About a year ago we created as an experiment a custom AST-tree with a renderer in React. We finished this part, but never actually finished any view in our app with this, due to other timeconstraints.

This week, our new project manager looked through the usage of the implementation and basically figured it was shit. This part is fine, it was just an experiment.

But then he said that we sgould never use any AST’s ever in our project. I tried to explain that ASTs are a general concept and mentioned that for instance TypeScript uses it. Then he went bat-shit crazy and disallowed the use of typescript. We spent the next two hours explaining that we cannot avoid ASTs and that they are not bad in general.

But we are not allowed to ever implement some similar to an AST. Sometimes, I’m just blown away by the stubbornness combined with ignorance of some people. Either is fine, but not both.

Looking through some code from a new project at my old job.

It seems they are sending off some audio files from interviews into an online transcriptions-service, and putting the result unsanitized into a string-concatenated INSERT-statement into the db.

I look forward to the demo, I’m going to yell “single quote Drop table users semicolon dash dash”

A while back I took over responsibility for getting one of our developers up to speed, after the other guy basically gave up on him.

Management insisted that this new recruit was our guy. I was kind of going along, since I had been there during the recruits first meeting with us, and he seemed to know his stuff.

I was very wrong. He was suppose to have been working with kubernetes, but suddenly did not know what a container was. After explaining it to him, he said along the lines of “yeah, sure, I was only testing you, I know all about this”.

He did the same thing for a number of other technologies. Always said that he knew very well what it was, and that I did not need to teach him those things.

Yet, he always seemed to get stuck with basic stuff, like installing node, setting up env-vars, starting docker-containers locally and that sort of things.

I mean, it is perfectly fine to say that you don’t know. I even consider it a great answer; it shows honesty and makes me trust you more. But with this guy, it was just impossible to get him up and running, since he always “knew”, but yet always needed help.

We had to let him go. Since I had been the one who had spent most time with him, it was natural that I was to be the one to tell him. I was not looking forward to it, I’m not reallly a persons-guy. Still, I was calm and honest with him and basically told him that I had found it impossible to work with him, kind of harshly.

He then asked me if he could put me on as a reference for his future job-applications. I told him politely that I did not think that was a great idea. He asked why, I told him I would be unable to say anything that would benefit him. He then asked me to lie.

I didn’t know what to say, except for “no!”. Never saw him again after that.

This Christmas I transitioned into a new job. At the old job I was the only kubernetes-guy, so since they no longer have any developers who are confident working with that, they decided to go with LAMP-stack.

The data from dev-kubernetes-server was backed up by some guy and moved to an offsite-server, or so they told me. Turns out, he had backed up the kubectl-config-file, and not the databases. Now everything is wiped. Sure glad we still have that config-file!

Of course, since that was only our dev-server, there was nothing too important there, except for all the documentation. The only other backup? On my laptop, which I turned in to them, and is now wiped and used by one of the sales-guys.

Now I’m being called in at least twice a day, since I was their goto-guy for almost anything backend-related. Feels great, after they spent a couple of months attempting to rewrite everything in pure PHP (with a strict no-dependency policy for some reason). Fml.

Our company today disallowed the use of GitKraken to all developers. Reason? They wanted to save money. When I told them that software is free, they responded with , “No, not in any way! All developers can use GitHub Actions instead”.

I don’t think they know what GitKraken nor GitHub Actions is, nor that GitKraken is free.

Not that I like GitKraken, but I don’t want to limit other developers use of it if they like it.

Meanwhile, we have been running no less than four kubernetes clusters, of which only one is in use…

Great news, our company's has a brand new security-first product, with an easy to use API and a beautiful web interface.

It is SQL-injection-enabled, XSS-compatible, logins are optional (if you do not provide a password, you are logged in as admin).

The json-api has custom-date formats, bools are any of "1", "0", 1, 0, false or null (but never true). Numbers are strings or numbers. Utf-8 is not supported. Most of our customers use special characters.

The web interface is using plain bootstrap, and because of XSS it is really easy to customize everything.

How the hell this product got launched is beyond me.

You know your company is in shit when the only products that their customers are using are all written by people who has since left the company.

I guess the first ones to leave are the best developers.

I'm a backend developer who for the last year has been helping the iOS-, Android and Frontend team with rewriting their shit.

Now I got yelled at for not making any new features on the backend, and we need to ship fast. So my manager dropped all further work on our backend, since it clearly needed a rewrite, since there have been no new features which to him indicates bad code that is hard to change.

Now all the developers are rewriting their applications to fit the new backend created by some new guy, which for some reason is stuck in creating a log-aggregator from scratch instead of the actual product.

I got my first developer job three years ago. I’ve always had a great eye for detail, and getting things done while following best practices. I learned that a few years ago from typography, which I think is a fascinating subject, which has a lot of shared ideas with software development.

In my first job, I immediately took a lot more responsibility than what I was assigned to. This job was as a React Developer, but I quickly got into backend development and set up kubernetes clusters, CI/CD.

Looking back, this was to me quite an achievement, considering I had never done anything even remotely close to it.

I did however, work my ass off. 18 hours work days without telling my boss, so only getting paid for 8. Plus I worked weekends.

I did love it. After a while, I got promotes to Senior Developer, and got responsibility for everything technical. I tried asking for help, but everybody else was either a student, or working purely front-end or app-development. Meanwhile, I was Devops, API-design, backend, Ci/CD, handling remote installations (all our customers are Airgapped), customer support, front-end and occasionally app-development when the app-developers could not handle their shit. Basically, I was the goto-guy for every problem, every feature, every fix. I don’t say this to brag.

I recently quit my job, started working as a consultant, because I almost doubled my pay. However the new job is boring as shit. I’m now an overpaid React Developer. And I really hate React. Not because it is shit, but simply because it is boring.

I’m thinking of going back to my old job. It was a lot of work, but it was really interesting. However, after I quit, they have changed their whole stack. No more Golang, Containers, Kubernetes, webRTC and other fun new technologies. Now, it is just plain, PHP without any dependecies. It is both boring, and idiotic. So I’m thinking of just quitting. Either doing some personal projects like game-development. I dont know.

Seeing our products for the last two years being ripped out and replaced with basic php-server using the owasp-top-10-list as a checklist of things to implement. Reasoning: GraphQL is too hard on the client-side.