Chatbot developer.

Prod code. The legacy codebases never fail to shock me just when think you've seen it all.

Favourite year as a dev? The first year. It was still so new and interesting to me yet to be soiled by money, deadlines, managers, waking up early, commuting, coworkers etc... Ah to be able to go back to those days.

Just recalled the time we sent the new apprentice developer to HR for a "verbal agreement form" to request his birthday off. HR Came back down with him unsure as to where to find the verbal agreement forms.

"Well, that's not very funny." - HR

Support run checks on our core VMS twice a day and report back their findings. We had big problems.

A taxi booking platform to support functioning B2B taxing booking company that was turning over 15 million per year.

It offered portals for B2B and B2C. Rather simple concept.

Business or client raise a booking, booking is submitted to a 3rd party taxi firm we manage the booking throughout its lifetime for the client.

We had an existing legacy product in place that needed redeveloping.

Management sunk many, many millions of pounds into the project, it never lunch and teh company was sold off twice will extreme losses each time. First sale was in the millions and the second was for 500k.

This was a result of poor technical choices made by past lead developers and extremely poor choice of management who cared more for managing their reputation as they were self aware of how much knowledge they lacked.

The technical aspect of the company was created a child company of the parent. This child company was responsible for the downfall of the parent which was functioning well and making a profit.

The company as a whole has since been liquidated thanks to that project. Many out of a job.

I jumped ship after 8 months as I couldn't continue to work with the crazy management. By crazy I mean they should have been in a tincan.

Azure. Its so vast has something for just about anything, and isn't crazy expensive if you implement whatever it is you're doing with cost in mind.

Used different features of it at old companies Storage (blob/table), service bus, application insights, app centre, event hub, functions etc...

Currently at a company that is slowly moving over to Azure which is a great process to be apart of. Get to spend a lot of time investigating what is available as it seems each and every time I come to use it, its grown substantially.

Myself a few months into my new role.

I attend the Christmas work event (free bar) and got super drunk. I go the toilet for a piss...

During that time I strike up a conversation with the dude stood next to me and to cut a long story short I end up betting, stake defined, hand shook that the company we both work for will fail within two years due to some governmental reforms I knew little about.

Turns out the dude happens to be one of the board members. Its big company 100's of employees.

There were other employees in the toilet at the time too not 30 minutes later and everyone knew what I'd said. It was rather embarrassing I almost didn't turn up the Monday following.

Not my proudest moment, but thankfully I wasn't fired. Its been 1.8 years... I and still work there.

The last two frontend devs I interviewed.

First:

He had 15 some years of experience, but couldn't answer our most basic of technical questions, we stopped asking after the first couple.

Based on a technical test I got the impression that he couldn't distinguish between backend and frontend.

So, I posed a simple question "Have you interfaced with REST API'S using Javascript before?"

Which lead him to talk about arrays. I shit you not he droned on about arrays for five minutes.

"I have experience using big array, small arrays, breaking big arrays into littler arrays and putting arrays inside other arrays."

Never been in an interview situation where I've had to hold back laughter before. We refer to him as the array expert.

His technical knowledge was lacking, and he was nervous, so he just waffled. I managed to ease his nerves and the interview wasn't terrible after that, but he wasn't what we were looking for.

Second:

This was a phone interview.

It started off OK he was clearly walking somewhere and was half preoccupied. Turns out he was on his way back from the shop after buying rolling papers (we'd heard him in the shop asking for Rizla), and he was preoccupied with rolling a joint.

We started asking some basic technical questions at which point he faked that he'd seen a fight in the street.

We then called him back five minutes later you could hear him smoking "ah, that's better". After that the interview was OK, not what we were looking for, but not bad.

Top tip: If you require a joint to get through a phone interview, roll and smoke it before hand.

Just read a comment on rant that stated "You’d be surprised as how disgusting people are especially in the work setting.". In regard to bathrooms. This reads true, for my current place of work

I was about to reply to that, but I thought this is worthy of a rant of its own. Allow me to quote some emails...

"We have had reports of excrement being left on toilet seats, which surely could be seen by the person responsible before they left the cubicle. "

"very poor toilet hygiene in some the ladies toilets.

Firstly, someone person should I say.... has used a toilet brush to clear a blockage in the Ladies loo nearest [removed]. They obviously couldn't unblock the toilet due to the density of the blockage and therefore.. returned the brush to it's holder full of the blockage!! "

"The phantom "snot" wiper is back and is using the back of the toilet door nearest the [removed] as a tissue! Again.. the poor Cleaner has had to clean this up... "

"Toilet paper being put in the Urinal blocking the system in [removed] and faeces being left on the toilet floor in [removed]. This goes without saying that this can't go on and it's not the cleaners job to be cleaning such messes! "

Its ever worse in our other office that contains a call centre. A lady was fired for leaving shit in the stairwells on multiple instances. She had been fired from her last role for the same thing.

There were also reports of subway subs been left in the toilet bowl.

You also find the most curious items in the waste bins (they have no lid, we're not search through them - just to make that clear) everything from half eaten sandwiches to watermelon.

So, firstly allow me to start with I'm not one to use my phone, so the idea that I'm not allowed to doesn't actually bother me, but the threatening tone really does drive me insane. The corporate office environment here is quickly getting old. Am I wrong to be annoyed by this?

[To IT Department Group]

Remember these emails?

PUT YOUR PHONES AWAY. Next one I see I will confiscate until the end of the day.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

[Head of IT footer]

----
Forwarded email.
----

[To IT Department Group]

I see mobiles starting to creep out onto desks and people with heads down texting/looking at their phones.

Please stop.

What I said previously still stands.

Put them away, or I will.

[Head of IT footer]

Interview stories. What are your funny/bizarre /success stories both as an interviewee or interviewer?

My 14 year old self stared at Chrome and decided to consult Google on a random fleeting thought...

"How is software made?"

The search resulted in my downloading Visual Studio. Without any understanding of what it was or how it worked I somehow managed to create a new Winforms project.

I started to drag controls from the ToolBox onto the form, and I specifically recall thinking "Wow! This is easy.". Little did I know...

I then inadvertently double clicked either a control or the form which as most will know switches from the designer view to the code editor taking you to the code that drives the form.

"What the hell is this?"

I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at, but decided I was determined to understand what all of that random text did.

So, yeah, my first dev project was a Winforms App consisting of a single button that did absolutely nothing, but yet happens to be the most important app I have ever created.

To think I'd be working in an entirely different sector if it wasn't for that one Google search.

Production code.

devRant needs some form of syntax highlighting, so 𝐂𝐨𝐝𝐞 snippets can be posted as oppose to screenshots.

Just found this little nugget... So much wrong with this.

public static class CleanString
{
public static string CleanString(this String str)
{
if (str != "" && str != null)
{
str = str.Replace("!", "");
str = str.Replace("£", "");
str = str.Replace("$", "");
str = str.Replace("%", "");
str = str.Replace("^", "");
str = str.Replace("&", "");
str = str.Replace("*", "");
str = str.Replace("(", "");
str = str.Replace(")", "");
str = str.Replace("-", "");
str = str.Replace("=", "");
str = str.Replace("{", "");
str = str.Replace("}", "");
str = str.Replace("[", "");
str = str.Replace("]", "");
.....
return str;
}
}
}

Nothing special

Sites that make you sign in to verify an email address :/

New guy added this in a Angular 4 project :/

Apparently they'd never heard of bools. The best part is the case check given that they define the string.

We have a portal which uses Windows Integrated auth that lists out all off our internal sites.

Navigating to any of these produces a URL like the one in the attached image.

Turns out all our internal application use a base64 encoded email address in the query string as the means of authentication.

So, anyone can authenticate themselves as another employee within the company by simply changing the query param value to said employees email address.

Fucking nuts.

Having to create manual builds/deployments as lead doesn't trust auto build/deploy.

XML and JSON endpoints while forcing Content-Type Text/Plain instead of allowing Web API to handle the serialisation. The f were these devs thinking.

Check your nulls kids.

When I left school I decided to apply for a junior dev role. I received a call back later that day and they tried to sell me access to some course with the promise of a job afterwords. They gave me a website to visit to find more information.

I Googled the company and found that it was as I suspected a scam and that they had been praying on the jobless for sometime.

So, I played around on the site they told me to visit for a while and found a rather simple SQLI. I managed to pull the admin email/password (which they stored as plain text) the email address belonged to a Gmail account.

I tried the password for the Gmail account turns out the account belongs to the person running the scam. I find an email from the hosting account and you guessed it the password was the same.

I pulled the site down and replaced it with a picture of the person running the scam along with his name and the words "I'm a dirty scammer".

Then I sent all the info to the police (he'd been running a few others scams too) not sure what that lead to I didn't hear anything back.

Just took a new role...

Production database filled with tables like the following :/

SELECT TOP (1000) [ID]
,[Field1]
,[Field2]
,[Field3]
,[Field4]
,[Field5]
,[Field6]
,[Field7]
,[Field8]
,[Field9]
,[Field10]
,[Field11]
,[Field12]
,[CapID]
,[Car_Manufacturer]
,[Car_Range]
,[Car_Derivative]
,[Field17]
,[Field18]
,[Field19]
,[Car_Model]
,[Field21]
,[Field22]
,[Field23]
FROM [****].[dbo].[****]

This isn't even the worst, there's a table with 250+ fields that should be broken out into 10-15 tables. The code is far, far worse.

Don't think I'll be here too long.

Update your LinkedIn to include “Agile Consultant” and watch the job offers fly in.