I Quit My Software Project To Get Healthy!

[@HealthyDev]

Have you ever been on a good project but realized you can’t be successful in your current role? How did you deal with it?

[@nayaleezy]

I voiced my perspective, not intensely because of a laid back personality, followed by a period of resignation where I just focused on completing tasks, and when it was clear to me that the dynamics weren't improving took steps to move on.

[@HealthyDev]

Sounds similar to what I went through mentally here. I was under so much pressure I’m not sure I even noticed feelings of resignation. But now that you mention it, I’m sure I did at some point.

[@limouzine1529]

I was in a similiar situation where we had to take over someone else's work that was not completed on time and the client decided to finnish the contract with them. We realized after a few days that we cannot be successful by continue working on someone else's unfinnish work. We managed to convince the client that we had to start all over again instead on working on somebody else's code , a "tabula resa" strategy where we cleaned up the table and started from scratch with our own architecture, methodology and developers.

[@HealthyDev]

@@limouzine1529 thanks for sharing that, we ran into a similar dilemma. About a quarter through the project the management at the two consulting agencies I was helping asked me if we should have just started from scratch at the beginning. I told them "probably, but I don't think we could have known that without spending more time with the code". Hindsight is 20/20!

[@HealthyDev]

@tubetib there are many people in management positions in our industry completely unqualified to do so. While some people in these positions actually are just looking for someone to blame, a big part of the problem is our "accountability culture" based on World War II management techniques that focus on efficiency over effectiveness - and these don't translate in software (as you know). It's a cultural shift that's slow to happen, management in our industry need way more training than they are currently getting. The interviews for technical managers should be much harder than they are compared to developers. We've got it backwards.

[@ancienttech4603]

I've been in the industry for 30 years, and the most important thing I've learned is I am not my work. This is a really hard thing for someone as driven as a software developer to understand. I give my employer more than they pay me for, but I do not judge my self-worth by the quality of the product I am forced to deliver. Quality is too subjective a metric anyway. (See Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for more on that topic!) Take your pay and use it for your personal development. Limit the number of hours you spend on a project per day and per week. Don't let your job define you. You are a person who develops software, not a Software Developer.

[@HealthyDev]

Sage advice here - you got it!

[@lukesky6335]

it sounds like you went thru an all-too-familiar situation of "work overload" and management's perception that things should be "so simple and should not take you that long to do". It's the worst feeling. The pit/knot in the stomach is real. Also, the constant interruptions and task-switching. Toxic environment.

[@mandolinic]

Nothing is impossible - to the person who doesn't have to do it!

[@ChrisAthanas]

If it was so simple, why can't they do it themselves? Why do they never want to admit software dev is super complex and not setup for agile anything? Why do they trust company after company that tell them it's going to be easy and six months later it's not anywhere near finished? Who keeps telling them it should be easy?

[@anikets4699]

@@mandolinic 🤣😅😂🤘🔥🔥🔥

[@mandolinic]

There are very very few people who, on their deathbed, say to themselves: "Oh, I wish I'd spent more time at the office."

[@HealthyDev]

One of my favorite sayings ;) nice

[@manishm9478]

I love these kinds of videos. Super interesting. I just got off a project that was a little bit similar in terms of the client not having much experience with software, and I didn't really have the skills to explain why things weren't going the way they wanted it to.

[@simonagar1]

Hi Jayme thanks for these honest videos and your humility. I’m over 50, been developing almost 30 years and was feeling hopeless. However, just because I don’t know all the latest stuff and lingo, I can bring stability and good sense to the development discipline (hope that’s the right word to use).

[@sidheshwartiwari9834]

Brother you got your bread and butter in place that's how you are able to keep your sanity and afford to take breaks. We have to just keep grinding to make ends meet. 😭

[@HealthyDev]

Far from the truth actually. I lost most of my retirement when I could only work on and off around this period. I made good money on this project but it all went to bills.

[@samsarasap4911]

Being a healthy Software Developer: 50% depends on the project (well organized clean code pesimistic deadlines), 30% your boss, 20% YOU :)

[@Matthy5k]

It is tough but I think you made the right call. All the best!

[@jsarnowski]

Awesome to see you back! :)

[@HealthyDev]

Thanks! 🙏

[@dirk2]

Thank you for this update! This is so useful for those of us also experiencing this intense amount of pressure :)

[@JM-jc8ew]

Welcome back!

[@HealthyDev]

Caesar Rodman thanks Caesar! 🤗

[@43audio89]

I dont code, I just like learning about different things. Ive watched 6 or so of your series so far. Very good stuff man! I wish someone from my profession (Recording Engineer) would do something like this. Eye opneing. Very Nice Moog! Check out Rolands SE02 I just picked it up and its fantastic!

[@matthiasschuster9505]

You are the right person for this!

[@jonathankennedy2888]

Thank you! Hearing that others are going through the same issues really helps. And the advice and guidance is much appreciated.

[@pk5298]

I was just looking at your channel yesterday, glad to see you're back!

[@HealthyDev]

Hey thanks! I’m still learning how to protect my time better after so many years of this. It’s hard!

[@pk5298]

Yeah it is! For me, for about 6 - 9 months I was responsible for 3 projects at once: a web app backend/front end, an internal CRM with external API connections, and a desktop application. The hard part wasn't that I was handling all three, it was that I wasn't getting any focus on one at a time for long enough to make an impact. I finally talked with management and we figured out a way to keep me out of 2 of the projects MOST of the time except for high priority situations, and things got a lot better! Sometimes you just need to talk it out and set expectations. Worked for me at least :)

[@HealthyDev]

Good for you! I usually am pretty successful at convincing people of important changes. I think this one was especially difficult given the client’s prior bad experience and the multiple parties that all had to be on board. I can always improve my convincing skills so I’m reviewing some of the stuff I studied years ago to see if I can do better next time.

[@jacekjacenty]

What are your thoughts about recovery from a setback like that and moving on?

[@HealthyDev]

Hey good question. I took two months off and just spent some time with my family. Worked on my music, and getting my sleep back in order. Maybe I should do a video about that too?

[@greencol]

I just quit a project under very similar circumstances. The root issue I think was that senior mgmt do not understand software development generally, and so they basically gave a blank cheque to an external consultancy, who then provided contractors to supplement our developers, but also for project mgmt and architecture roles. Those key people were very inexperienced, but there were no checks on them, which ultimately lead to basically everyone leaving the project, both contractors and permanent staff. Some of those permanent staff had been with the company for 20 years+! (including me). I tried many times to communicate what was going wrong to mgmt, but they seem pathologically unable to receive feedback from staff beneath them in the org. Sometimes you just have to accept the organisation is broken and move on.

[@hophmanbg]

I am 15 years into software development mainly backend. There is no such things as healthy softwate development, my strategy is I am trying every time and when my tolerance for the low level moral experires I take a long break like a few months. After I recharge and improve my skills I jump back to the agile fakeness.

[@marna_li]

No matter what position you are brought in as to solve a problem in a project, one should not make a fool of oneself. It is better quit if you are not the right one for the task, than continuing and make management disappointed and them fire you. I have seen people, som nice and some bad, using their power and get everyone against them for destroying their routines. One time, a specialist was unable to be pragmatic and instead used processes and patterns. So be aware of the "controlling" types that think that everything would be great if they just follow their rigid instructions. And don't get into that situation yourself, even if you are a great person. A piece of advice is also to learn to know how management operates - if they have too big of demands from you as a specialist. And don't promise them too much! However, the management culture will affect you anyway, in perhaps unhealthy ways.

[@farmcat3198]

It's a real bummer to be the lone voice of reason on a project. Over time, one is labeled "difficult" and becomes the scapegoat for your effort performing the task competently. Taking a couple of years off, working as a laborer, and working a 12 step program helped me recover from the insanity within software development. It's unclear if I'll return to it.

[@HealthyDev]

I went through a 12 step program myself this year too. Not for software development specifically, but it definitely addressed some of the core issues I was having there too. Glad to hear you're finding some hope and healing.

[@rozzerthat]

Welcome back after burning out some. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Just looking back at videos in your own channel should get you up and ready for the next iteration I guess. While you were MIA these past 6 months, I ended up focusing some on ergo issues that us Developers run into and it has been such a relief. Sure these 2 physical therapists are slightly corny, but I can attest that their methods work, check them out kzbin.info/door/mTe0LsfEbpkDpgrxKAWbRA Recuperate, rejuvenate and well, keep these off the cuff videos coming.

[@HealthyDev]

Thanks. I wasn’t considering it burnout but now that you put it that way, you could be right. I guess I’ve always thought of burnout in a career context but from a project? You’re probably seeing a blind spot I have.

[@panick.attack]

Just put my two weeks in to take care of my mental health. Hoping to recover by the end of summer. Please, pray for me!

[@nayaleezy]

I appreciate this share! Learning to be effective amid org/project/team wrecks, but also when to depart is valuable.

[@HealthyDev]

Thanks Lee, I still wish them the best and truly hope they’re successful. Glad you were able to relate. 👍

[@lukesky6335]

We're in a very toxic environment using Agile. I hate agile the way they're using it. It's mainly a tool for management to run a sweat shop. Even if you tell them your points/estimates, they're (non tech mgmt) going to tell you "no" and put rediculous deadlines on the cards. Also, the cards have little to no description and the pre-amigo's are almost non-existant. Co worker programmers are always loaded with anxiety with the cards. It really stinks and has created a toxic culture of burnout and "programmers are just resources and numbers".

[@HealthyDev]

I agree. Part of the reason I made quite a few videos about agile so far is to try and help programmers understand agility actually is important and valuable despite it seeming like it’s so abusive in most cases. I don’t blame them for hating it, I’ve been there. I just hope they learn how to survive when it’s toxic long enough to find a truly agile team and don’t “throw the baby out with the bath water” etc.

[@travis1240]

Wow. I've had my estimates changed by management before... it didn't end well. Agile was designed to fix that sort of problem by measuring the team's actual velocity. I actually think the best thing is to hire enough good people that actually know what they're doing and trust them to get the job done. Process is secondary.

[@jcdentonunatco]

Nice video. One thing that I struggle with is admitting defeat. Even if I know that a project is doomed, I can't live with myself knowing that I threw in the towel. To me its more impressive to turn around a doomed project than to call it quits, but like...at what cost to myself you know? Like how far can I let the project push my buttons before I get really burned out? I guess it comes down to pay too, like am I being paid enough to put up with this BS?

[@HealthyDev]

I think you’re coming to some healthy conclusions. I never found putting in the Herculean, self-sacrificial excess effort (on top of an already difficult job) to ensure someone else’s mismanagement of their own product resulted in equivalent Herculean reward. That’s not to say I don’t care a lot about other people’s products - but I needed to draw a more realistic line where I would let the responsibilities fall on the company and not myself.

[@PaulSebastianM]

When you can give coherent and concise off the cuff talks like this, then you're truly a pro.

[@bimboyaquino7091]

I quit the job after being assigned to a Project wherein this Software that the PM promise to the our client came from Sourceforge. I feel SETUP TO FAILURE upon doing my research on those who'll be the member of the team(that it was only ME doing the workload) other member like The PM is just fresh from online course of how to do his job.

[@HealthyDev]

The best PMs I’ve worked with give a lot of trust and input to their developers. The rest are surprised why the development team isn’t enthusiastic. Such a disconnect... 😢

[@jctradinginsights]

Being a long term developer (20 years experience), I totally understand the frustration you mentioned in this video...That's why I think as a developer, sales, marketing skills are key to success, because without them, we couldn't control the upstream requirement, we are just hired guns to do grunt work...

[@HealthyDev]

I totally agree. I discussed how important it is for healthy culture and sustainable success (just as you’ve said) that developers don’t just code in a couple of my other videos: “Product Managers Are A Programmer’s Best Friend!” kzbin.info/www/bejne/apOQeYFmZb1nfJo “Why Do Leaders Treat Programmers Like Children?” kzbin.info/www/bejne/h6HCqoCXmb5jfKM Hopefully these help someone!

[@jctradinginsights]

Thanks, I will check it out.

[@rampage241]

Glad to see you back Jamie! Got the alerts when you posted this new batch of videos, but I had too save them for when I could really concentrate on what you're sharing. As always it is GOLD! Cheers

[@HealthyDev]

Glad to have your support! 👍❤️🙏

[@KevinHead]

Not sure how I ended up on your video but I am in devops role which I am just leaving and experience practically the same thing that you just described in your video thanks for sharing.

[@HealthyDev]

Sorry to hear that! I’m glad you are making the right move for your career. 👍

[@FlyingJolly]

Your stories and perspective resonate...unfit microservices architecture, tech debt, premature complexity, not launching asap. Ya, retracting oneself from an unhealthy job can mess with one's natural sense of loyalty or obligation - but in the end your psychological and physical health aren't worth it. Any thoughts on how to respond to a CIO of a smallish company who's asked you to hypothetically spearhead the introduction of DevOps practices into the business? I keep thinking: "your managers have gotten the definition of agile wrong; do you really know what DevOps means?"

[@HealthyDev]

What you just said you’re thinking is probably most what they need to hear. One challenge will be to figure out how to make sure they know you’re giving this input not to tear anyone down but because you want the project to be more successful and everyone to enjoy it. Maybe try to think of 3 things in the agile or DevOps areas on your project(s) that would have the highest impact with the least disruption, and pick one of those 3 together to work on first. It seems like people respond best to this sort of thing when they can see a roadmap of sorts to where they’re going but with the understanding that changes will be incremental. Just some ideas. I have an older video on here “How To Earn Trust” that goes deeper into this topic: kzbin.info/www/bejne/r4a3YZKdaNxli80

[@ScottKFraley]

Loving your VLOG Sir! I love how down to earth / reasonable you are about the topics I've seen you discuss so far. Keep up the good work! :D

[@HealthyDev]

Thanks Scott. The encouragement means more than you know... 👍

[@benlewis9036]

Things to learn: - 1. DevOps is a separate team within the whole development department, who have some redundancy built in to allow for the crunch moments that always come. 2. When you are the overworked lynch-pin for the whole thing, point out that your role is a single point of failure, promote & get more staff or change the timeline expectations. 3. A supportive environment, allowing the friction within teams to be resolved needs skilful handling by the company. Otherwise this requires separation/removal of individuals!

[@ashishkpoudel]

Was thinking where you gone.. I thought someone forced you to shutdown this channel. Hehehe your back

[@samsarasap4911]

This is why I moved to Software Testing... As a software Tester you just look for problems... and oh boy there are so many problems. As a developer .... too too hard to have a normal life... If it is MY company maybe I will give my life as a Software developer... but to work for somebody else like HELL .. FUCK IT!! NO WAY

[@ChrisAthanas]

This situation is the norm now and not unusual. Most projects I've been on have been like this unless I was greenfielding from scratch or doing the project myself from scratch.

[@HealthyDev]

I wish I could disagree but I don’t. I have my own opinions why that’s the case. What’s yours?

[@ChrisAthanas]

@@HealthyDev I think a lot of businesses are operating as cargo cults and only see the successful results of a software development effort and really have no idea what's involved with getting that result combined with hucksters selling the management the dream that it is quick and easy and no risk involved and that they don't need to learn or understand the process of creating software to be successful - just follow their 5 step method and profits fall from heaven.

[@antoniocs8873]

02:25 - Everyone from management and clients

[@stewiegriffin6503]

IT became psychology

[@seamusmoran4776]

I just started going to school and will begin CS classes in the fall, your experience, cogent expression, and amazing personality inspire me. Thank you.

Welcome back, dude! I did quit a pretty stable job because of the project I was working on was lame and I felt like I was not getting nothing new from it. Also, the coworkers were lazy and not interested in getting any professional growth. To quit is hard when you are in a comfort zone, but that's the thing, growth and success never come easy.

[@HealthyDev]

Very interesting insight. I’ve been on short gigs where I wasn’t growing but never quit one for that reason. Makes sense though based on how you described it.

[@Jeremy-bd2yx]

really cool channel! thanks for the insight

[@lararawf6100]

God bless you

[@jcwrightson]

Hey Jamie, really appreciating your channel! Are there any books on Agile you'd recommend?

[@HealthyDev]

Hey John! Continuous Delivery, The Lean Startup, and The Phoenix Project are probably my favorites. Flawless Consulting and Principles of Product Development Flow are also excellent.

[@jcwrightson]

​@@HealthyDev Ah cool, I have the Lean Startup already... will pick it back up! I'll give these others a look too, thanks! :)

[@HealthyDev]

Nice! The industry would be a much nicer place if more people read books!

[@TimSchraepen]

There’s also the book Accelerate which really can’t be missed in that list. :)

[@j-t-ogamingblahblah3025]

Now way man,you got a Himalayan rock too haha, so far you had a guitar and now piano and salt rock haha (fate must have sent me here! Only got ours last Christmas 🎄!!!

[@j-t-ogamingblahblah3025]

Great videos btw - I reckon to the youngsters who watch these, they will realise its probably equally as important as their actual skills career wise, or they will once they're into their own first situation if which you speak!!! I 100% gurantee that!!! And I don't do that often eh!!! (Feckin auto correct! And phat fingers phone syndrome)

[@seraphcms2511]

This story is so familiar......being in the middle of a project that is never going to work (for any number of technical and non-tech reasons) and where everyone knows where it is going. People are not trying to be evil (butend up being totally evil because what's good for them is at a slightly different what's good for you! It's all so complex and rigid that even though you're working furiously...nothing changes....it's impossible to get your head round the problem. You've very lucky that you were a consultant and it was possible to get out of the mess....when It happened to me I was on staff so there was no escape :-( Thanks for sharing.

[@HealthyDev]

No problem, glad you enjoyed it. I’ve been on several projects with a fast trajectory towards failure (death spiral) where I couldn’t get out! I made a video to try and help managers and developers in that situation: kzbin.info/www/bejne/f2XLqGaMndh5m6s

[@seraphcms2511]

@@HealthyDev That's a great video ...... Brilliantly explaining how a backlog is missunderstood (a very common occurrence) and most importantly, highlighting that estimation is incredibly hard. In my view, the only time estimation has a chance of being anywhere close to accurate is if the dev is very familiar with the codebase....otherwise it is a complete guess on anything other than a completely trivial task. This is not helped by the fact that the people being given the estimates take them as fact and not an estimate using the current (i.e. incomplete) understanding. Do you believe that an estimate can ever be accurate and have you discovered any tools to help improve them?

[@HealthyDev]

@@seraphcms2511 thanks for the feedback and great question. Yes, I believe it's possible for estimates to be accurate. Unfortunately I also believe they're more often wrong than right, and most people who get good at it change to management or leave the industry altogether by the time that happens. Now this might sound like I'm saying not to estimate. I actually think estimating is a great tool, but for a different purpose than pretending to be able to forecast a software project; which is what management tries to often use it for that are unfamiliar with the difference between our industry and manufacturing. I think it's useful for helping developers think through the work before they do it so they can come up with a better design when they write it, collaborate with their peers to help them adapt to changes they might make, and help product managers make trade-off decisions with one change vs. another being attempted depending on what's most important to the business. But even with all that benefit, the vast majority of developers I work with are not good at estimating even though they put a huge amount of effort into getting better, and there's really no way to predict everything you're going to encounter ahead of time since most of our work is highly variable, and not repeatable (unique tasks with tons of variability that have never been done before). The only exception to this is as you stated, if they are doing something extremely mundane and repeatable they've done many times before - which is hardly ever the case in our field. I talked more about this in another video on the channel, "How Agile Teams Grow Toxic! Ep. 3 Forecasting": kzbin.info/www/bejne/apSapYt9fs2UrKM

[@seraphcms2511]

@@HealthyDev I haven't had a chance to watch the video yet but I certainly will. I agree completely that estimation is a useful tool for product managers to look to compare tasks. The real problem is exactly as you say.....Managers (AKA project managers) treat software and estimates like civil engineering which is such a tempting analogy... Devs don't help themselves by using the word Architecture!!!

[@matthewsheeran]

"A lot of mistakes happening and people just pointing fingers" oh how many times have I seen and heard that!!! And I dont think that there is any real correlation with company size either but just with a bad culture and bullshitting or inexperienced management out of its depth. They do say (political) people get promoted to the level of their own incompetance! AND as for the presenter - from my own experiences and watching his videos over a period -: this guy should be a CEO running a company and again size I dont care about as this guy could successfully run any size company. Such a waste of talent as just a consultant/dev/devops guy although he is also probably smart enough to prefer dealing with the machines rather than the people but this is just the kind of CEO you want to cut through that bullshit of "A lot of mistakes happening and people just pointing fingers"! --- You've now got my reference mate from downunder: do please feel free to quote me contact me or use it!

[@HealthyDev]

Thanks Matt, did you mean to underline that? I’m confused 🤷‍♂️

[@stevenlewis8782]

Microservices? Thar be dragons. IMO, to do microservices right you need a larger team and a very experienced team. And probably one that can communicate effectively, with no major company-company boundaries. I could be wrong.

[@HealthyDev]

Yeah I think it could be done with a smaller team, but it’s going to take a lot longer to produce things. I agree with you on the communication and boundaries challenges. In the case of this project, it was a combination of a super aggressive schedule, overinflated confidence in market adoption, and it just not being implemented right in the first place. Just my opinion, but I tend to prefer a (non-micro) services architecture that’s split at real scaling points, or even a monolith for an MVP. It’s less expensive and difficult to migrate to microservices as needed than to start with them from the beginning. Of course that won’t make people who want to use them on every project happy. Just my experience and opinion!

[@stevenlewis8782]

@@HealthyDev I agree. Make money first with a monolith. Scaling problems are a good problem to have, once you are there.

[@HealthyDev]

Absolutely! If you have a scaling problem hopefully you have income. Assuming it’s not another viral business model with a “we’ll make money after our userbase is huge - somehow” 🤣 approach.

[@tkousek1]

IHMO, whether you implement microservices or not, Domain Driven Design is worth learning/applying even if to an application that is packaged as a monolith. Even if breaking out the different bounded contexts into different schema's within the same DB instance, it leads to a very clear seperation of concerns.

[@akivaliaho5166]

When you mentioned microservices it got my blood boiling already. Please don't do Google if you are not Google. Google has at least 700 engineers (heard from a Googler) who have a singular duty to maintain their microservices platform. That's 700 people who don't even code any features. They just make it possible to work with the distributed architecture for other devs. Companies pretending to be Google, Amazon or Netflix when they are not are insane.

[@dhruvshetty2127]

Hey,I used to have one of those rocks that’s in your background in my room too!

[@HealthyDev]

Nice. I’m not sure if I believe the science behind it helping you by putting salt in the air, but I like the vibe it gives off. Was a Christmas present from my wife a couple years back.

[@arrowrod]

I worked way too hard. Most didn't. Falsely accused of not delivering, to cover non work of others. Nobody was penalized. Finally, it was decided I was the problem. I left, product collapsed. Retired, worked as hourly consultant. Found out I could work 6 months at unlimited hours. Did some stuff that couldn't be done. Nobody really cared. Should have been an HVAC professional.

[@samsarasap4911]

60% of software companies are shitholes where you work like a slave ...you need to find a good company that has good practices... never work on projects starting from scratch ... it is a nightmare because customer doesn't really know what to build.. and it comes being a babysitter and fortune teller... actually doing BI Test and Development Roles.. with already successful projects people know what to build and how to build

[@striker865]

Micro services are so scary, almost always a disaster

[@HealthyDev]

A valuable technique used in situations that truly require it, and teams that have the commitment to testing and monitoring to really master their design and maintenance. In other situations, a blind following of a fad that is completely unnecessary and costs way more than its worth - ultimately putting the project at risk. It’s up to us to be the voice of reason on these decisions, and not to allow our desire to pad our resume or “keep up with the Jones’s” to get us in trouble!

[@istovall2624]

So many "man with the hammer"-devs out there with new tech... I've seen micro service hell... just for the sake of "we use AWS/Azure", when a simple spa will suffice, disgusting.

[@striker865]

@@istovall2624 developers are addicted to complexity, it's sad. It just shows how new the whole field is

[@FernandoJS]

I can feel your pain. I really don't understand how some developers/managers don't care about the problems, they don't act to solve them. It scares me a lot. Be good my friend, your channel is precious.

[@JHatLpool]

Mr. Healthy Software Developer, your discussions and videos make for great listening. In brief: i) software developers need to learn how to manage themselves in terms of time management and the message that they give to their own managers (and by that I mean, you need to be able to give an accurate/ honest status report on a particular activity), ii) software project managers- if you are only interested in relaying good news to your senior management, then you are in the wrong job, iii) software developers should not expect to learn new fizzy coding techniques from their project managers. The project manager is their to manage you (and the rest of the team) in terms of your time and activity objectives (i. e. you as a resource), iv) companies that employ software developers need to learn that if the developer needs to take part in system architecture design, fault finding etc. These activities take ... time !!! ... and a specific amount of time in the developers' working week needs to be set aside to do them. There you go. Now, where is my cheque ?

[@edmarsouza2479]

When you said: "The previous vendor suggested a microservices architecture..." I felt your pain...

[@HealthyDev]

🤣

[@akivaliaho5166]

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the microservices pattern. The unfortunate fact is its even more exploited and wrongly understood than agile itself in this industry. Microservices work very well when you have a use-case for them, eg. You have a clear-cut independent service boundary that can do a bunch of work and has a diagnozed need for perf/redundancy. People misuse microservices. If you have a team of two backend developers they don't need an architectural pattern geared towards solving problems with decoupled teams of hundreds of developers! That is Insanity but it is what we do. Productivity of those two guys is going to plummet due to technical overhead imposed on them by an architectural pattern that doesn't reflect their team structure. I've been in this situation multiple times. Sometimes its very difficult to persuade management that something needs to change as they are the ones who have agreed to build something like this in the first place and view admitting to a mistake as career-ending. You're going to get a lot of: "But the previous guys were top-notch and built everything with best practices and great quality. It's impossible we have technical debt you are just being a pansy-ass", which is somewhat nerve-wracking.

[@ashishkpoudel]

I am php laravel developer, i wanna level up my game. Can you please recommend resources for a person linke me. Thank you

[@HealthyDev]

Hey there. I’m sorry but I can’t help you with that. I’ve done php in Wordpress over the years but haven’t really had to learn much more than that. Do those sites like leetcode and hacker rank support php? As for laravel it looks cool but I haven’t had a need to check it out yet. Wish I could help you more.

[@alexbarker4832]

Hi Ashish, I am not sure exactly what you are asking by "level up my game," but I will try to throw out some ideas. I've been in and around PHP for nearly 20 years now and I've seen many frameworks come and go. I would recommend branching out and learning other frameworks like Symfony or Yii to get some experience with how other frameworks structure the application and how that can be better, worse, or just different than what you are use to. After you get some experience with how different frameworks do things, try using a unopinionated "micro" framework like Slim (www.slimframework.com/) and create an application using your favorite composer based libraries. When you start getting into the realm of unopinionated frameworks, adopting and understanding the PSR standards laid out at www.php-fig.org/ are really important. These standards ensure interoperability between implementation components of your application. The standards are not perfect, but they do a good job of trying to structure the PHP dumpster fire that has been burning for the last 25 years. With that said, the overwhelming majority of PHP the powers the internet runs on either WordPress or Laravel, neither of which make any attempt at implementing these standards. ::shrugs:: The PHP developer community has a lot of deep rooted, long standing problems. A lot of these developers cannot decide if they are building an application or a webpage, if that application is Object-Oriented or Procedural, or even what the differences between these concepts are. Maybe some exposure to more structured ecosystems like Node/Express.js or Java would be a good way to diversify your skill-set and help you separate some of the good core concepts from the implementation bias with PHP.

[@ashishkpoudel]

​@@alexbarker4832 That was a really wonderful/informative reply thanks copied it and saved

[@robotempire]

I think I’m having the same emotional struggle about my hairline you were clearly in the midst of in this video

[@HealthyDev]

LOL!!!

[@kevin2themystic]

I definitely appreciate this discussion. Thanks for sharing!

[@HealthyDev]

Glad it was helpful!

[@MA-rc2eo]

I wish you the best. May I suggest that you create tutorials on KZbin, so we can learn from you sir.

[@ICrashALot]

Did you try turning it off and on again?

[@HealthyDev]

🤣

[@mywetaresocks_8959]

oh god, why was this similar to my situation...I'm currently considering to quit too.

[@Dizzymack1]

Dude thank you I thought I was crazy

[@RandomNullpointer]

Welcome back, Jayme! Nice to see you again

[@HealthyDev]

Thanks Sam :)

[@sethruf8993]

Love the channel! You ever consider doing a podcast?

[@HealthyDev]

Hey there thanks for the support! I have interviewed a few people in a more open ended podcast style but no, I really only have had time to do videos (I'm looking to start them up again this year). You probably already know all these videos are available as a podcast to listen to - but I'm guessing you mean podcast format not just the ability to listen as audio?

[@guganga12]

id rather quit my health to get good money software project xD

[@kai990]

Anyone wanna make a startup with me that purchases leftover merch like coffee mugs exclusively from bankrupt startups and other firms and resells them under a new brand, something like shards of broken dreams.

[@HealthyDev]

LOL!!!!!

[@robertbeckman2054]

"White paper on how to spot fake Agile"...I love it. I've hated agile ever since I realized everyone in the world was embracing it. Upper management, in my experience, management (CEO, CTO) have seen Agile as "programmers being agile in that they can switch mid-project on a dime, multiple times a month, a week, or a day. Perhaps, the Agile I could like it the "real" Agile.

[@HealthyDev]

Thanks. Yes I've experienced a few good agile teams and they are truly amazing. Unfortunately it's rare - and there are more fake/bad agile projects that are worse than waterfall. So I can totally understand how many developers hate it.

[@rokyericksonroks]

Nothing wrong with Kan Ban but some people prefer Agile methods.

[@Cokoladni]

so where would you start with learning understanding devops?

[@HealthyDev]

The book “Continuous Delivery” by Dave Farley and Jez Humble.

[@HealthyDev]

Another good one is “The DevOps Handbook” but honestly I’d start with the other one, it’s more comprehensive.

[@grimus]

From your description of it, I think we’ve worked on the same project. 😆

[@HealthyDev]

Ha! If so I hope it worked out better after I left 😉

[@kiwidave72]

sounds like you stayed there to long.

[@HealthyDev]

Yep. Wouldn’t be the first time 😉

[@Budulai89]

Thank you for sharing your stories.

[@rokyericksonroks]

Some of Jayme’s clients are pissed off that he keeps throwing shade at them. Good 4 us, bad 4 them.

[@ubobcat]

Lol, when you mentioned C# it all made perfect sense to me. I've never seen a good project on C#. Choosing C# as my career path was the worst mistake of my life

[@HealthyDev]

What other languages have you seen better projects done with? What were some of the contributing factors? Thanks for the feedback.

[@ubobcat]

@@HealthyDev Surprisingly Javascript has been much better experience for me. Javascript projects tend to be smaller, better organized, split to manageable chunks. Whereas C# projects are either overingeneered monsters or just badly written legacy piles of undocumented crap. I guess OOP does more harm than good for C#, since programmers tend to create a lot of unneeded classes, overingeneer the applications, instead of just splitting it to microservices or so. Implementing a feature on C# is always a nigtmare, you have to do so much overhead work besides just writing a logic. It is so much simpler with Javascript. But maybe it is not just technical reasons, maybe for some reason most toxic and garbage companies tend to choose Microsoft stack? Maybe these companies are just corrupted and managers get kickbacks for using crappy Microsoft products?

[@HealthyDev]

Interesting. Yeah I’ve experienced good and bad c# codebases. It sounds like the people on the JavaScript projects you worked on made better architectural choices and stuck to them. That’s something every project can benefit from! Thanks for sharing. 👍

[@Patrick_Bard]

8 minutes? A legacy software I've worked on took more than half an hour for a full build.

[@HealthyDev]

As in developers change one line of code and want to debug it, and it takes a half hour? That sounds like a codebase that needs packaging and modularization. Ouch sorry you had to deal with that!!!

[@Patrick_Bard]

@@HealthyDev In that case not that much because because compilers are very well optimized for smaller incremental upgrades which indeed took seconds, we also had some hotswap magic to help alleviate this impact. But when it was necessary to do a maven clean install (Java, yeah) for whatever reason (which was quite often), this process would take around 30 minutes.

[@HealthyDev]

@@Patrick_Bard okay yea, that's different than the problem we had. Literally ANY change to the code required an 8 minute compile! It was ridiculous...

[@Patrick_Bard]

@@HealthyDev That's sad man, doesn't look like a project I'd be happily working every day

[@HealthyDev]

@@Patrick_Bard it's OK, it was only about a 7 month project and I got paid a great rate, so I dealt with it the best I could until I moved on. We fixed the issue with the 8 minute builds through restructuring after the first couple months, it just took us a while to convince the project sponsor it was worth doing.

[@vlogs.anurag]

Is that a grandmother?

[@HealthyDev]

Yes.

[@qmulus1]

Moog Grandmother?

[@HealthyDev]

I love it! Kind of wish I had a matriarch but it wasn’t out then.

[@qmulus1]

@@HealthyDev NIce! I've been wanting to get a Matriarch for my eurorack, but I have no room for it. One can dream. :)

[@HealthyDev]

Ha! That’d be on big rack ;)

[@actualprogramming]

The only video I've ever came across that has no dislikes.