End of the Snap saga (Patreon)

I've had a draft of this post written for a while and I've received payment for my last invoice so now I can talk a little bit about the project.

 tl;dr it was an interesting & enlightening experience. And while I'm glad I did it, I will definitely not do it again.

The project itself was a trainwreck. I'm not going to divulge private details about it but let's just say lots of promises were made before vetting.. like, anything.

There was a grandiose idea of packaging this un-packageable solution as a Snap but no research went into it at all. They were looking for an "expert" and represented me as such and I am hardly an expert or authority on Snapcraft.

I was given these unrealistic deadlines and for the first month or so, the lead at the company was secretly rewriting all my code so my name wasn't on the delivered commits. I put a stop to that once I discovered it was happening.

Working with the Snapcrafters was honestly not great. At first, they seemed like responsible, responsive, and competent developers. Unfortunately, that illusion fell apart rather quickly.

The Snapstore is effectively a walled garden protected by the Snapcraft forum. This is a fine idea but there's nobody dedicated to maintaining the forum; developers are just expected to keep an eye on it.

So, what happens if nobody responds to an issue or post? Nothing. We had issues go weeks without any resolution which is a major problem with the lead of the company is making promises to clients that require action from the Snapcrafters.

There are also massive quality concerns. The last thing I did on that project was fixing a CI/CD issue that was caused by a bug upstream in LXD land, another Canonical project.

This is the forum post but the tl;dr of it is they let upstream container images expire and their CI process never replaced them. So when users tried to pull images, they simply weren't there. This bug lasted days before I reported it and they fixed it. Unbelievable.

On the flip side, since that invoice got paid I decided to indulge and get an Egee partial! So in a roundabout way, Canonical and the Snapcrafters are responsible for bringing Egee to life!

Isn't that freaking weird??? 😂😂