!rant

This was over a year ago now, but my first PR at my current job was +6,249/-1,545,334 loc. Here is how that happened... When I joined the company and saw the code I was supposed to work on I kind of freaked out. The project was set up in the most ass-backward way with some sort of bootstrap boilerplate sample app thing with its own build process inside a subfolder of the main angular project. The angular app used all the CSS, fonts, icons, etc. from the boilerplate app and referenced the assets directly. If you needed to make changes to the CSS, fonts, icons, etc you would need to cd into the boilerplate app directory, make the changes, run a Gulp build that compiled things there, then cd back to the main directory and run Grunt build (thats right, both grunt and gulp) that then built the angular app and referenced the compiled assets inside the boilerplate directory. One simple CSS change would take 2 minutes to test at minimum.

I told them I needed at least a week to overhaul the app before I felt like I could do any real work. Here were the horrors I found along the way.

- All compiled (unminified) assets (both CSS and JS) were committed to git, including vendor code such as jQuery and Bootstrap.
- All bower components were committed to git (ALL their source code, documentation, etc, not just the one dist/minified JS file we referenced).
- The Grunt build was set up by someone who had no idea what they were doing. Every SINGLE file or dependency that needed to be copied to the build folder was listed one by one in a HUGE config.json file instead of using pattern matching like `assets/images/*`.
- All the example code from the boilerplate and multiple jQuery spaghetti sample apps from the boilerplate were committed to git, as well as ALL the documentation too. There was literally a `git clone` of the boilerplate repo inside a folder in the app.
- There were two separate copies of Bootstrap 3 being compiled from source. One inside the boilerplate folder and one at the angular app level. They were both included on the page, so literally every single CSS rule was overridden by the second copy of bootstrap. Oh, and because bootstrap source was included and commited and built from source, the actual bootstrap source files had been edited by developers to change styles (instead of overriding them) so there was no replacing it with an OOTB minified version.
- It is an angular app but there were multiple jQuery libraries included and relied upon and used for actual in-app functionality behavior. And, beyond that, even though angular includes many native ways to do XHR requests (using $resource or $http), there were numerous places in the app where there were `XMLHttpRequest`s intermixed with angular code.
- There was no live reloading for local development, meaning if I wanted to make one CSS change I had to stop my server, run a build, start again (about 2 minutes total). They seemed to think this was fine.
- All this monstrosity was handled by a single massive Gruntfile that was over 2000loc. When all my hacking and slashing was done, I reduced this to ~140loc.
- There were developer's (I use that term loosely) *PERSONAL AWS ACCESS KEYS* hardcoded into the source code (remember, this is a web end app, so this was in every user's browser) in order to do file uploads. Of course when I checked in AWS, those keys had full admin access to absolutely everything in AWS.
- The entire unminified AWS Javascript SDK was included on the page and not used or referenced (~1.5mb)
- There was no error handling or reporting. An API error would just result in nothing happening on the front end, so the user would usually just click and click again, re-triggering the same error. There was also no error reporting software installed (NewRelic, Rollbar, etc) so we had no idea when our users encountered errors on the front end. The previous developers would literally guide users who were experiencing issues through opening their console in dev tools and have them screenshot the error and send it to them.
- I could go on and on...

This is why you hire a real front-end engineer to build your web app instead of the cheapest contractors you can find from Ukraine.

Do not continue reading if you value your life.

Visual fucking studio 2015 installation. MOTHERFUCKER !!!

OK new project will only work on VS2015. Need to download it. OK, go to MS website. Project works with community edition. Fucking great. Download the installer. Run the installer. MOTHERFUCKER DON'T OPEN THE FUCKING BROWSER TO THANK ME, YOU FUCKING FUCK. Ok...Wait to download the packages. One fucking eternity later download completes. FUCKING GREAT. Proceed to package installation. After two fucking hours installation progress bar stays the same. Google "vs 2015 installation stuck windows 7". MOTHERFUCKING BACKGROUND PROCESS IS FUCKING STUCK AND INSTALLATION DOES NOT CONTINUE. FUCK YOU. I'VE LOST TWO HOURS. OK, stop the process. Installation gets cancelled. Run the installer again. STOP THANKING ME YOU PIECE OF SHIT :@ OK, check again all downloaded packages. All good. Continue with installation. Installation completes. MOTHERFUCKER WHY YOU WANT TO RESTART THE WHOLE SYSTEM ? FUCK YOUR WINDOWS UPDATES. Ok, restart and be done with it. SSD to the rescue. Try to set up the project.

MOTHERFUCKER I DIDN'T INSTALL THE C++ PACKAGES. WTF WERE YOU DOING ALL THAT TIME? OK, run installer again and install C++ packages. I SWEAR TO GOD MICROSOFT, IF YOU THANK ME ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME, YOU'RE GETTING HATE MAIL.

Ok, installation completes. It's coding time. NO BITCH. VS2015 silently crashes after splash screen. :@@@ Google wtf is wrong again, turns out the C++ packages fuck shit up. Ok, pass some arguments to devenv.exe to reset. Restart VS. Ok, seems to be working now. Make a test project. Fucking awesome. Close VS and get the project files from perforce.

OK, files downloaded. Open VS again....

VS: "You're my bitch, you won't code today. Run from console and pass some shitty reset parameters"

YOU FUCKING FUCK. GO FUCK YOURSELF UP YOUR FUCKING ARSE. Ok, pass the parameters from console. Run again. Same "you're my bitch message" :@ OK, run with administrator rights, opens like charm. Run without admin rights again, "you're my bitch message". :@@@@@

Restart system, VS2015 finally opens project normally. Build project, 6934 errors.... :@ I'M DONE ! IM GOING BACK TO LINUX PROJECT. FUCK YOU ALL.

First law of javascript
Always open your browser console while developing
Second law
Never trust any javascript frameworks

If it were possible to send messages back in time, this is what I’d tell myself

The most annoying thing about using both bash and browsers is accidentally pressing ctrl + shift + C in the browser and the fucking debug console appearing. I just want to copy some shit from stack overflow!

Google told me I was speaking their language and asked if I wanted to play a game in a very Matrix-esque way. I'm now in the middle of coding challenges and when I finish one of them a ascii white rabbit hops across the in browser console. You have my attention Google, well played.

In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:

- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.

- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it

- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.

- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.

- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.

- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages ​​and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages ​​in the job interview.

- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).

- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML

- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...

- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.

- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.

- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022

- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.

- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.

- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.

You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.

As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.

If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!

Installing something
Ctrl+c on web browser
Ctrl+shift+v on terminal
Next command
Ctrl+shift+c on web browser
Console opens

Go on, test this on your browser console.
You won't regret it xD xD

Had a blast from the past the other day. Testing an issue with an AngularJS app in IE11 on a project managers Surface.

Nothing works. Just a blank screen. I open the JavaScript console to hundreds, maybe thousands of errors. They all seem eerily familiar, but I can't place them. It's like something from a past life.

Then I see one that brings the issue into sharp focus.

"{{variable_name}} is a reserved word"

No it isn't, I think. That hasn't been a reserved word in JavaScript since...

Me: "Is your browser in Compatibility Mode?"

PM: "Yeah, it's for one of our legacy programs"

Me: "You need to turn that off to test this app. It thinks you're using IE6, so it's having a 2 decade old shit-fit. I haven't seen those errors since I was a teenager making crap on Geocities"

I never thought an error message could make me feel so old 😩

fuck..fuck..FUCK..FUCK YOU MANTIS!!!
fuck you and your fucking invalid security token... fucking cunt...
yeah i love extracting my notes from POST data via the browser dev console cause you fucking delete it when hitting the back button...
THANKS FOR NOTHING

My IT-teacher has a website. Aside from it looking like from 1980 (which is ok), he has a "security js Mail decryption":
In his page there is a <script> with a simple yet custom de/encrypt function. Then his E-Mail is an <a href="javascript:mailto:function('rubberish173848'>private email</a>. (Or something like that)

You can just run this link (open email app and read it) or use the same function and same href in the browser console and read it. It sounds so stupid.

(Yet I figured out he probably doesn't want bots to spam his mail, so maybe I am stupid)

FUCKING CSS and browser inconsistencies.

Trying to make a simple static site but these fucking browsers are making it so hard I want to program console application instead.

Also for some reason mobile Firefox don't give the right window height and width fuck everything.

I like how software is smart so I have to do things twice instead of once.

Automatically putting quotes works only if you put quotes and then paste inside it, the problem is I usually paste then put first quote and then need to remove second quote and put it on back and remove second quote from back.

Video start from where you left automatically fires and shows closing credits because you obviously want to see them.

Evaluate variable removes old evaluation because why you want old one when you have new.

Collapsing imports or functions in ide so you need to expand them all the time because who needs to look at functions when we have ai

AI models suggesting and adding meaningless annotations and code suggestions to distract me.

Randomly running some console command because I entered keyboard shortcut I don’t know even exists.

Literally every web browser address bar becomes advertising network instead of showing me history results.

Shadowing browsing history when you click back and forward button.

Search results are now buy results.

Suggesting me useless crap to watch because I watched one video in that topic.

Showing me 10 minutes videos as a solution to my problem where I want to find exact line of text to copy paste it. If I’m lucky I need to write text from video into my computer.

Stack overflow infinite loop of answered in #some-different-question

I think it’s about time for me to slowly retire from programming and software as a whole or switch to notepad because I don’t want to use this crap anymore.

Looks like software is now meant for entertainment and distraction instead of doing actual work where you need precise data and information.

Luckily if everything goes good I can retire soon and throw everything away for a while.

Debugging WebRTC is pure hell.

For starters, it's JavaScript, so you know this isn't gonna end well. Second, it's still in kinda beta phase for some browsers so you gotta add polyfills. Let's talk compatibility now. During normal days, yeah, I could ask for a couple of computers in the office, each using a different browser. But, covid. One browser mishbehaves and doesn't wanna share the camera with the other browser, so I can't really test a connection with the only 1 computer I have. I can't take my partner's computer all day to debug.

Solution: ask the marketing department or even the execs to video chat with you to test it on a staging server. So I push my changes to the server, wait for them to build, call my lab rat, check all the bugs, clean the code, push the changes back up. No fancy breakpoints. I'm doing the old style like my great uncle did. Oh wait no, he was pretty intelligent, but my lab rat isn't. They probably don't know what a console is. So no baby I'm not only talking about console logging the problems, I'm talking `alert` the heck out of the bugs - okay no, I'll just display the objects in the middle of the screen. The screen is my console.

The fuck? I'm trying to automate login for an asp.net website from a C# console app using HttpWebRequests. I used Fiddler to see how the login happens and how the browser obtains the session and auth cookies from the server. When I replicate the same procedure from C#, I am able to get both cookies withoth a problem, but when I try to use them to get data about the user, I get a 500 ISE. What the actual fuck? I've double-checked every single header and the URLs and it's doing literally the same thing as chrome: Get asp session id (POST)-> get an auth cookie (POST username and passwd) -> interact with the site using the session id and auth cookie (GET). And obiviously I don't have access to the server logs... :/

First time installing a Linux distro as my main system. I chose arch and finally got xorg with lightdm and i3 working. I really live it so far.

Still no browser besides lynx though. Buy there's a more important thing I need to fix first. Gotta style that white console away😎

Also I corrupted windows while installing, so I'll have to reinstall that later ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I really don’t get it, how can most people just so easily accept shortcomings and not even try for a second to improve the situation?

It drives me crazy ...

story:
I’m debugging an issue with a colleague over screen sharing, both of us have huge 4k screens. Colleague sets a breakpoint, popup opens „do you want to switch to debug perspective“, clicks on yes for the umpteenth time. Breakpoint halts, IDE is full of open and unrelated panels, he doesn’t even see the whole line if code but still grabs the scrollbar every friggin time and scrolls left, right, left, right, ...
changes some code, popup that hot code reload didn’t work, clicks ok for the umpth time here as well, although it has a don’t show again checkbox, like every frigging dialog in eclipse.

how can people work like this, it’s driving me nuts. Am I the only sane dev here??
Other colleague has weird message in the browser console (angular). I ask whats the problem and if he can’t just set a breakpoint to analyze the situation. No thats not possible, he says, instead he’s going to add a return statement to check how far the code execution goes ...

I wonder sometimes if I‘m already dead and have to suffer in dev hell for an unknown reason ... 🤔

Couldn't be arsed with all the conditional compilation that angelscript required, so I dumped right back to good ol' lua for now.

Got lua in, vm started, loading strings and pushing/popping the stack.

Got SDL actually drawing as intended.

I don't know even half of what I'm doing.
Apparently header files that end in ".hpp" are specific to c++, while .h are for c headers.

I like the new SDL2 though, little bit different than SDL1. Not a lot of tutorials cover the difference, but I could kinda suss out from the documentation where I needed to adapt, even though I'm still pretty loose on the library, on the docs, and on c++ itself.

Still just a learning project.

Also, I'm continually surprised there isn't a portable, platform independent tool or little language just for replacing all pseudo-languages out there like .bat and .sh, and .zsh

Maybe even just a tool that standardizes it all, then takes config files that map the new standard to system dependant commands, so you can download the damn thing, configure the relevant environment variables, drop in the platform dependent configuration (or your browser or package tool detects what platform you are on and chooses the relevant package/download for your platform), write a console script and the tool automatically translates, and emits the system-relevant commands to that platform's console (so you don't even need much platform-specific code to do things like file access).

I was writing some JS files, and each time I tried to run them, the browser gave me errors on multiple lines. After looking at the source code, editing tons of lines and still not getting any result, I opened the source through the Chromium console and noticed it was different from mine. I thought there was a problem saving the file. Checked folder permissions, restarted Atom and Chromium, but still nothing.
What happened? I had opened the backup file in Chromium. 😩

There's a simple issue with this opensource browser extension.. actually I think I can fix that real quick and submit a pu OH WAIT!!!
I booted to Windows partition and don't have any fucking dev tools/console/package manager to install what I need!

Javascript is actually a weird language which I dunno why I like a lot.
new Date() in NodeJS gives a different value, while new Date() in the browser console(so react js and normal js) gives a different value.
I dunno if my online searching skills are bad but I didn't find anyone addressing this online. Lol I had to create a manual work around for it then.

Send a complete & as helpfull as I could imagine bugreport to dropbox. All info about OS version, browser, console messages where their application failed etc. Fuckers send (a bot?) mail back directing me to the faq. You're welcome. Last fucking time!

Disclaimer: Technically it's not "our" stack, but we have to use it so....

A webapp we built runs inside the company's network we built it for. Their IT are windows lovers, so everything has to run on Windows servers, even the tablets which are used to access said web app need to have windows.
Their company network isn't accessable from the outside world, so we have access via VPN to get into their network. But this isn't enough to access that shitty windows server our software runs on. After that VPN, you have to connect to a different VPN to which you can only connect to while you're inside the company's network. Then you have access to two servers, one the application is running on and one, well to see if you're changes were deployed correctly because the production server doesn't have a browser on it other than shitty internet explorer 8.

The only way to connect to the server is using RDP. Not even samba or so. To deploy the changes we made to our app, you need to copy paste the files from your local machine to the server. And don't get me started on running mssql migration with the shitty mssql console 😤😤

Why would anyone who isn't a complete idiot use Windows for servers or mssql in the first place????

Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.

It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.

Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.

Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.

Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.

I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.

So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.

I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?

The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.

I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.

I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.

The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…

there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…

thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!

Thats top notch design.
All actions happening on the page go to one endpoint. Removing old trusted computers, changing the password, changing 2FA, you name it.

Now if you want to remove all old trusted devices, you cannot remove all at once, there is no button for it. So you click one after the other. And then it stops working. Ok, then do the normal password rotation. Hmm, button has a loading spinner and then nothing happens.

Looking into the browser console:
- All requests go to /myaccount/security/graphql
- All requests get a 429 Too many requests
- Even if you just click a panel, it tracks the action to the graphql endpoint. Or at least tries to because even that gets shot down with a 429

Pretty dumb, eh? Must be some small shitty website. It's not. It's fucking paypal.

If your SPA doesn't work with the browsers navigation buttons . . . go fuck yourself and fix your application.

At work I have to deal with an application that manages work tickets. There's a login page, an overview console and a page for each individual ticket (and a whole bunch of other pages that I'll ignore for this rant.) If I click on a ticket to view it I go to a new page, right?

What happens if I want to go back to the overview? I hit back on my browser. That should take me back!

WRONG

Nope. Because it's a single page application with no fucking routing programmed, the browser still thinks that the login page is the last page so it takes me there instead.

Like come on, good UX/UI design takes advantage of what the user expects and what the user is used to. The user expects the back button to take him back one page, and therefore it is the responsibility of a SPA developer to mimic that capability in his app. I don't know what framework this web page uses (it has none of the recognizable hallmarks of React or Angular) but for gods sake, implement a freaking router.

I don't know why but the default settings in Ubuntu have changed quite a lot. There was once a glorious time when if your Ubuntu got stuck, you could press Ctl + Alt + F2-F6, login to a console, run top command to see which process was taking too much time and kill it, and you can go back and start the process and again.

I remember days(~15-20 days) between restarts of my laptop, because I could do that. But now, my Ubuntu gets stuck, and continues to get stuck for about 5-10 mins, and then just restarts.

I have run the disk checks to see if my hard disk is creating issues, but no issues there. Maybe, there are times when the processes execute some buggy code and cannot get out. One fine moment, one of the processes(probably a browser or Eclipse), starts using too much memory or cpu, and the whole worlds seems to be crashing down.

But, my control to kill it promptly without crashing my other applications, was so good to have. And now, every time this happens, I feel 2016-17 and earlier days were so much better.

Browser console open on every page. I dont feel confident in closing it.

Commons sense/ best practice:

Is It ok ti initialize (angular) variabile as {id:" ", name:" ", ..} to avoid errors in the browser console such as "can't get ID of undefined"?

My concern is code readability and debugging, is not ok for the ones looking at the browser console to have such useless errors, on the other side you have to initialize some variables with object that have a lot of keys(id name ecc...) Whith empty fields...useless.

The apps work both cases, whit or whitouth initialization.
By the way we are getting such data by api calls later on.

When your VP of IT doesn't know how to use the browser console....wat?

I did an engineering quiz yesterday as a way of introducing a new database the school recently got access to. You had to sign up for the site.

- Passwords were max 20 characters (which is better than 10, but still, why???)
- You couldn't use special characters, but there was NO INDICATION ANYWHERE THAT THAT WAS THE CASE. It would just silently fail to log in. I had to open the browser console to figure out what wasn't working. FUCK