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.

Threaded | Flat

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

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*

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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...I feel your pain.

Good luck. With everything!