balinares | (no subject)

It's over. Dammit, it's over.

And there I sit, numb with exhaustion, and while I know that in all likelihood there will still be loads of cleanup to do in the coming weeks, at least the bulk of the work, the nightmarish assignment that's kept me more and more busy at work at the increasing exclusion of anything else, is done.

Today was the hard deadline when the old ~~datacenter~~ room-with-servers-in-it had to close due to its Internet connectivity contract expiring, and I'm the poor fuck that got saddled with the task of getting a large bunch of insanely badly coded Web sites transferred to a new datacenter[*], packing the tens upon incompatible, undocumented tens of them onto one single server while not looking at them wrong because that's known to make them a'splode.

I am sure, I am terribly sure that at least a few of you are, by now, blinking in confusion. Surely relocating a few files shouldn't be all that hard, right? Right?

And if you're one of those poor innocent souls, all I'm going to tell you is that just about every last one of those sites broke in a different way[**]. I didn't even know there existed so many ways to make software so brittle. No, I couldn't make an exhaustive list, because there was just plain too many of them mind-boggling issues, bugs, broken assumptions and horrible design choices, and I want to forget, dammit.

At this point, it might be useful to point out to the more recent arrivals among you guys that I've always despised Web development. Because of all the field of computer-related activities, it consistently seems to attract the worst of the worst of incompetence and malpractice and half-assed crummy jobs. And I thought so before working in the field myself.

Imagine how I feel about it now. It was so bad that I had to fix many of the bugs myself, because the developers were, I kid you not, not able to, while I'm not even supposed to be a developer.

Well.

Anyway, at least my life is going to feel like vacation until the daily grind catches up with me, right? Right?

Well, no.

It turns out that my former landlady from before we bought the house seems intent of screwing me out of a sizable chunk of cash, and it looks like I'm going to have to take her ass to the tribunal. I SO want to go through that right now, yeah.

For chrissake. I just want some quiet, dammit.

[*] Not entirely true:

issarlk got to move one for that same client (only one, but by far the worst), plus a few more for different clients.

[**] Except those few which had been, back then, developed under my governance. Somehow those migrated smoothly, without downtime and without issues. Funny how it goes.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Ach, Gott in Himmel. Sorry shit's going so pear-shaped, hon. If there's anything I can do, let me know.

Yes: EMAIL ME. Email me to tell me when you're happy, to tell me when you're sad. Email me about some small thing you saw this morning, email me about the deep questions of life.

It'll make both of us feel better. ♥

Wow. I'm sorry you had to go through that, hon, but pat yourself on the back for getting everything working. I hope the next project is more sane.

And good luck in the next arena... *many hugs*

Right now I'm probably going to go back to addressing trouble tickets as they are opened, which is not exactly gratifying, but should at least leave me with enough mental space to go about the next problem. *hugs back!*

From my side, I can say without hesitation that IT is one of the most ungrateful jobs in the modern corporate world. Good news are always welcome.

Tell me about it. To think I went into this field because it was what I liked to do at the time...

I chew you with acute, heartfelt, burning sympathy. I know exactly what you're going through. Web developers, as a whole, are even worse than physicists.

I resent that remark.

I regret your resentment, as it was not my aim to offend individual Web developers (or physicists). But I do not retract my remark. Fortunately I know there are commendable exceptions—I believe

makali to be a splendid developer, and I am quite prepared to accept that you are too.

Lies, all lies: I'm terrible too ← also lies.

^^^[icon love ♥♥]

Actually, Grey is a physicist.

... Then again, he wrote a Turing machine interpreter in pure Python so I guess that definitely makes him above the mass of Web developers out there. :)

Chewage well received and appreciated. *nibbles back!* Sometimes I wonder if there is money in doing Web development in a non-sucky manner, in which case I might consider starting my own company, dammit. I don't think that's how the world works, though.

Ah, l'autre jour j'ai vraiment un truc qui a explosé dans un labo. (2,4kW était peut-être un peu trop puissant, a la réflexion). Mais c'est pas grave, seule une coupure de courant et une inondation ont suivis. :D

Bon, pas de dégats matériels, c'est l'essentiel!

Non, rassures toi, que des pertes humaines ;P

My dear, I really wish you could have come to work at my company — mind you, we also have our very own lot of shit, but none of it is related to Web. We don't even maintain our own website, and you would not be surprised to see how ugly and amateur it is.

Good luck with your former landlady, and if there is anything we can do to help... Well, you know... A friend will lend you a hand, a real friend will help you hide the bodies!

Gimme a call, I'll bring my shovel.

I went and checked out your Web site.

... Oy.

Also, thanks, I hope it'll all pan out, if not well, at least not too bad, in the end.

Congrats on getting through the Transfer Shitpile, best of luck with the landlady issue, and better times wished. *squeesh*

*squeeshes back!*
Good words taken to heart. Thank you, hon. ♥ Who cares if things go wrong when one has such friends as you guys. :)

Go on, tell me that all the worst, most horrible projects were written by idiots in PHP. :)

... Of note is that those people, quite unlike some snowybutt I know, would still choose PHP if given a totally free choice. c_c

The sad truth is that I'd probably still choose to code serious projects in PHP, not because I like it, but because I'm an expert in that domain, which makes me a lot less dangerous than if I was coding python or something, which I love, but am still not that familiar with. I still think that PHP is redeemable; it's a shame that they didn't have enough balls to make a fresh start with version 6. Tidy the default namespace, force all input through the filter extension, and settle on PDO as a db layer, instead of having dozens of different methods, and it'd be a lot safer from power-newbies, and tidier too. For now though, I can at least enforce that as house style/coding standards and make my life tolerable. The rest comes after world domination I guess :)

Eh, I dunno. I understand very well the wisdom of keeping with the known, but there is such a thing as a dead horse. Maybe, in a theoretical sense, a sufficient amount of beating might grant you a zombie horse; in which case you should still mind your brain very, very carefully, lest you it ends up eaten, or worse, corrupted into thinking that mb_* variants of string functions can ever, ever be a substitute for a true Unicode type.

By and large programmers are either really good or barely passable. I am glad you got the work done.
Good luck with old landlord.

I dunno. In my experience, some are okay, a tiny few are great, and the rest range from bad to abominable. Then, I don't have a very extensive experience of the many, many subfields of the software industry, so what do I know?

I...I feel your pain.

Good luck. With everything!

Mrah, thanks, dear. Eventually it'll work out, and then life will, for a few weeks at least, dare I hope, be a bit quieter than it's been lately.