So as new user I used devrant straight for 6 hours and this happened.
Am I the only one who thinks this helpful tip should be given at 3rd upvote and not 80th?

Should I be afraid right now?

Dev: can I swap out an existing UI framework from this codebase for a completely different one, because it doesn't do the small enhancement I've been tasked to do?

Me: ...............

please lord, give me strength in these pressing times.

“Fullstack dev continues to be consistent”

We’d an enhancement request where we needed to support Ionic apps. Our manager didn’t know anything about Ionic so she asks us what it was instead of asking Google.

Manager: so what’s this Ionic thingy?

Me: Ionic issss.... (gets interrupted by Fullstack dev)

Fullstack dev: so the thing is ... it’s like... (consistent with his opening lines as always) it’s a third party plugin which converts react app and html pages to native code.

Me: (thinking of sacrificing him at the altar of Lucifer)

Manager: Nice!

More to come.

@dfox would it be possible to have the menu open when swiping from the left edge? (E.g. Slack, Stack Exchange)

The menu button is quite high on larger phones, hard to reach with me thumb.

Clients always add up:
- The time it took you to create the project.
- Enhancement times.

Client: "How are we still working on this a year later?"

Me: "Well motherfucker, you requested a change recently. It has nothing to do with the original request, nor the last 39 updates."

Like it's my fucking fault you keep changing your mind.

So here's the deal. I am a team lead of a small company and I have a junior who is an idiot. I mean literally, idiot. We code in Python mostly and as Python is not structured as a default Java or C# project, the developer needs to be very careful so that the structure (or tiers) is maintained properly.

Now this girl, always messes up the tiers. Say one enhancement can be easily implemented in the UI tier, she would do the implementation in the core Db access layer, which may complete this particular enhancement, but breaks all the other functions (sometimes the whole project) connected to that particular module of the Db layer. She doesn't do any integration testing after updating the code, she only checks the current enhancement she is working on. When the enhancement goes to the testing phase, the testers find those broken functions and that results a re-work (most of the times done by me).

I have warned her. Even our manager has warned her. She always tells that she is working to improve herself. But I know, she isn't. She mostly chats with her boyfriends (yes, with an 's') when she has no work to do. She never upgrades herself or works on her skills.

I can easily report about her, and they will fire her without any warning (they did it already with a guy earlier). I don't want to do that again. What should I do? Any suggestions?

Oh, she has a great ego. She thinks that knows and understands everything. She will listen to your suggestions carefully, but will never follow those.

Add a random string (like "AnyBrowser/1.2.3") to your user agent string, and get warnings about unsupported browsers, reduced functionality, and Google drive completely refusing to start at all.

It's the very same browser, just another user agent string. Ever heard of feature detection? Ever heard of usability, accessibility, progressive enhancement? How can developers be so lost in 2022?

I just tried to reproduce the reason why Vivaldi stopped adding their brand to user agent strings but sails under false flag pretending to be Google chrome. So it doesn't show up in browser statistics either and Google people can keep thinking everyone is using their shitware.

“Fullstack dev morphs into a security expert”

We have a simple user registration system. Get the user details, generate an OTP, save in Oracle, email the OTP. The SMTP host is configured to send emails only to people who have an existing @a_very_famous_bank.com email address.

As a part of an enhancement request, the other day, we were trying to register a non-bank email address. As expected, it failed.

Manager: Meeting... meeting... meeting

Me: (Explained the problem)

Fullstack dev: so the thing is.. it’s like.. (doesn’t falter to open with these lines)...what I can do is...I can send you an HTTP security header in the HTTP request. It’ll work!

Me: (I hope an adult giraffe fucks you in your belly button)

More to come!

My first rant...

Every time a coworker asks for an enhancement, the request is followed by "it should be easy to implement".

1) If you think it's easy, then you obviously know the code better than me, right?
2) The idea of the enhancement may be easy, but you don't think about how a small change can have a cascading effect throughout the entire process... and potentially in a catastrophic way.

Happens every time. Maybe I'm just bitch eating crackers at this point, but it annoys me when people analyze something they have no idea how to write themselves.

Static HTML pages are better than "web apps".

Static HTML pages are more lightweight and destroy "web apps" in performance, and also have superior compatibility. I see pretty much no benefit in a "web app" over a static HTML page. "Web apps" appear like an overhyped trend that is empty inside.

During my web browsing experience, static HTML pages have consistently loaded faster and more reliably, since the browser is immediately served with content useful for consumption, whereas on JavaScript-based web "apps", the useful content comes in **last**, after the browser has worked its way through a pile of script.

For example, an average-sized Wikipedia article (30 KB wikitext) appears on screen in roughly two seconds, since MediaWiki uses static HTML. Everipedia, in comparison, is a ReactJS app. Guess how long that one needs. Upwards of three times as long!

Making a page JavaScript-based also makes it fragile. If an exception occurs in the JavaScript, the user might end up with a blank page or an endless splash screen, whereas static HTML-based pages still show useful content.

The legacy (2014-2020) HTML-based Twitter.com loaded a user profile in under four seconds. The new react-based web app not only takes twice as long, but sometimes fails to load at all, showing the error "Oops something went wrong! But don't fret – it's not your fault." to be displayed. This could not happen on a static HTML page.

The new JavaScript-based "polymer" YouTube front end that is default since August 2017 also loads slower. While the earlier HTML-based one was already playing the video, the new one has just reached its oh-so-fancy skeleton screen.

It would once have been unthinkable to have a website that does not work at all without JavaScript, but now, pretty much all popular social media sites are JavaScript-dependent. The last time one could view Twitter without JavaScript and tweet from devices with non-sophisticated browsers like Nintendo 3DS was December 2020, when they got rid of the lightweight "M2" mobile website.

Sometimes, web developers break a site in older browser versions by using a JavaScript feature that they do not support, or using a dependency (like Plyr.js) that breaks the site. Static HTML is immune against this failure.

Static HTML pages also let users maximize speed and battery life by deactivating JavaScript. This obviously will disable more sophisticated site features, but the core part, the text, is ready for consumption.

Not to mention, single-page sites and fancy animations can be implemented with JavaScript on top of static HTML, as GitHub.com and the 2018 Reddit redesign do, and Twitter's 2014-2020 desktop front end did.

From the beginning, JavaScript was intended as a tool to complement, not to replace HTML and CSS. It appears to me that the sole "benefit" of having a "web app" is that it appears slightly more "modern" and distinguished from classic web sites due to use of splash screens and lack of the browser's loading animation when navigating, while having oh-so-fancy loading animations and skeleton screens inside the website. Sorry, I prefer seeing content quickly over the app-like appearance of fancy loading screens.

Arguably, another supposed benefit of "web apps" is that there is no blank page when navigating between pages, but in pretty much all major browsers of the last five years, the last page observably remains on screen until the next navigated page is rendered sufficiently for viewing. This is also known as "paint holding".

On any site, whenever I am greeted with content, I feel pleased. Whenever I am greeted with a loading animation, splash screen, or skeleton screen, be it ever so fancy (e.g. fading in an out, moving gradient waves), I think "do they really believe they make me like their site more due to their fancy loading screens?! I am not here for the loading screens!".

To make a page dependent on JavaScript and sacrifice lots of performance for a slight visual benefit does not seem worthed it.

Quote:

> "Yeah, but I'm building a webapp, not a website" - I hear this a lot and it isn't an excuse. I challenge you to define the difference between a webapp and a website that isn't just a vague list of best practices that "apps" are for some reason allowed to disregard. Jeremy Keith makes this point brilliantly.
>
> For example, is Wikipedia an app? What about when I edit an article? What about when I search for an article?
>
> Whether you label your web page as a "site", "app", "microsite", whatever, it doesn't make it exempt from accessibility, performance, browser support and so on.
>
> If you need to excuse yourself from progressive enhancement, you need a better excuse.

– Jake Archibald, 2013

When I had to submit an enhancement to the customer and so I pulled an all nighter in my office. I knew before hand that the office would be empty post 11 pm, so I sneaked in 4 cans of beer and coded the night away while downing chilled beer.
That was a good night. :)

I have just done my manicures yesterday evening. And, it's so nice to look at when you have your nails done from my point of view, especially when coding. So much view and can really boost self esteem, lets you smile, and motivated to work though I don't usually love Mondays because yeah, another manic Monday.

I just so love my manicures today, despite the allergies that I still have, the enhancement code that has not yet been deployed by our ever loving, supreme, Grandmaster turd, let's just name him, John Doe.

P.S. please not be easily removed manicures. For you are the only source of my happiness and my motivation to go to work (because bills is too mainstream and will always be the classy reason also)

@dfox - a poll post type would be awesome

JS interview:
– we expect you to know the concepts of immutability, persistence, software architecture and systems theory, methods of analyzing complexity beyond the big-O notation, safe parallel code execution with web workers, WASM, modern web standards including working drafts, progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, WCAG recommendations and web accessibility in general, UX strategies and modern graphic design trends. Nice 20k github stars you got there. By the way, what's your opinion on modern optimistic UX?
– I know this all but I somewhat disagree with some status-quo UX strategies
– unfortunately it's a no

PHP interview:
– Do you know how to wipe your ass?
– *excited hysterical jumping with head nodding*
– You're hired

Once a fellow dev gave me the advice of always questioning the enhancements and fixes that are asked to be done. She said i should always ask things like is this a legitimate enhancement asked for by the client? Is it really required? Will it alter any existing established flow of our system? Etc.

At least I found this helpful because it saved us a ton of unnecessary work that would later have to be rolled back.

I don't fucking see how others get their stuff through code review, if when I make an enhancement it gets stopped for stuff other people did before me. Like, at this point it seems like I'm spending more and more time refactoring than simply doing the requested enhancements.

I don't blame the team, they're going off of the documentation. But this is getting ridiculous.

I found out that a major open source project pulled in some of my code for an enhancement I wrote in my own repo. The code was modified some to match the current conventions of the project, but it contains some of my original comments so I know it was based directly off my code. I'm not entirely sure how to feel. On one hand I'm super stoked to know that the maintainers of the project actually looked at my code and included it. On the other, I'm a little bummed they didn't credit me or at least give me a little shout out...

What do you call a developer that fixes bugs or add enhancements?

For example, I have , like two projects, none developed by me, I have to add enhancement/ fix bugs when the issues/change-requests arrive.

Now I am preparing my cv and I am like what do I write for these particular projects?

Don't feel right writing developer for these projects since it gives the impression I developed the entire thing. Co-developed does not sound right either. Maintenance? Now it feels more like server operations than anything to do with code. Bug Fixer? Sure got a nice ring to it, but it does not feel professional.

So guys, any ideas?

The "JavaScript-based web app" starter pack.
Build web sites, not web "apps".
JavaScript is an enhancement, not a replacement for HTML.

The client wants the booking project to be all in JS Framework (not specifying any) and NO PHP since client hates PHP (and I don't know why) from the very beginning when the only dev was my former front-end partner (lead dev).
I was wondering why the client still continued the project, YET the file extensions were still on PHP. I asked the lead dev what happened and answered he didn't know know how to start migrating to JS framework and just started NATIVE PHP.
Still, as being a good dev and a supporter to lead dev, did accept and the project as lead dev's assistant. Fixed bugs, enhancement and responsive (DEMMIT, I FREAKING HATE RESPONSIVE) and later complained why am I doing front-end tasks, when it's not my task, supposedly. I EXPECTED MORE ON BACK-END TASKS!

(HERE'S THE EPIC ADVISE GOES AND CALLED OURSELVES MASTER)

Me: Master, why did you not started the project in JS Framework instead of native php?
Lead Dev : You know what master, this project has been already done if the client allows US to use WordPress for this project will still be migrated to JS. And now, WE are trapped to make every window size be responsive since there are already a standard for each window screen.
Me: (DO NOT INCLUDE ME IN YOUR FUCKING SORCERY! I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DID THERE AND WHY D'YOU ACCEPT THIS PROJECT, SLAVE, WHEN YOU ALREADY KNOW YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DO IT, IN THE FIRST PLACE. STOP BEING A DICKHEAD AND DO NOT WASTE CLIENT'S MONEY AND EFFORT FOR YOUR USELESS BUNCH OF SHIT!) Indeed, responsive is a such a pain in the arse.
Lead Dev: Maybe, let's just finish our tasks first and wait the project to be migrated to JS.

P.S. The project manager and client asked me if I do know how to migrate the project from native PHP to JS framework and sabotaged lead dev. OFCOURSE, YES! But, I did not respond that quickly, unless eerm, you know, I earn greater than lead dev. Truth be told and practically speaking, it's really unfair for me if I accept the back-job when the lead dev delivers inaccurate deliverables and earned greater than me. No way, Jose!

Now, I am not working with him because I'm super done with him and later did I know, lead dev is looking for Drupal dev to be working for the booking project.

I always love to stare the application that I develop... First I start with admiring it... then the things that could have been done to enhance the feature.. then the bugs that could only be seen by me.. then all these results in new update of the application and this cycle continues 😂

*everyone bitching about a piece of software that everyone hates because it's awful, doesn't work, AND costs millions of dollars*
Me: Hey here's a solution that's basically free and gives us everything we need, and all of the enhancement requests
"Cool! We'll look into it for 2020. Keep working on it for a third of what you should be making though"
.. but we need it now??

Barracuda Email Firewall for Dummies:

1. Email Client with perfect grammar and nice subject line. (Email rejected)

2. Change subject line to include Russian and Chinese characters along with discount advertisements for Xanax and male enhancement pills. (Email sent!)

Progressive enhancement

Really ??

:|

Super brilliant idea for Windows: when logging on with a password that is only slightly mistyped, or with the consecutively appended number from the previous month, it should still be accepted. So much more usability - Microsoft just cannot reject that!

I hate how React is used almost everywhere nowadays. Especially when single-page applications are used for purposes that don't actually benefit from them.

Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned, but I want websites to work even with client-side JS disabled. At least sites like Amazon don't rely on it, and work just fine. Progressive enhancement is the way to go.

Asked if I'll meet a July 15 deployment date for a payroll app that has been out in UAT since Jun 27th with no comments (6 working days and 2weekends)

Me "Well I smoke tested it and it worked but if I get a 20 item correction(/enhancement) list on the 12th from the customer rep again, then I won't"
m
Team Lead: "I'll try to play with (test) it some today"

Me :)

Two (2) senior developers and one (1) senior tester left our team and I am left with two (2) Java legacy applications that are hard to maintain. Here is a list of things I hate about these old webapps (let's call them app A and B):

1. App A depends on 80% web services. If one web service for a product or warehouse goes down, work flow is impeded while prod support team checks with the core services team for repair

2. App B is a maven project with multiple modules dependent on libraries that are dependent on company's internal libraries. So if we want to upgrade to OpenJdk 9 and up, the project will definitely produce a lot of errors due to deprecated/unsupported codes

3. App A is dependent on Tibco and I have no experience on that

4. App B's continuous integration build tool is Jenkins and the jobs that build it has a shell script that wasn't updated during the tech upgrade enhancement. The previous developer who did the knowledge transfer to me didn't tell me about this (it should be considered a defect on her part but she already resigned)

5. App A when loaded in eclipse IDE is a pain to work with since it is only allowed to build a war file using ant. I have to lookup in quick search instead of calling shortcuts (call hierarchy) because the project wasn't compiled via eclipse.

6. It's impossible to debug app A because of #5

7. Both applications have high priority and complex enhancements and I have no other teammates to help me

8. You never know what else can go wrong anytime

A dedicated team has built an "infrastructure" for creating UI for c++ developers in the company. What looks like a poor attempt at recreating what Microsoft did with XAML at first glance, it actually is a horrible exercise in force feeding people the stinking pile of shit that their code is.
The idea is to make it easy to create UI for developers who aren't used to front end development. They should just need to declare the layout. Very noble.
But.
If you want to do anything more than show a checkbox or a radio button, if you dare to define relationships between the UI controls or worse, if you get ambitious with creating a simple UI that uses a lot of similar controls and similar relationships with dynamic content... be prepared to eat your own barf from eating too much of their shit.

Not only do you now need to write front end code (including JS among others), you need to do it with limited or poor support and you have to make sure that it sits well with the house of moist, crumbly cards the team proudly created. Or resort to some very stupid and performance costing "bypasses" that further cripple your application code. Usually you have to do both of these things.
To think that scores of other teams have welcomed this amazing enhancement with full support without any resistance. It's sickening.

I waste too much of energy (and good jokes!) with these people.

Debugging and fixing other shit when needing to work on an enhancement.

I think it's procrastination, but in the end the thing I'm fixing actually works as intended, so I don't have to lay eyes on it anymore...

So for the past one month I'm working on an enhancement in a product coded in C++ and shell script, running on RHEL. After toiling away for almost 10 hours/day for a month, the enhacement is ready. Coded, tested, documented. Ready to ship.

The client is supposed to recieve the update as a drop. 1 day before the drop is scheduled to be released to Quality Control, I fire an overnight build on the build machine, update the change request ticket, update other related tickets, inform QC of the drop to be released tomorrow. On the D-day, I package the drop using the company's painfully arduous method. Everything is ready by the evening, and the drop is good to go.

At 7pm (one hour before the drop is to be released), Jack fucking Jack-o-lantern (one of the top most exec in the company) tells me that the default value of the parameter introduced in the enhancement, needs to be changed from 86400 to 1500. HALF AN HOUR BEFORE THE DROP IS TO BE RELAEASED!

Now here I am, changing the value in over 25 files, followed by firing an overnight build, followed by sanity testing, change specific testing, followed by drop packaging, followed by inform QC that the drop will be delayed.

All because fucking jack-o-lantern wanted to change the fucking default value.
GOOD FOR YOU FUCKING JACK.

Learning how to make browser plugins by shamelessly ripping off my favourite dumb Reddit Enhancement Suite feature. DevRant Nicknames, coming Soon™️.

For our product there is a common type of bug we get reported. It is not really a bug, also it is not a feature - instead it is a missing or incomplete feature.

For example to help users we add a search feature on one screen, but there is no search on some other screen. Now the absence of search on that screen is apparently a bug.

To make things worse to report the bug users try to trick us. They say something like:
"Hey can you help me? How can I find things in the abc screen?"

So I explain how to browse for the item or whatever.

Then they say:
"Ok now how do you do that on the xyz screen?"

Slightly suspiciously I now tell them how you can browse for the item like before or we have this new feature eg. search you can use if that is quicker.

Now they say:
"Don't you think it would be better to have that search on the first screen?"

OK now I realize this is just a trick and the person doesn't actually need help using the software. So I tell him how we only added the feature on one screen and if he thinks there is value adding it on other screens he can put enhancement request in and if wants he can talk to my boss about making it a priority.

Then they go on asking other rhetorical questions like:
"why was it designed like this?"
"Are you guys deliberately trying to make life harder for people by making them learn different ways to do things?"

I now want to delete the new search feature but luckily it is close to lunch time so I have a good excuse to escape the conversation.

Hm, is **website** progressive enhancement still a thing?

Please be welcome into slaughter discussion. I just read some articles today and i'm realy curious what your thoughts are.

"It isn’t a question of enhancement through design. Whether an editor realizes it or not, design is part of what he does every time he prints the paper." - Louis Silverstein

Any suggested performance enhancement drug?

Despite not having any real C# experience to speak of, I've been put on a short and rather intense enhancement project that was written with .net framework and MVC.

Yesterday I had to add a new method to call a stored procedure. The file I had to add it in was over 6k lines long. Most files, not including entities, are well over 1k - including the views.

Can't say I'm enjoying working on this project so far.

(Did I mention the clients have a tendency to change requirements mid sprint?)

Working on an enhancement for a legacy product that's been in the industry for about fifteen years... The situation is that I fix one defect and give more pop up. I'm frustrated so much that I give up twenty times a day.
Please tell me that's how you work on legacy software 😔

Dear web developers, please think of the boot disk users.

Users might have to boot their computer from external bootable media such as a live USB stick, SSD, or live CD/DVD, after their operating system caught a problem that prevents it from booting.

Emergency boot media usually has earlier versions of web browsers because they are not frequently used, much less updated. Sadly, the developers of many websites have a habit of breaking compatibility for older web browsers. For example, the new audio player used by the Internet Archive (Archive.org) does not even support Firefox 57, a version that was released as recently as November 2017!

Therefore, websites should retain support for old web browsers. If not all features can be made to work, at least the essential features should work on older browser versions. Websites should not let down people who are stuck due to a computer problem. Those users should still be able to browse the Internet for help, and perhaps enjoy basic entertainment such as watching videos (YouTube, Dailymotion) and listenening to music or audio books (SoundCloud, Internet Archive) while at it.

The attached screenshot shows something no internet user wants to be "greeted" with.

Keep the Internet accessible.

So many occasions to choose from! Probably the most pissed I've been is when I'd been assigned to work on (and completed fixes for) the same bug as another developer twice in the same week after already having spent 4 days working on a new enhancement that's requirements changed literally an hour after I'd saved the code!

Sveltekit's progressive enhancement on forms is an obstacle more than a tool.

Submit buttons stop working when they want.
Other buttons in the forms may trigger an action via POST if their type is not defined.

Everything with no feedback whatsoever. At least tell me I'm an idiot in the form or let me know why a button type="submit" does nothing to send the form data 🤦

Friend showed me some video about some researchers being able to extract fingerprints of people from their pictures (like when you pose with the peace sign). Thinking about it, it's quite possible with the clarity of today's ordinary phone cameras and image enhancement. Thoughts about this?

@dfox love your work. Have an enhancement request for IOS app badge counter: tapping on notification symbol in top right corner to view +1's should be the action to clear the badge counter for +1's, not the action of tapping on individual +1's (there's nothing to read when tapping on them)

Sveltekit progressive enhancement form docs fucking suck.

Arbitrary, non-reproducible examples.

The docs show: return fail(400, { email, missing: true });

The client response says: {
"type": "success",
"status": 204
}

Man, if the docs were monkey-typewritten, they could have warned us first…