11
ekat
5y

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 SURPRISE, the docs ARE NON EXISTENT unless you wanna call an outdated diagram a sufficient doc.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.

Comments
  • 0
    Being a front-end dev, is it common there for you to fix backend issues too?
  • 1
    I feel the pain. The version of the product I work on at my company is 10+ years old. Barely any documentation on the database or the entire internal software stack we use. It's just a learn as you go or ask someone who's been here forever and they might know. Senior developers have great job security
  • 1
    @asgs it starts becoming quite common now that management decided that everyone has to become full-stack. Of course, it sounded like “we have to share knowledge to avoid silos”. But in the end of the day, they just don’t want to deal with dependencies
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