!dev

Find the snake under 10 seconds If you can.

"This will fail in 2022, but there's no way my code is still gonna be used then"
- Some Microsoft engineer in the '90s

Manager: We need to setup the security in the Mexico server

Dev: You mean that 3rd party firewall add on?

Manager: Yes

Dev: And set up the billing on the Mexico account?

Manager: Yes

Dev: lol, sure thing I’ll create the ticket

Manager: What’s so funny?

Dev: Nothing

Ticket: Build wall and get Mexico to pay for it.

Manager: You really shouldn’t be doing that

Dev: It’s in my job description

Manager: Yeah but you still shouldn’t be doing it.

Dev: Who should I hand it off to?

Manager: We don’t have anyone else to hand off that task to.

Dev: Ok, do I stop doing it?

Manager: 😡 Of course not, it needs to get done! I’m just saying you shouldn’t do it.

Dev: ???????????

User: We have been dealing with this bug for a month now! How come nobody has fixed it?

Dev: Who did notify about this issue?

User: You’re not listening we have been dealing with this for a MONTH!

Dev: When this issue first occurred did you tell anyone?

User: Yes!

Dev: Who?

User: …. Ok I don’t remember but I know I said something to someone. Anyway it doesn’t matter, your job is IT so how come this isn’t fixed?

Dev: Did you have an email? Ticket number? Teams message? Any record of where this was dropped?

User: I think you’re missing the point. We haven’t been able to do out jobs for A MONTH. We’ve just been sitting around completely helpless. We’ve been trying to figure a system using paper and pencil to replace the electronic one but it’s too complicated. How come this wasn’t fixed the second it happened?

Dev: It’s hard to respond to an issue if it’s not brought to out attention.

User: Ok but we are too busy to create a ticket! We have a million things to do and we can’t do any of them because your app doesn’t work! We’ve been sitting here telling each other how terrible this system is AND IT HAS BEEN A MONTH.

Dev: …. Yeah I got that

Today I discovered that we have a CSV export button for an order transaction system, on a page which is completely disconnected from the rest of the website.

It is only being called by an internal server, used by our Data department.

They run selenium to click the button.

Then they import the CSV into a database.

That database is accessed by an admin panel.

That admin panel has an excel export button.

Which is clicked by our CFO. But he got bored of clicking, so he uses IFTTT to schedule a download of the XLS and import it in Google Sheets.

That sheet uses a Salesforce data connector.

Marketing then sends email campaigns based on that Salesforce data...

😒

Visual studio
VS code
Sublime
😋

Thursday: Hey wife…. I finished my project and tomorrow I should have a very easy day, just watching Slack.

Friday: Database— corrupted bin logs, major production outages.

Wife: 😡I can never believe you when you say you’ll have an easy day.

My dad at my age: Running a whole department in the navy

Me at my age: Panicking because the company let me have my own project

A seasoned colleague just wrote this and I think it was very valuable:

On tech debt:

So the big challenge with technical debt is making non-technical management (CEO, COO, CFO, directors) understand what it means, and just how it operates. Sometimes it actually makes good sense to incur technical debt to get to market sooner, just as it sometimes makes sense to borrow money to get cash now and repay that loan later with (hopefully) resulting greater revenues from that investment. But just like a loan, tech debt always has to be paid some day. The longer the tech debt goes, the more expensive it gets. And also like a loan, the cost compounds, like compound interest on a loan. Tech debt should always be chosen with a clear plan to pay it off at some point in the not too distant future. The longer one waits to pay it, the more expensive it gets.

text-align: center

Designer: “it’s not cantered, it’s 2px too much to the left”

Me: *does nothing* “what about now?”

Designer: “perfect”

Yup. This IS the Truman show.

Amazon was the first company that adopted the hybrid model: working from office Monday to Friday and working from home on Saturday and Sunday.

Manager: Oh my god have you heard of libraries? I don’t even need to hire developers anymore, everything can just be done with code other people have already built for free

Dev: Well you actually cause a bit of technical debt when you use an abstrac—

Manager: EVERY TICKET SHOULD BE DONE USING LIBRARIES GOING FORWARD.

Dev: …This is going to implode…Can we at least fund some of the libraries we end up using?

Manager: WHAT? NO! Open source developers are suckers, what idiot puts code on the internet for free?? I shouldn’t be required to fund their stupidity. Let’s just take their stuff and make money with it.

Dev: *Phone rings 100th time today from recruiter*. One sec I have to take this call……It’s urgent.

Dev: Breaks unit tests

Same dev: Merges it to master anyway

Same fucking dev: Can't merge to master coz CI is screaming at you? Merge locally and FORCE push.

Me: Hi, I'm blocked. I can't merge to master coz of this failing test, can we get on a quick call and figure this out?

Same fucking fuckface dev: *after 3 fucking days* Yeah, I don't know why it's failing.. the results seem to be inconsistent..

Jesus Christ. I am so close to leaving this side-project because of the frequent shit I have to go through with this fucking idiot.

God I wish I didn't need the money.

“In order to release on production you merge on production”

Makes sense.

“In order to release on staging you merge on release”

Wait, what?

“The CI for the staging release is called release to production”

What? No, stop!

“You also need to create a tag called pre-production-deployment, so that staging can work”

STOP FFS

“It’s very easy, you just need to read the documentation!”

How do people do not realise they are spitting out bs?

Samsung be like...
-- 8GB ram
-- 64GB storage.

Buy phone...
Open settings...
-- 50+ system apps
-- 2gb ram left
-- 12gb storage remaining

dev: “I want to start working on [feature]”

Me: “I already started to work on it, sorry for not mentioning it, we need specs from design team before I can go on, but I’d suggest going for another task meanwhile”

Manager: “noooo design is very very busy, [dev] will take care of it.”

Me: “[dev] still needs specs from the design team... and I am half done with it so no real point in re-writing the same code I wrote”

Manager: “just trust me, we do this and [dev] takes care of it.”

*me and [dev] look at each other perplexed and just nod to the manager cause it’s Thursday and the fucks to give are over*

... am I actually a patient in an asylum? I question my sanity after this exchange of words.

I bought myself a small summer gift 😍
This may or may not encourage me to work more at home this summer.

We had a client visit our PH office to "hang out" and see the progress in this educational type game we were building for their private school (apparently, it's the one that Obama's kids went to).

Manager oversold the progress and actually guaranteed some features that we were still working on and estimated to finish in the next 3 sprints (2 week intervals).

Client was due to be in the office in 2 days.

PM pushes back and says we need to manage client expectations properly.

CEO got wind and sat the dev team down. Dev lead, two seniors, and junior me. He sat us down and asked us what we think.

Lead says we can do it.

Now to be fair, I know this guy to be very competent and an INCREDIBLE programmer. He is the person I consider to be the first real mentor I ever had but I really thought we were fucked here.

Next day and half was hell--for me, at least and I really couldn't see how this was all possible.

But then the fucker came through. This beautiful, majestic meganerd and the two other guys shat out 6 weeks of code in ~30 hours.

And the crazy part was it was all working. Bugs were caught in the next few days for sure, but the demo went flawlessly.

I never doubted this guy again.

Years later, I'd meet up with him and would talk fondly about those days and all he could say was "I don't really remember". He remembers the project and that we had a demo but he couldn't remember anything around those days.

Two of the most stressful days of my life and to him it was a fucking Wednesday. What a fucking champ.

When I was in school I had some guys walk up to me and asked:

G: Are you Feeno?
Me: Yes, what's up?
G: We need our FY project on school management system done.
Me: Okay?
G: How much will that cost us?
Me: *confused because I was still a freshman. At that point the only programming language I knew was elementary qbasic. I couldn't even write a hello world program without the help of Google*
So played along because yes we're talking about money here.

Me: It will cost you guys N amount of money (*improvised deep voice*).
G: Okay. Fair price.
* Right there they transferred half the requested amount to me. *
Holy moly! This guys aren't joking around. I don't know shit! They clearly mistook me for a senior student whose first name is Feeno, to me that was a nick referred to me by my friends.

I'm in this one for sure and it's a do or die transaction cus I'm returning no fucking money. I told my friends what had happened and they insisted I return back the money to the students and admit I can't deliver the project they were requesting.
Fuck all of yah! I'm keeping this money. Same afternoon I visited the school library with the intension of writing the code using the help of YouTube tutorials. I didn't find anything useful for qbasic as I thought I could write a full fledged school management system using qbasic.

I was lucky enough to find an existing source code on Codeproject, God bless that Indian guy. The source was in PHP and the tutor gave a step by step guide to setup XAMP and MySQL. I really don't know PHP but I guess source code modification is a natural skill to all programmers as I was able to modify the code to meet the requirements of the students (i.e school name, logo and other minor changes).

Most of what I learnt in programming came from modifying the source of that project. I learnt how to connect a PHP source to a MySQL database, I learnt about functions and their usage, I learnt the basics of HTML, I really learnt a lot and I would say that the speed at which I learnt was proportional to the amount of pressure I received to deliver.

That was how my journey as a full stack developer started. By chance maybe.

Slack Boss: hey, could you check work of dev that is okey, we want this update fast.

Me: hey, just tell him to open PR and assign me, I will check and merge changes.

Slack notification: Dev: Hey, could you please merge Pull request on the project ?

Me thinking, hmm weird, I didn't get email.
Checking github, 0 pull request.

Me: hey, I don't see any pull request open, and when you make pr, just assign me I will merge it right away.

Dev: takes half a day

Dev: Makes pr and assign correctly me.

Dev on slack: HERE is PR open now @me.

I get 3 notification to see this PR, sure at least it is there.

I check this PR, 50 commits, X conflicts, cannot merge this.

Me: Hey, @dev please fix conflicts in your PR.

DEV: takes another 2 days to respond.

Boss in the meantime: hey, have you pushed those new changes ?
Me: I am waiting for conflicts to resolve.

Dev: I fixed the conflicts @me.
I check the PR conflicts are there.

Me: are you sure you pushed your changes @dev ? I don't see them resolved

Dev: takes another day and pushes changes to resolve conflicts.

Me: merges PR to master becaus he based it on master, I will sync the developer branch myself.

All good, everybody happy.

I write to dev: Next time base your changes on develop branch and resolve conflicts before making PR.

Two weeks later new PR From this dev.

Based on Master, conflicts everywhere.

The network starts slowing down, transactions start to fail across the 450+ stores, the website starts to spit 500 errors what is going on?

Queue a frantic running around the office working out what was going wrong... Calls from all 3 data centres, nothing is going in or out of the network.

Notice the network admin come back to his desk, his eyebrows raise and he looks left and right before unplugging his laptop ethernet from one of the server access points

The network rushes back to life, everything is fine.

That particular network mapping tool is now banned for use on production.

Just discovered double tap upvotes a rant. :) Have a lovely day

Current project has a ridiculously high amount of formal requirements

Two of them literally are
• the system shall have an “off” state
• the system shall be in the “off” state if no power is supplied

Boy do I have just the solution for you!

........

Sister's new boyfriend at xmas party: So what do you do for a living?

Me: Well, I would say I'm a "full stack" developer, but what does that even mean anymore right? With the state of front-end development being in a constant state of flux and/or kissing its own ass, and every client demanding their one page website used solely for their phone number be offline first WPA SPA Web 7.0 REST Enabled clusterfuck that requires using at least 65% of the AWS stack, most of it completely uselessly. But hey, Neural Network AI looks good on your "grandma's cookies" website, and for only $9,000 per month you can now set the timer on your oven from your phone. So, man, I guess even though I've now been at it twenty years, even I'm not sure what the fuck it is I do anymore. How about you?

Sister's Boyfriend: I'm unemployed.

Fullstack

Jira ticket

Wonder how many people already clicked on it

Well that's it folks,
Australia has started to shutdown and become the isolated island it once was again, even more so with states shutting down independently.

Atleast we have the intern -

fuck, got to reboot the modem... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
where was i, oh yea -

internet right? It's not like the NBN wasn't designed to have every fucking Aussie using it at once or anything 🙄

https://abc.net.au/news/2020-03-22/...