SoyViking [he/him]

I’m the guy on that airplane at the moment.

I get specs for an external API to use in a new major feature. I begin implementing, the specs doesn’t add up because nobody paid the eastern European gig programmers to document anything. Eventually I derive plausible specs from a frustrating process of emails and trial and error.

I implement the major feature to the specs provided by the client. The client tests in staging and requests several adjustments. I implement those, client tests again and accepts.

The feature is pushed to production. The client finds a ton of errors because of course the rudimentary specs I managed to wrestle out of the client and the big-shot corner-cutting third party API developer didn’t describe half of the ideosyncratic data structure they send. Stuff like sending completely empty posts and expecting empty rows to be inserted in the database, sending text comments in fields intended for storing numbers instead of in the dedicated comment field. That sort of bullshit. They want to pour garbage in an have garbage coming out.

So I had to do a ton of hotfixes directly to production. Everything have to be fixed yesterday because it is a business critical feature. It sucks. It’s a clusterfuck of cherry picking and it becomes impossible to do any sort of quality control.

A ton of errors got introduced because nobody explained to the Eastern Europeans what the API should do or gave them the time to do it properly. I am the lead engineer on the project and I have to rush to make emergency bug investigations all the time. Most of the things the bug is that the Eastern Europeans didn’t set up their system like they were asked to or that nobody told them how it should work and just assumed they would know. I wrote more emails than code. The client pays a ton of money for all of this and nothing gets done because they rushed into this feature without planning it properly.

Potatoes, rice, rye bread and dry pasta.

Traditional family Christmas: Tonight we have my mother in law and her husband over for Christmas dinner and a ton of gifts for the kids. Tomorrow on Christmas day we will have the traditional “food hangover” and total relaxation day while the kids play with their presents. Yesterday we went for dinner and presents at my father in law’s house and the day before that we had my parents over for presents and sweets. On boxing day we go to a combined family lunch and my mother in law’s birthday which usually involves sizable amounts of smoked fish.

All these newfangled high-faluting AI tools are ruining the software industry and making developers go soft. Back in my day we didn’t need no robot to get things done, we knew the value of hard work and wasn’t afraid to pull up our sleeves and copy/paste the code from Stack Overflow ourselves.