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

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.