• Prime Mover (unregistered)

    Had a similar situation in my last gig which I walked out of a couple of years ago.

    The offshore team had built a typically substandard front-end app for our proprietary banking software. So substandard was it that (among other egregities) they were stackdumping to the log files all sorts of personal data when (as often happened) the DB interface routines crashed through misuse. Customer of course not cool with that. So I was tasked with capturing the logged messages as they were generated, parse them for the specific fields that held personal data, and asterisk them out before writing them to the file.

    I was tired of always being asked to fix the wrong problem, but fortunately I was headhunted at about that time, and got a considerably better-paying gig doing something rather more interesting.

  • Industrial Automation Engineer (unregistered)

    Use ROT-13 in your logging. Problem solved. You can thank me later.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Industrial Automation Engineer

    "Use ROT-13 in your logging. "

    Can we use ROT-tweiler with the customer instead???

    ps: I love rotty's they are wonderful dogs....

  • Allie C (unregistered)

    This is a relatively happy ending! Perfect way to start a Wednesday :)

  • Robin (unregistered)

    OK, I read this back through a few times and still can't figure out who the hell Arthur is.

    That aside, amusing story. This is why you should always ask what the use case is for any complex feature request. More often than not, it's an XY problem (feel free to Google that if you haven't come across it).

  • Yodeling Dad (unregistered) in reply to Robin

    I had the same problem and actually had to go back and re-read, but Carol, Larry, and Arthur are introduced in the second paragraph as "veterans of the project." I'm shifting the blame to lack of coffee on my part.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Allie C

    Darn! I thought it was friday!

  • some guy (unregistered)

    If the veterans were listed as Arthur, Carol, and Larry, they could form an ACL - Access Control List.

  • Martin (unregistered)

    I've had similar conversations, but they ended differently. My bosses defaulted to a "customer is always right" mode which put the ball back in my court. Since they were not tech-savvy, I couldn't get the bosses to understand that they were putting a mountain of work on me that was impossible to achieve on top of my other work, and since they insisted on having the conversation in front of the customer and our veeps, it was difficult to even try to get the point across without making us all out as incompetent/idiots.

    From my point of view, the WTF is that this didn't happen to Alan.

    (I left that job shortly after.)

  • D-Coder (unregistered) in reply to Industrial Automation Engineer

    Use ROT-13 in your logging. Problem solved. You can thank me later.

    For double-security, of course, use double-ROT-13.

  • Argle (unregistered) in reply to ESkIiHccraVBD

    The both of you stop messing with my head! I've already restricted my drinking only to days that contain the letter D.

  • a cow (not a robot) (unregistered) in reply to D-Coder

    :-D

  • (nodebb) in reply to Martin

    I'd optimize for popcorn: have those awkward conversations about insufficient resources in front of the customer. If possible, give a very large estimate, and ask management which bugfixes and features can be deprioritized in favor of this new work. Give suggestions for which features can be skipped, starting with the customer's favorite features. Return awkward to sender. Maybe they'll stop discussing in front of the customer.

    But I'm just a shitposter on a distant computer screen, and I don't have to deal with this kind of thing in person. So you likely did what was the best option at the time.

  • dpm (unregistered) in reply to some guy

    They had to be listed in that order . . . Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Q.E.D.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Argle

    You need to move into a different country. Where I live you'd only drink on Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays.

  • Prime Mover (unregistered)

    As for documentation ...

    Had an on-site couple of months in which we had sold a feature to the customer who wanted the javadocs for the package we'd sold them, as was their right. Imagine my embarrassment when they sent the zip file containing all those javadocs, and practically all of them had something to the effect: "Suppose we ought to fill in the silly Javadocs for this bunch of cr@p ..."

  • (nodebb)

    "Your log files contain the password to our Radiology Information System (RIS) in plain text!" complained a customer. Well, it was true. Our logs contained all environment variables and their values in plain text. The password for the RIS was one of them...

  • other guy (unregistered) in reply to some guy
    Comment held for moderation.
  • other guy (unregistered) in reply to some guy
    Comment held for moderation.
  • RussellF (unregistered)

    Typo in this post: "desceded" should be "descended"

  • Peace. Love. Med. - Medical Spa in Boca Raton, Florida (unregistered)

    Through educational excellence from top research institutions and a decade of experience, we are the best med spa in Boca Raton, Florida! Call us today!

  • .env user (unregistered) in reply to BernieTheBernie

    Isn't passing passwords as environment variables standard practice?

  • devnull (unregistered) in reply to .env user

    Yes, it is very common to pass credentials via env cars.

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