regression tests. Have to reimplement all the type, field, alias and other kinds of mappings they made for XStream, and sort out all the regressions this causes.

And the dude who designed all of this is revered in the company, although he left a while back. Not sure if I'm too much of an idiot to understand the utter brilliance of the approach, or its just poorly designed... Fuck my life, those due dates just keep creeping closer and closer and this kinda crap just keeps coming :S

Luulz
I hate react, ok it is now a knows thing about me...
But i have to maintain a huuuuge app made on react.
And the old developer mixed the nodejs backend with the frontend... And it is already a russian doll mess in components, cuz he seems to develop it during 2 years and only after one year he discovered redux !
Gosh... For a lil simple feature there is so many files involved... Gonna go crazy !
Happy that at least client pay big money for that

I started to learn backend development for help a friend with his idea for an startup. i learn the basics in one week. then we put the hands on the project.

the first week everything was ok, we make progress fast and get things done, second week my productivity go to the floor. i found my self trying to do hacky stuff every day. never reach solutions. i was a mess.

Today i just broke, inclusive with my main Data Science projects im feeling bad. i quit everything a start watching Mr. Robot.

Right now i feels truly bad, but i have no option, tomorrow i will pit my hands again on all this shit, what more i can do? this is what i want to do.

The suffering and stress seems to be part of this job. We can only keep going.

Need some advise from all you clever devs out there.

When I finished uni I worked for a year at a good company but ultimately I was bored by the topic.

I got a new job at a place that was run by a Hitler wannabee that didn't want to do anything properly including writing tests and any time I improved an area or wrote a test would take me aside to have a go so I quit after 3 months.

Getti g a new job was not that hard but being at companies for short stints was a big issue.

My new job I've been here 3 months again but the code base is a shit hole, no standardisation, no one knows anything about industry standards, no tests again, pull requests that are in name only as clearly broken areas that you comment on get ignored so you might as well not bother, fake agile where all user stories are not user stories and we just lie every sprint about what we finished, no estimates and so forth, and a code base that is such a piece of shit that to add a new feature you have to hack every time. The project only started a few months back.

For instance we were implementing permissions and roles. My team lead does the table design. I spent 4 hours trying to convince him it was not fit for purpose and now we have spent a month on this area and we can't even enforce the permissions on the backend so basically they don't exist. This is the tip of the iceberg as this shit happens constantly and the worst thing is even though I say there is a problem we just ignore it so the app will always be insecure.

None of the team knows angular or wants to learn but all our apps use angular..

These are just examples, there is a lot more problems right from agile being run by people that don't understand agile to sending database entities instead of view models to client apps, but not all as some use view models so we just duplicate all the api controllers.

Our angular apps are a huge mess now because I have to keep hacking them since the backend is wrong.

We have a huge architectural problem that will set us back 1 month as we won't be able to actually access functionality and we need to release in 3 months, their solution even understanding my point fully is to ignore it. Legit.

The worst thing is that although my team is not dumb, if you try to explain this stuff to them they either just don't understand what you are saying or don't care.

With all that said I don't think they are even aware of these issues somehow so I dont think it's on purpose, and I do like the people and company, but I have reached the point that I don't give a shit anymore if something is wrong as its just so much easier to stay silent and makes no difference anyway.

I get paid very well, it's close to home and I actually learn a lot since their skill level is so low I have to pick up the slack and do all kinds of things I've never done much of like release management or database optimisation and I like that.

Would you leave and get a new job?

I cannot not like backend, I'm currently trying to build an Angular WebApp together with a Java Project through Maven. It's just too much fun to mess with stuff like this.

Trying to make a nodejs backend is pure hell. It doesn't contain much builtin functionality in the first place and so you are forced to get a sea of smaller packages to make something that should be already baked in to happen. Momentjs and dayjs has thought nodejs devs nothing about the fact node runtime must not be as restrained as a browser js runtime. Now we are getting temporal api in browser js runtime and hopefully we can finally handle timezone hell without going insane. But this highlights the issue with node. Why wait for it to be included in js standard to finally be a thing. develop it beforehand. why are you beholden to Ecma standard. They write standards for web browser not node backend for god sake.

Also, authentication shouldn't be that complicated. I shouldn't be forced to create my own auth. In laravel scaffolding is already there and is asking you to get it going. In nodejs you have to get jwt working. I understand that you can get such scaffolding online with git clone but why? why express doesn't provide buildtin functions for authentication? Why for gods sake, you "npm install bcrypt"? I have to hash my own password before hand. I mean, realistically speaking nodejs is builtin with cryptography libraries. Hashmap literally uses hashing. Why can't it be builtin. I supposed any API needed auth. Instead I have to sign and verfiy my token and create middlewares for the job of making sure routes are protected.

I like the concept of bidirectional communication of node and the ugly thing, it's not impressive. any goddamn programming language used for web dev should realistically sustain two-way communication. It just a question of scaling, but if you have a backend that leverages usockets you can never go wrong. Because it's written in c. Just keep server running and sending data packets and responding to them, and don't finalize request and clean up after you serve it just keep waiting for new event.

Anyway, I hope out of this confused mess we call nodejs backend comes clean solutions just like Laravel came to clean the mess that was PHP backend back then.

Express is overrated by the way, and mongodb feels like a really ludicrous idea. we now need graphql in goddamn backend because of mongodb and it's cousins of nosql databases.

My team and me nearly finished a big new feature for our website.
I am a junior dev and this was the first big thing I was in charge of and now that I see how it unfold I feel really bad.

It consists of php backend (integrated into a 20 years old monolith) and vue frontend (punctually jumpstarted by a clusterfuck of typescript files included into php rendered html) and especially the frontend part looks so bad.

Vue is relatively young in our project and almost nobody has a clue about it. I learned so much about vue in the process, but the result is a behemoth of awfulness that grew over several months.

I have a really strong desire rewrite the whole mess, but I will never be officially allowed because it works and practically all the flaws in our code base are subject to the classic

"well, someday, somebody probably has to do something about that, but for now let's start this shiny new feature"

So for now I think about doing it secretly and pass it to my buddy to review it. I guess chances are high that not even the colleagues in my team (apart from my buddy) are going to notice, since they aren't as interested into vue as I am and don't have the overview over this features code as I do, but on the other hand it feels like something I could get in trouble for and apart from the cursed code base my company is great.

Have you ever bin that disgusted by your own production code before it was even one year old?

!rant

Someone posted a link to a 30-day-security-challenge here on devRant some time ago and I just thought well, why not try to migrate away from the big companies - I've been using OneDrive as my only cloudstorage since the time when it was called SkyDrive and I've been hosting my Emails at outlook (via Live Custom Domains, a service that does not even exist anymore) for about 8 years now. Since I've always been lazy and since exchange activesync is a great feature if you have multiple calendars and want to sync them and your contacts to several devices I never tried to switch but now I am half done with migrating my data to my own nextcloud installation and my emails to my own mail server - since I don't want to loose the exchange functionality I am also setting up Z-Push and oh boy, this thing is bitching around but my webmail is already nicely integrated into nextcloud, IMAP / SMTP is up, configured and secured (still have to mess around with spamassassin as this email adress is floating around the web for about 10 years now). The only things to do is to get Z-Push work with STARTTLS and the card/caldav backend running and then the basic setup should be done.

I am just wondering if someone could hand me over a guide on how to sign / encrypt emails (GPG?)

Originally designed backend to work one way but then frontend UX was shit because of how the app was structured. Have reworked frontend to be structured differently and now I have to work around the original backend structure because I don't have time to rewrite it. Everything's a mess. It works, but it could be way simpler.

This sucks.