Pushing changes to production via SFTP. Luckily I don't work at that company anymore.

So in my current job and the current projects that I was a founding member of, there have been a bunch things that have been done that has made the management of projects a complete nightmare. An example would be the vendor directory being submitted into the repository. This was not my decision as I was against it at the time.

So for the past 3 years I've been bitching about fixing it and have always been denied because they wanted me to work on other things. But with me leaving at the end of the month, they suddenly want me to fix everything. Guess they want to get every drop of work out of me as once I'm gone, there'll be no one left who understands the core of all the applications.

So I handed in my official resignation last week as I will be changing to a new job next month. So one of the last big things that I have been working on is a Jenkins server for the rest of the team to use and currently writing up the documentation for it.

However I haven't been told who I will be handing over my work to, but the bigger thing I feel is that even if I write all the documentation, no one will actually read it. Reason I think this is because I doubt anyone else in the team will even use the Jenkins server. The major issues are that no one writes unit tests and don't even understand what CI is!

So right now it feels like my final month of work will all be for nothing and makes me wonder if I should even bother writing documentation, especially if it isn't going to be handed over to anyone.

Just when I thought a project I'm analyzing has done a good implementation, I found out that they got lazy and started writing business logic DIRECTLY into models!! Now stuff is tightly coupled that extracting it will cause unknown effects.

1) Let me work with devs without me having to explain fundamentals of programming

2) Stop devs from copy pasting code from StackOverflow or any other project without actually understanding what it does

3) Get devs to actually read and understand project documentation FIRST before jumping into any programming work

By implementing proper eager loading in Eloquent, based on a sample request, I reduced it from 850 DB queries down to just 14 DB queries. So that's an increase in 98% performance?

Every time I see the N+1 query problem in people's implementation, I feel like crying. Especially when it's dealing with large data sets of something like 1000 records.

So I'm currently "assigned" a task in which I need to fix a slow query problem, which isn't a big deal. The biggest problem is that the original team of this project haven't got any means to develop things on your local machine. Looking at their docs and scripts, it seems like everything is deployed to a dev server. But whilst looking for details for this server, I found out that the network team have decommissioned the server!

So my dilemma right now is that I can't test any of my fixes on anywhere besides staging, or possibly production! Inheriting projects is the bloody worst!

At a previous job someone created their own framework that had no features that you would expect from a normal MVC framework e.g routing, view template etc.

Need motivation as a starting point. Forget about finishing side projects, need the motivation to start one first!

Be part of a company or service that can change the world!

Or on small scale, find a place where someone can actually teach me something about programming rather than me teaching them!

Writing documentation is one of those tasks that most developers don't like doing. Especially when it comes to writing in say a Word/PDF file, an online wiki, or Confluence. It's time consuming and a pain in the ass.

But even if you don't like it, at least write comments in your source code! I hate having to keep writing "Write the PHPDocs for this class/function" in every pull request that I review. It's wasting my time writing such comments when it's such a basic thing to do when writing source code.

Many years ago when I changed to my second job, I had to do a lot more JavaScript work and upon Googling for a solution, that's when I came across jQuery. The idea of only having to write a few lines instead of multiple lines just to do a simple task was pretty exciting.

Plus looking through the docs and reading up about animations, I thought that was pretty cool and started playing around with it. Eventually I came to a project where I needed an interactive form and so I used jQuery to handle a lot of the UI work. My managers and the client were pretty excited about seeing how stuff can appear/disappear.

Worst one was in my first ever web developer job. It was a small company where everything was done in Adobe ColdFusion. Was there for 2.5 years before they went bankrupt and I got made redundant.

So when it came to look for another job, I was hoping to get another ColdFusion related job. But a lot of company's requirements were pretty bullshit. Junior position, but must have 5 years experience.

After 4 months of looking, eventually found another job but as a PHP developer. But since my PHP skills were beginner's level, I had to start from a new graduate level salary all over again. Felt like the past 2.5 years at my first job was a waste of time.

It's kind of depressing looking at how bad the source code has transformed from a previous project that I had planned, designed, and did the initial implementation.

But I guess this is the problem of having developers who don't really care about the quality of their work, especially when it comes to PHP.

So at the moment, I'm currently reviewing the API specifications that got written up as the other developers haven't bothered to update it themselves. When you think about it, that's kind of dumb. If you are in charge of a particular function, it should be your responsibility to maintain documentation.

Anyway I'm cross referencing to what I see that has been done in the source code and finding way too many inconsistencies across specifications and implementations. Even parts where they have the exact same data, the structures are completely different. Or some parts have been documented but are not in the implementation, or vice versa. SO I can't tell which is the correct one!

So the project I have been working on for the past 5 months was finally released yesterday with only very minor problems, this stemmed from both programming side, and users entering data incorrectly.

It has been a rather hectic 5 months. I've had to deal with crap like:
- clients not knowing their own products
- a project manager that didn't document anything (or at least everything into a Google Slides document)
- me writing both requirements AND specifications (I'm a dev, not a PM)
- developers not following said specifications (then having to rewrite all their work)

But the worst thing I think would be the lack of vision from everyone. Everyone sees it as a "project" that should be get it over and done with rather a product that has great potential.

So with the project winding down, and only very few things left to fix/implement. Over these 5 months I learned a lot about domain driven design, Laravel's core, AWS, and just how terrible people are at their jobs. I imagine if I worked with people who gave a damn, or who actually had skills, I probably wouldn't have had such a difficult project.

Right now I'm less stressed but now feel rather exhausted from it all. What kind of things do you to help with the exhaustion and/or slow down of pace?

Not sure if I'm missing it or not, but is there a way to display rants from newest to oldest order? At the moment it only displays by largest ++ in descending order. Would be nice to have a sort by option.

My last job in Australia before moving to Japan was where I had my best boss. He was pretty chill about a lot of things and he was also a pilot and DJ in his free time. But he was also the no BS type of guy and would help resolve issues in a quick manner.

Also before moving to Japan, I did consult him about it and he was very supportive about it and encouraged me to do the move as it'd be a good experience for me.

For the final week of a group project at university, the project members and I ended up staying in the computer labs pretty much for 5 days. Another project group did the same (to this day we're still good friends). Everyone brought in their PCs from home and we ended up sleeping in the labs overnight. None of us went to classes as it was pretty full on crunch time to get the project done.

When it was time to eat, we each took turns to go on a food run for everyone, like getting McDonalds, or getting everyone coffee or energy drinks. Of course it wasn't all just work. At the time Quake 4 was just released and we had some pretty epic matches at 3am.

This is my work desktop. Since I'm working in a Japanese office, they're very specific about making sure your workspace is clean and tidy at all times. Also they expect you to have very little to no personal items on your workspace.

The mini whiteboard is my best tool. It makes it easier to work out minor concepts or to explain things to co-workers.

So when I was working for a web dev shop, one of the clients asked us to have a drop down of all the different combinations you can have for street types to appear on the address form of their shopping cart. So stuff like "Street", "St", "Drive", "Dr", "Lane", "Ln" etc. We told the client that it wasn't possible since the possible combinations and how some street don't all end with a type.

But the client was adamant about having this so we ended up building a section in the administration section to allow the client to add any new street type to a database table that will populate the dropdown.

‪Many years ago I was told by a senior dev that caching is one of the hardest things I'll ever come across. At the time I didn't know what he meant, but these past few days I'm starting to understand‬ what he meant. It's not using the cache itself, it's the cache management that is hard. Determining what needs to be cached, when a cache should be invalidated, how long should something be cached etc. It's pretty insane when you start having to compare it with the requirements.

This was WAY back in my first job as a programmer where I was working on a custom built CMS that we took over from another dev shop. So a standard feature was of course pagination for a section that had well over 400,000 records. The client would always complain about this section always being very slow to load. My boss at that job would tell me to not look at the problem as it wasn't a part of the scope.

But being a young enthusiastic programmer, I decided to delve into the problem anyway. What I came to discover was that the pagination was simply doing a select all 400,000 records, and then looping through the entire dataset until it got to the slice it needed to display.

So I fixed the pagination and page loads went from around 1 min to only a few seconds. I felt pretty proud about that. But I later got told off by my boss as he now can't bill for that fix. Personally I didn't care since I learned a bit about SQL pagination, and just how terrible some developers can be.

When it comes to config files for any kind of application, I tend to make sure that I understand what each config does, and that for each environment, they have the correct settings.

However some of my co-workers don't bother understanding what the configs mean and so I have people copying and pasting config details from development environments into staging and production configs. They think that just changing hostnames is more than enough.

So they ended up wasting a good 3 hours trying to figure out why sessions were always invalidating and cached objects were not caching. I had a look at the config and realised their mistake in like 3 mins.

When it comes to writing comments in your code, I do quite a lot of it. Even for parts where you just need to read the code to understand what it does. However I do write very clean comments, not even snarky comments where I know someone has done something completely stupid. In my work, I generally keep it very clean. I wonder how many people write profanity, or use weird naming for functions or variables?

https://thenextweb.com/dd/2018/...

Once I was working on a project that had a few complex implementations that needed to be done. So I got a colleague to get me a few Coronas from the staff bar on a Friday afternoon and did a little overtime. For some reason I was extremely focused, my mind was rushing, and I managed to do some pretty good implementations as well. I guess beer can make you smarter.

Recently I've been thinking about doing some PHP freelancing to get some extra cash, but I'm not exactly sure where to start. I used to do freelancing before but those kind of jobs were from friends and former colleagues who contacted me.

So how do you get started with a client base of zero? I have looked at sites like freelancer.com but it seems like the majority of those projects want something for very little, or you get underbid by someone else.

So for the current project, they want to start testing the application from Monday next week and the development part section still has a few bugs that need to be handled. But that isn't the worst part. The worst part I just heard is that the designs themselves haven't even been signed off. How the fuck did we get to the point where the designs haven't been signed off where the development has been going underway for the past 2.5 months? I swear I'm working with the fucking worst project manager!

Going through another department's API documentation and wrapper library where it has documented samples on how to use it. One of the samples specifically shows how to disable HTTPs requests for when retrieving customer info but it also states in the documentation to specifically NOT USE this disable function.

When it comes to customer info, I don't know why the fuck you would allow an override option to do everything over unsecure requests, and even document about it!