Boss: “Our YouTube channel doesn’t look at all like our website.”

Me: “I’ve made it look as close to our branding as YouTube allows for with its limited editing controls.”

Boss: “This is unacceptable. I expected more from you.”

Me: “I cannot accept the blame for this. YouTube is setting the design parameters for all channels and I can only do so much.”

Boss: “You can call the YouTube, can’t you? Why didn’t you call them?”

Me: “.......and ask them....what?”

Boss: “You don’t ask! You tell! Our company has been around for 140 years. Our brand name carries that weight. They’ll change their design to what we need if you’re assertive enough.”

Me: “Ma’am, that’s just not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.”

Sit down, Alexa. Sit. Down.

I would be SO pissed.

Every website: “Please disable your ad blocker to have a better experie—“

Me:

How I feel when I have to do the marketing side of a website.

Meditation for the rest of us...

Me (5 days ago): A major, life-threatening hurricane is coming. I need to prepare. I know you have a need to launch so I will do my best to finish your project.

Client: Ok, stay safe.

Client (today): I know you're not done. You're late actually. To provoke you into further action, we went ahead and announced the launch and people will begin using the website now.

Me (at the store buying food for the next two week): What in the actual ... Here is your code. Finish it yourself. May God have mercy on your cold, dark soul.

When doing a coding project for lawyers, hire a lawyer. That is all.

Tried to impress the boss with my work ethic by staying late to install a new VoIP system. Wasn’t even part of my job description. A few days later I had a flat tire on the way to work. It took me a couple hours to get that taken care of. When I got to work, the boss told me I had to work 2 extra hours that week to make it up. I reminded him that I had worked overtime recently to install his new phone system. He said, “Doesn’t matter. You still need to make up the hours.”

From that moment on I never worked one second more for him than I had to. I quit less than a year into the job.

Me: “I’m gonna rebuild this site from the ground up.”
Also me, 5 minutes into it: “Can’t figure out this stupid CSS thing I need to do. Gonna take a quick break.”
Also also me, looking at it 5 days later:

Just went skydiving. Realized I probably should have left behind all my clients' site admin passwords in case my chute didn't open. Turns out I'm still alive so no harm done.

Life Coach: "I want a website where I can charge $5,000 for 6 weeks of coaching for [weird life problem very few people have or think about].

Me: "That'll be $5,000."

Life Coach: "That's too expensive for a website."

Me (inner voice): "tHaT's ToO eXpEnSiVe FoR a WeBsItE."

Me (real voice): "Consider it not as a cost but as an investment necessary to obtaining your first customer. Once the first customer is realized, you've paid for the website and the future customers will make you profitable.

At the peak of the dotcom boom of the early 2000s I had been hired above my skill set because recruiters were desperate to fill seats. I had a pulse and could code even a little so they hired me.

I was the senior web developer on an agency contract with a major corporation working on an ASP (pre ASP.NET) website. I had hired a temp to help me with the workload and one day, in exasperation at my spaghetti code and non-understanding of MVC concepts, he threw his hands in the air and exclaimed, "Do you even know what you're doing?!"

Not having the type of personality to give any subordinate a dressing down for insubordination, I just felt awkward. He was right, of course. I used that as impetus to study more and attend conferences. I'm still a below-average coder because my brain struggles with math and logic. A lot. But that definitely took me down a peg. All those recruiters treating me like I was hot snot on a silver platter when I was really just a cold booger on a paper plate.

Boss, on a Saturday: "Here's some code to upload."

Me: "Bruh..."

If you want a career where you can never do enough to make clients happy, choose web development.

Google: “Your websites must load the first byte in under 500ms and be fully loaded with no render blocking and local caching of all external site callouts to even begin to rank in Google searches.”

Me: “Ok, Google. Your wish is my command.”

*Looks at Chrome’s memory usage to load a blank page*

Well. My life is over. I got punchy and accidentally deleted a client’s entire site. Backups and all. Wasn’t paying attention to which specific delete feature I was using and POOF. It’s all gone.

The worst part? I was actually just trying to delete a staging site where I was trying out some stuff to try to win a site redesign contract. Now it looks like I’ll be paying THEM for damages and/or building them a new site for FREE.

I’m so done.

So apparently the Amazon S3 outage happened because of one setting being wrong in a looooong string of commands issued to shut down just a few servers.

Am I the only Linux user who totally gets how that could happen to just about anyone regardless of how awesomely competent they might be?

Ok, people who invented CSS... which seems more intuitive and easier to read?

div {
margin-right: auto;
margin-left: auto;
}

Or

div {
center-this-damn-div: true;
}

I'm seriously considering never doing fixed rate projects for clients ever again. The conversation will likely go like this, though:

"How much to build my website?"
"$100/hour."
"Sorry, I don't think you heard me correctly. I asked how much to build the whole website."
"$150/hour"
"Wait, you changed the rate! Why won't you give me a fixed cost?"
"Why won't you pay me for my time?"
"Because I can get it done for a cheaper fixed cost somewhere else!"
"But how do you know that's actually cheaper?"
"What do you mean?"
"We pad fixed price projects precisely because we fear not being fully paid for our time."
"Oh."

Website A = Website B
Script to import CSV file on Website A = works
Script to import CSV file on Website B = !works
Clock = 4am
Me = null

“Please develop my complicated eCommerce website. The cost should be somewhere between $0 and $100 because I can do it with a template in Wix or SquareSpace or hire a bot non-person from Fiverr to do it for me if you don’t honor the price I’m asking.”

—United States

Client, two months ago: "Where is the new and complicated custom software?! We needed this a week ago!"

Also client three weeks after delivery: "We still don't have time to test the new and complicated custom software. You'll have to wait for payment a little longer."

TL;DR, employers are often penny wise and pound foolish.

One morning, my vehicle had a potentially life-threatening condition that I needed fixed before I could drive to work. I was 3 hours late but made a productive day of it. Plus I had stayed late after work, for no pay, a couple of nights because I have the kind of work ethic that compels me to do weird stuff like that occasionally.

When the time clock report came out it showed I was 3 hours short for the pay period. I brought up that I had "paid it forward" a few weeks prior and asked for an exception based on that. I was told that a) all "extra" work had to have been approved prior to doing it and b) that pay period had already passed, so no, I'd need to make up the hours. Being pretty miffed at being so nickled-and-dimed, and for being expected to drive to work in spite of the possibility of losing my life, I just had them take it out of my time off.

Fast forward to my latest monthly review: After another potentially life-threatening vehicle breakdown and fix, I decided to ask whether I could have a couple of telecommute days per week to offset fuel and mileage to recover the repair cost for the wear and tear on my vehicle. The answer was "No, because then everyone will want to work from home and then we'd have no way to know if they're really working."

On that same day I got an offer for doing the same job at another company for 100% telecommute and at nearly twice the salary. I turned in my resignation two days later. Now they're scrambling to try to replace me.

Got an all expenses paid trip to the Bahamas as part of a company recognition initiative. They rewarded me for a database and website that made a series of books searchable by key learning attributes and resulted in several big sales. Last I checked it was still in use.

The Matrix, minus the oppressive AI overlord, so I can jack into it and learn all the frameworks necessary to build said dream project.

Everyone’s a remote worker at our company by default. Literally no HQ or central physical office to report to. As it should be for most people who are knowledge workers or coders. Why commute and pollute and all that nonsense? It doesn’t make sense anymore for a lot of people like us.

Google: You need a fast website to rank well.
Me: Ok, so why does your Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Optimize code drag my site down to the seventh circle of Hell in performance?
Google: You need a fast website to rank well.
Me: ...

Team Lead: "Today we're going to discuss how we can be more inclusive with getting people on board with XYZ organization. StackODev, what ideas do you have?"

Me: "Uh. Not really sure. I mean, it's not like we're being 'exclusive' in any way. People can join the XYZ organization without any restraint or discrimination. They just sign up on the website and they're done. There are no litmus tests of any aspect of their demographics or beliefs."

Team Lead: "Yeah, but how do we make sure we're getting more of Wanted Group A so that it's not as much of Less Wanted Group B?"

Me: "Well, that's a different question, isn't it? That would maybe meet the diversity and equity goal, but wouldn't that defeat the inclusion goal? Isn't it 'exclusive' to put more effort into attracting Wanted Group A people and less effort into attracting Less Wanted Group B people? And at what point do we draw the line between creating an enrollment system that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive and one that favors Group A over Group B explicitly?"

Team Lead: "Why don't you shut up now and we'll get ideas from some other team members."

My favorite client just brought in a new team member who thinks he's god's gift to web development and design. Every week he gives me a long list of things he thinks are wrong with the website.

Now he's cloning pages of the site and adding hideously distorted images and excel screenshots of information matrices formatted the way he wants them. And he wants them published as he has made them because his ideas are obviously the best ones! (guess who he voted for)

He also claims that nobody can figure out how to purchase anything on the site, including him! Even after I've made it so you'd have to be frickin' Helen Keller not to be able to stumble over a BIG FAT BUY NOW BUTTON literally everywhere you look because this site is for geriatric senile MORONS who can't click their way out of a paper bag!!!

I think I'm doomed when it comes to posting the kinds of rants that get upvotes. The pattern I've noticed is that profanity-laden rants get more love than ones that are more tame. I was raised old-school, so profanity isn't my thing. Guess I'll just sit back and watch.

Does anyone else not enjoy pair programming? As an introvert who prefers to "work alone" and someone who has to look stuff up frequently, even things I "should know by now", I find pair programming very anxiety-inducing. I'm always wondering if the person I'm programming with thinks I'm an idiot/imposter.

When a company comes at you with a skills test or a stupid whiteboard interview, while completely disregarding your portfolio/GitHub/other proofs of competence, run far away.

It was 1999. I was just starting my first real job as a programmer for a major insurance company. We were working on code that would screen scrape legacy mainframe data output and convert it to a web-based UI. REALLY stupid project approach I had no input on. I happened to find a programmer in Germany who had released his code in the public domain that would help with making a certain conversion task easier. I downloaded his code and put it to work.

During a code review, a programmer who was probably about 60 asked me where I got the code and what it was doing. I didn't even get to the part about what it was doing because he made fun of me so badly, in a fake German accent in front of a room full of non-programmers, for using code that today is no big deal due to the prevalence of open source. I just clammed up in humiliation because he got everyone laughing at me. His philosophy was if we didn't buy it or write it ourselves, we had no business using it.

I guess I was just ahead of my time?

AM I THE ONLY PERSON WHO READS THE CSS !important RULE AS ACTUALLY SAYING THAT SOMETHING IS _NOT_ IMPORTANT EVEN WHEN IT MEANS THAT IT _IS_?!!

Just kill me.

My therapist tells me I’m not allowed to talk about problems I’ve had with designers anymore. *pops a valium*

My daughter made me two things:
1) She found a rock in the shape of an “alien” head. Knowing I love to research UFOs, she used nail polish to decorate the rock like an alien. And I just love it!

2) I have a reputation for being just like Charlie Brown with my luck in life. I also suck at math. Like, really, really bad. I was diagnosed with dyscalculia 22 years ago. It’s a running joke at our house such that I even have the t-shirt she depicts me wearing in this painting of “me” she did for my birthday.

In my last job they required us to turn on a task timer for every little thing. Remembering to do that, and to turn it off, was a royal pain. First I had to look up which task it is, start the timer, stop the timer, find the next task and repeat, then flip back to the first task. Lots of open browser tabs within tab groups to keep track of it all. And if I came up short or went over on budget, there was a “conversation” with management to account for discrepancies. Then I had to go by memory and try to reconstruct the “missing time” accurately enough to be convincing.

Now that I’m freelancing, I try to keep up the habit because it does have merit for tracking estimates and actuals, but now it’s just me to answer to for discrepancies and I can fudge the numbers as I see fit. The time records did, however, save my bacon in a recent dispute.

When I was in college in 1996, one of my roommates had a “Web 101” class. At that same time, the office of a government agency I was working for had asked me to publish a website to let the public know what they were doing. Prior to that I had bought an HTML 1.0 reference and had been fiddling around with some things. I got excited about it all when I realized that just within 2 weeks of using the book I had passed up the entire class my roommate was taking and apparently knew more at that point than the professor. I published the agency site, then went on to build sites for the Uni and freelance clients, and then to apply to teach a more advanced class in the Continuing Education courses the Uni offered to adults in the community. All of that got me a job at a startup which led to the rest of my career. That was pretty dang exciting to me.

I wonder if I'm getting tired of making websites for people. I just "fired" two longtime clients today without really caring all that much. Not for no reason. They just were asking too much for too little. And I was getting bored of them. When I think about what I want to do in my spare time, the first thing I think about is creative writing. The last thing I think about is code and website design. It didn't used to be this way.

Just got a signed contract for a new client's project. PLEASE don't be crooks! PLEASE pay me on time. PLEASE don't make my life miserable. Like the last one did.

How I feel when I ask a question on StackOverflow...

!Rant
Had an employee evaluation today that I had been anticipating with a lot of anxiety since December. Went in with major impostor syndrome thinking I’m just not contributing enough and I was going to be put on the spot. But, they told me they couldn’t be happier with the work I’ve been doing. Now I can finally relax.

Me: My site doesn't validate for AMP because of some JavaScript the app performance measurement tool inserts into every post.

Support: Do the thing.

Me: I know, but how?

Support: Read the docs.

Me: All it says is "do the thing". But it doesn't state how.

Support: So, do the thing.

iMac tiny keyboard + my fat fingers + Command+Q when I meant Command+A = Table Flipping Extravaganza!

Got the ideal job right now. Over market salary. 100% remote. Mornings to myself until the rest of the team in another time zone comes online. Working within my competency with just enough challenge to make it interesting. Free products for being an employee. Only wish it came with paid health insurance but I do get a partial reimbursement.

Sent another developer instructions for generating an SSH key pair and to send me the public key. He did so. There was a problem getting it to work. So, naturally, he emailed me the private key.

Kid brings me an ancient Chromebook with non-functioning "t" key.

I crack open the case and remove a bunch of screws trying to get to the keyboard.

No can do. This thing is built to basically self-destruct upon user tampering (Dammit, China!!!)

Put it all back together with the intent of trying to wipe it and recycle it.

The "t" key is suddenly working fine.

"You should record video tutorials of how to do stuff", people say to me.

#1 - I suck on camera. I have a really annoying nasally voice that I just can't stand to hear in my own head, let alone on video.
#2 - I look like every stupid a--hole fat old ugly white guy people love to hate. Nobody wants to see that.
#3 - I suck at remembering what the f$$# I was going to say to begin the video, to show the thing I was going to show, and how to end it without sounding like a complete #@#%@# moron.
#4 - %@%$#@ QuickTime! And any other video screen recording software that NEVER $%#@#$% WORKS for me!! I'll be in the middle of a very complex process I'm demonstrating and BAM! The whole recording crashes. Six takes and six more crashes later and I'm @#%#@# done with trying to do this #@$@#%.

Screenshots and text it is and always will be.

I hired a coder to write a WordPress plugin on my dev server. He no longer works for me and is unreachable. The plugin does most of what it needs to do. But when I dig into the code and the database to find what should be obvious bits of code that do obvious things? None of that code is found. Not even with a recursive directory keyword search for that should be easy to find like CSS class names and IDs. Even the data that comes from the database and that I see on the screen is not actually present in the database!!! Yet it all works. I'm pretty sure at this point the code and data reside in a parallel dimension only the coder can get to. How do I debug code that doesn't actually exist?!

Two places: At a major NYC firm, I was in charge of social media. I was also involved with an intranet community. Something went bad with the intranet community project politics and I got blamed for it even though I had emails to prove I hadn't said/done what I was accused of. But to assert their dominance, my bosses called me to their office, sat me in literally a corner of the room, and interrogated me for 2 hours. The only thing missing was the bright light in my eyes and the "good cop" part of the routine. I'm ashamed to say they "broke" me and I just gave up and did what they told me to do to "fix" it even though I hadn't done anything wrong. The bosses were old enough to be my parents, so I wonder how much of that worked its way into the psychology of it all.

The second toxic workplace was where each month the boss would come from his home by the beach to tell us plebes what new ideas he wanted us to work on. We would just get done reporting on the results of his delusions of grandeur from the month prior and he'd pull the rug out and start us on some new thing. Never got any consistent traction on anything. He was the ultimate seagull manager: fly in, make a lot of noise, poop all over everything, and leave us cleaning up the mess. Oh, and we had to change the locks because we had to fire a customer service guy who was a little bit on the ragey side of things. Because of high turnover, I had seniority within 4 months of starting there.

I'm old and dumb comparing how things are today with where I started from. Time to start over again.

It's 2:37. I was up until this time 3 times this week working on projects for 6 different clients. I have no reason to be up right now except to be on DevRant.

Me: I need an SSL certificate.

Support: No problem. Just fire up your command line and generate one via OpenSSL.

Me: I'm on Windows.

Support: Ok, so what you do is code a Linux command line from scratch that will run in Powershell. Next, compile OpenSSL from your favorite of 60,000 versions available. Now, just fire it up and you're all set.

Me: Goodbye everything I've ever enjoyed doing in my free time.

Most pissed off? Must have been the time I created a $10,000 hole in a marketing team's budget after trying to build a Tetris-style Facebook app game (back when FB apps were all the rage). It turned out that Tetris, which was up to that point commonly considered as public domain, had been scooped up by a patent troll who had made a convincing case that he had found and gotten agreement from the originator of the idea (a Russian dude who may or may not have been its original source). I had to scrap the whole project and explain what I did to an old-school manager who didn't even know how to operate a computer. That resulted in my losing credibility as a team member for the next 6 years. I never lived it down. I was pissed mostly at myself for following my assumption and not doing any patent research.

When you walk away from your Windows 10 box for a meeting and come back in the middle of an unsolicited reboot. Where's my axe?

Can code awesomeness for my clients.
Can drive traffic to almost any website.
Can turn half-baked ideas into money for clients.
Have absolutely no game at all with the opposite sex.

Sometimes the tradeoff of being a geek sucks.

Anybody ever have a client treat you like a garbage slave and then actually _cry_ over the phone because you quit and now they don't want you to stop working for them?

When you resign and before you leave your coworkers ask you to help them write a job description for your replacement and you be like "MUUUUUUHAHAHAHAHAAAA! Just TRY to find THIS!" #IDoAllTheThings

!rant. Encouragement for those feeing impostor syndrome like I am right now with a new employer. Source +
Bonus Panel: goo.gl/mhOvDs

What management does even when it’s not your fault...

Being railroaded by a colleague and accused of project sabotage, then having to submit to a 2 hour interrogation where I was literally sat in a corner and read a riot act. I had done nothing of which I was being accused. I sic'ed HR on them in a followup meeting but all HR did was sit and listen and then find in their favor despite the written evidence because my manager outranked the HR manager. That was when I learned that employees are always wrong when the manager wants them to be. I freelance now. No manager, and I can fire my clients.

Even Santa has CAPTCHA.

It was 1986. I'd just bought a computer because I wanted to make a cool flight sim like I saw a friend at school do by typing in a bunch of code from a magazine. I read a thick book on DOS/BASIC and another on Assembler. As I had no idea what Assembler could possibly be useful for in my life, I went the DOS/BASIC route and made some fun programs. Then it was Prolog followed by C and Smalltalk and then HTML and JavaScript. All by taking classes or reading books and then making something useful or teaching others.

Dear Client,

You said it was of paramount importance that this software work flawlessly. I've worked hard to make it so, even when your indecision and lack of attention to detail indicate you don't care as much as you say and have made the project late.

Yesterday when I handed you a step-by-step user acceptance test plan, you delegated it to someone not as familiar with your specific requirements. You said you don't have time for such things.

I will remind you of those words when the project launches and you find something you dislike.

Sincerely,
Me

Client: "We're not ready to be finished with the project but I don't want to pay you any more money to meet the terms of the contract we both signed, even though all my must-have changes led to more costs just like you had warned me they would."

Me: "Don't make any more changes, plez."

Client: "Imma make another change."

Me: "No. Stahp. Don't."

Client: "I added four new fields and probably a ton more business rules I don't care to understand."

Me: "Kill me. Just put this gun to my head and kill me."

Client: "That's not in our contract!"

I *hate* when the boss asks me to add people to our mailing list who didn't opt in. I just sent out a campaign and, predictably, a ton of people flagged it as spam or unsubscribed. Only three sales out of over 10,000 sends. But in his mind, that's ok. Ugh.

About to enter the snake pit of lawyers for a client call about a late project. Putting on my super suit.

PayPal sucks. They canceled our ability to take ecommerce payments just because. No reason given. We had not violated any terms of service. Our customers are happy with our products. And we were making them lots of money. They just up and pulled the plug because they’re PayPal and screw anyone who asks why. Idiots.

To the remote dev who ghosted me right after we discovered a major bug in your code, and whom we paid up front for development, thanks for nothing.

You’re fired.

Me a month ago: "I'm done with full-time corporate work. I'm going to shift to freelance only so I can enjoy my life and not be in a grind, bowing and scraping to a manager all day."

*Recruiter finds me and offers me a full-time opportunity*

Me now: "Well, I guess I can look into it..."

Me 9 months from now: "I'm done with full-time corporate work. I'm going to shift to freelance only so I can enjoy my life and not be in a grind, bowing and scraping to a manager all day."

Repeat until dead.

I absolutely HATE that stage fright feeling I get when I'm about to launch new software into production mode for a client! Anyone else feel that? Makes me want to vomit thinking of all the promises I've made that it will work fine and then all the things I don't even realize could go wrong. I never have enough testing resources because client budgets tend to favor shiny features at the expense of testing.

I used to almost agree with everyone who hates on WordPress for being needlessly complicated and convoluted and with really bad coding. Now, let me introduce you to my new nightmare...Joomla.

I was helping a client launch a new website. We met in a restaurant to do the final launch work. I mentioned I use VPN software to protect my computer on public WiFI and taught him what it means. He said it sounds hackerish and untrustworthy and I had a hard time explaining how it’s actually a countermeasure to hackers.

The next day he calls and says his cell phone is acting up and wants to know what my VPN software might have done to cause that.

How do some people get dressed in the morning?

Me: This is a good article about a CSS problem I always have and can never remember how to fix. Imma bookmark that.

Me, the next time I have that problem: Dang. Why doesn't this work. Better Google it.

Pro Tip: If you're working Tier 1 tech support, before you start reading your script to the caller, be sure to let the caller complete at least one sentence to tell you what steps he's performed and what the error message is vs. what you're thinking it is. That'll save you from a lot of grief with your boss who will ask you why the customer was screaming at you on the call recording to SHUT UP FOR A SECOND SO I CAN FINISH TELLING YOU WHAT THE PROBLEM IS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In early 2016 I got a front end web development job.

<1 month later, was fired from thatfront end web development job.

Reason: After several years focused primarily on social media marketing, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and couldn’t catch up fast enough to what their shop was using. My coding skills were way more out of date than I ever anticipated.

In retrospect, the only reason I got the job was that their 3rd party skills testing website repeatedly wouldn’t submit my results and didn’t change up the questions, so by the time it finally did, I had guessed 90% of the answers correctly. I registered as a false positive and that was, apparently, enough for their HR person.

Estimate for writing a custom WordPress plugin:

1 hour - Learn the API the plugin will support
1 hour - Review how plugins are written
60 hours - Set up XAMPP only to find that the version with PHP 7 no longer supports MySQL but something called MariaDB which my host doesn't support and then uninstall XAMPP and install MAMP only to get really frustrated setting it up and beat myself for not just buying that $99 Windows Pro upgrade so I can install Kalabox with HyperV which is much easier than all of this and why doesn't Kalabox have a way of supporting Windows Home because not everyone buys Windows Pro or can afford a Mac or has time to screw around with 100 possible Linux distros to figure out which one will work best and then buy gasoline and matches and set it on fire and watch it all buuuuuuurn such pretty fire.

Do less development and more living. I’m tired of all of it. I need a career track change. I don’t know how anyone can keep up with all of it.

I don't want to sound ethnocentric but is anyone else annoyed by having to correct the spelling of variable, class, table name, and other code after it was built overseas? I'm in a third round of combing consecutively deeper into the code to ferret out these misspellings so they don't go into production. Is it too much to ask that the freelancer who says he speaks and writes native English not then turn that work over to a subcontractor who clearly does not?

@dfox, thanks for the stickers!

I just added this to the commit log:

Stray apostrophe.
Like a splinter in my mind.
Now has been removed.

Management: “Let’s put StackODev in front of clients.”

Me: “Ok, but you’ll have to sign a waiver.”

What is this “successful project” of which people speak? It is an elusive creature which I have not hitherto observed.

A couple weeks ago I told a now former client that I just "fired" that I had no remaining invoices to send them. Today I discovered a couple of invoices from a couple months ago that it appears they'd not yet paid. This is why I need to quit trying to run a business and just be an employee again. I suck at accounting.

I really don't like billing time for things I am not really sure how to do and need time to educate myself on. This happens more often than my wallet is comfortable with and I spend more time learning than making money. How do you go about staying in an estimate or fixed budget when something comes up that you don't know anything about?

My wife and I met on a university VAX BBS just as Tim Berners-Lee was concepting something called “the World Wide Web and before the NCSA Mosaic browser was built. She had once dated a guy in high school who eventually worked on Mosaic and then became a founding Netscape programmer and whose twin brother went on to write the first version of the Apache web server. I saved her from a life of wretched millionaire excess when she married me, a lowly web designer.

I got home from my day job today to work on a side client's project that is due tonight.

Realized I'd left my laptop with all my setup for the project at the office.

On Tuesday my client states she will get me one more piece of info I need to launch the site.

On Wednesday, nothing.

On Thursday, nothing.

On Friday she berates me that the site is overdue and demands it be launched before Saturday so she can send the announcement email.

I remind her that I was waiting for the information.

She responds, testily, that the info wasn't mission critical after all and to just insert something as a placeholder. Oh, and that there had been a religious holiday and so nobody would have been available to respond to the information request anyways. Like I'm just supposed to know all that without anyone telling me.

I'm now trying to get the attention of our overseas developer, who is the only person who can pull this off, but he's likely clocked out for the weekend.

I'm so mad right now I'm about ready to burn the whole site to the ground, cut my losses, and just walk away. But that would damage my reputation.

Here we go again. Months have passed since this client first wanted their website launched. But because they were suddenly and inexplicably in no real hurry to make it go live, we are now waiting for them to get back to us on whether to push to Production. Meanwhile, I have bills to pay and as soon as I told them I need the check by no later than April 1st, everyone over there is no longer answering phone calls or emails. Voicemail box is full and not accepting any more messages.

I think this would be the part where I call "Big Nick" and ask him to pay them a little "visit". If I knew someone like that.

Dear Client: Thank you for asking me to fix a problem and then condescendingly informing me _after_ an hour of _me_ working on it that _you_ actually had a working solution shortly after you asked me to work on it. That'll be $75 added to this month's invoice.

I just won this debugging buddy at a children's carnival. I must name him. I'm taking suggestions. The winning suggestion gets ++ on their 20 latest rants.

Worked harder today than I’ve worked in a while. Still got nothing done. Crap.

So I noticed people are increasingly putting their preferred pronouns on their social media, email signatures, résumés, etc. I also noticed a certain amount of praise gets ladled onto the ones who are other than their cisgender while heaps of scorn come at those whose pronouns match their apparent gender. Especially if they dare defend an idea that non-cis people are against.

Is this the world we live in now? Or is my little corner of the online world just a non-representative fluke, and non-cis people are actually more tolerant than I’m seeing?

Staring at a CSV file full of data looking for that one extra comma or stray double quote or some out of place Unicode character that might exist but you don't know which of the hundreds it could be feels like staring into a pit of despair.

Today was my last day at my old job. At my last monthly review, the CEO actually said to me how things would be much better if I were making enough sales happen on the websites to justify my (very low) annual salary. I checked the numbers on my way out the door. In the past 8 months I definitely cleared that threshold and then some. I wonder if he would've given me the next 4 months off with pay. LOL

I really don't know how to please StackOverflow people. I did my due diligence on a bit of code but, like we all do, I got stuck and needed a bit of advice. I posted clearly and concisely and still my question got downvoted twice. What do they want? For me to post the question AND the answer? Only ask Ph.D.-type questions? Why am I never good enough for these people?!

Clients that call to ask you for the URL to the test environment seem to never have heard of these things called “email” and “text”.

It sucks having to revert 2 days worth of commits all for some issue that I can't independently confirm actually exists. Site owner has panicked and wants to hit Ctrl-Z back 7 commits. There goes two days of my life I'll never get back.

Every day I am reminded that some people just refuse to be helped. Today I saw an article in a prominent Facebook WordPress group I belong to. The author was sharing tips on how to improve presentation skills at WordPress conferences. One tip was to ensure no spelling errors exist in your slides. But the article itself, and the author’s bio, had five spelling errors. I pointed that out in the comments. Aaaaaand now I’ve been kicked out of the group.

Here I am just tryna browse a site and this stupid attempt to trick me into falling for a scam pops up. There is no way to stop the pop up because I can’t tap anything fast enough. Not even restarting the browser because it remembers this as the last URL it had accessed. Looks like I have to uninstall and reinstall chrome. Honestly, if you’re a scammer, what the hell is the point of doing this? What idiot is going to call the number? All it does is annoy you to the point of suspicion. Or maybe there are people stupid enough!?

I wonder sometimes whether people in Silicon Valley know how the rest of the world thinks about and acts on technology. I mean, I know they do to a degree, but is there anyone else besides me that thinks it’s kind of an “ivory tower” existence over there, with people chasing the latest shiny thing regardless of if people want or need it?

When my mom died in 2014, I was shocked to find that her profile on Facebook was suddenly changed to “memorial” mode and therefore I was no longer able to log into it. (If you’re tempted to tell me I’m dumb for using it, I don’t disagree, but save it for another thread...she and I kept in touch over FB because it was easier for her to manage.)

I think it was triggered by their monitoring of things and seeing keywords like “funeral” and “passed away” associated with her account, then having a person on their end change its status. Or something like that.

What I hadn’t known about (or I would have used it) was the legacy contact setting where she could have set me as the contact so I’d have at least a little access and control. But because of their strict policies, I’m forever locked out.

I get why they need to do this (to avoid fraud and impersonations) but the fact that there are zero documents or proofs I, as the executor of her estate, can provide that Facebook will accept to make an exception seems unnecessarily severe.

Anyone else experience this? Known workarounds?

Is it a bad sign when you sit in your car for as long as possible before going into your office building? Asking for a friend.

Microsoft FrontPage. At the time I thought it was the stuff. I still cringe when I think that I started my career in web development with that overwrought, underpowered, non-scalable, inefficient, barely functional piece of garbage. May it, and its creators, not Rest In Peace.

I built a fairly simple database and website to showcase school curriculum “reader” books searchable and sortable by levels of difficulty and other metadata. I didn’t think much of it when I was building it but apparently it won the company a few million bucks in revenues once it launched. The big wigs rewarded that by selecting me as one of a few folks that got to go to a big corporate retreat in the Bahamas. This was before the company management went to crap and stopped incentivizing innovations at the employee level.

To my client who wants a two-column formatted email built with tables in Constant Contact to appear in the same two-column format on mobile devices: You're lying when you say your previous developer achieved a legible, mobile, tiny screen email this way. I know because I can see the previous email formatting. In fact, I cloned that exact email and merely swapped out the content. You really do not understand what you're asking for.

Super depressed rn and nobody to talk to about it. Stupid life problems. Can’t seem to learn new tech so if I lost my job I’d have to switch to landscaping or something. Can’t talk normal with people without someone taking offense at something I never dreamed could be offensive (stupid cancel culture) or trying to shut me down. Friends ending friendships and family cutting me out of their lives without communication as to why. My kids just don’t seem to care about anything I have to try to teach or share with them anymore. Nothing I do seems to matter to anyone or make a difference even when I’m trying to do good things for people. I don’t want to take my life but tbh if COVID got me I wouldn’t even be mad. I’d embrace it as my get out of jail free card.

Look, I get it. Wordpress sucks. It’s bloated. It’s slow. It’s not elegant. It’s a nightmare to debug and code for. The plugin ecosystem is an insecure, confusing mess of outdatedness and issues.

We can all agree that in a perfect world all power to determine everything about a website, from the code to the content, would be in our power as developers. But we don’t live in a perfect world. People want convenience, even at the cost of performance and security, and they will inevitably resent technologists who refuse to give it to them. We do ourselves and our customers a disservice when we only do what we feel is in our own best interests or preferences and not what will help them with their realities.

Yes, it sucks. Yes, it’s a pain. Yes, it’s in demand and there’s nothing any of us can do to change that.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

I'm getting to the point where every time I encounter a new bug to fix I die a little inside. So tired of stuff not working and as soon as I get one thing fixed another blows up. Unresolved problems and open loops keep me awake all night. I sometimes want to switch careers but what else is there for me after more than 2 decades of this? I guess I could flip burgers and mow lawns. The burger flippers make about what I made in my last job and the guy who mows my lawn makes twice that much.

I gotta say I never understood owning a Roomba until my wife got me an off-brand Deebot one for my birthday. I named it “The Kraken”, as in “release the...” because it sees nothing and devours all. My kids can now rest easy because they won’t hear me complain about how the floor is always dirty and how nobody wants to vacuum but me. Now I just fire up the app, hit “Auto”, and The Kraken cleans my house. It even mops! I feel bad for the doggo, though.

Ohhh, I get it. Apple thinks it isn't getting enough money from us by selling us one iMac, so it wants to sell us a second one by making the first one's memory physically non-upgradeable via soldered memory even though the software says it _could_ be upgraded.

Exactly when I do NOT need to be doing updates because system stability is critical to meeting deadlines, suddenly...

Just me. Working on my next coding project.

The ::before and ::after pseudo elements. I’ve spent an hour sometimes trying to figure out how to get some element to do something and not realizing it was because of those.

Every. Freaking. Monday.

Coding tests. I hate them. On any timed test, I completely lock up and forget everything I know. I'm amazed I've gone 26 years in my career without being fired for not taking tests well. Because, as we all know, that's the core task of every single job. Taking timed tests and shit.

Hmm. This code needs refactoring.
*recodes on Local and uploads*
Works on my branch.
*git push origin master and merge*
Works on Dev.
*deploy to Test*
Works on Test.
*deploy to Live*
Doesn't work.
*compares Live to Test, Dev, and Local*
No f$@%^%%$# difference!?!!

*quits development and lives under a bridge*

Boss: “Our ecommerce conversions in Google Analytics are less than the actual pace of orders.”

Me: “Nothing has changed in the tracking code or setup. It must be our goals setup which you have to have a Ph.D. to understand, plus whatever mood Google’s algorithms are in today.”

He’s not mad at me. We’re both just confused why Google AdWords, Analytics, and Tag Manager have to be so damn hard to get right. I’ve never been able to do it right. And most data is thrown out because people browse websites while logged into their Google Account, which makes their clickstream disappear and become unattributable because of understandable privacy policies. I don’t want my data tracked when I’m logged in either!

So now we have had to hire specialists at several thousand dollars per month to figure this out.

So I still get occasional email from my former employer’s ecommerce mailing list. The budget for live model shoots is nonexistent, so we had to make do with photoshopping products into different scenes. Not ideal but done right it was ok. I’m looking at the latest ad emailed to me and realized something...was...off.

Happy bitday @stackodev!
Not too old with your 33!

Best boss is my current boss(es). They don’t breathe down my neck, no micromanagement, and basically let me outsource anything I don’t want to do or don’t know how to do. I work 100% remote on my own schedule (except for a few core hours) and every time I ask if they have any problems with my work or feedback for my improvement they say they couldn’t be happier. If I make a mistake, they don’t rake me over the coals and they just let me handle the problem.

I’ve been waiting over 20 years for a job like this one. Why can’t it be this way for everyone?

I came up with what I considered to be a brilliant approach to a festering internal knowledge management problem using a third-party SaaS. I rolled it out and it was very popular. Weeks later, after my profile had become the "linchpin" by which hundreds of other employees had joined the service, I was told that a female employee (yes, gender is important to this story) had produced a proposal for a more in-house solution that used a different company's software and that I would be on the team to roll it out. I thought it was a great idea and I deferred to her on pretty much everything.

Months after that I was accused, by several other female managers, of trying to take over the whole leadership of the project just because of one minor suggestion I had proposed. One day, after a lengthy interrogation about their take on my emails on the matter (lacking only the bright, hot spotlight in my eyes) I was booted off the project and the woman who had proposed the project was promoted. She then proceeded to lord it over on me and treat me like crap.

This type of thing was a general pattern within the company that amounted to a form of a reverse discrimination "policy" (unwritten). The effect was that the ratio of men to women in upper management was not equal but completely flipped. Way more women than men had upper management positions and higher pay.

In their eyes, the ends (women broke through the glass ceiling) justified the means (discrimination and bullying) which I guess is good and "equal", again in their eyes, in terms of the overall perception modern feminism has about men needing a comeuppance.

But in the context of HR's stated policy on equality, meaning 1:1 men and women in position of power and pay and a non-threatening work environment for all, which we all (men and women) were forced to sign every year, it was an utter fail as far as the math and intimidation went.

People at work emailing me with questions and I’m just tryna take a nap.

The agency I own built a WordPress plugin for a client using a freelancer developer. The client, out of ambivalence, withheld information that would have drastically changed the design of the plugin, but by the time we found out it was much to late to start over. The developer moved overseas in the middle of it all and from then on was not very responsive to communications about the project which delayed things by months. I tried to find a replacement developer but nobody else had experience with the third-party API. The live version of the API ended up not being able to support what we were trying to get it to do with the plugin even though the test version of the API was fine and the vendor was unhelpful. And because we spent so much time and money on the plugin, we weren’t able to even begin on another part of the project. The client complained of over $30,000 in lost revenue due to these issues. Complete fail all around. I’m never doing another custom software project again. It’s all just website design from here.

We had a lab in middle school, 5th grade, I think, where they had a few Apple IIe computers.

I remember one day looking over at a smart friend's screen and he was playing a flight simulator. I'd never seen anything like it before. When I asked him how he did it, he showed me a computer magazine where all the code was published for it. He had typed the whole thing in and saved it to a floppy.

It was part of a turning point for me when I was deciding between social groups: wanting to be a dumb jock or wanting to be smart. Thanks to that kid's example, I chose being smart. It cost me dates with the hot girls later in high school when I should have been carrying a pager for all the teachers who needed me to fix their computers for them, but I made sure to cry all the way to the bank when I was eventually making six figures.

Ugh! I'm in unfinished project Hell. Three website owners need me to finish big features and I just keep uncovering bugs and feature gaps. So much anxiety about all of it.

Exercising. Which I stopped doing a few months ago. Which probably explains why everything I’m doing is turning to crap.

When you post a web designer job announcement for U.S. citizens living in the U.S. who speak and write perfect English and 75% of people who apply have terrible English and either outright lie about their citizenship and location or beg for the job in spite of the requirements.

Happy (U.S.) Father’s Day to all the DevRant Dads!

I just don't get the WordPress hate or CMS hate in general. Using these is not perfect, but neither is _anyone's_ code. Get over that and be more productive for your client. Unless you're the best coder the world has ever seen, and you're _always_ available to push content for an organization of 90 or 900 or 9,000 people, nobody CARES about your "coding purity". They want a website that they can still operate if your ass gets hit by a bus. Don't like WP? Find a CMS that ticks most of the boxes for your client's needs. If you have the time, budget, and long-term inclination to provide bug fixes for it, write your own Awesomesauce Custom CMS(TM) and release it to the open source community so we can finally replace WordPress with the next best thing.

Otherwise, launch site, get check. Repeat until you can retire.

Not a fight I was involved in but one I observed. A junior dev on my team and a server ops guy had major personality conflicts. One day the server ops guy had enough and physically went after the junior dev. I was senior but still pretty new to my own career and had no idea how to handle it. Server guy got fired soon after. I was glad I didn’t have firing power and that he didn’t even report to me anyways.

Our Joomla-based site just got a redesign. The developer who did it did something wrong. Articles no longer are attached to their parent categories and are now all referenced at the root level in URLs.

I pulled up the 404 log and now see that some website or bot or whatever is hitting up each category for each article, which screws with our SEO 404 report in Google Search Console.

Which means I have to find a way to programmatically redirect every article within every category "up" a level to the root where each article is now found.

And I have no way of knowing which article belongs to which category anymore. Even if I did, a test shows that articles attached to categories still want to come up at the root level, not in their categories.

Joomla is G.A.R.B.A.G.E.

Dear client,

I'm trying to import your data into your new system with a one-off custom script. But the fact that you keep screwing around with the data and rules is like jamming a stick in the spokes of the bike you're riding. We're never gonna finish this project if you keep doing that.

Sincerely get a clue,
Me

So I go into Google Search Console to try to determine why its saying pages are not compliant with mobile and whatnot.

3 hours later I come out realizing that what Google REALLY wants is for everyone to build every web page as static HTML with no script tags and never a call to an external website. Just dump all that javascript and css and HTML into one BIG FRIGGIN FILE so our crawler feels satisfied that it's loading everything all in one request.

No CMSes allowed unless GOOGLE built it.

Let's just all revert to HTML 1.0 and be done with it.

Agree or disagree: as a developer guaranteeing your work, when you accept a deposit from a client as a milestone payment, you should not spend that money until the client signs off on the milestone in case they decide your work is unsatisfactory and want to go elsewhere.

I got out of bed at 2:10am to film the Falcon Heavy launch from my driveway, where I have a direct, due east line of sight to Cape Canaveral. I’m thinking “What a time to be alive!” and “Why didn’t I pursue the aerospace career I started in college?”

I think I may have officially gotten myself fired before I even started a new job. My salaried start date was supposed to be Jan 3 but they hired me to do spot work at my hourly rate until then. My server side PHP skills were never great but they appear to be completely inadequate to the task of patching their undocumented, spaghetti legacy code. I just sent a note basically saying I either need to convert their entire site to something else 3 weeks ahead of the timeframe we planned or to basically outsource my work to another developer to patch this code. Feeling like a total imposter at the moment. I wouldn't hire me.

Regex syntax and vocabulary when talking about it reminds me of what Scientology would look like if it had its own coding language.

Thanks, AfterShip.com, for working flawlessly while the system I was building was in dev/test mode and for the first few days in live mode, then completely crapping the bed the first day I needed you to work with real tracking data with the live system. You were the ONE thing that was working consistently well, and you had to go and ruin it.

Need advice. I've constantly been the type of person who cannot master any programming language because I struggle with knowing "what to do/type next". If you had this problem and fixed it, how?

New person joins client's team to handle one product on the website and asks me to restructure the whole site. Sorry, pal, but unless you have money to add to the project's already spoken-for pot of resources for features, you're gonna have to wait til next year.

I think I have made a big mistake. I posted a freelancer project to a FB group. I was trying to be very careful and vet people closely so there would be less chance of fraud. The guy I gave the work, and a deposit, to was either very, very, very good at constructing a bulletproof social media profile con game or he's just too busy to get back to me on a status report I asked for two days ago. :(

This project is gonna drive me insane. I'm moving a custom-scripted WordPress ecommerce site to WooCommerce. The basis of the source site was WooCommerce but with the advantages stripped away and with a LOT of hard coded stuff added to it to make it seem like a unique, custom ecommerce engine.

Now I have to strip all that away and standardize it back into the WooCommerce way so it's all easier to maintain.

It's like I've been handed a jigsaw puzzle of a bunch of clowns and now I need to take it apart and put it together again but make it look like George Washington instead.

My productivity is dying for want of a second monitor. I've been hooking up a new-ish HP external LCD to my brand new HP Spectre laptop. Every time I do this, the laptop soon locks up. Won't launch programs, won't even let me click the Windows button to restart. Have to hard reset and go back to single 15" screen. THEY'RE THE SAME BRAND?! WHY ARENT THEY COMPATIBLE?!

I hate UpWork and Freelancer.com fees and policies about the privacy (or lack) for your projects. But I grudgingly admit they offer protections against fraud. If you're a freelancer, or if you employ freelancers, and do so without the fraud protections of these types of services, how do you guard against being taken advantage of by clients or freelancers? I mean, anyone can write and sign contracts but in the end they're just paper promises not worth anything if the people you're working with or for are "dogs on the Internet" who can simply disappear.

Dear Client,

Proper English sentence structure, the kind that accurately conveys what you mean to ask me to do for you, requires a subject and a predicate. To hearken back to “Schoolhouse Rock”, if Mr. Morton is the subject of my sentence, then what the predicate says, he does. Mr. Morton walks. Mr. Morton talks. Etc.

Just tossing out random nouns and verbs in random order in an email will not help me to help you.

Sincerely,
Mr. Morton

When you're playing the piano at a church meeting and patching WordPress on a client's hacked website through your iPhone as you play.

I got my job by applying on Indeed. I know! Crazy, right? You apply for it and you get it. Pretty much never happens with these job sites because of crappy recruiters and clueless HR drones who tend to post and forget. I must’ve hit the luck lottery that day.

I don’t recall why but a project was in need of an all-nighter and I was the only programmer available to do it. I even brought a sleeping bag and, about 2 hours before people started arriving for work the next morning, I slept in a gap between my cubicle and a wall. I brought a shaving kit and everything. For some reason I didn’t want people to know I had pulled the all-nighter so I had to make sure to get up and look presentable before the first person got there.

When my kids get the mistaken notion that they’ll be able to be like me right out of school and be able to make the money I make and have the flexible schedule I have and work from home and choose projects I like, I tell them my war stories about how I had to work 23 years of some hellish stuff to gain that privilege.

!rant Need advice. Been wanting to switch to Mac-based dev for a while and finally found an $810 new-in-box iMac 21.5" 4K with retina / 3.1Ghz quad / 8GB / 1TB bought new from BestBuy late 2016 but manufactured sometime in 2015. Never opened. Any potential pitfalls with that and expected OS updates or dev tools?

Dear Client,

If you could go ahead and decide your product pricing instead of having me publish the wrong pricing and get all your customers excited only for them to see you double the price later? That'd be greeeeaaaat. M'kay?

P.S. I make money when you make money. You're gonna lose money now. Lots of it.

Ever had one of those days (or many of them) where all your jokes offend, all your interactions fall flat, none of your code works, and everything you try to do just goes to crap? Hoping it’s not just me.

I finally have a quiet Saturday to record a tutorial video for a client. I begin recording the video and every damn lawn mower in my neighborhood starts up simultaneously. The universe is _absolutely_ conspiring against me.

So it’s feast or famine as a freelancer. I went from just a couple active clients to three new clients and four new proposals to write for new prospects. Discovering the limits of my productivity and brainpower at the moment.

Trying to play Warframe with my son. Why do I spend 3 hours updating Steam and/or Warframe and troubleshooting drivers and settings for every 1 hour of play?

Which one of you is it that works for Apple or Microsoft and writes the code that tells a computer to slow down, lose its internet connection, freeze, reboot, crash your browser, or generally respond to a request for a website with a friggin' spinning beach ball of death right at the moment of highest productivity or crisis?

!rant The end of the world arrives. I have an 8GB Flash USB drive on my keychain. What hacker-ish/prepper stuff should I have already installed on it to take control and survive the apocalypse? Aaaaand...GO!

I've been using Git since 2014. So why do I STILL cringe whenever I have to revert commits or do a hard reset back to HEAD? What's going to disappear? What will remain? Will my entire Git history be vaporized? It's a total game of Russian Roulette to me. So, without the certainty level I want, I just do what feels safer...I grab the versions of the files I think are what I need and stick them back into my repo, then git status and commit the correct changes back in.

I see a lot of great desk setups but none like all the marketing stock photography I keep seeing that tells me I’m a loser if I don’t have an all glass office and all the most expensive stuff.

Because the client had me roasting on a spit in nearly impossible features Hell for an entire year on a piece of custom software that ate up all the budget and my profitability, I completely forgot about a major other requirement that now will take me months to integrate. And they still haven't paid me for my other work so I can pay my other dev. My vendor/client negotiating "prowess" got me from "still not paid" to "indentured servitude".

FML. How did I convince myself that I'm good at business relationships?Why did I think I would be able to do custom software? I need to stick to just designing websites as a rank and file employee. No, actually I need to disappear until North Korea starts thermonuclear war and nobody cares about software anymore.

Had one of those unicorn coding moments where my from-scratch code worked the first time I wrote and tested it. That hasn’t happened in a long time.

Thursday: Made an appointment with doctor for (painful because no anesthesia) outpatient procedure. Sent message to team slack saying appointment would interrupt part of my day.

Friday: Boss decides to launch website. Launched.

Saturday: Fixed many broken things.

Sunday: Fixed more broken things.

Monday morning: Texted team about fixing more broken things WHILE BEING OPERATED ON!!!!!!!!!

Monday afternoon and evening: STILL WORKING ON MORE BUG FIXES!!!!!!!

From a dev and eCommerce management perspective, Groupon is THE WORST. They just launched a brand new marketplace site but STILL don’t have an API I can connect with to do fulfillment. Their CSV format is useless for our shipping company. Their data inputs are not sanitized and standardized enough to be predictable for purposes of transformation via scripting. The exceptions and edge cases are infinite. So I’m STILL stuck having to take time out of my day to manually copy and paste and correct order data into the proper format to FTP to the fulfillment company. Oh, and I don’t yet know if the new marketplace does this, but the old one used to suspend vendor accounts for...get this...selling TOO MUCH! How is Groupon still in business?

My first exposure to computers was the TRS-80 (a.k.a. TRASH-80) my mom (the city Library Director) bought for library patrons to use. It’s data store was on a cassette tape and programs came on cartridges, IIRC.

Around the same time I was learning to do Logo and BASIC on an Apple IIe in 5th grade.

My cousin’s Commodore 64 came next and my grandma saw how my interest in computers was blooming, so she suggested I use the savings I had built up from birthday money and mowing lawns to buy an IBM PC/AT 8088 clone. $1,300 later and lots of time in my basement figuring out how to build it all from separately-shipped components, I was on my way to learning Assembler, BASIC, and DOS.

When you have to stay awake until 4:30am uploading and importing 134 .sql files split up from a larger single exported file because for some stupid reason MySQL can only handle importing the data at this insane level of incremental push.

Anyone here old enough to remember a subscription shareware service called “Big Blue Disk”?

!rant
I'm astounded. I just took a crack at some PHP logic that would be easy for a lot of you but hard for my math-and-logic-challenged brain.

It worked.

The first time.

Why is IEeeeeeeee! still around? Does anybody know?

I just watched a video where a guy used a homemade band saw made of wood to make another homemade band saw made of wood. This is the very definition of recursion, amirite?

Finishing at least one novel so I can jumpstart a new career and get out of web development while I'm still ahead. That or get better at math/physics so I can solve anti-gravity/free energy and become a legend. Neither of these things is ever likely to happen.

If your client is interested in Accelerated Mobile Pages, get it in writing and include a fee for undoing AMP if they don't like it. If you don't update Google's AMP project cache directly with a special URL for each and every blog post and page URL you AMP, Google holds onto the AMP page in its SERPS and CDN for eternity! Even doing the reminded and manual URL update, this stuff can still be around for a month. Ugh.

I just started a new project with a new client who once off-handedly mentioned offering us stock options if the site is successful. He's paying us real money to do the site and I hope he doesn't pull the old "Oops, I'm out of money. Would you like stock options?" move. Thanks to hellobonsai.com contract language I think we're covered.

Rant but also !rant

When I got the new remote dev job, there was no laptop purchase involved. We were down a computer at home when a desktop died and there was a lot of sharing going on with only one laptop. So we spent more than we planned to for Christmas and bought a replacement for the dead desktop so I could have more use of one for my job.

Yesterday my new boss says "Oh, we should get you a new laptop. Here's some money."

Oh well, at least this way there is more to go around!

Aggravated after having pointed a remote coworker at documentation that would speed along some development he was assigned to do, only to find weeks later, and several "talking past each other" conversations later, that he had disregarded it or severely misunderstood it and went his own route. Showed him today how something was done under what I supposed he had been doing and he reveals he "didn't know" it was to be done that way.

I've always sucked at OOP and OOD, _in part_ because I have never encountered a good, common sense, relatable real-world example or analogy of why one would use protected or private variables/objects/functions over public. I watch tutorials and it all just sounds like static in my head and the explanations are just like "well, it's obvious you want to do blah blah blah because reasons."

Maybe it's just painfully obvious to everyone but me and my tiny brain just isn't capable of understanding. But if anyone has the example or analogy that made OOP click for you, please share.

Finally got fed up with nvm and npm being messed up somehow and decided to reinstall it. It’s finally finished after 84 years and more text than the Bible and the complete works of William Shakespeare has been scrolling in my terminal as it installs.

Aaaand it’s still just as broken as before. I’m now considering re-imaging the entire machine and starting over again.

I know all the “right answers” as to why and how we use Node but I sometimes wonder how much of that is sunk-cost groupthink as well as “we’ve always done it this way”.

Should _setting up_ to write code and release software take longer than it does to write code and release software?

Look, extra remote team member. If I hired you with the express requirement that you work and/or live in sync with my time zone, and you claim to live and work in my time zone for a few weeks but you're lying to me and you were actually just on vacation here and have moved back overseas, you SUCK. And now we're firmly entrenched with the project and it's near impossible to fire you at this point if I don't want to deal with a whole new developer and learning curve!!!

I think today makes a new record for the number of times I have muttered "What in the actual FUCK is going on with this stupid WordPress plugin/theme/database/etc.?!"

I know. I know. I chose this life. It's my own fault. Don't bother with the anti-WordPress beatdowns in the comments. I've heard every. last. one. and I'm too old and too close to retirement to want to start over again with something else.

Sometimes I feel like I don't improve as a developer. I'm referring to the net amount of information that must be flowing into my head on any given day just to keep up with it all. As soon as I focus on, say, upgrading my CSS skills, I lose track of new developments in, say, jQuery, or any of dozens of other things I need to stay on top of. I don't improve. I just stay afloat.

Feeling the need to drop a client who always wants the "beer rate" for LOTS of work. Problem is, it's still income I wouldn't otherwise have, I'm a "people pleaser", I hate to cut people loose when I know I can be of help to them, and I hate seeming rude. Anybody got any tips for me?

Not finding a way to make money posting YouTube videos all day long. Like that woman who uploads DIY “how to make slime from Elmer’s Glue” and makes over $100,000 every month from ads and merchandise. Or that 5 year old who makes millions per month in ad views playing with toys on camera and his parents upload it to YouTube calling it a “toy review”.

I wanna be a YouTube star for just a year so I can retire.

Can't I just have ONE website that works the way I'm intending it to? All I ask is for one.

Sadly, I’m not a good enough developer to have clever and hacky solutions to anything. In college I did once use Visual Basic to spoof a Novell login screen and steal other students’ passwords and write them to a diskette, which I’d recover after they walked away from the machine. The worst I did to them was log into their messaging and send them messages from themselves. Oh, and I also set up an “underground” web site that the campus sysadmins didn’t discover for a while. I used it to set up a forum where students could sell their used textbooks for better prices than the buy back program at the campus bookstore.

That moment you realize you just completed a task for a client because they asked for it but you didn't first check to see if the request was part of the original spec and estimate and so you don't really get to be paid for it.

I’m driving out to Cape Canaveral early on Feb 6 to see if I can get a good view of the first Falcon Heavy launch. The space geek in me can hardly handle the cool factor of Elon Musk having built a rocket company to send a car from his car company to ever lovin’ Sol/Mars orbit. If it scrubs, I’ll keep going out there until it launches. Wish me luck!

Had a nightmare last night where I was called in to do a coding challenge against two other people...on a whiteboard only and no Google or StackOverflow. I couldn't even get one line of code written. The other two guys got a bunch. Too bad one of my real life projects has a lot in common with this nightmare.

I’ve discovered I can almost never do business with friends or become friends with previously non-friend clients. It becomes too often an excuse not to pay me for my work.

DAMMIT WINDOWS! WHY EVERY TIME I DO A LENGTHY FILE UPLOAD OR BACKUP OR COPY OPERATION YOU GOTTA FREEZE THE HELL UP SO I HAVE TO RESTART AND TRY TO FIGURE OUT WHERE THINGS LEFT OFF?!

It’s like the Microsoft programmers wrote a function:

userDoingSomethingImportant {
reboot();
}