I’m in my first professional role and the first project was completed and aside from my boss I was the only other dev. So I was naturally excited for their (clients) feedback on it.
Well fast forward a couple of months where they really didn’t interact with the application much and then came the queries and then not understanding how to use it. Find boss sets aside 10 days for me to write some documentation with screenshots of all the journeys (free of charge).
Again, tumbleweeds. Then all of a sudden it’s boom emails a plenty.
Can you fix this, this is a major bug kinda emails. Like it isn’t a bug, you don’t know how to use it.
Now we are dumbing down the software to make it more align with what the business is used to, which is fine but even my boss has said (as I over think and want to reply to things instantly) that just because they have come to life doesn’t mean we drop everything else to tend to them now.
that just normal software development with contacts and waterfall. usually with agile it’s meditated to some extend, because with agile the customer is on board and cannot say afterwards i didn’t want it.
Welcome to the professional world where everything is iterative and and 95% of your clients (internal or external) are data illiterate and don’t want to learn whatever self service tools you build.
Yeah it’s going to wild I can already tell. I know your right to as it’s only a small company I work for, less than 10 of us and they all complain about stupid things the clients do.
I have a colleague who is the contact for a dude that takes a picture of a site with his phone, so he photographs the monitor. Which I know isn’t that unusual, but wait.
He then emails this to himself, perhaps to have it on his desktop. Proceeds to print off the image, but not just the image, but the image as it appears in the email. THE ACTUAL EMAIL.
Then he will annotate the printout and I shit you not, will take another photo, but this time of the printout. Inception level shit.
Behind every ❗️❗️❗️🚨🚨🚨URGENT🚨🚨🚨❗️❗️❗️ there is a person who’s about to miss a deadline and, instead of working on themselves to prevent that from happening in the future, makes it the developer’s deadline to miss
Me this morning. I’m gonna take a look at why this Jenkins pipeline is failing. This one job starts a dozen others. Half are failing. For different reasons. After starting rewriting a job that someone half assed. Realize the original error was caused by missing input but some are still valid. Still can’t figure out why my rewritten program is erroring. Get pulled away because another program did something weird… I completed nothing today but worked a ton.
At work, I am currently dealing with a table that has no primary key, no foreign key, duplicate (almost) serial numbers, booleans stored as strings, and so on. It’s a nightmare of a table.
Entity framework is acting like I’m on meth for using such a table.
No, we have worse. Dates sometimes stored as strings, sometimes as datetimes, and sometimes as integers. There is no consistency, logic, or forethought to the schema.
Yeah. Luckily the work I am doing is to fix some really bad work that the entire company has been complaining about. So once it’s fixed it will hopefully be a little bit more recognition than that. Plus my boss is pretty level headed.
But who fucking knows? There is always the likelihood that people will say things along those lines. And it ain’t my job to fight them on that.
I have been trying to get people in my area to make their new table generically named, since it’s going to be the only table that can map a date range to a different date range, but I’m on holidays now, and they can’t imagine anything other than their little project needing this table, so it’s going to be named for this one project, and it’s columns will be named for the specific data they’ll hold :(
Nah this is one of those slick work deals, legit all you need to do is list all your entries, order a pivot table, and then you can just arrange your variables to display however you want them to, do a little format pizaz, and voila, here’s that “report” you asked for!
Because Jen in accounting doesn’t believe in it, and Tom the CIO likes his data stored raw in TXT Amphibious Delineated. Then our biggest client prefers data as Jason so we swapped half of our database to that to speed things up.
But the real problem is high turnover because we don’t pay anyone enough to work on things they are proud of. After 2 years we stop doing even 3% COL raises so they go elsewhere. So every 2-4 years each position gets a new opinionated asshole.
our biggest client prefers data as Jason so we swapped half of our database to that
the app I work with currently stores json as the only column in a sql table and it hurts me so very much. like watching someone pick up a screwdriver and try to bash a nail in with the handle.
Same feel as “how long is this going to take to pull?” Well I don’t know if part of what you’re asking for exists, how clean it is, and if can join the data you’re talking about, so anywhere from 5 minutes to never?
That’s exactly how you should respond. I’ve been on the requester for some of these and if my team gave me that as a response I’d just say “let me know what you find out or when you know more.”
Man I don’t regret leaving this behind at my last job. You start out by doing someone a one-off like “sure I can pull the top 5 promotional GICs broken down by region for your blog article - I love supporting my co-workers!”
Then requests become increasingly esoteric and arcane, and insistent.
You try to build a simple FE to expose the data for them, but you can’t get the time approved so you either have to do it with OT or good ol’ time theft, and even then there’s no replacement for just writing SQL, so you’ll always be their silver bullet.
At that point you teach them how to do it themselves. Isn’t there a way to give them an account that only has read access so they can’t inadvertently screw up the database?
In Oracle you’d just set up a user that has limited access and give them those credentials. Creating a few views that pulls in the data they want is a bonus.
I like that idea, and it actually did work for our Marketing guy (Salesforce has a kind of SQL). Near the end there, I just had to debug a few of his harder errors, or double check a script that was going to be running on production.
Never thought of it for Postres or Mysql, etc, but I suppose there’s got to be an easy enough way to get someone access
A view is a saved query that pretends it’s a table. It doesn’t actually store any data. So if you need to query 10 different tables, joining them together and filtering the results specific ways, a view would just be that saved query, so instead of “SELECT * FROM (a big mess of tables)” you can do “SELECT * FROM HandyView”
Basically scripts you can run on the fly to pull calculated data. You can (mostly) treat them like tables themselves if you create them on the server.
So if you have repeat requests, you can save the view with maybe some broader parameters and then just SELECT * FROM [View_Schema].[My_View] WHERE [Year] = 2023 or whatever.
It can really slow things down if your views start calling other views in since they’re not actually tables. If you’ve got a view that you find you want to be calling in a lot of other views, you can try to extract as much of it as you can that isn’t updated live into a calculated table that’s updated by a stored procedure. Then set the stored procedure to run at a frequency that best captures the changes (usually daily). It can make a huge difference in runtime at the cost of storage space.
It can really slow things down if your views start calling other views in since they’re not actually tables
They can be in some cases! There’s a type of view called an “indexed” or “materialized” view where the view data is stored on disk like a regular table. It’s automatically recomputed whenever the source tables change. Doesn’t work well for tables that are very frequently updated, though.
Having said that, if you’re doing a lot of data aggregation (especially if it’s a sproc that runs daily), you’d probably want to set up a separate OLAP database so that large analytical queries don’t slow down transactional queries. With open-source technologies, this is usually using Hive and Presto or Spark combined with Apache Airflow.
Also, if you have data that’s usually aggregated by column, then a column-based database like Clickhouse is usually way faster than a regular row-based database. These store data per-column rather than per-row, so aggregating one column across millions or even billions of rows (eg average page load time for all hits ever recorded) is fast.
I hate these requests so fucking much. I’ve learned a lot of SQL because of it but I’m sick of it. Especially sick of the users who ask for the same data over and over again.
One guy asked me to run a report every first of the month and then he wouldn’t respond when I would send it so I stopped sending it. Additionally because he would request it AGAIN later in the month after I already sent it at the beginning of the month.
Guess it’s too much to search your fucking emails before requesting a new report to be run. A report that I’ve told you countless times will slow down everything for everyone else who’s using the system.
But tHis iS uRgENt aSAp to run a report asking for all data for the last 3 years.
And the data they want is the entire FY, is 3,000,000 records and they need every single data attribute making the file like 250 MBs. Then you put it in their SharePoint and they get mad they can’t just view it in the browser despite the giant “This file is too large to view online, download it” message.
Newspaper: Hackers are announcing a trove of personal data leaked from [company] after a forwarded spreadsheet inadvertently contained more data than the sender realised.
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