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Search - "terrible design"
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Just who the fuck from apple thought its a good idea to make the FUCKING SCROLL BAR overlap, the FUCKING PROPERTY ARROWS, everytime i accidentaly hover over it? I cant change shit! I have to wait few seconds every time i accidentaly hover over the scrollbar so i can be able to FUCKING CHANGE the value!
Dear Apple Inc,
Fix your shit! We're paying 100$ a year for what? More bugs and toruture? I didnt sign up for this bullshit! Give us back some real quality products, or just buy the company Jetbrains and let them build the IDE for you instead.12 -
It's so fuckin hard to work with people who don't get sarcasm or humour.
The UI guy gives me design (which is a regular design, not something unique)
Me: “wow fresh and unique design (obviously sarcasm).”
Designer: “thanks, I worked on this whole day. Glad you like it.”
Me: “huh...”
Now I feel like a terrible person.6 -
!Rant
I have the absolute greatest and nicest front-end developer in the world.
Today I was being given all kinds of praise for putting something on a site that the client loved and it seems to be getting the conversions they want. I felt really bad taking the praise because I didn't design it. The front-end developer designed it for me and gave me a picture of what she thought the client wanted and I built it. So I passed on all the compliments to her and told her that everyone was super happy with it.
She accepted the thanks but then floored me telling me that she didn't feel like she did anything and that my job was more important. We started arguing about who was more important.
"I accept that your designs do nothing without my back-end code, but without your designs no one would ever use anything I made."
She responded by sending me a list of sites with terrible designs that people use daily. And continued to tell me how much more important back-end is than front end.
If she wasn't 1500 miles away I might have kissed her. I needed to hear that today.2 -
Just came back from a new café (to the pedantic among us, yes I know it's a bar.. get over it).
And I met some Apple fanboy 🤭
So the guy kept on bragging about his shiny iPhone 6.. and I figured that I'd chime in. Due to my short-term memory being terrible, I'll be paraphrasing here.
M: me
S: iPhone usar _/\_
M: iPhone 6 ey..? I've heard about some devices in which the old ones are throttled down in a system update "to save the battery".
S: Yes, biweekly updates!! You can even delay them to tune them down to the time during which your device is charging and can commence its system update.
M (thinking): You've clearly missed the point sir.. but on Android, system updates don't need to be willfully delayed even. They (usually) won't commence unless your device is 80% and charging. OnePlus has been an exception to this though, probably under the assumption that their users are mostly power users that know what they're doing.
M: You do realize that given that your iPhone 6 is quite old already, Apple will very likely start throttling your device during a system update in the next few months, right.
S: What the hell dude.. look, look how smoothly it's been going for the last few years!!! Nothing wrong with that.
M: Just wait until your repair bill comes from those Geniuses 🤭
M: Sir, you do realize that Apple quotes €600 for battery repairs nowadays, right.
S: What the hell dude!!! I can buy a whole new phone for that much!!
M: Exactly!! That's exactly Apple's business tactic!!! They design their phones as such that the battery replacement (one of the most common repairs) requires you to replace not only the battery, but the whole chassis!!! And on the XS, the battery replacement is nothing short of atrocious!!!
M: Here, have a look at this: https://youtube.com/watch/...
*shows Louis' newest video about him switching to iPhone XS*
S: Yeah that's just bullshit. I bet you're showing me this on one of those crappy Samsungs.
M: No sir. I'm showing this on my Nexus 6P, that is tethered to my OnePlus 6T. Speaking of which, let me introduce you to the Nexus 6P's (one of the crappiest Android flagships to ever exist) repair, the battery replacement of which I've done myself.
(you can watch the iFixit video about it here: https://youtube.com/watch/...)
*explains heatgun, screwdriver, heatgun battery replacement of Nexus 6P and the time each step takes - more than an hour combined*
S: Yeah that's because it's one of those crappy Androids. That'd never happen to this shiny iPhone, look, I've got a $20 battery right here!!!
*shows battery*
M: Sir... That's a battery for a MacBook. A laptop battery.... 🤨
I love how willfully ignorant these Apple users are. To them, all that exists is Apple and Samsung (both of which I hate because lockdown). And they apparently don't even know what repair they have to look for when they'll need one.. maybe that's why those Genius Bars exist? 🤭
I'd love to see the guy's face when the Geniuses quote him the price for battery replacement when his planned obsolescence time comes 🤭14 -
"WTH! Get the fuck out of here, bitch!!".
I started a new job today (remote) and my first task was to improve product sign-up process, basically the UX is shit and the backend is even worse, never felt so bad looking at terrible software design my entire life and career. My first assignment was to introduce some sanity. (Mr. Supervisor's exact words)
Anyway, I report directly to upper management but need to get onboarded by current technology expert who's highly skilled at writing shitty code and is also stupid, literally.
It took the whole day to get him to grant access to the private repo in order to start working but that's not the story.
So, I'm seated, demoralised about the structure of software I have to work on and here I was refreshing localhost:7878 consistently and was consistently getting the message:
"WTH! Get the fuck out of here, bitch!!".
So, this same codebase I have is suppose to be the exact same one that's powering the app in production. I was furious and confused. Is stupid calling me a bitch already??? He wants to fuck??? What the hell!!!
I called him and turns out, I was suppose to switch branches. The branch I had was suppose to show that message intentionally (??!???!???) (His words exactly), I couldn't even muster the words "Why" completely before he hung up.
So basically, I got onboarded today. Quite successfully, I must add, because I know exactly the battlesuit I have to wear to my new remote job going forward!11 -
The senior developer who's never had a smartphone in his life gave me a lecture on why my UI improvements to the mobile application were terrible and to revert them. He didn't want to hear squat from me, and was literally saying "You're not gonna win this" while I was trying to argue why these features were necessary.
1 month later, we get a Interaction Design expert to review the app. His recommendations were hardly surprising.
Except, now I have a tighter deadline and will work this weekend. Sigh.4 -
Yesterday I completed a transactions module that used an external payment processor, similar to PayPal. It was hard, but after few hours of trying out different options I finally managed to get it to work.
I decided to create a simple prototype UI without any styling just to show my progress to the manager and let him know that it's working.
His response? "yeah, that seems to work, but that UI is terrible and not appealing at all. Change that immediately and try to add more thought into your design"
I guess I won't be making prototypes any time soon6 -
I’m pretty terrible at soldiering and small electronics in general, but I’m kind of okay with how this turned out.
Back story:
That helmet is my sister-in-law’s, she drives a polaris slingshot. (It’s technically a motorcycle here in the US because it has three wheels.) and she hooked up some EL wire to her helmet and the larger black rectangle in the picture is what the battery pack looked like before. (It takes two AA batteries.) and doesn’t have anyway to recharge them natively.
I did some research and found a neat little charging board (TP4056) and got her a small single cell li-ion battery for it. Now it’s not only less than half the length of the original, but it has a rechargeable battery and a charging circuit built in. The battery is 500mAh and lasts about 65-70mins on a charge. Personally, I feel like that’s not a good enough battery life on a charge, but my sis-in-law says that her and her slingshot friends usually only run with the EL lights on for 30 minute stretches at time so they should be able to get two to three uses before needing a recharge. Which btw, only takes about 35-40 minutes from completely dead.
The box looks like shit cause I literally hacked away at the original casing with a pocket knife and then crammed all the pieces back in and hot-glued the casing together. But I took measurements of the final-ish design and will try to find a small electronics box that will be able to house everything internally. (L: 1-3/4” W: 1-1/4” H: 1-1/4”)6 -
I hate buying new laptops. HATE IT. The manufacturers are always trying to do something that makes it more complicated to buy a laptop confidently.
Why not name all of the laptops with numbers? Make them really hard to differentiate. Then offer the same model number across multiple years so it is difficult to determine which year the laptop is from.
Oh. And let’s make sure every laptop has a major flaw in the form factor.
Let’a add a numpad that squishes the keyboard to the left in a weird way. Lets do something to the trackpad to make it awkward to use. Maybe the keyboard should have a weird configuration. Maybe we can put 4 spare characters of various colours on the symbol key caps. How about a battery only lasts a few hours. May we add specialized hardware so you are stuck with windows. Maybe we can make it super thick and heavy. Lets have a screen with terrible viewing angles. Since this laptop has no major flaws we should overprice it. No repairs or upgrades on this one because we filled the computer with glue. Lets double the amount of useless media keys.
It is like manufacturers are trying to design laptops like RPG game character classes. The fighter has no magic or stealth. The magician is weak and gets fatigued. The rogue is very stealthy but has poor defence and attack. The cleric can use magic but only to heal so it is useless in battle. The ranger is good at distance but has poor defence and no magic.
The only notebooks sold that are trying to make balanced character classes are MacBooks. Those cost a premium and aren’t reparable.17 -
A month or so ago this manufacturer of soldering equipment contacted me with the request to make a video about a review unit (a soldering handle) that they'd send to me for free in exchange. Initially I was really pumped about it - company would send me free stuff!! - but fast-forward to today and I realized how terrible a choice I've made by accepting that offer.
See, that handle is worth only €40 and I've spent so much time on the bloody video material already that it'd make my "pay" expected to be close to €1/h if not less. I feel like I've been exploited, especially since I don't even like the handle's design and am not using it. It's just collecting dust, making my work essentially free labor.
I could return the item but that's gonna cost me a fuckload of money, I could pay for the handle and cut my losses that way.. or I could do the review anyway and end up feeling very bad about that company. Or I could tell them to fuck off and lose a supply chain for my soldering equipment.
I have no idea what to do about this..
Oh and the fact that the correspondent in that company has the worst Chinglish skills imaginable, the communication skills of a toddler and is also super indecisive (they asked me to make a YouTube video first which led me to assume a video format for YouTube, but instead they want to put it on their fucking AliExpress product page, rendering my existing video footage useless!) doesn't help either.. I hate that shit company. Fucking leeches!
Anyway, what would you do when you're in a position like that?6 -
I see too many back-end rants against front-ends.
Should we talk about table layouts, malformed html, programatically generated spaghetti wrong markup, css absurd class naming, infinite div wrapping (div-itis), awful usability, poor legibility, terrible typography, wrong color palettes and user-unfriedly design? To name a few horrors i've seen so far.
Some people won't admit that their contempt against HTML and CSS being 'not real code' actually hides their inability or unwillingness to learn it. Or they need the feeling of superiority.11 -
Oh boy. Gotta love having a team member (For a School project) be in charge of the Database functionality/design, who has almost no communication skills and basically no clue about how to store data in a data base.
Im talking dates stored as varchar(5), column sizes being way way to small, overall table design being rather terrible, no primary/foreign keys, pretty much... Actually no, everything was being stored as a varchar.
Not only that, but there was a hell lot of data that needed to be stored that wasn't even accounted for in the DB design. He made some code that could be used by our team members for queries, creating tables, inserting data (etc), almost 2,000 lines of it.... And basically nothing was fucking documented at all. I'm talking comments like "Insert data into cities table" and nothing else. More complicated functions had as much, or less documentation. Complete mess.2 -
When will Amazon learn that I'M BRITISH! DONT FUCKING SHOIW ME PRICES IN FUCKING USD*, EVEN WHEN I'M ON THE FUCKING BRITISH SITE! WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO FUCKING SIGN OUT AND IN AGAIN EVERY FUCKING TIME TO REMIND IT!?
I'm just trying to buy a raspberry pi zero....
* I have nothing against USD, but I need to swear in order to vent my frustration.8 -
So I wrote an application that loads data from a 3rd party API. It allows the user to enter a record locator number and pull it up. By design, the value can be a partial match and it will pull up the record still.
The first API call I make only took 2-3 seconds, so I didn't see an issue as it's loading most of the data the app needs. I keep the filters/fields as they are and move on.
Fast forward 6 months. The user is complaining that the records are taking 30-45 seconds to load. Sure enough, load times are terrible. I've made lots of changes to what fields I'm loading through the API, and I'm calling several additional APIs, so I start pulling pieces of code out to see if anything improves. They all barely make any difference--still 30+ second load times. I end up removing everything except the first API call I developed that was taking 2-3 seconds before. Still taking 30+ seconds.
The 3rd party API allows you to filter using "starts with" or "contains". I used "contains" initially and had no issue, but I decided to try "starts with" since it should fit most use cases.
Load time is less than one second. I add back everything else. Load time is just over a second.
It seems that the 3rd party updated the API and multiplied load times by 10 when using that particular filter. I spent almost an hour on this since the platform doesn't support performance or debugging tools very well, and it all came down to a one line fix.4 -
Fuck this day!
Like really fuck it!
I have one of the most terrible crunch-time i ever experienced.
I’v been working 12+ hours every day with an ever-changing project timeline.
It started simple, we made a timeline, it was risky even then but it was realistic, we started working immideatly, everything looked good then a few days in BOOM! Actually our project management completely forgot client B’s projects soo we need to do that too with the same fucking deadline!!! (About 10x more work in waay less time)
Then this morning i got an email from the graphics team that we need to document our design process RIGHT FUCKING NOW! Because management wants documentations, in the middle of a fucking crunch-time.
Today it almost got physical with my project manager, i told him that he is not a programmer, i dont fucking care about his shit, just fuck off and let me work because we won’t be ready based on his unrealistic bs.
I feel like completely fucked over, like we were told 2 days before deadline that the whole company and people’s jobs depends on us now because if we wont finish this clients won’t pay.
WE ARE TWO PROGRAMMERS for studio of 10-12 people!!!
Soo i’w been thinking about getting the fuck out of here ASAP, i got an offer from a pretty big international gamedev company just what i needed, i already did their test before all of this, i passed A+.
We scheduled a skype interview for today. I had completely no time to prepare or chill off, just got out of the office, got into a starbucks and i’m interviewing. No time to even check my mic or internet, the call was so shit i could not hear anything, they neither because the plaza was loud af. Meanwhile im nervous about work, about the interview, about can they hear me at all because of the noise. I fucked it up. BIG time! I was so done i could not reverse a fucking string in c++ or explain what is a signed int!!!
Needless to say they said no.
Need time to think about it or realize what happened? Nice dreams. Back to the office and continue working.
I can’t do this anymore. My girlfriend came for me and took me home at 10pm but all i could do was stare at the floor on the subway. I don’t want people to lose their jobs but i just phisically can’t do this anymore.
Meanwhile any time i talk to my project manager about being tired he says like “hshshsbsb i have 60 hours in the last 4 days i got the worst part, i would be grateful in your place..” like fuck off dude, i dont give fuck about how you feel about this. This is not okay for me, you did this to the project, your fucking job is to manage it! I have one day off before going back to this, i have completely no idea what to do now...
[ps: this is not Nemesys. They did not let me work on my own stuff because i would be a competitor, so i left.]5 -
If you're making a game, dont start by thinking about your inventory system. Start by thinking about what you want your player to be able to DO, the cost of those things, and the constraints.
For example, ages of empires didnt have you worrying about unit equipment at all. every villager could do almost any job. while survival games, especially survival horror, like the recent RE remake, severly restrict inventory and stack sizes to make resource managenent more important.
Games like Fallout had list based inventories because lists are cheap, and it allowed a tighter interaction loop. players would loot. go into inventory. close container, onto the next container, keeping the player in the exploration loop longer. neoscav did the opposite *for effect* harkening back to diablo, but taken to the nth degree: *everything*, actions, combat, exploration, character design, all based on an inventory-style grid.
while games like rimworld and dwarf fortress have your inventory represented by zones where items are physically *stored* in stacks on the ground, extending the concept of base management to resource management through physical layout and build optimization.
its important to think about what kind of actions you want players to be able to do, and the kinds of challenges and constraints you want on them at each point of the game and each mechanic they engage in.
other examples, though terrible, include fortnite, where the limitations of competitive play had inventory limited to a resource system and a hotbar. while earlier battle royale and sandboxs games like rust and battleground induced tension by combining loot mechanics and grid inventories with the constant danger of competing players, allowing them to have richer inventory systems at the risk of frusterating players who frequently died while managing their inventory. meanwhile in overwatch, notice how the HUD changes to best represent the abilities of each character.
all in all it is better to stop thinking of inventory systems as a means to an end, and instead as the end representation of desired mechanics, or artificially selected representations for particular effects.
this applies likewise to ui and ux in general. because the design of interface is fundementally about the design of *interactions*, and what you want to enable a user or customer to *do* will ultimately drive those interactions.6 -
So as applying for an internship to a new company, they wanted me to make an account and do some things to get use to the website... That's great, until I learned their website is fucking garbage!
Takes 5 seconds to load any page (they import and link so much shit, it's poorly optimized), their website is vulnerable to Javascript injection (in many different places), im sure it will be vulnerable to sql injection too.
Their design looks bad, icons are terrible, no common design flow, super busy. And they are taking about using machine learning and big data? Bitch you need to fucking make your site usable first!! If contacted them and will give them 30 days to fix their shit before I write about it -
I started a project at high school 7 years ago, I had no idea what's clean code or design pattern, just learn while keep coding. I eventually stopped because my code is so terrible I cannot understand it anymore.
Now, after 1 year of working, I look back those dirty codes and think it is actually not that bad. Within hours I even fixed a bug with concurrency.
I start to think, instead of learning to how to write good code, maybe I should learn how to read bad code. That's just much more practical.5 -
I just made a terrible mistake 😬 finishing my Android app for school project on my Ubuntu, Android Studio opened, trillions of chrome tabs opened, Spotify opened (it's a must! 🎶🤘), simply typical school project coding. Then I wanted to fully complete design and I remembered I did some prototypes of that app using JustInMind on VirtualBox win. So I without realizing what monstrosities are already running on my poor laptop I booted it.
I'm using Ubuntu for five years now and this was the first time I had to hard-reset it 😬😬 lets hope to never do the same mistake again2 -
The single most annoying thing about working with Microsoft is how they, at one point, decided to wipe 99% of their articles and downloads on their site. But instead of updating it in their OWN FUCKING OS, they just leave links to the broken pages in their help system. The second problem then arises when you realise that instead of giving you an error page, it automatically redirects you to the default page.
But on top of wiping their site, not updating windows to reflect those changes, and having a terrible site design, they have also decided that it would be best to keep the pages that once we're, online. This means that they will still show up in search engines, without any content being there.
Add to that the fact that their support team is incompetent to an insane degree, and often doesn't know what they're talking about. This has caused me so much frustration over the last few days.
Dear Microsoft, please get your act together and fix your shitty website.
Greetings,
A pissed of customer who paid money for your shitty services2 -
My two cent: Java is fucking terrible for computer science. Why the fuck would you teach somebody such a verbose language with so many unwritten rules?
If you really want your students to learn about computer, why not C? Java has no pointer, no passed by reference, no memory management, a lots of obscure classes structure and design pattern, this shit is garbage. The student will almost never has contact with the compiler, many don't even know of existence of a compiler.
Java is so enterprise focused and just fucked up for educating purpose. And I say it as somebody who (still) uses it as main language.
If you want your students to be productive and learn about software engineering, why not Python? Things are simple in Python can can be done way easier without students becoming code monkeys (assuming they don't use for each task a whole library). I mean java takes who god damn class and an explicitly declared entry point which is btw. fucking verbose to print something into the console.
Fuck Java.17 -
It's still in development. It often says the opposite from what is expected. Try Retoor1b chatbot at https://llm.molodetz.nl
This was result after building bot + chat website from scratch including training with embeddings. Design is generated by GPT, I tried my own but all ugly.
It's quite cool huh? Ask it to write some code for you. It's absolutely terrible. If it's down, try again in 5 minutes. I'm still working on it.
What's the result? I finally have a toolkit to make good/serious bots. Code could be bit better, but that's for other day.
Stack: self written webserver (and yes, you can post a gb to it or ddos it. Not sure if it survives the first one. I should limit requests to one mb anyway. Http headers may officially not be more than 4096 in total) since I know http protocol from my head anyway. Python websockets module. Asyncio, chromadb.
It could have xss issues. Don't care.
Let me know what you think42 -
Going through site after senior dev asked front end dev to go through it and tweak it for design and better responsiveness(he and I are back end oriented and have no design skillz).
Things are breaking visually on almost all devices.
Client sends an email saying it suddenly looks terrible on mobile and wants to know what happened. I let him know we were actively working on things and it should be good in a few minutes.
Looking over CSS...there are "!important" tags EVERYWHERE, media queries are in the wrong order and have "!important" attached to almost everything so the largest screen size settings win.
Why do I even bother?2 -
So I'm coming out of one that has a focus on this stack (JS [JQuery after weeks of Vanilla JS drilling in our heads, React], Java, MySQL, Python [Django, Bottle], HTML/CSS, and a few web security concepts (XSS, SQL injections).
The whole course has been 4 months learning, 3 weeks working on a final project. Next week is the presentation, so I think I can safely comment on the course.
We moved fast, but that's to be expected. Lecture in the mornings, exercises in the afternoons, assignments due at the beginning of each week. Constantly working towards it and improving. I have been working pretty hard. We were given some help, but had to get a lot of answers online (based God StackOverflow), but that's part of it.
We touched on some concepts like inheritance in JS, Python and Java, OOP and to be open to concepts we don't know so we should be thirsty for that knowledge.
In my off time, I've begun texting myself Node and really trying to double down on React because it seems useful. I realized I was more drawn to the backend, but I was comfortable in front end as well. (Just don't ask me to design anything, my eye for aesthetics/CSS sorcery is terrible.)
The overall experience has been pretty mixed, but we were mostly unsatisfied. We weren't given then help we were promised. The explanations weren't exactly crystal clear, so we would have to teach ourselves and each other quite a bit. We worked together a lot. Some people really fell behind, some caught up, some flew ahead and thrived. (I'm somewhere between caught up and thrived, I recognize where I stand.)
I'm happy I did a bootcamp, they aren't miracle programs, but they at least kick you into place that you are learning and need to continue to learn. (Just kinda wish I had done a different one.)
Feel free to ask about anything concerning it! -
Overengineering. Finding the right point between overdesign and no design at all. That's where fancy languages and unusual patterns being hit by real world problems, and you need to deal with all that utter mess you created being architecture astronaut. Isn't that funny how you realize that another fancy tool is fundamentally incompatible with the task you need to solve, and you realize it after a month of writing workarounds and hacks.
But on the other hand, duct tape slacking becomes a mess even quicker.
Not being able to promote projects. You may code the shit out of side project and still get zero response, absolutely no impact. That's why your side projects often becomes abandoned.
Oversleeping. You thought tomorrow was productive day, but you wake up oversleeped, your head aches, your mind is not clear and you be like "fuck that, I'm staying in bed watching memes all day". But there's job that has to be done, and that bothers you.
Writing tests. Oh, words can't describe how much I hate writing tests, any kind of. I tried testing so many times in high school, at university, even at production, but it seems like my mind is just doesn't accept it. I know that testing is fundamentally important, but my mind collapses every time I try to write a single fucking test, resulting in terrible headache. I don't know why it's like that, but it is, and I better repl the shit out of pure function than write fucking tests. -
So due to some necessary repairs on my Nokia 6.1 i had to use an iPhone for the last 2 weeks (was the device they gave me for the duration of the repair). And let me say something in advance: I own a Macbook Pro, i own an iPad Pro, both devices are excellent for what i use them for. I enjoy OS X, i enjoy iOS on the tablet. But oh boy is the iPhone a shitshow of a magnitude i have never seen.
First off: The notifications. They feel like Android 4 or something. No customization, no grouping, not context. Also the swipe down gesture simply blocks whatever i am doing.
Multitasking: What a shitshow. There is no continuity, apps reload on a whim, no switching between apps (except that strange thing where the app shows up on the left upper screen, but i can't go back from there?)
Settings: WHY ARE APPS SETTINGS IN THE GLOBAL SETTINGS!! And not even all settings are. They are all over the place. And the settings are so convoluted and bloated, i can't find half of the things i am looking for.
Clock & Alarm: Goddamn that design choice with the edit button infuriates me to no end. Why can't i click an alarm and simply edit it? Also: Why do i have to enter the clock app to even see which alarm is going off next?
The Appdrawer: WHY CAN'T I SORT MY APPS BY NAME?? I have to conciously remember where i put things. Apps i use rarely, apps i use often.
God, iOS on the phone is so fucking terrible.4 -
i had an epiphany today, in a discussion with the software architect of our new project.
i'm having the epic job to design & implement a prototype for a C++ library in a new software project and collected some inspiration in our "old" software, where i'm maintaining the module that fulfills the same functionality (i thought). i've been maintaining this module for around a year now. i analyzed the different features and stuff to consider and created a partial model of the new library.
when i showed it to the architect today, he was like "oh my god, no no no, you don't need all this functionality, this shall not be part of the new library!"
this was the moment when i realized how deeply fucked up the code base of the old module is.
imagine it like this:
you want to automate the process of making yourself a good ol' cup of coffee.
the reasonable thing would be to have
- a smart water boiler where you set parameters water temperature and amount of water to be fetched from the water supply
- a smart coffee bean grinder where you can set type of beans, amount of beans and grinding fineness
- a component where water and ground coffee are joined to brew the coffee, where parameters like duration, pressure etc. are set
- a milk tank where amount of milk, desired temperature and duration / speed of foaming can be set
- a sugar dispenser where amount of applied sugar can be set
- optionally, additional modules with spices, syrup, ice cubes, whatever for your very personal coffee experience
on requesting a coffee, you would then configure and orchestrate all components to your wishes to make you a fine cup of coffee. you can also add routines like "makeCappucchino()", "makeEspresso()", or whatever.
our software is not like this.
it is like this:
- a smart water boiler consisting of submodules that know how to cook water for e.g. "cappucchino with sugar" or for "espresso without sugar, but with milk and ice cubes"
- 5 smart bean grinders that know how to grind beans for e.g. cappucchino, espresso, latte macchiato and for 73ml of water preheated to 82°C
- a very smart sugar dispenser that knows how to add sugar to 95, 98 and 100°C coffee and to coffee made of BOTH coffee arabica AND coffee robusta beans.
etc. etc., i think you're getting the gist.
when i realized this, it was like, right in front of my eyes, this terrible pattern emerged like a foul, corrupted caleidoscope of chaos, through the whole code base of this module.
i've already known how rotten from the core this code base is, but today i've actually identified a really bad pattern that i hadn't realized before. the whole architecture is so bloated that it is hard to have an overview of the whole thing. and it would require a LOT of refactoring to repair this pattern.
but i guess it would also be infinitely satisfying because i could probably reduce the code base for 30% or something...
but unfortunately, this is never going to happen, because screw refactoring.
it's a great feeling to start this new library from scratch, tho...6 -
Engineering manager and I have a chat last Friday about some working performant code that needs to be refactored for future reusability. Not my favorite stuff but ok, let’s do it. We talk about things VERBALLY, one way of doing it, then another way. She’s in a rush to her next meeting and has to go. I feel very clear on what she wants and how it needs to happen.
After the call I do some thinking and I give her the estimate and brief her my plan. I tell her exactly the way it’s going to be done. She says do it and gives me her sign off.
I submit my MR today. And then she says why I didn’t do it another way. A more generalized way. And “the way we talked about.”
And I ask her if she can explain her way bc there is obviously some misunderstanding. And she proceeds to zero in on some functions I wrote and say how they are not generalized enough and how it’s basically the same as what we had before (but it’s actually a much different design). I patiently listen and at some point she abruptly says she’s out of time and needs to go to a meeting. I say I still don’t understand what she wants. Then she says that she will implement it bc I still don’t understand and she has no more time to explain. I feel pretty bad.
I suggest next time she can show me on zoom whiteboard, just anything visual and not auditory to make sure things are clear and we are on the same page.
She concludes that management has directed us to come to the office more so I need to come in so we can do in person white-boarding.
This whole thing feels unnecessary. We’ve never had this issue before. It seems like either some intentional plot to get me to come into the office more often or terrible communication skills and a lack of priority on my managers part. Like can you just white board your ideas for 5 minutes?!?! There are many tools to do this digitally!
The thing is I still don’t know where the communication gap is bc I still don’t know what she wants. Keep in mind all this fuss is over three cards of text on a webpage.
This is my first job in industry. How do managers normally communicate engineering ideas? And what are the best ways over zoom? And in person?
I noticed here there is not a culture of whiteboarding or pair programming.
It’s on the days like these I question what I’m doing here…10 -
I was logged into an account just now. On the "My Account" page, there was a button that said, "Manage Subscription." I clicked it. Instead of just opening the subscription page, it opened the help page in a new tab showing me how to manage my subscription. No mention anywhere about how to actually get to the subscription page. All I wanted to do was make a payment.1
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I always thought wordpress was ok, not great not terrible, from a coding perspective. Now every new framework I have worked on makes me see why Wordpress is on 40% of the internet.
Now I love wordpress not because of what it did do, but because of all the really stupid things it managed to avoid doing including: over abstraction, trend chasing, using "new transformative technology" that disappears in 2 years, breaking plugin economy with updates and making devs start over, making everything OOP for the sake of making everything OOP, making adding on a bit of code take multiple files of multiple formats and boiler plate code, boiler plate code, compiling dependencies, composer, twig, laravel, one page applications, react, angular, vue, javascript only stacks (MEAN), not letting you control sql queries, protected/private scopes and design that doesn't let you fix or alter bad code others did, and the list goes on and on.
Wordpress did a lot right, and devs should try learning from it instead of making more problems to solve. Sure it's not elegant, but you known what it does do? Focus on a solving a problem. Then it does. Without inventing new ideas or concepts to inject into the code and create new problems.
And you know what else? Hooks are actually very well implemented in Wordpress. I've seen it done much worse.
Honestly my main gripe with the entire platform is a slow moving to OOP for no reason and the database design should separate post type into different tables, the current design makes it less scalable for large data sets for multiple reasons so I'd fix that.5 -
Why exactly did i decide to use kivy is beyond me, but now i started so might aswell stick to it. Expect rants vecause there are a lot of terrible design decisions here.
Also, does anyone have a kvlang documentation/examples? Couldnt find any.1 -
I was sitting down at my desk today, pissed due to some more lack of coffee, and wondering about my future.
It came upon me that I absolutely despise what I am currently doing (job wise). There is a part of me that tells me that things are going to be alright, but that is just some nonsense that my mind makes up to rationalise how terrible it actually is here at this company.
I think that perhaps my abhor for my current position is a little more directed to the people and company that I work for, but I am really just fed up.
I have found quite a liking in terms of web-design. The clients and the work is a lot less stressful than what I am doing now - and I actually enjoy what I am doing. It is nice to see something come to fruition.
Perhaps that's the way to go? God decisions are fucking risky.1 -
Adobe XD is the newest terrible child of the idea that you can design "user experience." What a waste of time. How many more middle-men do we need in this work flow?4
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Thinking back, it’s pretty terrible how long it took to create my first real development project.
When I was the ages of 13-18 I built websites on and off but I would never consider them good enough. I would literally design a bunch of images and then, using just HTML, put all the images together like a puzzle using exact pixel locations. Might be fine and dandy now but back then it would look great on my monitor but on others it would be an absolute mess.
Anyways, after that I got in college and started learning C++ and did assignments but I don’t count those as my own either. Not until I was 29 (my current age) did I finally develop a program assigned by my internship. Prior to that I always just re-learned C++ over and over again off and on because I had no clue where to go after that.
Apologies for the long intro. So the first development project that I feel is legit at my internship I had to use my companies API to track the amount of time it took for them to encrypt a packet and then decrypt it as well as grabbing the packet and seeing how long the hash was, the letters used in which position and so on. Essentially grab a whole bunch of statistics from their software and then output it to an excel document. It had a menu, and I had to make it work on Windows, Ubuntu, Raspbian, and some other systems on different devices.
I was actually really proud of what I ended up with and they use it to test their new versions and compare and so forth. -
Chrome...
Chome what the hell is this?
In Firefox with my default theme I can tell which tab is open and which one isn't. In Chrome, you put !!white as a highlight over gray.
You have actually managed to design a UI element almost on the same level of terrible as IE6-11, almost.2 -
Jesus fucking Christ windows firewall is a tumor on this Earth. Serious who the hell thought of the design for that shit? The way rules are implemented are fucking terrible and you really can't tell one choice from the other. All I needed was for a game to be allowed through my firewall so I could host games and it took hours to fix this problem.
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IOS keyboard is utter garbage. IOS as a whole is utter garbage, but the keyboard is the cream of the crop of garbage.
Wasting a user's time and destroying/changing the user's input against their wishes is malicious design of the highest order and this dumpster fire excels in it.
Type something completely valid and autocomplete changes it to something that doesn't makes sense. It not only gives you a terrible suggestion half the time, it will also change previous parts of the sentence that it somehow allowed you to keep. If you reject its suggestion, it deletes your current word and previous word(s), instead of restoring it to what it was before it made the terrible suggestion, like every other keyboard does.
Need to go back and adjust your sentence? If you tap it will hijack the cursor and highlight the nearest word it doesn't like instead of moving the cursor where you touch. If you accidentally hit a character on the cramped and unusable keyboard, congrats, you get to type the word again.
I know about hold space to drag the cursor.
I don't want Apple to decide for me that I actually wanted to go to the closest word it doesn't like, or the current word, or the next word based on a dice roll. I want the cursor to go where I tap. Like literally every other input device functions.
Want readily accessible numbers and punctuation? lol no
I know there's gboard, but compared to Android it's also almost unusable. This leads me to believe the keyboard is little more than a skin over the IOS keyboard engine, like Safari, another IOS dumpster fire. But, it is slightly better than the stock keyboard, which isn't saying much.
I yearn, minute by minute, for the time I can ditch this dumpster fire for a real phone.11 -
Whats people's opinion using other design languages on other operating systems.
For example, using the UWP design language on the Xbox android app.
I absolutely hate it... Makes the app look terrible and out of place in my opinion, even worse when they use there square style icon and just put it in a circle for it to 'match' the pixel launcher, for example, LinkedIn -,- -
I'm want to hear other Dev's opinions on this week's weekly group rant! Do you find that the "worst projects" are caused the most by:
A) Poor solution design and/or terrible-idea-to-start-with
B) Poor process and/or terrible project management
C) Working with terrible teammates/customers6 -
I overcomplicated shit yet again.
Last year we had taken over a massive project, where the main problem was an abundance of design patterns. I was (who am I kidding, I still am) a newbie, and most patterns I'd seen the very first time. By the end of it I learned what they're good for, but now I love design patterns for what they are rather than the problems they solve. I write the same horror that I saw and I know full well how terrible it is, but I Just. Can't. Stop.
What do I do?2 -
(Warning, wall of text)
Settle an argument for me. Say you have a system that deals with proprietary .foo files. And there are multiple versions of foo files. And your system has to identify which version of foo you are using and validate the data accordingly.
Now the project I was on had a FooValidator class that would take a foo file, validate the data and either throw an error or send the data on its merry way through the rest of the system. A coworker of mine argued that this was terrible practice because all of the foo container classes should just contain a validate method. I argued that it was a design choice and not bad practice just different practice. But I have also read that rather than a design choice that having a FooValidator is the right way to do OOP. Opinions?1 -
With my work putting more and more things on my plate that I don't want to work on and refusing to increase my pay proportionately I'm thinking about going freelance. My biggest argument against is this that I'm terrible with design.
What design tools to you guys use for mocking up a website? I use Windows and Linux for my work so Mac only apps aren't going to help.
I also struggle with colors. I've never been officially diagnosed as color blind, but I've been told I'm wrong about colors enough to know there's something going on there. Are there any good tools out there that can help select colors that go well together? I'm thinking if a company has a red they use for everything, I put that in and the tool gives me a few color pallettes to work with.
I've also thought about just finding a designer to work with, but then I have to budget for this person as well which means I'd have to take on even more clients. I want to improve my design abilities so I can do more myself.
Any help appreciated guys.2 -
Make sure your software does not lose data when improperly quit, and does not allow deletion without a proper confirmation dialogue.
I have experienced pre-installed voice recorder applications that leave behind an unsalvageable corrupt file if the smartphone shuts down due to running out of battery charge, or powers off due to battery undervoltage (as a result of an aged battery).
As often, third-party software beats pre-installed software, and the voice recorder "ASR" by "NLL apps" leaves behind a playable file when unexpectedly quit. Might be because it uses the OGG vorbis format rather than M4A or 3GP audio.
Also, the camera software of the Samsung Galaxy Pocket smartphone from 2012 (which was crap anyway) would discard a video file if the recording was quit through the "back" navigation key.
Perhaps this was done deliberately, but it is a terrible idea due to the possibility of accidents happening.
Some gallery software for Android lets the user delete photos and videos by swiping vertically. After this, a so-called "toast" notification appears with an undo button. If not responded to within seconds, or when tapping next to it due to stress, the photo or video is gone. This is, needless to say, terrible design.2 -
Anytime I operate with hardware RAIDs on prod servers, I still sweat from the nerves of sending a wrong command that would wipe the RAID metadata clean and make all the data disappear.
Doesn't help that the CLI tools (MegaCli / StorCli) are both kinda terrible. The prior has a terrible documentation / switch design and the latter cannot do everything the prior can... -
Some mobile file managers kick me back to the beginning after selecting items for copying or moving.
When tapping on "copy" or "move" after selecting files/folders, some file managers like ES File Explorer (back when it was popular) conveniently remain in the current directory, whereas the stock Android file manager and many vendors' pre-installed file managers like that of Samsung kick me back to the initial directory. On phones with MicroSD, that's the storage selector, and on phones without, that's /storage/emulated/0/.
If I wanted to move files into a sub folder of the currently viewed directory, I have to navigate all the way back to that current directory, which is, needless to say, annoying.
Who thought it was a smart idea to kick the user back to the initial directory? But vendors' pre-installed file managers tend to be garbage anyway. Samsung's "My Files" file manager does not let me enter file names longer than 50 characters, does not let me change the extensions of files, does not support selecting files from search results or jumping to their parent directory, does obviously lack range selection, hides the status bar while opened (what's the point of that?!), its search feature is slow and sometimes crashes, and it can only search the entire device storage or memory card and not individual directories.
It's almost like Samsung deliberately tried to design a file manager as terrible as they possibly could.5 -
So the project I have been working on for the past 5 months was finally released yesterday with only very minor problems, this stemmed from both programming side, and users entering data incorrectly.
It has been a rather hectic 5 months. I've had to deal with crap like:
- clients not knowing their own products
- a project manager that didn't document anything (or at least everything into a Google Slides document)
- me writing both requirements AND specifications (I'm a dev, not a PM)
- developers not following said specifications (then having to rewrite all their work)
But the worst thing I think would be the lack of vision from everyone. Everyone sees it as a "project" that should be get it over and done with rather a product that has great potential.
So with the project winding down, and only very few things left to fix/implement. Over these 5 months I learned a lot about domain driven design, Laravel's core, AWS, and just how terrible people are at their jobs. I imagine if I worked with people who gave a damn, or who actually had skills, I probably wouldn't have had such a difficult project.
Right now I'm less stressed but now feel rather exhausted from it all. What kind of things do you to help with the exhaustion and/or slow down of pace?1 -
The frustration you get in designing when the colors you want in your prototype design isn't the same color in your device. SO FRUSTRATED. I use an amoled device as my test phone. Looks terrible.5
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Question: What do you guys think of this logo?
Anyway, here's my rant..
I'm starting to get pissed off with my relative for whom I'm doing a project.
He's coming up with the ugliest logo and fonts I have ever seen in 2018.
I mean it's business so I don't have much say in what he decides esp since he seems to have taken it upto himself to design the logo and managed to make a logo suggestion I made even terrible.
I have told him multiple times to avpid the knockoff wierd fonts and use simple fonts that looks normal.
And yet, he comes back everytime by changing colors in one of the letter n the words 🤦♂️
Maybe it's because we are from different generations and we have different visions on what it should look like.
He is the kind of guy who goes on and on about how he used computers and internet back in the 90s everytime we meet!
He probably uses MS Word to design the logo! This is the newest logo he came up with.
If I were to be honest, I would be probably rude in his eyes, since it is his "work".
What do you guys think of this logo? Can only show that much of the logo to maintain some privacy.14