As a long-time iPhone user, I am really sorry to say it but I think Apple has completed their transition to being a company that is incompetent when it comes to software development and software development processes.

I’ve grown tired of hearing some developers tell me about Apple’s scale and how software development is hard and how bugs should be expected. All of those are true, but like most rules of law, incompetence and gross negligence trumps all of that.

I’m writing this because of the telugu “bug”/massive, massive security issue in iOS 11.2.5. I personally think it’s one of the worst security issues in the history of modern devices/software in terms of its ease of exploitation, vast reach, and devastating impact if used strategically. But, as a software developer, I would have been able to see past all of that, but Apple has shown their true incompetence on this issue and this isn’t about a bug.

It’s about a company that has a catastrophic bug in their desktop and mobile platforms and haven’t been able to, or cared to, patch it in the 3 or so days it’s been known about. It’s about a company, who as of a view days ago, hasn’t followed the basic software development process of removing an update (11.2.5) that was found to be flawed and broken. Bugs happen, but that kind of incompetence is cultural and isn’t a mistake and it certainly isn’t something that people should try to justify.

This has also shown Apple’s gross incompetence in terms of software QA. This isn’t the first time a non-standard character has crashed iOS. Why would a competent software company implement a step in their QA, after the previous incident(s), to specifically test for issues like this? While Android has its issues too and I know some here don’t like Google, no one can deny that Google at least has a solid and far superior QA process compared to Apple.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m fed up. Apple has completely lost its way. devRant was inaccessible to iOS users a couple of times because of this bug and I know many, many other apps and websites that feature user-generated content experienced the same thing. It’s catastrophic. Many times we get sidetracked and really into security issues, like meltdown/spectre that are exponentially harder to take advantage of than this one. This issue can be exploited by a 3 year old. I bet no one can produce a case where a security issue was this exploitable yet this ignored on a whole.

Alas, here we are, days later, and the incompetent leadership at Apple has still not patched one of the worst security bugs the world has ever seen.

We have a bunch of white people in human resources that are trying to hire "diverse" people because the company sets HR diversity targets. Which is an inherently racist way of hiring someone.

I am told to interview this guy who claims to have Angular experience. Before the interview I ask to see a form that he has built in Angular. He sends me a repo which is ripped off of an open source project and has the readme and git commits removed. A quick web search shows that it isn't his work. He shows up to the interview and I find out he is from a Southern African country. I deliberately ask some questions about code that I can see he didn't write that I prepared ahead of time. He lies to me and tells me all about how he wrote it which showed me that he has no idea what the code does. I tell HR they better not hire him because he was very comfortable lying to me, and I'm confident that he doesn't understand any of the code that he showed me. I do not trust this guy and would never choose to work with him. HR lady says "Ah okay."

Today he walks in with a big grin on his face. HR lady fucking hired this guy. I can see his monitors from my desk and he spent his whole first day looking at a soccer website on his second monitor. I call up HR, "Why would you even ask me to interview him if you refuse to listen to my feedback?". Lady tells me "You need to be open minded about diversity. Probably most of the things you observed were either cultural differences or language barrier." I tell her definitely not. He lied to me multiple times, and he took credit for other people's work." She tells me that they will keep an eye on me because I'm not being open to diversity.

Are you kidding me? This white lady is literally stereotyping me as a racist because I'm white.

So this fucking HR lady called me a racist because she decided to hire someone that we shouldn't trust. Then she put this asshat on my project. Now I have to be cautious about my position because HR is "watching" my racist ass. Even though I am literally the only one on the development team that is white and speaks English as my first-language. I called a team meeting before the on-boarding is over so I can tell the other developers what is happening. We restructured our code review process so that I will never give him feedback. Then when the time comes that he slips up the "diverse" developers will kick him out so I won't be reprimanded as a "racist".

This company that I work for is a special kind of stupid.

Client: I know other developers who would do the same and much more for much less.

Me: I am glad you chose to work with me instead.

Client: I mean I like the site but I still feel that the development process has taken longer than it should have.

Me: Well, it is within the time frame I had said I would be able to have the first version of the site running. I have also implemented quite a number of new features that we had not earlier agreed on.

Client: I think I'll pay (quotes less than 20% of the total cost ).

Me: That is less than the amount that you were to pay as the first instalment ages ago!!

Client: I mean I like the site, but I think it still lacks the X factor. I want ...*goes on to mention other features*

Me: While I take pride in making my clients happy, I believe this process should be mutually beneficial. You are constantly making requests for new features but are making no attempts to meet your end of the agreement.

Client: FYI, there are people begging me for this job.

Me: *Takes down the site.* I wish you all the best, I hope the other developers are up to your standards.

Client: *Literally ignoring the fact that I just quit*. I want (makes more requests).

I am simply going to ignore this one!!!!

Before an interview prepare a list of questions for them, they expect it!
My list to give inspiration:

Describe your company culture? - if the response is buzzword heavy, avoid.

What’s the oldest technology still in use? - all companies have legacy systems but some are worse than others

Describe your agile process? - a few companies I’ve interviewed with said they are agile but it’s actually kanban

Are developers involved with customers?- if they trust you to talk to customers you can infer trust to do your job ( I’m sure others will disagree)

Describe your development environment?- do they have such a thing as dev, test and prod?

These are the only ones I can remember but should give others a bit of inspiration I hope 😄

When I was in the army I wasn't officially a dev. But one commander needed someone to develop a bunch of stuff and couldn't get a dev officially, so I ended up as his "assistant", which was an awesome job with about 60% time spent on software development.

Except I wasn't an official developer, so I wasn't afforded many of the privileges developers get, like a slightly more powerful machine, a copy of Visual Studio, or an internet connection. In this environment you couldn't even download files and transfer the to your computer without a long process, and I couldn't get development tools past that process anyway.

So I was stuck with whatever dev tools I had pre-installed with Windows. Thankfully, I had the brand new Windows XP, so I had the .Net framework installed, which comes with the command line compiler csc. I got to work with notepad and csc; my first order of business: write an editor that could open multiple files, and press F5 to compile and run my project.

Being a noob at the time, with almost no actual experience, and nobody supervising my work, I had a few brilliant ideas. For example, I one day realized I could map properties of an object to a field in a database table, and thus wrote a rudimentary OR/M. My database, I didn't mention, was Access, because that didn't need installation. I connected to it properly via ADO.NET, at least.

The most surprising thing though, in retrospect, is the stuff I wrote actually worked.

The everyday software development process:

I can’t fix this!

Crisis of confidence 😕
Questions career 😳
Questions life 😩

...oh it was a typo, cool 😆 🙌

!rant

Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.

11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.

You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.

That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.

Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.

Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.

There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.

In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.

Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.

And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.

I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.

Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !

Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life

Requirements vs Delivery - Guide to Programming
This one is a killer and I've received it in multiple forwards in office email, and we always have a good laugh seeing this joke.

Client: “Our next requirement, and this is something big you know, we need an elephant”
IT Team: But why don’t you adjust with a buffalo, even it is big…. and black?”

Client: No, we need an elephant only, let me explain our current process……” (client explains for an hour)
IT Team: Fine, I understand your requirement. But our system supports only a buffalo…

Client:We need only an elephant!
IT Team: Ok, let me see if I can customize it for you”

Requirements are taken as follows:
Client wants a big black four legged animal, long tail, less hair. Having trunk is mandatory. The same was documented, signed off and sent to offshore for development!

At the Offshore Development Centre,

Design/Development – Based on requirement all features are supported in base product (as buffalo), for trunk alone a separate customization is done.

Finally the customization is shown to client:

Software development process

Watching the Dutch government trying to get through the public procurement process for a "corona app" is equal parts hilarious and terrifying.

7 large IT firms screaming that they're going to make the perfect app.

Presentations with happy guitar strumming advertisement videos about how everyone will feel healthy, picnicking on green sunny meadows with laughing families, if only their app is installed on every citizen's phone.

Luckily, also plenty of security and privacy experts completely body-bagging these firms.

"It will connect people to fight this disease together" -- "BUT HOW" -- "The magic of Bluetooth. And maybe... machine learning. Oh! And blockchain!" -- "BUT HOW" -- "Shut up give us money, we promise, our app is going to cure the planet"

You got salesmen, promising their app will be ready in 2 weeks, although they can't even show any screenshots yet.

You got politicians mispronouncing technical terminology, trying hard to look as informed as possible.

You got TV presenters polling population support for "The App" by interviewing the most digitally oblivious people.

One of the app development firms (using some blockchain-based crap) promised transparency about their source code for auditing.... so they committed their source, including a backup file from one of their other apps, containing 200 emails/passwords to Github.

It's kind of entertaining... in the same way as a surgery documentary about the removal of glass shards from a sexually adventurous guy's butthole.

Imma keep watching out of morbid fascination.... from a very safe distance, far away from the blood and shit that's splattering against the walls.

And my phone -- keep your filthy infected bytes away from my sweet baby.

I'll stick with social distancing, regular hand washing, working from home and limited supermarket trips, thank you very much.

First rant here. Long, but please bear with me:

So after slogging my ass off in various early stage startups for over 4 years and keeping up with the almost non-existent development process, I joined an organisation which has some of the brightest and smartest minds I have had the pleasure to work with.

Mind you, this company is the market leader in it's field and has a 50+ people in it's tech team and the quality of work is pretty impressive.

Now for this week's sprint, I was asked to develop a feature which already exists on the Android app and they want to introduce in the iOS app too. The backend APIs are all in place and all I need to do is build it with virtually no dependency. My PM asks me to start with the UI and ask the backend dev for the API list whenever I need them.This is where the story turns.

For my first API, I go to the backend dev and ask him to share the API documentation and he looks at me as if I have asked him to dance the fucking cha cha. With a straight face he tells me that, 'The organisation doesn't maintain any kind of documentation for it's APIs.' Now this really shocks me. Even in a 5 men tech teams I have worked on, we have always maintained a spec doc for the APIs and this is a company which is known for it's tech practices.

Being the new guy I compose myself and ask if they have anything for me here: Postman collection, a workflowy doc, a goddamn txt file; anything which might help me, and he laughs at my dilusion and says no.

Dejected, I ask for a way to get the APIs and I am told that there are only two ways: either I keep bothering the Android dev for the APIs(No, I don't have the access to the android repo and nor am I gonna get it) which he had worked on 4 months back or I install the prod app on my phone, and use Charles to get every fucking API which is really, really annoying.

I thought writing out this rant would make me feel better, turns out it just made me angrier. Why the fuck can't they document such an important thing!?

The man who runs my IT department. The man who is in charge of all things and people that are technical: IT management software development, infrastructure, training, help desk, system administration​, etc. A man with a staff of fifty plus. If you were to peel back the flesh on this man's head and crack open his skull you would find dung beetles feasting on the feces that power his thoughts and motor functions. Underneath this foul membrane, if you could push past the maggots; the meal worms; his undying love for hourly binges of Johnny Walker Black on any day of the week with a name that contains a vowel; his fascination with shiny objects and his endless internal monologue wondering when they would hatch rainbow ponies that fly; his desire whenever he enters a paint store to open all the cans of paint and taste the different colors; if you could push past all of the vile crap that exists where Thomas Aquinas once theorized there was a soul, you would find a colony of paramecia at the end of their short lives laughing hysterically at how much smarter they were than the host they lived in.

This man was in charge of hiring the Manager of Software Development. The manager I report to. After seven months of ignoring this chore; after interviewing the sum total of four candidates; after making a point to tell myself and a colleague that there was no one qualified to fill this position within our company (an opinion that is both untrue and, when spoken, runs afoul of internal hiring policies) this man hired a soulless cretin with no experience in software development or with running a software development group. A man who regularly confuses web servers and SQL servers. A man who asked me how my previous manager reviewed my work, was told by me that said previous manager read my code, and then replied in his capacity as the manager of software development that "looking at code is a compete waste of time for a manager." A man so without any humanity or reason for being that he will sit silently, creepily, in conference rooms with the lights off waiting for meetings to begin. Meetings he has scheduled. That have no reason for being in the first place. Just like himself.

Shortly before the man in charge offered the Dev Manager job to the simulacrum of human flesh that is my manager, he met with me and others who had been involved in the interview process. When I informed him that hiring someone with no technical knowledge for a very technical position would be a mistake that he would suffer through for years, he replied in reference to his future hire that "his managerial experience makes up for his lack of technical knowledge."

Best. Prank. Ever. Worst prank ever too. Fuck.

This is what I found in the logs:
3280546 I had a cup of tea and now it's fixed
9daaf6c copy and paste is not a design pattern
958ca5b It compiles! Ship it!
a9edf8d LAST time, Masahiro, /dev/urandom IS NOT a variable name generator...
438072f 640K ought to be enough for anybody
1fb839b Too lazy to write descriptive message
4d70890 ...
d6ce0c8 Ugh. Bad rebase.
a00b544 Programming the flux capacitor
49715cb Fix my stupidness
4babf07 Do things better, faster, stronger
49b3a7b SEXY RUSSIAN CODES WAITING FOR YOU TO CALL
12c7b55 formatted all
2658c87 and so the crazy refactoring process sees the sunlight after some months in the dark!
2376c89 - Temporary commit.
a83220a I honestly wish I could remember what was going on here...
3347007 work in progress
3382b4c well crap.
109748a Glue. Match sticks. Paper. Build script!
c3f025e Useful text
70394e7 Who knows WTF?!
0d78f14 breathe, =, breathe
5344e39 removed tests since i can't make them green
8a3a6bf better grepping
2777cc4 first blush
cf620ff Continued development...
9591c19 Too lazy to write descriptive message
767e0cd Some shit.
763602a Yes, I was being sarcastic.
8d7a602 /sigh
c6296e5 rats

The software development process consists of two activities: debugging and rebugging.

Software development is a learning process,

Working code is a side effect.

I’m a .NET desktop fullstack dev these days… Never worked web unless for my own small needs/personal projects.
I started using tech one way or the other by the time windows was version 3.1 and been through quite a bit ground-breaking changes in the industry of software development and the internet but if there’s one thing I cannot understand of it all, no matter how much thought I put into it is: How the fuck did we manage to make it so fucking complicated to develop anything these days?
I remember like it was yesterday that you could stand a website with HTML, CSS and JS, three fucking files and you’ve made yourself a single page site. Then came the word “Responsive”, “Responsive” written everywhere. Fair enough, grid system popped up. All of the sudden jQuery was summoned… and everything that happened after this point has been a fucking circus of high-pitched teens talking on conferences about fucking libraries and frameworks to make integration with real time, highly scalable, eco-friendly, serverless, data driven, genome aware, genderless, quantum technologies to interact with bio dynamically generated organisms, namely fucking users.
Every fucking bit of the process of building a mobile/web application seems to be stopped by yet another incredibly dumb attempt to suicide a developer. Can you go from starting an app and publishing an app without jumping through a thousand VERY specific hoops? No, fuck no.
I fucking hate it… It’s a bit hard to get Desktop dev jobs these days but for as long as I work on IT I will continue to stick to that area, until someone for the love of life comes up with a fucking solution to all this decadent circus of bureaucratic technocracy.
Fuck big industry, fuck tech giants, fuck javascript and webassembly, fuck kids putting ASCII art on console applications that I DON’T FUCKING NEED to install dependencies THAT I DON’T FUCKING NEED to extend functionality on frameworks that I DON’T FUCKING NEED… oh wait, I do need all this because YOU FUCKING MADE IT MANDATORY NOW! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU!!!

Rich CEO's are so out of touch with reality.

We outsourced part of our software development to a third world country. During hiring process I had pushed for us to hire the more expensive, more experienced devs in a second-world country, but nooo we must save up those bucks. The pay is so low you wouldn't be able to afford rent in *city where CEO lives*.

As @GiddyNaya has ranted about, third world countries face impossibly slow internet and frequent blackouts. I also ranted about it in my last post. The "last straw" for the CEO was when our dev's computer started malfunctioning.

boss: When is that computer from?

dev: 2017

boss: 2017?! That's a dinosaur! Of course you're having battery problems!

me, trying to come up with an affordable solution for our dev: Well, you can have the battery switched.

boss: But 2017 is too old! Your computer should be *at most* 5 years old. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have your work-related tools working. (last sentence is ad verbatim)

The boss, of course, recommended a Mac. Mind you, the closest Apple store to our dev is 500km away! And a month of their salary will not come close to paying a Macbook.

Providing them with the equipment? No! We're already paying them a "competitive" salary!

Like seriously, how out of touch with reality can you be? Does greed blind you that much?

(The dev seems to have fixed the computer problems on his own tho)

I joined a company 6 months ago.
No CTO.
No development process.
Spagetti code.
Takes loads of new requirements on top.

Later
I advised the software head and managing director on how to improve our software development process.
New tools
Less requirement good quality software
New products and micro services.

Both of them agreed but they said they are waiting for new CTO to confim as an authority and responsibility.

Well I cant do much just to do my work.

1 month ago new CTO joined
Revised whatever I advised and implementing it right. I like it.

Got my confirmation after 6 months instead of 3 months.

CTO called me in for review and gave me 2/5. And said you need to improve more.

I asked him, in what do I need to improve.
He replies in technologies and development process.
And he takes credit for all changes and implementation.

I argued about it. I already suggested what you did but was ignore because we didnt have CTO.
Hes like ignored me.
Fucking you CTO.

*Opens some Computerphile video on YouTube in Chrome Canary*
CPU > hey ho dude, wait a minute..! I can't process all of this in realtime!!! >_<

Alright.. I think I've still got a copy of all their videos sitting somewhere in the file server.. perhaps I could use that instead.
*Opens said video from the file server in SMPlayer*
CPU > aah, thanks man. Now I can allocate 15-ish % of my resources to that and give you a good watching experience.

Web browsers are really great for being the most general-purpose document viewers, application execution environments (remote code execution engines as someone here called it), and overall be one of the most versatile programs on any PC's standard software suite.

But that comes at a price.. performance. And definitely when it comes to featureful fucking WordPress shitsites (shites?), bloated YouTube, Google, Facebook, and all that fucking garbage.. I fucking hate web browsers and this "Web 2.0" that people keep on talking about. Your boatload of JavaScript frameworks just to ease your own fucking development has a real impact when it happens on dozens of tabs, you know.

Besides, can't those framework creators just make it into a "compiler" * of sorts? So that front-end devs can flail their dicks in an shit-infested environment full of libraries and frameworks all they want, but the framework can convert it into plain JS code that the web server can then serve. Or better yet, the JavaScript standard could be improved to actually be usable on its own!

Look, I'm not a front-end dev. Heck, I'm not even a dev to begin with. But what I do know is that efficiency matters, especially at large scale. Web browsers being so overgeneralized and web devs adding a boatload of fucking libraries or frameworks or whatever, it adds up, both to the CPU's and my own temper.

(*) Quote marks because source code to source code isn't really compiling, but then uglified JS looks worse than machine code anyway so meh :/

Among my fellow developers at work, there is one guy who stands out because he actually strives to write modular, reusable and readable code. He literally saved me weeks of development by making his code modular enough that I can simply use it almost like a mixin where I only need to provide an alternative template. Note that the feature I'm talking about is for a pretty much sophisticated business process related to handling credit card data. Others in my workplace would just couple their logic tightly with their feature/scope's views.

I really wanna hug him and be his BFF now. #nohomo tho.

!rant

At my last job, my boss would constantly tear my work apart, belittle me and patronise me. He didn't really understand web development and just wanted to hire someone to do it for him. I ended up burning out and he persuaded me to quit because of it cause he didn't want to go through the whole disciplinary process (because he had no real reason).

A year later, and I've had my first review with my current boss, who's also a developer. He said he's learned a lot from me, I've helped the business and the junior devs grow; and that he struck gold in hiring me. I've got no feelings of burnout and I actually enjoy going to work now.

I'll be the first person to say that I'm not the best developer on my team and my new boss was probably exaggerating with me a little bit, but it goes to show that the people you work with are some of the most important people in your life.

TFW your client's git policies are so draconian that the dev teams use "develop" as trunk, and completely ignore the release process.

I wrote up 50 pages of git standards, documentation and procedure for a client. Bad indian director 9000 decides the admin (also Indian) who specializes in Clearcase and has no git or development experience is more qualified to decide and let's him set the policy.

FF to today:

- documentation, mostly contradictory, is copy pasted from the atlassian wiki
- source tree is the standard
- no force pushing of any branches, including work branches
- no ff-merge
- no rebasing allowed
- no ssh, because he couldn't figure it out...errr it's "insecure"
- all repos have random abbreviated names that are unintelligible
- gitflow, but with pull requests and no trust
- only project managers can delete a branch
- long lived feature branches
- only projects managers can conduct code reviews
- hotfixes must be based off develop
- hotfixes must go in the normal release cycle
- releases involve creating a ticket to have an admin create a release branch from your branch, creating a second ticket to stage the PR, a third ticket to review the PR (because only admins can approve release PRs), and a fourth ticket to merge it in
- rollbacks require director signoff
- at the end of each project the repo must be handed to the admin on a burned CD for "archiving"

And so no one actually uses the official release process, and just does releases out of dev. If you're wondering if IBM sucks, the answer is more than you can possibly imagine.

The software development process

i can’t fix this

*crisis of confidence*
*questions career*
*questions life*

oh it was a typo, cool

Feeling like I've gone back in time about 15 years!

Just told my CTO about various improvements we could make to the development process. Things like git, continuous delivery, agile project management apps such as Jira, task management such as Gulp, etc.

His response - "never heard of them. I bet they'll pass in a few months. Just another round of fads".

Me a while ago talking to a recruiter over the phone. This was for a C++ dev position.

(R)ecruiter : So except for the development things, we are looking for someone who has experience configuration linux. Do you have any experience with that?

(M)e : Sure, I use Linux all the time. What do you mean.

R : Well, Just using Linux isn't enough for this position, you need to have experience in configuration Linux.

M : Well. I can't answer your question if you don't specify what you mean. Do you mean that I need to be able to install my own packages? Set up my dev environment? Bash scripting? Being able to configure my bash profile to have good aliases? Use Linux to develop software? Because I can do all of these.

M : Or do you need someone who can write Kernel modules for the OS, because I don't have any experience in that but would like to learn.

R : Oh, I don't really know what it means. But the paper says that you need to have experience configuration Linux. So what would you say your experience with that is?

Me internally : JESUS CHRIST I JUST TOLD YOU WHAT I KNOW AND WHAT I DON'T KNOW HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ASSESS ME CORRECTLY.

Me 😎 : I use Arch and you have to set it up completely from the ground by your self so I know everything there is to know.

Basically every question was like this with the recruiter. I got further in the process but quit because the workplace looked like it would drain my soul when I got interviewed by the employees of the company.

Jesus Christ though, some recruiters could be replaced by an automated phone system.

I recently joined this big MNC after shutting down my own startup. I was trying to automate their build process properly. They were currently using grunt and I favor gulp, so I offered to replace the build process with gulp and manage it properly.
I was almost done with it in development environment and QA was being done for production.
In the meantime I was trying to fix some random bug in a chrome extension backend. I pushed some minor changes to production which was not going to affect the main site. That was in the afternoon.
This Friday my senior rushed to me. It was like he ran six floors to reach me. He asked, did you push the new build system to production, I refused. He then went to the computer nearby and opened the code.
It was Friday and I was about to leave. But being a good developer, I asked what's the problem. He told me that one complete module is down and the developers responsible for them left for the day already and are unreachable.
I worked on that module multiple times last month, so I offered my help. He agreed and we get to work.
The problem was in the Angular front end. So we immediately knew that the build process is screwed. I accidentally kept the gulp process open for anyone, so I immediately rebuilt using grunt and deployed again, but to no success.
Then I carefully analyzed all the commits to the module to find out that I was the one who pushed the change last. That was the chrome extention. I quickly reverted the changes and deployed and the module was live again. The senior asked, how did you do that? I told the truth.
He was surprised that how come that change affect the complete site too. We identified it after an hour. It was the grunt task which includes all the files from that particular module, including chrome extension in the build process.
He mailed the QA team to put Gulp in increased priority and approved the more structural changes, including more scrutiny before deployment and backup builds.
The module was down for more than 5 hours and we got to know only after the client used it for their own process. I was supposed to be fired for this. But instead everyone appreciated my efforts to fix things.
I guess I am in a good company 😉

I'm really close to just quitting coding all together. This job is sucking the life out of me. I've lost my interest in code and the idea that there are better jobs out there.

My "boss" who's not even really my boss but behaves like he is, is micromanaging my every tag, and is an information hog. He doesn't document, he doesn't tell me anything, I've been here six months and still don't know half of what I need to know to do my job properly!

I'm expected to implement a new responsive design, but we don't have design specifications.
Cool, you'd think, new ideas, complete overhaul! Let's get a good foundation in bootstrap going!

WRONG! It needs to fit in with the old, fuck- ugly pre 2000 design.

Not because of any design constraints in particular, but because HE wants it that way. You know what was fucking trendy in 2000? Tables. Tables fucking everywhere. YOU KNOW WHAT TABLES ARE NOT? RESPONSIVE YOU FUCKING ICE LOLLY CHEWER!

We have no development timeline, no process management, no fucking project management. THE FUCKING PASSWORDS WERE STILL STORED IN PLAIN TEXT UNTIL LAST MONTH YOU IRRESPONSIBLE BANANA DEEPTHROATER! 😤😤😤😤😤😤

I'm doing my best here to get something resembling the old page, but there needs to be some fucking compromise! We are in fucking 2017, let's work with Bootstrap instead of against it, how about that you fucking bald cactus!

I know enough about UI to know that the way we're going, this is just going to be another unusable fucking clusterfuck.

YOU KNOW THE BEST FUCKING PART? I'M A FUCKING BACKEND DEV AND I WAS HIRED AS SUCH! GIVE ME A DESIGN TEMPLATE AND I'LL DO MY BEST TO IMPLEMENT IT, BUT FUCK YOU FOR EXPECTING FRONT END LEVEL DESIGN KNOWLEDGE YOU DUMB FUCKING SPAGHETTI!

TL;DR
A "friend" is a tech fraud. Faking his resume as a software engineer! Only interested on the salary. This is unfair to all of us putting the hours of effort/practice just to improve our craft! 😠😤

I have a "friend" who is faking his resume, putting fake experiences and putting jargons not even related to tech just to make himself smart. He's using his customer service rep experience to talk confidently. His resume fcking long, 3 pages of fakery. I can't help, but to laugh when he sent it to me.

He has a tech degree, but worked in a BPO industry for 4 years, then recently, he quit. He got jealous with the lucrative software development industry and he wants to relearn coding, as a friend and I like sharing my knowledge, I agreed to guide him in the process.

After 3 moths, he got his first job, but unfortunately he got fired after two weeks because he commited sensitive data to the remote repo.

Then after a month, he got his second job and worked there for 6 months, he still don't know what his doing and always ask me solutions when he is stuck.

He got his 3rd job, remote work with high compensation. Fast forward after 3 months, he only got 1 month of salary, the other 2 wasn't given for unknown reason, my best guess is the company noticed his experience on paper does not match on real life.

Currently, he's working on another remote work with same compensation as before, and he still asks me super simple questions from time to time.

This is so unfair to all the devs who truly deserves the opportunity.

I'm disappointed with my boss.

I've always felt that the company I work for was different, I'm a web dev in a foreign country, finding a job as a fresh graduate wasn't easy at all.

before joining this company, all the employers I've met expected so many skills from foreigners like me, while they sat the bar so low for local fresh grad candidates.

Except my current boss, after the second interview he said that he believes in my potential and he wants to take this risk, the risk of hiring a foreign fresh graduate.

After I joined I worked my ass off and after 9 months I became a team lead.

And my boss said to me that the risk he took was completely worth it and I exceeded expectations.

Now I'm involved in assessing candidates applying for web development role at this company, we have 3 candidates 2 local and 1 foreigner.

Ironically the foreigner proved great potential and understanding of web technologies that exceeds a fresh entry role.

The other 2 local were alright, need training but they pass the criteria for an entry level role.

I reviewed this objectively and urged the same man that hired me to consider hiring the foriegner.

He said no, because of Visa costs and because of the lengthy legal process employers need to go through to hire a foreigner, and asked me to move forward with the 2 locals and not lose them to another company.

I felt that, if i were in the foriegner candidate's shoes I would've felt that there's something wrong with me for that no one wants to hire me for my skills and what I've worked hard to achieve was all not enough, it would make me feel like an outcast.

I know that I should do what I'm told, after all he's the employer, but still.. this feeling is bothering me, in a way I feel like I've cheated or I was just lucky and I didn't really earn this job.

I was taught from waterfall process model to Agile development..
But no one taught me this real software development process..

A few months ago I was working on a (totally underpaid project) where my friend and I had to basically rewrite the entire program our client was using.

So we started planning and wrote all sorts of documentation to show the client our ideas for the new flow of the program, the new structure of the GUI and a few more details of what would the inner workings of the new app. He seemed to like all those ideas and gave us the green light to go through with the project and start coding.

We spent a couple of months coding, redoing the front end from scratch (with a different framework even, so I couldn't reuse any code from the old version) and completely redesigning the back end so it would be better, faster, more scalable etc etc etc. During this process, we obviously showed the progress of the app to our client, explaining everything we had been doing, and he seemed to like every new version we showed him.

When we were in one of the last stages in development (basically sending versions of the app to the client for evaluation), the guy suddenly changed his mind. After agreeing on everything we had been showing him over the last months, he sent an email saying:

"...the new system makes the app too complicated. I want this program to be as simple to use as possible; so we should revert the "Policy" system to essentially what it was in the last major version. The only change I want to make is [...] and everything else is essentially the same as the last Policy system."

So basically he wanted us to FUCKING UNDO EVERYTHING WE HAD DONE AND REVERT THE FUCKING PROGRAM TO THE FUCKING VERSION HE HAD BEFORE HIRING US!!!! WHAT THE FUCK????

YOU WANTED US TO CHANGE YOUR APP AND THEN YOU SUDDENLY CHANGE YOUR MIND AFTER 3 FUCKING MONTHS WHEN THE PROCESS IS DONE???

GO FIND A SWORDFISH TO FUCK YOU IN THE ASS, IM NOT WORKING FOR YOU ANYMORE

God, it feels good to let that out.

Just started my new job.

Poorly defined requirements ✅
Expecting things to be done yesterday ✅
Poorly managed teams ✅
Terrible legacy code ✅
Half the development team is offshore ✅

Maybe I’m just selfish, but I need to work in an environment that has the following

A good technology stack.
A competent manager/team leader.
Competent colleagues.
Clearly defined documentation.
A proper onboarding process.

Why is this so difficult to find in organisations?

It's my first week working at shithole.co (can i say that?). My boss is a micromanaging asshole who knows the bare minimum re: programming. He thinks css is hard (no offense). I'm fresh outta college. He expects me to be able to do a very complicated api development through an equally complicated authorization process. Every fucking day "Is it working yet?" [This is my first week on the job]. I don't think he's read the documentation and I don't think he understands how to. As I am typing this out I realize I'm more educated than this dumb ass. Oh, some more context. Our senior dev is working on a more important project So we don't have time to bother him? So I am doing his job for 1/10 the cost. Oh, and i'm not allowed to contact him because he is too important. When the app inevitably crashes and no one knows how to fix it. I will give them my nutsack to swallow (can i say that?).

Client: We want to onboard people with sign-up wizard just like (Massive Industry Leader) so remove the sign-up process from the app.

1 week of development later...

Client: We need to take photos of their information, but we think its easier to take photos on the phone so once they sign-up link then to the phone.
Me: How will they get the apps if it not in the app stores?
Client: Get the apps approved for the app store! duh!

2 weeks later... 4 failed app submissions..

Client: Would it be easier if we just add the sign-up on the app?
Me: Yes... like it was 3 weeks ago?
Client: Yes! Why did we remove it?
Me: You did in an effort to be more like (Major Industry Leader)
Client: ....but we're nothing like them! Change it back!
Me: >•<!!!

I have to fire my client...

I just lost faith in the entire management team of the company I'm working for.

Context: A mid sized company with
- a software engineering departmant consisting of several teams working on a variety of products and projects.
- a project management department with a bunch of project managers that mostly don't know shit about software development or technical details of the products created by engineering.

Project management is unhappy about the fact that software engineering practically never sticks to the plan regarding cost, time and function that was made at the very beginning of the project. Oh really? Since when does waterfall project management work well? As such they worked out a great idea how to improve the situation: They're going to implement *Shopfloor Management*!

Ever heared about Shopfloor Management? Probably not, because it is meant for improving repetitive workflows like assembly line work. In a nutshell it works by collecting key figures, detecting deviation in these numbers and performing targeted optimization of identified problem areas. Of course, there is more to Shopfloor Management, but that refers largely to the way the process just described is to be carried out (using visualisation boards, treating the employee well, let them solve the actual problem instead of management, and so on...). In any case, this process is not useful for highly complex and hard-to-predict workflows like software development.

That's like trying to improve a book author's output by measuring lines of text per day and fixing deviations in observed numbers with a wrench.

Why the hell don't they simply implement something proven like Scrum? Probably because they're affraid of losing control, affraid of self managed employees, affraid of the day everybody realizes that certain management layers are useless overhead that don't help in generating value but only bloat.

Fun times ahead!

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

I just cant fucking believe this bullshit!

THE PRODUCT YOU'RE ASKING FOR NOW ITS NOT THE PRODUCT WE AGREED ON MAKING. ALL THE ADDITIONAL FUNCTIONALITY AND CHANGES YOU WANT TAKE TIME!

I can't believe how rude can people be! We were supposed to stop working in this product MONTHS ago but you keep asking for changes, for additional things and then you yell at us just because we dont have it ready for yesterday?! You got some fucking balls man just fuck off. You have to understand the development process, every change you ask for can have consecuences that make us rewrite a bunch of code and we also need to test everything again and again to make sure it works! Gimme a break!

There are three things in my workflow that I don't like:

1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.

It's common to be handled work at 2pm that needs to be deployed by the end of day. Usually it's bug fixes, and that's ok I guess, but sometimes it's brand new features. How the fuck am I supposed to do a good job in such a short time? I don't even have time to wrap my head around the details and I'm expected to implement it, test it, make sure it doesn't break anything and make it pass through code review? With still time to deploy and make sure it's ok? In a few hours? I'm not fucking superman!

2. Not being asked about estimates.

Everything is handed to me with a fixed deadline, usually pulled off my PM's ass, who has no frontend experience. "You have two weeks to make this website." "You must have this done this by tomorrow morning." The result, of course, is rushed code that was barely tested (by hand, no time for unit or integration tests).

3. Being the last part of the product development process.

Being the last part means that our deadlines are the most strict. If we don't meet the deadline, the client will be pissed. The thing is, the design part is usually the one that exceeds its time (because clients keep asking for changes). So when the project lands on our desks it's already delayed and we have to rush it.

This all sounds too much like bad planning to me. I guess it's the result of not doing scrum. There are no sprints, no planning meetings, only weekly status update meetings. Are your jobs similar? Is it just usual "agency work"?

I'm so tired of the constant pressure and having to rush my work. Oh, and the worst part is we don't have time for anything else. We're still stuck with webpack 2 because we never have time to update it ffs.

My department is focused solely on web development. Of course we are part of the major portion of I.T

The entire I.T department got acknowledged for a very important piece of software. That I wrote.
The ceremony in which we were being recognized did not listed MY department, no, they listed the ENTIRETY of I.T.

Thing is, if this product was not delivered, then I was told that the blame would be MINE (I am speaking as the head of my department) but apparently if it succeeded (which it did) it is to be attributed to people that were not even involved in the project.

My employees tried calming me down when I got upset, one of them stated that it was not even our department's effort, but mine alone. And yes, I was the one that developed the solution. By myself, with complete testing, staging, the whole works. Everything, developed by me. BUT my employees held the entire department down while I was behind close doors developing this solution.
I was fucking upset, more so because my director sent an email thanking the entire I.T department for this "win"
I asked him through or messaging service if he could point out to me who else was involved, since I did not know of anyone else that did absolutely anything in this process other than myself and my guys.

Maybe the output of my program was parsed by another I.T department and something happened from it, maybe the money generated by the application (obscene amounts of it btw) were used to add more to the infrastructure etc, who knows, but as far as I know, you cannot say "if this fails it is on you" just for them to later on thank people that were not involved in the project.

This is why I would gladly move on to a different field. I don't want to be patted on the back constantly, I know how fucking good I am at what I do. But if I do something amazing I do not want to see those efforts being given to someone else.

The dev world is usually a thankless industry, but if thanks are given, then I want the sole credit.

If I am winning or loosing I want the whole fucking credit and you can be any more gangstah than that.

I'm still at my first job, got the job by word of mouth from a friend.

This company wants me to develop both their iOS and Android apps, and being the solo developer it's a long process. I forgot to mention I had to learn objective-c on the job, and being from a java background Android was easy to pick up but it wasn't exactly 100% easy either.

8 months down the line I finished the iOS app and working on the Android app, which is more so copying the features I did with the Android prototype I worked on at the start.

I get paid minimum wage with from the looks of it no sight of a pay raise.

This company doesn't seem to know about how difficult it is to be the only developer for two apps in two different languages.

Anyway aside from this I was wondering if I could get some advice, I want to apply for jobs while I finish up the Android app, but is it a good idea to put the company I work for on my CV? I don't want to risk getting found out for looking for a job, without my boss knowing.

Would it be ideal to just have some sort of more information on request type thing if the jobs I apply for respond?

I guess I could stay until I'm here for one year (student advisor said this) but in saying that I don't think he understands that software development is done in projects rather than time, and after these apps I'll have to start on a new app from scratch, which I'm not looking forward to.

Anyways for any advice you guys give me thanks in advance I really appreciate any input, just wanna get out of this job, the 10 hours of commute I spend a week is killing me :/ along with it being expensive.

The software development process.

I can't fix this.

*Crisis of confidence*
*Questions career*
*Questions life*

Oh it was a typo, cool.

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

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

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

Little to no adherence to SOLID principles.

No automated testing whatsoever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data Engineering cycle of hell:

1) Receive an "beyond urgent" request for a "quick and easy" "one time only" data need.

2) Do it fast using spaghetti code and manual platforms and methods.

3) Go do something else for a time period, until receiving the same request again accompanied by some excuse about "why we need it again just this once"

4) Repeat step 3 until this "only once" process is required to prevent the sun from collapsing into a black hole

5) Repeat steps 1 to 4 until it is impossible to maintain the clusterfuck of hundreds of "quick and simple" processes

6) Require time for refactoring just as a formality, managers will NEVER try to be more efficient if it means that they cannot respond to the latest request (it is called "Panic-Driven Development" or "Crappy Diem" principle)

7) GTFO and let the company collapse onto the next Data Engineering Atlas who happens to wander under the clusterfuck. May his pain end quickly.

Impossible deadlines are ubiquitous in our company. Our CTO has the opinion that development is a lightning-fast process that doesn’t require testing and deployment because every developer is a God.
It is normal to hear something like ”just develop it tomorrow morning, it is easy” from him, but in reality, it is never that easy.

Working in the embedded systems industry for most of my life, I can tell you methodical testing by the software engineers is significantly lacking. Compared to the higher level language development with unit tests and etc, something i think the higher level abstracted industry actually hit out the of park successfully.

The culture around unit testing and testing in general is far superior in java and the rest.

Down here in embedded all too often I hear “well it worked on my setup... it worked at my desk”.. or Oh I forgot to test that part.. or I didn’t think that perticular value could get passed in... etc I’ve heard it all. Then I’ve also heard, you can’t do TTD or unit tests like high level on embedded... HORSESHIT!

You most definitely can! This book is a great book to prove a point or use as confirmation you are doing things correctly. My history with this book was I gonna as doing my own technique of unit testing based on my experience in the high level. Was it perfect no but I caught much more than if I hadn’t done the testing. THEN I found this book, and was like ohh cool I’m glad I’m on the right thought process because essentially what they were doing in the book is what I was doing just slightly less structured and missing a few things.

I’ve seen coworkers immediately think it’s impossible to utilize host testing .. wrong.

Come to find out most the of problems actually are related to lack of abstraction or for thought out into software system design by many lone wolf embedded developers.. either being alone, or not having to think about repercussions of writing direct register writes in application or creating 1500 line “main functions” because their perception is “main = application”. (Not everyone is like this) but it seems to be related to the EEs writing code ( they don’t know wha the CS knows) and CS writing over abstraction and won’t fit on Embedded... then you have CEs that either get both sides or don’t.. the ones to understand the low level need but also get high level concepts and pariadigms and adapt them to low level requirements BOOM those are the special folks.

ANYway..the book is great because it’s a great beginner book for those embedded folks who don’t understand what TDD is or Unit testing and think they can’t do it because they are embedded. So all they do is AdHoc testing on the fly no recording results no concluding data very quick spot check and done....

If your embedded software engineers say they can’t unit test or do TDD or anything other than AdHoc Testing...Throw the book at them and say you want the unit test results report by next week Friday and walk away.

Lol

My development process seems to go:

1. Write code
2. Believe that said code is amazing
3. Write more code
4. Revisit earlier code and start to doubt it's amazing-ness
5. Get frustrated that it could be done better
6. Redo 1 and repeat cycle

Seems a massive waste of time but I tend to like taking a different approach as soon as I find I'm getting stuck with the previous one.

I then get encouraged to take the quick/easy approach which seems like a backwards step and not worthwhile because I know it won't be as fast/efficient.

Devs can hardly stand testers but both of them are an integral part of the development process...

Kinda rant, kinda not.

At the start of this year all of my colleagues left company beacause of low raise. This process took like 3 months. After that I automatically became most senior in our team with 8 months of experience in my current company and 3 years total. It was rough days and still is. One downside is some days I can't even touch my own development tasks. Sometimes I ask for other developers help and assign them tasks. I'm evolving into team lead I guess. Yeah, more like junior team lead. But after few weeks I got a call from our cto and he told me they are raising my salary even I had a raise just 3 months ago. And he told me it will be raised again soon. Even my workload increased I'm still kinda having fun. I think its a bit early for me to be good at this role but I'm learning how to manage people :) Well, at least I got a raise

devRant is awesome, but Disney also manages to light-up my day.
This is how Wall-E became a beloved member of our team, and helped me put a smile on my face throughout a very frustrating project.

It all started in a company, not so far far away from here, where management decided to open up development to a wider audience in the organization. Instead of continuing the good-old ping-pong between Business and IT...

'not meeting my expectations' - 'not stated in project requirements'
'stuff's not working - 'business is constantly misusing'
'why are they so difficult' - 'why don't they know what they really want'
'Ping, pong, plok... (business loses point) ping, pong'

... the company aimed to increase collaboration between the 2 worlds, and make development more agile.

The close collaboration on development projects is a journey of falling and getting back up again. Which can be energy draining, but to be honest there is also a lot of positive exposure to our team now.
The relevant part for this story is that de incentive of business teams throughout these projects was mainly to deliver 'something' that 'worked'. Where our team was also very keen on delivering functionality that is stable, scalable, properly documented etc. etc.
We managed to get the fundamentals in place, but because the whole idea was to be more agile or less strict throughout the process, we could not safeguard all best-practices were adhered to during each phase of a project. The ratio Business/IT was simply out of balance to control everything, and the whole idea was to go for a shorter development lifecycle.
One thing for sure, we went a lot faster from design through development to deployment, high-fives followed and everybody was happy (for some time).
Well almost everybody, because we knew our responsibility would not end after the collection of credits at deployment, but that an ongoing cycle of maintenance would follow. As expected, after the celebrations also complaints, new requirements and support requests on bug fixes were incoming.
Not too enthusiastic about constantly patching these projects, I proposed to halt new development and to initiate a proper cleaning of all these projects. With the image in mind of a small enthusiastic fellow, dedicated to clean a garbage-strewn wasteland for humanity, I deemed "Wall-E" a very suited project name. With Wall-E on board, focus for the next period was on completely restructuring these projects to make sure all could be properly maintained for the future.
I knew I was in for some support, so I fetched some cool wall papers to kick-start each day with a fresh set of Wall-E's on my monitors. Subsequently I created a Project Wall-E status report, included Wall-E in team-meetings and before I knew it Wall-E was the most frequently mentioned member of the team. I could not stop to chuckle when mails started to fly on whether "Wall-E completed project A" or if we could discuss "Wall-E's status next report-out". I am really happy we put in the effort with the whole team to properly deploy all functionality. Not only the project became a success, also the idea of associating frustrating activities with a beloved digital buddy landed well in our company. A colleagues already kickstarted 'project Doraemon', which is triggering a lot of fun content. Hope it may give you some inspiration, or at least motivate you to watch Wall-E!

PS: I have been enjoying the posts, valuable learnings and fun experiences for some time now. Decided to also share a bit from my side, here goes my first rant!

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

interview today

me: and can you tell me a little bit more about your development process? e.g. an example dev cycle from reqs to testing and review...?

senior dev interviewing me:
*gives frustrated/annoyed "why tf are you asking these?" look*
So, uh, we don't really use testing for these projects cuz it would make it harder to refactor later.
(and responded nothing else on the topic)

I left shortly after that.

“PHP is evil” is not just a joke.

PHP is usually percieved as a language which is not so consistent and has some opinionated historical aspects but allows rapid development because it’s easy. They say PHP doesn’t focus on that “purist shit” such as concepts and “just gets things done”.

Hovewer, this is not true. PHP lures you in and lies to you promising saving time on development, but everything, and I mean EVERYTHING written in PHP is doomed to turn into a bloody mess sooner or later.

You have to be an AI to manage the growing PHP codebase and add features without breaking anything. With every feature it gets harder and harder. If you’re still a human managing a human team, you have to enforce guidelines. Automatic error preventon measures are made of code themselves so the cost of deploying them ona late stage can be ridiculous. And you never deploy them on early stage because you want to “save time”. Your people have to spend more and more time everyday checking on that guidelines. Your development process only becomes slower and slower. If you try to push things, your project will crumble to dust.

To make PHP at least decent, you have to figure out all this by yourself on an early stage. When you’re done, you spent a lot of time creating the buggy, ad-hoc, unspecified and unsupported alternative of what works out of the box in other languages. And you still code in PHP and still have all its disadvantages in your project’s DNA.

PHP is evil because it promises and never delivers. PHP is evil because it lies to you and it already fucked over so many of us.

If you want to code in PHP, do it under your pillow. Code your own silly projects.

If your project has the word “production” somewhere in its plans, PHP is not the way to go.

Amen.

Client : We want to develop this particular software. While developing it, we will be following Agile methodology.

Developers: Sure.

After developer achieves few features and decides to give 1st Demo of the software to the client.

Client : Wtf is this? This is an incomplete software, there are bugs in it.

Developer : Yes, you point that out to me and I will solve them.

Client: What do you mean point them out for you l, couldn't you do it yourself?

Developer: As a standard method, we often do unit tests, but we are not testers and with a strict deadline to match, we are more on the core implementation then checking again and again for minor bugs.

Client : I thought it would be a full proof software without any bugs in the 1st demo.

Developer : Software development is a process. It's not straightforward, hence you only mentioned at the initial, it's agile.

Client : If that's so, let's make it not agile and make you rot in hell for the next few fays. Now you next time show me a demo with no bugs, great complicated features and we will not mention you our expectations, predict them by yourselves, and most importantly, here's an impractical strict deadline.

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

My old job was great. I was writing automation software for one of the world's biggest storage deployments, and there was always a new challenge. But over time, I was asked to lend a hand with the tedious task of corresponding with procurement vendors and on-site technicians. At first it was one site, then it was two, and then it was an entire region of the US, spread across two time zones I'm not in.

I hated that work, and I found that I didn't have time anymore for software development, because of the time commitment the logistics work was. I was never hired to do logistics work, I was never trained, never qualified, and as I said, I hated it. I agreed to it to temporarily help out a weakness due to a shortage in staffing. But it never got taken off my plate, except for a short stint toward the end, just before I was placed on a PIP, because surprise surprise-- I'm bad at logistics.

About halfway through the PIP, I told my boss I wasn't doing it anymore. I said he could either put me back on software development or let me go, if ticket-monkeying and phone calls is the direction the wind is blowing for our team. I told him I had no intention of resigning, as you are not eligible for unemployment or severance if you resign, so their choice was to let me go. I'm told by people who are still there that everybody on the team is a ticket-jockey button-pusher now. Bleh.

My wife and I sold our old condo in Kansas City earlier in the summer, so we had about a year's worth of cushion, which was why I was willing to be let go. I was profoundly unhappy in my work, and it was bleeding through to my relationship with my wife and kids. So I took advantage of the time between jobs by spending more time with my family and just generally becoming a happier person again.

Meanwhile, I was in no desperate hurry to find a new job, so I got on linkedin, and had no more than two irons in the fire at a time. After just over two months I got an offer for a better job than before, which I accepted. There wasn't anything remarkable about that process though-- it's just something I've gone through recently.

Goddamn, why is Android SDK setup such a stupendous pain in the ass?

"Wah wah, can't find JDK!"

Wtf are you talking about you stupid fuck, JDK is right there, all IDEs find it, environment vars are set, it is the right version and is used on this machine for a billion development purposes! Stop being a useless cunt!

And this is everytime. Had to setup up Android SDK four or five times by now on different machines and it has NEVER gone smoothly. There is always a plethora of different issues and you end up wasting all day going through fucking dependency hell!

Read a book on ergonomics, you colossal android fucks. Just because you got JetBrains behind your IDE and they actually know what they are doing, doesn't make your setup process any less of a braindead nightmare.

Fucking hell.

Asshole-Driven development (ADD) – Any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions is asshole driven development. All wisdom, logic or process goes out the window when Mr. Asshole is in the room, doing whatever idiotic, selfish thing he thinks is best. There may rules and processes, but Mr. A breaks them and people follow anyway.

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

I'm a game designer student in a Brazilian university. In my class I'm the only one who likes code and made the secure choice to be a future game programmer.

But recently some dudes on my class started to discourage me and telling me to give up that course and change to a computer science course.

I didn't feel that way... I think game programmers who know all the stuff and process of game development( modelling, concepts etc) are better professionals than the ones who just knows the scripting process. But sometimes their opinion flows up my head and I feel so unknown if I staying in the right way or not.

(Sry if my english still bad..hope you all understand anyway)

OMG, more changes requested by a client for their website. Co-worker is wondering why they're doing these requests and is asking my boss if the design confirmation process has been skipped.

I'm a junior developer, and this is my only experience so far. I don't know shit how to deal with these stuff. I just wanna focus on development right now. Have a proper team to guide me. Be in an environment where I can get strong technical learning. I don't know how to deal with all these politics yet.

I wanna walk out but I can't. I can't be selfish to my wife and let her be the only source of income, seeing as she even has it worse and wants to get out of her workplace too. I've done it before, can't let it happen again.

Sorry for the drama. I gotta vent out.

Place: Microsoft, Visual Studio department

Boss: we need to make beautiful changes, and make the development process more simple and beautiful.

Employee 1: let's arrange error messages to be more readable.

Boss: no, I don't need any details of error, just say there is an error.

Employee: But..

Boss: This is genius, do it now.

Me: 😭

How I got selected for GSoC'19:
I will describe my journey from detail i.e from the 1st year of the college. I joined my college back in 2017 (July), I was not even aware of Computer Science. What are the different languages of CS, but I had a strong intuition of doing BTech from CSE only?

So yeah I was totally unaware of the computer science stuff, but I had a strong desire to learn it and I literally don’t know why I had this desire. After getting into college, I was learning HTML, Python, and C, also I am really thankful to my friends who really helped me to learn, building logic and making stuff out of it. During the 1st month of joining the college, I got to know what is Open Source, GSoC, Github due to my helpful seniors. But I was not into Open Source during my 1st year of college as I thought it is very difficult to start. In my 1st year, I used to do competitive programming and writing scripts in Python to automate various stuff. I never thought that I would even start doing Open Source development, also in the summer vacations after the 1st year I used to practice programming on HackerRank and learnt an awesome course called Automate the Boring Stuff with Python(which I think is one of the most popular courses for Python) which really helped me to build by Python skills.

Now the 2nd year came, I was totally confused between doing Open Source development or continue with my Competitive programming. But I wanted to know about Open Source development, so I thought to start now will be a good idea. I started attending meetups of OSDC(Open Source Developers Club) which is a hub of my college, which really helped me to know more about Open Source development from my seniors. I started looking for beginner friendly projects in Python on the website Up For Grabs, it’s really helpful for the beginners. So I contributed in a few of them, and in starting it was really tough for me but yeah I continued, which really helped me to at least dive into Open Source. Now I thought to start contributing in any bigger project, which has millions of lines of code which will be really interesting. So I started looking for the project, as I was into web development those days so I thought to find a project which matches my domain. So yeah I finally landed on Oppia:
Oppia

I started contributing into Oppia in November, so yeah in starting it was really difficult for me to solve any issue (as I wasn’t aware of the codebase which was really big), but yeah mentors at Oppia are really helpful, they guided me which really helped me to start my journey with Oppia. By starting of January I was able to resolve around 3–4 issues, which helped me to become the collaborator at Oppia, afterward I really liked contributing to it and I was able to resolve around 9–10 issues by the end of February, which landed me to become a Team Member at Oppia which was really a confidence boost and indication for me that I am in the right direction.

Also in February, the GSoC organizations list was out, and yeah Oppia was also participating in it. The project ideas of Oppia were really interesting, I became even confused to pick anyone because there were 4–5 ideas which seemed interesting to me. After 1–2 days of thought process I decided to go for one of them, i.e “Asking students why they picked a particular answer”, a full stack project.

I started making proposals on it, from the first week of March. I used to get my proposal reviewed frequently from the mentors, which really helped me to build a good and strong proposal.

I must say a well-defined proposal is the most important key for getting selected in GSoC, also you must have done some contributions to the organization earlier which I think really maximize your chances of selection in GSoC.

So after my proposal was made, I submitted it on the GSoC website.
Result Day:

It was the result day, by the way, I had the confidence of being selected, but yeah I was a little bit nervous. All my friends were asking when is your result coming, I told them it will come at 12.30AM (IST). Finally, the time came when I refreshed the GSoC website, Voila the results were out. I opened the Oppia organization page, and yeah my name was there. That was the day I was really happy and satisfied, I was thinking like I have achieved something in my life. It was a moment of pleasure for me, I called my parents and told them my result, they were really happy for me.

I say cracking GSoC is worth it, the preparation you do, the contributions you do, the making of the proposal is really worth.

I got so many messages from my juniors, friends, and seniors, they congratulated me. After that when I uploaded my result of Facebook and LinkedIn, there were tons of comments and likes on the post. So yeah that’s my journey.

By the way, I am writing this post after really late, sorry for it. I must have done it earlier, but due to milestone 1 of GSoC, I was busy.

codepen is the best thing which could happen to frontend development... i tried it out 5 months ago and now it is the most important part of my development process

I've had a couple of interviews that were bad because I fluffed them, but the worst was a 4 stage process I went through a while back.

Development hub for an international org, 1st stage was a phone call with high level questions. Stage 2 were online coding tests, which I passed. Third - another phone call. Finally, a visit to the office. I was informed that I was the only one to get this far after the other filtering. This is where it all went wrong.

I'd been led to believe this would be a reasonably informal chat (around an hour or so) to fill in some of the detail of what I'd already been given. It wasn't. It turned into 2+ hours of the most intense grilling I've ever had. Felt like I'd gone 12 rounds by the end. Another coding test in the middle of it. The interviewer seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to show that he knew much more than me and seemed to be trying to catch me out, rather than really discover what I knew.

By the end of it, I didn't want the job and I didn't want to report directly to someone who seemed to thrive on making life difficult to boost his own ego.

Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.

Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.

I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.

Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.

Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.

Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.

So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.

Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.

As devs, our keyboards are arguably the most used tools in the creative process of software development. Shortcuts are essential for (most of) us.

What's your most used keyboard shortcut in your most used IDE? Please explain what it does in which IDE.

Mine is Cmd+Alt+L in IntelliJ (reformat code, but only VCS changed or selected lines). I press it all the time, almost maniacally, after changing anything.

Close second place candidates: Shift+F6 (rename anything, e.g. file, class, function, variable), double Shift (search everywhere), Cmd+Alt+F (find in path, also in code), Cmd+B (go to declaration).

The development process that my boss called SCRUM. It was anything but. Management thought they could make us do more work than possible.

It is said that the number of programmers doubles every five years with fresh CS, CE, and EE grads. Assuming that's true, then at any one time over half the developer community are novices in the early stages of their career.

My entire life's been spent in software and I've been in it now for about 15 years and I've seen a lot of people make alot of things and I've seen a lot of people fail at alot of things. My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers, the people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker doer in one person. It's very easy to take credit for the thinking the doing is more concrete. It's very easy for somebody say "oh, I thought of this three years ago" but usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people that really did it. Were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems.

Many people falsely believe that a great idea constitutes 90% of the work. However, there is a significant amount of craftsmanship required to bridge the gap between a great idea and a great product. As you evolve that great idea it changes and grows it never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it and you also find there's tremendous amount of trade-offs that you have to make.

There are certain things you can't make electrons do, certain things you can't make plastic or glass, certain things you can't make factories or robots do. and as you get into all these things, Designing a product involves juggling 5,000 different concepts, fitting them together like puzzle pieces, and exploring new ways to combine them. Every day brings new challenges and opportunities to push the boundaries of what's possible, and it's this ongoing process that is the key to successful product development. That process is the "magic"

I really think there should be a subject in every CS course to teach us how to handle/work-under Grade-A assholes and dumbfucks. Not that it would help, but atleast warn us on what we are getting into.

In my opinion, development is not *that* hard or frustrating but is made so by these shitty people. But again, what do I know.

I was scolded by my boss for using for-loop to iterate through an array recently. Apparently for-loop is not used in real world projects and this iteration should be done "in-memory". My colleagues and I are still trying to understand and process that.

I was asked to add fitbit integration to a project within 2 hours just because I had "already done it a week ago" in *another* project. Luckily, it was then given to a "senior" developer who took 4 days for it and essentially copy-pasted my work without much changes, ofcourse it stopped working every now and then.

I am given unreal deadlines on my tasks, on technologies I haven't worked on before, and then expected to churn out production ready code with no bugs in them.

My boss literally just sends me the links of 1st three google results on the problems I encounter and report, after humiliating me ofcourse. Yes, I did google it and yes I went through all I could find from Google forums to GitHub issues. When the library/plugin author himself says that this feature is not yet available, don't expect me to develop it in 2 hours you dumbfuck.

And for the love of God, please stop changing the data model every single day and justify it with agile development. Think before making any changes to it. Ever heard of Join queries? Foreign keys? Or any other basic database concepts.
We reached a point where each branch in the repo had different data model. Not kidding. And we were a team of just 4 developers. Atleast inform us when you change models after discussing it with your shit for knowledge "senior" developer, so we don't have to redo it all over again. The channels on slack are not for sharing random articles only.

I am just waiting to complete my year here.

I should have known what I got myself into the day he asked me to remove the comments I had added to explain what my code does. Why you ask? Because "we don't write comments".

My first rant! let's see what is about!

Greetings from Venezuela, the oil and corruption country of South America...

Is it possible to become a good software developer just being constant, every day trying, even when you don't know what you're doing but, keep it up till you accomplish a goal? Or is anything more needed to succeed? I mean I'm trying to make my first desktop app and sometimes I feel like fck! I'm leaving this... I'm trying to dominate the software development process to get better a better job, in here or out there... But geez its hard...

Well, I want to believe that maybe someday I will become a good software developer...

First rant without thinking too much...

So lets start here, as i have been preparing myself for a while for that rant. I have been putting it off for a while, but today I had enough.
Fuck react-native and fuck facebook react-native team. Bunch of lazy incompetent twats.
The all amazing framework that suppose to be speed up your development process, since you don't have to compile your code after each change. SO FUCKING WHAT if the god damned framework is so fucking buggy and so fucking shit that you constantly have to fix build, dependancies etc issues. Every day since I work on this project that is using react-native I have to deal with some of the react fucked up behaviour. You got an issue ? don't worry google it just to find out that 100 other people had the same issue. Scroll through down the bottom of the page just to find out that facebook devs have closed the issue as resolved (without fucking fixing it) because there wasnt recent replies to the post. Are you fucking kidding me? It's ok thou, create a new issue just to get an automatic reply from the bot that locks the thread and keeps it locked till you update your React-native version to the newest one. You do that and guess fucking what? Their newest version fucks up remote debugging on iOS(fucking android been broke for over a year) so say good bye to debugging your js code. Documentation is fucking trash. You found a nice function like autoCaptialise on your text input? Great! Ah wait, its not fucking working, what is wrong? You google this just to fucking found out it, function never worked on android, so why the fuck you still have it exposed and still have it in your docs? You want to add package? So fucking ez, just type npm install <name of the package>. Ha! fuck you, you still have to go and add them fucking manually in gradle in android and in pod in xcode, because obviously react-native is a one big fucking bullshit. Oh and a scroll view is a fucking glorious highlight of that framework, try add some styling to it, you gonna have loads of fun. Fuck react-native. And fuck the fucking idiot who convinced my boss that framework is so fucking great and now I have to work on this shit. Sincerely Xamarin Developer.

developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.

manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).

spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.

... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )

finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code

get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.

we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"

PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )

WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.

This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?

I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )

Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏

Currently working on app that is about 10 years old at work. Here’s how today has gone:

Can’t run application locally because the process management engine doesn’t allow access locally, can’t access in development because process management engine doesn’t work here either, can run app in test but waiting on special server access to get the logs.

Make the request to security to access the server - they decline it telling me that the form I submitted is outdated and to submit a new one. Requires three approvals, am still waiting on them.

Every time I make a change and want to test, I have to commit the changes, wait for them to build. Release the changes, build the release project and then deploy it in bamboo.

I can’t wait for my new job to start.

A service had/has been logging hundreds of errors in the development environment and I reached out to the owning process mgr that the error was occurring and perhaps a good opportunity to log additional data to help troubleshoot the issue if the problem ever made its way to production. He responded saying the error was related to a new feature they weren't going to implement in the backing dev database (TL;DR), and they know it works in production (my spidey sense goes off).
They deployed the changes to production this morning and immediately starting throwing errors (same error I sent)
Mgr messaged me a little while ago "Did you make any changes to the documentation service? We're getting this error .."

50% sure someone misspelled something in a config, but only thing they are logging is 'Unable to parse document'. Nothing that indicates an issue with the service they're using.

The most obnoxious company process I've encountered so far is the nonexistent one.

This is what happened at my first professional job. PM and CTO quit after about a year, yet the top honchos were insistent of salvaging what was left of their "enterprise" software suite and putting us through a death march to try and continue development.

No plan, despite having a JIRA board filled with month-old backlog stories. No direction, because the CEO was now head of the project and wasn't in the office about 50% of the time, and our lead dev wasn't willing to take the reigns.

I wouldn't have minded trying a bunch of different things and having them fail. At least then we'd be doing something, you know? But instead we sat around, trying to squeeze any kind of goal from the higher ups, until I finally had enough and found a much better job.

It wasn't enough to convince me to give up software development. But boy, did it sure come close.

As I am working with WordPress for the really first time I am making horrible experiences now.

My client wants a simple submenu on the sidebar if the user is logged in else he want the login form to be there. Easy peezy done with php and just good old plain html. Maybe some JavaScript to make the login process asynchronous.
But fucking bitch - NO. As I found out after searching and digging. I have to create a menu in wp-admin first. Then add a menu-widget to the sidebar. And then install a plug-in to make the links only visible for logged in user. Wtf?

WordPress takes all the joy in doing web development for me. I won't do that anymore. I will force all new clients to use proper tools to make their shit work for them. And as I am the expert in this things I am the one who suggests the right tool.

Fuck this shit.

At a previous job, boss & owner of company would waste hours of my time to show me, at his own desk, every small detail of some random feature he had fallen in love with on some random webpage he found, while saying "I don't want to disrupt your plans or anything, this is just something to keep in the back of your minds, as this would be a really nice thing to have, even tho none of the clients have asked for this and I have asked no one else for a second opinion, and I will most likely ask you to remove this feature in the future because I will finally have realized it wasn't that good an idea anyway."

Ok dipshit, what the fuck are we supposed to do with this information? Every week from this moment on you will ask whether we have found the time to implement this feature, even though you are fully aware that our schedule has no room for random, unplanned features and that we are already not able to meet the unreasonable deadline you pulled out of your ass two weeks into a development process that would end up taking 8+ months.

We are already overworked, we already work hours upon hours of unpaid overtime, and yet you still think it reasonable to pull us away from our work every other fucking day to talk about random extra features you want added, but don't want added to the roadmap because you want no delays... Fuck you, fuck your toxic attitude, fuck your meetings where you spend half an hour complaining about features we are still in the process of developing the backend functionality for (on test servers) not having the right font colour for the text, and fuck your legacy desktop software originally written in COBOL that you now want moved to "the cloud".

I would rather be unemployed and live as a hobo on the streets with a "will code for food" sign than work for you ever again.

I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

I just have to rant...

7 months ago, I was still a pretty new iOS developer, but finally coming into my own. My boss gave me my first feature ever... a fully custom backend tweaker for our development builds, complete with text fields that devs and testers alike could fill in themselves for whatever they needed to test. I worked harder on that than I’ve ever worked on anything... and I got to make all the decisions on how it looked, behaved, what exactly the user saw/read... everything.

A month ago the most senior dev on my team was asked to update the tool to prepare for a backend migration to a new server. He was then hired to work for Apple, hurried to finish this task, and left forever. (He deserves it, we probably were slowing him down realistically. But that doesn’t forgive the following...)

Unfortunately, he thought it’d be a good idea to remove my entire custom backend tool in the process. Not sure why— maybe he thought it was legacy code or something. He must not have tested either, because the entire backend selector stopped working after that. But that was no problem— I could fix the pre-filled environment buttons just by updating a few values.

It’s the fact that he removed 100+ lines of my custom code from 3 separate classes (including entirely removing one of those classes), for no known reason, and now I have to completely rebuild the feature. Since it was entirely custom, it required no change for our migration in the first place. But he rewrote how the entire view works by writing an entirely new VC, so there is no chance I can just restore my work as it was written.

And in the shared class, he erased every line with the word “custom.” So, so many lines of hard work, now irrelevant and only visible in old defunct versions. And my boss has asked me to “just make it look how it did before the migration.”

I know it’s useless to be angry at a guy who’s long gone, but damn. I am having a real hard time convincing myself to redo all this work. He removed every trace, and all I can think is WHY DID YOU DO THAT YOU FUCKING MONSTER? IT WAS MY GREATEST WORK, AND NOBODY ASKED YOU TO DESTROY IT. THIS WAS NOT EVEN RELATED TO THE TASK YOU WERE GIVEN, AND NOW A SIMPLE TICKET TO RESTRUCTURE A TOOL HAS BECOME A MANDATE TO REBUILD IT FROM SCRATCH.

Thank you for being here, devRant. I would’ve gotten myself into deep trouble long ago if I didn’t have this safe place to blow off steam 🙏

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

Instead of accepting reality like a big man and acknowledging that making software with a cargo culted process that has no function in organizing the development work, the boss is insisting I'm to blame and wants me to "take responsibility". Taking responsibility my *****. I slay the dragon in its lair.

Since I'm leaving, I tried to give him some sincere advice, totally flipped him out.

#6 days left.

We have “adopted” Agile as our development process. Now I will be honest that I don’t know everything about Agile because I am very new to developing things in a professional setting. But the person who has been the advocate of Agile always starts his sentences with: “Whatever I have read about Agile..”

You can understand why I don’t get a good feeling/confidence regarding this adoption strategy. Things haven’t changed, just the presence of words like “DevOps”, “Agile”, etc has increased in the morning meetings.

Of course the shouting episodes all happened during the era I was doing WordPress dev.

So we were a team of consultants working on this elephant-traffic website. There were a couple of systems for managing content on a more modular level, the "best" being one dubbed MF, a spaghettified monstrosity that the 2 people who joined before me had developed.

We were about to launch that shit into production, so I was watching their AWS account, being the only dev who had operational experience (and not afraid to wipe out that macos piece of shit and dev on a real os).

Anyhow, we enable the thing, and the average number of queries per page load instantly jumps from ~30 (even vanilla WP is horrible) to 1000+. Instances are overloaded and the ASG group goes up from 4 to 22. That just moves the problem elsewhere as now the database server is overwhelmed.

Me: we have to enable database caching for this thing *NOW*

Shitty authors of the monstrosity (SAM): no, our code cannot be responsible for that, it's the platform that can't handle the transition.

Me: we literally flipped a single switch here and look at the jump in all these graphs.

SAM: nono, it's fine, just add more instances

Me: ARE YOU FUCKIN SERIOUS?
Me: - goes and enables database caching without any approvals to do so, explaining to mgmt. that failure to do so would impair business revenue due to huge loading times, so they have to live with some data staleness -

SAM: Noooo, we'll show you it's not our code.
SAM: - pushes a new release of the monstrosity that makes DB queries go above 2k / page load -

...

Tho on the bright side, from that point on I focused exclusively on performance, was building a nice fragment caching framework which made the site fly regardless of what shitty code was powering it, tuned the stack to no end and learned a ton of stuff in the process which allowed me to graduate from the tar pit of WP development.

Finally finished the longest ticket I've ever worked on in my life. The ticket title and description was a pretty simple and straightforward one: "Upgrade from PHP 7.4 to 8".

If it was only so simple in real life. Our application is mostly done with API Platform framework, which is based on top of Symfony framework which is based on top of PHP language.

Once I did PHP 7 => 8 upgrade I needed to upgrade API Platform 2 => 3. But of-course that couldn't have been done as before that I needed to upgrade from Symfony 5 => 6.

This all was literally an equivalent of touching into a wasp nest - it took me a bit over 5 months and 800 hours of work and there was literally not a single source file left untouched.

In the process of all of this I've ran into literally dozen undocumented feature-breaking changes, broken backwards-compatibility promises and inside out architectural changes - from both the frameworks and the language itself.

Upgrading just one major version of anything SHOULD NOT be so hard. And to top it all up just to think I will need to do this again in a year or two..

Experiences like these really set my hate for time-based model of releases and the state of today's development in general.

Fuck it all to Hell today. I'm cutting into my mostly night time Xanax script at noon.

My boss just made my coworker remove his own copyrighted photo from our Trello board for internal development. The board is only used by the two of us for internal projects. He thinks that our C-level execs would get onto him, not my coworker, for us having a fucking photo of the Boston city skyline on our own, internal, never fucking seen by anyone but us, Trello board. It has fucking animated gifs from Giphy on it, but my fellow dev can't use his own god damn photo as the background.

We're a fucking marketing department for home building materials not a blog using Getty images without permission for fuck's sake.

Then on top of that fucking Cache rules are fucking up on Drupal views and a webform decided to just stop fucking working for submissions after about 26,000 successful ones and it corrupted the last 500 or so in the process.

Oh and fuck Varnish.

Got another thing I'm interested in hearing from other developers.

What made you the developer you are today? Like what made you get into programming and was was a defining moment that changed your development process?

For me I started out making Minecraft mods because I was bored, spent most my time hard coding and suddenly discovered a way to do external assets and since then everything I've made is build to be individual standalone modules with easy to create user generated content.

I kinda hate to admit it but they were right. Data structures and algorithms are kinda the shit and you should try to learn and appreciate them. Not just so you’ll use them. But in that learning them helps you become a better problem solver.

There’s a self taught dev that my company works with for really bespoke applications. A senior dev that works with him and helps manage the development process told me that the dev in question doesn’t really know how to implement the finer details. Very telling indeed.

Today's my birthday... As usual, I worked in my office... At morning (approx 11:30AM) I received a call from my boss yelling cause a shit deadline and for some shit that I didn't sent to him (I already sent, the bastad was in vacation and didn't saw it)... His wife wished me happy birthday but the mother fucker didn't say a shit instead yelling during all day... Our relationship sucks cause he's a fucking bastard that doesn't know a shit of development process and I am done of his stupid shit... I fucking need to change my job!!!!

I’ve been a solo frontend developer for a couple of weeks now with critical enormous features and some bugs to get out the door by the end of next week.

On top of that, I got a backend bug to fix which is fine since I know the stack. The SQL that’s causing a bug is an obvious fix but as a FE dev I have no damn idea about DB structure.

I decide to setup local DB to see it for myself. So as a reasonable developer I look for docs to set it up since it sounds like quite a process after confirming with colleagues.

ANNNND... SURPRISE, the docs ARE NON EXISTENT unless you wanna call an outdated diagram a sufficient doc. Just so you understand the pain, we have 9 micro services, a weird db structure and only 5% is documented.

I requested help from my colleagues, but their answers were similar to docs with a follow up of “maybe you can document it after you set this up”. Barely stopped myself from asking “do I look like I have time for this crap? Why don’t you document it SINCE YOUR SETUP IS READY TO GO?”

So I’ve been at it for a couple of hours and I gave up. Will go back to frontend development since still a ton of shit to do anyway. Tomorrow I will attempt this again.

I basically need a select few contributors to speed up the development process. Python3 developers, testers and researchers are all welcome

So this happened a few days ago.

Me: (chilling like a mo'fucka then suddenly an email alert)

*Opens email and realises it's from a recruiter*

Recruiter: We are a venture-based startup out of LA, funded by a top VC. We have developed the first turnkey Serverless Swift platform for app development.

We are looking at expanding our team and we have a few different openings for remote and contract work.

Simply reply to this email with your resume attached.

Me: Thanks for reaching out and presenting me with this opportunity.

I plan on going back to school this January and for that reason I humbly have to bow out.

I will surely keep an eye out for {company_name}. The idea is rather interesting I should say.

*I go back to chilling like a mo'fucka*

*The next day I'm at work, I get an email from the same recruiter again*

Recruiter: Thank you for submitting your resume.

We are expanding our team and are looking for Swift rockstars to join the movement of bringing server-side Swift to the masses.

We were impressed by your resume and wanted to get to know you better. This survey is the first step in that process.

Please take a moment and complete. It should not take longer than 10 minutes.

Me: ...........................
*Calmly walks away from my desk to the bathroom*

WHAT FUCKING RESUME HAVE I SUBMITTED TO YOU? BITCH, MY EMAIL EXPLICITLY SAID: THANKS BUT NO THANKS...

You can't just force an applicant

Brazil is the country where companies spend the most to find out how much tax they should pay on a product. This process is so complicated that it consumes more than half of all software development professionals available. I'm one of them, and I can't stand working with this shit anymore. I have other projects, but I can never get rid of this niche that is more profitable. It sucks when even though you do what you love, you use it for such a stupid purpose, which is to calculate how much you should give to the government.

The disconnect between the hiring process and the actual job in software development is mind boggling.

They give you an online test in the first step. You can't open a new tab otherwise that's considered cheating.
Holy crap, it doesn't work like that in the actual job. Googling things is a SKILL every dev should possess.

I've started telling hiring managers I'm not interested anymore in the job the second they pass me an online test.

I created a YouTube channel for this exact reason. Go watch me code on camera so you get to know my coding skills better otherwise go fuck yourself.

For two projects, I have been in a solo work pattern, been a time bottleneck, and been irreplaceable on the projects. Four months ago I told management, "If anything happens to me these projects will be in trouble. I want to train a backup. I can't sustain this momentum. It isn't good for me, or for the success of these projects."

Four months later I still have no backup. They decided to diversity hire some new developers in the wrong area and now there is no money for a backup for me. I can't do all the work on both projects as a solo developer. I could have if I wasn't pushed into doing trial and error development on a poorly defined MS Dynamics API. Since the projects were behind schedule the customers lost confidence in the company to deliver. So the executives railroaded both project managers to save face.

Instead of addressing the development issues they did a bunch of other silly things. I got a job offer lined up and issued my resignation. That news absolutely exploded. After resigning my executive decided to say how awful I am in front of the customer in an attempt to save face for the company. The customer contacted the recently railroaded project manager and asks why. Former project manager tells customer, "You noticed how much faster the development of that part of the application went when he joined. You noticed how much better the quality of the project was. What do you think is happening? Do you think that a very good developer and an experienced project manager are to blame for the failures here?" So the executive is 13/10 pissed off because I may have accidentally struck a death blow for millions of dollars of business. I committed to taking care of the handover to the customer, and the company can't afford to get rid of me without completely losing confidence of the customer. The developers that I work with don't blame me at all and they are disgruntled that executive tried to character assassinate me and realize that it could have been them. I sense that I also may have initiated a developer mass-exodus. So the last few days have been the most stressful of my career but none of it is sticking to me because I followed all of the correct process.

You play stupid games you win stupid prizes.

Just had a customer into my shop. A regular chap but we've never really spoken before. Turns out he's a system architect for British Aerospace Engineering, a huge company up here in the north of England. So we were chatting about what I study and what he does and I said, if I come out with a first or solid/high 2:1 in my software engineering degree, would that qualify me for an entry level at your place, and he said no. Hrs part of the interviewing panel, and he wouldn't even consider people my age (23 at time of qualification) without at least having another job in the field, and said most places would be the same. So let's say I decided to not go in for anything Web development and focused on C++, is there any sort of way you guys know of gaining experience in the field without first having another job? As mentioned I do freelance Web development, but do you think having a large Github portfolio and such would help me stand a chance? I know I'll need to take a lower tier job straight out of uni in the field, but as something to help speed the process along...

1. It's gonna be more and more specialized - to the point where we'll equal or even outdo the medical profession. Even today, you can put 100 techs/devs into a room and not find two doing the same job - that number will rise with the advent of even more new fields, languages and frameworks.

2. As most end users enjoy ignoring all security instructions, software and hardware will be locked down. This will be the disadvantage of developers, makers and hackers equally. The importance of social engineering means the platform development will focus on protecting the users from themselves, locking out legitimate tinkerers in the process.

3. With the EU getting into the backdoor game with eTLS (only 20 years after everyone else realized it's shit), informational security will reach an all-time low as criminals exploit the vulnerabilities that the standard will certainly have.

4. While good old-fashioned police work still applies to the internet, people will accept more and more mass surveillance as the voices of reason will be silenced. Devs will probably hear more and more about implementing these or joining the resistance.

5. We'll see major leaks, both as a consequence of mass-surveillance (done incompetently and thus, insecurely) and as activist retaliation.

6. As the political correctness morons continue invading our communities and projects, productivity will drop. A small group of more assertive devs will form - not pretty or presentable, but they - we - get shit done for the rest.

7. With IT becoming more and more public, pseudo-knowledge, FUD and sales bullshit will take over and, much like we're already seeing it in the financial sector, drown out any attempt of useful education. There will be a new silver-bullet, it will be useless. Like the rest. Stick to brass (as in IDS/IPS, Firewall, AV, Education), less expensive and more effective.

8. With the internet becoming a part of the real life without most people realizing it and/or acting accordingly, security issues will have more financial damages and potentially lethal consequences. We've already seen insulin pumps being hacked remotely and pacemakers' firmware being replaced without proper authentication. This will reach other areas.

9. After marijuana is legalized, dev productivity will either plummet or skyrocket. Or be entirely unaffected. Who cares, I'll roll the next one.

10. There will be new JS frameworks. The world will turn, it will rain.

A few years ago, i had a task to implement a webservice of an insurance-company into our .NET Development.

The security requirements of this insurance-company webservice were top notch.
As a client you had to build a request that used a negotiated certificate, canonical header structures, security timestamp, a secret token in header, ...

To configure all this stuff via web.config WCF was pure pain in the ass.

After many phonecalls and emails, i finally managed to meet all security requirements to send a valid request.

First, i didn't recognized my breakthrough, because my client still had thrown exceptions while calling the insurance-webservice.

Why was that?

The exception told me on the most possible gentle way, that .Net isn't able to process an unsecured response, when there was a secured request before.

So there was top notch security for requesting, but dumbass unsecured responding with all the precious customer information.

*epicfacepalmnuclearexplosionfollowing*

I even had to raise the. Net Version of our. Net client, because i wasn't able to configure that it is allowed to process an unsecured response after using a secured request.

Whyyyyyyy?!!?!!1el even!?!

As a junior dev from a sysadmin and security background, this is a list of software development concepts I never seemed to truly understand but hope to(rated from most intimidating to least):

1) Frontend web development and all the huge world of javascript frameworks and tools. - It's more overwhelming than the political geography of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages.

2) Machine Learning, Deep Learning and A.I- too much math that fucks with my brain.

3) low-level programming(kernel,drivers) - sounds extremely interesting but the code in assembly/C/C++ looks like Linear A Minoan hieroglyphics.

4) Rx(insert language here) - I never get why it is useful or why someone invented this. Seems interesting though.

5) Code Reflection - sounds like Thelemic magick.

6) Packaging, automation, build tools, devops, CI, Testing -seems too complicated. I just want to run an executable at the client or make a web app that does something. Why all this process?

Fuck windows!

Now that I have your attention. My problem is with "IAR embedded workbench", not so much with windows but I'll get to that.
I've used that IDE for a few years.. 2 years ago. Since then I apparently forgot how to even create a project from scratch with adding all the necessary libraries and all that.

My initial deal with a client was to give them a solution using whatever tools I deem necessary. As I recently moved to linux and IAR is not available for that os.. and I also enjoyed working with CLion and PyCharm which Are available I decide to use CLion to write my C project.
A problem was that to compile code for microcontrollers I need tools unsupported by CLion.. oh well. I can do all the compilation and uploading of the code through terminal .. so I make a bash script that does it all. Super convenient. Development is going well and all.. until they ask me for the project.

I sent them the project so that they can see my progress. They can't do shit with what I gave them because they don't even have make on their machines let alone the compiler. All they have is IAR. But the guy that wants to see the code is not really a programmer.. he is a hardware specialist so I can't expect him to do anything more than use what he knows. He doesn't need or want to learn more right now.

So I go to windows and start porting my code to an IAR project and 2 days later I am still stuck with it. FUCK. Not only was the installation process horrible but the tools I wanted to install additionally did not work as promised either.

I know it took me about 2 days to setup all I needed on linux but I was enjoying it every step of the way. While this garbage is frustrating me so much. The fact that I used to do it before adds to the pain.

I am this close to telling them to just look at my code in notepad and I can setup a vm for them in which they can compile it if they really really need to.

If they just told me from the very start that they want me to work with IAR that would have been fine. I would have never seen the easier way and would have gladly figure it out then. Not now.

Just my luck that I get the best wk76 story ever on wk77. Either way:

So some of you may know that the current project I am on has some shared code components with one of the other projects in the product line. And we have some differences in our processes. This leads to a lot of fun.

So, I was working on converting one of our shared components into a more modern language. It would save us time, money, and sanity by allowing us to more easily maintain our product. Sounds like a win-win right? That's what I thought. Until I had a meeting with the other team. THEN THE QUESTIONS ROLLED IN. Well who is going to integrate our product with yours? (You?) Are you changing the interface? (Not really.) Are you going to generate a design document? (Absolutely not especially since the interface isn't changing for the most part.) Well you are changing the type of one parameter in one method from an undocumented unmanaged type to a well documented managed type that we control. Shouldn't you generate a document to document that change? (Again absolutely not.)

So first they basically browbeat my lead into putting me in charge of their integration effort. Its fine though, as they gave me an account to charge. However, when I was finally able to get a machine with their build environment on it (at least two months later), they then told me that that account was closing and I had to wait until next quarter. So fuck me right. And because of their process I would break them if I were to check my changes in.

So fast forward to today. They are translating some shared components for the same reason that we are. However, they are changing code that while shared is technically "ours" and that will DEFINITELY break us if they do this work since this is the code that controls our algorithms. And while we have a fault tolerant process, or at least more fault tolerant than the other group's, we are currently doing a huge amount of development in the part they want to change. And when we ask them "who is going to do this work to integrate our product with your changes?" they stare at us slack jawed. Like "um, you right? it doesn't affect us." Like MOTHERFUCKERS!!! YOU LITERALLY JUST FOIST ALL THIS WORK ON US TO INTEGRATE WITH YOU BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE PEOPLE TO SUPPORT IT!!! BUT YOU CAN PAY THIS GUY FOR SIX MONTHS TO DO ALL THIS WORK THAT WILL BREAK US BUT CAN'T SPARE HIM TO INTEGRATE WITH US!?!?!? EVEN IF WE'RE PAYING HIM AND NOT YOU!?!?!

I will let you know how this goes when we have the discussion. I am drinking right now because it it easier and better for my emotional and physical health than bum fights.

Old story, happened some way back. I worked part-time for a small web development company that did between other things something called SharePoint development, basically .net webforms with shit glitter on top of it.

The most weird part of it, was the fact that we were working on vms that hosted the app, it was our dev, test and staging environment, as well as were we showed the client the polished turd.

Did I say that it was on a vm? Well it was on a remote vm, that each of use had access to it, through our domain accounts, and they couldn't configure the windows server to accept more than two or three users at once to be connected.

That was our test enviroment and dev enviroment, sooo showing the app to the client meant for the rest of us to not write any code because it might crash or get stuck.

The app was accessible and discoverable by url and through google search from outside, I dont think that should have been allowed.

The most disastrous part was that we had NO source versioning whatsoever, just plain old copy and paste in different folders.
Deploying to client meant remoting to the clients host or whatever it was, and manually copying the source files

If someone wanted to debug the application you had to shout, and you also could hear it, in the office: "I'm debugging!" or "I'm deploying!". Because we were on the same machine, there was only one process with the server and it meant that if you debug or deployed it would block it for the others.

Should I talk about code quality? Maybe not.

The worst part of being a dev? Working in teams.

And I don't mean that in the "I'm the best ninja code wizard in the whole world and you're all holding me back" kinda way. I'm thinking more in the lines of someone who has to deal with that kind of attitude on a daily basis. As someone who recently was put in a leading position in a dev team, this is by far one of the worst experiences that came with it.

Some examples?
- One dev completely changed the naming scheme for variables in a class he worked on for one. single. bug fix. His reason? He just didn't like it!
- Another one noticed that data he was supplied with was not in the specified format. Instead of flagging this with the project leads, he just rewrote his parser to fit the data. A couple of weeks later the supplier noticed the error, fixed the format and suddenly everyone wondered why the software failed processing the data.
- Or that one senior dev, that just refuses to accept changes because "it was always done like this and it worked" No, it didn't. That's why it was changed!

Once a dev team reaches a certain size, people need to realize that stuff like coding rules and process guidelines are not there to annoy them but to help the whole team work as efficient as possible. I don't care how good a programmer you are, if you can't check your ego you don't belong in any kind of team-oriented development project!

Here comes lots of random pieces of advice...

Ain't no shortcuts.

Be prepared, becoming a good programmer (there are lots of shitty programmers, not so many good ones) takes lots of pain, frustration, and failure. It's going to suck for awhile. There will be false starts. At some point you will question whether you are cut out for it or not. Embrace the struggle -- if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.

Remember that in 2021 being a programmer is just as much (maybe even moreso) about picking up new things on the fly as it is about your crystalized knowledge. I don't want someone who has all the core features of some language memorized, I want someone who can learn new things quickly. Everything is open book all the time. I have to look up pretty basic stuff all the time, it's just that it takes me like twelve seconds to look it up and digest it.

Build, build, build, build, build. At least while you are learning, you should always be working on a project. Don't worry about how big the project is, small is fine.

Remember that programming is a tool, not the end goal in and of itself. Nobody gives a shit how good a carpenter is at using some specialized saw, they care about what the carpenter can build with that specialized saw.

Plan your build. This is a VERY important part of the process that newer devs/programmers like to skip. You are always free to change the plan, but you should have a plan going on. Don't store your plan in your head. If you plan exists only in your head you are doing it wrong. Write that shit down! If you create a solid development process, the cognitive overhead for any project goes way down.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, especially to the experts you are learning from. They are good because they have done the thing that you are struggling with at least a thousand times.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself today to yourself yesterday. This will make it seem like you haven't learned anything and aren't on the move. Compare yourself to yourself last week, last month, last year.

Have experienced programmers review your code. Don't be afraid to ask, most of us really really enjoy this (if it makes you feel any better about the "inconvenience", it will take a mid-level waaaaay less time to review your code that it took for you to write it, and a senior dev even less time than that). You will hate it, it will suck having someone seem like they are just ripping your code apart, but it will make you so much better so much faster than just relying on your own internal knowledge.

When you start to be able to put the pieces together, stay humble. I've seen countless devs with a year of experience start to get a big head and talk like they know shit. Don't keep your mouth closed, but as a newer dev if you are talking noise instead of asking questions there is no way I will think you are ready to have the Jr./Associate/Whatever removed from your title.

Don't ever. Ever. Ever. Criticize someone else's preferred tools. Tooling is so far down the list of what makes a good programmer. This is another thing newer devs have a tendency to do, thinking that their tool chain is the only way to do it. Definitely recommend to people alternatives to check out. A senior dev using Notepad++, a terminal window, and a compiler from 1977 is probably better than you are with the newest shiniest IDE.

Don't be a dick about terminology/vocabulary. Different words mean different things to different people in different organizations. If what you call GNU/Linux somebody else just calls Linux, let it go man! You understand what they mean, and if you don't it's your job to figure out what they mean, not tell them the right way to say it.

One analogy I like to make is that becoming a programmer is a lot like becoming a chef. You don't become a chef by following recipes (i.e. just following tutorials and walk-throughs). You become a chef by learning about different ingredients, learning about different cooking techniques, learning about different styles of cuisine, and (this is the important part), learning how to put together ingredients, techniques, and cuisines in ways that no one has ever showed you about before.

I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.

Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:

//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO

# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO

# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO

# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO

# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO

# Do not read the documentation. YOLO

# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO

# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)

# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO

# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO

# You always use production as an environment. YOLO

# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO

# Don’t indent. YOLO

# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO

# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO

# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO

# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO

So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.

*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.

*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.

*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.

*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.

*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.

Send the dev a request for a design before they do a delicate process. They send back some mess done in MSPaint and a ton of select statements, with no context or explanation.

Send back an example of what they need to work through. Get back a response saying that the previous spec was just a draft, and once they complete development they’ll complete the design.

Why would I want a design once it was too late? What would be the point?

Yesterday I had a conversation with a mobile app development company to make a clone of the current contacts app. 3 points from 10 mins conversations;

1. They offered me for a working prototype in just 35% of actual app development cost. They'll take 15 days to work on that. ( Me: "Do you mean the prototype that I created in 40 mins using invision and sent you its video recording?" after a little argument they agreed that they meant the same.)

2. They said they will have to embed the complete search engine in the app. (Really!! we never name searching in DB as "search engine")

3. They said they'll take approx 15 days in UI and UX. (Me: "will you change the designs I shared?" They: "It is our internal process, we can't give much detail on that")

Been working on a new project for the last couple of weeks. New client with a big name, probably lots of money for the company I work for, plus a nice bonus for myself.

But our technical referent....... Goddammit. PhD in computer science, and he probably. approved our project outline. 3 days in development, the basic features of the applications are there for him to see (yay. Agile.), and guess what? We need to change the user roles hierarchy we had agreed on. Oh, and that shouldn't be treated as extra development, it's obviously a bug! Also, these features he never talked about and never have been in the project? That's also a bug! That thing I couldn't start working on before yesterday because I was still waiting the specs from him? It should've been ready a week ago, it's a bug that it's not there! Also, he notes how he could've developes it within 40 minutes and offered to sens us the code to implement directly in our application, or he may even do so himself.... Ah, I forgot to say, he has no idea on what language we are developing the app. He said he didn't care many times so far.

But the best part? Yesterday he signales an outstanding bug: some data has been changed without anyone interacting. It was a bug! And it was costing them moneeeeey (on a dev server)! Ok, let's dig in, it may really be a bug this time, I did update the code and... Wait, what? Someone actually did update a new file? ...Oh my Anubis. HE did replace the file a few minutes before and tried to make it look like a bug! ..May as well double check. So, 15 minutes later I answer to his e-mail, saying that 4 files have been compromised by a user account with admin privileges (not mentioning I knee it was him)... And 3 minutes later he answered me. It was a message full of anger, saying (oh Lord) it was a bug! If a user can upload a new file, it's the application's fault for not blocking him (except, users ARE supposed to upload files, and admins have been requestes to be able to circumvent any kind of restriction)! Then he added how lucky I was, becausw "the issue resolved itself and the data was back, and we shouldn't waste any more yime.on thos". Let's check the logs again.... It'a true! HE UPLOADED THE ORIGINAL FILES BACK! He... He has no idea that logs do exist? A fucking PhD in computer science? He still believes no one knows it was him....... But... Why did he do that? It couldn't have been a mistake. Was he trying to troll me? Or... Or is he really that dense?

I was laughing my ass of there. But there's more! He actually phones my boss (who knew what had happened) to insult me! And to threaten not dwell on that issue anymore because "it's making them lose money". We were both speechless....

There's no way he's a PhD. Yet it's a legit piece of paper the one he has. Funny thing is, he actually manages to launch a couple of sort-of-nationally-popular webservices, and takes every opportunity to remember us how he built them from scratch and so he know what he's saying... But digging through google, you can easily find how he actually outsurced the development to Chinese companies while he "watched over their work" until he bought the code

Wait... Big ego, a decent amount of money... I'm starting to guess how he got his PhD. I also get why he's a "freelance consultant" and none of the place he worked for ever hired him again (couldn't even cover his own tracks)....

But I can't get his definition of "bug".
If it doesn't work as intended, it's a bug (ok)
If something he never communicated is not implemented, it's a bug (what.)
If development has been slowed because he failed to provide specs, it's a bug (uh?)
If he changes his own mind and wants to change a process, it's a bug it doesn't already work that way (ffs.)
If he doesn't understand or like something, it's a bug (i hopw he dies by sonic diarrhoea)

I'm just glad my boss isn't falling for him... If anything, we have enough info to accuse him of sabotage and delaying my work....

Ah, right. He also didn't get how to publish our application we needes access to the server he wantes us to deploy it on. Also, he doesn't understand why we have acces to the app's database and admin users created on the webapp don't. These are bugs (seriously his own words). Outstanding ones.

Just..... Ffs.

Also, sorry for the typos.

I’m currently working with a devops team in the company to migrate our old ass jboss servers architecture to kubernetes.

They’ve been working in this for about a year now, and it was supposed to be delivered a few months back, no one knew what’s going on and last week they manage to have something to see at least.

I’ve never seen anything so bad in my short life as a developer, at the point that the main devops guy can’t even understand his own documentation to add ci/cd to a project.

It goes from trigger manually pipelines in multiple branches for configuration and secrets, a million unnecessary env variables to set, to docker images lacking almost all requisites necessary to run the apps.

You can clearly see the dude goes around internet copy pasting stuff without actually understanding what going on behind as every time you ask him for the guts of the architecture he changes the topic.

And the worst of all this, as my team is their counterpart on development we’ve fighting for weeks to make them understand that is impossible the proceed with this process with over 100 apps and 50+ developers.

Long story short, last two weeks I’ve been fixing the “dev ops” guy mess in terms of processes and documentation but I think this is gonna end really bad, not to sound cocky or anything but developers level is really low, add docker and k8s in top of that and you have a recipe for disaster.

Still enjoying as I have no fault there, and dude got busted.

When your forced to change your "Development Process" on a weekly basis because everyone has a better idea

Hello world,
at my current job at a "big company" our development process sucks, something is on fire at all times, there are hundreds of dependency issues, it's so bad that I'm struggling to find motivation.

Yet they pay me well.. Yaay for big companies that refuse to change when provided with feedback on how to improve things.

I always write a Google Doc before I start developing a feature to help me think what and how should I implement it and so I can share it with the team.

It is possibly the most frustrating process of the whole development cycle because Word and Google Docs still manage to make it a fuckin ordeal to insert a simple image without bombing the whole text to hell. How is it that after almost 30 years of history it is still shit to write a document?

Software Development Process

0. I can't fix this
1. Crisis of confidence
2. Questions career
3. Questions life
4. Oh it was a typo, cool

*Not my original content, but it made me smile and I need one more point on this uncomfortably hot day

I've been trying for the last 3 months to land my first development job. I have a good (over 3 years) amount of experience, but no industry experience and no degree. So it's been a uphill battle. Currently working at a call center making garbage and most of my time and energy is invested into this. Currently am not mobile so most of my money is being geared towards that. It's just frustrating to see all these over glorified job postings that ask so much for just entry levels. I haven't even gotten a damn interview, I feel like in houston it's either you have a degree or you are not even considered for just a fucking interview. If I can get at least one they will be able to see my drive, persistence and skills that have been developed overtime. And fuck recruiters, have been interfacing with them over linkedin and not one of them seemed eager (initially yes) to land me an interview. Most of these fucks don't even fucking understand the technology or buzzwords that are on the job posting. If I were a recruiter I would at least put a little research into what the different technologies are so the process will seem less abstract. The tech will have more meaning and maybe I would be able to get a better success rate with clients if I knew what was really required of them. Not just looking at xyz and seeing if client has experience with them, but really see if they know what they are; that way I will have more confidence sending them into an interview. But of course that's not how it works. "Oh yeah Java and javascript are very similar"... get the fuck out of here.

So I started working at a large, multi billion dollar healthcare company here in the US, time for round 2,(previously I wasn't a dev or in IT at all). We have the shittiest codebase I have ever laid eyes on, and its all recent! It's like all these contractors only know the basics of programming(i'm talking intro to programming college level). You would think that they would start using test driven development by now, since every deployment they fix 1 thing and break 30 more. Then we have to wait 3 months for a new fix, and repeat the cycle, when the code is being used to process and pay healthcare claims.

Then some of my coworkers seem to have decided to treat me like I'm stupid, just because I can't understand a single fucking word what they're saying. I have hearing loss, and your mumbling and quiet tone on top of your think accent while you stop annunciated your words is quite fucking hard to understand. Now I know english isn't your first language and its difficult, I know, mine is Spanish. But for the love of god learn to speak the fuck up, and also learn to write actual SQL scripts and not be a fucking script kiddie you fucking amateur. The business is telling you your data is wrong because you're trying to find data that exists is complex and your simple select * from table where you='amateur with "10years" experience in SQL' ain't going to fucking cut it. Learn to solve problems and think analytically instead of copy fucking pasta.

just as Erik Meijer said scrum is the most stupid shit in modern development process. I worked in an organization hires ppl as full time scrum master, which is joke. each day the asks what did u finished yesterday and how long it need to finish the task assigned to u. btw the scrum masters know nothing about programming. come on man how can u finish any serious shit in one day and who cares how much shit others finished. each week just attending those freaking meetings without coding. each programmer are assigned at least 5 bosses, and what the fuck is product manager doing, it's not adding indirection can solve anything.

I'm relatively new to the whole development and stuff, so I have no idea how usual process goes.

So when my project moved onto closed beta, I thought I could rest a bit.

NOPE.

Apparently half the shit I've done sucks so much and I need to debug the shit out of it.

Bless the testers.

Welcome to our development process! Where we come up with a project idea when we have two upcoming projects, have a late night writing an 16 page design document, to later cancel the project two months later.

Started opening tabs in Firefox Quantum like all you devs do during development. All of a sudden, firefox gave up and stopped loading any new websites.

Bookmarked all the tabs and closed ff. Clicked on again, the old process appearantly is stuck, so it showed a warning, closed the old one and opened it again.

Alright fine, opened all the tabs from bookmarks again. Firefox is again stuck. Realised some of the tabs might be acting up. Just to double check if it really is those tabs, decided to open them in chrome.

It opened fine and I continued to browse in Chrome without any hiccups.

:/

So I got everything done that I'm supposed to this month. Now usually I would try to get ahead of the rush. However, since now even upper management doesn't trust me to do my job I figure I will adopt the same development process as the rest of the group: do nothing for the first three weeks of the month and in the last week hastily make excuses for why nothing is done while doing just enough to justify my continued employment.

We need to update the slang "script kiddie" to "prompt enginot" or something.

So my boss's boss or someone even higher up drank the generative AI kool-aid and hired a 40-something kid to generate images for the marketing teams (or something like it).
Naturally, things soon went to shit.
The bloke already left, having staid less than six months on the job.
Guess who got to handle all the shit-is-currently-on-fire the kiddie left behind?

First impression: apparently, muggles tried to slak him some very broad descriptions of what they needed, and at first he actually tried to summarize those bark-speech pseudo-words into an actual prompt.
It does not seem to have gone for too long, though.
After users requested changes to the AI outputs, he would update the prompts, all right. And the process seemed to go fast enough... until reaching near-to-completion status.
Then users would request the tiniest changes to the AI output...
And the bloke couldn't do it.
Seriously. Some things were as simple as "we need this slider to go all the way up to 180% instead of 100%" on a lame dashboard and *kid. could. not. do. it.*.

In many cases he literally just gave up and copied the slak history into the AI prompt. No dice.

Bloke couldn't code a print('hello world') into a jupyter notebook cell, that's what i'm saying.
Apparently, he was "self taught", too. And was hired to "speed up the process of generating visual aids for usage in meetings and presentations". But then "the budget for this position was considered excessive" (meaning: shit results from a raw idea some executive crapped some day) and "the position was expanded to include the development of Business Inteligence Dashboards and Data Apps".

So now it is up to me (and my CRIMINALLY UNDERPAID team) to clean up his mess and maintain/fix/deprecate DOZENS of SHODDILY DESIGNED and MOSTLY USELESS but QUITE ACTIVE "data vis" PIECES OF SHIT.

Fuck "AI prompters", fucking snake oil script kiddies.

Error Driven Development™
Join the hype and fail with a process - for science!

Anyone here uses Contentful and Gatsby? Can you please share your experience? How hard was it to integrate them? How did they improve you development process? What problems did you encounter?

Went really well through development questions, some basic process stuff... generally a really good interview, only thing that seemed at all unusual was the guy conducting it seemed very young to be holding interviews for such a senior role.

Then we were chatting casually before we wrapped up, I mentioned something about my kids. The guy immediately went stiff as a plank, rushed through mumbled pleasantries to get me out the door, and I got a rejection email 25 minutes later.

It was horrific but I'm guessing I dodged quite the bullet!

I work with statistics/data analysis and web development. I study these subjects for almost a decade and now I have 4 years of practical experience.

This information is on my LinkedIn profile and from time to time tech recruiters contact me wanting to have an interview. I always accept because I find it a great way to practice interviews and talking in English, as it isn't my native language.

A remark that I always make to my colleagues wanting to start doing data analysis related work is that it may seem similar to development, but it's not. When you develop, your code work or not. It may be ugly, it may be full of security problems, but you almost always have a clear indication if things are functioning. It's possible to more or less correlate experience using a programming language with knowing how to develop.

Data science is different. You have to know what you are doing because the code will run even if you are doing something totally wrong. You have to know how to interpret the results and judge if they make sense. For this the mathematics and theory behind is as important as the programming language you use.

Ok, so I go to my first interview for a data science position. Then I discover that I will be interview by... a psychologist. A particularly old one. Yeah. Great start.

She proceeds to go through the most boring checklist of questions I ever saw. The first one? "Do you know Python?". At this point I'm questioning myself why I agreed to be interviewed. A few minutes later, a super cringy one: "Can you tell me an example of your amazing analytics skills?". I then proceed to explain what I wrote in the last two paragraphs to her. At this point is clear that she has no idea of what data science is and the company probably googled what they should expect from a candidate.

20 minutes later and the interview is over. A few days later I receive an email saying that I was not selected to continue with the recruitment process because I don't have enough experience.

In summary: an old psychologist with no idea on how data science works says I don't have experience on the subject based on a checklist that they probably google. The interview lasted less than 30 minutes.

Two weeks later another company interviews me, I gave basically the same answers and they absolutely liked what they heard. Since that day I stopped trying to understand what is expected from you on interviews.

Ugh am so done with linux.

I dualbooted ubuntu 16.4 LTS alongside win10 on my new laptop 3 years ago. Back then , the whole os and kernel stuff were new for me, but once i understood how things work in it, i always found linux to be a superior alternative for doing any development related task than windows.
The way terminal gives us sheer raw power to handle services and applications ourselves makes everything easy in linux.

Wanna run a lamp server? Install all parts by yourselves. Problems with the lamp server? You are just 1 command away to know which service/package is causing issue. Some python module fucked up? You can go on checking every package present anywhere on your disk. No permissions? Sudo.

But recently i got so much fed up of its gui. I have gone from 16.4 to 18.4 to 20.4 , but no version seems to handle multiple gui s/w running parallely .
I usually have the requirement to open 2-3 windows of chrome with 30-40 tabs, 1-2 projects of Android studio and studio emulator. But this shit blows even with just 1 project open on studio and nothing else! The even the keyboard and mouse gets stuck when i studio is making a built.
And don't get me started on how slow my system becomes when switching b/w AS and chrome :''( . Maybe there's issue with the dual boot or because i gave very large swap/root partitions when i first dualbooted or something else , but i am in so much pain :/

Finally i went back to win10 a month ago and was a little surprised to find that it sucks a little less now. Aside from the ugly forceful updates, it has been a breeze for working . The builds take longer time (fuck windows defender), but My Android studio (and everything else) does not lag when switching between multiple processes. I even once ran an emulator instance and it was still working fine . The process management of windows is very good.

I have heard that mac is kind of in middle of the 2 and better than both providing rich process management and powerful terminal commands . Waiting for the day when i have enough money(or no longer require my kidney) to buy and maintain a MacBook :/

Working on an app to sync data between our ticketing system and an API a vendor made for us to interact with their ticketing system. I put off working on it for months, mostly because I had mountains of other "urgent" things that jumped in my face, but also because I needed to design the whole thing, and I really have to get into the right frame of mind for that kind of creative organization.

Today I dove into it. I built the JSON to submit, given whatever variables are necessary, and figured out after a while that the smartest way to handle this is not to search for an existing internal ticket, but to have the creation of the internal ticket set a flag for an automated sync process to check when it runs.

It's going to be much easier when I get that built, but now, knowing that, I'm daunted enough that I'm procrastinating. Think of something, chart it out with notes in a text editor, procrastinate.That is probably like 95% of the time I spend in "development."

so if i get this correctly :

1. mongodb( community server) is going to create some files in my system which will be called "databases/collections/document bullshit via its own special process called mongod (similar to mysql , but ok)

2. my python flask app is going to connect to it via its official driver pymongo (which could be used directly)
3. mongoengine is a library (more of a wrapper on pymongo) providing "easy ways for connecting mongodb via pymongo" (which again could be used directly)

4. flask-mongoengine is library (more of a wrapper on mongoengine providing "easy ways for connecting mongodb via mongoengine via pymongo" (which again could be used directly)

5. flask-pymongo is some another bullshit library/wrapper that took away 6hours of mine which again is "A FUCKING WRAPPER PROVIDING EASY WAYS FOR CONNECTING TO MONGODB VIA PYMONGO"

seriously, fuck web development. Why can't the original driver (i.e pymongo from mongodb devs) could have simpler wrappers? and why does my fucking tutorial instructor had to use the most fucking rarely used flask-mongoengine (which i accidently read as flask-pymongo and got f**ked) to teach newbies? fucking day wasted trying to understand this crap.

I don't like monnopolies, but its somewhat good that the mobile environment is still in the hands of nononsense players like google and oracle(java) . atleast we don't have people releasing wrapper over wrapper over wrapper and then fighting about which wrapper is better to use.
Like , even when devs started cmplaining that android dbs are too difficult to understand, google themselves created an actively supported wrapper that shutted down the fight over which wrapper to use(sqldelight, realm,sql bright etc)

So I had this thought all of a sudden. (Without any drug in my system)

Why are we still developing same old systems, softwares and web applications till now?

Websites, games and creativity involved development are understandable because people have different taste.

But workflow and process are supposed to be precise, standardized and consistent. No?

Is it because businesses are operating in various ways? Then again why?

Shit. I should stop my thinking at this level. 😑

Old old organization makes me feel like I'm stuck in my career. I'm hanging out with boomer programmers when I'm not even 30.

I wouldn't call myself an exceptional programmer. But the way the organization does it's software development makes me cringe sometimes.

1. They use a ready made solution for the main system, which was coded in PL/SQL. The system isn't mobile friendly, looks like crap and cannot be updated via vendor (that you need to pay for anyway) because of so many code customizations being done to it over the years. The only way to update it is to code it yourself, making the paid solutions useless
2. Adding CloudFlare in the middle of everything without knowing how to use it. Resulting in some countries/networks not being able to access systems that are otherwise fine
3. When devs are asked to separate frontend and backend for in house systems, they have no clue about what are those and why should we do it (most are used to PHP spaghetti where everything is in php&html)
4. Too dependent on RDBMS that slows down development time due to having to design ERD and relationships that are often changed when users ask for process revisions anyway
5. Users directly contact programmers, including their personal whatsapp to ask for help/report errors that aren't even errors. They didn't read user guides
6. I have to become programmer-sysadm-helpdesk-product owner kind of thing. And blamed directly when theres one thing wrong (excuse me for getting one thing wrong, I have to do 4 kind of works at one time)
7. Overtime is sort of expected. It is in the culture

If you asked me if these were normal 4 years ago I would say no. But I'm so used to it to the point where this becomes kinda normal. Jack of all trades, master of none, just a young programmer acting like I was born in the era of PASCAL and COBOL

Got my first dev job last November and I've been working as a contractor for the government. Supposed to be on a 4 year contract job, just found out that out project is being pulled in September. Is this common for federal contract work? My Human Resources team haven't been very helpful in explaining the process to me. Is private sector development any less volatile? I don't have a mentor or anybody I can bounce questions off so sorry if this is more or less common knowledge :/

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?

For higher grade software development it should be mandatory to understand the big picture of problems...

If you are working for a online shop, you might want to ask marketing, what they want to sell, before they do it

You might want to ask billing, what customers buy, before you spend time on unnecessary features

You want to ask billing and legals, how they do fraud detection and you want to get the it security fellows on board too.

If marketing and billing knows, that maintenance needs time and money, they can calculate with that. If security knows, that some fails will be catched, no matter if you fix it in software or not they can adapt their priorities.

You might want to know something about process optimisation... Factories of car parts have spent years on such problems - learn from them.

Just had the worst exam of my life today in system development at my university. This cock sucking bitch of a sensor claimed I was wrong in various assumptions about Extreme Programming. Such as: saying XP is an incremental process and not iterative. Claiming UP is more iterative than XP and that various analogies about what iterative means compared to incremental was wrong and even disrupting me while I was talking. Mind you I've been studying these subjects closely the last week and have been reading most of The Pragmatic Programmer to verify various things she disagreed upon. Result grade? In the middle of the fucking scale. Fuck this shit. I'm just glad the grade won't appear on my final graduation papers. And yes, I'm a perfectionist when it comes to this and programming, so if I'm in the wrong please correct me.

This 3 day weekend couldn’t come at a better time! Today has done everything it can to delay it and everything has been a superb annoyance!

It started off with our internal systems going down, a frustratingly tedious project proposal process, our phones went down, off the wall calls to support all day causing them to ask me junk.

As a parting gift the pending windows update and it completely crashed my development VM and corrupted my install of virtual box. I had planed in only working a half day, but worked 6.5 hours, hit traffic al over. Was late to the event.

Not I get here and there’s a bunch of smokers outside and I could reallllllly use a drag. But I’m not gonna. 😒

Just ready to kick back and do non computer things til Tuesday. 😎

A bit late for wk61 but here goes:

Does anyone have any advice for an older dev (just turned 50) during job hunting?

One of the devs on my current project was let go some years a go, and hasn't found a new job yet.

He keeps applying to positions, but keeps getting rejected and being told "we went with another candidate".

Choosing the young buck who will leave in a year over a older dev who still can contribute for ten years seems like the most common descicion.

I hired him on the current project I'm doing for a client, which is on iOS, and I've thought him swift and the general process of development on ios. And he's taking to it really well :)

I hope this will better his chances, but the current client won't have the resources to hire someone full time now.

Finally done with school. It were three years of ups and downs.

The downs were plenty and mostly in the way school material was organized.

We've spend years learning web development where the course should have been more broad (application development)

So by the time my first internship period of half a year approached I searched for a company outside of web development and ended up at a company which did serious games using unity C#. Those were the best months of my 3 years. I managed to push the company into a direction for a future even though it was reletively small.

After that I took up .net and got the MTA C# Fundamentals certificate from microsoft itself. (School offered the exam).

Then there was the 2nd internship.
Worked for a company who sold intranets to other enterprises and I developed a mobile app which connected a user's phone to their account on their intranet. Allowing to seperate work and their private life.

That project was fun but the company itself was terrible. 4 people at the office and the owner treated us as objects rather than people. The company was too small for such an environment and most of them were irritated 9 times out of 10. Glad to be rid of them.

Now I'm in the process of looking for a job and have a meeting with a recruiter tomorrow

Wish me luck.

Ever suggest improvements and get shot down at every turn? I was discussing automating our release process today and suggesting that instead of having to do everything manually and babysit the build, we should let Jenkins deal with releasing and the attitude was that we shouldn't even try because we'd spend more time maintaining the automation and wouldn't gain anything. Obviously I disagree, but it seems like I'm always coming up against shit like this.

Our requirements gathering is another point of contention; I think we could be way better at it if we invested more time talking to customers before a project starts but the attitude is to get straight into development and deal with that later.

I don't know why I even bother sometimes...

My biggest personal challenge as a dev is getting help. Sometimes I feel so deserted.

Now and then I have to do things that are not my expertise and I feel out of my depth. I think if I had an expert come in for a day they would be able to save me weeks of slow progress. There are dev things like updating frameworks, etc which I am fine to struggle through or read the docs, etc but things like setting up servers, enabling single sign on, database administration, integration with other systems. These are not really software development tasks but they need to be done. It seems every time I try to get help it is so much effort then the help I get turns out not to be helpful.

In my current role I have no budget or company credit card, etc. To make any sort of purchase I need to get my manager to write a business case to get approved by his manager signed in triplicate, buried in soft peat, etc. Even if I went through this process there are so many companies out there who want to get paid to do nothing and say they are experts in all things. It is almost impossible to know if we would get competent help or if I end up just wasting time explaining issues to people in phone meetings who are no help.

This is gonna be a long post, and inevitably DR will mutilate my line breaks, so bear with me.
Also I cut out a bunch because the length was overlimit, so I'll post the second half later.

I'm annoyed because it appears the current stablediffusion trend has thrown the baby out with the bath water. I'll explain that in a moment.

As you all know I like to make extraordinary claims with little proof, sometimes
for shits and giggles, and sometimes because I'm just delusional apparently.

One of my legit 'claims to fame' is, on the theoretical level, I predicted
most of the developments in AI over the last 10+ years, down to key insights.
I've never had the math background for it, but I understood the ideas I
was working with at a conceptual level. Part of this flowed from powering
through literal (god I hate that word) hundreds of research papers a year, because I'm an obsessive like that. And I had to power through them, because
a lot of the technical low-level details were beyond my reach, but architecturally
I started to see a lot of patterns, and begin to grasp the general thrust
of where research and development *needed* to go.

In any case, I'm looking at stablediffusion and what occurs to me is that we've almost entirely thrown out GANs. As some or most of you may know, a GAN is
where networks compete, one to generate outputs that look real, another
to discern which is real, and by the process of competition, improve the ability
to generate a convincing fake, and to discern one. Imagine a self-sharpening knife and you get the idea.

Well, when we went to the diffusion method, upscaling noise (essentially a form of controlled pareidolia using autoencoders over seq2seq models) we threw out
GANs.

We also threw out online learning. The models only grow on the backend.
This doesn't help anyone but those corporations that have massive funding
to create and train models. They get to decide how the models 'think', what their
biases are, and what topics or subjects they cover. This is no good long run,
but thats more of an ideological argument. Thats not the real problem.
The problem is they've once again gimped the research, chosen a suboptimal
trap for the direction of development.

What interested me early on in the lottery ticket theory was the implications.
The lottery ticket theory says that, part of the reason *some* RANDOM initializations of a network train/predict better than others, is essentially
down to a small pool of subgraphs that happened, by pure luck, to chance on
initialization that just so happened to be the right 'lottery numbers' as it were, for training quickly.

The first implication of this, is that the bigger a network therefore, the greater the chance of these lucky subgraphs occurring. Whether the density grows
faster than the density of the 'unlucky' or average subgraphs, is another matter.
From this though, they realized what they could do was search out these subgraphs, and prune many of the worst or average performing neighbor graphs, without meaningful loss in model performance. Essentially they could *shrink down* things like chatGPT and BERT.

The second implication was more sublte and overlooked, and still is.
The existence of lucky subnetworks might suggest nothing additional--In which case the implication is that *any* subnet could *technically*, by transfer learning, be 'lucky' and train fast or be particularly good for some unknown task.

INSTEAD however, what has happened is we haven't really seen that. What this means is actually pretty startling. It has two possible implications, either of which will have significant outcomes on the research sooner or later:
1. there is an 'island' of network size, beyond what we've currently achieved,
where networks that are currently state of the3 art at some things, rapidly converge to state-of-the-art *generalists* in nearly *all* task, regardless of input. What this would look like at first, is a gradual drop off in gains of the current approach, characterized as a potential new "ai winter", or a "limit to the current approach", which wouldn't actually be the limit, but a saddle point in its utility across domains and its intelligence (for some measure and definition of 'intelligence').

Rum.

A little in my coffee.
A little in my soda.
A little in a glass.

Just not too much. Drunk development leads to more tough days. Only enough to take the edge off and help the thought process.

After years of back-end development there's a thing which keeps bugging me: how little "interactive" the development process can be.
When I did front-end I took for granted that the application I was developing was easy to run so I could immediately test any little change I do on code but on back-end this is rare to see: you develop with tons of external dependencies (authentications, VPNs, databases...) so getting your application up and running can be an huge hassle and testing API controllers can be slow and frustrating since I have to continuously juggle multiple development environments, manually regenerate tokens, do guesswork to find which parameters you have to use for your API request, maintain my Postman/Insomnia HTTP calls collection to prevent it from turning into an unusable spaghetti mess... lots of repetitive tasks which kills my focus and makes me struggle in getting into a decent flow.

Automated testing has lot of potential in helping with that but its hard to introduce when you're rewriting a legacy sistem and you're already exceeded your budget.

I wonder if I'll keep doing back-end once I'm done with this project.

Just a quick question (& rant) about the titanium SDK
If people don't already know titanium is an SDK which you can use to make cross-platform apps, it is what devrant uses. I am starting a project using it but it's so terpremental, the build manifest file doesn't get created so a full rebuild occurs everytime and the builds only are successful half of the time.
I am also using tishadow to speed up the development but after a few code changes it will crash and I have to go though the same process again.
So my questions are to anyone who uses the titanium SDK, is it as buggy for you (it might be because I'm using windows Ew I know) or if this does happen to you how do you develop applications with it?
Thank you :)

Let's see: Right now I am in two recruitment process of two enterprise.

One enterprise (Genexus, a big enterprise) I would join the I+D team, good salary, EXCELLENT work place, and 2hs of travel from home.

The other enterprise (InnovaAge, a little but powerful enterprise in grow) I would join as trainee / junior developer who helps in the development team and I would constantly learn to become like my teammates, same salary than Genexus, good work place, and 1.5he of travel from home.

Same working hours amount and same salary but InnovaAge have the GREAT advantage of be near from my University, Genexus is TOO far from there.

So, I ask you: if both enterprises would want to recruit me ... What offer should I accept?

I ask to you because you have more knowledge and exp. You are lvl 20-40 xD

Fr-Agile

Francium Agile Methodology is characterized by lack of proper planning, and constant interruption during the development process as specs are pulled out of product owners asses ad nauseam. Fr-Agile methodology is known to result in an extremely radioactive team environment.

Where do I start...

I have seen a QA load local code to a machine, run it and then say it was ready to deploy. Little did we know she wasn’t following the deployment process at all and didn’t even realize she had to. We were a week trying to figure out why the deploys wouldn’t work until she spoke up.

I knew a dev/founder that said to me “source control is only for large projects”, I tried to convince him and his cofounder to use github or bitbucket. Nope, they weren’t into it (fresh out of school listening to professors who hadn’t worked a development day in 20 years) One cofounder got disgruntled, thought he was doing most of the work and decided to quit, he also decided to wipe the code off his co-founders machine. I literally saw a grown man come out of a meeting crying knowing he would never gain back the respect of those mentors and advisors.

I once saw a developer create a printed ticket receipt for a web app. Instead of making a page and styling it to fit a smaller width, he decided to do everything in string literals. More precisely, he made one big long fucking strong literal and then broke it up using custom regex to add styling to different sections. We had a meeting and he was totally convinced this was the only way. In the end we scrapped the entire code and the dude didn’t last very long after that.

Worst of all! I once saw a developer find a IBM Model M keyboard and said “I’m gonna throw out this junky keyboard”. I told him to shut his stupid fucking mouth and give the the keyboard.

He did

I think i dont have the brain capacity or brain power to process and code extreme complex team WEB projects. Is this normal for WEB development, do i need a lot more practice, more time to understand or am i just fucking dumb for this shit? Honestly

I can code complex mobile apps but i get fucking lost in the middle of coding web projects... Its like im lost in the woods at dark and do not know what to do and where to go.... Literally stuck in one spot, idling.....

Context: This team has been constantly behind on deliveries, ignoring advice from other teams or more experienced colleague, making mistake after mistake and now, just revealed they have major performance issues, as warned...

So, in the most recent Sprint review they were, once again, criticized for their bad approach and inability as a team to receive feedback and work on that feedback, resulting in mediocre development...

As I left the room I heard one of them say:
"We make this huge rocket that most wouldn't be capable of doing and they cry that it's blue and not green... Others make a ls on a command line and everybody applauds"

Now, this is for everyone to whom the shoe fits...

Listen here you little entitled snotty prick, where do you think you are!? Yes most should not make a rocket when the requirement was a bike! That's overengineering and besides that most of your decisions were arguably wrong!

I will never applaud you or anyone else for doing your fucking job and being mediocre about it... What we applaud is value added! Value to the project, to the process or to the team... Bring value and I will applaud, do your job and you get a salary. Be a snotty childish dipshit and you might find yourself forcefully searching for new professional challenge!

Ok, today's rant brought to you by Microsoft Visual Studio, once again. The updated version I downloaded yesterday now has a weird problem where upon the first run of the emulator, my changes show, but on subsequent runs, no matter how much I change, save, clear cache, restart the emulator, no changes will show in the emulator until I completely restart visual studio! Currently in the process of uninstalling the updated version to download the older version, but again I can't just refresh my PC, because I have to download a version from the developer account downloads. Because the trial version can't be upgraded. This is Microsoft's Flagship Development product running on their flagship OS on a machine with killer specs and the latest updates. GET IT TOGETHER. I would be fired if I released such buggy updates and had such an arduous user experience.

I'm writing all the dev things I know in a docs site as a means to be hireable should I need to switch jobs.

I'm not gonna go too deep on how I'm doing it. One style I'm enjoying is making every article take only one page long, and if they take longer, maybe consider breaking it into another article.
Fuck long articles. Yes, that's a bit autistic.

But I will describe the challenges I'm finding (which are quite many) in further detail.

One of them is that words can be ambiguous. Production can mean the production environment but it can also mean production in plain english.
And there are tons of cases like this.

Because of this, I felt a lot of confusion in my beginner days. So it my objective to write this as to prevent as much confusion as possible.

Granted, I don't want to write "development for dummies". Software is complex. But because it's complex on its own, I don't want to add complexity to the learning process through obscure language usage.

"Fine", I say, "I'll disambiguate". But this means I find myself branching out very often into fundamental or commonly used software terms like "framework", "model", "scaffold", "algorithm", "viewport", "breakpoint", etc.

Another challenge is reaching good levels of completitude.
This means I have to explain that obscure CLI flag I never used in my life.

If I don't do this, then what makes my docs different than these superficial dev.to or medium posts? Nothing.
But trying to explain EVERYTHING about a software can generate a lot of frustration: I never finish.

It also makes me wonder "do I even know shit?". I think some amount of insecurity is healthy and pushes myself forward.
But at some point it's kind of making me feel like shit. Maybe I just need to keep learning.

Something they don't tell you about c++ development until it's too late: cross-compiler compatibility is an enormous monster.

When I worked with C# creating a DLL and distributing it to others is a completely transparent process, there's no special considerations required at all.

In c++ you basically aren't allowed to use the standard library in many cases. You can't just export a class with a standard string as a member because when another person goes to use your DLL, the string might have a different implementation.

My app is finally on the Apple App Store.

The rant: how bloody difficult was it to get on there?! They scrutinise EVERYTHING. My promo copy, my screengrabs and also it seems that there is code that works on iPhone that doesn’t work on iPad.

I thought it was designed to be the same for ease of development? However I found a function that works perfectly well on iPhone but breaks iPad.

Anyway I guess in the long run this keeps the App Store’s quality level high and it isn’t the Wild West like the google play store. However it’s still pretty annoying. I can see why devs get angry about Apple’s process.

12 Stages of Software Development:

1. Analysis.
2. Development
3. Realization the whole analysis is complete bullshit and has nothing to with reality.
4. Denial about failing deadlines.
6. "Acceleration": adding more people to the project, bringing out big corner cutting machine.
7. Learning that massive amount of new features needs to be added, while the deadline is two weeks away.
8. Putting some random crap in production, riddled with horrid bugs and security flaws, to technically not miss the deadline.
9. Get the mess almost working long after the deadline has passed.
10. Maintain this steaming pile of crap for a year.
11. Start planning for full system rewrite that "Makes Everything Better".
12. Goto 1

Long story short I joined this company as a junior after 1.5 years of a break from development. Before that I worked for almost 3 years in the required stack. We agreed that if I do well after 3 months probation period I can ask for a raise.

It turned out that Im doing better than half of my team so 1 week before probation was about to end, I put in my raise request. Got nothing but strong feedback, even managed to burn myself out a couple times.

Now since the request 11 weeks passed. Our HQ which has the final say about the raise is overseas. Im getting excuses about summer: allegedly because of summer some people in the appproval chain have vacations so this process is taking a long time. This is the excuse they are giving to me.

Right now Im getting really pissed off and resentful because this drag is becoming unnacceptable. Also being in a new scrum team filled with total juniors complicates everything a lot. Im not having the best time here. But at the same time I dont have any savings actually am in debts and currenty barely am able to survive paycheck to paycheck to I cant just quit on the spot.

Had I known that they will drag this out that much, I would have applied to other places and presented them a counter offer. Or at least bluffed from the start in order to speed the raise proccess up.

Should I give ultimatum to my manager?

Im hesitant to do that because up until now we had a decent relationship and he seems like a nice guy so I dont want to rock the boat.

Or should I bluff about having a counter offer, so he would speed things up? But what happens if he asks me to forward him evidence of my received offer?

Bro I fucking hate Flutter and android studio. I have just started android development and oh my god the bunch of errors i’m getting is crazy af. Like I don’t get one point, flutter was created by google and android studio was also created by google… then why tf they don’t focus on normalizing the development process. Why so many errors ???????? And no easy fix for it like whyyyyyyyyyyy?????

Anyways sorry for the rant but there’s more to it. I just built a fuckin app which was running fine in my AVD and then when I sent it to my friend he was seeing a grayed out screen and then I searched for the error and then I was like bruh, I was sitting for sooo long building the first app of my life and here we are. My app can’t even run on someone else’s phone because of a fuckin gray screen error (i’ll fix it tomorrow)

Extremely frustrated with the release process and versioning system at my current company. Don't know if this is same everywhere or the half ass release managers can't think of a better way here.

Basically for any client raised issue that can't wait for next release are built as a hotfix. However hotfixes are never bundled togather or shiped to other clients. This is causing a vicious chain, two clients raise two separate issues on same version. Instead of fixing them as single hotfix (however minor the issues) we create two hotfix versions for each with only their issue. A week later same clients come back with the issue the other raised. Once again instead of bundling what is now effectively same code we build hotfixes on top of the clients respective branches. We now have two branches to maintain with same codebase. No matter how serious issue, the hotfix is never made generally available and always created on client's specific hotfix version.

Now that was an example for only two clients, in reality we have released five patch versions of a product in last 2 years. Each product version contains about a dozen artifacts (webapps, thick clients, etc) with its own version. Each product version being shipped to various clients. Clients being big banks never take a patch of product even if it fixes their issues and continues requesting hotfix. We continue building hotfixes on client branch and creat ever increasing tech debt. There is never a chance to clean up or new development. Just keep doing hotfix after hotfix of same things.

To top if all off, old branches are still in svn while new in git. Old branches still compile with ant new with maven. Old still build with java 5,6,7 while current with 8. Old still build from old jenkins serve pipelines while new has different build server. Old branches had hardcoded integration db details which no longer exists so if tou forget to change before releasing it doesn't work.

Please tell me this is not normal and that there are better ways to do this? Apologies I think I rambled on for too long 😅