So my compiler has been compiling the newest version of my compiler for about five hours now, and progressed 10% in the last hour... Looks like my poor laptop is gonna have to pull an all nighter

Dreamt I was writing code for work last night, pretty sketchy stuff. But then at some point I woke up, and in my daze panicked thinking that I'd actually written that code. So when I fell back asleep, dream me was working on fixing all the issues that I actually had never writen. Woke up again, worried about if I had left everything well, and realized my stupidity.

I need some days off... 📴

Bossman called me up the other day, asked if I had looked at courses and told me I should think about signing up in September.

Thing is, I don't have a degree or anything beyond a high school diploma, since I'm self taught and got hired because of my ability to learn fast and my portfolio, and I told them I'd consider looking at a two year program.

But I don't want to have to be doing coursework after work, and besides, if I do a course, I want to do so because I wanted it... Sad thing is, yearly review is coming up in a month and I worry my salary is gonna stay where it started... Which is not great :S

Any thoughts?

After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...

So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.

Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.

Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...

So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.

Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).

We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).

I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...

Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks...

Had a four hour retro/review yesterday. Plus a mini demo I had to put together. Three hour sprint planning session today.
And they still wanted me to go to some "company values" meeting tomorrow, aside from the weekly call I have to report progress. Fuck that shit.

I feel like I got nothing done this week. Monday and Tuesday were fine for the most part, but since it's been just complete idling.

I mean, I love my company, great coworkers, good management, and just all around great experience. But man, it gets frustrating when you lose so much development time... I wanted to sprinkle in some extra goodies for the next sprint, but it doesn't look like that's gonna happen.

Long story short, I'm unofficially the hacker at our office... Story time!

So I was hired three months ago to work for my current company, and after the three weeks of training I got assigned a project with an architect (who only works on the project very occasionally). I was tasked with revamping and implementing new features for an existing API, some of the code dated back to 2013. (important, keep this in mind)

So at one point I was testing the existing endpoints, because part of the project was automating tests using postman, and I saw something sketchy. So very sketchy. The method I was looking at took a POJO as an argument, extracted the ID of the user from it, looked the user up, and then updated the info of the looked up user with the POJO. So I tried sending a JSON with the info of my user, but the ID of another user. And voila, I overwrote his data.

Once I reported this (which took a while to be taken seriously because I was so new) I found out that this might be useful for sysadmins to have, so it wasn't completely horrible. However, the endpoint required no Auth to use. An anonymous curl request could overwrite any users data.

As this mess unfolded and we notified the higher ups, another architect jumped in to fix the mess and we found that you could also fetch the data of any user by knowing his ID, and overwrite his credit/debit cards. And well, the ID of the users were alphanumerical strings, which I thought would make it harder to abuse, but then realized all the IDs were sequentially generated... Again, these endpoints required no authentication.

So anyways. Panic ensued, systems people at HQ had to work that weekend, two hot fixes had to be delivered, and now they think I'm a hacker... I did go on to discover some other vulnerabilities, but nothing major.

It still amsues me they think I'm a hacker 😂😂 when I know about as much about hacking as the next guy at the office, but anyways, makes for a good story and I laugh every time I hear them call me a hacker. The whole thing was pretty amusing, they supposedly have security audits and QA, but for five years, these massive security holes went undetected... And our client is a massive company in my country... So, let's hope no one found it before I did.

Yeah, another one of the legendary printer stories.

So yesterday my dad phones me up, and says: "Hi son so they changed our wifi and now the printer doesn't connect, how can I connect the printer to the wifi, and the computer to the printer?"

And then seemed confused when I told him I couldn't do it over the phone, that I usually have to fiddle with it physically. It baffles me that they think I'm some kind of all knowing wizard... And that I have memorized all the menus and setups required to do all this stuff...

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

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

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

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

Writing code at work be like:

Hmm okay so if I call this facade looking for an order with a code, and the order can't be found, it will return null. Thank God this bit of code is documented...

Ten minutes later

Why is this not throwing an exception when I pass invalid parameters in...?

Two minutes later

Oh, so this never returns null. If the order isn't found, it returns an empty DTO. Fucking docs.

Seriously, the only thing worse than no documentation is documentation that lies. And that's all I get for my first project at the company, which I am having to do alone. Either no docs, or misleading docs.

Came across 'var3' and 'var15' while debugging Hybris. What the actual fuck SAP, since when do you hire preschoolers to code.

*Watching a TED talk*

*Sponsored by SAP*

*screams internally*

I remember the promise I made to myself when I dropped out of university to look for work.

"I'll explore different areas of software engineering since I like a number of them. But never shall I ever do backend web development"

Guess what job I landed.

Having to rebuild and start my Hybris server while learning the framework really kills my productivity... What am I supposed to do for ten minutes while it sorts itself out?

I miss the days compilation only took seconds...

About six months ago I decided I wanted to learn to write a neural network from the ground up, using only the C++ standard lib. Had to learn some linear algebra, multivariable calc and a dash of wizardry.

The mathematics of neural networks is still one of the coolest things I've ever learnt. It still marvels me that you can make a specialized mini-brain out of nothing but numbers.

New setup, in my new flat 😎

That moment when you have to file your hours worked, but the service we use to do so *exclusively* runs on *Internet Explorer* so you have to shut down your Linux distro with all the stuff you have running, boot up your Windows pro partition and log into your service, just to punch in a couple numbers.

Seriously. A website that runs *exclusively* on IE?? What the fuck.

Decided to ditch chromium when installing Linux on my work laptop for the first time, and stick to Firefox and DDG. No regrets, it works great!!

Spent seven hours reading source code at work yesterday. The little documentation I was able to find alternated between English and Spanish. And some of the things I saw... Straight out of a horror novel.

For example: NUMBER_2 * NUMBER_60 * NUMBER_60 * NUMBER_1000 to get the number of milliseconds in two hours.

Or this super contrived method which capped the registration age at 100, which now caps it at 102 anyways because they use hard coded values for the current year. Took me 15 minutes to find out what "fixYear" (this method) did.

No wonder I got home and crashed in bed till nearly midnight after that... I swear that was harder than a university Calc final...

The best kinds of comments:

/**
Gets user CC info datas.
*/
public Object getUserCCInfoDatas() {}

If you really want to outdo yourself:

/**
Gets user CC info datas.
@param someshit Outdated docs ftw
*/
public Object getUserCCInfoDatas(String unrelatedToDocAbove) {}

Honestly, no documentation is better in some cases. At least I can't be angry about their shitty quality... And they don't waste my time.

Just opened a project that I'll be working on for work, first thing I notice is C++ like code formatting, which hurts my eyes (keep in mind this is Java)

But then decompiled Hybris classes came at me with not only that, but three newlines between methods.

I fear what I have yet to see...

Stares idly at computer screen for 30 mins, while Hybris is initializing.

Me: Aight might as well break for lunch since this is taking so long.

Hybris init finishes.

Fuck.

Three days into my job and the client is asking when we can start my project... Supposed to have two weeks training, and I don't even think that's enough to learn Hybris, so instead of being an angry rant I'm just gonna sit here and be a sad one :(

I can already feel the incoming shame. Shame. Shame...

Just signed the contract for renting my first ever place today, and tomorrow is my first day of work as a software developer at a large company... It's been a crazy weekend, and tomorrow is probably gonna be even crazier! Little bit nervous tho... We'll see how it goes

Procrastinate side projects, or straight up never finish them.

Times are tough when there is only one question on StackOverflow regarding the problem you're having, and it was you who asked it, six months ago...

Man, at the rate I'm going, I'll have to put a bug I found back in April on my new years resolution list...

Sad thing is, as we all know, new years resolutions never work out... So maybe this bug will never be solved :S

Just closed my first job contract today... Haven't signed yet, but feels good! Haven't had to face rejection :) (yet)

First comment by the architects that were reviewing my test, as part of the selection process:

"Well the code was very well documented, not something we see much of..."

Made my day :)

Have the technical defense of the practice project a company asked me to work on tomorrow, as part of the selection process.

Fingers crossed they don't realize I have no idea about Spring or webdev... I've already prepped a fair bit, and will a bit more in the morning before the call. Now, my bed is calling, so if you'll excuse me...

What profession would you say is most like software development? I'd love to be able to give people an idea of what I do, without making it sound like witchcraft...