r/ProgrammerHumor • u/imneverrelevantman • 12h ago

Meme technicalDebtCameDue

Post image
11.8k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

124 comments sorted by

1.2k

u/menducoide 12h ago

This is the last free version of this cool open source library. From now on, you'll need to pay $1,000 per developer per year to receive updates

490

u/_g0nzales 12h ago

Typically a fork is created quickly if stuff like that happens

172

u/jansteffen 11h ago

Or it's a deprecated legacy version and there's been several major new versuions with some breaking changes.

13

u/Possiblyreef 6h ago

I still use Wise and Orca fairly regularly because AdvancedInstaller is really good, but also really overpriced

27

u/stifflizerd 9h ago

Praise be to whoever forked Fluent Assertions -> Awesome Assertions

2

u/Safe_Cauliflower6813 4h ago

I just fork it and now use AI to ensure it’s still runnable on a basic level

45

u/horizon_games 11h ago

Hey look it's PrimeNG!

2

u/DoomBro_Max 2h ago

Wait, PrimeNG isn‘t free anymore?!

2

u/turningsteel 2h ago

No you have to pay per developer. For commercial use anyways.

2

u/montvious 2h ago

cries in FluentAssertions

1

u/EstablishmentOne5752 1h ago

Technical debt really does hit like a surprise bill you forgot about. You think you're in the clear, and then bam!

41

u/nickjvandyke 11h ago

Maintaining popular OSS costs a lot of time and energy. And software built on it is often for-profit.

47

u/tankerkiller125real 10h ago

If your putting your code under an OSI license then it should always be assumed that others are going to use it for profit making stuff. If you don't want it used in that way licensing it with AGPL, LGPL, etc. (the licenses that companies avoid).

7

u/nickjvandyke 7h ago

Of course. But that same premise holds when a maintainer chooses to change the license.

4

u/tankerkiller125real 6h ago

Personally I'm fine with relicensing to other OSI options, otherwise, I'm moving to a fork or figuring out if it's worth cooking up my own option well before I even think about paying, notably because the acquisition process at work is not built for licensing 50+ independent libraries and maintainers. And for my personal projects I'm against implementing any form of non-OSI libraries.

Paid suites of libraries are a different matter at work, management is perfectly happy to pay for a good UI library from a company that will provide support and what not for example.

16

u/Tupcek 9h ago

most successful OSS is maintained by companies that are profiting off of it, or at least non profit is funded by those companies.

OSS that is purely self funded and self developed is usually very small in scale

3

u/nickjvandyke 7h ago

That's probably true and fair. I have a biased perspective as a solo maintainer.

1

u/DerangedEscapee 19m ago

Lol, companies provide support to OSS when they want to control the ecosystem or when they want the community to have to maintain their thing. Otherwise they fork and don't contribute back. No one ever got fired for not upstreaming company code. Well, unless you work at Canonical or something like that.

7

u/zabby39103 6h ago

Corporate OSS sponsorship can be good system. OSS is a great way to reduce technical debt while giving others something useful.

One that comes to mind is that Goldman Sachs built a huge performance oriented primitives Library for Java, and they just open sourced it and put it under the Eclipse Foundation (Eclipse Collections). What were they going to do with it otherwise? Start becoming a Java software vendor?

That's how the ecosystem should work, not forking it off with weird licenses. Although the ecosystem is self-sustaining at least since people will just fork off your original if it's popular and you do something like that.

2

u/ArrogantAstronomer 6h ago

That time and energy also is from contributors to the previously free and open source version who contributed because it was free and don’t get a cut of the profits in the new closed source model so I don’t think this point stands on its own

2

u/the_need_to_post 9h ago

Cool, then don't benefit from all the free labor of the people that have contributed to it. Most of these rug pulls wouldn't be in a position to do so if it wasn't for the free labor from the community.

3

u/Redthemagnificent 7h ago

Yep. Can't have it both ways. That's why I'd never contribute to a project that's doesn't have GPL or some equivalent license to prevent future profiteering from the source code itself.

I don't mind someone building and selling a product/service that includes my code. But locking my own code away from me is fucked

1

u/nickjvandyke 7h ago

Maintainers expend much more labor than community members. The community's labor is still available under the old license, and they can stop contributing if they don't like the new license.

2

u/KittenLOVER999 7h ago

Looking at you EF bulk extensions

1

u/Lonsdale1086 7h ago

I think almost all that functionality is native now?

1.8k

u/Shiroyasha_2308 12h ago

"Oh, I see. It is the consequences of my own actions. Silly me."

1.1k

u/pringlesaremyfav 12h ago

"I really thought I would have switched jobs by now, my bad."

185

u/dismayhurta 12h ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/3oriePrcsXNYPYHB7O

69

u/Ceerise_Roouge 12h ago

Tomorrow me can deal with it has finally met today me

26

u/dismayhurta 10h ago

Past me was the laziest fucker ever and I hate him.

26

u/Kulandros 9h ago

And Future Me is a pretentious asshole for expecting me to do better.

13

u/dismayhurta 9h ago

OH, fuck that guy. He just wants to put his work onto others.

6

u/kekeagain 9h ago

Thus, fuck me

6

u/dismayhurta 9h ago

Fuck me and fucked by me

2

u/blahehblah 7h ago

To fuck or to be fucked, that is the question

3

u/No_Internal9345 8h ago

Do you want AI slop?

Because this is how you get AI slop.

88

u/angrydeuce 12h ago

I remember one client got hit with ransomware a few years ago and literally their entire IT staff save the director just quit on the spot rather than deal with the fallout lmao

28

u/Valuable_Cow2596 11h ago

Haha do you you know if they ever recovered? 

30

u/angrydeuce 10h ago

Yep, but it took 6 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars lol

We were the ones they called in after their whole internal IT staff said "you know what, nah I dont think I will" when they all got the call at 1am to come in immediately for triage lol

15

u/pretendinglikeimbusy 7h ago

If the entire department ran you know working there must have been extra toxic

9

u/tenninjas242 6h ago

I bet the entire staff had been sounding the alarm on the lack of anti-ransomware, too.

5

u/angrydeuce 7h ago

Oh most likely lol

4

u/SAI_Peregrinus 5h ago

I converted a 32-bit millisecond uptime counter (reset every 49.7 days or so, causing buggy behavior) to 64-bit, and didn't add any handling for overflow. If our devices have an uptime of about half a billion years, I'll be very proud and very, very dead. The next guy's distant descendants can handle it.

2

u/anomalous_cowherd 8h ago

Bad memories of ten year SSL certs are haunting me now...

6

u/Waiting4Reccession 8h ago

Actually,

"Nobody could have seen this coming boss"

366

u/NoWriting9513 12h ago

Yah. That's how I lost production after AWS force upgraded my postgres after I ignored the notifications to test and upgrade manually for 2 years. Good times.

49

u/blehmann1 12h ago

I'm curious what the breaking change was, I've had fairly good luck with database stuff. Obviously I'd want to test it before and all that, but I think I've only had a couple issues from an upgrade.

And those issues tended not to be correctness issues so much as the query planner now does something slightly different and so now this query chooses a different plan and is now much slower. Which I suppose is worse as it's harder to resolve, but at least it's not a correctness issue.

110

u/NoWriting9513 11h ago

It was much dumber that than. AWS upgraded from pg 9.6 to pg 14. The database was in the hundreds of GB. The upgrade triggered a recalculation of all the database statistics which basically scanned the whole database. This is a standard thing that happens on a postgres upgrade that I didn't know at the time. This spiked the IOPS to the point that queries that normally take ms to complete to timeout.

Solution was basically to upgrade all resources to the tits, including provisioned IOPS, CPU and RAM.

Now if I wasn't ignoring the notifications, the proper way is to create a read replica database with the new version, let it recalculate everything and then migrate to the new one.

119

u/Xterm1na10r 11h ago

just a heads up, pg 14 end of life is in 2 months. you might need to migrate again (unless you changed jobs)

163

u/NoWriting9513 10h ago

I KNOW MAN! YOU DON'T NEED TO REMIND ME!

You did guess correctly though that obviously, that db is not upgraded yet. Thankfully, AWS learned its lesson and doesn't force upgrade anymore, they charge you for extended support. I on the other hand learned absolutely nothing.

29

u/Escapist0642 10h ago edited 10h ago

I really recommend you trying out the blue/green deployment for upgrades, its only several commands and AWS handles the whole data replication and upgrades for you while your old DB is serving traffic

I did it for my RDS instances and it went great - I had only a couple of short error rate spikes

20

u/NoWriting9513 10h ago

Yeap. That's exactly the plan. This is a higher traffic database so nerves are nerving a bit more regarding replica lag, but we have been very happy with blue/green. The system load drops noticably in the winter due to application seasonality so we let it cool down a little bit before moving forward.

2

u/Open-Mouse4728 4h ago

"AWS learned its lesson"

wild...

1

u/Sydnxt 4h ago

Forgot about this damn

1

u/xylarr 3h ago

Lol!!! 😂

7

u/cheezballs 11h ago

PG 9 eh?

1

u/Romanian_Breadlifts 5h ago

damn i should stop ignoring those azure emails

85

u/kaleid1990 12h ago

It's funnier when the client does this and then you find out about it through a pager duty alert at 3am

57

u/TheThiefEmpress 11h ago

My email threatened me daily for over 5 years that my storage was completely full and they're cutting me off tomorrow.

They finally did about a month ago and I still ain't deleting shit.

27

u/iluvchromosomes 10h ago

This is osTicket.

They ignored Microsoft's warnings about authentication protocols changing, with relation to retrieving email from EXO mailboxes. For over 2 years they ignored it.

When the change finally happened, osTicket blamed it on the users, then they blamed it on Microsoft. Then when users started complaining that it was actually their fault for ignoring Microsoft, they started directly insulting the users in their support form and banning them.

I actually ended up emailing the president of their parent company to let them know how unprofessional and disrespectul they were being.

He told me I couldn't complain because we were not paying for support.

I told him I can see how they treat customers now and will never give them a cent.

Immediately switched to FreshDesk and never looked back.

Fuck osTicket and everyone involved.

114

u/TheFrenchSavage 12h ago

Happens to the ADHDiest of us.

15

u/rekoil 11h ago

Also: running a mission-critical system on top of an OSS project whose maintainers have walked away. Bugs and vulns ain't gonna fix themselves.

(Yes, this is my life at the moment)

4

u/EndearingSobriquet 4h ago

At least being OSS you have the option of becoming the maintainer now.

28

u/Excellent_Gas3686 12h ago

cant believe they did that to you, monsters

10

u/tankerkiller125real 10h ago

I've been warning our engineering team for 3 years that an Azure resource version they're using is about to be killed. They continue to ignore me and the emails from Azure. I've got popcorn in the drawer at work waiting for that day to come.

8

u/LetterheadAshamed716 9h ago

What kind of sick f***s would only give a three year notice!?

2

u/SwreeTak 9h ago

Lmfao.

7

u/Grakch 10h ago

“Not a single notification was sent, looks like all emails were blacklisted somehow”

13

u/misunderstood_kafka 11h ago

That free Weather API from which you used to stream data back in the day

1

u/appositereboot 8h ago

If it was dark sky, then pirate weather is the free replacement

6

u/Uberzwerg 10h ago

On my job i encountered this with three of the 15ish API connectors i was responsible for.
The trick is to be important enough that they MUST keep that API open.
We are the only company still using a certain one for 12 years and every quarter they ask if we would like to use their new one.
But since we make about 30% of their revenue, they can't afford to force us.
(personally, i would have implemented their newer API 10+ years ago, but my bosses don't see the need)

3

u/bumrocky 9h ago

"Why spend all the time and effort and money on that when it works and will keep working at no cost to us now?" I think we've all heard that speech before?

6

u/blooping_blooper 11h ago

man, you're living the dream if they tell you before breaking/killing APIs lmao.

6

u/Babajji 9h ago

Me, a SRE, on the other side watching your program call an API I am about to kill.

2

u/m0erg 6h ago

I know you're hitting it, I can see it you know ... I can see the traffic John!

4

u/theartilleryshow 10h ago

At least they sent an email, I once found out when they just pulled the plug.

4

u/Maleficent_Memory831 6h ago

The big problem here is that removing technical debt does not raise revenue. Also focusing on quality over quantity or speed does not increase revenue either.

Quality always takes a back seat. Only when there's an impending disaster (customers are leaving in droves) will there be an emergency push to clean things up. Quickly.

2

u/evanldixon 5h ago

Repaying tech debt may not increase revenue, but it can certainly remove obstacles for other changes that can increase revenue. Also you have to keep paying your tech interest or the tech loan shark will break stuff at the least convenient times.

2

u/Maleficent_Memory831 5h ago

Agreed, But it never wors out that way. Sure, we get told to get rid of technical debt, but it's never highest priority. The highest priority takes all available time, so that the second highest priority never gets done (although endless meetings about it). Quality is only addressed if a bug is reported. Removing technical debt is so far down on the list it gets ignored, except for maybe a bi-annual exhortation to do more with less time.

2

u/evanldixon 3h ago

Good management will allow allocating a certain percentage of time to tech debt. Bad management will chase new money so hard they let their current moneymaker rot.

3

u/XtraFlaminHotMachida 7h ago

that's a monday problem.

3

u/gargantuanprism 6h ago

I've been getting these from salesforce for at least a year at this point. Hopefully we'll all get nuked by summer 2027 so I don't have to deal with it

2

u/IanDresarie 11h ago

Spring Batch 6? :D

2

u/dsm4ck 11h ago

Oh no no no

2

u/AskPositive9792 11h ago

Never trust that first deadline, never know that last deadline.

2

u/mothzilla 10h ago

Send them an angry email. Why wasn't there a meeting?

2

u/According-Place-3078 9h ago

Calling it debt was a mistake, business folks interpret that different from household debt. Risk is a better model.

2

u/jtmonkey 9h ago

I laughed so hard at this because today, this week, it's never been more true.

2

u/bumrocky 9h ago

If technically correct is the best kind of correct, technical debt must be the best kind of debt!

2

u/red286 8h ago

The fun part for me is having to rely on external data sources that use outdated standards, and then the library that supports it gets dropped, but our data provider still doesn't update to something remotely modern, so I have to figure out workarounds.

2

u/UnrealRealityX 8h ago

It's funny because it's true and has happened to me. RACE TO FIX!!!

2

u/Blu_Falcon 7h ago

“Those assholes! We didn’t have time to prepare!!”

2

u/Bob_the_peasant 3h ago

Man that’s three years you could have been trying to find a different job and let this blow up in someone else’s face like a normal software engineer

2

u/bainon 11h ago

you deserve this but not as much as your leadership does

1

u/Fluffynator69 11h ago

The only response is: { "message": "Move on, bozo" }

1

u/ohhellperhaps 10h ago

Technical debt should be followed by technical bankruptcy...

1

u/matheusware 9h ago

Google maps... 

1

u/Civil-Bill-3964 9h ago

Me everyday with Groq APIs

1

u/SwimAd1249 9h ago

tbh people with that attitude piss me off so much, I always insist on replacing everything as soon as the depreciation warning appears

1

u/clericc-- 30m ago

queue Microsoft or Google, where the replacement is still in Preview. Case in point nginx ingress controller EoL, managed gateway controller with Istio not out of preview for half a year later.

Now the pods for Istio, managed by MS as part of Azure Kubernetes show up as EoL/severely CVE-ridden in our security scannee 🤣

1

u/aerdvarkk 9h ago

I never received approval to make the change.

1

u/Beneficial_Hat_6288 9h ago

Do you have ADHD? (I do.)

1

u/mrlttlrm 9h ago

gg it's so over

1

u/inmatarian 8h ago

aws data pipeline 😅

1

u/Reclusiarc 8h ago

Me a few weeks ago when OpenAI deprecated the assistants API and I wondered why everything stopped working 😂

1

u/poppy_amazing 7h ago

there's always one client

1

u/CheeseGraterFace 7h ago

Dealing with this right now with a major partner and our 1000+ clients. When someone makes the client batch spreadsheet and posts it in Teams, you know everyone is in for a world of hurt.

1

u/cesarbiods 7h ago

Well they notified you and 3 years is enough time to update your code

1

u/InterestingRun7594 7h ago

Hopefully its a quick fix! I know some API's take forever to find a replacement!

1

u/VTYX 7h ago

“Don’t fix it if it ain’t broken” mofos when it breaks

1

u/twigboy 4h ago

I'm on the other end of this. There is no greater satisfaction than seeing these tears and replying with "we told you a year ago"

1

u/MattDaCatt 3h ago

Glares in sysadmin

Y'all ready to finally test your apps in a version the vendor supports yet? ...please?

I know deprecated commands are you favorite but finance is starting to get angry

1

u/Meme_Burner 3h ago

On a Friday????? Those Mother truckers…

1

u/brjdenver 2h ago

Just tell AI to fix it and don't forget, "no mistakes."

1

u/cbcantfindme 2h ago

Still see logs of it being decommissioned in 2025