[Development] Dev needs to be optimised

[De CodeerHeer]

Completely unrelated but which certs did you do? I'd kinda like to have git certified on my list, even just as a training thing, even though I hate git with every inch of my body

The company I work at supplied all these courses and certificates. We are required to have full knowledge of the tools we work with in order to operate smoothly within any of the development processes.

I strongly disagree with your strong disagreement.

I think everyone who has worked with the gamemode before knows how unstable it is and that it has a tendency to crash frequently. This alone requires devs to at least kill and restart servers, in case the so-called "DevOps developers" are unavailable, e.g. because it's 4 AM.

But that's not even the main reason I disagree. Developers (in case of them being active, so excluding you) spent lots of their freetime working for this community and receive basically no payment. So it's even more important to keep developers motivated. Restricting them in everything hurts this in my opinion. I remember the struggle of being unable to fix various bugs on the website because I simply had no access to it, and the developers having access were inactive.

As said we have a separate server panel that is accessible and managable to a certain extend. The limit being access to the point where things can get even messier than they currently are and can cause confusion to infrastructure of the system.

I'm sorry you have had a bad experience with inactive developers being in "charge" of a certain department. But you have to understand that everyone has its expertise and experience with their subject. Whilst I praise the possibilty to widen and extend your coding capabilities and knowledge, it still has to be safe at the end of the day to secure the data. Which is one of the points for setting up a good workflow with reviews. Where such things can be resolved before reaching production. This is a much safer process of development and my reasoning for implementing it. This has nothing to do with enterprise standards. This is care a developer should have for it's work. Sure it might not be the quickest solution. But its the safest, and that is necessary for a community with a size like this.

Looking at the sheer amount of times features of the "correct git flow" (for example LFS) simply fail to work just proves that sometimes you need to log in with a shell and pull changes forcefully. It is also ironic how for years developers, who invest their freetime into trying to make FL better, always have to fight against distrust, while apparently developers who actually abused their powers to great extent still get a 2nd chance in one of the highest positions. It just doesn't quite make sense to me.

The initial problems with git lfs was it being setup by someone who was new to LFS and didn't have the required experience to set this up, being one of the reasons why server maintenance has been assigned to DevOps.

2nd chances exist to show that was you did was wrong and regret your actions. But still have the interest of helping my community with the skills and knowledge you possess. Same for me. It's not like I didn't had to earn this trust again.

I'm also not sure about your "ticketing system". Yes, it's important to properly test and get approvals for big updates, however, I think that is really unnecessary for minor updates or bug fixes and only hurts the development workflow and motivation of developers. Something I can see you benefit from, is having a GitHub action that checks the code for syntax errors and blocks PRs from being merged if they contain any. But that is not a thing to this day, afaik.

You need to understand that some actions have been taken due to feedback from the community. The sole purpose of contributing is to take approved suggestions and implement them into the gamemode. When the community complains you have to take action and revert to how the system supposed to work. This is done via tickets so you have control on what goes in. I find it facinating how the owner and management barely has a say on what is being implemented just because there is no grip on development. This is not how it is supposed to work. You don't add features the client hasn't asked for?

Back in my day I had to ask permission for everything. Implementing new features were done via a teamviewer session on the owners pc. These days we have a lot more access, but still some things are not for us to decide.

While in enterprise it is important to have clear roles, I don't know anything that could be further from enterprise than FL. I think the way you are doing actually slowly kills active development.

Even outside enterprise it is important to respect each others expertises and knowledge. If that means it will be safer, its a far better solution. If you don't think thats top priority, I doubt your intensions.

Also, I can vouch for at least 3 current developers (and even more if we included retired ones) that are well able to use shells. If you genuinely only know Lua and have never touched another programming language and system infrastructure before, I'm not sure one is even fitted for the developer rank. Yes, in enterprise-level companies you require developers who only know one specific area, and thus it is fine there. But as mentioned previously, FL is so far from enterprise, and developers literally need to be experienced in so many areas. I remember when FLs harddrive crashed and Conn (I think it was him) had to literally spent days trying everything to restore any data, and actually succeeded.

I'm not saying that there is a lack of shell knowledge. I'm saying that there lies a lot more behind the shell that you might not have enough knowledge of. Setting up and managing a linux server goes far beyond basic shell operations. Mistakes made in this area can cause huge implications (data leaks or failure). When you have people on the team who actually have the knowledge and experience (cause it's their daily job) you'd have to respect that, especially when it's of high importance to keep it secure.

I wad involved with the data recovery process. Most of it went lost or deemed unusable. The actual data recovery was unsuccessful. Almost everything was restored from off-site  backups or was reprogrammed.

Everything has it's reasons, being fair or not. We still have a community to serve at the end of the day, and we all have the intentention to this as good as possible. In order to keep that going well, we all have our own expertises and roles within the team. A role we should stick to. Just because you're an admin, and you can code a little doesn't make you a programmer. But that doesn't mean you can't become one. The most beautiful thing about a community like this is the ability to contribute freely. Learn from each other, extend your horizon. But respect the knowledge one another has. Understand that some can have more knowledge about a certain subject, and it might be better to leave them to the more dangerious tasks.

I contribute with this belief. I want to create a safe environment where we can connect and collaborate. Respect each other, and learn from them. Where you are free to express your expertise and share your knowledge. That is the community I found 9 years ago, and that is the community I keep fighting for.