One of my old bosses used to say, “the choice is often not between right and wrong, but good, better, and best.”
I agree with that sentiment for the most part. Different styles is fine. But sometimes you run into someone who is trying to use a socket wrench to drive nails and all you can do is just kind of watch in amazement and wonder how they arrived at the conclusion that this was the way to go.
First One:
Big ASP.Net Core Web API that passed through several different contract developer teams before being finally brought in house.
The first team created this janky repository pattern on top of Entity Framework Core. Why? I have no idea. My guess is that they just didn’t know how to use it even though it’s a reasonably well documented ORM.
The next team abandoned EFCore entirely, switched to Dapper, left the old stuff in place, and managed to cram 80% of the new business logic into stored procedures. There were things being done in sprocs that had absolutely no business being done there, much less being offloaded to the database.
By the time it got to me, the data layer was a nightmarish disaster of unecesary repo classes, duplicates entities, and untestable SQL procedures, some of which were hundreds of lines long.
“Why are all our queries running so slow?”
We’ll see guys, it’s like this. When your shoving a bunch of telemetry into a stored procedure to run calculations on it, and none of that data is even stored in this database, it’s going to consume resources on the database server, thereby slowing down all the other queries running on it.
Second One:
Web app that generates PDF reports. Problem was it generated them on-the-fly, every time the PDF was requested instead of generating it once and storing it in blob storage and it was sllloowwwww. 30 seconds to generate a 5 page document. There were a list of poor decisions that led to that, but I digress.
Product owner wants the PDF’s to be publicly available to users can share links to them. One of the other teams implements the feature and it’s slated for release. One day, my curiosity gets the best of me and I wonder, “what happens if I send a bunch of document requests at once?” I made it to 20 before the application ground to a halt.
I send a quick write up to the scrum Master who schedules a meeting to go over my findings. All the managers keep trying to blow it off like it’s not a big deal cause “who would do something like that?” Meanwhile, I’m trying to explain to them that it’s not even malicious actors that we have to be concerned about. Literally 20 users can’t request reports at the same time without crashing the app. That’s a big problem.
They never did fix it properly. Ended up killing the product off which was fine because it was a pile of garbage.
“I’m going to set this right here. That way I will definitely remember where I put it.”
Narrator: “He did not remember.”
US Farmers having the day they voted for:
Its also incredibly fast.
“We’re going to use NestJS for the backend.”
Wait… Oh no. Oh please no. God why!?!
Set hammer on top of step ladder
Climb down from ladder
IMMEDIATELY forget about hammer
Move ladder
KLONK!! “Ow! Shit.”
“That’s the last time I’ll ever do that.”
Narrator: “It wasn’t even the last time that day.”
All the function parameter and returns types are going to be “any”.
And we’re not going to tell you.
Self hosting is a great opportunity to learn about some popular technologies and even acquire a few sysadmin skills. Required knowledge of a self-hosted solutions tech stack is not gatekeeping any more than required knowledge of tools and building materials is gatekeeping when it comes to renovating your bathroom. In either scenario, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s going to be a much more difficult job.
reverse proxies
That said, you should not be exposing any of your services to the public if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s a quick way to a bad time.
What’s really annoying is when you spend two days trying to track down a bug, only to find out it’s not really a bug.
It really used to piss me off when the older techs would make me crawl around in nasty crawlspaces while they stood around and smoked cigarettes.
I get not wanting to be there but I’m not not about to leave some poor kid who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing fumbling around in the dark by himself for half the day.
Sometimes I think I should have stayed in the trades. Then I remember having to tear hundreds of HVAC smoke dampers out of a new building and replace them with fire and smoke dampers because the boss decided he was just going to whatever instead of what the blueprints called for.
Then I’m good for a while.
I’ve seen plenty of back ends that needed to be destroyed.
One time I got written up for stating that “failing to take cyber security seriously creates a massive potential liability” for the company. Apparently that was “out of line.”
Well you know what else is out of line? Critical infrastructure organizations (i.e. utilities) that don’t take security seriously.
I do not miss that dumpster fire.
I grew up in a family with a cycle of abuse.
I now understand why my dad was as angry and violent as he was. It honestly made me feel sorry for him and made it easier to forgive him. But in no way did it excuse or justify his actions. What he did was still wrong.
When I forget the name of someone that I have known for ages. Especially frustrating when I see them somewhere and I’m scrambling through my phone contacts to see if it jogs my memory.
Then, all of a sudden POOF it comes back to me. So annoying.
I use Proxmox for Work and Hyper-V at home. Looking forward to retiring my old Hyper-V host and replace it with Proxmox because Hyper-V is a pain.
Virtualization really helps with reliability. In particular, by allowing you to quickly take snapshots before doing anything destructive and by streamlining backup and recovery.
Have you tried focusing and applying yourself?
/S
You just need a reminder to check your reminders.