So I need to create a nice new web app. Let's look at some cool JS frameworks that I can work with.

*5 mins later* Hm, Angular sounds good, is there any good competitor?

*5 mins later* Wow, React sounds awesome as well. Let me learn it.

Google search result:

"Planning to use react? Check out Vue JS first"

*5 mins later* Ok so vue seems faster than React and much easier to learn. Let me see if Vue is the final choice.

Google search result:

"Angular VS Knockout VS Ember VS React VS Mithril VS Mercury VS Ractive VS Vue VS Riot"

Nope, fuck it

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

Just reached 100+!!

Anyhow. I started coding prettymuch 365 days ago. My mate decided to launch his company and figured it was a good idea to start it with good friends who knew fuck all at coding.

Fyi, the dude can code 15 hours straight everyday for about a year (no shit thats what i saw).

Since he taught me html css javascript(even if i still suck abit at js). He made me remake the whole bootstrap in react by adding this new lib styled-components and test everything(95% coverage :)).

He also taught me webpack and rollup. Json schma forms，http requests redux， redux logic， and all the routing shit...he obliged me to i plement RR4 on release and is now making me overlook the merge requests of my other collegue (yes he made me a git pro，almost).

And now i have to work long distance by studying java， spring， oauth2 and start working on our api.

O yeah，and i went from microsoft to full on linux!!!

To be honest i thought i was gonna die this year. (Also have a kid on the way :)).

Devrant has been like going to the psychologist :) everytime shit hit the fan i realized every one has the same problems :)

Thanks to the community i can also now even give out nerd jokes :)

(L)Devrant

So I have been temporarily assigned to new team .. moving from mainly backend.. to help the Web team ..

Me .: Aight guys .. what we working with ?
Team: MVC .net
Me: awesome ..
Team: but we have our own version of MVC .
Me : 🤔 your own MVC ?
Team: yeh we only buse controllers.. but no models at all ?
Me.: 😲 So where does the view gets its data from ?
Team : from Azure functions apps.
M: how ?
T: ( in very proud tone ) .. we use js to call all functions.
M: so why not just use HTML pages . Why MVC then !
T: coz MVC is modern architecture design.
M: but you not using it and all of calles to the functions are exposed publicly.
T: 🧐 THIS IS MODERN DESIGN !!
M: 🤪 My bad .. what the hell do I know ! I only been developing MVC applications for 7 years !!
Please tell me more about your " Modern Design "
🤮🤮🤮

You know who sucks at developing APIs?

Facebook.

I mean, how are so high paid guys with so great ideas manage to come up with apis THAT shitty?

Let's have a look. They took MVC and invented flux. It was so complicated that there were so many overhyped articles that stated "Flux is just X", "Flux is just Y", and exactly when Redux comes to the stage, flux is forgotten. Nobody uses it anymore.

They took declarative cursors and created Relay, but again, Apollo GraphQL comes and relay just goes away. When i tried just to get started with relay, it seemed so complicated that i just closed the tab. I mean, i get the idea, it's simple yet brilliant, but the api...

Immutable.js. Shitload of fuck. Explain WHY should i mess with shit like getIn(path: Iterable<string | number>): any and class List<T> { push(value: T): this }? Clojurescript offers Om, the React wrapper that works about three times faster! How is it even possible? Clojure's immutable data structures! They're even opensourced as standalone library, Mori js, and api is great! Just use it! Why reinvent the wheel?

It seems like when i just need to develop a simple react app, i should configure webpack (huge fuckload of work by itself) to get hot reload, modern es and jsx to work, then add redux, redux-saga, redux-thunk, react-redux and immutable.js, and if i just want my simple component to communicate with state, i need to define a component, a container, fucking mapStateToProps and mapDispatchToProps, and that's all just for "hello world" to pop out. And make sure you didn't forget to type that this.handler = this.handler.bind(this) for every handler function. Or use ev closure fucked up hack that requires just a bit more webpack tweaks. We haven't even started to communicate to the server! Fuck!

I bet there is savage ass overengineer sitting there at facebook, and he of course knows everything about how good api should look, and he also has huge ass ego and he just allowed to ban everything that he doesn't like. And he just bans everything with good simple api because it "isn't flexible enough".

"React is heavier than preact because we offer isomorphic multiple rendering targets", oh, how hard want i to slap your face, you fuckface. You know what i offered your mom and she agreed?

They even created create-react-app, but state management is still up to you. And react-boierplate is just too complicated.

When i need web app, i type "lein new re-frame", then "lein dev", and boom, live reload server started. No config. Every action is just (dispatch) away, works from any component. State subscription? (subscribe). Isolated side-effects? (reg-fx). Organize files as you want. File size? Around 30k, maybe 60 if you use some clojure libs.

If you don't care about massive market support, just use hyperapp. It's way simpler.

Dear developers, PLEASE, don't forget about api. Take it serious, it's very important. You may even design api first, and only then implement the actual logic. That's even better.

And facebook, sincerelly,

Fuck you.

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

I think the weekly rants just exist because @dfox & @trogus got banned from stackoverflow and they still have questions.

When it comes to learning cutting edge tech... Go build already!

I found Rust intimidating.

I read the first few pages of the official book, got bored, gave up.

Few months later, decided to write a "simple" tool for generating pleasing Jetbrains IDE color schemes using Rust. I half-finished it by continuously looking up stuff, then got stuck at some ungoogleable compiler error.

Few months later I needed to build a microservice for work, and against better judgement gave Rust a try in the weekend. Ended up building an unrelated library instead, uploaded my first package to crates.io.

Got some people screaming at me that my Rust code sucked. Screamed back at them. After lots of screaming, I got some helpful PRs.

Eventually ended up building many services for work in Rust after all. With those services performing well under high load and having very few bugs, coworkers got interested. Started hiring Rust engineers, and educating interested PHP/JS devs.

Now I professionally write Rust code almost full-time.

Moral of the story:

Fuck books, use them for reference. Fuck Udemy (etc), unless you just want to 2x through it while pooping.

Learning is something you do by building a project, failing, building something else, falling again, building some more, sharing what you've made, fighting about what you've built with some entitled toxic nerds, abandoning half your projects and starting twelve new ones.

Reading code is better than reading documentation.

Listening to users of your library/product teaches you more than listening to keynote speakers at conferences.

Don't worry about failures, you don't need to deliver a working product for it to be a valuable experience.

Oh, and trying to teach OTHERS is an excellent method to discover gaps in your knowledge.

Just get your fucking hands dirty!

TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN

I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳

We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;

JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).

HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).

There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.

No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.

You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.

Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!

Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!

Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.

...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!

You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.

I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.

I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.

Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.

I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.

But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.

He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.

Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.

The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.

Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.

I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.

Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it.

Every programming language I know of does trigonometry in radians.

Yet I have been puzzled for 4 hours whether JS was broken because it kept saying Math.sin(30) != Math.sin(150), trying all kinds of values, looking up basic trigonometry stuff again and again.

After that, 10 minutes of wondering why my json was invalid... right, you can't comment things out.

Then 15 minutes being baffled by a simple script tag not working, because I wrote script href instead of script src.

Finally, I threw a liter of chocolate milk over a $400 keyboard.

I really need to stop setting up new projects at 3am.

Not a rant - just wondering if anyone else witnessed a really awkward closing talk at a conference.

Attended a mandatory JS conference yesterday where all the speakers gave the typical conference talks on new ideas, frameworks, packages with code demonstrations. Most of talks were great and the some of the speakers were extremly humorous making the whole audience laugh which is hard to do. The talk right before the keynote speaker was like this.

Then the keynote started...

The end presenter was an asian-american woman (normally would not metion race/ gender but it’s important to the story) whose talk was basically how the white males of the world are controlling tech an their bias and privilege are marginalizing the rest of us who are not white american ‘cis-males’

She had no data and weak examples, such as sensors on automatic soap despeners not working on darker skins tones (that’s not racist it’s physics). Another example was a plugin where true=male and false=female. That is not gender biased it’s just lazy programming.

At one point she said:

“Have you even been to a party at a rich white guy’s house? There boring! I’m sorry”

This was just a talk about her feelings, if I was not surrounded by my coworkers I would have left.

I feel like this was not appropiate talk for one track conference since it traps everyone into listening. Especially where attendance is obligatory by your employer.

The conference should have warned people it would be an uncomfortable talk and invite people to start happy hour early if they chose.

To add to the weirdness in the closing remarks of one of the organizers patted himself on the back for supplying the women’s bathroom with tampons. He even created a slide for it with a tampon illustration.

Example slide from her deck.

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

Yesterday my father called me and asked if I'd have a look at his website to exchange his logo with a new one and make some string changes in the backend. Well, of course I did and hell am I glad I did it.
He had that page made a few years ago by some cousin of a friend who "is really good with computers", it's a small web shop for car parts and, as usual costumer accounts. Costumer Accounts with payment infos.
Now I've seen a lot of bad practices when it comes to handling passwords and I've surely done a few questionable things myself but this idiot took the cake. When a new account was registered his php script would read the login page, look for a specific comment and add a string "'account; password'," below into to a js array. In clear text. On the website. One doesn't even have to breach the db, it's just there, F12 and you got all the log ins.

Seriously, we really need a licensing system for devs, those were two or three years this shit was live, 53 accounts... Now I've gotta decipher this entire bowl of spaghetti just to see if he has done any more unspeakable things.

The overhead on my JS projects is killing me. Today, I went to implement a simple feature on a project I haven't touched in a few weeks. I wasted 80% of my time on mindless setup crap.

- "Ooh, a simple new feature to implement. Let's get crackin'!"
- update 1st party lib
- ....hmm, better update node modules
- and Typescript typings while I'm at it
- "ugh yeah," revert one node module to outdated version because of that one weird proxy bug
- remove dead tsd references
- fix TS "errors" generated by new typings
- fix bug in 1st party lib
- clean up some files because the linter is nagging me
- pee
- change 6 lines of code <-- the work
- commit!

A couple of goodies here:

1 - The guy that said 'I prefer to work remote so noone can bother me. I will never answer my phone if you try to call me, and emails will only be read the second I arrive at work and never again. Do not disturb me at all. I decided not to bother him again with another interview request.

2- I personally interviewed at a gaming company in Dundee, Scotland and they wanted me to create a JS application, on video call to them, on Google Docs, and that they had set aside 3 hours for this whilst they watched me and ate lunch. I apologised, said that was the most absurd thing I've ever heard of, and cancelled the interview and hung up without saying bye.

How the fuck can any sort of developer think that's okay to try to make people do?

Well I've been at a new company for the last 6 months now, and I've just discovered that job is still being advertised.

This happens to me all the time at my new company, the amount of wtfs I say in some js files, man...

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

This is more of a wishful thinking scenario......but language/tech stack/whatever bashing.

Look, I get it, we like development, we would not be here if we didn't like it. But as my good friend @Stuxnet has mentioned in the past, making this a personality trait is fucking retarded, lame, small, and overall pathetic. I agree with this sentiment 100%

Because of this a lot of people have form some sort of elitist viewpoint concerning the technologies that people use, be it Java, C#, C++, Rust, PHP, JS, whatever, the same circle jerk of bashing on shit just seems completely fucking retarded. I am hoping for a new mentality being that most of us are younger, even if you are a 50+ year old developer, maturity should give you a different perspective, but alas, immaturity and a bitchy attitude carried throughout years of self dick sucking implications would render this null.

I could not give two fucks if the dude next to me is coding his shit in whatever as long as best practices are followed, proper documentation is enforced, results are being brought to our customers(which regardless of how much you try to convince us, none of your customers are fucking elite level) and happiness is ensured, then so fucking be it.

Gripes bitches and complaints are understandable, I dislike a couple of things about my favorite tools, and often wish certain features be involved in my particular tech stacks, does this make stuff bad? no, does it make me or anyone else less of a developer,? no so why give a fuck? bitch when shit bites you in the ass when someone does not know what the fuck they are doing with a language that permits writing bullshit. Which to be honest ALL of them fucking allow. Not one is saved from this. But NOT knowing how to work a solution, or NOT understanding a tech stack does not give you AUTOMATIC FULL insight on how x technology operates, thinking as such is so fucking arrogant and annoying.

But I am getting tired of looking at posts from Timmy, a 18 year old "dev" from whothefuckcares bitch about shit when they have never even made a fucking penny out of their "development" endeavors just because they read some dickhead's opinion on the internet regarding x tech stack and believes that adopting their bullshit troll ass virgin ideas makes them l337.

Get your own fucking opinion on things, be aggressive and stand fucking straight, maybe get some fucking pussy(or dick, whatever) and for fucks's sake learn to interact with other fucking human beings, take a fucking run, play games, break out from your whinny bitch ass shell, talk to that person that intimidates you, take a run, do yoga, martial arts anything that would break you out from being such a small little bitch.

Just fucking do something that keeps you from shitting on people 24/7 365/ a year.

We used to bitch about incompetent managers, shit bosses, fucking ludicrous assignments. Retarded shit that some other dev did, etc, etc. Seems like every other fucking retard getting into this community starts with stupid ass JS/PHP/Python/Java/C#/ whatever jokes and you idiots keep upvoting that shit. Makes those n00bs gain credability. Fuck me shit is so pathetic.

basically, make dev rant great again.

No fuck off and have a beer, or tea or whatever y'all drink.

Code review time:

Hey Rudy, can you approve my PR? ??? Shouldn't it be can you review my PR?(thought to myself)
Anyway, as a new practice, we(royal we) do not approve PRs with js files. If we touch one, we convert it to typescript as part of a ramp up to a migration that never seems to get here. But I digress.
I look at the laziest conversion in history.

Looked like
Import 'something';
Import 'somethingElse';
Import 'anotherSomething';

export class SomeClass {
public prop1: any;
public prop2: any;
public prop3: any;

public doWork(param: any){
let someValue = param;
// you get the idea
return someValue;
}
}

Anyway, I question if all the properties need to be visible outside of the class since everything was public.
Then if the dev could go and use type safety.
Then asked why not define the return type for the method since it would make it easier for others to consume.
Since parts of the app are still in js, I asked that they check that that the value passed in was valid(no compilation error, obviously).
Also to use = () => {} to make sure "this" is really this.
I also pointed out the import problem, but anyway.

I then see the his team leader approve the PR and then tell me that I'm being too hard on his devs. ????

Do we need to finish every PR comment with "pretty please" now?
These are grown men and women, and yet, it feels oddly like kindergarten.

I've written code in the past that wasn't pretty and I received "WTF?" as a PR comment. I then realized I ate sh*t on that line of code, corrected it and pushed the code. Then we went to Starbucks.
I'm not that old(35), but these young devs need to learn that COMPILERS DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS!!!!!
Ahhhhhh
Much better.
Thanks for the platform.

I am much too tired to go into details, probably because I left the office at 11:15pm, but I finally finished a feature. It doesn't even sound like a particularly large or complicated feature. It sounds like a simple, 1-2 day feature until you look at it closely.

It took me an entire fucking week. and all the while I was coaching a junior dev who had just picked up Rails and was building something very similar.

It's the model, controller, and UI for creating a parent object along with 0-n child objects, with default children suggestions, a fancy ui including the ability to dynamically add/remove children via buttons. and have the entire happy family save nicely and atomically on the backend. Plus a detailed-but-simple listing for non-technicals including some absolutely nontrivial css acrobatics.

After getting about 90% of everything built and working and beautiful, I learned that Rails does quite a bit of this for you, through `accepts_nested_params_for :collection`. But that requires very specific form input namespacing, and building that out correctly is flipping difficult. It's not like I could find good examples anywhere, either. I looked for hours. I finally found a rails tutorial vide linked from a comment on a SO answer from five years ago, and mashed its oversimplified and dated examples with the newer documentation, and worked around the issues that of course arose from that disasterous paring.

like.
I needed to store a template of the child object markup somewhere, yeah? The video had me trying to store all of the markup in a `data-fields=" "` attrib. wth? I tried storing it as a string and injecting it into javascript, but that didn't work either. parsing errors! yay! good job, you two.

So I ended up storing the markup (rendered from a rails partial) in an html comment of all things, and pulling the markup out of the comment and gsubbing its IDs on document load. This has the annoying effect of preventing me from using html comments in that partial (not that i really use them anyway, but.)

Just.
Every step of the way on building this was another mountain climb.
* singular vs plural naming and routing, and named routes. and dealing with issues arising from existing incorrect pluralization.
* reverse polymorphic relation (child -> x parent)
* The testing suite is incompatible with the new rails6. There is no fix. None. I checked. Nope. Not happening.
* Rails6 randomly and constantly crashes and/or caches random things (including arbitrary code changes) in development mode (and only development mode) when working with multiple databases.
* nested form builders
* styling a fucking checkbox
* Making that checkbox (rather, its label and container div) into a sexy animated slider
* passing data and locals to and between partials
* misleading documentation
* building the partials to be self-contained and reusable
* coercing form builders into namespacing nested html inputs the way Rails expects
* input namespacing redux, now with nested form builders too!
* Figuring out how to generate markup for an empty child when I'm no longer rendering the children myself
* Figuring out where the fuck to put the blank child template markup so it's accessible, has the right namespacing, and is not submitted with everything else
* Figuring out how the fuck to read an html comment with JS
* nested strong params
* nested strong params
* nested fucking strong params
* caching parsed children's data on parent when the whole thing is bloody atomic.
* Converting datetimes from/to milliseconds on save/load
* CSS and bootstrap collisions
* CSS and bootstrap stupidity
* Reinventing the entire multi-child / nested params / atomic creating/updating/deleting feature on my own before discovering Rails can do that for you.

Just.
I am so glad it's working.
I don't even feel relieved. I just feel exhausted.

But it's done.
finally.

and it's done well. It's all self-contained and reusable, it's easy to read, has separate styling and reusable partials, etc. It's a two line copy/paste drop-in for any other model that needs it. Two lines and it just works, and even tells you if you screwed up.

I'm incredibly proud of everything that went into this.
But mostly I'm just incredibly tired.

Time for some well-deserved sleep.

Joined a new company...
It's been a week since I joined.I feel like shit.
There are over 20 employees, however I didn't had a chance to chat with a single person for more than a minute or two. Not a single meaningful or even a shitty but personal conversation. I'm trying to strike up conversations whenever I can, but there are no possibilities to do so. I think they have a few chat groups where I'm not added. At lunch time they suddenly start running to a guy that gathers the money to buy lunch, i saw that and joined, but I'm 99% sure they are communicating/speaking on some kind of chat.

I joined as a front-end developer, however I'm not sure if I'm a junior or whatever here. On the first day they showed me the system, they are using PHP and jquery + es6, the structure is messy and I'm not used to it It should be MVC-like, but messier, but it's not like anything I have seen. I usually work with opencart / cakePHP style systems. There are js files with a lot of custom funcions and sometimes there are functions that have mixed jquery and es6 inside script tags top or bottom of the view files. There are a lot of code that I don't understand, on the third day they gave me a task - to remodel a view (basically one page in the cms) I did it, but they didn't check up on me untill the next day, I gave them some notes on the task I finished, and I started making some of the code easier to read for myself after I was done. They didn't really gave me a new task, and I don't know what to do, don't have anyone to ask about what to do, because there are only 2 developers here, and the other guy is on vacation. The boss is also a coder, but he's never here and I feel like I shouldn't be asking him stupid coding questions, because you know.. He's a boss. I understand a lot more of their PHP code then their js/jquery. I feel like I'm stupid and I don't know what I am doing here and what I will be doing here in the future. I did move across the country to join this company, and if this won't work out i have a rent contract signed for a year. Today I was looking at the clock for the last 2 hours of the work day and waiting untill I could get out of there. To say that I feeling like shit would be an understatement.

I don't have anyone whom I could ask for coding advice outside of the company. Fuck.I have worked in a few companies before, but there was always an introduction to the staff, and or the working environment and usually there was a person that I could ask questions on the regular. This company is bigger however and I'm not an emotional guy whatsoever, but I feel like I will start crying.

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.

Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"

He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.

As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.

Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.

Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.

I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)

3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.

Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".

I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.

I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.

The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.

December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.

I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.

In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.

The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.

In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.

I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.

My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.

HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.

In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.

Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.

As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...

Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!

And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).

! rant
age++

Here I'm celebrating my birthday away from home doing first job as developer.

I started my journey one year back when i had no knowledge of any programming language except basics of C.
Learnt python, Js and many more things.
Prepared for interview, got selected in first interview.
It's been more than 2 months at the new job.
Really it feels so great to see people using your developed tools in real life.
Hope to be more successful and to contribute more to community. 🤞

Branch Manager without actual credentials (just a manager no real business decisions are made by him).

- Constantly is sick
- at home a lot doing „home office“ and not being responsive in company chat or emails
- is in home office 3-4 days a week while company policy clearly states one day a week
- watches YouTube a lot at work and calls out other people when they check their emails or quickly order something on amazon or maybe just listen to a podcast at work
- is a scrum master but rarely acts like it as in softens up rules as he sees fit
- backstabs employees in front of ceo when he actually entrusts them beforehand and says he is definitely in the employees side
- actually tried to physically intimidate me and another employee
- has no real technological background but chimes in on technical discussions and thinks it’s a new round of bullshit bingo
- does personal errands during work and books the time for it as work time
- claims people cheat on their time management entries and gets them warned and fired for it, while doing the exact thing himself
- knows he is trusted by the ceo but actually takes 0 interest in the future of the company
- tirades and gossips about other employees that just aren’t around at that moment
- is sexist at times
- very untrustworthy
- is responsible for a very toxic environment around the office

So that are his attributes - he got me warned and sacked because I supposedly committed fraud with my time management and caused the company financial harm - I had no projects or todos and was keeping myself busy with learning JS and python stuff instead of sitting around waiting for a ticket to come around.

Needless to say I’m glad I don’t see that guy any more. I’d break his jaw if I’d have to see him again.

Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.

I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".

People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..

So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...

Yknow, I want to make an android app that I have in my mind for about half a year now and I already tried twice, both with Kotlin and with Java but everytime I try it's just pain and suffering and frustration...

No it's not because of the language, I like Java and I like Kotlin too and I'd say I'm at least decent at Kotlin and really good in Java...

No no.. the issue is the fucking Android SDK and the mix-and-match documentation available online!!!

Every fucking time I want to implement some sort of UI element, user action or a background service and I start googling how to do it It comes with with at least 3 different stack overflow solutions, all of them saying "that way of doing it is deprecated, instead you should X" and looking up the OFFICIAL FUCKING DOCS it will just make me roll up in the corner and cry because of how fucking inconsistent it is and the retarded domain language it uses... fucking transactions for fucking fragments inside fucking activities... because I guess the word "screen"/"view"/"template" or something similar natural just was too mainstream for the all knowing alphabet soup that google is...

And then you start looking up what the fucking difference even is and how to code it up only to find out there's at least 12 other opinions on how fragments should be used and what should be an activity and what should be a damn fragment...

But that's not all, that's just the base... I get a headache even thinking about how the fucking inflating of templates and the entire R. notation works. You want to open a fucking tiny corner menu with the settings options? WELL THEN YOU FUCKING BETTER REMEMBER TO IMPLEMENT IT THROUGH SOME SORT OF EVENT AND INFLATE THE MENU YOURSELF EVEN THOUGH ITS THE SAME FUCKING THING WITH STATIC STRINGS...

AND WHY THE FUCK DO I NEED LIKE 4 NEW FILES TO IMPLEMENT A FUCKING LISTVIEW...
also talking about ListViews... what was wrong with "ListView"... Why do we need a "RecyclerView"... oh right... because the fucks fucked the fuck up and all the legacy components were designed by a monkey and are next to useless! SO WE NEEDED A NEW NAME FOR THE FIXED VERSION, CANT NAME IT LISTVIEW AGAIN... FUCK YOU...

honestly... if I got a dolar for every "what the fuck android" I said during trying to understand that mess I'd be richer by a few hundred...

oh oh oh, but you know what? You don't like the android SDK? that's fine, you can use fucking React or Flutter or something... yeah.. because instead of torturing myself with the android SDK I want to torture myself with an abstraction of the same SDK and JavaScript as the fucking cherry on top... HAVE YOU FUCKING SEEN THE CODE FLUTTER SHOWS ON THEIR WEBSITE AS THE "Introduction" ?!!!

Look at this piece of shit:

[code in attached image, we could really use a proper Markdown support at least for rants]

THAT'S NOT EVEN THE ENTIRE THING, THAT'S JUST THE *REALLY* UGLY PART...

The fucking nesting... What is it with JS and all the fucking nesting everytime?! It looks like shit.... It reads like shit as well...

WHY, in the name OF FUCK, IS THERE MORE THAN 5 ANDROID FRAMEWORKS and ALL of them... used this FUCKING NOVEL idea of programming using A FUCKING BRACKET WALL

It always looks like:
(code(code[code{code(code{code()})}]));

If I wanted to make a fucking app or a website using fucking Haskell I'd do that.... at this point reading assembly code feels like heaven compared to this retardation... Why is this so popular?! WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE SEE IN IT?! Clearly it's not the aesthetics... it looks like a fucking frog vomit running down an emus leg, fuck that.... I don't even hate classic JavaScript, it's a good enough language and it does what I tell it to... but these ugly fucking frameworks like react, angular and whatever else uses this fucking format can go fuck right off. This is not the way JS is gonna get a better name for itself...

So:
Fuck Google

Fuck the marionette that designed the Android SDK

Fuck the Hellspawn the came up with the "functional-like" way of using JavaScript

Fuck everyone that thinks "JavaScript everywhere" is a good thing

And deeply future-fuck everyone that makes a new framework following any of these standards, stucks a .js at the end of the name and releases his hairball.js of an invention into the fucking world....

It's a mess... fuck everything android related...

Hey guys!
Been away for some time. Didn't have anything to tell tbh - until today.

As you may remember I started a new apprenticeship at big (and super cool) company. We develop software for various platforms.
I'm currently working on a plugin displaying some weatherdata. This plugin is supposed to be in 2 of our products. One is pretty nice but a pain in the ass to compile. The second one is a pure WTF. It's a web app with approximately half the functionality but 5x loading time (without demo data!) of the other product.
Well, today I learned why we have this loading time. They use I don't know how much different js frameworks and libraries for every single simple task. "It's easy and Facebook does it too. Besides that why are there frameworks if you could do it native?" HMMM LET ME GUESS BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE ARE FUCKING LAZY!?
Why do you need MULTIPLE frameworks for a simple web display!?

I’m trying to add digit separators to a few amount fields. There’s actually three tickets to do this in various places, and I’m working on the last of them.

I had a nightmare debugging session earlier where literally everything would 404 unless I navigated through the site in a very roundabout way. I never did figure out the cause, but I found a viable workaround. Basically: the house doesn’t exist if you use the front door, but it’s fine if you go through the garden gate, around the back, and crawl in through the side window. After hours of debugging I eventually discovered that if I unlocked the front door with a different key, everything was fine… but nobody else has this problem?

Whatever.
Onto the problem at hand!

I’m trying to add digit separators to some values. I found a way to navigate to the page in question (more difficult than it sounds), and … I don’t know what view is rendering the page. Or what controller. Or how it generates its text.

The URL is encrypted, so I get no clues there. (Which was lead dev’s solution to having scrapeable IDs instead of just, you know, fixing them). The encryption also happens in middleware, so it’s a nightmare to work through. And it’s by the lead dev, so the code is fucking atrocious.

The view… could be one of many, and I don’t even know where they are. Or what layout. Or what partials go into building it.

All of the text on the page are “resources” — think named translations that support plus nested macros. I don’t know their names, and the bits of text I can search for are used fucking everywhere. “Confirmation number” (the most unique of them) turns up 79 matches. “Fee” showed up in 8310 places before my editor gave up looking. Really.

The table displaying the data, which is what I actually care about, isn’t built in JS or markup, but is likely a resource that goes through heavy processing. It gets generated in a controller somewhere (I don’t know the resource name so I can’t find it), and passed through several layers of “dynamic form” abstraction, eventually turned into markup, and rendered as a partial template. At least, that’s how it worked in the previous ticket. I found a resource that looks right, and there’s only the one. I found the nested macros it uses for the amount and total, and added the separators there… only to find that it doesn’t work.

Fucking dead end.

And i have absolutely nothing else to go on.

Page title? “Show”
URL? /~LiolV8N8KrIgaozEgLv93s…
Text? All from macros with unknown names. Can’t really search for it without considerable effort.
Table? Doesn’t work.
Text in the table? doesn’t turn up anything new.
Legal agreement? There are multiple, used in many places, generates them dynamically via (of course) resources, and even looking through the method usages, doesn’t narrow it down very much.

Just.
What the fuck?
Why does this need to be so fucking complicated?

And what genius decided “$100000.00” doesn’t need separators? Right, the lot of them because separators aren’t used ANYWHERE but in code I authored. Like, really? This is fintech. You’d think they would be ubiquitous.

And the sheer amount of abstraction?
Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

How do I even start?
The guy that's supposed to be our extra resource, our go-to person, asked me why node_modules and typescript output files are not committed.
Node.friggin.modules!
And by typescript output files, I mean the compiled .js files. Shoot me now...
All he does all day is waste time! Useless calls scheduled way too early, 'cause IST & why the heck not?

And don't even get me started on his "knowledgeable" colleague who spent 2 friggin' days on figuring out how to find an element in an array.
I mean ok, I get that the language is new and the syntax is different, but boy, how I wish that was the problem! But nooo, her issue was figuring out the damn logic behind it!
Not to mention that I gotta do the code review and she keeps ignoring the changes that I ask of her unless I raise that in our daily meeting and reports stuff as done even before submitting a damn pull request. Also, I gotta shut up and take it, 'cause they are the client's internal resources, which has me ranting about it at 2 a.m. T_T

Ugh...

Won a new job; 50% payrise which, for a junior, is a pretty big deal.

A bigger team, with more established practices, a commitment to testing and code coverage, code reviews, and a smaller learning surface area as I go forward (focusing entirely on the js ecosystem, 80% frontend).

So this is all good.

But I *have* to go back to Windows. Windows *7*. Their infosec practices move at a glacial pace. After two glorious years on mac/linux I feel like being sick.

I should just quit. I am not paid enough to deal with this pissing contest.
Reviewer:
Need to add instructions (on readme) for installing pnmp, or if possible, have the top-level npm i install it (lol).
Also, it looks like we are no longer using lerna? If that's right, let's remove the dependency; its dependencies give some security audit messages at install.
Me:
it's good enough for now. Added a new ticket to resolve package manager confusions. (Migrate to pnpm workspaces)
Reviewer:
I will probably be responsible for automating deployment of this (I deployed the webapp on cloudflare pages and there is no work that needs to be done. "automating deployment" literally means replacing npm with pnpm). I disagree that it's good enough for now.

Imagine all readmes on github document how to install yarn/pnpm.

Lesson learned:
If you think an OOP static site developer can't handle modern JS framework, you are probably right.

(New account because my main account is not anonymous)
Let's rant!

I'm 3 exams away from my CS degree, I've chosen to do some internship instead of another exam, thinking was a great idea.

Now I'm in this company, where I've never met anyone because of pandemic. A little overview:
- No git, we exchange files on whatsapp (spicy versioning)
- Ideas are foggy, so they ask for change even if I met their requirements, because from a day to another they change
- My thesis supervisor is not in the IT field, he understands nothing

The first (and only) task they gave me, was a web page to make request to their server, fetch data etc.
Two months passed trying to met their requests, there were a lot of dynamic content changin on the page, so I asked if I could use some rendering framework to make the code less shitty, no answers.
I continued doing shitty code in plain JS.

Another intern guy graduated, I've to mantain his code. This guy once asked me "Why have you created 8 js modules to accomplish the web page job?", I just answered saying that was my way of work, since we're on the same level in the company I didn't felt to explain things like usability, maintainability etc. it's like I've a bit of imposter syndrome, so I've never 100% sure that my knowledge is correct.
Now we came at the point where I've got his code to mantain, and guess what:
900 lines of JS module that does everything from rendering to fetching data..

I do my tasks on his code, then a bug arises so the "managers" ask him what's happened (why don't you ask to me that I'm mantaing is code!?!?), he fixes the bug nonetheless he finished his intership. So we had two copies of the same work, one with my job done and still with his bug, and another one without my work and without the bug.
I ask how to merge, and they send me the lines changed (the numeration was changed on my file ofc, remember: no git...)

Now we arrive today, after a month that they haven't assigned any task to me and they say:
"Ok, now let's re-do everything with this spicy fancy stunning frontend framework".
A very "indie" Framework that now I've to study to "translate" my work. A thing that could be avoided when I've asked for a framework, 2/3 MONTHS AGO.

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

------------------------------------

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

Flash has made Java programs look desirable. And anyone keeping up with me knows I despise Java and C#, despite having written C# and currently working on deciphering a Java server to create documentation.

Before I begin, I want to make this clear: IT IS TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING EIGHTEEN. 2018. WE HAVE BETTER TECH. JAVASCRIPT HAS TAKEN OVER THIS BITCH. So, firstly, FUCK FLASH. Seriously, that shit's a security liability. If you work for a company that uses it, find a new job and then fucking quit, or go mutany and get several devs to begin a JS-based implementation that has the same functionality. There is no excuse. "I'm fired?" That's not an excuse - if there is a way to stop the madness, then fucking hit the brakes on that shit or begin job hunting. Oh, and all you PMs who are reading this and have mandated or helped someone else to mandate work on an enterprise flash program, FUCK YOU. You are part of the problem.

The reason for this outburst seems unreasonable until you realize the hell I went through today. At my University, there is a basic entry-level psychology course I'm taking. Pearson, a company I already fucking hate for some of the ethically sketchy shit they pulled with PARCC as well as overreach in publishing to the point they produce state tests here in the US - has a product called "My PsychLab" and from here on out, I'm referring to it as MPL. MPL has an issue - it is entirely fucking Flash. Homework assignments, the textbook, FUCKING EVERYTHING. So, because of that, you need to waste time finding a browser that works. Now let me remind all of you that just because something SHOULD WORK does NOT mean that it actually does.

I'm sitting on my Antergos box a few days ago: Chromium and Firefox won't load Flash. I don't know why, and don't care to find out. NPAPI and whatnot are deprecated but should still run in a limited mode or some shit. No go on Antergos.

So, today I went to the lab in the desolated basement of an old building which is where it's usually empty except a student hired by the university to make sure nobody fucks things up. I decided - because y'all know I fuckin' hate this - to try Windows. No go in Chrome still - it loaded Flash but couldn't download the content. So I tried Firefox - which worked. My hopes were up, but not too long - because there was no way to input. The window had buttons and shit - but they were COMPLETELY UNRESPONSIVE.

So the homework is also Flash-based. It's all due by 1/31/18 - FOUR CHAPTERS AND THE ACCOMPANYING HOMEWORK - which I believe is Tuesday, and the University bookstore is closed both Saturday and Sunday. No way to get a physical copy of the book. And I have other classes - this isn't the only one.

Also, the copyright on the program was 2017 - so whoever modded or maintained that Flash code - FUCK YOU AND THE IRRESPONSIBLE SHIT YOUR TEAM PULLED. FUCK THE SUPERIORS MAKING DECISIONS AS WELL. Yeah, you guys have deadlines? So do the end users, and when you have to jump through hoops only to realize you're fucked? That's a failure of management and a failure of a product.

How many people are gonna hate me for this? Haters gonna hate, and I'm past the point of caring.

I'm at a pretty cool company today, learning new stack now. Everyone is helpfull and teaches me a lot.

I remember at my first job, when I just started, my boss sent me a MINIFIED .js file (just one file and nothing else) and said "it doesnt work, please fix this". After OBVIOUSLY not being able to fix it, at that moment, I started to doubt my choice to become a web dev.

I turned out to be pretty okay. But, fucking hell, thinking back, that "ex-boss" of mine could potentially influence my later career decisions and not in a good way.

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

Spend almost 3 days translating a library from js to python, 2 hours to upload it to PyPI, 10 seconds realizing, that there is already a library that does the same thing + something a friend of mine is working to achieve. I am so fucking done...

(At least I some new learned stuff in JS and Python)

I've been staffed on a old ongoing project, first day.
0. Compatibility has to be guaranteed down till IE9... ppf.
1. Front end made in XHTML+JS(jQuery)... bah, ok.
2. XHTML+JS is actually generated by PHP5.4, not a line is actually statically served... beh, funny, ok.
3. PHP files are the output of an XSLT transform of a bunch of XMLs... meh, seriously? Oooook.
4. XMLs are the product of the serialisation of a truck of stateful JavaEE6 DTOs populated magically (undocumented) with data coming from a SQL DB... WTF mode!!!
5. Session logics lives within PHP-land at point 2, front end makes ajax calls here that propagates to another WS out of our control that triggers -somehow- (undocumented) our Java backend at point 4 to generate new XMLs and then reach front end again. Kill me now.

Boss: look... it's too slow for the client, it's too heavy on our servers: fix it. Ah, and we sold 85% test coverage by October. You're the man for the job. (I'm a Node.js fullstacker and right now there's not even a testing scaffold, ofc).
Me: prod is on Linux or Windows?
Boss: RHEL7.
Me: rm -rf / as root. Done.
Boss: I know I know...
Me: ...

I think time has come...

This is a story of suffering and despair.

I'm working on a build system for our firmware. Nothing major, just a cmake script to build everything and give me an elf file.

I'm fairly new to cmake at that point, and so it's not abundantly clear to me how the `addDirectory` command works.

Now those of you with experience in cmake will say:
"Hold on there champ, this is not a cmake command, the real thing is add_subdirectory()"

Well, that is not what chatGPT told me. I still trusted the fucking thing at this point, it explained that it was in fact a command, and that it added all subsequent source files from a given folder. When I asked it to provide me with sources, it gave me a dead link in a cmake dot com subdomain.

I spent FUCKING HOURS trying to understand why I couldn't find that shitty command, I looked through that shitty page they call documentation through and through, I fucking checked previous and nightly versions, the command was nowhere to be found.

Until I found an old as time post in stackOverflow...
Someone had made a macro with that name, that did what GPT had described...

On the positive side, I know cmake now. I also don't use this fucking deep Learning piece of shit. Unless you write simple JS or blinking LEDs with Arduino it codes like a Junior, high on every kind of glue on the market.

Internships are fucking bullshit and if more senior developers were to take the role of an actual mentor to coach juniors properly then the state of software engineering would be better.

Some people can be let down easy in terms of "this is not for you bruh", others can be built. I know that social interactions are not common for a lot of the morons in here, but being polite and kind is relatively simple if you know what you are doing. Being a dickhead != "royal levels of expertise" and if we were to coach more people into proper development practices then software would not be in such a shitty state.

For an environment that thrives in cooperation I find it hard to believe that we are still subjecting new people to the field to what can be considered slavery with little to actual no monetary compensation.

I removed many of the requirements for the application to a software developer job where I am at (I am the boss, I get to do shit like that) and my fight with HR was "I would rather someone fresh from college that I can coach properly than some dickhead with years on the field that won't listen to anything else than their own words"

Sure it would be slow, sure it would be hard, nothing ever is that simple, but my idea is "train this mkfer, level the fuck out of him, let him be off to great shit rather than giving him to some dickhead that will treat him like shit on account of being a newbie"

And yes, I do know how and what can go bad, I am going to have someone desinging shit in basic html/js/css with some php here and there not giving them the keys to every server I control. Thank you for your fucking concerns, I know what I am doing.

the experiment fails? GOOD more data for me.

Plus, you learn more when you teach others.

Yay, I have to rewrite + design a 15-20 year old website 🎉

Originally written in, God knows what version of php, HTML and JS by a Java dev, and patched every other year when something broke or a new feature was needed, every time by someone new...
Some years ago the system was moved from a Windows host to Ubuntu and that was a nightmare in its own, because of all the hard-coded paths...

Welp, at least some fucker found another fucker who is willing to create a new design for the site, so that's off my plate...

For those struggling with imposter syndrome, keep a record of your progress.

Break it down into

* used

* learning

* dont need a manual or cheat sheet

* use every day

You can also break it down per project:.

"Project xyz (python: 2 years)"
"Project ijk (js:6 months)".

Etc.

Critically, keep these in something physical, like a notebook or whatever you use *regularly and frequently* to keep notes. That's important because you should be glancing over your progress as a remainder.

Each time you want to add a new line, rewrite your existing progress on a new page, before adding the new line.

So as you flip through the pages you get a large and larger chronological list of your progress, and improvement, and experience.

Add a date to the title for each and a brief note about something that you did or happened on that day or week.

You wont second guess yourself so much once you can see how far you came.

Like at one time I was actually competent at js! (Before I stopped the flash cards anyway).

These motherfucking incompetent programmers... Demon spaghetti code base saga continues.

So they have a password change functionality in their web app.

We have to change the length of it for cybersecurity insurance. I found a regex in the front end spaghetti and changed it to match the required length.

Noticed 7 regexes that validate the password input field. Wtf, why not just use one?! REGEX ABUSE! Also, why not just do a string length check, it's fucking easy in JS. I guess regex makes you look smart.

So we test it out and the regexes was only there for vanity, like display a nicely designed error that the password doesn't have x amount of characters, doesn't have a this and that, etc.

I check the backend ColdFusion mess that this charismatic asshole built. Finally find the method that handles password updates. THERE'S NO BACKEND VALIDATION. It at least sanitises the user input...

What's worse is that I could submit a blank new password and it accepts it. No errors. I can submit a password of "123" and it works.

The button that the user clicks when the password is changed, is some random custom HTML element called <btn> so you can't even disable it.

I really don't enjoy insulting people, but this... If you're one of the idiots who built this shit show and you're reading this, change your career, because you're incompetent and I don't think you should EVER write code again.

Visual Basic at high-school, pascal and C and Java at University. VBA for macros on a job. html+css+js learnt o er a weekend to pass the screening for a new job, then ruby and php on that job to build internal tools. Now I am into python for data science. It has been fun.

I've been a bit "removed" from .NET lately and I've been slowly forgetting about it. It's like I grieved a loss, and now I was moving on, for lack of a better analogy. I was just beginning to get used to my new environment of Node JS and PHP. And, recently, I was put on track to complete a full project using Node JS.

And then suddenly a new company reached out to me, interested in my skills, and asked for me to build a simple .NET web app to showcase my abilities.

I got started, and holy crap I forgot how nice it was to be coding in this environment. Everything I had forgotten about switched on for me, like riding a bike. I was done with the app in a matter of hours. It was probably the most productive I've been with a coding assignment in forever. I was beaming with pride at the fact that I could code so fluently despite some time away. Everything here just made sense to me.

After I submitted it to the company for review I sat back and thought, damn, do I have to go back to Node/Express JS? I barely have any experience with it 😂. The only reason I know anything is because I watched a 20 minute quick tutorial on how to build an API. That's it.

I really want my current company to give me projects that are in my preferred language and they aren't and that's killing me right now. I can learn, that's not a problem, but my effectiveness as an employee is completely shot by not allowing me to build in code that I know and understand. I was fuckin hired for my specific coding experience, why not take advantage of what I know?

I should say something to my manager but I know they will just tell me no because they want it to be built in Javascript as it's the preferred language of the Gods.

Joking aside, I don't think they will go for it because it is another language that they would have to manage and maintain if I ever leave.

Oh well 🤷

Oh, $work.

Ticket: Support <shiny new feature> in <seriously dated code> to allow better “searching” (actually: generating reports, not searching)

UI: “Filter on” inputs above a dynamic JS table don’t update said table; they trigger generating a new report.

Seriously dated code: 12 years old. Rails v3-isms. Blocks access without appropriate role; role name buried in secrets configuration files. Code passes data round-trip between server/client/server/model that isn’t ever used. Has two identical reports with slightly different names, used interchangeably. Uh, I guess I’ll update both?

Reports: Heavily, heavily abstracted; zero visibility.

Shiny new feature: Some new magical abstraction layer with no documentation nor comments. Nobody in my team knows how it works. The author… won’t explain, but sent me her .ppt presentation on it (the .ppt, not a recording).

Useless specs for seriously dated code: Tests exclusively factory-generated data; not the controller, filters/lookups, UI, table data, etc.

Seriously dated code and useless spec author: the CISO.

The worst part: I’m not even surprised at any of this.

Subaru's Symmetrical AWD is the best thing in the world at the moment. Also, warning: !dev

Tl;dr: I'm getting another RPi3 thanks to awesome engineering.

Got a couple of inches of light snow here, and on my way home I came across a GMC Sierra dually stuck at the bottom of a moderately sized ditch. Naturally, I stopped by in my Forester and offered to tow it out.

With my 20ft tow rope stretched to its full length I was barely touching the road. He signalled that he was ready, and I gunned it. Slowly but surely the truck crawled out of the 6ft deep trench. She crested the hill with much applause (from me and the driver of the truck). As a thanks, he gave me $30.

Looks like I'm gonna get a new Raspberry Pi to play with. I think I'll turn this one into a countertop MAME arcade machine.

And for those of you wondering why I'm praising Symmetrical AWD as opposed to AWD in general, here's a quick lesson in drivetrains:
Most all wheel drive cars power the front wheels most of the time. This saves on fuel economy. The thing is, power is only transmitted to the rear wheels when the front wheels start to lose traction. At that point you're already screwed; only two wheels at any one time are putting useful power to the road.
Symmetrical AWD systems, like you'll find in all Subarus and most performance cars, distribute the vehicle's torque eaqually front-rear at all times. So instead of waiting until the front wheels start slipping, all of the wheels are powered right off the bat.

To make this more devvy: grrrr php, vim is best, I configured the tab key to enter four spaces, js has too many damn frameworks and they're still being pumped out faster than rabbits in a bunny farm.

what the fuck is wrong with boomer professors ?? I enrolled in a front-end development elective at my uni in hopes to just brush up on some little things I may have missed on my self taught education.

this class has been an absolute tragedy. he spends about 1 hr each class trying to figure out how to configure docker... FOR A PROJECT THAT IS JUST BARE HTML CSS JS. WHY??? he is so adamant that we use DOCKER for this class. I don't understand why.

most of the students are BRAND NEW to front end development and know Jack shit. and here this professor is insisting on nuancing the class with docker. it makes absolutely no sense.

Just got a new job at an old school hardware company. The codebase is giving me heart attack. They don't care about dev experience or code navigation at all. Every attempts to modernize the codebase is so half assed. All patches are so bloated that make the codebase even worse.

Frontend is migrated from prototype-oop-jquery cluster fuck to AngularJS, then finally angular. Holy moly, all business logics are baked into UI "classes" using prototype chain. When they migrated to AngularJS, someone simply added a wrapper to that jQuery cluster fuck class and overwrote all the prototype with a 10k +lines file. Since all the methods are hidden in either prototype, JS object, or callback function, it's impossible to trace the data pipeline using IDE when "go to definition" on update() method gives you all the update methods/string in all objects/classes. And they don't care about immutability. References are taken out, renamed, and mutated everywhere. Finding the source of a bug is fucking guessing game.

I don't know what trick they use that makes cLion static analyzer fail.

And there is no unit test or spec doc.

Fuck me dead

So recently I needed to make a little Tic-tac-toe game with Node.JS for an university project. I previously learned Java and C# so Javascript as a non-compiled, script based language was something new for me.

Now during the programming process I reached the point where I needed to implement a function to change the player who's playing.

I was testing the game and... It seemed like the player was changed twice so it immediately switched back to the previous player.

Using a lot of console.log's I finally stumbled upon the error... (since Javascript or at least Visual Studio Code, I honestly don't know, doesn't have any kind of debugger or something).

Why the fuck does js allow to make allocations in if conditions?

I accidentally wrote one '=' instead of three '==='.

No error, no warning... Nothing.

Since then js and me are not friends anymore.

(long post is long)
This one is for the .net folks. After evaluating the technology top to bottom and even reimplementing several examples I commonly use for smoke testing new technology, I'm just going to call it:

Blazor is the next Silverlight.

It's just beyond the pale in terms of being architecturally flawed, and yet they're rushing it out as hard as possible to coincide with the .Net 5 rebranding silo extravaganza. We are officially entering round 3 of "sacrifice .Net on the altar of enterprise comfort." Get excited.

Since we've arrived here, I can only assume the Asp.net Ajax fiasco is far enough in the past that a new generation of devs doesn't recall its inherent catastrophic weaknesses. The architecture was this:

1. Create a component as a "WebUserControl"
2. Any time a bound DOM operation occurs from user interaction, send a payload back to the server
3. The server runs the code to process the event; it spits back more HTML

Some client-side js then dutifully updates the UI by unceremoniously stuffing the markup into an element's innerHTML property like so much sausage.

If you understand that, you've adequately understood how Blazor works. There's some optimization like signalR WebSockets for update streaming (the first and only time most blazor devs will ever use WebSockets, I even see developers claiming that they're "using SignalR, Idserver4, gRPC, etc." because the template seeds it for them. The hubris.), but that's the gist. The astute viewer will have noticed a few things here, including the disconnect between repaints, inability to blend update operations and transitions, and the potential for absolutely obliterative, connection-volatile, abusive transactional logic flying back and forth to the server. It's the bring out your dead approach to seeing how much of your IT budget is dedicated to paying for bandwidth and CPU time.

Blazor goes a step further in the server-side render scenario and sends every DOM event it binds to the server for processing. These include millisecond-scale events like scroll, which, at least according to GitHub issues, devs are quickly realizing requires debouncing, though they aren't quite sure how to accomplish that. Since this immediately becomes an issue with tickets saying things like, "scroll event crater server, Ugg need help! You said Blazorclub good. Ugg believe, Ugg wants reparations!" the team chooses a great answer to many problems for the wrong reasons:

gRPC

For those who aren't familiar, gRPC has a substantial amount of compression primarily courtesy of a rather excellent binary format developed by Google. Who needs the Quickie Mart, or indeed a sound markup delivery and view strategy when you can compress the shit out of the payload and ignore the problem. (Shhh, I hear you back there, no spoilers. What will happen when even that compression ceases to cut it, indeed). One might look at all this inductive-reasoning-as-development and ask themselves, "butwai?!" The reason is that the server-side story is just a way to buy time to flesh out the even more fundamentally broken browser-side story. To explain that, we need a little perspective.

The relationship between Microsoft and it's enterprise customers is your typical mutually abusive co-dependent relationship. Microsoft goes through phases of tacit disinterest, where it virtually ignores them. And rightly so, the enterprise customers tend to be weaksauce, mono-platform, mono-language types who come to work, collect a paycheck, and go home. They want to suckle on the teat of the vendor that enables them to get a plug and play experience for delivering their internal systems.

And that's fine. But it's also dull; it's the spouse that lets themselves go, it's the girlfriend in the distracted boyfriend meme. Those aren't the people who keep your platform relevant and competitive. For Microsoft, that crowd has always been the exploratory end of the developer community: alt.net, and more recently, the dotnet core community (StackOverflow 2020's most loved platform, for the haters). Alt.net seeded every competitive advantage the dotnet ecosystem has, and dotnet core capitalized on. Like DI? You're welcome. Are you enjoying MVC? Your gratitude is understood. Cool serializers, gRPC/protobuff, 1st class APIs, metadata-driven clients, code generation, micro ORMs, etc., etc., et al. Dear enterpriseur, you are fucking welcome.

Anyways, b2blazor. So, the front end (Blazor WebAssembly) story begins with the average enterprise FOMO. When enterprises get FOMO, they start to Karen/Kevin super hard, slinging around money, privilege, premiere support tickets, etc. until Microsoft, the distracted boyfriend, eventually turns back and says, "sorry babe, wut was that?" You know, shit like managers unironically looking at cloud reps and demanding to know if "you can handle our load!" Meanwhile, any actual engineer hides under the table facepalming and trying not to die from embarrassment.

what kind of dumb fuck you have to be to get the react js dev job in company that has agile processes if you hate the JS all the way along with refusing to invest your time to learn about shit you are supposed to do and let's add total lack of understanding how things work, specifically giving zero fucks about agile and mocking it on every occasion and asking stupid questions that are answered in first 5 minutes of reading any blog post about intro to agile processes? Is it to annoy the shit out of others?

On top of that trying to reinvent the wheels for every friggin task with some totally unrelated tech or stack that is not used in the company you work for?

and solution is always half-assed and I always find flaw in it by just looking at it as there are tons of battle-tested solutions or patterns that are better by 100 miles regarding ease of use, security and optimization.

classic php/mysql backend issues - "ooh, the java has garbage collector" - i don't give a fuck about java at this company, give me friggin php solution - 'ooh, that issue in python/haskel/C#/LUA/basically any other prog language is resolved totally different and it looks better!' - well it seems that he knows everything besides php!

Yeah we will change all the fucking tech we use in this huge ass app because your inability to learn to focus on the friggin problem in the friggin language you got the job for.

Guy works with react, asked about thoughts on react - 'i hope it cease to exists along with whole JS ecosystem as soon as possible, because JS is weird'. Great, why did you fucking applied for the job in the first place if it pushes all of your wrong buttons!

Fucking rockstar/ninja developers! (and I don't mean on actual 'rockstar' language devs).

Also constantly talks about game development and we are developing web-related suite of apps, so why the fuck did you even applied? why?

I just hate that attitude of mocking everything and everyone along with the 'god complex' without really contributing with any constructive feedback combined with half-assed doing something that someone before him already mastered and on top of that pretending that is on the same level, but mainly acting as at least 2 levels above, alas in reality just produces bolognese that everybody has to clean up later.

When someone gives constructive feedback with lenghty argument why and how that solution is wrong on so many levels, pulls the 'well, i'm still learning that' card.

If I as code monkey can learn something in 2 friggin days including good practices and most of crazy intricacies about that new thing, you as a programmer god should be able to learn it in 2 fucking hours!

Fucking arrogant pricks!

I don't know what to do with my life anymore, as a self taught web developer, I started like anybody doing HTML, CSS and js, and then I met PHP and WordPress.
why the fuck PHP is ugly ? and why WordPress is uglier ? I tried to learn how to build a simple plugin in WordPress but the hooks system make me want to kill my self, how the fuck PHP powers 80% of the web ? every time I write PHP I wish I was never born, the problem is that I can't change job because I am old and I live in a fucking country who is technologically primitive, they fucking know only PHP and JAVA, no Node, No Ruby, No Python, only fucking PHP.
I learned React, I learned Node but you know what I did this last year ? I raped a themeforest theme for about dozen plus websites, A SINGLE THEME FOR MORE THAN DOZEN CLIENTS, my boss does not care, only me who is not sleeping at night because a tried to customize a Prestashop theme and it gave me cramps in the stomach, I feel depressed and useless, I want to quite my job but I can't, I have mouths to feed, WHY THE FUCK DID I FELL IN LOVE WITH PROGRAMMING, I was happy fixing computers, what can I do if the only project that I have are WordPress and Prestashop?
how did you do to stay sane when working with wordpress and prestashop ? are you not human ?I can't take it anymore.
I need a new road map, fuck it I will focus only on JS and Node and fuck PHP.

I am a junior web developer, currently working in my first job for a small company, I was hired because I have an interest in meteor and modern web dev.

When I say small I mean I am the only full time js dev.

So the project we are working (my first ever professional project from start to finish) is a travel booking web app (being a little vague, for the sake of privacy). I am the lead developer, as a new programmer of a project that is far from trivial. There are no other javascript devs in office, no sort of code review. We have an outsourced dev but as I got in a flow with one dev my boss supposedly told him to do it part time (without discussing with me), but haven't heard anything from him, so assuming he's just disappeared (probably annoyed at being treated like a commodity).

Boss has set up the stages, and forces me to move on to the next stage before that stage has been finished. I will have to go back over the whole thing to finish things off.

He will only hire cheap juniors, one front end guy with barely any experience is styling the site.

He is used to churning out WordPress and Magento sites.

Wish I had a senior I could learn off.

I want to stick at this project and see it through, but i can only see it ending in a train wreck.

At the same time I want out, I want to work under a better team with senior programmers and better code review.

I just have to do my best and see how it goes I guess

In cour company we need an online dashboard that monitors logfiles from various interface processes.

My collage and me, the newest company members (for almost 2 years) get the task to build this and get it presented as some intern project where we can try out some more recent technologies/frameworks.
Now in the first meeting our senior team leader told us we shoeldn't use the noew hot buzzword js frameworks.
Reason? They are not proven and wil probably lose popularity next year and we don't want to migrate everything every half year. Plus he had negeative experiences with Angular in some project he had to work on, probably just because his limited JS skils.
So he wants us to use jQuery to build a modern web application.

I get it you don't want to migrate to TheNewHotThing(tm) every year. Guess what? You fucking don't have to. If I build sonting in Vue.js now, it won't stop working when a new framework comes along.
Look at our own fucking ASP.NET Web Forms prooject, that stil works. Just don't deny the usability of modern frameworks.

I'm thinking of opening a small onsite web development class for teenager (maybe between 10-20 yo). The problem in Indonesia is most of us learn programming language at an older age, maybe because of the language barrier and lack of good tutorials in Indonesian language.

I want to change that by teaching them early, so that in the future, Indonesia can contribute more to the world of software and web development. Maybe even create new JS frameworks.
JK. ;)

But I don't know where to start. I mean, I've never even posted any article or tutorial (I'm not good at writing). How do I develop the curriculum? I've thought about creating a web quiz, but what do I write? How do I make the material?
Has any of you ever done this?

Story time.

We are all alike as devs, just surrounded by the people who has an idea of "new facebook", but i like how their mind works and how they long for a change, so it does not annoy me that much. I just simply explain how it is not likely to happen, without decent marketing and innovation.

However, yesterday i went to my dad's workplace, because i was bored. He has lots of friends there, and i happen to meet one. When he heard me that i am a software engineer, he told me that he has an idea.

I prepared my words to explain why it is not possible, but when i heard what it is, i was ashamed of myself.

He sells and manages car tires. He wants a simple showroom website to show what tires he has,( not stock-wise. Price, size, type, brand etc. ) and he wants to update them himself.

I swallowed my words and told him that i could do it. Normally i don't make websites, i provide utilities and APIS to make the front-end devs job easier at my work. But i will turn his idea into reality.

He said that he hired someone else for that years ago, but the one he hired made the website in ASP.NET 2.0, so making one from scratch would take much less time.

No way i would touch that mess came from the seventh layer of hell itself, to torment developers endlessly.

Just a simple front-end seasoned with bulma and pure JS, node to communicate with the DB ( maybe golang for fun ? ) and a simple admin panel for him would do the trick. I am excited !

Learn nodejs, love it, abandon it coz most jobs in the country want php and none heard about the new js frameworks.

1 year later, decide to change job, look at posting to find senior php position, all companies want node, angular, react & vue...

I've been struggling with some financial issues lately. I haven't told this to my family bc I am helping my mom with money, hat wouldn't help.

Sadly, I got two general tickets for WebSummit 2019 and I thought "okay, I am nearby Portugal rn, somebody of my circle could go with me and have some fun, I feel so blue..."

No one. Not a single one. Nobody.

"Maybe with those Telegram groups of JS developers..."

No one.

Maybe it sounds like some fraud or something, so they didn't answer. I even mentioned to an old entrepreneur friend of mine, and he didn't even answer me.

Disheartened is the word for today. I don't know, I am not expecting that people can join this adventure just bc is awesome, we all have bills to pay, but at least an answer would be fine.

I know it is not a fun story, and there are people in worse situations than mine. I just wanted to do some catharsis bc I lost my laptop.

I still have bills, two tickets, and a new kind of miserable mood.

Thank you for reading.

So my friend that wanted to start learning how to code started with some basic JS and he just decided after a little research to learn some C++, started out with free tutorials but I recommended a C++ Udemy course that was recommended to me from one of you guys, he said he was enjoying it so I was pretty happy...

At about midnight last night he tells me he is thinking about switching to Linux after using Windows his entire life... I have done gods work my friends...

I'm thinking about trialling him with standard Ubuntu 18.04 and maybe Elementary OS 5.0, anyone else got some recommendations for a new Linux user's first distro?

There is this dude called Richard Eng which is sort of famous for 2 things:
First: he is known as *the* Smalltall evangelist of mothern times. And he constantly writes about it. Which is fine since he tries to attract new users to this beautiful and simple little language.

Second: his constant bashing of other technologies, mainly Javascript stating that it is the most harmful tech known to man.

The thing is, saying "use this because that is shit" is never going to convince a community, specifically one as potent as that of the JS community. And to make it worse...the dude links his reasoning about bad languages to articles he wrote. As in "this is shit, look at my completely biased article regarding why its shit"

Once he is confronted about it he links back to his own writings. Much like christian fanatics do
"good is real because it says so in the bible"
"but how can you trust that resource?"
"Because the bible is the word of God"
"and how do you know?"
"Because it is in the bible"

Circular arguments like that cannot be taken seriously. And what this guy does for the Smalltalk community hurts more than it helps really.

Claims like those are all around us. If we were to believe or consider them depending on who said what then we would never have the amazing cluster of tech choices that we have.

Take c++. It is absolutely powerful and gives you the ability to do pretty much anything. If we were to take Linus Torvalds's word about it being shit and only having subpar development we would miss on absolutely powerful tools.

The same came to me from Evee, writer of "PHP a fractal of bad design" or the "Node.js is cancer" article.

You are never going to please anyone with anything. I go by live and let live, and whilst I don't like some technologies I certainly don't look down on those that do.

I've been sort of lost after New Year's...

Last few years, my main goal was just to learn stuff to pass technical interviews. I also did a lot of personal dev in C#... and played with the js, python, and when a bit of c++.

But this year I kinda feel sorta of "ah screw it". Interviews never work out, haven't for years, what's the point in even trying... I get paid enough though the work is sort boring and team sort of feels like the Wild West, no rules, code reviews, processes...

But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Feels like coding has lost its place at the top now. The future is all cloud, machine learning, big data/real time analytics but feels like these are out of reach for just 1 guy...

And well doesn't seem like anyone is going to give me a job because I'm not a good fit or have enough experience in these areas...

Sorta lost now but guess this is what a sudden thought leads to...

Oh and maybe just with tech in general. It feels this year I'm just not as interested as I was before... Spent a lot of time binge watching movies and stuff instead....

I'm tired of meth. I mean math. MATH.
I'm sick and tired of everything.

"First!" numerous blog comments shout to no-one, from the colorful abyss of the internet.

And for me, this is a first. But lets rewind.

It's 2 AM, about a month ago, spring in Akron Ohio. Someone reading this is no doubt shocked "You just revealed where you live, ON THE INTERNET! The weirdos will find you." Anyway, it's a dark and stormy night, as the cliche goes. Like most people up after midnight, I'm browsing facebook posts and useless productivity sites. (lifehacker)
I yearn for something more out of life, somewhere deep down inside..maybe in my colon?

All the articles are saying "10 tips to supercharge your life", "how to discover your life purpose in three easy steps", mixed with an ad about ron jeremys one secret tip to grow a massive cock, and exhortations to buy such-and-such's "new ebook!"
I am not moved by any of this.

Scrolling, and tabbing, and intermittently dropping f-bombs because of js ads locking up my browser, I stop and lean back. In the blue afterglow of my shitty compaqs screen, a thought appears, like a cheesy genie, popping out of a brass toilet. "Start a blog! A youtube channel! A podcast" the ad proclaims. "Yes. Thats what I have to do" I whispered (I'm embarrassed to admit I really did say this).

Then I Control+W'd out of it, and flopped onto my mattress. This was the wasteland of my life. I couldn't help but think The whole internet was like some seedy back alley 2.0, where boxcar willie with his train of needle marks had been replaced by more upstart, greasy-haired gurus. Each peddling 'ebooks' of 'advice', stuffed in between ads to buy 'this one hot stock you have to own' and porn. And that alley was really the 'blogosphere' and 'youtubers'. As I drifted off, the last thought was 'We're all just bottom feeders,leeching and whoring on the attention of faceless anonymous users, hoping for another quick fix.'

I fell asleep, these racing thoughts fading into sweet oblivion, but never too far away.

Welcome to My Back Alley

That title is only twice as dirty, and half as thought-out as I planned. As you imagine, the lure of being the electronic equivalent of a conman never quite faded. And the more I read, the stronger the message "Start a youtube channel!" grew. As if everyone and their grandmother having a youtube channel would somehow make the world right, cure cancer, and save kittens from animal shelter gas chambers. Everyones an expert, everyones an agent of change. Maximizing productivity, Evangelizing Technology, ninjas collaborating to socialfy your community diversification benchmark for target traffic
through user-engagement and authentic grass-roots, blah, blah, blah, blah, money. Thrusting, moaning, screaming. Money. Pumping at the center of it all.

Wake up and smell the bullshit.

This blog is not a blog. This blog is the anti-blog, and we are the anti-streamers. 'We' (read "I") resist your bullshit lingo bingo, call out the Truth (Tm) and refuse to be satisfied with any standards of decency, journalistic integrity, or common sense.

Every blog, every channel, every podcast is Starbucks And I'm tyler durden, pissing in your coffee, and calling it a 'latte'.

Freaks, and anarchists, laymen and losers. If you feel as I do, then this is the place for you. Welcome to devrant.

As a student I got involved in a project written by another student who wasn't working at the company for the time I started. It was a web based application written in plain JS and PHP. His attempt was really terrible and I had to rewrite almost everything. If I sum this up I deleted about 4k lines of code and replaced them with about 2k of my code. My attempt is scalable and it is much easier to build new functions and modules.

Apparently my learning style is more rote memorization than learn-by-doing and I've been trying to learn by doing for years as a hobbyist.

It took a fucking *national quarantine* to get me to try something different and I'm blown away.

What would have taken me many months to learn I've all but grasped in detail in a matter of 20 hours of study over the course of a week.

Fuck you javascript. I WIN THIS ROUND. No more looking at the documentation for stupid shit like how to write a regex, or why everything is wrapped in fucking parenthesis (IIFE), or why
I keep getting a uncaught reference exception.

The important thing to realize about learning is NEVER be obstinate about it. Try many things, and don't get stuck in one way of learning unless you know thats what works for you.

This is why having study partners and mentors are important.

I think experience/practice and rote learning work in tandem. Rote learning lets you skip the much longer step of grasping the fundamentals, bootstrapping the process of learning the abstractions that are composed of those fundamentals.

I'm still adding cards to my anki flash card deck, but if anyone wants it I'm willing to share. It's mostly just 1. practice questions, 2. detail questions (what are the types? What does this regex do?, etc), 3. implication questions (heres this bit of code. It's XYZ, why did it fail? Correct it.), combining core details to memorize, and the application of the facts learned.

It helped me to learn and I'm apparently retarded, so if you're new to programming and want to learn JS, it can probably help you too. Unless you're more of a tard than me lol.

So my IT teacher wrote his own web server framework for NodeJS and he forces us to use it for assignments. Would be fine if:
1. It worked properly.
2. It had any kind of documentation.
3. He knew how it worked.

But no, we have to debug his shit and edit the js files in node_modules to get shit working.

Is he open to suggestions? Not really. If you have a fix, you have to create a gitlab account and send a pr. Even if you tell him what exactly is wrong. He won't do anything about it.

Why use express when we can learn something we'll never use again?

At this point I think we're using it only so that he gets downloads on npm.

Oh ya, he also copies package.json from project to project instead of creating a new one with up to date dependencies.

🙃

I've been working on the ecommerce website from hell for over a year now. I should have heard the alarm bells when the studio who were running the project took a month to pay my deposit but still expected me to start working, but I explained that I wouldn't start without some form of security and they were cool with it, so I carried on.

It started off as a simple build with simple products, no product variations etc and a few links on the designs which appeared to lead to external links, and checkout and cart pages were nowhere to be seen. It wasn't a big money job so I just build them in as plain and straightforward as I could, in line with how the rest of the site looked. They then changed their mind about how they wanted these to look, and added loads of functionality to the site throughout the build, so by the end of the line, the scope of work had completely changed. I also had loads of disagreements in terms of design and useability, as their designs straight-up weren't going to function otherwise, plus every round of changes meant that I had to prolong the job further and fit it around work for other clients.

Fastforward a few more months and I get sent a really angry email with some of the client's complaints, including one that raised an issue with the user journey, and the finger of blame was pointed at me. The user journey had been a part of the designs from the start, and this was never raised as an issue for A WHOLE YEAR. They then said that it had to go live on Monday (three days after they sent email with these huge new structural changes). I told them I could no longer work on the project but was happy to waive the rest of my fee (3/4 of the total fee, when I had essentially completed the site, minus 2 minor bugs), so they could find another developer in the limited time they had. At first they refused to hire another developer, claiming that it would be too expensive, which made no sense, as for a few minor fixes and out of scope additions he could get paid a wage that would have otherwise paid for the majority of the work I had done on the site. I stood my ground and finally they found someone, so I sent over all of the files and database to their new developer and asked him to give me a heads up when I could remove the staging site from my server. The next day, I received an email from the studio asking me to fix some bugs the developer was requesting I fix so he could carry on with the site. They were basically asking me to work more, for free, to enable him to walk off with the majority of the money and do less work. They also forwarded a suuuuuper shitty, condescending email from him, listing all the things he thought was wrong with the site (he even listed 'no favicon' although they'd never supplied a graphic for this). He also wrote a paragraph at the bottom EXPLAINING MY JOB TO ME and telling me:

I get the feeling you like to write Javascript, while being one of the easiest languages to learn, it can also be one of the hardest to master. While I applaud you for writing Vanilla JS, it looks like you have a general problem with structuring your application.

Not sure if I'm being oversensitive here but it felt so patronising, and i couldn't even go for an angry walk to get it out my system because of social distancing lol.

Let a girl quarantine in peace!!!!!!

Multi User, One Account, and other shit

I'm gonna rant about something as a user, and someone who makes stupid web stuff.

My bank has been updating their web banking over time and they decided that every individual on an account, should have their own login. They really want to push this on their users, I suspect specifically folks like me and my wife who share one login for the joint accounts we have at the bank together.

Why share one login, because it's the only sure fire way I know that I and my wife can see all the same shit no doubt about it.

The banks never tell you what you can see or can't with joint accounts, I doubt it is even documented on their end, but in every damn case something is hidden or different in some weird way.

Messages to the bank people? If I send it, my wife often can't. I get that for security reasons that's a thing, but it makes no sense for a joint account.

ANY difference to me breaks online banking ENTIRELY. Joint accounts are supposed to be... well one account that is the same.

Other banks we used where we had different logins for the joint account, each login actually had separate bill pay accounts per user. So if I went to bill pay and scheduled something to be paid, my wife had no idea, same if she did.

Right fucking there, banking is just broken entirely!

So no Mr. Bank, fuck you we're both logging in via the same login.

Fast forward to N00bPancakes making a thing.

So my employer has a customer (Direct Customer). Direct Customer wants a thing that makes communication with their customer (Indirect Customer) easier.

The worst thing about making something for your customer's customer is that Direct Customer always imagines that Indirect Customer is gonna be super ninja power users....

But no, that's not the case... in fact almost nobody is a power user, and absolutely nobody WANTS to be a power users.

Worse yet in my case the only reason this tool exists is because Direct Customer and Indirect Customer can't communicate well enough anyway... that should tell you something about the amount of effort Indirect Customer is willing to expend.

So with that tool, this situation constantly comes up:

Direct Customer thinks it would be great if every user from Indirect Company had some sort of custom messaging, views, and etc in of Cool Communication Tool. The reason is because that's what Direct Customer loves about Ultra Complex Primary Tool that they use ....

Then I have to fight the constant fight of:

NOBODY WANTS TO BE A POWER USER, NOBODY EVEN WANTS TO DO MUCH OF ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET THAT ISN'T SCREAMING AT OTHER PEOPLE OR POST MEMES OR WATCH SHITTY VIDEOS. THE MOMENT ANYONE AT INDIRECT COMPANY LOGS IN AND SEES ANY INFO THAT IS DIFFERENT FROM THEIR COWORKER THEY'LL SHIT THEMSELVES, FLOOD EVERYONE WITH 'OH GAWD SOME NON SPECIFIED THING IS WRONG' AND RESPOND TO EMAILS LIKE A JELLYFISH DROPPED OFF IN NEW MEXICO... AND NOTHING WILL GET DONE!!!

God damn it people.

Also side rant while I'm busy fighting the good fight to keep shit simple and etc:

People bitch about how horrible the modern web is and then bitch at web devs like we're rulers of the internet or something.... What really pisses me off about that is other devs who do that.... like bro, do you make policy at your company? You decide not to sell some info or whatever shit your company sells? Like fuck off with your 'man I miss html' because you got scared by some shitty JS error and ran back to your language of choice and just poked your head out of the the basement and got scared... and you shit on another developer about that? Fuck you.

It's been a while DevRant!

Straight back into it with a rant that no doubt many of us have experienced.

I've been in my current job for a year and a half & accepted the role on lower pay than I normally would as it's in my home town, and jobs in development are scarce.

My background is in Full Stack Development & have a wealth of AWS experience, secure SaaS stacks etc.

My current role is a PHP Systems Developer, a step down from a senior role I was in, but a much bigger company, closer to home, with seemingly a lot more career progression.

My job role/descriptions states the following as desired:

PHP, T-SQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, XML

I am also well versed in various JS frameworks, PHP Frameworks, JAVA, C# as well as other things such as:

Xamarin, Unity3D, Vue, React, Ionic, S3, Cognito, ECS, EBS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB etc etc.

A couple of months in, I took on all of the external web sites/apps, which historically sit with our Marketing department.

This was all over the place, and I brought it into some sort of control. The previous marketing developer hadn't left and AWS access key, so our GitLabs instance was buggered... that's one example of many many many that I had to work out and piece together, above and beyond my job role.

Done with a smile.

Did a handover to the new Marketing Dev, who still avoid certain work, meaning it gets put onto me. I have had a many a conversation with my line manager about how this is above and beyond what I was hired for and he agrees.

For the last 9 months, I have been working on a JAVA application with ML on the back end, completely separate from what the colleagues in my team do daily (tickets, reports, BI, MI etc.) and in a multi-threaded languages doing much more complicated work.

This is a prototype, been in development for 2 years before I go my hands on it. I needed to redo the entire UI, as well as add in soo many new features it was untrue (in 2 years there was no proper requirements gathering).

I was tasked initially with optimising the original code which utilised a single model & controller :o then after the first discussion with the product owner, it was clear they wanted a lot more features adding in, and that no requirement gathering had every been done effectively.

Throughout the last 9 month, arbitrary deadlines have been set, and I have pulled out all the stops, often doing work in my own time without compensation to meet deadlines set by our director (who is under the C-Suite, CEO, CTO etc.)

During this time, it became apparent that they want to take this product to market, and make it as a SaaS solution, so, given my experience, I was excited for this, and have developed quite a robust but high level view of the infrastructure we need, the Lambda / serverless functions/services we would want to set up, how we would use an API gateway and Cognito with custom claims etc etc etc.

Tomorrow, I go to London to speak with a major cloud company (one of the big ones) to discuss potential approaches & ways to stream the data we require etc.

I love this type of work, however, it is 100% so far above my current job role, and the current level (junior/mid level PHP dev at best) of pay we are given is no where near suitable for what I am doing, and have been doing for all this time, proven, consistent work.

Every conversation I have had with my line manager he tells me how I'm his best employee and how he doesn't want to lose me, and how I am worth the pay rise, (carrot dangling maybe?).

Generally I do believe him, as I too have lived in the culture of this company and there is ALOT of technical debt. Especially so with our Director who has no technical background at all.

Appraisal/review time comes around, I put in a request for a pay rise, along with market rates, lots of details, rates sources from multiple places.

As well that, I also had a job offer, and I rejected it despite it being on a lot more money for the same role as my job description (I rejected due to certain things that didn't sit well with me during the interview).

I used this in my review, and stated I had already rejected it as this is where I want to be, but wanted to use this offer as part of my research for market rates for the role I am employed to do, not the one I am doing.

My pay rise, which was only a small one really (5k, we bring in millions) to bring me in line with what is more suitable for my skills in the job I was employed to do alone.

This was rejected due to a period of sickness, despite, having made up ALL that time without compensation as mentioned.

I'm now unsure what to do, as this was rejected by my director, after my line manager agreed it, before it got to the COO etc.

Even though he sits behind me, sees all the work I put in, creates the arbitrary deadlines that I do work without compensation for, because I was sick, I'm not allowed a pay rise (doctors notes etc supplied).

What would you do in this situation?

Being a front end developer and working in a team of motivated "full stack" developers sucks big time.
So, recently joined this new company with a very small project which just started, basically a cloud version of a really old desktop app. Few people from the team completely from the asp dotnet background decided the architecture few months before I joined in.
So, they did it something like this -

- mono repo dotnet project with VueJs app served within it (because that would be maintainable 😑)
- vue app served by pointing the built files through dotnet index file (simply because they didn't care about the gift to the front end world which is webpack or even had any knowledge about it 😑)
- added typescript because, u know it's cool 😑, without even knowing that they don't possess that team which know how to write the types (f***ers write classes for every payload object coz they don't know what interfaces are)
- no loader to load typescript, they are running tsc in watch mode and we have .js and .js.map for every .ts file in our project which some teammates are even pushing to repo

Recently, I added eslint with git hooks to the project so that everyone will at least stick to the coding standards. Now, to avoid the errors they are bypassing the git hooks by uninstalling the library and then installing it after the commit😂😂
Then we have a girl who uses document.getElementById to programmatically change styles in a Vue project😑😑😑😂
Then we have dotnet people using dotnet coding conventions all over the front end app.

People, how do I deal with these so called "full stack" people?

Hi everyone, I’m new here and this is also my first rant.

I’m in the job hunting boat once again and I’ve been looking at Junior front-end positions. I thought I’d rant about something that always annoys me when looking through the requirements.

Wait, so in order to land a Junior front-end job, I have to be a freshly graduated person with a Master’s degree in CS, with a minimum of 3 years working experience and all that just to come code in HTML, CSS and JS?

For the love of god, I’m one person damn it. It’s not like I’m a self-taught developer that taught myself those things and more in a shorter period of time after quitting college.

On a more serious note, I’m not by any means claiming that I know everything, but having a CS Master’s degree for these types of positions is clearly ridiculous in my opinion.
Sometimes I wonder if the people writing these things are making it up as they go or whether they’re actually serious.

C# has become shit.

I work since 2013 with C# (and the whole .NET stack) and I was so happy with it.
Compared to Java it was much lean, compared to all shitty new edge framework that looked like a unfinished midschool project, it was solid and mature.

It had his problems,. but compared to everything else that I tried, it was the quickes and most robust solution.

All went in a downhill leading to a rotten shit lake when all this javascript frenzy began to pop up and everyone wanted to get on the trendy bandwagon.

First they introduced MVC, then .NET Core, now .NET 5-6-7-8.

Now I'm literally engulfed with all these tiny bits of terror javascript provoked and they've implemented in all the parts of their framework.

Everything has to be null checked at compilation time, everything pops up errors "this might be nulll heyyyyy it's important put a ! or a ? you silly!!!" everywhere.

There are JS-ish constructs and syntax shit everywhere.

It's unbearable.
I avoid js like a plague whenever I can (and you know it's not a luxury you get often in the current state of a developer life) and they're slowly turning in some shit js hybrid deformed creature

I miss 2013-2018, when it wass all up to me to decide what to do with code and I did some big projects for big companies (200-300k lines of code without unit tests and yes for me it's a lot) without all this hassle.

I literally feel the need c# had to have some compiler rule you can quickly switch called "Senior developer mode" that doesn't trigger alarms and bells for every little stupid thing.

I'm sure you can' turn on/off these craps by some hidden settings somewhere, but heck I feel the need to be an option, so whoever keeps it on should see a big red label on top of the IDE saying "YOU HAVE RETARDED DEV MODE ON"

So they get a reminder that if they use it they are either some fresh junior dev or they are mentally challenged.

Set some dev goals..

TLDR: spend less time at work coding

No, really..for what I do at work, I am happy. Would like to learn more recent stuff (partially stuck with vb.net), but I don't even know where to start googling.. sooo... get more free time I guess to figure this out..which is a dev goal on it's own too, come to think of it, this translates as don't spend so much time at work coding.. and spend some of it learning new (dev related) things outside of work..new/different js frameworks, python (been fixing/adding some code here & there, but never learned it properly & to check it's full potential, I heard it is awesome btw), read up on algorithm time costs (learn how to fuckin spell this!!)...

And kinda dev related as I will have to spend less time at work is to get back in 'sort of' shape and climb (more)..and spend more quality time with my husband, who is too good, totally supports me & my work, so I never get to hear him nag I was working late, which leads to 'stop working so long' goal I rly need to get in order or I'll burn out again, and I'm bitchy and horrible whe BO..and we don't wanna see that again..

Sum up: work less, learn new things, climb more, be happy/content.

FUCK YOU NODE JS AND FUCL YOU SYNOLOGY

Decided to give an old Synology DiskStation that sits at home slme new life besides just sharing files. Since Synology has SSH but not a full Linux OS, installed DebianChroot (so far so good). At one point I needed Node JS, so installed NVM and tried to install Node. Well guess what didn't work. Tried a few more things including directly downlosding node from the official node website. Trying different versions, the whole drill.

After about 5 hours of installing and errors, well really usfull errors like "There where 2 errors during installation" WELL HOW ABOUT YOU FUCKING TELL ME WHAT THE ERROR IS YOU FUCKING FUCK!

I found a formum wkith a guy haveing similar problems. Able to install legacy 0.10.x versions but not 4.x.x. Or 6.x.x oder whatever. He found that you have to have at least an ARMv6 compatible processor, otherwise it won't run. Checked it and well, that old fuck of mine only has ARMv5. FUCK! But honestly. You detect it's an ARM architecture. You detect it's not one of the v6 or v7, you try to install the general arm version, BUT YOU DON'T GET THE FUCKING IDEA TO MENTION TO CHECK WAHAT VERSION YOU HAVE AND IF THAT IS SUPORTED BY FUCKING NODE!

One afternoon wasted, at least I got a little more wisdom. Fuck do I hate Node now. On the bright side, I've ordered a Raspberry Pi and two cases for Harddisks, I'll create my own diskstation with blackjack and hookers (I realy hope you get that reference)! Fuck you Synology and Node JS (yeah yeah, it's not Synologies fault, but I'm mad anyways!)

I'd like to ask: What's trending at the moment instead....

Either I'm old and senile and missing something, or there is not really sth new.

Okay, JS might be crapping out new frameworks in their common "Not invented here" diarrhea....

But otherwise? What's really new?

I don't really know. I'm not only thinking about languages and stuff, but even in hardware there ain't really a big thing going on in my opinion.

Hab ich wat verpennt?

(Have I overslept?)

We had an interesting and frightening discussion regarding NGINX, as it is russian software today and that a new trend of a true, actively developed webserver is severely lacking... Apache looks semi dead and most other niche webservers, too.

That's all I've seen as a "trend" discussion in the latest time

I made a huge mistake

I got "in the zone", I was coding so nice and fast and everything was working, so I didn't want to commit every single minute and then have to go back, cherrypick commits squash them revert them etc.

So I didn't commit anything at all... Now if I were to commit the commit would modify 2 files, create 26 new files and delete 2 files.

The changes include moving from JS to TS, implementing a desearialization scheme, implementing a server class and wrapper client classes, with common type interfaces for different requests...

So now I need to save my changes somewhere, go back to the last commit and slowly incorporate the changes.

I'm dumb

I was looking for a JS library for good typing effects for my portfolio... couldn't find any

So I had created my own... with blah blah blah effects

Today I was trying to search in Google, if in case it appears on 1st page of search result.... Now I've found at least 4 good libraries for typing effects :facepalm:

Now comparing with each to check if it is worthy to spend time to add new features.

Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...

This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:

- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.

- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.

- There's no single source of truth.

- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?

- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!

- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?

- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?

Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.

What I would like to see:

A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.

Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.

Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.

There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.

Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.

In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.

What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.

Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.

In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.

Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.

I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.

Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.

Now that my math posts have failed to garner the anger they formerly did, we here at Wisecrack Studios, like all teams of people completely out of ideas, have come up with a brilliant never-before-tried concept to bring fresh shitposts to your pocket-telescreen this fine year of 2020.

We present to you the DevRant shitposter census!

Yes we pride ourselves in our quality bait and bullshit here at WS. Founded in [previous year a long long time ago], we focus on craftmanship, tradition, and doing it right. Our bait is loved the world over for "it's fresh flavor", "so good, it's like you're abusing heroin right along with the company employees!'

And now, you too get to participate and choose your very own bullshit!
You could say we may have invented a totally new word just to describe it: crowdsourcing!
Isn't it just *brilliant*.

Here is Wisecrack's "Private Select" census, of only the most choice *premium* finely-aged shitpost ideas for this [current year].

Please, please, one vote per customer!

* Moar javascript shitposts (no we won't be doing any more, even WE are tired of js rants).

* Overly pixelated memes (obviously not) blatantly ripped and automatically uploaded via shitty selenium scripts

* Real life hijinxs, trolling shitty companies hiring processes for fun at their expense!

* DevRantCon now with 100% more orgies. Reserve your kickstarter ticket today.

* Disappointing vaporware announcements that take ten minutes to read and build your excitement up only to crush it before your very eyes like a child's first lego build in the hands of an angry nd merciless andre the giant disappointed by the craftmanship of a five year old.

* A livestream of a monkey on an actual typewriter, with a btc betting pool each time an actual word is typed, along with a $5 "shock the monkey" button to spice things up a bit
(our lawyers are informing us this may or may not be illegal in some or all nations. We'll get back to you when sealand responds with our request about their laws on unnecessary animal cruelty. )

* Video conference with devrants creators where we all play "I've never" that doesn't end until at least one person passes out black drunk.

* Weekly comedy write ups with jokes (not obviously) blatantly stolen from cards against humanity

* HipsterRants: why your favorite [thing - game, music, movie, book] sucks, and why I hate you for liking it.

* Did we mention javascript rants?

* Cool new projects by devranters and our merciless breakdown of why each one is pure, unadulterated shit, everything that was done wrong, and why you should personally be ashamed for using it.

* SadRants: cancer, meth abuse, homelessness, how we'll all die at the end, and how the sun will one day turn into a giant ball of fire that will consume the earth and leave no trace that anyone ever existed, and nothing we do will ultimately matter.

* HappyRants: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) oh yeah, you feeling it now mr krabs?

* Technical breakdowns that are completely wrong, utterly incompetent, intentionally misleading, and wildly upvoted by people who are unfamiliar.

Vote for your favorite topic/idea today! or even submit your own for our 'consideration'!

Clickbait, now in technicolor!

Converting server time to any given local timezone is a pain in the ass.. at least in JS.

Here's what I've got:
convertNowToTimezone = (localOffset) => {
let d = new Date();
let millis = d.getTime() + (d.getTimezoneOffset() * 60000); //convert server local time to UTC millisec
d.setTime(millis - (localOffset * 60000)); //convert UTC millisec to required local time
return d;
}

where I pass localOffset as -330 (IST offset).
Works in chrome console but gives a diff of 4min in the server side nodejs I'm running it in..

🤬🤬😡😡😡😡😡

Curious what you guys think about the creator of Node.js saying that he does not think Node is the best tool for servers and that Go is a much better option.

For me at least, I think it is great that people like him become aware of the shortcommings of the technology they devised, but wonder if it is such a good move to say such things (even tho apparently he is not the head of the Node.js project anymore)

I have always been fascinated by Node and the whole JS ecosystem. I think it did wonders for JS developers and it pushed the whole JS experience to a whole new level, but I am also aware of the shortcommings of it just as I am of the other environments that I use.

So, what do you guys think about his statements? Would you consider investing time in Go as a Node developer? Do you think that it will be possible to do a switch or would you rather stay in and advance the state ot Node development?

Hey. Can I borrow your ears for 5 minutes?

Since I've been out of school, I've often felt that even though I've learned how to code, the education went into a totally direction than the one I want to go. Of course a school can't teach you everything perfectly, but having almost no experience in frontend (mind you we learned the BAREST basics) just makes me feel entirely empty in that regard stepping up to a company. I've been pretty loaded during school, since I was struggling with a lot of things so I couldn't really find myself pursueing the direction of coding frontend apps being fun. I needed the little time I had to blow off steam playing games etc.

So the few things I know are all self taught, but I was never given a hand been shown best practices or solid advice where to look. Sitting down now at my pc trying to learn ReactJS for example feels incredibly draining and difficult, since we've never done JS in school ONCE. All the C# experience barely helps, since with ES6 being rolled out parallel to "normal" JS it's even harder to me to connect the lego blocks that is frontend development. Since many best practices are applied to ES6, I can barely even tell what previous practice they are replacing, making the entire picture even more spongy. In one sentence it's very overwhelming.

I've thought I'd apply maybe as a UX/UI Designer since I've got a great visual sense (confirmed countlessly by many, friends and strangers alike) maybe contributing to the frontend part that way. But as I was applying I've noticed that chances are seemingly pretty low to get accepted since it seems you've got zero reputition if you don't have a degree in Design.

It breaks me apart. I could probably apply as a frontend developer, but I am not sure if I would be happy doing that on the long run. Since just fucking around in Photoshop creating things seems like no effort and brings me joy, as compared to coding out lines for example.

I wanted to make money after school, improve on myself and my quality of life since I've drained that entirely for the sake of my education. Not spiral into another couple years just to eventually maybe get in the direction I want to.

On the flipside going into frontend dev with 0 skills, 0 experience, but being expected to have 2 years of hands on experience with the newest frameworks makes me feel empty and worthless.

I often hand out advice to other people on devRant, but this is the one time where I need some. Desperately. I feel shattered inside, getting out of bed in the morning has no incentive to me since I'll just feel like shit all day, watching YouTube to cheer me up temporarily, only to feel immense remorse not spending the day learning or improving on myself. Barely anything brings me joy. I don't wanna call myself depressive, but maybe I am just dodging the term and I am exactly that.

Thanks If you've read through this monstrosity of a rant/story. I'd be glad if you'd be so kind to give me a different take on my situation or a new perspective.

I am stepping on the spot and I am slowly dying inside because of it.

It dreads me to say it, but I need help.

I've been a frontend engineer at 6 companies for the last 10 years. Both big and small companies currently at the largest I've ever worked for. I'm totally over it. Maybe burnt out is the term. I have zero motivation to do any work or coding. I'm not a lazy person. I love working, solving problems, learning new things. I'm just sick of what I do. I used to love following all the newest tech trends, following devs on twitter, checking hacker news and creating side projects. Now I feel like my job has lost all that joy and excitement. I work remote and have been for the past 3 years. I wonder how much of that, not having any social feedback and interaction around the job has attributed to me feeling like this. All the JS frameworks suck. PR reviews, process, requirements; I'm just tired of everything. Has anyone else experienced this? If so, what did you do? Were you able to find the passion for programming again?

I can't share it but I basically just wrote an email at work that's pretty much a rant.

Basically something like should we use Java for this new component? It needs to communicate with our existing server written in JS.

And someone was like no we should stick with JS and Node because that's what the website is written.

And so I'm like wtf... It doesn't matter as long as everyone agrees to follow the same rules... And then added a part about commenting and documenting stuff being more important so I don't need to keep doing CSI on the codebase when something blows up.

Any other IT company is like:

* Task -> Designer -> Markup coder -> Backend -> Finish

Our IT company:

Act I: "Art of setting up contact with idiots".
------
Items:
*Cave scripts (aka "typical task")

Designer: -- "DAFUQ?"
Customer: *gives another interpretation*
Designer: -- "Erm... really? White text on white background?"
Customer: -- "Make a decision by yourself. I was expecting much more independence from you. You are an expert after all."
Designer: -- "Well. I'm making decision by myself. The text will be placed *here* and will be gray-colored, because *bla-bla-bla*"
Customer: -- "I disagree."
Designer: *1 hour of silence later* -- "Well...k."

Act II: "Design meets ar(u)tist"
----

Items:
*Something, that was drawn by dumb kid while smashing his own head against desk. (PSD layout)
* Salt (to pour it on open wounds)

Designer: -- "I'm seeing this task *this way*"
Markup: -- "And how do u think i should get this done? Have you even seen what you made?? This is bullshit!"
Designer: -- "It's not bullshit! It's a sci-fi themed layout!"
Markup: -- "With gameplay elements and graphics from Alien Shooter??"
Designer: -- "Well, I don't care." *brings new edits and changes*
Markup: -- "????"
Designer: *smug face* -- "!!!"

Act III (7 days later, 9 hours till deadline): "Short story about boy, who was trying to hang himself, but instead fell out from window."
----

Items:
*Markup, smelling like it went through hell and back (x1)
* Markup coder with fried butt (x1)

Backend: -- "What. Is. THAT?"
Markup: -- "It's a work we should complete in 9 hours."
Backend: -- "WE?? I know u mean me, but that's a nightmare. What the f*ck were you doing all this time?"
Markup: -- "Well..." *finds out that he was only watching films and sleeping* "I was making this thing up..."
Backend: -- "You mean "f*cking" *this* thing "up"?"
Markup: -- "Not without it"

(*3 hours of edits and changes of color from white to white later*)
Backend: -- "Well, let's do this."
*Picks PHP and tries to bundle it up with MongoDB. After some time tries to rewrite everything to JS and starts shouting something like "F***CK" and looking for window to walk through. Figures out that he is on first floor. And that he is too lazy to go upstairs*

Act IV (3 days after deadline): "Pain and misery":
-----

Items:
*Something covered with insul(t)ating tape. (Final product)

Customer: -- "Really?"
Team: -- "Kinda."
Customer: -- "Well, thanks for your work anyway. It feels like it's going to disassemble right in my hands but it just works. Oh, also, you didnt made this in time, so your payment will be over9000 times lower. That's all"
Backend, on fluids: -- "Well...yeah..."
Markup: -- "Don't look at me like that. I really was doing my job."
Designer, with twitching eye: -- "Huh, I see. You worked so hard that we have nothing to eat now. Thanks for that."
Backend: ...

Hey fellas,

So, our company is taking up some consulting projects to survive this pandemic since our main business is a little down. I've been assigned to a RN project and the client company has 2 other devs. Those devs are so incompetent that they don't even know the basics of JS and RN. They don't even understand how to split code into components and make it resusable. Okay, fine they must be new devs. I get it but can't you even fucking follow the instructions and guidelines that I'm giving you!! The code is very bad with a lot of pitfalls. In the first 2 weeks I reviewed all the code they were writing and gave comments for improvements. They didn't even care to do that! Now I've given up!

Every single day looking at the codebase makes me sick and not want to touch anything. I've practically started hating the project. How do I deal with this situation? Now, we are reaching the deadline and they're piling up the work on me. Any suggestions on how to handle this?

Thanks!

P.S: This is my first actual rant!

Hate the urge to rewrite, when a new major version of your JS library is out....

Especially when you're at the last laps of your project...

Sharing a first look at a prototype Web Components library I am working on for "fun"

TL;DR left side is pivot (grouped) table, right side is declarative code for it (Everything except the custom formatting is done declaratively, but has the option to be imperative as well).

====

TL;DR (Too long, did read):

I'm challenging myself to be creative with the cool new things that browsers offer us. Lani so far has a focus on extreme extensibility, abstraction from dependencies, and optional declarative style.

It's also going to be a micro CSS framework, but that's taking the back-seat.

I wanted to highlight my design here with this table, and the code that is written to produce this result.

First, you can see that the <lani-table> element is reading template, data, and layout information from its child elements. Besides the custom highlighting code (Yellow background in the "Tags" column, and green gradient in the "Score" column), everything can be done without opening even a single script tag.

The <lani-data-source> element is rather special. It's an abstraction of any data source, and you, as a developer can add custom data sources and hook up the handlers to your whim (the element itself uses the "type" attribute to choose a handler. In this case, the handler is "download" which simply sends a fetch request to the server once and downloads the result to memory).

Templates are stored in an html file, not string literals (Which I think really fucks the code) and loaded async, then cached into an object (so that the network tab doesn't get crowded, even if we can count on the HTTP cache). This also has the benefit of allowing me to parse the HTML templates once and then caching the parsed result in memory, so templates are never re-parsed from string no matter how many custom elements are created.

Everything is "compiled" into a single, minified .js file that you include on your page.

I know it's nothing extraordinary, but for something that doesn't need to be compiled, transpiled, packaged, shipped, and kissed goodnight, I think it's a really nice design and I hope to continue work on it and improve it over time

If you just want to answer my question, skip to the bottom. For those who cares, some backstory:

So...I seemed to have finally caught a break; a friend of my dad owns an IT company and also makes websites...used to. It was becoming too much for him alone so he decided to discontinue, but that's where i come in. We talked a few days ago and it sounds like I'm finally going to have a decent dev related job--even if it's only mainly websites, at least I can work from anywhere once the ball starts rolling since I'll just get direct deposits. Meaning I'd be able to visit my gf in Florida and sustain myself over there while I look to build my own client base or even get a job offer, who knows?

For you guys and gals reading this, what's your favorite/preferred static site generators and css frameworks? I know that I'll be doing mostly static sites first, and i want to deliver quality work as quick as possible. I'm cool with learning a new language once it's not too obscure; i mainly do JS and I know a bit of Python, PHP, and just the basics of Go and Ruby

I don't know if it's age, having too many other things I can/need do, not having any more major personal tech itches to scratch, or just seeing no point in learning any new tech unless I need it for work... But I've just been coding less personally... And maybe even at work...

I feel like in terms of being a dev, there's nothing else I want anymore, nothing I want to learn unless I actually need it...

I haven't done any major personal projects in maybe the last year or more (although I have made small tweaks to a few of my existing ones).

And well I don't care anymore about React, Angular, or the latest JS frameworks or have any interested with Cloud or Docker....

And as long as I have a decent job, even though it's pretty boring and not much growth.... I don't care and no longer bother trying to get a better one...

Wondering if anyone else feels like they have peaked or just lost the drive and motivation to get better?

I don't know maybe it's just work... Ok my team I think I'm probably the best and will I'm tired of telling other people what they should do.... And maybe also tired of looking for or chasing "opportunities" that don't seem to lead to anything.... Except wasted time and effort?

!rant

Had to build an app using Cordova because... well, I am a web dev and know a shitload of PHP and a good part of JS, but no Swift or Java or whatever.

So there is a deadline set to like half a year after we had the initial talk with the customer. 6 months to build a relatively easy and small app.

So yeah, I procrastinated like one would do when he's got that kind of time left and not much else to do.

And yeah, I did work, but also procrastinated some more. The development was as expected, and I was well in the anticipated time frame.

Then I got a really bad disc prolapse and was sick at home and the hospital for (all together) 5 weeks.

After that, I came back to work for a week, then leaving for a (previously planned) vacation with my little family.

On my first day back at work after the vacation, I quit my job with a 6 weeks notice, of which I have to work 3 weeks.

I know it sounds like I'm a real prick, but it was never planned this way. I never searched for a new job. It just came to me.

I am still finishing the app, though :)

Why am I telling you this?
Well, I do that to show that there still are great bosses out there. My boss has NEVER spoken a bad word to me, even after I quit my job. He's always been kind, fair and understanding.

I just wanted to show that between all these rants about bad bosses and colleagues (which I have had my fair share of in the past), there still are some real gems out there.

Gotta my my boss - he's been one of the best I have had so far.

Peace out folks. Good night...

I actually do have something to rant about!

The people I've decided to work with... are complete and utter fools. They don't want to keep updated with new practices and merely talk about awesome stuff... Let me elaborate.

The first person is someone I spent really many hours just writing with, I've helped him build on his personal project, which has now become our project (which I've done most of the work on now). He keeps writing about things that aren't fucking relevant for the current task - furthermore, he completely refuses to use any type of collaboration software in order to keep an eye on tasks we want to, and already have completed. He likes Git but doesn't provide helpful git messages, sometimes even stuff like 'forgot this'.. never any freaking description of what's actually been done! Not even after agreeing it should be done, he just doesn't understand what a helpful message is apparently.
I might be a bit special regarding wanting to follow practices, but how the fuck do you make any amount of money by being so ignorant!? He was a WP 'developer' a while ago, and has since changed to JS and are using a framework which he doesn't understand - he can't even remember what the documentation states.

So why do I 'work' with him? He knows a lot of phrases he's read in books, blogs, and the likes. That makes him really inspirational and positive and he really wants to become successful(like me!). But over the last few months, I've realized how bad he is at programming - he doesn't know basic programming concepts and have a hard time applying any sort of knowledge to his programming. If it's not pre-built, he can't use it, not even if the documentation has specific examples. He barely grasps the concept of binding data to a variable. He wouldn't know how to access it again though, it's just for the sake of binding it to some existing functionality.

The other guy really likes his old style. He hired me to maintain some application. Which has turned out to be a hell of several small tasks he needs to be finished or reworked - with no clear definition of the task. Most of the time, he'll do some initial changes, show the changes to me, vaguely explain what they do (not what he's trying to achieve) and first THEN ask me to do these changes, most often in some files that don't exist (he uses the wrong filenames so I have to guess/ask where the changes need to be made).
To top it all off, old syntax is used and don't get me started on the spaces+tabs for indenting lines... Because I've already added a great ESLint+Prettier conf and everything should be nicely formatted according to pre-defined rules.
But he won't take the time to install some plugins in his editor and I'm left with sometimes buggy, badly formatted code (the code I have to make changes with!) - that's while he several times have agreed that I can do what I want and that he even questions his own ways when looking at my changes which he calls by-the-book.
So why the motherfucking fuck do I keep working with him?

Well, he keeps paying so that's really nice - I haven't been able to properly execute the bigger tasks(which pays more) though, due to a lack of information or some badly written code I couldn't quite figure out how works (at a glance).

He also keeps talking about these new projects he wants to make.. he even has these freaking papers with descriptions and data-structures and we converse really good about these new awesome projects. He also likes cryptocurrencies(which is an interest of mine he has inflamed quite a bit) and lastly, he seems like a genuinely nice guy who I'd like to spend some time with even besides coding and work.

So now I stand here - stuck with people that make me feel like a demi-god or something because I use a git style-guide and ESLint+Prettier with the Airbnb style-guide.

What should I do? I'd really like some remote work and have a desperate need for money... So much so, that I might even have to pick up a fulltime job, in order to save my sorry ass - all because I like speaking with people who just like the thought of programming...

I'm actually quite lonely with my thoughts and they are the two only people I've had some sort of relationship with - who has an invested interest in programming/dev... I really like that, despite having to follow their thoughts as they surely can't follow mine.

Please be my friend or give me some paid work lol.

Also, I've been moving the last couple weeks - those weeks has been the most stressful of my life and have not contributed to my overall wellbeing and relations with people... It's good to be back at the computer again and be reading some devRant though!

I’m working on a react codebase and company decided to add a new module.
Now im writing markup and css to ensure UX is smooth as designers thought of it.
Imagine my horror when I start to code and find out no matter what HTML tag i use, it’s been FUCKING OVERRIDDEN in the global stylesheet. AND STYLES HAVE BEEN OVERRIDDEN WITH !important

They’re also using Ant design as a component library. Guess what, default ant design classes have been overridden too. So i try to use ant design button or card, and bam, MAGICALLY SOME DESIGN FROM SOME SHITHOLE MODULE DECIDES TO FUCK WITH MY STYLES

On top of that, styles of parts of application has been written in SASS, some part of application uses bootstrap components some use third party components like tables and responsive grids to suit to their preferences. Some parts use handwritten css. Some parts use CSS IN JS and styled components. THE FUCK IS THIS GARBAGE!!!! THE FUCKING CODEBASE HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN!!!!!! YOU NAME A WAY TO ADD STYLES TO A COMPONENT, ITS THERE!!!
And the company’s management thought a “fractal” approach to maintain each individual view is “best” for SCALABILITY!!! HOW THE FUCK DID IT NOT CROSS YOUR DUMB MIND THAT FRACTAL APPROACH ALSO GUIDES TO HAVE ALL COMMON STUFF AT ONE PLACE!!!! THIS CODEBASE HAS DUPLICATE STYLES AND DUPLICATE CODE IN ALMOST EVERY MODULE!!!!

Not to mention every developer choosing to freely decide the way they should write their code without any guidelines.

HOW THE FUCK PEOPLE WRITE THEIR CODE WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT OTHER DEVS!!! SO BASICALLY I AM NOT ONLY CLEANING SOMEONE ELSE’S SHIT BUT ALSO TRY NOT TO SHIT IN THE PROCESS!! FML

I spent 2 weeks at work building a dashbord (not a feature but...) wich provided an overview of projects and tasks managed in redmine (Kanban tool) by using its API. After i finished it we started using it till my boss found out that it was completly "useless" for him - it had all the features he asked for! -.- ...
three days later the redmine server crashed and we changed the provider, nobody missed my dashboard and so it got abandoned :( sometimes i miss it, it looked fancy af and stuff!!
But at least i learned a lot of js and API stuff. I was verry new to js back then :)

Boss asked -> I deliver -> and *pooff* down the river it goes. seems like my tasks have not changed much since then.

I’m sooo excited when any new frontend JS framework is available. Angular, React, more recently Vue, Svelte. Bring ‘em on. I wanna try them all.

Just kidding…
As long as the tools at hand allow me to get the job done, keep clients and end users happy, I don’t give a fuck.
This meme is actually the epitome of what I hate with a lot of web developers I’ve encountered

Just purchased a new domain and decided to once again design my website personally (Fuck wordpress man) but...

I absolutely hate working with HTML and JS at the same time (I actually love JS on its own), its like bloody Stockholm syndrome!

HTML may beat me senseless.. But i love it too much to stop!

A bit late.. and not much about how to learn to code..but more of a figuring out if the kid has a right mind set to do so..

If the kid is not the type to question everything, not resourceful, not a logical/critical thinker, gives up easily and especially if not interested in how things work then being a dev is most probably not for them.. they can still persue coding, but it will end badly..

From my experience, people who have a better education than me, but lack those skills turned out to be a crappy dev.. not interested in the best tool to complete the tasks, just making 'something', adding more shit to the already shitty stack.. and being happy with that.. which of course is not the best way to do things around here..or in life!!

Soo.. if the kid shows all that and most importantly shows interest in learning to code.. throw him the java ultimate edition book and see what happens.. joke!

There are plenty of apps thath can get you started (tried mimo, but being devs yourself it's probably not so hard to check some out and weed out the bad ones) that explain simple logic and syntax.. there is w3schools that explains basics quite well and lets you tinker online with js and python..
so maybe show them these and see what happens.. If it will pick their interest, they will soon start to ask the right questions.. and you can go from there..

If the kids are not the 'evil spawns' of already dev parents or don't have crazy dev aunties and uncles, then they will have to work things out themselves or ask friends... or seek help online (the resourceful part comes here).. so google or any flavour of search engines is their friend..

Just hope they don't venture to stack overflow too soon or they will want to kill themselves /* a little joke, but also a bit true.. */

Anyhow, if the kid is exhibiting 'dev traits' it is not even a question how to introduce it to the coding.. they will find a way.. if not, do not force them to learn coding "because it's in and makes you a lot of moneyz"..
As with other things in life, do not force kids to do anything that you think will be best for them.. Point them in direction, show them how it might be fun and usefull, a little nudge in the right direction.. but do not force.. ever!!!

And also another thing to consider.. most of the documentation and code is written in english.. If they are not proficient, they will have a hard time learning, checking docs, finding answers.. so make sure they learn english first!!
Not just for coding, knowing english will help them in life in general. So maaaaybe force them to learn this a bit..

One day my husband came to me and asked me how he can learn.. and if it's too late for him to learn coding.. that he found some app and if I can take a look and tell him what I think, if it is an ok app to learn..
I was both flattered and stumped at the same time..
Explained to him that in my view, he is a bit old to start now, at least to be competitive on the market and to do this for a living, but if it interests him for som personal projects, why not.. you're never too old to start learning and finding a new hobby..

Anyhow, I've pointed out to him that he will have to better his english in order to be able to find the answers to questions and potential problems.. and that I'm happy to help where and when I can, but most of the job will be on him.

So yeah, showed him some tutorials, explained things a bit.. he soon lost interest after a week and was mindblown how I can do this every day..

And I think this is really how you should introduce coding to kids.. show them some easy tutorials, explain simple logic to them.. see how they react.. if they pick it up easily, show them something more advanced.. if they lose interest, let them be.

To sum up:
- check first if they really want to learn this or this is something they're forced to do (if latter everything you say is a waste of everybodys time)
- english is important
- asking questions (& questioning the code) is mandatory so don't be afraid to ask for help
- admitting not knowing something is the first step to learning
- learn to 'google' & weed out the crap
- documentation is your friend
- comments & docs sometimes lie, so use the force (go check the source)
- once you learn the basics its just a matter of language flavour..adjust some logic here, some sintax there..
- if you're stuck with a problem, try to see it from a different angle
- debugging is part of coder life, learn to 'love' it

I wanted to learn a new language.
Started looking through jvm languages first because thats where i feel home, but they are all just subpar versions of java.
Then i started looking at script languages but anything they do, i can just do with java (i know js too, dont recommend that)
Out of the other languages, c# is the only thing that can give me something extra through unity, but hell, i can just use jMonkey.

So my questions is, can you give me languages that are both useful and unique? Also, opinions on Rust please.

!rant

I'm a rather young developer, self-learned everything and started when I was 13 (now 20) but I still feel like I'm a total beginner since I have not yet mastered the things I am OK at.

Php (laravel, since it makes things much easier), js (jquery, bad at vanilla, have used angular and ember but not mastered), node, linux, html, css, photoshop, illustrator, sql, mongo and windows servers

I know little about many things, can create things that are asked of me but the methods I use are rather bad imo.. ex: I finish coding a section of a site, but when I need to add a new feature I find myself rewriting most of the stuff to add the new feature and in the end still feeling like the code could be optimized further, even though I have no idea how.

TL;DR I write bad code, but things work as long as I am monitoring them. I know little about alot of stuff but mastered none of them.

What should I do? Go to school for programming?

<!doctype confusedRant 😕>

Plot: we need to release our website in two weeks which holds at least a thousand pages. All these pages are manually migrated from the old website, which doesn't have a database. Current status: 650 pages/1000 are completed, 40 different templates need to be adapted. I'm alone on these templates, my colleagues create the pages and fill the new database

So I'm working on the templates a WebDev coded for our website on a licensed CMS, and had this decently simple html block that looks like a square and consisting of roughly this (Emmet style):

a.area > blockquote > strong.title + p

After adding another <a> element inside the p, I noticed that my <a> wouldn't display and bust the whole look of the square.

Just for more details, the CSS the dev made is ultra specified (meaning each element is too precisely "described" : div.class .child .child2 { /* styles */ } when it could be .class .child2 for example). Also, the templates he made need to be compatible with any "module" the website has, thus the need of this high specificity

So I fired up the DevTools to check what happened, and had:

Expected: a.area > blockquote > strong.title + p > a
Actual result: some new a.area were wrapping the <strong>, the <p> and the <a> I just added. The source code was not showing any of this but just the rules I initially wrote - the expected result

Wtf?! I thought the JS the dev made was adding elements. I disabled said JS, and bam, these a.area were still wrapping everything!! What black magic would add these stupid tags I never asked for.

So I went looking in the CSS files in case some wizardry was happening, but everything was OK.

I tried changing my structure, changing tag (swapping a.area to p.area or without .area), HTML just said "nope, have those please".

Eventually I rewrote my own module out of frustration after three quarters of an hour fiddling with this stupid "module". I hate losing time for such shenanigans and under a lot of pressure because of deadlines.

Still haven't figured why those <element>.area would wrap everything out of nowhere...

One of my greatest personal challenges has always been to try and balance "good enough asap" and "but I know how to do this better if I spend a few more days on it". I like to think I've gotten better at it; Leaving things be if they are to spec and keeping my implementations consistent with existing work even if I disagree with it being ideal.

Which makes this new project we're taking over my trial of fire. The combination of the codebase - a Vue app from a previous rant where Vue is mostly used as a callback function to alter the dom using the document api in plain js - and the expectation for us to implement new features and minor tweaks to a user base of literally 4 people is like a charicature of the type of work I struggle with.

Even writing all this I'm evaluating if I'd be able to remake it all from scratch fast enough to sneak it in without anyone noticing.

It's an uh, "opportunity" for me to learn how to handle these situations, I suppose. Have mercy.

after exploring a lot of ui frameworks and architectures, i am trying to go back to android dev but again with the curiosity for the one single question that i had at the start of my career 5 years back : why is it's ui so complex?

can anyone help me understand it?

like comparing with the most basic ui framework : html/css/js, why android is so different? we got activities, fragments and views. the worst thing in android is lifecycles, that each of these ui components have.

The view lifecycle is simple to get over with : whatever is the lifecycle of its parent, is the lifecycle of view.

a view's parent is another view, whose parent is another view, whose parent is... and so on until we reach the root view which is stored by either a fragment or activity

therefore a view's lifecycle = lifecycle of activity or fragment

till here its very clear. the fuckup is simply in the next part:
WTAF is activity ?WTAF is fragment? why are their various functions called in the sequence they are called? oncreate, on start, onstartview, ondestroy... why?
activity is still somewhat okay, but fragment is completey weird af : it can be a part of activity: basically it can cover your complete screen and behave as an activity itself (so you don't get to say that activity === screen and fragment === view) AND IT HAS ITS OWN FUCKING LIFECYCLES! So does that mean fragment's fucntions cna also be called by OS?

what's more mind fucking, is the fact that android activity can destroy/pause or recreate fragments on its own, by some "views" like viewpager , or even hold multiple fragments as "alive" at the same time, using something called a "backstack" ??!??!

and each of these fragments in the stack can be called by system at any time? like wtf???

all these stuff is super confusing and i haven't even scratched the surface. the newer , more complicated stuff like viewmodel, livedata and again "lifecycles" has a complete seperate behavior and functionality of their own. plus the various "reality-check" scenarios like: when a user is streaming a video in picture-in-picture mode while keeping your app in split screen with maps in the second split, when a call comes and the video keeps running, and user rotates the device, let me know the clusterfuck situation for the 3rd fragment in your 5 icon navigation view currently at the payment page with 2 fragments and 1 activity in backstack!!!

god bless thy soul for this shitty framework isn't going anywhere , rather its super strong and getting more clusterfucked with new beautiful shit everyday.

(if someone can ignore my gentle language, i would really like to know/get redirected to some resources where i can learn more on this)

Went to meet up last night. I was there acting like I have no experience and was just starting to learn programming. Suddenly this guy turns and faced me he said non verbatim “don’t use JavaScript thats the worst programming language, its used by wanna be software engineer. Use c# they have blazor so you wont have to code using JS”. My blood pressure went up guys. I understand this because hes kinda old and dont want to learn new things but i got caught off guard. To be honest im not mad, im just sad though, imagine if i was really new and had no experience and just started few months ago. All the hard work and studying will be nothing. Btw hes nice he offered me free food and beer its just JS.

If you’re learning any language specifically JS. Dont mind the naysayers. Just learn it and be good at it. Languages has its use cases. Conversation with whats better programming language is useless and a waste of time thats what my professor said and its true.

Not a js expert. I'm trying to learn a new js framework so I'm stuck between angular and react. I'm a Django dev, so I'll be mostly using this framework in my Django apps. Which one should I learn? I'm migrating from jquery so please don't be harsh at me 😅

After some time, planning to install Linux again for personal use and some dev work at home. My current pc is getting too slow sometimes and it irritates me a lot.

My current pc 2gb RAM, Dual core Intel, 32 bit.

Main criteria, os should be fast, I can compromise on GUI, should be stable, should support my old configuration. I like to work on Java/Scala, python, js and sql. Eclipse will be there since I use it at work.

Short listed Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS,
mint (huge confusion on gui),
Opensuse, elementary OS and arch. I had Ubuntu, mint for some time as secondary OS. Arch will be totally new world for me. I have tried few OS in USB boot but couldn't fix one.

Right now I am confused about which one to choose, since everything looks fine but I want the best choice based on my criteria.

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.

Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.

With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.

All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.

I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.

Say what you will but React JS development is utterly exhausting. Every React project is a totally new stack and there is no consensus in the ecosystem.That is how I feel after having worked on 5 big SPA React JS projects over the course of 5 years.

The structure of these projects was all but similar: most used HOC's, some render props, functions-as-a-child, hooks or rather component lifecycles, some used container-components, some Redux, others sprinkled business logic & state all over, and yet others use a mix of server-side rendering and "hydration"...

I dangerouslySetInnerHTML on LazyExoticComponents, and dared not useEffect on the DO_NOT_TOUCH_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED root property. Hooks embrace functions, but without sacrificing the practical spirit of React, you see.

I didn't make this up. It's verbatim from the code and the docs.
This is not web development, this is at best a tedious fantasy multiplayer game or at worst, a costly joke.

do I really need another tool to make my life more simple in the js world?? I mean who the fuck thinks we need another choice in this js world at this point? data layer used to be the easy part for me, now I need this new great thing I can't live without?? and the have to have new way tool never simplifies. like ever. sequelize my balls.

I got a new idea : I'm writing some python scripts to help me in my projects at school, I think it will help me a lot !

But I would like to code some scripts for my side-projects that are made using full JS.
NodeJS + Express + Sequelize for the Web API and ReactJS and HighlightJS for the client.

I would like to know if you could give me some ideas of scripts I could write for these JS side-projects ?

Today is the last day of my placement.

Over the past year, I began working on small front end bugs, to becoming the sole front end developer on the project, to being full stack.

Back in July, I and the other dev on the project released the app into the wild. It now is reaching 100 users.

The app has a lot of external dependencies (10+), one of which could cripple it entirely should it cut us off (which they can do at any time, it's a free API).

I was given, effectively a week and a two days to do a complete handover/transfer of knowledge to the placement student that will be taking my place. They hadn't touched front end (like me) when starting, but also had no experience in node/js.

As of this, I can't leave feeling like I've fully completed my work, and I feel bad leaving the new guy with these clients. Undoubtedly I'll be doing some off-the-record help.

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 🤬🤬🤬

Another new JS library rears it's head. It's called 'Preact.js'.

I'm as little suspicious at this point. Is it written by devs from China? A year from now I'll have to learn 'Predux' if Preact gains popularity.

!rant
I have my 121 in a few days with my new manager and am trying to get a raise either through moving from junior to mid level dev or being given a significant raise , am being paid a tad below the London market rate's lower range for my skill level.

Any advice on how to approach the topic?

Some bits of my background:

I got almost 4 years of exp :
almost 2 working there...
6 months short term contract as a ruby sql dev another company...
1.5 years worked for an abusive joke of a company who took advantage of my naivety since i was fresh out of uni ( did stuff like pressured me to add more features to a pojo system i made for them) barely learned anything there since i was the only IT person there developing solo, the project lasted 1.5 years and was a total mess to finish, so am not too sure of factoring it into my years of exp.

My Qualifications are:
bsc in information systems
Msc in enterprise sw engineering

My "new" Manager is seeking to retire real soon.

The company isn't doing too well but we just landed 2 big customers who are buying the product my team is working on

I Am one of two last devs on my team and we are barely holding on with the load, can't afford the time to train a newbie to join us

my department is soon to be sold (soon according to what mgr says). They have been saying so for 10 months now.

Last year , since the acquisition Is taking so long and funds were running out We were hit by a wave of redundancies which slashed our workforce in august/ july, told we could last till march this year on our funds . Even senior staff were on a reduced work week...but since we Got new customers then money should be coming in again , this should mean thats no longer the case. Even the senior staff have returned to 5 day work weeks.

Am being given only JavaScript work to do despite being hired as a junior java dev, my more senior colleagues dont wanna even touch js with a long stick

Spoke to 3 recruiters , said they got open roles in the junior- mid level range that pay the proper market range if am interested to put my cv through.
Thats like 25% more than I currently make.

Am a bit scared to jump into a mid level position in another company because i lack a bit confidence in my core java skills.
although a senior dev who used to be on my team thinks i can do it.
i recon i can take on the responsibilities of a mid level dev in me existing company since am pretty familiar with the products

I dont get to work with senior devs and learn from them since we are so stretched thin, hence am not really getting the chance to grow my skills

I know i have gaps in my knowledge and skills having not been able work in java for a while hasn't allowed me to fix that too well. I badly need to learn stuff like proper unit testing, not the adhoc rubbish we do at the moment, frameworks like spring etc

Since I have been pretty much pushed into being the js guy for the large chunks of the project over the last year , its kinda funny am the only guy who has the barest idea how some of the client facing stuff works

The new manager does seem to be a nice guy but he is like a politician, a master bullshitter who kept reassuring all is well and the company is fineeee (just ignore the redundancies as the fly past you)

The deal for thr aquisition seem to have sped up according to rumors
And we heard is a massive company buying us, hence things might pick up again and be better than ever

Any ideas how to approach the 121 with him?

Any advice career wise?
Should i push for a raise ?
promotion to mid?
Leave to find a junior to mid level position?
Tought it out and wait for the take over or company crash while trying to fill the gaps in my knowledge ?

Sorry for the length of this post

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!

I think I've asked this before. Just cropped up again cuz I'm pushed to do some stuff in nextjs

I Wonder how much longer before js framework devs realise they've been reverse engineering the browser this whole time, that the current browser spec was outdated since the dawn of Web fidelity and real time applications

I wonder whether there are some guys who have seen this and are already cooking in the background. The browser still treats the Internet like front end and back end, whereas with the way apps are going (eg deprecation of the front/back end roles), it seems apparent the browser needs to scale up by fading whatever js is now

I'm seeing "use server", which was one of php's infamous atrocities back in the day (lack of separation of concerns, everything in index.php). It's shocking how those who ridicule that language let this fly, but that's probably a separate thread. Point is, a bunch of these stuff done by front end frameworks seem like boilerplate but the syntax is far different from what I remember javaScript to be. I only vaguely recollect and understand what I'm reading

Why not merge all the cryptic syntaxes struggling to achieve bare minimal expectations, into advanced markup language controlled by dom attributes? Overhaul and Rethink client - server communication to fit modern standard. Someone needs to step out of the box and take a good look at the rat race. I find our lives would be made much simpler if api integration into client side behaviour wasn't a separate thing altogether

You have all these funny hoops and precarious bridges to cross. The reality is what we're fighting to overcome is the manner the architecture is setup. We need a Google/meta/amazon/apple to step in with a new browser since it's not a weekend gig and might need their reach to catch on with mainstream users. Sadly, they're the same guys rolling out new js frameworks

Not sure if I'm sick or I'm actually in my full sense ....

I reached a point that I'm sick of all that million language to work with, maintain lots of shit, and started to consider using Flutter and get it done.

But I still don't like to build on these things because well, for the lots of trouble I went through in React Native, and yet again in Flutter having to modify several plug-ins because they don't support a simple feature as simple as Authentication header

I thought I'd give SwiftUI a go, but for a starter:
1. No pull to refresh
2. No proper grid (aka UICollectionView)
3. Comparing SwiftUI with Flutter, Google did a better job at keeping things simple
4. Only iOS 13+ supports SwiftUI, their statistics might show 90% using latest update, but that's their target audience, mine might be 90% not on latest update ...

Just some midnight thougts filled with frustration and wondering: How do web developers keep up with those "look ma! I made a new JS Framework!!" their life must be tougher ....

[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 job

Quick question to you guys and gals,

I really want to become an iOS app developer. I know it would be long and painful way to learn Objective-C (some say it looks like alien language compared to C). Swift is rather new, much easier to learn, but I know Objective-C is a must to be considered as true iOS dev.

The question is: is there such a need of iOS developers (I mean UK/Canada/US/Germany)?. I live in Poland and there's not much to do in iOS development (few job offers, everybody is hyped by JS and frameworks changing every year, some offers are often underpayed remote work for foreign clients). I am now 20 years old, still learning at Uni and not having any responsibilities, so I may go someday to UK for a year or two, since the market for iOS devs is more diversed and bigger than in Poland. I know I am complaining (most Poles do that), but I've learned English since I was 4 and it's a pity not to use it as a resource to get a better job offer than in my mother country.

Thanks for all the responses, especially from people working as iOS devs

!rant advice needed

I have an interview at a company this week who work in PHP, magento, angular js, swift and sometimes c#. Sounds quite good for a new grad with one year of experience in PHP and front end.

The problem is the salary is 20-22k. My friends are looking in London and the ones who ha e secured roles are 36k and 40k. They are roughly the same level of developers as me.

So what to do? Probably turn it down? I don't know what o should expect but I was hoping for around 30k. I need the money for personal reasons and 22k doesn't seem like a lot for a first class computer science graduate with a year and a half industry experience. I could be wrong?

!rant apologies

I am a third year computer science student and I'm interested to see how professionals think I stack up against grads they have worked with straight from uni.

I have spent 15 months at a web company working on bespoke solo products on LAMP stacks. I know html, css, JavaScript and its library JQuery very well (I know JavaScript is massive to be saying I know it well)

I am reasonable at PHP and MySQL. Currently I am studying node.js and building an api that mashes up data from other APIs to build a new service. I'm also working on a C# Microsoft framework bespoke website. I know git to a reasonable level - branches, merges, rollbacks and all that jazz.

I am also studying development architectures to try and be more useful.

So if you guys came across a new grad that knew HTML, css, JavaScript, JQuery, maybe angular js, PHP, basic Linux commands, MySQL, C#, dev architectures, agile methods, node.js, git and has 15 months experience working on small to medium sized solo projects would you want to hire them?

Point to note I'll probably graduate first class (80%+) from a mid range uni.

Sorry, I know this is not the place but I like this community.

TL;DR I just recently started my apprenticeship, it's horrible so far, I want to quit, but don't know what to do next...

Okay, first of all, hey there! My name is Cave and I haven't been on here for a while, so I hope the majority of you is doing rather okay. I'm programming for 6 years now, have some work experience already, since I used to volunteer for a company for half a year, in which I discovered my love for integrations and stuff. These background information will probably be necessary to understand my agony in full extend.

So, okay, this is about my apprenticeship. Generally speaking, I was expecting to work, and to learn something, gaining experience. So far, it only involved me, reading through horrible code, fixing and replacing stuff for them, I didn't learn a thing yet, and we are already a month in.

When I said the code is horrible, well, it is the worst I have ever seen since I started programming. Little documentation - if any -, everywhere you look there is deprecated code, which may or may not been commented out, often loops or simply methods seem to be foreign for them, as the code is cluttered with copy paste code everywhere and on top of that all, the code is slow as heck, like wtf.

I spent my past month with reading their code, trying to understand what most of this nonsense is for, and then just deleting and rewriting it entirely. My code suddenly is only 5% or their size and about 1000 times faster. Did I mention I am new to this programming language yet? That I have absolutely no experience in that programming language? Because well I am new and don't have any experience, yet, I have little to no struggle doing it better.

Okay, so, imagine, you started programming like 20 years ago, you were able to found your own business, you are getting paid a decent amount of money, sounds alright, right? Here comes the twist: you have been neglecting every advancement made in developing software for the past 20 years, yup, that's what it feels like to work here.

At this point I don't even know, like is this normal? Did git, VSCode and co. spoil me? Am I supposed to use ancient software with ancient programming languages to make my life hell? Is programming supposed to be like this? I have no clue, you tell me, I always thought I was doing stuff right.

Well, this company is not using git, infact, they have every of their project in a single folder and deleting it by accident is not that hard, I almost did once, that was scary. I started out working locally, just copying files, so shit like that won't happen, they told me to work directly in the source. They said it's fine, that's why you can see 20 copies of the folder, in the same folder... Yes, right, whatever.

I work using a remote desktop, the server I work on is Windows server 2008, you want to make icons using gimp? Too bad, Gimp doesn't support windows server 2008, I don't think anything does anymore, at least I haven't found anything, lol.

They asked me to integrate Google Maps into their projects, I thought it is gonna be fun, well, turns out their software uses internet explorer 9.. and Google maps api does not support internet explorer 9... I ended up somehow installing CEF3 on that shit and wrote an API for it in JS. Writing the API was actually kind of fun, but integrating it in their software sucked and they told me I will never integrate stuff ever again, since they usually don't do that. I mean, they don't have a Backend as far as I can tell, it looks like stuff directly connects with their database, so I believe them, but you know... I love integrating stuff..

So at this point you might be thinking, then why don't you just quit? Well I would, definitely. I'm lucky that till December I can quit without prior notice, just need a resignation as far as I can tell, but when I quit, what do I do next? Like, I volunteered for a company for half a year and I'd argue I did a good job, but with this apprenticeship it only adds up to about 7 months of actual work experience. Would anybody hire somebody with this much actual work experience? I also consider doing freelancing, making a living out of just integrating stuff, but would people pay for that? And then again, would they hire somebody with this much experience? I don't want to quit without a plan on what to do next, but I have no clue.

Am I just spoiled, is programming really just like that, using ancient tools and stuff? Let me know. Advice is welcomed as well, because I'm at a loss. Thanks for reading.

People, help me out.

(first some abstract thoughts)

I am a final year undergrad yet to take steps in the world and i am trying to figure out what to do with my time, what my end goal and next steps should be.

As of now I think my end goal is "relaxation , peace and happiness of me and my loved ones", and to reach there , i need money.

My younger self chose engineering for a particular reason(that i vaguely remember) and weather it was a right or wrong/illogical decision, i guess i am stuck with it and have to use this only to reach my end goal.
Maybe i am regretting this and want to change. Maybe i am just a lazy ass who is bad in his assigned role of an engineer and is running towards glitter in other fields, whatever it is , i am not going against the decision of my past and accepting my identity as an engineer.
I believe once i am able to achieve my goal( that am still not sure about but overall is a good one from general perspective), i guess i will be satisfied

------------------------------------------------
(enough with the deep stuff)

I want to learn how to "learn" . like i am always conflicted about what to do next once the tutor leaves my hand.

for eg, let's say i goto a site abc.

1. They got 1 course each for android , web dev and ai. I choose the web dev course and give my hardworking attention to it
( At this point my choice is usually based on the fact that <A> i should not be stupid to buy all 3 course even if i have money/desire to buy all of em because riding 2 horses is only going to break my ass and <B> some pseudo stats like whichever got more opportunity, which i "like", etc(Point B is usually useless in the long run i guess) )

2. From what i have experienced, these courses usually have a particular list of topic that they cover and apply them to 1 or 2 projects. For eg, say that my web dev course taught me 20 something concepts of basic html/css/js/server and the instructor applied it to blog website

BUT WHAT IS NEXT ?

2.1.
>> Should I make more projects using only those particular list of concepts?
I usually have a ton of ideas that i want to implement now that i know how to build a blog site.
say i got a similar idea to make say url shortner. I start with full enthusiasm but in the middle way there is some new thing that i don't know and when i search the internet, i realize that there are 5 ways to implement such concept, making me wander off towards a whole list of concepts that were not covered in my original 20 concept course. This makes the choice 2. 2

2.2
>> Should I just leave everything , go to docs and start learning concepts from the scratch ??
Usually when i start a project, i soon realize that the original 20 concepts were just the tip of iceberg and there are a ton of things one should know, like how os works, how a particular component interacts with another, how the language is working, how the compiler is executing, etc .
At that point i feel like tearing all my notes away, and learning every associated thing from the scratch. No matter how much my project suffers, i want to know how the things are working from the bottom , like how the requests are being mad, how the routes are working, etc which might not even be relevent for the project.

Why i want to follow approach 2? because of the Goal from abstract thoughts. in theory, having deep knowledge is going to clear my interview thereby getting me a good job.
I will get good money, make projects faster and that will be a happily ever after story.

But in practical this approach is bringing me losses and confusion. every layer of a particular thing i uncover, turns out there is another layer below that. The learning never stops. Plus my original project remained incomplete.

What is your opinon, how do you figure out what to do next?

firstly, does anyone know of an online telegram or whatsapp group where i can ask silly stuff regarding web dev and get immediate answers, just like it is here?

secondly i am trying to learn js and there are just too many related terms that are messing with my brain:
"some features are supported ines5/es6/es15/es16/es17 , some are supported in chrome's v8/chakra/spidermonkey/android browser , some features are only supported in "serverside" and blocked in all browsers thanks to browser's vm environment; babel can't read this code, some features are provided only by node js..."
WHAT THE MESS IS THIS?

All i am trying to do is to write code that would make a website visible to everyone. if by specific browser , i want to target, chrome and its subsidaries and android chrome/other android browsers .
for other browsers am willing to make external converters later but don't want to change my code by 1 bit. And from what i know, each browser (at least the browsers am thinking of supporting) has the complete JS compilers already built in

can i or can i not built a complete functional website with those things?

and finally my main question : how to make custom exceptions in vanilla js? i saw this answer on stack overflow:
===================
function InvalidArgumentException(message) {
this.message = message;
// Use V8's native method if available, otherwise fallback
if ("captureStackTrace" in Error)
Error.captureStackTrace(this, InvalidArgumentException);
else
this.stack = (new Error()).stack;
}

InvalidArgumentException.prototype = Object.create(Error.prototype);
InvalidArgumentException.prototype.name = "InvalidArgumentException";
InvalidArgumentException.prototype.constructor = InvalidArgumentException;

Usage:

throw new InvalidArgumentException();
var err = new InvalidArgumentException("Not yet...");

=====================================

where is the error code? what would be the exception details? what is the line number/timestamp of error?why is that function making an error, i thought error/exception is a class in JS?

Asking for a friend....

New job, fairly new to web development, very new to JS. I am failing miserable at my job can’t complete tickets which are mostly bug fixers created by testers. So I am debugging code that I didn’t write on a tech stack I do not know (ampersand, q, radio, lodash, react, etc)

Do I try to learn the language better?
or
Focus on learning debugging with dev tools and getting better at using the webstorm IDE.

Ooh this project.. So I was put in charge of creating new pages, and general maintenance as the site was already built by a previous dev on the team before i joined the company. I take a look at the design, fairly strange forward quick analysis most of it bootstrapable, some custom code is needed for some parts so no issues there.

Looks at the code, only the bootstrap grid system is being used, the rest is custom code, an additional 9K lines of CSS and 526 lines of JS. What the hell is this.

The thing about me is that I always like to test new language, I like python javascript(node js, ...) and swift but at works I use pho and JavaScript, every time I start a project in a certain language than after some weeks I forget what I learn because I don't use every day

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 ?

How do you pick a new language to learn?

I am a C# developer and at work I work on desktop apps and legacy web services etc.

I fancy learning something else so I can have a bit of variety when working on personal projects etc.

I am doing a distance learning degree which has used Java and Python so far, with some PHP and JS etc to come later.

I’m drawn to Ruby as I already have experience there, but I was also thinking about looking at Node as that covers back end and front end all using JS which is definitely useful in general as I look at moving to a more web based role.

Many people seem to hate jQuery and want to do stuff in some library's way, and I'm here like... What? jQuery is a perfect way of doing things like DOM manipulation, when everyone comes along with their libs, they will only exist for 1 microsecond before it gets abandoned, while jQuery has been around for YEARS and it still works the way it first has been

I don't get the appeal for new JS libs and hate for jQuery, at this point I'm suprised its included in standard browser contexts

Sophomore year starting soon so I'm looking for new project (s) to complete in parallel with the studies.
Some are more design-y and some more backend-y but I recently started getting better at designing so :)

1) Learn some fragment shader stuff. I've always been messing around with graphics and have a game on steam, so I think that's a good idea to be paired with signal processing.

2) Reactive web services. Preferably with spring-boot or vert.x but

3) I would also like to dive into golang (and make some reactive thing with it)

4) WebAssembly seems nice... But I got some concerns

5) exercise making wireframes -> CSS (with some js)

6) I've never really done any real backed work with nodejs, except serving and aot compiling js, or doing gulp tasks

7) Implementing a whole project, or a fraction of it as serverless on aws

* I'm definitely going to use a couple very simple services to make a docker swarm with load balancing, etc, just because I know how everything works but got no practical knowledge

8) Design an esports jersey for the university department I'm in (shouldn't take long)

So what do you guys think? Recommendations are welcome :)

P.S. last year in review:
> A webapp running on a raspberry pi powering a reflex testing game on gpio (java/spring-boot , codename: buttonmasher)
> small Elastic search cluster to monitor some random university servers through kibana dashboards
> laser tracking on wall of *any* colour and variable light conditions via a webcam (opencv) , controlling the mouse pointer, whether you run it against a projector or any wall
> jstrain.herokuapp.com => a small JavaScript powered tool with a DSL to help you train more efficiently without a coach
> Various random Photoshop stuff

Today I submitted to code review the first iteration of a microservice done with Ramda and flow by request of my collegues. This is the first time they look at anything similar to functional code or typed js, and only one of them took the time to actually do a review.

I really like having my code reviewed and reviewing others', but please don't pester me to make a PR for a microservice you'll never look only to bail off as soon as you see something new that scares you. Buckle up and learn new stuff!