My most frustrating week at ZiffDavis since I started.

What I Did

• Helped our team update some systems to work with a new authentication platform
• Not-so good week for my pretend baseball team as we got swept in 3 games by the best team in the league with 3 more games to go
• Continued printing updates for my bigger printer with my smaller printer, with a long print (90 minutes) failing when I couldn't break off support structures correctly

Longer Threads

At work there has been a poorly-planned migration from one authentication service to one that we have built internally. Our team was tasked with helping to try and push this over the finish line. My task? Update a React application and change all the internal calls to the authentication service to use the one built in-house.

Setting aside that my React and JavaScript skills suck, I quickly realized that this was going to be a task I was not going to be able to finish on my own.

Simply put, the state of the application is such that I was unable to get it running locally. Which means it would be impossible for me to test my changes. Sure, we have instructions but when I followed them, I got error after error and was so frustrated I eventually started asking Gemini and CoPilot for help.

They were absolutely useless, just helping to confirm my own biases against these tools being useful.

There are other people on my team and in the org who have a working version of the application so eventually I handed it over to them. I, once again, reiterated to my manager that any application we have to work with must be in a state that anyone can install it locally with approved tools.

It was madness doing it the way I was -- make a change, push it, see if the build in CI failed, repeat until I gave up.

To make matters more complicated, the system in question is one that we are trying to replace with the system we are now building. My manager did not want to invest any time into fixing things so I could make it work. "We're replacing it, why would we fix it" he said. Which is true, but I remain unconvinced that this is the last time we will have to go into the codebase and make changes. Which means if it does need fixes I won't be the one doing them.

Current mood: 1/5