There come a time in everyone’s life where we need to decide to say “Fuck it” and just say what’s on our mind…

With the current world events many people are realising a few things:

1. Misinformation is rife
2. People believe everything they read
3. People have no idea how to research
4. The general public don’t understand maths, science, or anything of value

This has lead to my total loss of respect from many people; My family, some friends and most of the people I follow on Facebook (and literally everyone on Facebook groups)

All of the misinformation travelling around always ignore one major thing; Exponential growth.

Instead of explaining it here is a video that explains how it works:

Right so let’s do some maths, When you have exponential growth within a population (2 becomes 4, then 8, then 16, 32 and so on) and you have a multiplication every 5 days (So this is an infection rate that is consistent with COVID-19) then every 5 days the number of people that are infected are DOUBLED. Then you take 1% of those people and kill them. So scenario: Right now in south africa we have around 500 deaths.

That’s really low right? Let’s lift the lock-down tomorrow, like everyone wants right?

We take 12,000 total infected and lets’ be nice and remove the recovered 5000 people, 7000 active infections, Lock-down gets lifted on Friday 15 May.

Wednesday 20 May we have 14 000 infections (Already more than the TOTAL infected since February) with a 2% death rate: 280 Deaths

Monday 25 May: 28 000 infections. 560 Deaths

Saturday 30 May: 36 000 infections. 1 120 Deaths

By 19 June: 576 000 infections. 11 520 Deaths

In just over a month we have half a million infections. Let’s keep going

By 14 July: 18 432 000 infections. 368 640 Deaths

19 July: 36 864 000 infections. 737 280 Deaths

We’re now passing the half the country population mark, at this point it’s likely that people are either getting reinfected or are dying from other causes

24 July: 73 728 000 infections. 1 474 560 Deaths

At this point the maths exceeds the population of the country, this is unlikely to happen as the infection rates begin to slow at the halfway point (This is just due to fear, overlap of people healing and those just getting through lucky)

People are advocating for the release of South Africans, but that’s also a death sentence to 15% of the population.

It’s also worth noting 2 things here: The growth is exponential however it is not truly accurate in terms of population, this is based on everyone in the country being in the same room and the same distance from each other. The other is that Deaths climb more rapidly when there is no medical care (when hospitals are full) and it is closer to 15% death rate, assuming that the hospitals fill by the 100 000 Infected mark the numbers get a lot more grim, with the virus ending closer to 11 MILLION people dying from this disease.

We’ve all been there: Get asked to do something or check something and the problem that you discover is quite straightforward. X is not working.

In this case it was a wordpress site, client sends us a request and a screenshot, they can’t access their back end of the website, I’d include the screenshot but it was a blank webpage with the address in the bar at the top and that was it.

Now some wordpress dev’s know this as the “White screen of death” Basically there is a fata error somewhere and yuo have to find it. The list of fixes is relatively short, recreate the database, disable plugins, disable the theme, copy in a fresh version of wordpress. All straightforward stuff….

Except none of that worked. So, the big guns come out and as follows: Copy everything into local and try again…. Updated WordPress and everything, got a fully working version on local (With the correct admin set up) And voiala, push it live and…. Broken… Worse than before.

Well there is some upsite, we now have errors! Some people think errors are bad, but errors are the first indication of WHERE to look. there was just one problem: The error? “Not found” According to the website the folder “wp-admin” didn’t exist, except it did, I was looking at it, I’d installed it, there it sat in front of me on the FTP client I was using.

After 3 days of hair pulling, screaming and many smoke breaks later. I found the conclusion… I copied the email below that I sent out when it was done. Obviously I changed the names of hosts and things, Enjoy:

It started as a PHP update on the host, the new PHP has certain commands that instead of returning “Null” and not having errors it now throws an error and crashes the website.

This new PHP version change would have been fine EXCEPT web browsers now force https which cause the server to redirect to https://example.com instead of http://example.com

Again this would be fine, except without proper DNS settings and an SSL certificate your browser would redirect to the mail-admin logins for the email server that serves example.com which had the SAME web address.

This meant that when a user tried to access example.com/wp-admin to login to the backend you were trying to login to the wordpress backend of the mail server, which didn’t exist.

To fix the system: We implemented a proper SSL certificate for both website and the mail server web addresses, we used a DNS to separate the addresses and made sure that when one user wants to access one or the other their browser no longer gets confused and redirects to the wrong website.

We then updated some of the plugins to work with PHP7.2, less error codes now, and made small changes to the files that we can’t update without breaking anything.

And there it was, the issue was not with wordpress at all, it was an SSL certificate and and proper DNS.

Just goes to show, keep zooming out until you see the whole picture.

As a Developer in a small marketing company the development “Team” is a whole 2 people, this means that out time is not only very valuable but we try and be as efficient as possible with what we do. It’s therefore easy to justify using a freelancer when we need them, if a whole website needs to be created and we need the extra hand, sure, use the Freelance guy.

From a business point this all makes sense, it means you can grow your team to take on a project when needed and once the project enters maintenance and update phase you kick the extras, thank them for their time and then carry on as normal with 2 developers looking after the myriad of pages and posts and updates created.

So why do I say it’s killing our industry? There’s a few reasons and I’m going to be as reasonable as possible for this; I mean, I don’t want to, but if someone does read this I don’t want pitchfork anarchy showing up at my place of work.

Freelancers have no accountability, they do what needs to be done to get paid, drop the project like its hot and then that’s it. Gone, no contact and no obligation to answer any question other than “Can you work for us again? We’ll pay you!”. But what happens to the developers that stay on? (me!) we have to now learn how the hell this guy codes, read through his largely undocumented project and try find out how the hell he did it in order to get familiar with the code. Now you might be thinking, “Aw don’t be like that, reading code and understanding it is easy”. And it is, right up until you get tasked with changing something, and you have to spend an extra 20 minutes to change a setting in a plugin that you didn’t know existed. “It’s only 20 minutes” you say. Yes, 20 minutes 3 times today, twice tomorrow, next week it’s going to take us an hour to find the Google API that he used so we can change the address for a client. This time adds up, and I’m pretty sure in the long run it means more cost to the client (Remember, we charge hourly) than if we had developed the website in house.

Another reason is that some freelancers create a website completely out of scope, then throw it at the company’s feet, say “thanks” and walk off, company then gives it to another agency who manage the website, they see that the freelancer was crap so they make more changes, but not real adjustments, just duct tape and some cardboard to make it “Work” again. Then that website gets passed around a few more times, each time the developer (or nearest person with google) tries to make some changes, this goes round and round until it end up on my desk (or my server, you decide what is funnier here). And here it site, like a blobfish falling apart while I have to spend extra precious hours trying to save this thing from falling apart. All because some freelancer didn’t take the time to document or just build in the correct way of doing things and did the shortcut to make it work.

The last reason is that Freelancers are in high demand, because full time developers are expensive, so they aren’t working full time, this means that every Freelancer that you hire is also working on something in Angular, and IONIC project, 3 WordPress websites and his own “Million Dollar” Android app. But he promises he has the time for your one project to be done in a week. These guys are burnt out and underpaid at best.

So what’s the solution? HIRE your good freelancers, the guy is probably a multi tasking machine, and like a BA student that has to review his own essay, let that guy review and maintain the shit he wrote.

Everyone keeps telling me I should write, I keep telling me I should write, the person sat next to me on the beach while I helped my mom with a crossword said I should write.

So, I’m doing this now, I don’t like people who tell people they’re a blogger. This means that by my own logic I hate myself; if you’re a ‘Millennial’ then that qualifies as comedy.

I want to use this platform to spread my own stories, adventures and just to write down the thoughts that go through my brain when I’m driving, in the shower or procrastinating homework or normal work. Or both. Which is the same reason that this blog exists. Ironic, isn’t it?

I really just wanted to be able to tell my stories and my thoughts and not have to worry about what other people may say or if the joke I said is funny. It was funny, and you only didn’t laugh because you’re either Slow, Didn’t get the reference, or weren’t in the mood. Writing this all down then, is the best way to alleviate all those issues. You can have a google tab open too, just to double-check the references and you can read as slowly as you want.

So, without further ado, clean your reading glasses, recline your chair a bit, open a beer, and move your mouth as you read and just take a look at the chaos that happens in my brain. The thoughts that get to me, and things that are far more annoying if you over think them then they should be.