“Full Stack Dev” AKA Backend Dev who knows just enough about CSS to be dangerous.

Real talk: I wish more orgs place a high value on QA. A good QA team is worth it’s weight in gold and helps prevent a lot of stupid mistakes.

No good deed goes unpunished.

One time I worked on a team that had a ridiculously high defect rate. Stuff was constantly getting kicked back from QA. Management kept piling on all kinds of convoluted processes to try to reduce the number of defects which only made things worse.

I started really hammering the need for doing a root cause analysis as part of bug/defect tickets. Don’t just fix the bug. Make sure you understand what caused it and link the bug ticket to the ticket that caused it.

Big surprise (not really), 90% of the bugs and defects were being caused by like 3 people.

Your comment made me think of some of the PM’s whining about adding one story point for doing an RCA because apparently it’s better to just ignore the problem and keep pumping out shitty broken code as fast as possible.

Yes. Because they’ll store everything in MongoDB.

PO: “Why does it seem like it takes a really long time to develop new features?”

Dev: “I’m glad you asked! We’ve got this piece of code (points at smoldering pile of spaghetti) that literally has to be changed every time we do anything. The person who wrote it has been gone for like four years. No one knows how it works and it’s central to the entire application. I would estimate that this easily doubles the time it takes to work each ticket. I’ve created a set of stories to rewrite this code. We just need your approval to bring it into an upcoming sprint.”

PO: “Can’t… Hear… Breaking… Up… Bad connection…”

Dev: “Uhhh… This isn’t a Teams meeting. You’re sitting in the room with us right now.”

PO: …

Dev: “We know you’re still here even if you’re not moving.”

PO: …

Bet you $1,000 the credentials are stored in plain text.

My first thought when reading the OP was “Who the hell touches anything on a Friday evening? That sounds like a good way to end up working the entire weekend.”

Nearly every time I ask ChatGPT a question about a well established tech stack, it’s responses are erroneous to the point of being useless. It frequently provides examples using fabricated, non-existent functionality and the code samples are awful.

What’s the point in getting AI to write code that I’m just going to have to completely rewrite?

My experience has been more like:

“We’ve scheduled the wedding. Not only have I not asked her out, but the [potential] bride is guaranteed to be completely turned off by the whole idea. I won’t know that because I’m not going to ask her opinion about anything until she ghosts me three weeks before the wedding.”

Pats top of Dell Optiplex

“Good boy.”

Since you’re already working in C#, an ASP.Net Core backed, with whatever database you prefer, will do what you want.

You could self host it, but I wouldn’t call that easy. There are plenty of cloud providers that can integrate with your preferred git repo and really streamline the build and deployment process. I run a few applications as “Apps” on Digital Ocean. Once you get it configured properly, deployments are quick and easy.

Mini split is currently in the backlog. It will be closed as “not planned” three years from now.

Some of the features you’re looking for led me to switch to Quicken a few years ago. It’s a legacy desktop app (Quicken Online sucks) and it’s not very fast but it is still the gold standard for personal accounting software. I’ve honestly been happier with it than I was with anything else I’ve tried.

Thankfully Intuit sold it off so they can’t enshitify it anymore.

“Dad, you better quit taking those blood pressure meds. You might become dependent on them.”

About 12 years ago, I promised an agent at Safeco (AKA Liberty Mutual) that they would never get another penny from me because they wouldn’t honor the terms of my policy, refusing to pay the full amount on a vehicle collision claim. They’re just another business that doesn’t keep their word. But I absolutely plan to keep mine.

PM: “How long is developing this feature going to take?”

Me: “Due to all the refactoring that’s needed --which I’ve been repeatedly bringing up for two years – just to implement it, it’s going to take about 6 months.”

PM: “Is there any way you can have it ready for the release in two weeks?”

Me: “No.”

PM: Proceeds to tell everyone that it will be ready for the release in two weeks.

I would advise against it. Separation of concerns isn’t important until it is. If your host server is unavailable for any reason, now EVERYTHING is unavailable. Having your server go down is bad. Being unable to browse the internet when your host is down and you’re trying to figure out why is worse.

There are also risks involved in running your firewall on the same host as all your other VM’s without adding a lot of complex network configurations.

I initially read the phone number as “Ass I’m Late” and I was very confused.

If you’re gonna do that it should only be after sending a very blunt CYA email.