The feeling when updating a site when you know it's going to break any second...

I've been at my job for about 3 months now. They have me remaking a 10 year old site so that it's responsive and updated to HTML5. well the "senior developer" I'm working under doesn't know squat about responsive design and doesn't know that tags like font are deprecated so he's basically just copy pasting old code into bootstrap grid and calling that "updating the site". Lol did I mention he's still declaring the doctype as HTML 4 too? how did I get stuck here? -_-

For the first time in ages I decided to order a takeaway.

Had a quick check on the takeaway's online menu. My order total was going to be £15.60.

I called up to order and the total was apparently £21.40.

I queried this with the member of staff and mentioned I got the prices from their online menu.

I was told the online menu was "slightly out of date".

When I got into the takeaway to pickup my order I got speaking to the owner. He said the menu on their site was from 2009. He stressed updating the menu was on their list of things to do.

Lol :)

!rant Realized I can embed repl.it repls into a webpage, which means that I can show off all my cool little C/ C++ programs on my portfolio website. Which of course led me to realize my portfolio site needed updating which is of course the reason I’m still up at 4:30 am.

So my host of choice decided to migrate an old site to a new set of IPs without warning yesterday, down side to a VPS I guess.

Now this wouldn’t be an issue if it wasn’t on a dedicated IP you wankers.

DNS won’t resolve to new location yet and Virtual hosts contained the old IPs and for some fuck of a reason the httpd file is auto generated 😡so updating it will be lost on reboot.

Like What the flying fuck you imbeciles, this site has been up and running for 5+ years on this IP.
I barely do any maintenance for t as it’s just an old horse sitting on the web but fuck you don’t need to fuck with it or atleast give some fucking warning before you go drop it offline 😡

DISCLAIMER: I swear to god this is true. This is a completely unfabricated anecdote.

Soon we are moving to a new office space, and my department have been delegated the responsibility of moving all of the computers from the old work space to the new one. I was a little confused at first, because I'm a software developer, not a removalist.
It gets better.

We just had a meeting the other day, and my manager had advised us that we were to be moving the machines on a Saturday. I confirmed whether we were being paid overtime, simply because I had never worked a Saturday before. My manager replied (this is paraphrased but ultimately accurate) - "It's unpaid. Because you get paid a salary, you're expected to do unpaid overtime here and there. We have christmas parties and nights out, all of which come out of the companies pocket. Not all companies do this, so it's only fair you give back".

I honestly couldn't believe it. I was being asked to spend basically the majority of my day off moving computers from one site to another, for free, purely because it's "expected". Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?

Long story short, I went home and started updating my resume.

Got my first Webdev job at a small marketing company, felt very lucky as I didn't have much experience. Turns out I'm the only one that could program. The other guys just use Wordpress. It felt wrong at first, using plugins instead of developing, but we got results and clients were happy. I felt like there was a lot less to this development thing than I'd previously thought! And so we continued.

But I noticed that some of our more plugin heavy sites (not made by me - these were made in some drag/drop Wordpress interface) were running slow. I mean 15 seconds load time slow. I joined devRant around the same time and discovered that no - this is not what normal development actually is. Wordpress seems universally hated. Thank god, because something seemed very wrong!

So with us getting complaints all over the place over page speed from relatively high-profile clients, I've gone and set up a script on a server that downloads the whole front end of these Wordpress sites and serves them up instead of the 'real' thing. Did I mention that there's basically no dynamic content on most of these sites? It works like a charm! I'm now trying to figure out how to get forms and route them into the real, hidden version of the site, as well as automatically updating the html views whenever the client changes anything in the Wordpress backend. Not sure if this has fixed the problem or just enabled bad practice, but I don't think I'm going to be able to stop the others from doing things this way...

For the record, yes there are plugins that do similar stuff but I thought it'd be nice to never use plugins again! And hey, I got to learn all about bash scripting so I can't complain.

For real though, I didn't quite realise how bad the Wordpress thing really was until I came here. Thanks for making me aware, all!

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 services

Mgr: composer require. That's all you're allowed to do. I want you to manually go through our word press site, check which ones need an update. And do a composer require in the command line for each to update them.

Me: wouldn't it make more sense to just increment the version in the composer.json and then run update?

Mgr: no, you don't understand how composer works, it's very complicated. Just do require. Don't ever do update.

Me: *does it anyway (reverting later of course) and compares update vs require and their differences in the lock file*

I mean it looks like 'update' is updating important dependencies for each of the packages as well as the package itself... The 'require' just seems to download the package itself but no updates to dependencies for those packages.

But seriously is composer that complicated that I can't just do an 'update'?

I've been reading the composer documentation and it seems to be saying that update is the better way to go...

I'm doubting myself these days...

DevRant-Stats Site Update:
Future projections & Live General Section

Added some future projections like SocialBlade, where you can see your score in the future, according to the stats in the last 30 days. Therefore it will only be available after storing the stats for 30 days.

Also made the complete "General" section live now, and replaced "Live Score" with "Devrant++ Member since".
So now the values are updating every second! (Using EventStream so not working in Edge Browser lol idc)

Have fun!
Feedback is appreciated!

Me: Hey SEO guy. I am updating our online store from Flask/jQuery in ReactJS.

SEO guy: That is amazing. Google LOVES ReactJS and it will crawl the site very fast.

*fast forward*

SEO guy: Hey, did you change anything in the site because the site is not ranking anymore on Google. The URLs are dynamically generated in front end. Google does not like that.

ME: But you said that Google loves React. It took me nearly 1 month to migrate the code in React.

Fucking hell.

I have an idea and I want some feedback.

I'm the only web developer and I've been updating our systems so they can be maintainable. Previously we have used Wordpress for landing pages which is complete overkill So here's the idea:

Static sites for landing pages and any forms that would need to filled out would be on a separate site.

Ok so here me out. First the landing pages barely need any maintenance so using pure HTML/CSS/JS wouldn't be a problem. This means I can strip away all of the crap from Wordpress and make the load times faster. Second all of the landing pages forms would be hosted in a single place making analytics easier for the reporting system.

Really I just despise Wordpress and am trying any practical reason to not use it as much as possible. Oh and don't worry I'll use preprocessors and minify the production files.

When updating + restarting your Windows PC fixes the random exception being thrown in your controller when you were worried your frontend code broke the site. 😲

So my manager mentioned off hand that we might look at updating our company website to look a little more modern...

Me being me jumped right into action and now that I've finished I remember why I haven't built my personal site.. Fuck static web pages man...

Don't know why I did this, not even happy with it but I think it'll do, CSS and HTML is messy but fuck it, it works...

I think I may be someone's wk101soon given how things are going for me.

So I get shipped over to the new offices to do some work. Initially, I was supposed to be updating SQL stored procedures.

That I can handle, well my task is now to build the skeleton project for a web API in core 2.0 using domain driven design and onion architecture which the rest of the team will use.

Okay, I don't have any experience in any of that at all. And god bless the team lead explaining some stuff to me. But it's going to take more than a 20-minute chat here and there for this stuff to sink in.

And being told just to build it how you think it should be isn't great advice when I'm trying to figure out how the systems work.

Every other API project I look at is structured completely different from one another so looking for patterns has failed.

I'm fucking stressed out every bit of information I'm getting on whats potentially happening with my job im getting second hand from people. Because I can't access my emails while off-site something I'm repeatedly flagging.

Every job advert is painstakingly making it clear how out of date my skill set is (or lack of). Evidently, I've been way too lax, and this has been a kick in the bollocks I'm not likely to forget.

If we're being evaluated on performance to see who they'll keep, then I've failed at the first hurdle.

Life lesson for those in education, don't be this knob head here and get comfortable when you land a job. Just knowing about the tech that's commonly used in your field does jack all study it.

Not a structured/meaningful rant and shits probably not as bad as I see it. I've only chewed through one fingernail after all.

Me working on html/css updates for a banner message.

Web Ops Director: [slack] Hi! nice to e-meet you! I was talking with the Mgr of Product. He thinks it would be great if the banner message updates were on the site right away instead of having to wait 10 minutes for the cache to clear after updating the banner content in admin. Can you add that to your ticket?

Lol that’s a load of crap. 1) Product would have just told me himself and 2) Product would never pull this bullshit of bringing a ticket out of scope like you’re pulling right now. And 3) My spidey sense says this is a red flag 🚩.

Me: [in words web ops will understand] That’s going to a lot of time. And it would keep your content updates from making it to the weekly release. 😁

Him: "I'm updating a site and I'm trying to find the REST endpoints you put out to replace the SOAP services"

Me: "Send me a list of endpoints it's using and I'll tell you what the new ones are"

Him: "Here's a list of the endpoints. The ones I've found are in bold"

Me: "Here's the new list."

Him: "Why did you only fill out the ones I'm not using?"

So, FML, he sent me a list of everything in the WSDL and bolded the ones he "found" in his code. And I'm the asshole for getting frustrated that he wasted 30 minutes of my time.

I came from being a game developer, to doing VR/AR stuff, to mobile app/game development, to website development, to arduino, IoT and robotics.

... And now most of my time is spent on updating a portal site using a shitty cms with each page needing to be crafted manually using html and deadlines are always a few hours away, with revisions on the launch day itself.

I really wanna go back to the interesting stuff. :/

The long talk about the site's design and updating it according to the recent events...
Turned out the client wanted to add the snowflakes on the site.

This bitch im dealing with thinks I care about updating her site.. I don't. If you try to get my mates dad fired for bullshit 😒 I won't give a shit about your project.

Yes it's not professional... But quite frankly. I don't care. I have more important work

Need some advice here.

So hello everyone! I recently moved abroad for work, for the sake of the experience and the excitement of learning how developers in Latin America tackle specific problems. To my surprise, the dev team is actually composed solely of Europeans and Americans.

I work for a relatively new startup with an ambitious goal. I love the drive everyone has, but my major gripe is with my team lead. He's adverse to any change, and any and all proposals made to improve quality of throughput are shot down in flames. Our stack is a horrendous mess patched together with band-aids, nothing is documented, there are NO unit tests for our backend and the same goes for our frontend. The team has been working on a database/application migration for about a month now, which I find ridiculous because the entire situation could have been avoided by following very rudimentary DevOps practices (which I'm shunned for mentioning). I should also add that for whatever reason containerization and microservices are also taboo, which I find hillarious because of our currently convoluted setup with elastic beanstalk and the the constant complaints between our development environment and production environments differing too much.

I've been tasked with managing a Wordpress site for the past 3 weeks, hardly what I would consider exciting. I've written 6 pages in the past two weeks so our marketing team can move off of squarespace to save some money and allow us more control. Due to the shit show that is our "custom theme" I had to write these pages in a manner that completely disregard existing style rules by disabling them entirely on these pages. Now, ironically they would like to change the blog's base theme but this would invertedly cause other pages created before I arrived to simply not work, which means I would have to rewrite them.

Before I took the role of writing an entire theme from scratch and updating these existing pages to work adequately, I proposed moving to a headless wordpress setup. In which case we could share assets in a much more streamline manner between our application and wordpress site and unify our styles. I was shot down almost immediately. Due to a grave misunderstanding of how wordpress works, no one else on the team seems to understand just how easy it is to fetch data from wordpress's api.

In any event, I also had a tech meeting today with developers from partner companies and realized no one knew what the fuck they were talking about. The greater majority of these self proclaimed senior developers are actually considered junior developers in the United States. I actually recoiled at the thought that I may have made a great mistake leaving the United States to look a great tech gig.

I mean no disrespect to Latin America, or any European countries, I've met some really incredible developers from Russia, the Ukraine, Italy, etc. in the past and I'm certainly not trying to make any blanket statements. I just want to know what everyone thinks, if I should maybe move back to the states and header over to the bay/NY. I'm from the greater Boston area, where some really great stuff is going on but I guess I also wanted a change of scenery.

Our site has a feature where if a user changes some parameters in his profile, his plans on the site are updated in accordance with the change.

It took me a 2 weeks to implement a proper queue based updating mechanism.

My manager : "What's taking so long? Why not implement it in a recursive loop of all the users in the database?"

I could only stare with my mouth open.

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.

Anyone familiar with Wordpress site migration?

I'm trying to move a client site from my dev server to theirs, seem to do so fine, but all urls still point to my dev domain.

A search and replace plugin was recommended but it doesn't seem to be updating the database references correctly...or at all.

Not sure if anyone would mind lending some insight so I don't have to essentially redo the whole website over :p

actually it wasn't mine. But it affected me. So we had a project website on wordpress and wanted to rewrite the theme. everything went well to the Point of production. Site is fine locally, at testing and on stage. On production we still see old, a bit broken old version, but only on homepage. Wtf. Nothing helped. After couple of hours later we found out, that the admin was updating php version and he left html shot at production, which was taking over.

Why does a site have two caching plugins? Whoever made this site (that I'm working on improving) needs to get new and updated training.

And why is this site using godaddy shared hosting? I couldn't even update more than two plugins at a time.

Someone asked me to check on his Wordpress site. Can't upload media. 'Failure to write to disk' Updating fails too. Directory and file permissions are ok. Server has enough space. Cleared tmp. Any more ideas?

4 of apparel manufacturer gap sites down for hours this morning. Motives ? They were updating each site for "a better shopping experience". Source : internetretailer.com