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You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.
I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.
I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.
Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.
I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.
But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.
He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.
Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.
The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.
Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.
I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.
Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it. -
When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...
I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.
Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!
That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…
Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…
<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).
I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!
When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”
That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!
A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”
Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…
What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…6 -
I developed a simple scholarship management system for my school using Laravel, MySQL, jQuery and Bootstrap, I did it for free since college students from my country have to pay social service to get their degrees. Everyone in the scholarships department seemed to be really happy with my work and they evaluated my social service with 10/10, but yesterday they asked for one last favor: to go talk to the new social service guy who'll be supposed to maintain my project, a mid 30's dude who was really pissed off from the beginning because he wasn't even able to deploy the project, he wasn't even able to clone the project from Github. Ok, so I tried to explain to him the tools I used and how the project was structured, but everything I said seemed to piss him even more, so I stopped and had a chat like:
Me: "Look man, do you know or at least have basic concepts of PHP and MVC frameworks?"
Guy: "Yes, but I'm a project manager, not just –despectively– any programmer, and you didn't write proper documentation, it's impossible to deploy your project with the manual you wrote, I cannot work like this".
*We go to their computer and I clone and setup the project in 3 minutes.
Guy: "Yes, but I still don't know how the project works, I need everything documented. If I have to change something, I don't know where to look.
Me: "Man, that's why asked you about knowing PHP MVC frameworks".
Guy: "I cannot work like this, nothing is documented, I don't even know what's that software you're using *points at Sublime Text*. Or tell me, can you arrive at a place where they expect you to work with something you don't know and they have no documentation?"
*At this point he was really pissed
Me: "Well... Dealing with non-documented software is what I do for a living"
Guy: "I don't know what companies you've worked for, probably not big ones..."
Me: "Well, I actually work for *I mention one of the biggest music apps in the country*"
*Guy ironically laughs
When I gave my feedback to the lady in charge of the department, I told her that this guy was really pissed off at how things were done and that I wasn't so sure of him being capable of maintaining the system. She told me not to worry, that the guy became a well known asshole in the office only after a few days, and that she'll probably have to find something else for him to do. It'd be hilarious if this guy ends up capturing scholarships in the system I made.4 -
It was my internship and I've end up working on a law company specializing on Australian construction laws they're working on a website that will take care of all the paperworks for the contractors. They have a dev team who's working on it but they don't have a web designer. I was accepted for the job as an intern/web designer/tester. I was so happy that I've got a really cool internship as a designer but that's only for a second.
The hell starts on day one. They've told me that they're using agile workflow and that they need to make the website responsive. It was based on bootstrap and gosh their code was so broken. HTML tags overlay on each other, some are unclosed. I've tried to fix the problems and did a great job at that. Made the front page responsive and all laid out. When I went to the next php file it has a different header.php and footer.php and same problems apply and we're not even touching the worst.
They didn't use any version management and they're cowboying everything. Now that the website is on the staging server they use Cpanel text editor to edit the code! My headache started to pileup.
The Australian client asked me to provide icons and fix the colors of the website. Also the typography looks great already. I've fixed almost all the problems and I'm satisfied with the design when suddenly a new co-worker from a famous and expensive college was absorbed by the company. He worked as the marketing specialist who has no experience at web design at all. He told me to do this and that and the whole website changed. He bullied me for my skills in design (I'm an intern) and just took over the whole design. Everyone even the boss listen to him as if everything he say is right. He's skilled at design but not web design. He made the website look like a freakin movie poster.
All my works are for nothing, I got headache for nothing and I've got hated for nothing.
It was the day when I finished my internship. It was a long 3 months. After a month I've heard from my co-interns that the whole dev team was fired including the marketing specialist. Also the whole website is scrapped and has been rebuilt by a single guy who used WordPress which he did in only a month. -
All this started around an year back. In college we had this subject of web programming where we were given a mini project to do. The topics were given related to college stuff. Mine was an attendance system. Made a simple website using all i knew about bootstrap, jquery, etc since i had some previous experience with web. The professor liked it and asked me to further improve it so that it can actually be implemented. This was six months back.
Since that day, to this date, that guy asks me to add a new feature or just modify something every two weeks. These guys just want free work and think everyone is just free. Neither does he help a bit... just demands... god knows when this forever loop would end! It has become frustrating now...it just feels as though why i showed my skills in the first place 😐😖5 -
Me during a presentation of a website for university project. It's a simple project for our university where there is internships offer for our field, stack : php, js, css (bootstrap), and the presentation was on my computer, so on localhost.
In that projet i have implemented a back office to manage all the offers, basic CRUD functionality, and as lazy as I am, for delete confirmation i used a simple javascript alert for that.
Me during the presentation :"so here is the back-office to manage users and internships offer, and for deleting one offer you just have to click on this trash icon *click*".
Ze professor : "hold on hold on, why it's showing 'localhost' "
Me : "it's javascript alert"
Prof : "but why 'localhost' "
Me : "oh, because i'm running the website on my computer as a server"
Prof : "but why localhost, it's not professional"
Me : *god please "it's javascript alert rendered by the browser, we can't do anything about it, and for a simple application it's sufficient"
Prof : "but why it's bigger than the message, and if we host that, do we steal have that localhost"
Me to end that : "I'm sorry i made a mistake on that".
Fortunately i had a good mark on that project.
It's my first story here, and sorry for ze bad English ^^
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Yo , people
I have never used bootstrap and idk if i plan to
I always built a website from scratch , made it responsive and so on
Is it a bad thing?
I know it seems like i waste time but it helps me knowing exactly where to go and what to change, ez visualization for me.
So what do you prefer?10 -
I'm living it.
I started an internship at this web store made of different pieces and following no apparent rule or convention. They asked me to do this landing page, but I can't access to the development environment, nor push, create a docker, kill myself, nothing. I have to build from the DOM and write with inline style a page copied and pasted, with 300 lines of CSS already in the tpl, overwritten bootstrap 3 and two main CSS files linked. And "they don't do !important".
I wish I could say I'm learning a lot, but not. My life has become a waste of hours trying to please a company stuck and aged. -
* sees mock-up in the provided design PDF, notices a diagram that could be made with CSS
* writes responsive CSS for the boxes and makes them more appealing than in the original design
* feels proud
Skip to today, it got assigned as an 'issue', got asked to NOT do it like this, and instead extract a png from the PSD and use that instead. Despite me saying not only is it going to look bad because it's not exactly going to be responsive the way they want it to be.
Bootstrap doesn't magically make images responsive, goddammit...2 -
I have to confess, the first time I saw a framework like bootstrap I hated it because I didn't understood most of the HTML with a lot of tags with classes everywhere. It took me like 3 weeks to learn how to use it right and I made 3 websites from 0 in the process.
One day I read about a framework that uses Material Design rules (which I apply in my electronic projects with rgb screens). Since that moment I started to use it. I love how easy it´s to do a complex thing with a few lines.
For those who are starting with web design, give it a try to these frameworks. They will make your life easier. I was the kind of guy that writes every single line of html, css and javascript by hand.5 -
{TL:DR/ a super non web dev non frontend non interested person aka me somehow cracked the interview(through wrong practices i guess) landed into an internship that would have gone to a better person.I cracked the interview but am shit scared if i could stand the job}
- So 3 days ago i was talking to my friend regarding random stuff, when he told about needing a front end dev for making static template based html pages for their company.
- (I haven't ever worked in deep with web dev, just generated a few websites using mardown to html convertors, and was recently trying to learn flask/bootstrap/js) I was in need of some work so immediately requested him to talk about me in their company.
- yesterday i get an interview call from the hr of that company . She ask what i know, what they want and if i could do. I honestly tell them about my experience with web dev( with some maybe's)
- moments later , she adds me to a group with another guy, and gives us both a task to use create a clone of same website in 2 days.
- The website is a super graphically designed web page with lots of animations, custom mouses and what not. I could sense the basic elements out of it , like the nav bar and the carousals, but those animations were way beyond my knowledge. yet i start working on it
- I try with taking the clever top down approach of cloning the website and fixing its structure. It has such long code files of 10k+ lines, but i was still able to clean the css and html files and some of js code to make the website work
- later my friend calls and tells me that the other guy is a 1st year student / his brother and he doesn't know much stuff so he's kinda like me.
- He shows me a video of his code that he sent to him. That guy took the honest, bottom up approach, used the design as inspiration and was trying hard to create the similar design and animations via js.
- among other things, he also tells me that this challenge is super difficult and the level of difficulty in the work is certainly going to be lesser than this.
- In my task, I was super stuck at js because i haven't learned it much, therefore after spending 1.5 days, i made a submission without the main thing, i.e one particular carousal working
- later I get a call from another friend (B) of mine and while discussing random things, i show him my code over anydesk and ask him if he could somehow get my code to work. He asks for some time and sends me a complete refactored version of code with the same design but fully working carousal and other stuff.
- meanwhile i get to see the other guy's code and he had legit made all the designs and functions by himself, but his code looked less polished and different from the design.
- I pushed my friend(B)'s refactored version and added a comment on the group the carousal in mu code is now working.
- later at night my friend1 calls and tells me that their company was considering my submission and i would be getting the selection call
- I feel like a crazy fraud who somehow cracked the interview but is going to get his ass whipped. Where and how can i learn js, and jquery?5
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