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Today was my last day of work, tomorrow i have officially left that place. It's a weird feeling because i'm not certain about the future.
The job was certainly not bad, and after all i read on devrant i'm beginning to believe it was one of the better ones. A nice boss, always something to eat/drink nearby, a relaxed atmosphere, a tolerance for my occasionally odd behaviour and the chance to suggest frameworks. Why i would leave that place, you ask? Because of the thing not on the list, the code, that is the thing i work with all the time.
Most of the time i only had to make things work, testing/refactoring/etc. was cut because we had other things to do. You could argue that we had more time if we did refactor, and i suggested that, but the decision to do so was delayed because we didn't have enough time.
The first project i had to work on had around 100 files with nearly the same code, everything copy-pasted and changed slightly. Half of the files used format a and the other half used the newer format b. B used a function that concatenated strings to produce html. I made some suggestions on how to change this, but they got denied because they would take up too much time. Aat that point i started to understand the position my boss was in and how i had to word things in order to get my point across. This project never got changed and holds hundreds of sql- and xss-injection-vulnerabilities and misses access control up to today. But at least the new project is better, it's tomcat and hibernate on the backend and react in the frontend, communicating via rest. It took a few years to get there, but we made it.
To get back to code quality, it's not there. Some projects had 1000 LOC files that were only touched to add features, we wrote horrible hacks to work with the reactabular-module and duplicate code everywhere. I already ranted about my boss' use of ctrl-c&v and i think it is the biggest threat to code quality. That and the juniors who worked on a real project for the first time. And the fact that i was the only one who really knew git. At some point i had enough of working on those projects and quit.
I don't have much experience, but i'm certain my next job has a better workflow and i hope i don't have to fix that much bugs anymore.
In the end my experience was mostly positive though. I had nice coworkers, was often free to do things my way, got really into linux, all in all a good workplace if there wasn't work.
Now they dont have their js-expert anymore, with that i'm excited to see how the new project evolves. It's still a weird thing to know you won't go back to a place you've been for several years. But i still have my backdoor, but maybe not. :P
16 -
I’m surrounded by idiots.
I’m continually reminded of that fact, but today I found something that really drives that point home.
Gather ‘round, everybody, it’s story time!
While working on a slow query ticket, I perused the code, finding several causes, and decided to run git blame on the files to see what dummy authored the mental diarrhea currently befouling my screen. As it turns out, the entire feature was written by mister legendary Apple golden boy “Finder’s Keeper” dev himself.
To give you the full scope of this mess, let me start at the frontend and work my way backward.
He wrote a javascript method that tracks whatever row was/is under the mouse in a table and dynamically removes/adds a “.row_selected” class on it. At least the js uses events (jQuery…) instead of a `setTimeout()` so it could be worse. But still, has he never heard of :hover? The function literally does nothing else, and the `selectedRow` var he stores the element reference in isn’t used elsewhere.
This function allows the user to better see the rows in the API Calls table, for which there is a also search feature — the very thing I’m tasked with fixing.
It’s worth noting that above the search feature are two inputs for a date range, with some helpful links like “last week” and “last month” … and “All”. It’s also worth noting that this table is for displaying search results of all the API requests and their responses for a given merchant… this table is enormous.
This search field for this table queries the backend on every character the user types. There’s no debouncing, no submit event, etc., so it triggers on every keystroke. The actual request runs through a layer of abstraction to parse out and log the user-entered date range, figure out where the request came from, and to map out some column names or add additional ones. It also does some hard to follow (and amazingly not injectable) orm condition building. It’s a mess of functional ugly.
The important columns in the table this query ultimately searches are not indexed, despite it only looking for “create_order” records — the largest of twenty-some types in the table. It also uses partial text matching (again: on. every. single. keystroke.) across two varchar(255)s that only ever hold <16 chars — and of which users only ever care about one at a time. After all of this, it filters the results based on some uncommented regexes, and worst of all: instead of fetching only one page’s worth of results like you’d expect, it fetches all of them at once and then discards what isn’t included by the paginator. So not only is this a guaranteed full table scan with partial text matching for every query (over millions to hundreds of millions of records), it’s that same full table scan for every single keystroke while the user types, and all but 25 records (user-selectable) get discarded — and then requeried when the user looks at the next page of results.
What the bloody fucking hell? I’d swear this idiot is an intern, but his code does (amazingly) actually work.
No wonder this search field nearly crashed one of the servers when someone actually tried using it.
Asdfajsdfk.21 -
I applied for a backend job. Somehow i ended up doing frontend. Ok whatever the pay is alright and i dont mind doing js. But then i see the backend team doing absolute horseshit, stacking up overhead and not even fucking documenting the endpoints, i get mad.
And now our sysadmin left so there is no fucking server and i cant run locally because of 9trillion config files (remember the overhead part?) and the pm is nagging me to get the site done WHEN THERE IS NO FUCKING SERVER. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME, SET IT ALL UP AGAIN? THATS NOT MY FUCKING JOB YOU IMBECILE FUCKFACE.8 -
Pm: '[...] So when will you set up the server its urgent'
Me: 'look buddy i applied here as a java dev, ended up doing fronted. Fine, i like js, i can do that. But then dont fucking ping me daily with server stuff what has been overcomplicated and i got no idea about, theres a backend team, ask them.'
Pm: 'you said you would do the frontend'
Me: 'yeah that doesnt contradict a word i said'
Pm: 'you took responsibility, fix it'
Me: '?????? THATS WHAT IM SAYING YOU FUCKFACE COCKSUCKER ASSHOLE THAT I DIDNT AND I WONT, FUCK A HORSE'4 -
i was graphic designer but couldn't find a reliable frontend dev to implement stuff for my clients. So i decided to learn. Then i found fun in js, later on angular. Then i found node.js and this was FUN! so im a backend dev for quite a while now :-)3
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Be me, making a self hosted website-blog thing because why not
making the backend: yeah cool, easy, ive been doing this stuff for a while
making a frontend: ehh, some template will do fine, im not that great at js
making an admin page: yay this is actually fun
setting up portforwarding on my router to my pi: fucking piece of shit work already dammit8 -
Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.
I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.
I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.
That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.
Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).
I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.
Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.
I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.
Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.
To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?
Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?
There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...20 -
The only serious, as in customer affecting, bug I never git fixed was an indexing bug that caused an exception requiring manual intervention by one of us.
Despite going at it for many years I never found the root cause before I left the company.
The reason it was so difficult was that it only occurred every second month or less and with different customers.
It was also not triggering directly when the error occurred but a while later once the error had caused accumulated errors until one value got negative.
Also, it was a combination SQL, backend code and frontend js and the time from initial error until an invalid value could be hours, days or even weeks.
And we never ever managed to replicate it our self and found no common pattern between occasions.
We think it was some kind of race condition when updating the db that caused duplicate values or a hole in the index series (db transaction or db index was not an option for various reason that would require a redesign of the central tables and most if the central code).
This then grew into multiple error on consecutive updates until one f them resulted in a negative number that then caused a regex in js to fail.2 -
I fucking hate my boss so much
He looks down on me like I’m some idiot who doesn’t know his shit.
The other day he was trying to explain OAuth2.0 to me in the most dumbed down way ever, even after telling him I do already know how OAuth 2.0 works. He just said “oh well just making sure” and continued explaining it to me the exact same way. Felt shitty having something explained to you which you already know in such a way in front of all of your coworkers
Whenever I give my thoughts on something he answers with an argument that’s essentially true but pretty stupid:
B: “We don’t need to bundle our JS files” (see my other rant)
M: “Our load time is around 15 seconds though and it takes forever to update our script tags”
B: “Yes but it’s only 15 seconds once and the tags are already there so it’s fine”
How do you reply to something like that??
On top of that, his code is absolutely awful, always looks hacked together, lacks documentation and i don’t think he has written a unit test in his life
I don’t even like frontend, was told I would mostly do backend and it seems like all I’m doing recently is write fucking javascript because even if I wanted to write backend code, it’s nearly impossible to write clean code in this pile of horseshit codebase7 -
What kind of developer are you and what is your opinion on other development areas?
Me: Junior dev, oriented towards full stack and Android(with a sysadmin background):
-Low-level(kernel development, embedded, drivers, operating systems, reverse engineers)- Badass, I wish I could do that.
-Mobile apps- awesome but too high level sometimes.
-Full stack/Backend- awesome.
-Web Frontend- fuck HTML+CSS. JS is cool I guess.
-Enterprise applications(e.g SAP) Pajeet, my son.
-Malware development- Holy shit that is awesome.
-Video Game development- was my dream since childhood.
-Desktop apps- No opinion.4 -
To all frontend webdevs here:
Explain to me how do you cope with all this insane clusterfuckness of frameworks, tools and js libraries.
Why is it so hard for a beginner like me to learn webdev? Android and backend are much more logical and sane. Even Node.js is pretty dope.11 -
There you are, fiddling with next.js webpack settings, because your isomorphic JS-in-CSS-in-JS SSR fallback from react-native-web to react-dom throws a runtime error on your SSR prerendering server during isomorphic asynchronous data prefetching from Kubernetes backend-for-frontend edge-server with GraphQL.
You have all that tech to display a landing page with an email form, just to send spam emails with ten tracking links and five tracking beacons per email.
Your product can be replaced by an Excel document made in two days.
It was developed in two years by a team of ten developers crunching every day under twelve project managers that can be replaced with a parrot trained to say “Any updates?”
Your evaluation is $5M+. You have 10,000 dependency security warnings, 1000 likes on Product Hunt, 500 comments on Hacker News, and a popular Twitter account.
Your future looks bright. You finish your coffee, crack your knuckles and carry on writing unit tests.
5 -
There are a couple of them to list! But to sum my main ones(biggest personal heroes):
John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence and accredited with coining such term(sometimes before 1960 if memory serves right), a mathematical prodigy, the man based the original model of the Lisp programming language in lambda calculus. Many modern concepts that we have in programming where implemented in one way or another from his systems back in the day, and as a data analyst and ML nut.....well I am a big fan.
Herb Sutter: C++ programmer extraordinaire. I appreciate him more for his lectures and published articles than anything else. Incredibly smart and down to earth and manages to make C++ less intimidating while still approaching it with respect.
Rich Hickey: The mastermind behind Clojure, the Lisp dialect for the JVM. Rich is really talented and his lectures behind his motivations and reasons behind everything he does with Clojure are fascinating to see.
Ryan Dahl: Awww shit y'all know how it is. The man changed web development both in the backend and the frontend for good. The concept of people writing their own servers to run their pages was not new, but the Node JS runtime environment made it more widely available to people by means of a simple to use language that was already popular with web developers. I would venture to say that Ryan's amazing contributions to JS made the language better, as it stands, the language continues to evolve and new features that make it overall better keep being added. He is currently building Deno, which would be a runtime environment for TypeScript, in Rust.
Anders Hejlsberg: This dude was everywhere man....the original author of Turbo Pascal and the lead of Delphi back in the day. These RAD tools paved the way for what would be a revolution in the computing world. The dude is also the lead architect and designer of the C# programming language as well as TypeScript.
This fucker is everywhere and I love it.
Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto: Matsumoto san is the creator of the Ruby programming language. Not only am I a die hard fan of Ruby, but of the core philosophies that the man keeps as the core of his language design: Make the developer happy, principle of least surprise. Also I follow: minswan which is a term made by the Ruby community that states Mats is nice so we are nice. <---- because being cool to others is better than being a passive aggressive cunt.
Steve Wozniak: I feel as if the man does not get enough recognition...the man designed the Apple || computer which (regardless of how much most of y'all bitch and whine) paved the way for modern micro computers. Dude is also accredited with designing one of the first programmable universal remotes(which momma said was shitty) but he did none the less.
Alan Kay: Developed Smalltalk and the original OOP way of doing things. Smalltalk as a concept is really fucking interesting. If you guys ever get the chance, play with Pharo, which is a modern Smalltalk. The thing is really interesting and the overall idea of Smalltalk can be grasped in very little time. It sucks because the software scales beautifully in terms of project building, the idea of hoisting a program as its own runtime environment and ide by preserving state through images is just mind blowing to me. Makes file based programs feel....well....quaint.
Those are some of the biggest dudes for me. I know that the list is large, but I wanted to give credit to the people that inspired me the most. Honorary mention goes to other language creators and engineers of course, but it would be way too large to list!9 -
How I knew this was for me.... I didn't.
It kind of just happened in the natural order of things.
I was once a wii young lad who had a dream, and that dream became a smashing pile of being broke, jobless and unemployable, not a great way to start off that early life but hey, it was what it was.
So I looked at my computer one day, lousy dusty Pentium 4 with a massive 80GB HDD, in the corner, and went... fuck it, this thing is going to make me money.
So from there I picked up my old high school book on VB6 and on with it I went, forcing my self to make that calculator I couldn't do in school and a few other things, from there I got into a course for webDev, not uni, and after being dropped from that course ... that's a story for another time, I basically said fuck the system and my journey into webDev took on a life of its own.
Starting with frontend (back when layouts where tables and css was font colours) and IE5 was still a thing, and progressing into JS for a fucktonne of "onClick" events, then backend... I went down the .PHP3, PHP4 hadn't been released yet, but at the time .ASP was a thing too although it was complicated as fuck.
For many years it was just 1 thing after another, picking up MySQL, screwing around with databases, setting up linux servers, gobbling up Python a couple years later and started automating different things, just building site after site, until one day I landed a professional gig - not just casual freelance stuff, and from there when you think you know a lot, what I thought I knew got blown out the window and imposter syndrome sunk in, but I kept pushing ahead.
That saying "you don't know what you don't know", it has meaning here, you don't know what you don't know... but the moment you know you don't know enough, you either crumble or you keep waterboarding yourself in knowledge to reduce the unknown.
And somewhere along the line I accepted this path.
It may have taken me a few years to get off my feet but I'm glad I took that first step.1 -
So, for the past...what, week or so? I've been working on a side project with @gianlu. It's the PretendYoureXyzzy fork - our attempt to rejuvenate an old shitty piece of software.
I had started working on a fork alone, and then he asked to team up so I was like "Sure, I got nothing better to do." So, he's working on the backend (and hooking JS up to the backend) and I'm developing the frontend.
I don't know why I thought tech would stand still. Google says they're putting MDL on life support and replacing it with a much more complex successor, MDC. It's not hard to use, but what really bugs me is the lack of notice on getmdl.io. If you are switching to another project as your main focus, why the fuck wouldn't you advertise in the most places possible?
Granted, I don't do web design and/or development on the daily. Yes, I can do it, but I'm not always as up-to-date with web technologies as I'd like to be.
However, the screencap captured is the third time I've taken the knife to the UI. MDC is great tooling, at least to me. That dialog? Not something MDL would've had out the box on the first day. You'd have to work for that.
I don't have an issue with MDC, I have an issue with the lack of PR around it.
6 -
One day my colleague says that React Js is used for frontend as well as backend. I did not agree with him also he blames that Backend API’s also can be created using React Js. I could not believe because as per I know React Js is a library for frontend not for Backend. Still, some other colleagues supported him because he is the senior developer I am an intermediate developer.
Then I ask some of my friends who are currently working on React Js, Can we use React Js for the backend? And the next day I went office and talk to my colleague that I could not found that React JS can be used for backend and backend API. And he replied You can use nodejs. Oh! Man But I think Node and React are different tools.10 -
Interestingly enough, the worst JavaScript code I’ve ever had to deal with was written by back-enders coming from a Java background. The app was unusable and it took me a few weeks to put it back on track.
So is JS the culprit, or is it the elite backend community that fails to even try to make good use of it? 🤡2 -
Got contacted for a job "interview" by a company because they were looking for "people with my skill set". All my profiles say I am a fullstack web dev with experience in frontend js frameworks and js and php backend frameworks.
Come in to find the "interview" is an exam. Ok, fine. My brain could do with some exercise.
After the basic IQ type questions, I get the web dev exam.
It is 95% of the questions are about CSS and HTML basics.
WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK.7 -
I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.
So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.
I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.
Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.
This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?
And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...
I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?
I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.
And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?
This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.
There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.
I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.
Man, I don't want to go to work today.6 -
I was talking to a friend about the current state of machine learning through tensorflow and commented about the use of Javascript as a language.
He discarded the idea as he views Javascript as something that should only be used as a frontend technology rather than something to build backends or deep learning models.
I am thorn. I have always liked Javascript but will admit that I have used it mostly in the area of front end with very few backend instances(i did create a full stack intranet app in Express once, major success for the application it was hosting, it was a very basic api which had its own nosql db with no need to interact with the company's relational data, it was perfect for the occasion and still help maintaining it from time to time)
My boi states that node's biggest issue has always been npm and the quality of packages. I always contradict those statements by saying that if one uses community standards and the best packages then one does not need to worry about the quality(i.e mongoose over some unmaintained mongo wrapper etc)
I sometimes catch myself finding that my way of thinking adapts better to JS than it even does Python (which is his preference for deep learning) and whilst there are some beastly packages for python in terms of quality and usefulness such as matplotlib etc that one can do great things with the equivalent JS.
I mean, tensorflow.js came from the same wizards that did tensorflow (obviously) and i find the functional approach of JS to be more on par with how we develop solutions.
I am no deep learning expert, and sadly I have no professional experience with machine learning. But I venture to say that we should not cast aside the great strides that the JS community has done to the language in terms of evolution and tooling. Today's Js is not your grandaddy's Js and thinking that the language is crippled because of early iterations of the language would be severely biased.
What do you guys(maybe someone with professional experience) think of Js as a language for machine learning?
Do you think the language poses something worth considering in terms of tooling and power for ml?2 -
I was asked to make proof of concept small frontend app with some simplified requirements, they asked me because it should be written in the stack I done most of my career work with. I do it in 3 days instead of 5, using those 2 days to optimise the app and explore different approaches. I noted down my findings, what to avoid and reasons and also what is good to use and reasons and shared with everyone.
We waited for the project to start, I started working on another project in the meantime and there was a big rush to make project go live etc., so I was consumed 100% on that new project.
So they put in charge backend php developer to do frontend js work. I said ok, do you need help in starting out? Nah, my proof of concept repo is enough.
4 days before that small project goes live they asked me to do code review. All things I noted down to avoid are in the codebase, few bad practices but everything is over-engineered (in a very bad way), some parts should be more flexible as current setup is very rigid, having almost all kinds of CSS, I saw SASS, CSS variables, 2 different CSS-in-JS tools with some additional libraries that is used to toggle classes.
I don't know how to approach this as I am not asshole as a person and I don't want to say to my colleague that his codebase is completely trash, but it is.
The worst parts: They called me to help finish the app and budget is almost spent!
I would rewrite the whole app as the state of the current app is unusable and everything is glued with bad Chinese ducktape that barely holds.
Additional points because it won't bundle as everything is f**ked.
I am seriously thinking of duplicating master branch and refactor the whole fricking app but won't do that as I am burning midnight oil on other two projects. Don't worry overtimes are paid.
I hate those shitty situations, this project was supposed to be tiny, sweet and example of decent project in this company but it is instead big fat franken-app that will be example how smart it is to avoid putting backend dev to do frontend work (I also agree for vice versa)! -
when you build the whole landing page, forms, php mail sender, SMTP, marketing integrations, analytics and all of that from scratch, and 1 hour before it goes live your boss tells you to change some inputs on the form.2
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GraphQL fans, please read the whole rant until you jump in the comments.
I get it, when you have multiple data sources (that aren't always proper databases), your stuff is relevant.
But most of the people use GraphQL when they have a single database. In that case, native joins are always faster than GraphQL dataloader N + 1 BS you have. It takes less time and less code to go to the backend and write an endpoint for the frontend with a DB query than write several GraphQL ones on the frontend and then combine the data with imperative JS. It will work faster too.
So why the fuck should I use GraphQL at all?28 -
Web developers, please recommend a tech stack. I have work experience in Laravel, Angular and Node Express. Personal small experience only for Vue and React.
Frontend: Angular, React or Vue?
Backend: Node Adonis JS or PHP Laravel?
CSS framework: Angular Material(angular), Material-UI, Tailwind CSS or Bootstrap?
This is for a personal project API based. What frontend backend tech stack are you using right now? Thanks!24 -
To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.
The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).
The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.
Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.
1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.
Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.
2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.
Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.
3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.
Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.
4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.
Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.
5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.
Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.
6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.
(TBC)4 -
Hello, everybody! Recently, I've decided to switch from Android development to web-development, mainly JavaScript. Ok, it is clear what to do and what to learn in frontend part. But what about backend? I have a some kind of a dream to learn Go. It is clear language it is a great pleasure to write on it, and I've started to learn it. In parallel I'm trying to study JS + Angular... Well, now I have some douts: is it effective to learn two different languages, which are quite new to me? Maybe, I should learn Node.js instead of Go? Right now it is clear, that this technology (node) is much more demanded. What path should I choose? To follow heart and learn Go? To follow mainstream trend and learn Node.js?1
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I really hate the term fullstack developer. Just call it what it really is. Javascript react developer who dabbles in node occasionally.
If you don't have some knowledge of tuning a database, tuning your runtime, handling issues with networks and latency in your code, dealing with issues with message queues, writing abstraction layers for the database, etc. you aren't a backend developer, sorry to say.
Being able to reason about a mean stack running on digital ocean doesn't not make you proficient in the backend.3 -
"You can never understand everything, but you can push yourself to understand the system"
If I hear this stupid quote one more time I will scream.
Node.js is a piece of shit and thanks to Ryan Dahl, we now have to deal with ugly JS not only on the frontend, but also the backend.2 -
So i was considering to start learning laravel but after all the hate php gets, i'd like to ask for your opinions guys.
I recently started working on django for a college project and that made want to learn new stuff, so i'm hesitating between JS (plain Javascript, jquery, node, angular...), laravel, ruby on rails or anything that could help me both on frontend or backend.
Any opinion is welcome and most appreciated11 -
I have my first developer interview next week. I'm really nervous. Its an interview for both a front end role and a php backend role, and they are hiring 9 developers.
I'm a full stack developer, dot net core backend and learning React.js frontend. My html and CSS knowledge is fine but I don't quite have a grasp of js yet. As for php, I know nothing, but the recruiter said they are looking to train someone and I explained that I enjoy learning, not to mention php is very popular so it's a good tool to have knowledge with.
I've been told to look at their site, so I've written a list of about ten aspects of the site that I like and that I would change. From the lack of interactivity to images being larger than necessary, something that could be optimised.
The interview will be an hour and a half long and I'm shitting myself. Im not a confident person as is, plus I suffer from anxiety. I'm mostly worried about being put on the spot with questions like "tell me your best achievement". I will rehearse the obvious questions this weekend.
Doss anyone have any advice? Good experiences, bad experiences etc.7 -
Need some advice. How should I look for and join an active open source project?
I'm looking for Java/C#/backend. Not to big on JS... But definitely No Frontend web stuff6 -
How do you manage switching between different languages and the tools and frameworks that are used for each?
Or frontend server and APIs are in JS and use mocha for testing.
But backend is in Java which uses Mockito.
Every time I need writes tests and well anything that is language specifics, I basically have to relearn rather than just getting it done.2 -
Actually a WordPress developer does both backend and frontend. They should know JS, PHP, react (for Gutenberg) and still some others think they are not programmers.
Next time someone tries to bully me about being a WordPress developer, I will not be quite. Even my friends.3 -
Hey guys, quick one.
Frontend guys,
I need some CSS library that I can use for project I need do ASAP.
I have +- 1h to learn it, I need frontend and I need it NOW. It can be ugly. Prefered flex grid or sth along these lines. But please, if it has more than 15 minutes of reading through doc's its disqualified.
Any suggestions?
Im backend guy and know no shit about frontend.
NoJs. No Jquery. No JS. Nope. Im not having time for any line of shenanigans of JS.
Thx; peace.26 -
!rant
Frontend people, I need your opinion.
I will soon start building the next version of a rather large project's frontend but I am mostly a backend guy.
It is a custom made web application (PHP, Postgres) that handles all business aspects of a shipping company of about 50 people (trucks, truck free space in shipments for new packages, package tracking via gps on the truck, invoicing, reselling shipping services to other businesses, everything).
The existing frontend is using an ancient version (1.x) of the YUI framework and uses AJAX heavily to refresh the user interface. It's usable, but maintaining and extending it is getting really hard as the project grows larger and larger and more systems are integrated.
So the question is, given this use case, what JS framework do I use and what is a good resource to start learning it?5 -
I feel sad about being in a standstill position in my life right now. everything feels like stopped, and i am not growing.
My only source of income is my job, which does pays well, but not much. I have been in this job for 6 months (3rd job in 3 years) and although it is satisfying in terms of the work i do, everything else is just bleh. quantity of work is a lot, there is chaos everywhere, bosses are incompetent and demanding and worst of all , its hybrid, so am wasting 2-3 days every week.
apart from work, i struggle to make myself useful. outside work hours, i want to earn more money, health, popularity and power.
- for health, i goto gym , which hopefully is the onlh thing going correct in my life. although am not getting any major transformation, the feeling of pain among my muscles feels good and people seems to know me somewhat in there.
- for money, popularity and power , am again at a still.
--- power comes from popularity and money.
--- money comes from ability to influence(and optionally with knowledge) .
--- popularity also comes with knowledge and/or ability to influence.
--- knowledge can be bought/learned.
- above all are my guesses. i haven't yet cracked the exact dependency graph in here. but the simplest thing to get is knowledge and i have been trying to get a hold of it, but in vain
- i have tried a lot of stuff in last 3 years :
--- get better in android ( which i did by working professionally) ,
--- learn web frontend (html/css/js/react, etc ., for which i took courses and i know them now somewhat ) ,
--- learn web backend ( spring, node, flask, aws, etc .,for which i took courses/videos)
--- learn no code stuff (markdown generators, wordpress etc , for which i tried as hobby)
--- learn ios/hybrid stuff(flutter, react native etc, for ehich i watched videos, did courses etc)
- the problem is, am just good at one thing (android) and have a limited knowledge (5-30%) of all the others. companies won't pay me more to be a mediocre full stack dev than what they are paying me now to be a decent junior android dev
- the areas where i lack as of now is DS,Algo, Competitive programming and System designing. these are skills expected for someone trying to crack a good fortune 5xx company
- i am not so sure if i want to do these since there isn't a guarantee whether i will be happy to be in google or amazon. i could guess the amount they would pay me for being a mediocre full stack dev.
- i am not even sure if its good for me to change jobs every few months. i contribute heavily wherever i go, nd i leave at the moment am about to receive a probable reward(probable promotion/increment) for a more concrete reward ( the definite increment from a job switch)
- my existing knowledge is being wasted like the various uselss courses i did in college as i am unable to find a usecase for them. i am tired of making useless jira clones , caclulators and portfolio pages for myself which no one will be using or appreciating.
- keeping the whole tech life aside, my family runs the blood of businessmen and i am not able to progress in that as well. my father was an average grocery shop owner whose shop is now on rent and who is now doing a sales job too. however, their family shop with grandfather and brothers was once a very popular and money minting business 40 years ago.
- i sometimes feel i could do good in business area, but i am a complete blank slate in that department with no one to support (my father is old now)
- alongside non career problems ( midlife crisis, money shortage, no friends ), life feels pretty stagnant right now :/13 -
I'm on vacation.
A friend asked me if I could work on a freelance web project. I was getting bored of summer vacations so I said yes.
It was a website for online lottery and it was already developed by some freelancers.
Owner wanted more freelancers to revamp design and administration panel.
I looked at the site and knew that I had seen the worst design and code of my life.
Frontend was made of two colors only, black and yellow. Out of both, black was more prominent. Moreover it had nothing related to Js as if it was developed as a challenge to be accomplished without java script.
Admin panel and backend was much worse than that. No security practices and deprecated essential libraries.
The nightmare is about to end as I have inducted a much better design from themeforest for frontend.
Backend is in my homebrew php framework.
(Good luck future freelancers 😆)
I'm positive that next edits will be features additions only and no one will blame my code.6 -
Is GraphQL worth it? It promisses to keep some load away from backend programmers but what about this scenario:
There's a list of items with scroll load/infinite scroll. There can be several filters as well as the Option to change the ordering of the list items.
With "traditional" REST, I'll hit the DB with one request, get the data in the right order to the backend, might itterate over it once to add additional information, cache the result in Redis/Memcache and send it off.
Using GraphQL, the frontend has to load all entries first, sort them in JS (which probably is slow on mobile devices), and then display it. No matter how "expensive" the query is, there's no caching.
Is that about it? Did I get something backwards?2 -
Coz a question like this in SO will get me banned......
I know HTML, CSS, JS, React in frontend.
I know Java as backend including database connectivity and all.
Should i learn a more demanding backend language lile PHP?
Or should I further learn frontend technologies like Angular, D3.js, and other frameworks?15 -
To all Full Stack js employed devs here,
How much frontend vs how much backend you do?
It's just that I'm going to be in a job with a Full Stack node/vue/ember/AWS/Redis dev role and I don't know how much frontend I'll do compared to the backend stuff, I'm alot more of a backend guy...1 -
So i was trying to learn php from a udemy course. The guy there mixes a hell lot of php with html, like all the pages are .php with html content and mini <?php ... ?> Scripts in between everywhere: titles, swl queries running and displaying outputs as html with echo php variables, etc..
Now am not much versed with client server data model, but isn't there supposed to be clear distinction between the server side and the client side? He puts a form there using echo "html string" , rrcieves the form input in the string's action , runs an sql query and generates another set of html strings. All in one file.
Is it how major php websites work? On the other hand My web dev friend om who works a lot with js usually runs 2 seperate aws instances for frontend and backend and makes them communicate via apis9 -
[CONCEITED RANT]
I'm frustrated than I'm better tha 99% programmers I ever worked with.
Yes, it might sound so conceited.
I Work mainly with C#/.NET Ecosystem as fullstack dev (so also sql, backend, frontend etc), but I'm also forced to use that abhorrent horror that is js and angular.
I write readable code, I write easy code that works and rarely, RARELY causes any problem, The only fancy stuff I do is using new language features that come up with new C# versions, that in latest version were mostly syntactic sugar to make code shorter/more readable/easier.
People I have ever worked with (lot of) mostly try to overdo, overengineer, overcomplicate code, subdivide into methods when not needed fragmenting code and putting tons of variables.
People only needed me to explain my code when the codebase was huge (200K+ lines mostly written by me) of big so they don't have to spend hours to understand what's going on, or, if the customer requested a new technology to explain such new technology so they don't have to study it (which is perfectly understandable). (for example it happened that I was forced to use Devexpress package because they wanted to port a huge application from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and rewriting the whole devexpress logic had a HUGE impact on costs so I explained thoroughly and supported during developement because they didn't knew devexpress).
I don't write genius code or clevel tricks and patterns. My code works, doesn't create memory leaks or slowness and mostly works when doing unit tests at first run. Of course I also put bugs and everything, but that's part of the process.
THe point is that other people makes unreadable code, and when they pass code around you hear rising chaos, people cursing "WTF this even means, why he put that here, what the heck this is even supposed to do", you got the drill. And this happens when I read everyone code too.
But it doesn't happens the opposite. My code is often readable because I do code triple backflips only on personal projects because I don't have to explain anyone and I can learn new things and new coding styles.
Instead, people want to impress at work, and this results in unintelligible, chaotic code, full of bugs and that people can't read. They want to mix in the coolest technologies because they feel their virtual penis growing to showoff that they are latest bleeding edge technology experts and all.
They want to experiment on business code at the expense of all the other poor devils who will have to manage it.
Heck, I even worked with a few Microsoft MVPs.
Those are deadly. They're superfast code throughput people that combine lot of stuff.
THen they leave at you the problems once they leave.
This MVP guy on a big project for paperworks digital acquisiton for a big company did this huge project I got called to work in, which consited in a backend and a frontend web portal, and pushed at all costs to put in the middle another CDN web project and another Identity Server project to both do Caching with the cdn "to make it faster" and identity server for SSO (Single sign on).
We had to deal with gruesome work to deal with browser poor caching management and when he left, the SSO server started to loop after authentication at random intervals and I had to solve that stuff he put in with days of debugging that nasty stuff he did.
People definitely can't code, except me.
They have this "first of the class syndrome" which goes to the extent that their skill allows them to and try to do code backflips when they can't even do code pushups, to put them in a physical exercise parallelism.
And most people is like this. They will deny and won't admit, they believe they're good at it, but in reality they aren't.
There is some genius out there that does revoluitionary code and maybe needs to do horrible code to do amazing stuff, and that's ok. And there is also few people like me, with which you can work and produce great stuff.
I found one colleague like this and we had a $800.000 (yes, 800k) project in .NET Technology, which consisted in the renewal of 56 webservices and 3 web portals and 2 Winforms applications for our country main railway transport system. We worked in 2 on it, with a PM from the railway company.
It was estimated 14 months of work and we took 11 and all was working wonders. We had ton of fun doing it because also their PM was a cool guy and we did an awesome project and codebase was a jewel. The difficult thing you couldn't grasp if you read the code is if you don't know how railway systems work and that's the only difficult thing.
Sight, there people is macking me sick of this job11 -
It seems they mistaken me for italian giving me spaghetti all over the product. Go to frontend to check the app, react with weird jQuery, no routes, pages summoned by the templates that have concatenated values and html in vanilla js, changing screens/pages with jQuery, no router... ok lets see the other app, react, redux, offline capabilities and tought myself niicee hut nothing work as intended with clusterfuck of hacky workarounds that makes app look like it is working but with hardcoded data. Offline means automatic sync when you get the network back, right? Oh backend never developed any sync, so you guys can do it, we have to fix and patch some important stuff! I don't like php but whatever, let's see what is going on there... So much spaghetti bolognese there that Bologna actually called to ask if they can buy some, they are out of stock because of us!
This is just like that song mess.css from stdout, but in any file you open!
Living on deserted island eating grass and coconut for the rest of the life doesn't seem so bad atm!4 -
Horror story and rant time I guess...
I haven't seen the main developer of this MVC project that I've been working on but I can totally assure that his seniority isn't in frontend development 😠 and I doubt the backend too... Fucking DataTables converted to IDictionaries<string,object>
Guess who need to build on top of the pile of shit!
Anyway, I wasn't really careful about what kind of template I was given to work on a new SPA page, so I'm doing the job given the time, but it's fucking gory:
- matrioska style layers (n.3) without documentation
- partials everywhere
- too much inline styling
- too many <style> sections (n per layer or partial)
- too many <script> sections (n per layer or partial)
- poor CSS styling or no styling at all! (classes without any style nor js association)😠
He's just been lucky that the browser is capable of handling his shit
Now that at the end of this year I'll leave this project (solo fullstack) and need to provide documentation for the next poor souls I was thinking to leave behind something at par of my skills and capabilities but analysing the current mess ticks my brain in a bad way, fuck you Marco!
Fuck you
and your seniority
and the Italian way of perceiving seniority that gives you a higher living in the wrong side of the field 🤬🤬🤬2 -
I've to say that javascript is no language I like because I'm more fastinated of building a nice and scalable backend then building a gui (in the browser).
The funny thing is that right now javascript helps me at my current project because many websites implement wide-opened apis for their js frontend and it just works like a charm to use them instead of parsing the whole html and do some XPath stuff to fetch information. -
what's up with backend devs getting on rants about frontend frameworks? Don't they use frameworks for developing their precious servers? or do they just write the whole thing from scratch?
Shit tards, frontend development is evolving and for the better, we've got awesome frameworks that help us reduce the amount of code we need to write to attain a functionality and in a way that reduces headaches when building a large application and gives superb consistent performance because the code has been production tested a million times! yeah you can use js to build a frontend because its JS it's what it was designed to do, but tell me how reinventing the wheel everytime you make a frontend is useful, and how that is maintainable in the long run when building a large production frontend?
The modern frameworks, help us write modular and reusable components that can be shared and used by anyone for any of their application. They are arming the web with capabilities that are close to what native apps offer and still you keep bitching about it.1 -
2 years ago(jan-oct 2020) i was a college student giving his final exams. some of my personal stats were:
- current knowledge of Android Framework and associated stuff(android, java, kotlin, making and deploying apps , best practises, etc) : 30%
- current knowledge of Web tech (html/css/js/php): 5%
- current knowledge of creating backend/frontend apps:2%
also
- free time: somewhat
- Personal health: barely caring about
====
Same year i got my first job (oct 2020) which i switched in next year (oct 2021). before joining the next(my current) job, my personal stats were:
- current knowledge of Java : 30%
- current knowledge of Kotlin : 70-80%
- current knowledge of Android and Android Stuff(the framework, making production ready apps, deploying, best practises , etc) : 70-80%
- current knowledge of Web tech (html/css/js/php): 3-5%
- current knowledge of creating backend/frontend apps:1%
also:
- Free time: lol, i was working at 1 am too
- Personal health: even lesser caring about, body fats and thick muscles at various places
====
it will be almost a year of me working for these guys in November and this has been an interesting year so far. the stats are:
- current knowledge of Java : 35%
- current knowledge of Kotlin : 20-30%
- current knowledge of Android and Android Stuff(the framework, making production ready apps, deploying, best practises , etc) : 20-30%
- current knowledge of Web tech (html/css/js/node/react): 20-25%
- current knowledge of new stuff* (cordova,unity,flutter, react native, ios) : 5-10%
- current knowledge of creating backend/frontend apps:10-15%
also:
- Free time: a good amount of free time, like in addition to weekends and festivals, i take 2-4 leaves every month
- Personal health: improving a lot. loosing weight, gaining muscles, getting better stamina at running and other activities
====
So i am currently at a weird place. As from my stats, you can see that previously i was in a android heavy role in a company that put a lot of pressure, but i was able to become a better sellable dev through it.
My current role is also of an android dev here, but we maintain b2b products and i am sometimes asked to fix bugs in hybrid apps like unity, react native and cordova, so gained a few knowledge there too. and since i have a lot of free time in my hand, i explored a bit of web technologies too (apart from enjoying a relaxing life and focusing on personal health)
However my main concern is that am becoming a less sellable Dev. The lack of exposure/will to work on android tech has made me outdated from a framework that was once my stronghold. remember that i joined my first company purely because of my passion and knowledge of android os.
When i got offer from this company, i also had another, $5000/year lesser offer in hand. both of these offers were very generous , but i went with the greed and took the offer from this company despite knowing that they are looking for someone who will act as a developer-maintainer kind of person, while the other company giving lesser pay had a need of a pure android engineer.
So i am currently 24. should i keep on doing this relaxing but slowly killing job, or go into a painful, pressurizing but probably making me a better "android" engineer job ?2 -
Can you even call yourself a frontend dev when you betray your backend mindset by prefering JS over CSS and JSX over HTML + DOM API?3
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been wanting to make a landing page where students in universities sign up, and they can see a leaderboard score of sign-ups per universities on the page as well. What is the best way to do this? Appreciate any feedback on this question, I am a new dev!2
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