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 got this t-shirt from Amazon. 😂
Open source ❤️

Just created a CLUSTERED INDEX -- knowingly and intentionally -- for the first time. I feel like a frickin' sorcerer.

If ever there was something like dark ages, then we are living it: which programmer still knows what his statement does through the whole software stack down to the CPU (and could also account for what a modern CPU does with all its cores, caches, pipelines and -1, -2, -3 rings). Piled higher and deeper. I know nothing. So it's like being a cargo cult sorcerer, conjuring copy&pasted spells from SO to invoke Bjarne's, Linus' or whomevers forlorn spirit, so this shit won't break.

That I'm actually as good as my coworker tell me.

I have much to learn, no question there.
But for a long Time i didn't believe that I should be a programmer and do profesionally what makes me fun.

A lot of thanks to that goes to my two coworkers, which i'll soon leave.
(the next big personal challenge: to leave the first friends i ever made. Even though that we'll Stay in contact)

Do you all sometimes have this strange feeling, that.. actually humanity would not lose anything, if we killed all that useless tech we earn our money with?

Yeah, we get all that propaganda how technical prowess is empowering and sure we all know it's a nice feeling if you can apply the right clicks and bit flips to make the machine do as you want so you feel like the apprentice's sorcerer.

BUT even if you believe your user story adds some business value to some abstract package - what do these devices mostly do? Distract, diffuse your focus, envy other eye-porn provider, endless aberration of clips.

Fuck social media!
(Yes, I know I am on one, but this is because I haven't given up hope on this one.)

Being a modern day sorcerer, capable of building exotic creations through sheer force of will, constantly learning and advancing the craft

I was determined PHP advocate, always ready for debate with PHP criticizers. I am stacking with dozen other languages so I used to think I have all right to do just that. My code is fully OO, I used to scale FPM horizontally, eventually, with help of pthreds even vertically. With help of redis and chaching, I thought I was sorcerer, as I always find a way (or way around) to make things work, things that no one used to beleive it's possible. One day I started to work for language engineering company, when I suddenly realized how PHP often fails with it's come to localizations, translation, exotic charsets and over all multibyte operations. :( Whole this thing collapses. Wholes everywhere...