I hate this software

h/t to the I hate this guy thread

As at least like three of you know, I recently changed careers to software development (yay! I love it almost all of the time and find more professional satisfaction now than I ever have by orders of magnitude). This is great, but it has exposed me to news realm of godawful software that I want to fire into the sun.

Today: Motherfucking Confluence. Atlassian’s suite is…powerful? I guess. If you want to be charitable, it’s “a powerful interconnected set of tools for managing software development.” Right now I’m feeling more like “an overengineered nightmare of anti-performant bloat that shits the bed often enough that we should be billing them rather than the other way around.”

JIRA and Bitbucket are bad enough, but Confluence takes the whole shit cake. It’s literally worse than just running a roll-your-own Mediawiki instance behind whatever layer of authentication you deem appropriate. Slow as fuck, uses the shittiest adaptation of Markdown ever without much recourse around it, awful organization tools…I fucking hate Confluence so much.

TBF I probably hate Sourcetree more, but since I’m not an incompetent I can use SSH for all my git needs.

JIRA and Confluence are blights on humanity. We are worse off for using JIRA. I managed to get our company to use a private Discourse install instead of Confluence.

Also LOL to SourceTree. The git command line commands aren’t exactly rocket science.

Like, I’m trying to actually document this dumb thing (Doctrine ORM) I’m implementing so that we can access our database like some people would like us to, but I can’t exactly do that if Confluence won’t actually create a fucking page because their entire platform is built on ancient, shitty, deprecated JavaScript.

Fuck!

Most enterprise software is sorely lacking in usability. Especially since documentation tends to be lacking, and often the source code is inaccessible without risking losing all license support.

I’m looking at you IBM!

Good news is it gives me good pay to maintain.

I’ve had a progression of Lotus Notes to Sharepoint to Confluence for document organization so I’m pretty fucking happy with Confluence!

You’d think so right but I think some people are literally terrified of git. So they do stuff in Sourcetree or visual studio to try to ‘simplify’ git. Which just contributes to their confusion because they don’t actually understand the things the software is doing for them.

Well, I like Bitbucket. I’m glad there is a place where I can get private Mercurial repositories for free.

That said, I have no idea about the rest of the Atlassian stack. We have our own internal ticket/issue system (implemented as part of our web platform with Elm making things easy and awesome on the client side), and we’re a small team working on location, so no need for messaging systems or the like.

Git Choose Your Own Adventure:
https://sethrobertson.github.io/GitFixUm/fixup.html

This document is an attempt to be a fairly comprehensive guide to recovering from what you did not mean to do when using git. It isn’t that git is so complicated that you need a large document to take care or your particular problem, it is more that the set of things that you might have done is so large that different techniques are needed depending on exactly what you have done and what you want to have happen.

I’m not terrified of it, but I don’t like it. I think Mercurial is far more user-friendly both in interface and design. Git feels hacky and temperamental in comparison.

Oh wait, I should talk about software I hate! Ok. Microsoft Office. Any Microsoft web-based online management system. Oracle 8i. Solaris. Internet Explorer. I’m sure there’s lots more but that will do for the time being, right? ;)

Bah, if this thread isn’t at least 30% holy wars about dev tools I’ll be disappointed in us all ;)

I haven’t used Mercurial, but I’m pretty comfortable with git. And it’s so, so much better used from the terminal than from any GUI I’ve ever seen, not that my experience is all that extensive I suppose. I’m just annoyed at the shitty slow-ass trudge that is Bitbucket compared to Github, which is for my money a superior product in every way.

I do like how I can do diffs/resolves interactively within the JetBrains IDE we use, though. Fuck doing merge conflicts from inside bash.

I’m just saying it’s 20-goddamn-18 if I can’t solve a computing problem by clicking on a representative picture then what the hell is the point of anything?

Fucking command line yahoos. . .

I was documenting a large system I own, with an aim to sharing it with the organization via Confluence. Thinking I’d get ahead of the complications, I wrote it in Markdown format. Looked pretty sharp on my machine! Then I went to put it on the Confluence server, and things fell apart.

Their markup is inspired by Markdown, or probably Wiki, but is just not compatible with true Markdown. There’s an importer plugin, but I’m told it would cost $10k/year to have for an organization our size.

I wound up having to painstakingly whittle down all that was good about the document until it could be understood by Confluence’s limited dialect. And now I’m left with a dilemma. If I want to make edits, should I do it in the document that looks good (and therefore better represents the ideas), or the Confluence bastard offspring version?

If the primary use case is the Confluence server, make that the source of truth IMO. It’s not 1997 any more; offline documents are for fools and Communists.

The only cure for the blinding rage the MacOS Finder sparks in me is writing bash scripts to accomplish what I’m goddamned trying to do in their shitty UI that insists it knows better than I do.

Oh my holy fucknuts I hate Finder so goddamned much

Duuuuuude the terminal is the only thing you need for file management I’m telling you duuuuuuude

I’mma manage your files, FRIENDO

I remember the Windows vs DOS arguments on Usenet. DOS users were arguing that using the command line was way easier for filtering, renaming, deleting large directories of files than using the GUI. Little did they know someone would eventually come up with this monstrosity (which I’ve actually used and is quite handy!):

/triggered

If you can manage to overlook the horrible, horrible UI, BRM is actually a super useful tool and still seems to dominate the little niche it occupies.

Also, fuck JIRA, Confluence, etc. (I’m stuck with them too.)