Vampires, Kaiju monsters, YOURSHITTYCODE!
Developers are those weird guys that manipulate esoterich arts and make funny animated puppets appears on the phone screen. At least, this is the 'normal' opinion of about 90% of the users. The remaining 10% thinks they are criminals always trying to steal passwords and moneys and "hack" into super-secret places to do... don't know really what but must be some sort of evil scheme.
This is what USERS thinks. Of course, if you have a minimal knowledge with the "race" from a sysadmin point of view, you know that there are developers that are, unfortunately, an almost extint race while devePLOPPERS are reproducing faster than rabbits and, despite our best efforts, are getting more and more common in the IT environment.
I shouldn't explain what I mean with "devePLOPPERS", but since I am the one writing this, I'll do anyway.
A devPLOPPER is normally quite young, it has to be because when you get a bit older you start understanding something and that make you somehow less dumb (I didn't say 'smarter') and less prone to sprout bullshit, either that or you are the victim of some 'accident' that remove you from the gene pool in an abrupt way.
Being young unfortunately they suffer of the typical complex of "essential novelty": everything that is "new" is, by definition, wonderful, beautyful, superefficient, fantastic and absolutely NOT like that old fart from last week that obviously was a complete shit, old, dusty and creaking. For example, when presented with the term 'Database' they throw terms like Redis and Mongo those are databases, not that sql-shit-there that are completely useless and always have problems with those "keys" whothefuckcaresaboutkeys, we want NULL all over the place.
For the same reason now PHP is old and dusty while NodeJS is new and marvelous. Everybody is there talking about Kubernetes and Docker and Container and can't even use ssh. Actually they never use ssh, they only use https because it's new. But they have absolutely no clue what is 'tls 1.2' and ask annoied why should they have 'certificates' for the vpn. The vpn is old and dusty they are always wireless...
Devploppers, since are young, are always searching for the new and they never-ever makes mistakes. His code is always perfect and it always works perfectly on his latest macbook. If it doesn't work is time to ask for a new macbook because the old one is obviously defective, must be a problem in the cpu or maybe is the gpu that is not clear what is it and why should be there but that is probably the problem because it doesn't support the latest standard.
And with this, we're going to talk of the devplopper "du jour": CL.
And I have to begin by talking in his favour. Because the situation isn't really CL fault. About a year ago, the 3 SL that were in charge of the whole company reached an inpasse. Two of them were in favour of selling the whole shebang to $enormousretailer while the third one wasn't. But since it was 2 vs 1, he decided that the only option was to sell his partecipation to the other two and move out. The sale was finalized and one of the unexpected results was that we had to use $wehoststuff (of which I've already spoken about). Another unexpected result was that in short time, both the 'product owner' (aka: project managers) for the backend and the frontend of the system left, quickly followed by the CTO, that was also the architect of the whole IT environment, and 7 developers.
This left the 2 SLs, with a huge pile of open positions to fill and a lot of tasks for which there were not enough competent peoples. CL found himself moved from the 'frontend' to the 'backend' for the simple reason that he was the only one with a vague knowledge of the whole thing. Vague. Very vague. Basically none.
And CL is also a devplopper, not a developer. If you show him some code that he doesn't understand, he tend to retreat hissing like a vampire in front of a cross, instead of diving in trying to figure it out.
And yes, the backend code is quite a mess, not that much that you can just toss it out (it's Python, mostly) but it require a lot of maintenance also because the users that are using it require changes and update daily.
CL has also the habit of doing changes directly in production with the justification that "it works on his laptop".
And with this, we talk about last week, when, after repeated requests (and threat) by our finance department, he began working to a series of changes to some function. Changes that were promptly release on production. Strangely enough, nobody started screaming right away like I was expecting.
The next day however, somebody from the Logistic group came to notify us that some sort of 'data export' to our warehouse had failed to produce any data. After some inquiry, I was informed that the backend was producing every day a bunch of files that were then handed out to the warehouse and those files apparently were missing for the previous night.
A quick check told me that the files were actually MIA. So at 9.30, when CL entered the building, he had a welcome committee that was asking for files and answers. The files were easy to produce, the answers not so much.
After a bit of messing around, CL came to me with the view that "the production server is overloaded" a quick check told me that the cpu never get above 20%, "then is a problem with the memory of the system for sure", there are 8 Gb free, "the disk must be full", 40 Gb available, "the processes... the inodes... the network latency... interrupts... zombies...", vampires, Kaiju monsters, yourshittycode...
I send him to check the logs of that piece of crap and after a few hours he came back complaining tha he hasn't found anything. Yes because a decent logging require to think about it and implement it in a decent way, while throwing up everything into a file instead...
A few days passes by and the files keep not being produced. After the second day our Logistic groups came to ask a new "check" to be sure that those files are actually produced and if not, to notify pigs&dogs so everybody can came in early in the morning to complaint about it.
CL keep pointing the finger towards the server, the cpu, the ram, the disk, the network, the zombies... while I keep answering about vampires, Kaiju monsters and his shitty code...
We reach tuesday, with the files that are still produced by hand hours later.
CL - ...and it keeps running without giving any error and I'm convinced that is a problem with the CPU, the ram, disk, network... zombies...
Me - Vampires, Kaiju monster, yourshittycode!
CL - but...
Me - Listen, maybe it's me that jump to conclusions but... On thursday you released a bunch of stuff in production and starting from that very night, that thing began to crash. I see a connection between the two, you don't?
CL - I told you already, that stuff wasn't involved in the changes I released.
Me - Did you checked on test?
CL - No, why should I?
Me - I mean, have you tried in test to run that thing in the scheduler if it does work? Because on test there isn't a problem of 'load/memory' whatever for sure.
CL - Hemmm... no I didn't tried it in test.
Me - And don't you think you should do it? And maybe add a bunch of debug messages?
CL - But... the cpu, the zombies...
Me - The vampires, Kaiju montesrs, youshittycode!
So after a bit of ... encouragment... CL try that stuff in test. And he is astonished that... IT DOESN'T WORK IN TEST EITHER! At this point he start looking and...
CL - Hu... I need to do a release on prod to fix that export problem...
Me - Good, did you understood what was it?
CL - Yes...
Me - ....aaaand?
CL - Well... there were some changes that had been made to the scheduler but weren't release on prod and ... it was some simple stuff and ...
Me - You forgot about them and now the scheduler is fucked.
CL - He...
Me - So when you talked about the cpu, the zombies... Kaiju monsters and yourshittycode...
Davide
30/01/2019 15:51
E la gente si incavola pure se dico che gli sviluppatori software dovrebbero essere laureati e competenti (saper progettare un DB relazionale è il minimo minimo, ma c'è anche molto altro) mentre i programmatori dovrebbero almeno aver studiato programmazione, per es. in un istituto tecnico o facendo dei corsi seri, non bootcamp di 2 settimane.
