Why do some female programmers place emphasis on their gender?

It's always: female programmer... Female web developer... Female android dev... Female Sysadmin... Etc

I mean, you don't see males saying "I'm a male programmer."

Female programmers aren't rare anymore. More and more of them are starting to program, so what's the point of emphasizing your gender?

For some reason, females think it's "special" to be a female programmer.

How does your gender relate to your skill?

One of our web developers reported a bug with my image api that shrunk large images to a thumbnail size. Basically looked like this img = ResizeImage(largeImage, 50); // shrink the image by 50%
The 'bug' was when he was passed in the thumbnail image and requesting a 300% increase, and the image was too pixelated.
I tried to explain that if you need the larger image, use the image from disk (since the images were already sized optimally for display) and the api was just for resizing downward.
Thinking I was done, the next day I was called into a large conference room with the company vice-president, two of the web-dev managers, and several of the web developers.
VP: "I received an alarming email saying you refused to fix that bug in your code. Is that correct?"
Me: "Bug? No, there is no bug. The image api is executing just as it is supposed to."
MGR1: "Uh...no it isn't. Images using *your* code is pixelated and unfit for our site and our customers."
MGR2: "Yes, I looked at your code and don't understand what the big deal is. Looks like a simple fix."
<web developers nodding their heads>
Me: "OK, I'll bite. What is the simple fix?"
<MGR2 looks over at one of the devs>
Dev1: "Well, for example, if we request an image resize of 300, and the image is only 50x50, only increase the size by 10. Maybe 15."
Me: "Wow..OK. So what if the image is, for example, 640x480?"
MGR1: "75. Maybe 80 if it's a picture of boots."
VP: "Oh yes, boots. We need good pictures of boots."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how to break this to you, but my code doesn't do 'maybe'. I mean, you have the image from disk.
You obviously used the api to create the thumbnail, but are trying to use the thumbnail to go back to the regular size. Why not use the original image?"
<Web-Dev managers look awkwardly towards the web devs>
Dev3: "Yea, well uh...um...that would require us to create a variable or something to store the original image. The place in the code where we need the regular image, it's easier to call your method."
Me: "Um, not really. You still have to resolve the product name from the URL path. Deriving the original file name is what you are doing already. Just do the same thing in your part of the code."
Dev2: "But we'd have to change our code"
Mgr2: "I know..I know. How about if we, for example, send you 12345.jpg and request a resize greater than 100, you go to disk and look for that image?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily>
Me: "Um, no that won't work. All I see is the image stream. I have no idea what file is and the api shouldn't be guessing, going to disk or anything like that."
Dev1: "What if we pass you the file name?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily again>
Me: "No, that would break the API contract and ...uh..wait...I'm familiar with your code. How about I make the change? I'm pretty sure I'll only have to change one method"
VP: "What! No...it’s gotta be more than that. Our site is huge."
<Mgrs and devs grumble and shift around in their chairs>
Me: "I'm done talking about this. I can change your code for you or you can do it. There is no bug and I'm not changing the api because you can't use it correctly."

Later I discovered they stopped using the resize api and wrote dynamic html to 'resize' the images on the client (download the 5+ meg images, and use the length and width properties)

Long rant ahead, but it's worth it.

I used to work with a professor (let's call him Dr. X) and developed a backend + acted as sysadmin for our team's research project. Two semesters ago, they wanted to revamp the front end + do some data visualization, so a girl (let's call her W) joined the team and did all that. We wanted to merge the two sites and host on azure, but due to issues and impeding conferences that require our data to be online, we kept postponing. I graduate this semester and haven't worked with the team for a while, so they have a new guy in charge of the azure server (let's call him H), and yesterday my professor sends me (let's call me M), H and W an email telling us to coordinate to have the merge up on azure in 2-3 days, max. The following convo was what I had with H:

M: Hi, if you just give me access to azure I'll be able to set everything up myself, also I'll need a db set up, and just send me the connection string.
H: Hi, we won't have dbs because that is extra costs involved since we don't have dynamic content. Also I can't give you access, instead push everything on git and set up the site on a test azure server and I will take it from there.
M: There is proprietary data on the site...
H: Oh really? I don't know what's on it.
<and yet he knows we have no dynamic data>
M: Fine, I'll load the data some other way, but I have access to all the data anyway, just talk to Dr. X and you'll see you can give me access. Delete my access after if you want.
H: No, just do what I said: git then upload to test azure account.

Fine, he's a complete tool, but I like Dr. X, so I message W and tell her we have to merge, she tells me that it's not that easy to set it up on github as she's using wordpress. She sends me instructions on what to do, and, lo and behold, there's a db in her solution. Ok, I go back to talking to H:

M: W is using a db. Talk to her so we can figure out whether we need a database or not.
H: We can't use a database because we want to decrease costs.
M: Yes I know that, so talk to her because that probably means she has to re-do some stuff, which might take some time. Also there might be dynamic content in what she's doing.
H: This is your project, you talk to her.
<I'm starting to get mad right now>
M: I don't know what they had her do apart from how it interfaces with what I've done.
H: We still can't have databases.
M: Listen, I don't do wordpress, and I'm not gonna mess with it, you talk to her
H: I won't do any development
<So you won't do any dev, but you won't give me access to do it either?>
M: Man, the bottleneck isn't the merging right now, it's the fact that W needs a db
H: I know, so talk to her
M: THE RESTRICTION TO NOT HAVE DATABASES IS NOT MINE, IT'S YOURS, YOU TALK TO HER. I can't evaluate whether it's a reasonable enough reason or not since I don't know the requirements or what they're willing to spend.
H: It's your project.
M: Then give me fucking access to azure and I'll handle it, you know you'll have to set up wordpress again regardless whether we set it up the first time.
H: Man just do your job.

At this point I lost it. WHAT A FUCKING TOOL. He doesn't wanna do dev work, wants me to go through the trouble of setting up on a test subscription first, and doesn't want to give me access to azure. What's more, he did shit all and doesn't want to anything else. Well fuck you. I googled him, to see if he's anyone important, if he's done anything notable which is why he's being so God damn condescending. MY INTERNSHIP ALONE ECLIPSES HIS ENTIRE CV. Then what the fuck?

There's also this that happened sometime during our talk:

M: You'll have to take to Dr. Y so he'll change the DNS to point to the azure subscription instead of my server.
H: Yea don't worry, too early for that.
M: DNS propagation takes 24 hours...
H: Yea don't worry.

DNS propagation allows the entire web to know that your website is hosted on a different server so it can change where it's pointing to. We have to do this in 2-3 days. Why do work in parallel? Nah let's wait.

I went over his head and talked to the professor directly, and despite wanting to tell him that he was both drunk and high the day he hired that guy, I kept it professional. He hasn't replied yet, but this fucker's pompous attitude is just too much for me alone, so I had to share.

PS: I named his contact as Annoying Prick 4 minutes into our chat. Gonna rename him cz that seems tooooooo soft a name right now.

Frack he did it again.
In a meeting with the department mgr and going over a request feature *we already discussed ad nauseam* that wasn’t technically feasible (do-able, just not worth the effort)

DeptMgr: “I want to see the contents of web site A embedded in web site B”
Me: “I researched that and it’s not possible. I added links to the target APM dashboard instead.”
Dev: “Yes, it’s possible. Just use an IFrame.”
DeptMgr: “I thought so. Next sprint item …what’s wrong?…you look frustrated”
Me: “Um..no…well, I said it’s not possible. I tried it and it doesn’t work”
Dev: “It’s just an IFrame. They are made to display content from another site.”
Me: “Well, yes, from a standard HTML tag, but what you are seeing is rendered HTML from the content manager’s XML. It implemented its own IFrame under the hood. We already talked about it, remember?”
Dev: “Oh, that’s right.”
DeptMgr: “So it’s possible?”
Dev: “Yea, we’ll figure it out.”
Me: “No…wait…figure what out? It doesn’t work.”
Dev: “We can use a powershell script to extract the data from A and port it to B.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell, good…Next sprint item…”
Me: “Powershell what? We discussed not using powershell, remember?”
Dev: “It’s just a script. Not a big deal.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell sounds like a right solution. Can we move on? Next sprint item….are you OK? You look upset”
Me: “No, I don’t particularly care, we already discussed executing a powershell script that would have to cross two network DMZs. Bill from networking already raised his concern about opening another port and didn’t understand why we couldn’t click a link. Then Mike from infrastructure griped about another random powershell script running on his servers just for reporting. He too raised his concern about all this work to save one person one click. Am I the only one who remembers this meeting? I mean, I don’t care, I’ll do whatever you want, but we’ll have to open up the same conversations with Networking again.”
Dev: “That meeting was a long time ago, they might be OK with running powershell scripts”
Me: “A long time ago? It was only two weeks.”
Dev: “Oh yea. Anyway, lets update the board. You’ll implement the powershell script and I’ll …”
Me: “Whoa..no…I’m not implementing anything. We haven’t discussed what this mysterious powershell script is supposed to do and we have to get Mike and Bill involved. Their whole team is involved in the migration project right now, so we won’t see them come out into the daylight until next week.”
DevMgr: “What if you talk to Eric? He knows powershell. OK…next sprint item..”
Me: “Eric is the one who organized the meeting two weeks ago, remember? He didn’t want powershell scripts hitting his APM servers. Am I the only one who remembers any of this?”
Dev: “I’m pretty good with powershell, I’ll figure it out.”
DevMgr: “Good…now can we move on?”

GAAAHH! I WANT A FLAMETHROWER!!!

Ok…feel better, thanks DevRant.

You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

!rant

This was over a year ago now, but my first PR at my current job was +6,249/-1,545,334 loc. Here is how that happened... When I joined the company and saw the code I was supposed to work on I kind of freaked out. The project was set up in the most ass-backward way with some sort of bootstrap boilerplate sample app thing with its own build process inside a subfolder of the main angular project. The angular app used all the CSS, fonts, icons, etc. from the boilerplate app and referenced the assets directly. If you needed to make changes to the CSS, fonts, icons, etc you would need to cd into the boilerplate app directory, make the changes, run a Gulp build that compiled things there, then cd back to the main directory and run Grunt build (thats right, both grunt and gulp) that then built the angular app and referenced the compiled assets inside the boilerplate directory. One simple CSS change would take 2 minutes to test at minimum.

I told them I needed at least a week to overhaul the app before I felt like I could do any real work. Here were the horrors I found along the way.

- All compiled (unminified) assets (both CSS and JS) were committed to git, including vendor code such as jQuery and Bootstrap.
- All bower components were committed to git (ALL their source code, documentation, etc, not just the one dist/minified JS file we referenced).
- The Grunt build was set up by someone who had no idea what they were doing. Every SINGLE file or dependency that needed to be copied to the build folder was listed one by one in a HUGE config.json file instead of using pattern matching like `assets/images/*`.
- All the example code from the boilerplate and multiple jQuery spaghetti sample apps from the boilerplate were committed to git, as well as ALL the documentation too. There was literally a `git clone` of the boilerplate repo inside a folder in the app.
- There were two separate copies of Bootstrap 3 being compiled from source. One inside the boilerplate folder and one at the angular app level. They were both included on the page, so literally every single CSS rule was overridden by the second copy of bootstrap. Oh, and because bootstrap source was included and commited and built from source, the actual bootstrap source files had been edited by developers to change styles (instead of overriding them) so there was no replacing it with an OOTB minified version.
- It is an angular app but there were multiple jQuery libraries included and relied upon and used for actual in-app functionality behavior. And, beyond that, even though angular includes many native ways to do XHR requests (using $resource or $http), there were numerous places in the app where there were `XMLHttpRequest`s intermixed with angular code.
- There was no live reloading for local development, meaning if I wanted to make one CSS change I had to stop my server, run a build, start again (about 2 minutes total). They seemed to think this was fine.
- All this monstrosity was handled by a single massive Gruntfile that was over 2000loc. When all my hacking and slashing was done, I reduced this to ~140loc.
- There were developer's (I use that term loosely) *PERSONAL AWS ACCESS KEYS* hardcoded into the source code (remember, this is a web end app, so this was in every user's browser) in order to do file uploads. Of course when I checked in AWS, those keys had full admin access to absolutely everything in AWS.
- The entire unminified AWS Javascript SDK was included on the page and not used or referenced (~1.5mb)
- There was no error handling or reporting. An API error would just result in nothing happening on the front end, so the user would usually just click and click again, re-triggering the same error. There was also no error reporting software installed (NewRelic, Rollbar, etc) so we had no idea when our users encountered errors on the front end. The previous developers would literally guide users who were experiencing issues through opening their console in dev tools and have them screenshot the error and send it to them.
- I could go on and on...

This is why you hire a real front-end engineer to build your web app instead of the cheapest contractors you can find from Ukraine.

I. FUCKING. HATE. MOBILE. DEVELOPMENT.

I already manage the data, devops, infra, and most of the backend dev.

We had a mobile guy. He was great. I never had to think about it and kept moving quickly on my work. #SpecializationOfLaborFTW

He left. Why? Because they wouldn't give him a small raise despite being one of the best mobile engineers in the firm. WTF.

I made the mistake of picking up just enough slack on this workflow in the interim such that I'm, apparently, the fucking god-damned release manager, fixer of pipelines, fixer of build configs, fixer of anything where someone just needs to RTFM for a half-hour to not fucking break things.

Now, 8 months later...and, apparently, Fortune 500 companies are too fucking god-damned cheap to pay for someone who actually knows WTF they're doing for a very reasonable thing to have at least one dedicated set of eyes for.

I never wanted to be a mobile dev.
I never will want to be a mobile dev.
And I certainly don't want to manage your HALF-FACE-FUCKED detached expo configs.

There's a reason I never intentionally involved myself in mobile. All the way down, it's just shitty cross-compilation, transpilation, dependency-hell, brittle-as-fuck build processes so we can foot-gun and mouth-gun react-native and expo and babel and whatever the fuck else cargo-culted horseshit into the wild.

And why? What's the actual fucking root cause? The biggest white elephant that ever fucking elephant-ed? It's because Apple and Google decided to never collaborate on a truly-native cross-platform SDK--where engineers could write native code that compiles to native binaries that's simply write-once, run-everywhere. They know they could have done that, and they didn't. So what'd they get back? Expo--a too-cleverly-designed backdoor/hack--more-or-less a way to circumvent the sane release process software has usually followed: code -> executable -> deploy. Or code -> deploy (for interpreted langs). Expo's like "keep your same executable, we're just gonna to do updates by injecting new code into it whenever we want". Didn't we learn anything with web? Shit gets messy real quick? Not to mention: HEY EXPO, WE WERE ALREADY BUILDING NATIVE APPS, YOU SHORT-SIGHTED FUCKS. THANKS FOR LURING OUR CTOs INTO FORCING EXPO DOWN OUR THROATS W/ THE IMPLICIT (BUT INCORRECT) TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE PROMISE THAT WE CAN HAVE WRITE-ONCE, RUN-ANYWHERE WITHOUT ANY BUY-IN OR COOPERATION FROM THE ACTUAL TARGET PLATFORMS.

And, we just, like, accept this? We all know it's garbage engineering. The principles we learned in the classroom aren't just academic abstractions--they actually yield real-world results--and eschewing them yields real-world failures. Expo is tightly-coupled to high-heaven, with leaky abstractions six-ways-to-christmas, chock-full of foot-guns, and fails the most basic test of quality: does it, "just work?"

Expo is fucking shameful and it should fucking die. Its promises are too bold, its land-mines too many, its future-proof-ness is alway, always, always questionable as fuck and a risk to every project that uses it.

You want a rant? This is my fucking venue, 'tis not? Well, then this is a piss and vinegar rant straight from my blood-red, beating fucking heart:

EXPO FUCKING SUCKS. AND IF YOU'RE A FAN, YOU FUCKING SUCK TOO.

You know who sucks at developing APIs?

Facebook.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And facebook, sincerelly,

Fuck you.

Forbes has, by far, the shittiest and most user-unfriendly website I've ever gone to, in this gigantic clusterfuck we call the Internet. I honestly don't understand how they felt their site design is OK. Fuck their dev team manager.

Let's run down some of its worst offenses, shall we? FORCED ANTI-ADBLOCK, shitton of ads (some of which are extremely invasive and dangerous), autoplaying sidebar video WITH SOUND ON, that fucking social sidebar & collapsed navigation, and their mind-bogglingly irrelevant, frustratingly obnoxious, & totally pointless Quote of the Day, which itself has ads and A FORCED COUNTDOWN to go to the fucking article you went there to read to begin with.

The articles themselves on Forbes are solid, so why do they have to ruin it with this shit? I will never go to a Forbes link again. No article is worth facing their torture chamber.

TLDR: Fuck you Forbes, your site is absolutely the shittiest on the entire web (which is quite a feat).

I AM SO FUCKING TIRED OF BUSINESS MOTHERFUCKERS USING TECHNICAL FUCKING BUZZWORDS LIKE THEY KNOW SHIT ABOUT TECH! THEY TRY TO BE FUCKING SMARTASSES AND ARGUE WITH DEVELOPERS LIKE GOD KNOWS WHY THIS FUCKING DOUCHE IS NOT THROWN IN /dev/null YET!

Ugh. He try to sound smart and argued with a unity game developer why the dev is not using "react" and "redux" in his game, purely because "since its the hype in 2016"... I was like really nigga?? FOR FUCKS SAKE Do some research before you say! Then he argued with a senior full-stack web developer on why they're using ES6 and not ES7, purely because he heard that ES7 is newer. When we try to explain we're not using decorator syntaxes since we use pure functions in our codebase, or how we haven't installed any ES7 babel plugins to transpile our code, he kept saying ES7 is newer and cooler and we must use it somehow... More to rant but i am fucking tired right now...

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

So i just realized why servers are called "servers"

because they SERVE CLIENTS!

I've only been a web dev for 7 years...*facepalm for life*

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.

Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.

The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.

Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.

At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.

Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)

After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)

We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.

Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.

Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.

For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."

Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.

A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.

Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

Excuse the profuse amount of profanity below.

Fuck this fucking fucked up motherfucker of a fucking director. Money does not make you a fucking decent person, and you come in here and tell me that you pay my fucking measly salary so I must be fucking grateful.

Starts off with a boardroom meeting this morning. Wireless connection on my laptop takes two minutes to connect, I get told that I am wasting company time and that the salary of everyone in the meeting is quite a lot ("with me being the highest"- cuntface director) so stop wasting time. Fuck you man, it's a fucking wireless connection. I am building your motherfucking company applications and doing web design and for what, so I can earn fuckall and be told that I am fucking wasting time. I am presenting your fucking site you wanted, so give me a fucking minute extra to start up the fucking wireless connection.

The fucking mails are taking long to send, great, let's come down and fucking scream at the dev who regrettably said he would try and assist IT (by calling the provider). I literally just got told that I am the following. 1) Fucking stupid 2) He is going to close the dept down because I apparently fuck up (yet again cuntface, your fucking mailserver is NOT MY FUCKING PROBLEM) 3) He is going to contact an external company to come and check my work. 4) I am fucking useless. 5) I telling him lies (yeah fuckface, I worked as a sys admin, I know what a motherfucking DNS server is and what it does. you don't - so don't fucking tell me that I am lying when I tell you there is a DNS fucking issue, because you don't know what the fuck you are talking about - to top that off motherfucker, I FUCKING BUILT YOUR FUCKING SERVER AND YOUR FUCKING NETWORK. I FUCKING KNOW HOW IT WORKS AND WHAT THE FUCK I AM TALKING ABOUT).

On top of that, I got pushed out of the way of my own PC, my code got some fucked up gibberish in it (because he was trying to minimise my editor and he typed some in it, and now I have to fucking roll-back. He told me I am wasting company time and he will take my shit away from me if I download something again. It is an open network. I downloaded JAVA and fucking updated Sublime. Jesus man. What the fucking fuck.

"why is your gmail open?!?!" because I was testing your emails from an external network. "DON'T FEED ME BULLSHIT" (even though the top mail states "test"). It's the whole fucking "my money determines my dick size" mentality.

That being said, I got told that I need to work overtime, without pay, to resolve IT's issue, even if I have to on the weekend.

That being said,my new Dell that I had just bought (my own) got thrown on the floor and he fucked out of my office. Stupid motherfucker. I fucking earn nothing but cannot leave. I will find another job, and when I do - you can go and fuck yourself and your fucking degrading opinions. I am not fucking stupid, so fuck you.Fuck your company and fuck you. Cunt.

QA just asked me, why does the website look so ugly and no CSS is working on Internet Explorer
I'm lucky I'm not the web dev lol

*I laughed*
*IE laughed*
*Windows laughed*

I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.

My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).

Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.

I introduce to you, my team ...

Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.

UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."

Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.

Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.

Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.

Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.

Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.

Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.

The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.

There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.

All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.

I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.

Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?

And yeah, FML.

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

Fucking wix advertisements! Getting real tired of the "want a website? Why not make it yourself?" ads. You're already logging all my fucking google searches to display relevant ad info so maybe wrap your head around the fact that I'm a web dev and make my own fucking sites??

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.

A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.

Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."

A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.

Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.

KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."

KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.

It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.

I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.

Oh crap.

It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.

I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.

L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."

*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.

Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.

Conversations I've genuinely had at work:

Me: "Do you want some advice understanding that function?"
Dev: "Yeah, please!"
Me: "Get a plastic bag and some super glue..."

Dev: "I think I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!"
Me: "It's just the train of mental bitchslaps coming in the other direction."
... Some time later
Dev:"You were right... "

Dev: "If the system is so unstable, how does it keep working?"
Me: "Do you see any goats in the office?"
Dev: "Uhm no... Why would there be goats?"
Me: "There aren't, now, we ran out."
Dev: "The hell are you talking about?"
Me: "We just sacrifice our own blood to Cthulhu these days, it's cleaner and we didn't have to pay to have all the goats blood and waste matter to be cleaned up. That and it was needlessly cruel to the poor goats and that is why there is no goats and despite conventional logic the app continues to work."

Dev: "So what language is the web app written in?"
Me: "You need to understand I inherited this project, I had nothing to do with it's spawning..."
Dev: "OK, that sounds ominous... How bad is it?"
Me: "Java..."
Dev: "..."

Dev: "So what's it like working on this project? What should I expect?"
Me: "You'll call your grandmother during your lunch break just to know there's a world beyond this project. You'll go home, nose bleeding and you are gonna sit in the shower and rock back and forth, holding yourself and feeling like you're suffering imposter syndrome. You'll question why you joined this team and it'll get inside your head til it's all you think about..."
Dev: "Damn man, why are you still on it?"
Me: "Stockholm syndrome, it's too late for me..."

PM: "You're such a dark person, we're not gonna find you hanging from the lights one day are we?"
Me: "Impossible, we use those industrial fluorescent strip lights, there's no cord to hang from."
PM: "That really wasn't the comforting answer I was looking for."

Head of department: "So I need to apologize, you were never meant to be left on your to manage the product on your own, it's something someone way more senior should have been doing and we reassigned him. It wasn't professional of us, it wasn't fair of us, we're sorry. Truth be told,we're impressed you've not gone mad."
Me: "I think I have. Wibble."

A card goes round work for a sick member of staff I've never met.
Me: "How would you describe her condition?"
Dev: "She said that she 'survived' the surgery."
Me: "Yeah, I'm not great at being appropriate but even I think writing 'glad to hear that you are not dead' in a get well soon card isn't the done thing."

Why did I choose to be a web dev?

I didn't. That's the first job I found, and I didn't wanna starve

Man, I think we've all gotten way too many of these.

Normally most interactions that I have are through email. Eventually some would try to contact me via phone. These are some:

"Hey! We are calling you from <whatever company name> solutions! (most of them always seem to end on solutions or some shit like that) concerning the Ruby on Rails senior dev opportunity we were talking about via email"
<niceties, how are you doing, similar shit goes here...eventually>

So tell us! how good/comfortable would you say you are with C++?"

Me: I have never done anything serious with c++ and did just use it at school, but because I am not a professional in it I did not list it in my CV, what does it have to do with Rails?

Them: "Oh the applications of this position must be ready to take in additional duties which sometimes happen to be C or C++"

Me: Well that was not anywhere in the offer you sent, it specifically requested a full stack Rails developer that could work with 3 different frontend stacks already and like 4 different databases plus bla bla bla, I did not see c++ anywhere in it. Matter of fact I find it funny, one of the things that I was curious about was the salary, for what you are asking and specifically in the city in which you are asking it for 75k is way too low, you are seriously expecting a senior level rails dev to do all that AND take additional duties with c++? cpp could mean a billion different things"

Them: "well this is a big opportunity that will increase your level to senior position"

Me: the add ALREADY asks for a senior position, why are you making it sound that I will get build towards that level if you are already off the bat asking for seniors only to begin with?

Them: You are not getting it, it is an opportunity to grow into a senior, applicants right now are junior to mid-level

ME: You are all not making any sense, please don't contact me again.

=======

Them: We are looking for someone with 15 years experience with Swift development for mobile and web

Me: What is up with your people not making these requirements in paper? if I knew from the beginning that you people think that Swift is 15 years old I would have never agreed to this "interview"

Them: If you are not interested in that then might we offer this one for someone with 10 years experience as a full stack TypeScript developer.

Me: No, again, check your dates, this is insulting.

===

* For another Rails position

Them: How good are you with Ruby on Rails in terms of Python?

Me: excuse me? Python has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.

Her (recruiter was a woman) * with a tone of superiority: I have it here that Python is the primary technology that accompanies Rails development.

Me (thinking this was a joke) : What do you think the RUBY part of Ruby on Rails is for? and what does "accompanies Rails development" even means?

Her: Well if you are not interested in using Rails with Python then maybe you can tell us about your experience in using Javascript as the main scripting platform for Rails.

Me: This is a joke, goodbye.

====

To be fair this was years ago when I still didn't know better and test the recruiters during the email part of being contacted. Now a days I feel sorry for everyone since I just say no without even bothering. This is a meme all on itself which no one has ever bothered to review and correct in years for now. I don't know why recruiters don't google themselves to see what people think of their "profession" in order to become better.

I've even had the Java/Javascript stupidity thrown at me by a local company. For that one it was someone from their very same HR department doing the rectuiter, their shop foreman was a friend of the family, did him the service of calling him to let him know that his HR was never going to land the kind of developer they were looking for with the retarded questions they had and sent him a detailed email concerning the correct information they needed for their JAVAscript job which they kept confusing with Java (for some reason in the context of Spring, they literally wanted nothing with Spring, they wanted some junior to do animations and shit like that on their company's website, which was in php, Java was nowhere in this equation)

I think people in web development get the short end of the stick when it comes to retarded recruiters more than anywhere else.

All web developers should support up to IE9 without any problems.

Why? Because in Korea, it is normal.

Every person uses that damn Win7, which has either IE9 or IE10. Without IE support, no one will browse your webpage.

Now you would ask us, why don't you use other modern browsers?

We would then ask you, why would you install a new browser that is
1. Buggy
2. Heavy
3. Takes up ram
4. Has so many features
when you have an awesome minimalistic browser that is preinstalled, and works in all Windows? No thanks.

So, if you put a message saying you will soon drop support of IE, it means that you won't target Korea. Just after the support drop, there won't be traffic to your web site.

So what is the point of this rant?
1. We love IE. Lol
2. IE is lightweight, minimalistic, and the fastest browser in the world.
3. All websites should NOT drop support for IE.
4. We don't care whether web devs will have a hard time. We just think websites are built with Wix and Wordpress, and they work in IE, meaning, IE support is the number one priority.
5. If you ever start a business in Korea, and has a website, make sure to hire an senior Korean web dev who has worked with IE for a long time.
6. Here is the tl;dr
Hate us. Period.

Please. Hear me out.

I've been doing frontend for six years already. I've been a junior dev, then in was all up to the CTO. I've worked for very small companies. Also, for the very large ones. Then, for huge enterprises. And also for startups. I've been developing for IE5.5, just for fun. I've done all kinds of stuff — accessibility, responsive design (with or without breakpoints), web components, workers, PWA, I've used frameworks from Backbone to React. My favourite language is CSS, and you probably know it. The bottom line is, you name it — I did it.

And, I want to say that Safari is a very good browser.

It's very fast. Especially on M1 Macs. Yes, it lacks customization and flexibility of Firefox, but general people, not developers, like to use it. Also, Safari is very important — Apple is a huge opposing force to Google when it comes to web standards. When Google pushes their BS like banning ad blockers, Apple never moves an inch. If we lose Safari, you'll notice.

As for the Safari-specific bugs situation, well… To me, Safari serves as a very good indicator: if your website breaks in Safari, chances are you used some hacks that are no good. Safari is a good litmus test I use to find the parts of my code that could've been better.

The only Safari-specific BUG I encountered was a blurry black segment in linear gradients that go from opaque to transparent. So, instead of linear-gradient(#f00, transparent), just do linear-gradient(#f00f, #f000).

This is the ONLY bug I encountered. Every single time my website broke in Safari other than that, was for some ugly hack I used.

You don't have to love it. I don't even use it, my browser of choice is Firefox. But, I'm grateful to Safari, just because it exists. Why? Well, if Safari ceases to exist, Google will just leave both W3C and WhatWG, and declare they'll be doing things their way from now on. Obey or die.

Firefox alone is just not big enough. But, together with Safari, they oppose Google's tyranny in web standards game.

Google will declare the victory and will turn the web into an authoritarian dictatorship. No ad blockers will be allowed. You won't be able to block Google's trackers. Google already owns the internet, well, almost, and this will be their final, devastating victory.

But Safari is the atlas that keeps the web from destruction.

Fellow Dev: the clients are requesting a gallery on their website with functioning modals.

Me: okay cool

So for the record, I'm new to front-end and I've got quite a lot to learn in JavaScript.

*I googled as much as I could and I made a proper functioning gallery in 2 full days of coding*

Him: okay, so this is great but they aren't really digging it.

Me: *sigh* yes, so what do they want?

Him: have you seen how an image opens in Google images? Like you click on one, the image opens while the rest of the content shifts down?

Me: um... Yeah?

Him: yeah, so they want that.

Me: ... *Scoops the web trying to figure out how Google does it*. Dude, I can't find anything close to it and I've still got a lot to learn. Idk how to do it.

Him: well, you're being paid for that. So, you better do it.

Me: 1000Rs ( approx. 14.58$ ) isn't called "being paid". Gimme a break here.

Him: You're a novice rn.

Me: why don't you do it?

Him: I'm your boss.

*Sigh* (he indeed is my boss)

Him: deal with it.

Me: FU........C.....*suddenly I realized how it's done* OH OH OH OH I just got it, I just got it!

(I actually make something like that)

*Lol yay*

That's just my best story of a fight. Lol.

Fuck Google Chrome and fuck you too MSI...
Why the hell would you not allow me to register my motherfucking MSI motherboard without installing Chrome first.

We are now at this point where Web Devs are refusing to make a simple shitty html form work unless it is running in Google Chrome...

You know what? Shove a big fat horse dildo up your ass.. I'm not registering this piece of shit and if I find the dev behind this, I will shove the entire MoBo up their ass without lube just to watch them scream in pain and agony.

I swear I work with mentally deranged lunatics.
Dev is/was using TFS's web api to read some config stuff..

Ralph: "Ugh..this is driving me crazy. I've spent all day trying to read this string from TFS and it is not working"
Me: "Um, reading a string from an web api is pretty easy, what's the problem?"
Ralph: "I'm executing the call in a 'using' statement and cannot return the stream."
Me: "Why do you need to return a stream? Return the object you are looking for."
Ralph: "Its not that easy. You can return anything from TFS. All you get back is a stream. Could be XML, JSON, text file, image, anything."
Me: "What are you trying to return?"
Ralph: "XML config. If I use XDoc, the stream works fine, but when I step into each byte from the stream, I the first three bytes have weird characters. I shouldn't have to skip the first three bytes to get the data. I spent maybe 5 hours yesterday digging around the .Net stream readers used in XDoc trying to figure out how it skips the first few bytes."
Me: "Wow...I would have used XDoc and been done and not worried about that other junk."
Ralph: "But I don't know the stream is XML. That's what I need to figure out."
Me: "What is there to figure out? You do know. Its your request. You are requesting a XML config."
Ralph: "No, the request can be anything. What if Sam requests an image? XDoc isn't going to work."
Me: "Is that a use-case? Sam requesting an image?"
Ralph: "Uh..I don't know...he could"
Me: "Sounds like your spending a lot of time doing premature optimization. You know what your accessing TFS for, if it's XML, return XML. If it's an image, return an image. Something new comes along, modify the code to handle it. Eazy peezy."
<boss walks in from a meeting>
Boss: "Whats up guys?"
Ralph: "You know the problem with TFS and not being able to stream the data I had all day yesterday? I finally figured it out. I need to keep this TFS reader simple. I'll start with the XML configs and if we more readers later, we can add them."
Boss: "Oh yea, always start simple and add complexity only when you need it."

Frack...Frack..Frack...you played some victim complaining to anyone who would listen yesterday (which I mostly ignored) about reading data from TFS was this monumental problem no one could solve, then you start complaining to me, I don't fall for the BS, then tell the boss the solution was your idea?

Lunatic or genius? Wally would be proud.

Currently i have a small web dev project and i set up a live preview website so he cant see it developing and This literally Just happened

Client : hey, are you currently working on my website?
Me : Yes on my computer and working on it, can i help you with something?
C: yeah just a little bit, that logo on the top left are just a bit squeezed in size and stay like that since 5 days ago and it's bothering me, can you fix it?
Me : nah, its just a simple thing. give me a sec and try reload--
C: why is your voice echoing? Don't tell me you are coding in the bathroom
Me: ummm.. No... I guess...? (I Am)
C: 🤣
Me: sorry 😅

A few months back, me and my friends built our own Web Dev firm. I'm the one who talk to clients, customers, etc. and these have been the most ridiculous messages I received from them:

1. I don't like it, but I don't know why?

2. I have an idea! Can we change the design?

3. We want something with more of a `wow` factor.

4. Can't you just copy their logo?

5. But we are also a startup. You must understand that we can't pay the full price.

6. So do you have the file open and ready to edit/

7. Can't you just copy and paste it in?

8. We don't have much of a budget but there are plenty of projects coming your way.

These are just a few of the huckleberryfuck our clients sent. I'm not sure if I can handle them anymore.

I was on vacation when my employer’s new fiscal year started. My manager let me take vacation because it’s not like anything critical was going to happen. Well, joke was on us because we didn’t foresee the stupidity of others…

I had to update a few product codes in the website’s web config and deploy those changes. I was only going to be logged in for 30 minutes to complete that.

I get messaged by one of our database admins. He was doing testing and was unable to complete a payment on the website. That was strange. There was a change pushed by our offsite dev agency, but that was all frontend changes (just updating text) and wouldn’t affect payments.

We don’t want to enlist the dev agency for debugging work, especially when it’s not likely that it’s a code issue. But I was on vacation and I couldn’t stay online past the time I had budgeted for. So my employer enlists the dev agency for help. It’s going to be costly because the agency is in Lithuania, it was past their business hours, and it was emergency support.

Dev agency looks at error logs. There are Apple Pay errors, but that doesn’t explain why non Apple Pay transactions aren’t going through. They roll back my deployment and theirs, but no change. They tell my employer to contact our payment processor.

My manager and the Product Manager contact Payroll, who is the stakeholder for our payment gateways. Payroll contacts our payment gateway and finds out a service called Decision Manager was recently configured for our account. Decision Manager was declining all payments. Payroll was not the person who had Decision Manager installed and our account using this service was news to her.

Payroll works with our payment processor to get payments working again. The damage is pretty severe. Online payments were down for at least 12 hours. Our call center had logged reports from customers the night before.

At our post mortem, we had to find out who ok’d Decision Manager without telling anyone. Luckily, it was quick work. The first stakeholder up was for the Fundraising Dept. She said it wasn’t her or anyone on her team. Our VP of Analytics broke it to her that our payment processor gave us the name of the person who ok’d Decision Manager and it was someone on the Fundraising team. Fundraising then starts backtracking and says that oh yes she knew about it but transactions were still working after the Decision Manager had been configured. WTAF.

Everyone is dumbfounded by this. How could you make a big change to our payment processor and not tell anyone? How did our payment processor allow you to make this change when you’re not the account admin (you’re just a user)?

Our company head had to give an awkward speech about communication and how it’s important. The web team can’t figure out issues if you don’t tell us what you did. The company head was pissed because it was a shitty way to start off the new fiscal year. Our bill for the dev agency must have been over $1000 for debugging work that wasn’t helpful.

Amazingly, no one was fired.

I don't get it, really...
A web agency in my city published an ad on a jobs listing website; they search a php programmer who knows about magento. On their website, in the "contact us" page, they say that they are looking for:
- a graphic designer
- junior php dev
- magento dev

I sent my cv; they call me back for an interview.
This morning i went there for the interview; when the interview ended the guy just said to me "well, we don't have any open position at this moment. We make interviews from time to time, just in case in the future we may need help".

Ok. Now 2 things come to my mind:
1- i need a job now; if 3 months from now you call me cause you REALLY need a php dev, i will probably (hopefully) already have another job
2- FFS i lost 2 hours for you: 50 minutes of traffic going, 20 minutes interview and another 50 minutes of traffic going back home...

Just why?

An un-rant on Universities. (UC Irvine)

A lot of my friends and I are about to graduate 👨‍🎓 from UCI, with Computer Science degrees.

Most of them are complaining that they don't know any current frameworks, and all that we learned is outdated.
And that pretty much any bootcamper knows more tools that any of us do.

I totally disagree. I don't think it's the university's job to teach you tools (node, tencerflow, ...), rather, I think they made us into programming Swiss Army knifes. I can pick up any framework (I wanna be a web dev) real easy, and when shit breaks down, I can easily figure out the issue.

I think that's the major difference between Computer Scientists and Bootcampers/Programmers. We know "why", while they know "how".

What do you think? Is the current price of a CS degree worth it?

I'm so close to giving up. Yesterday, I travelled 4 hours in one direction for a job interview for a graduate position as a web developer. As I arrived at the interview, I was welcomed by a senior dev and one of the HR people.

I sit down and they start explaining how everything will commence(standard procedure stuff) and afterwards hand me the technical test. At this time I am super calm cause I did my homework, checked out their products, their websites and knew right away what I was going to work on. As I turn the page, I see at the top with huge fucking capital letters "JAVA OOP test".

I take a minute and look back at them, like wtf is happening. Turns out that they are looking for a java dev. They picked me for the role because I had literally 1 fucking sentence in my CV and where I have said that I studied java in one semester of uni. FYI my entire portfolio, cv and cover letter are focused on JS, html, css both for client and server side.

As the fucking HR guy stood there and asked me "is there something wrong", I felt broken inside. For the first time in my fucking life I felt like I was done and couldn't continue anymore. I felt like this is some bitch-slap from karma about something but I still can't figure out what. I just walked out of there being unable to realize what happened.

I just feel like I should end my developer career before it has even started, just go do business analysis or something. Why the fuck would someone put a job description entirely talking about Angular, Less/SASS, bootstrap and jQuery and then say that is a Java dev OOP role. Who the fuck allows those people to take good salaries yet still deliver the up most shittiest quality service.

Before the interview, I checked out their websites which are simply horrendous with the comparability of a fucking baked potato. Idk really what to do, I don't mean to sound as a whiny little b.... but as I walked out of their office, I felt broken inside. Sorry for the long rant.

Here’s one that has been the reason that I’ve not been on devRant for a while.

School counselor decides to come to me saying “Oh hey, it’s your last semester and at this rate you’re not gonna graduate bud” Why the duck couldn’t you tell me earlier?! Fine, fuck you, just give me FOUR extra online classes. ELA, Game Dev, Web Des, and Criminology. Alright, ELA and Game finished with no issue. Then comes Web.

This class is a complete piece of dog shit wrapped in HTML5 memorization hell. I don’t give a single fuck what a scrum is, or that this bitch doesn’t know how to ask her client if she can use their logo, the dumbass. How about you teach me more about actual STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION, HUH? MAYBE SOME EDUCATION THAT DOESN’T INVOLVE MEMORIZING ALL THE FUCKING HTML TAGS EVER?!

I am literally brute forcing my way through the tests. Failed? Open the lesson, close it, test reset and unlocked. Try again until you pass. Fuck this class in its miserably over complicated yet somehow over simplified existence.

Now I’m gonna go get some goddamn sleep. I’ve been at this shit for hours.

Worst guy I ever worked with was a Bulgarian Web dev that had been flown over to work on a few projects to make deadlines run smoother.

He would get offended if I was ever in another meeting without him and send passive aggressive emails then refuse to contribute.

He would storm off if anyone ever criticised his slow work ethic

He went on other team members desktops without permission, under one instance running a command line ddos that the IPS logged straight away and got that person a stern meeting. The Bulgarian guy said he was using it to "learn".

He would take a camera into restricted areas, take pictures and then argue as to why he couldn't do that when security would stop him.

I squashed a bee on his arm out of reflex, he screamed at me that I'm stupid causing a room of over 500 employees to go silent and stare.

Moral of the story, fk that guy

My department is focused solely on web development. Of course we are part of the major portion of I.T

The entire I.T department got acknowledged for a very important piece of software. That I wrote.
The ceremony in which we were being recognized did not listed MY department, no, they listed the ENTIRETY of I.T.

Thing is, if this product was not delivered, then I was told that the blame would be MINE (I am speaking as the head of my department) but apparently if it succeeded (which it did) it is to be attributed to people that were not even involved in the project.

My employees tried calming me down when I got upset, one of them stated that it was not even our department's effort, but mine alone. And yes, I was the one that developed the solution. By myself, with complete testing, staging, the whole works. Everything, developed by me. BUT my employees held the entire department down while I was behind close doors developing this solution.
I was fucking upset, more so because my director sent an email thanking the entire I.T department for this "win"
I asked him through or messaging service if he could point out to me who else was involved, since I did not know of anyone else that did absolutely anything in this process other than myself and my guys.

Maybe the output of my program was parsed by another I.T department and something happened from it, maybe the money generated by the application (obscene amounts of it btw) were used to add more to the infrastructure etc, who knows, but as far as I know, you cannot say "if this fails it is on you" just for them to later on thank people that were not involved in the project.

This is why I would gladly move on to a different field. I don't want to be patted on the back constantly, I know how fucking good I am at what I do. But if I do something amazing I do not want to see those efforts being given to someone else.

The dev world is usually a thankless industry, but if thanks are given, then I want the sole credit.

If I am winning or loosing I want the whole fucking credit and you can be any more gangstah than that.

First rant: but I'm so triggered and everyone needs a break from all the EU and PC rants.

It's time to defend JavaScript. That's right, the best frikin language in the universe.

Features:
incredible async code (await/async)
universal support on almost everything connected to the internet
runs on almost all platforms including natively
dynamically interpreted but also internally compiled (like Perl)
gave birth to JSON (you're welcome ppl who remember that the X in AJAX stood for XML)

All these people ranting about JS don't understand that JS isn't frikin magic. It does what it needs to do well.

If you're using it for compute-heavy machine learning, or to maintain a 100k LOC project without Typescript, then why'd you shoot yourself in the foot?

As a proud JS developer I gotta scroll through all these posts gushing over the other languages. Why does nobody rant about using Python for bitcoin mining or Erlang to create a media player?

Cuz if you use the wrong tool for the right job, it's of course gonna blow up in your face.

For example, there was a post claiming JS developers were "scared" of multithreading and only stick in their comfort zone. Like WTF when NodeJS came out everything was multithreaded. It took some brave developers to step out of the comfort zone to embrace the event loop.

For a web app, things like PHP and Node should only be doing light transforms between the database information and HTML anyways. You get one thread to handle the server because you're keeping other threads open to interface with databases and the filesystem. The Nexus.js dev ranting on all us JS devs and doesn't realize that nobody's actual web server is CPU bound because of writing HTML bodies, thats why we only use 1 thread. We use other worker threads to do the heavy lifting (yes there is a C++ bridge look it up)

Anyways TL;DR plz respect JS developers we're people too. ES7 is magic and please don't shit on ES3 or we'll start shitting on the Python 2-3 conversion (need to maintain an outdated binary just cuz people leave out ()'s in their print statements)

Or at least agree that VB.NET is an abomination and insult to the beauty that is TI-84 BASIC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR

* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *

30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*

*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *

"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."

My first reaction:

"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."

Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.

Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."

I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:

In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.

I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?

Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.

Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!

I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"

In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:

- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.

- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it

- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.

- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.

- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.

- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages ​​and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages ​​in the job interview.

- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).

- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML

- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...

- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.

- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.

- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022

- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.

- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.

- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.

You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.

As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.

If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!

I was reading the post made by another ranter in which he was basically asked to lower the complexity of an automation script he wrote in place of something everyone else could understand. Another dev commented that more than likely it had to do with the company being worried that ranter_1 would leave and there would be no one capable of maintaining the code.

I understood this completely from both perspectives. It makes me worry how real this sometimes is. We don't get to implement X tech stack because people are worried that no one would be able to maintain Y project in the event of someone leaving. But fuck man, sometimes one wants to expand more and do things differently.

At work I came to find out that the main reason why the entirety of our stack is built in PHP is because the first dev hired into the web tech department(which is only about 12 years old in my institution) only knew PHP. The other part that deals with Java is due to some extensions to some third party applications that we have, Java knowledge (more specifically Spring and Grails) is used for those, the rest is mostly PHP. And while I LOVE PHP and don't really have anything against the language I really wonder what would it be of the institution had we've had a developer with a more....esoteric taste. Clojure, Elixir, Haskell, F# and many others. These are languages and tech stacks that bring such a forward way of thinking into the way we build things.

On the other hand, I understand if the talent pool for each of these stacks is somewhat hard to come up with, but if we don't push for certain items then they will never grow.

The other week I got scolded by the lead dev from the web tech department for using Clojure to create the demo of an application. He said that the project will most likely fall into his hands and he does not know the stack. I calmly mentioned that I would gladly take care of it if given the opportunity as well as to explain to him how the code works and provide training to everyone for it :D I also (in all of my greatness) built the same program for him in PHP. Now, I outrank him :P so the scold bounced out of the window, plus he is a friend, but the fact remains that we reached the situation in which the performance as well as the benefits of one stack were shadowed by the fact that it holds a more esoteric place in the development community.

In the end I am happy to provide the PHP codebase to him. The head of the department + my boss were already impressed with the fact that I was able to build the product in a small amount of time using a potent tech stack, they know where my abilities are and what I can do. That to me was all that matters, even if the project gets shelved, the fact that I was able to use it at work for something means a lot to me.

That and I got permission to use it for the things that will happen with my new department + the collective interest of everyone in paying me to give support even if I ever leave the institution.

Win.

Outsourcing front-end for web is like playing russian roulette, but with 6 bullets in 6 chambers.
You shoot yourself in the balls (or ovaries)... HARD.

I don't know how you can develop in a complete nightmare of a SCSS file - 3500 lines of insanity.
This dev must have changed his mousewheel at least 50 times!
SERIOUSLY, why the fuck use SCSS when you piss everything into one single fucking file???
What drives me completely nuts is the fact that he even used an @import to include his custom.scss file... how many more IQ poins are needed to realize that you could SPLIT your spaghetti into smaller, sane files?

I need a whiskey...

Karma Story

2 motherfuckers that were absolute shit as managers applied for a position for the web tech manager at my institution. I was the one that Xed both their applications.

Now, I didn't do it out of pettiness, I did it because both of these assholes lied about their positions, responsibilities and knowledge.
One of them washed his hands on a project stating that he had no knowledge of web development, but stated on his resume that he was working as a web dev at the time(in node and asp.net) as well as angular frontends <--- fking bullshit

The other stated that he has been coding all his life. Yeah shitbag, that is why you were selling phones at a company and when i mentioned to you that i studied comp sci you said that it sounds interesting but you had no idea what development is or how computers even work.

There were many. Might say fuck it and just take the position for myself. Shit got funny af and it is amazing how being a shit person and a liar will get back to you and bite you in the ass.

Fuck them

Management: foobar resigned. We need to have a dev who can work the android app project.

Me: You have to find a dev who can work with that stack.

Management: You!

Me: Me?

Management: Yes, You.

Me: Me? Why me? I'm a web dev.

Management: Starting tomorrow you will work for 2 projects.

Me: but..

Management: accept it or..

Me: Okay. -_-

Management:

Me:

Is it because my browsing history already suggests I am a retard who sucks at programming?
YouTube now show this whenever I click any video about web dev :(
"You need a website. Why not do it yourself. ... choosing from more than 100 templates... "

To this day I can't figure out why people still drink the windows koolaid.

It's less secure, slower, bloatier (is that a word?), Comes with ads, intrudes on privacy, etc. People say it's easier to use than Linux, but 99% of what anyone does happens on a chrome based web browser which is the same on all systems!

When it comes to dev, it boggles the mind that people will virtualize a Linux kernel in Windows to use npm, docker, k8s, pip, composer, git, vim, etc. What is Windows doing for you but making your life more complicated? All your favorite browsers and IDEs work on Linux, and so will your commands out of the box.

Maybe an argument can be made for gaming, but that's a chicken an egg scenario. Games aren't built for Linux because the Linux market is too small to be worth supporting, not that the games won't work on it...

Why is it that an issue is only critical-priority until the person who's raising the biggest fuss has to do something about it?

I was notified that a website hosted in AWS went down overnight and never came back up. I was then bombarded with email after email after email while I logged into our AWS account and poked around. I'm responsible for cloud infrastructure stuff, like VMs or virtual networking or security or whatever, not the actual applications running on said infrastructure. Once I confirmed their EC2 instance was reachable and I could login with SSH, I told them they'd have to fix their application.

They told me that they had no backend developer on their development team. I'm still getting a deluge of emails from multiple people on this team and their managers and managers' managers and so on.

"Perfectly understandable," I told them, though it was anything but. "You should probably look into obtaining one."

The emails stopped immediately. I assumed they were handling it and closed my ticket and moved on. But apparently I was wrong.

Six weeks later, the site is still down, they still have no backend dev, and I'm convinced that they were lying to me when they stressed the importance of this web app because now that it's no longer my problem, not a single person seems to care that it's still broken.

I'm a junior programmer at a small company with mostly web dev. I had a C# project and before the deadline I granted access to the project repository one of my boss/senior coder. Several hours later I got an email with the whole project zipped and a note: I made some modifications, check it out.

Why someone doesn't want to use some kind of version control system?

I'll admit - I come from a WordPress background of almost 9 years in the making. I guess I can justify it because of all of the sites I created using it, it was the best that it could be on WP. Fast, efficient, custom - none of that off-the-shelf themeforest crap. I created everything custom. I actually knew what was going on behind the scenes of WP.

And then a buddy of mine and I had an idea for a new company/software project. I was smart enough to know that WP was not the foundation for this, so I did some NodeJS/Express tutorials. Started learning React, and really getting into the Javascript world.

And now I'm wondering WHY IN THE ABSOLUTE FUCK I ever bothered trying to become an expert in WP. It's the largest use of PHP in the fucking world and it doesn't even have native composer support. And by the time you actually get your project set up using composer you have to add a fucking mirror of the wordpress.org plugin repo to get anything to work. It's 2018 and you'd think that WP and composer would have all of this shit figured out by now.

And don't get me started on git - as soon as you have more than 1 person working on a WP site, I hope you have hourly backups of your DB because someones work will get overwritten. So you all either need to work on the same staging area of work around each other by pushing/pulling the DB and schedule your workflows.

I guess WP CLI and the REST API are a step in the right direction, but the foundation of everything is just so fucked up.

I don't feel like I've wasted my web dev career, but I definitely wish I had started down this path a lot earlier. I guess you don't know what you don't know. Thanks for reading!

I’m tired of all these profane “frontend developers” who do nothing but get cheap internet points by shitting on web technologies.

Bitch, NPM is just a package manager. That’s what it is. Anyone who ever used a package manager already knows how to use NPM.

Here on devrant, there at your workplace, people hear nothing but bitching when you open your mouth. You always need a “solid task description” and “best practices”. You always need somebody else to do your job for you. Frontend is the area where you have to constantly switch between heavy, performance-oriented coding, UX and graphic design while remaining in a dynamic environment that is called “web”, no wonder why you can’t do that. Instead of bitching, you could just present your own solution you designed with just a little bit of product-oriented thinking. But noooo, you fucking bother designers whenever you’re not sure about “how many pixels is that padding”.

You can only be barely productive (and only with a frozen spec) but can never take the lead just once.

In the 80s your kind of approaches were doubted, by the 90s they were dead. In 2020s they’re straight up laughable.

And don’t get me started on CSS. You have to be an absolute buffoon of a developer to not know how to use a DECLARATIVE tool that don’t even require real structural thinking.

No wonder why you praise php. You throw shit all over the place and tell everybody that you’re a “sociopath” and you don’t need that “stupid frontend” and “stupid users”. But you know what? Any real backend or embedded dev would’ve laughed at your face.

Because backend developers are respected.

You’re not.

Best code performance incr. I made?

Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)

Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.

Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.

Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.

With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.

Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."

After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.

At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.

VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>

A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"

Not about favorite language but about why PHP is not my favorite language.

I recently launched a web shop built on Prestashop. I found that some product pages are so god damn slow, like taking 50 fuckin' seconds to load. So I started investigating and analyzing the problem. Turns out that for some products we have so many different combinations that it results in a cartesian product totalling about 75K of unique combinations.

Prestashop did a real bad job coding the product controller because for every combination they fetch additional data. So that results in 75K queries being executed for just 1 product detail page. Crazy, even more when you know that the query that loads all these combinations, before iterating through them, takes 7 fuckin' seconds to execute on my dev machine which is a very very fast high end machine.

That said I analyzed the query and now I broke the query down into 3 smaller queries that execute in a much faster 400 ms (in total!) fetching the exact same data.

So what does this have to do with PHP? As PHP is also OO why the fuck would you always put stuff in these god damn associative arrays, that in turn contain associative arrays that contain more arrays containing even more arrays of arrays.

Yes I could do the same in C# and other languages as well but I have never ever encountered that in other languages but always seem to find this in PHP. That's why I hate PHP. Not because of the language but all those fucking retarded assholes putting everything in arrays. Nothing OO about that.

Name a more iconic duo than web developers on help sites and having pissing contests over which modules they use instead of actually answering the question!

I've been a web dev/server admin for all of about a month now, and only known PHP for about a week of that, and the one thing really that grates on me isn't PHP's odd function naming inconsistencies or at times outright trash documentation, it's the other developers who, when asked a fairly straightforward question about why a mysqli function won't return something, demand you use PDO instead.

Please. I'm running a LEMP stack on a Raspberry Pi here, I'm trying to keep dependencies to an absolute minimum because the SD card is tiny, the Pi will catch on fire if it runs any hotter, and more dependencies are more potential points of failure. Just answer the damn question. I'm not going to install PDO for something I know I can do anyway just because it makes my code look slightly prettier.

Honourable mention to all you Node.js developers out there too, with your thousands of useless npm dependencies. I salute you.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.

Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.

Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.

One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.

Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)

VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).

Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.

Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.

The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.

Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.

About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.

MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"

Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.

WTF!

I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.

She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)

MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."

TL;DR: Stop using React for EVERYTHING. It's not the end-all solution to every application need.

My team is staffed about 50/50 with tenured devs, and junior devs who have never written a full application and don't understand the specific benefits of different libraries/framworks. As a result, most of these junior devs have jumped on the React train, and they're under the impression that React is the end-all answer to any possible application need. Doesn't matter what type of app is, what kind of data is going to be flowing through the app, data scale, etc. In their eyes, React is always the answer. Now, while I'm not a big fan of React myself, I will say that it does its job when its tasked with a data-heavy application that needs to be refreshed/re-rendered dynamically and frequently (like Facebook.) However, my main gripe is that some people insist on using it for EVERYTHING. They refuse to acknowledge that there can be better library/framework choices (Angular, Vue, or even straight jQuery,) and they refuse to learn any other frameworks. You can hit them with countless technical reasons as to why React isn't a good choice for a particular application, and they'll just spout off the same tidbits from the "ReactJS Makes My Nips Hard 101" handbook: "React is the future," "Component-based web architecture is the future," (I'm not arguing with that last one) "But...JSX bro.," "Facebook and Netflix use it, so that's how you know it's amazing." They'll use React for a simple app, and make it overly-complex, and take months to write something that should have taken them a week. For example, we have one dev who has never used any other frameworks/libraries apart from React, and he used React (via create-react-app) to write what is effectively a single form and a content widget inside of a bootstrap template. It took him 4 MONTHS to write this, and it still isn't fully functioning. The search functionality doesn't really work (in fact, it's just array filtering,) and wont return any results if you search for the first word in an entry. His repo is a mess, filled with a bunch of useless files that were bootstrap'd in via create-react-app. We've built apps like this in a week in the past using different libraries/frameworks, and he could have done the same if he didn't overly-complicate the project by insisting on using React. If your app is essentially a dynamic form, you don’t need a freaking virtual DOM.

This happens every time a big new framework hits the scene. New young developers get sucked into it, because it's the cool hip new framework (or in React's case, library.) and they use it for everything, even when it's not the best choice. It happened with Angular, Rails, and now it's happening with React.

React has its benefits, but please please please consider which library/framework is the best choice from a technical standpoint before immediately jumping on the React train because "Facebook uses it bro."

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

Get an email from a client, who has been stringing me along for about 6 months, but ringing me up for advice on tonnes of different shit for free. Basically did his original website but his business model has changed to make his existing site irrelevant. Suggested months back doing a simple one pager as a stop gap with key messages. The bastard said no to that "just take it down for now and redirect to my LinkedIn page". He keeps saying we are getting stuff together and we hope to get together in September. However, yesterday he sends an email "we are getting a student in over the summer (not a Dev or designer or anything). Could you recommend any "web builders" so we can get on with the website in August. By that he means those drag and drop fucking pieces of shit website templates full of wysiwyg editors for creating shit typography. I give them free help and guidance and they think that I'm not going to want to smash him in his fucking face for his last email. The cunt.
I have an idea for 'having the last laugh' but I am open to suggestions from some devRanters, all legal of course.
P.S. I post quite a bit here about shitty clients, but I do have a number of really good clients who value my work and experience and have been with me for many years. It's just some that treat the profession with disdain and that they can easily do it themselves if only they had the time. These fuckers then wonder why their businesses fail.

!dev

I have a couple of thoughts about social justice controversies from these last years.

I think it's hard to have a good opinion about these events for several reasons.

One reason is that finding good information in 2019 is very hard.

Revenue based sites (thus unneutral) dominate the search results. You search about something and you find thousands of sites basically saying the same thing (because they copy each other).

That's why the existence of a free and open search engine is so important, so it's easier to find neutral hence good information on which to base your opinions, but they are prohibitively big for small groups to build.

Another reason is that controversies generate shock and shock curtails rational thinking. Maybe that's how the primitive brain works?

I'm not much of a scholar to feel confident to say that, but it's so recurrent that it's not too much of a wild guess.

When a controversy happens, a natural reaction is to pick a side. This means that:
a) we assume that there are only 2 sides, and
b) we must pick one of them

So, maybe the human is a bad politician by nature?

Also, because of the shock controversies generate, peaceful dialogue is very rare.

I have yet to see peaceful dialogue online about what patriarchy means to feminists and a lot of other terms they use.

I don't care much about feminists that vandalize or interrupt talks (yelling over someone else is abuse in my opinion).

But for the rest of them, I think discussing their ideas would be good.

I say this because most feminist discourse I see online is not open. Or maybe there are such instances but the web is so big that it's hard to find such instances.

I think some part of the modern feminist doctrine is bullshit, and some part is true.

I for one hate when some men I know in life expect their wives to be their cooks+cleaners (unless they want to do that, willingly). Personally, I'd encourage my wife to get a job (rightfully so, not just to meet some minority quota in some company).

I don't mind either calling a trans person the pronoun she wants.

But other ideas are awful, like the idea that meritocracy is patriarchy, so you need to force minorities to meet a proportionate quota. That's terrible reasoning.

Or the excessive self appreciation culture, like saying to yourself "you are pretty, you are beautiful, you are perfect". I think that grows arrogance and black-or-white thinking.

And some other ideas as well.

I guess the same you can say about any doctrine with different degrees. Some part is bullshit, some part isn't.

Some right wing people hate everyone who isn't white by default, but some want to have more immigration control.

I sure don't like the experiment of separating children from families like the current us govt did, but I wouldn't be happy either to know that by '99 50% of gangs members in the us were hispanic.

With this, I'm not going to say "embrace everyone's ideas" like an idiot. I hate when people do that. It's a stupid and weak reaction to radicalism.

In fact I think the way you fight radicalism and bad doctrines is that you listen to them and maintain good dialogue and counterargue in a respectful but insightful manner.

Making snide remarks, insulting or trolling won't change anyone's mind. That is just throwing fire to the fire.

In fact, when someone gets harassed because of something they believe in, usually it results in even more adherence to their beliefs, because of the usual assumption that success or goodness is full of strife.

So by telling a "sjw" or kkk member that they are idiots over twitter, you are in fact making them stronger believers in their doctrine.

Think of Daryl Davis, a black guy that made 200 members leave the kkk. How? He didn't tell them they were assholes, he somehow made friends with them.

I feel bad now because I've been trolling new devrant users a lot because of how they worsen the quality of the site, but maybe I should tell them that they are ruining the site somehow in a nice way and maybe they'll listen? I dunno...

It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.

Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.

Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.

I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)

I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.

After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.

Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.

//rant

So I'm a BI consultant, been doing this for about 6 years now, and I'm pretty good at the data stuffs. Now I had to complete a project for a client where we call a web service and it had to be done in .NET. I wrote a console app in C# that called the WS, dumped the data then a stored proc processed the staging tables into final tables that our visualization tool can consume.

It works, it's done.

Mind you I'm not a pure .NET developer.

And now that it's completed and working this fucking .NET dude that works for my client is basically giving me an attitude talking about "why wasn't it done as a Windows service? Blah, blah" Like WTF!!??? I get that he's the C# BSD but like chill bruh!!

It's annoying as fuck having to work on projects that are not your area of EXPERTISE and then be ridiculed by other elitist assholes about it.

Doesn't happen much, but fuck it's something I hate about dev. FYI, if it was the opposite I would just be asking questions for understanding, not being a sarcastic prick.

//rant done

Senior developer just showed me a "competitor" that seems to do things waaaaaaaaaaaaay better than us on his web site and was telling me:

Senior: damn, I wish I could figure out how they do this. I've been trying for so long...

I write the URL on chrome with dev tools open and literally the first thing that comes on the console is a nice greeting from their devs with links to they github repositories, ends up they are open source...

And now I'm here thinking "WTF!!!! WHY ARE WE NOT DOING THINGS THIS WAY?"

Android dev job question:

"Describe the activity lifecycle and write an application that does x,y,z in accordance with it"

Fullstack dev job question:

"Write some code that interacts with our API and does x,y,z, put the data into our database and build a web interface"

Java backend dev interview :
"BUILD AN ELEVATOR ALGORITHM WITH LESS THAN o(nlog(n)), FIND NEIGHBORS IN A BINARY TREE, WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN INTERFACE AND ABSTRACT CLASS?"

Why?

First time going to college was my first time commiting for real becoming a dev. But with my close minded brain. I believe i only want to became a backend. So here is my story of me getting mad to monitor.

First year i got 24" Monitor. "Shit this is so unproductive, a need a new workspace to place my debugger".

Got another 24" Monitor. "ahh better" -- later on got a Web Developing Class. "Fuck i need moar workspace, i need to see a live reload and a debugger !"

Got a 27" Monitor. "FUCK, there is no way to plug this monitor"

Got No-Brainer-Fast-Bought 1060 3GB. "Finally !". Hmm "this one bigger monitor seems odd, i need to change this to become even"

Got another 2x27" Instead of 1x24" To replace 27". "Why the hell am i wasting money?".

...
...

...Maybe gamble poker when working is nice...

...
...

Got another 27".

First time doing web development for front end AND back end and I just want to say...

FUCK YOU YOU SHITTY ASS BOLLOCK DRIPPINGLY RETARDING CACHE, WHO YOU LOAD THINGS I NO WANT YOU TO LOAD...WHY THO?...

Well that was 2 hours of my life wasted....

!rant

I used to doubt the usefulness of regex, until now.
I'm new to web dev, and downloaded a sample website to make a project with, but all the sources of images came as src="images/image.jpg", and for some reason I couldn't make it work, the only way that I found that could work to me was creating a static folder inside my app folder, declaring in the start of the document a {% load static %} and referring the image source as {% static 'images/image.jpg' %} in the html file, I kinda get what this is doing, but why it's the only way that works, it's beyond me.

Great! Now I can start the development server and see the website in its full glory!!! Then I realized: I had to edit the sources of every image and every reference to css and js in 5 html files to it work properly, and come on, do all that by hand?

Then regex came to mind, never had used it, never knew how to use it properly, after some web research I found if I did a find/replace with ([a-z]\w+\/[a-z,-]+\.[a-z]+{1,2}) and {% static '$1' %}, all the work I had to do, was resumed to a single click of replace all.

Man, I love doing what I do, and I love you guys/gals, never tough I would ever find a place in which I could share this kind of thing!

I'm a web dev who decided to take a shot at mobile development (My first mobile app mind you). I'm writing a mobile app and one of it's features is communicating to my server via websockets.

So I write the code, click to send the data and my server doesn't receive it. Fuck. I check why. I log everything. Nothing.
I spend several of hours and I'm exhausted by this point so i call one of our mobile developers to help me. Turns out my emulator didn't have a WiFi module. FUCK.

Alright so I compile it to an apk and install it on my phone. I popped open a terminal and started my local node server.

I click on the mobile app...

NOTHING LOGS. FUUUUUUCK.

And this is the best part.
Apparently I deleted the console.dir call from my server that executed when it received some data from an emitter.

I only thought of this last night at 2am so I got up and checked. Yep. Kill me.

I remember a time during my internship in the field of web dev, my Bootstrap didn't seem to work, and since I was quite a beginner, I was having a painful time figuring out the bug.

Turns out, one of my seniors had purposely changed the CDN URL from bootstrap to bootystrap :|

He said, "and that's why in web dev, when nothing works, start by checking your imports"

Lesson Learnt xD

Today on incompetent profs & classmates...

Dumb student forgets to exit vim and rewrites program 3 times before calling d prof
for help

I ask the prof for approval to use an IDE or a text editor in lab and she has no clue what an IDE is. I installed atom just as she left.

Another kid fooled into thinking web dev has no future.

Apparently I can't use laptop in class to execute programs as "other students may be at loss" i mean wtf that's their fkin problem why do I have to suffer.

Student questions unix prof about the file size limitation in fat32. She had a poker face.

Prof gives "hello world" program to sophomores. Nice.

After doing my first web dev project, I can definitely see why most of you guys prefer backend over frontend.

I recently got interest into web dev and... why isn't HTML + CSS considered art? I keep moving stuff one px to the left, one to the right then back left padding-top :40px, ehh to much, 20px ehh too little 30px ehh lemme just leave it at 40px. It's like when you erase a line on a drawing.

I hate web dev because I know enough to know how it "should" be done, know that it's not done that way, but also don't know enough to do it that way quickly.

Or why I spent the last 2 days scripting deployment of a website that costs 9$ a year to run, when I couldn't find a deployment script anywhere else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fucking arrogant pricks!

MS Access and VBA.

This combo is the worst dev tech I had to use it by now. Why? Because even if you try it, you can't make a single line of clean code. The syntax is horrible, it still use GOTO...

Maybe the reason why I hated working with it is linked to the context too: I was (and still) developing a system using NoSQL database and this system should be mostly fully configurable through metadata within JSON documents and it was. But we were still writing every JSON by hands so we decided we needed to develop a web based utility for us and clients who would need to configure the system but one of the head decision making people said that we don't need to use fancy technologies (because NoSQL is already "fancy") and that the configuration tool will be develop with Access because he used it a lot when he was younger and when he was coding during its free time. He said that using Access would be much easier and much time saving than our "fancy web based solution" and that he could help if we had questions...

Developing a MS Access software is already a pain in the ass but when you need to output JSON with it...

Why it seems that every Dev on the web hates PHP? I found It easy and full of usefull tools

C'mon, really?

Okay, I understand that they want to lock down the Chromebooks they send home with us, we don't own them and they have the right to do that. But I'm still annoyed when I find "harmless" stuff is blocked.

They said it themselves that they want us to be able to do basically anything we want web browsing wise on them.

It's not a fun experience to say to your self "hey let's look at the current humble bundles!" just to find that humblebundle.com is blocked for "games". (Which makes sense, but I can't remember any other examples)

Imagine thinking to yourself "I'm going to go to the Os Dev Wiki" and typing that into the Omnibox (tm) and pressing enter, directing you to your favorite search engine duckduckgo, but instead of finding the amazing duckduckgo results page you find the godforsaken securly "THIS PAGE IS BLOCKED" screen.

I can guess why they do that (probably because, to my knowledge, duckduckgo doesn't have any form of "safe-search" feature they can force it to use because they do that) but it's kind of annoying to not be able to use your favorite search engine anymore.

Should I really be getting so annoyed at this? No, because it's not my device, it's theirs and, they have the final say on what goes, but sometimes it really annoys me. I should be, and am, thankful they even let us bring the Chromebooks home, which is pretty cool.

Ugh...

If you want a fun time, just read the reviews on the Securly extension in the chrome web store!

I actually never felt the need to scream at a co-worker so let's talk about that time a co-worker screamed at me instead.

tl;dr : some asshole boss screamed and threatened me because someone else's project was shit and didn't work.

Context: I was in my third year of school internship (graded) and my experience is C, C++, C#, Python all in systems programming, no web.

I was working as an intern for a shit company that was selling a shit software to hospitals (though not medically critical, thank God) the only tech guy on site was the DBA (cool guy) the product was maintained by a single dev in VB from his house, the dude never showed up to work (you'll understand why) and an other intern who couldn't dev shit.

I was working with the DBA on an software making statistical analysis from DB exports, worked nice, no problems here if we forget the lack of specs or boundaries (except must work in ieShit).

The other intern was working on something else (don't ask me what it is) I just remember it was in GWT before the community revived it. His webapp was requesting the company http server for a file instead of having one of it's java servlet to fetch it (both apps ran on sane server) which caused a lot of shit especially CORS error. That guy left (end of contract) and leaves his shit as is, boss asked me to deploy the app, I fiddle with it to see if it works and when I find out it doesn't then that asshole starts screaming at me in front of every other employee present, starts threatening to burn me in the tech world and have me thrown out of my school for no goddamn reason than the other dude's project doesn't work.

After the screaming I leave and warn my school immediately.

I guess that's why the other dev never came to work.

I had three weeks of internship left, that I did from home and worked probably less than 2 hours a day so suck it asshole.

Still had a good grade because I was reviewed by the DBA and he was happy with the work I did.

It was only later that I realized that what he did was categorizing as harassment (at least in France) and decided that never again this would happen without a response from my lawyer.

I started noticing something about startups here. They all think they r innovative and full of fresh ideas, but they all just copy bigger companies. My old coworker started a small web dev company and they are using php with react, the company ladder is the fucking same as anywhere else.

I noticed these as i was collecting ideas for a company (if i write that word again pls shoot me). So far we are thinking
0) no, or minimal local storage, we would have a github subscription, jira cloud, vps
1) no strict hierarchy, ultimately the ceos would make the decisions but in every meeting we would include even the interns
2) the stack would not be set in stone, java spark and vuejs are good starting points but frameworks exist to serve a purpose
3) like 2-3 days office time per week, if someone wants to work from a café, why not

This is probably VERY OLD, but why don't devRant supports Markdown? Having to upload (not paste or drag) code screenshots and having to UPPERCASE to yell or emphasize text feels... quite non-dev.
I found the bug repo and checked the Markdown issue has... almost three years.

I just came by the @highlight bot. Seriously? There are several layers of "wrong" with that hahah

Bonus: not very good UX to write a message, try to post it, and ONLY THEN get to know there's a time limit. This should show when you open the form, not when you submit it.... But I just sent a bug report on that, at least.

Bonus 2: if the char limit is 5k, why's the textbox so tiny on the web?

I'm taking a web development course this semester. The course covers front- and backend as well as automation. I know my HTML&CSS but I know next to nothing about the rest (which is why I'm taking the course).

Could you recommend me some good web dev ressources/"absolute classics" for further reading/watching?

Back when I was still in school for comp sci we had an advanced software engineering and design class with c++. At this time, everyone was expected to be proficient enough with cpp to go ahead and properly work with whatever the instructor would throw at us. And pretty much everyone was since past classes included a lot of c++ development. Of course, efficient at least related to academic studies rather than actual real world development.

Our teacher would mix in a lot pf phyisics and mathematics into what we were doing, something that I greatly enjoyed, while at the same time putting real world value concerning cpp best practices to avoid common pitfalls in the development of said language. Since most bugs seemed to be memory based he would be particularly strict about that.

One classmate, good friend and an actual proper developer now a days would ALWAYS forget to free his resources...ALWAYS for whatever fucking reason he would just ignore that shit, regardless of how much the instructor would make a point on it.

At one point during class on a virtual lecture the dude literally addressed a couple of students but when he got to my boy in particular he said: "you are the reason why people are praying to Mozilla and Hoare to release Rust as fast as possible into a suitable alternative to high performant code in C++, WHY won't you pay attention to how you deal with memory management?"

And it stuck with me. I merely a recreational cpp dev, most of my profesional work is done on web development, so I cannot attest to all the additional unsafe code that people encounter in the wild when dealing with cpp on a professional level.

But in terms of them common criticisms of C and C++ for which memory is so important to work with, wouldn't you guys say that it comes more from the side of people just not knowing what they are doing rather than a fault on the language itself?

I see the merits and beauty of Rust, I truly do, it is a fantastic language, with a standardized build system and a lot of good design put into it. But I can't really fathom it being the cpp killer, if anything, the real cpp killers are bad devs that just don't know what they are doing or miss shit.

What do y'all ninjas think?

As a junior dev from a sysadmin and security background, this is a list of software development concepts I never seemed to truly understand but hope to(rated from most intimidating to least):

1) Frontend web development and all the huge world of javascript frameworks and tools. - It's more overwhelming than the political geography of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages.

2) Machine Learning, Deep Learning and A.I- too much math that fucks with my brain.

3) low-level programming(kernel,drivers) - sounds extremely interesting but the code in assembly/C/C++ looks like Linear A Minoan hieroglyphics.

4) Rx(insert language here) - I never get why it is useful or why someone invented this. Seems interesting though.

5) Code Reflection - sounds like Thelemic magick.

6) Packaging, automation, build tools, devops, CI, Testing -seems too complicated. I just want to run an executable at the client or make a web app that does something. Why all this process?

Well excuse me for trying to learn Web Dev! WHY MUST YOU JUDGE ME?!

I believe it is really useful because all of the elements of discipline and perseverance that are required to be effective in the workforce will be tested in one way or another by a higher learning institution. Getting my degree made me little more tolerant of other people and the idea of working with others, it also exposed me to a lot of topics that I was otherwise uninterested and ended up loving. For example, prior to going into uni I was a firm believer that I could and was going to learn all regarding web dev by maaaaaself without the need of a school. I wasn't wrong. And most of you wouldn't be wrong. Buuuuuut what I didn't know is how interesting compiler design was, how systems level development was etc etc. School exposed me to many topics that would have taken me time to get to them otherwise and not just on CS, but on many other fields.

I honestly believe that deciding to NOT go to school and perpetuating the idea that school is not needed in the field of software development ultimately harms our field by making it look like a trade.

Pffft you don't need to pay Johnny his $50dllrs an hour rate! They don't need school to learn that shit! Anyone can do it give him 9.50 and call it a day!<------- that is shit i have heard before.

I also believe that it is funny that people tend to believe that the idea of self learning will put you above and beyond a graduate as if the notion of self learning was sort of a mutually exclusive deal. I mean, congrats on learning about if statements man! I had to spend time out of class self learning discrete math and relearning everything regarding calculus and literally every math topic under the sun(my CS degree was very math oriented) while simultaneously applying those concepts in mathematica, r, python ,Java and cpp as well as making sure our shit lil OS emulation(in C why thank you) worked! Oh and what's that? We have that for next week?

Mind you, I did this while I was already being employed as a web and mobile developer.

Which btw, make sure you don't go to a shit school. ;) it does help in regards to learning the goood shit.

This is a story about my disappointment in modern GUI editors for desktop applications.

Well, first of all, I grew up with Delphi 5. Delphi has an awesome form editor. It's intuitive and works without any problem. It always does what you want it to do. Prototyping is really a problem of seconds here, even for people that never used it (I guess).

But the problem is that it is Delphi. Its so old, bloated, and most problems you'll ever have have been solved (through a hack) 20 years ago in some weird forum.

So I looked on and tried many other drag'n'drop gui editors.

The one for java is the biggest pile of crap I've ever seen. It slows down eclipse /intellij and does almost never do what I want. At least its not really intuitive.

Right after that, the one for C# (this xml Designer ) is okay-ish, but it's also not really intuitive and does not always what the user wants.

I also tried other ones. But I still miss an intuitive one that works without weird side effects.

I now can understand why the Web dev stack grows in the region of desktop apps. I can prototype stuff even faster in angular than in Delphi.
But shouldn't we improve the desktop stack instead of taking some bloated stack using a language that should have never existed?

I'm so fucking done with all the hate the modern web is getting. If you don't need it, don't use it. Shut the fuck up if somebody else uses it, because he needs it.
And that whole war between libraries is so fucking ridiculous. Why do I have to feel bad for using a tool that does exactly what I want, and provides me a great dev experience.
No I am not going to use a stack of 4 technologies because "native is faster". Fuck you. I don't care, and you shouldn't either.

I shouldn't even have the need to rant about this, but I'm just in this constant rut, because I feel like no matter what I'm doing, I'm doing it wrong. I hate it.

I have never understood why there is so much animosity from seasoned devs in the community.

I see it in a lot of places. Stackoverflow, reddit, even devRant. In so many cases, an inexperienced dev will post to the web, only to be shot down by things like "this question is stupid" or "you all have it too easy and its apparent you never learned basic CS principles" or things of that nature. In a lot of cases, these are generally unhelpful replies and often teach new devs to be wary of seeking help.

Please help me to understand, why this is.

Is it because the community is angry at these devs trying to get a high paying job by going to a bootcamp and shortcutting the hard work it takes to understand core CS principles to become a decent developer? Then why not take a moment to provide resources or insight to these folks so they can learn to be better?

Is it because the community feels that devs from bootcamps are just watering down the pool of talent making our worth decrease? I feel this isnt really valid because seasoned, experienced architects will always be needed to build good software. And at that, why are we not ensuring that the next wave of developers is equipped to handle tasks like that?

There are a lot of good people in this community who want to help and make the net a better place for all developers (after all, many of us consider it home), but there's a lot more people out there with really shitty attitudes, and it frustrates the hell out of me that my juniors now equate arrogant, self-entitled responses and attitudes with "seasoned devs" and discourages them from even bothering to get involved in the community.

Met one of my friends after almost three months. (He was out on vacation)
We randomly start talking about life and what we aspire to be.
He's doing Business Management Studies, so naturally, he wants to be some sort of manager.
He then asks about me. I tell him how I'm learning and aspiring to be a Web dev and do a little bit of ML on the side.
And following conversation ensues:

Him- Dude, what's the use of learning web development? Anyone can make a website today. Haven't you seen those ads?
Me- *Knowing he's talking about WIX* Yeah I've seen em. But it mostly generates dumb templates. If you need something custom, you gotta take help from a professional.
Him - Nah dude, you can get custom made stuff from them too. Web developers will soon lose their jobs. Learn something else.
Me - *Trying to control the urge to punch, I tried to explain that a website is more than HTML and CSS*
He - *Doesn't want to understand what I'm saying and says I should do something else, since automation will take away developer jobs *

WHAT THE FLYING SPAGHETTI FUCK!?
Why don't these people FUCKING UNDERSTAND (even after telling again and again) that there's more to a website THAN JUST FUCKING STATIC TEMPLATES
EAT SHIT AND DIE YOU FUCKING BASTARDS
And what's with claiming to know more about someone's profession than the person himself who's spending his days and nights dealing with problems your fucking zombie brains can't even fathom.
This was literally the third guy I met this month who said something similar. Are these people so common now?

Do you have any annoying you want to get rid off, but you can't because of reasons?
I do. They are 4, but for now I'll talk about the gold medal winner.

When we met about 8-9 ago, she had just come back to town due to some very bad personal experience (not her fault). Anyway, she is polite, but her major flaw is that she is pushy. REAL BAD! And she gets mad when other people (including me) try to do it on her. Another one is having calls during random inappropriate times, because she had fight #N with her boyfriend, and last but not least, she will call when needs something out of someone.

Lately, her project is finding us a job, since we're both unemployed. Any job. The sad part is when she sends me job ads for dev jobs I don't qualify, e.g. Company X is looking for a dev with Y year of experience, knowing A, B, C & D technologies. I've told her that I don't qualify for most of the dev jobs she sends me, but she insists I should send my CV anyway, cause of reasons. Also, for some reason, I should be accounted to her for all my current choices when what I would honestly say is "BUG OFF".

Her latest endeavour is getting me one of her friends (a psychologist) as a "client". Her friend wants to have a professional website with writing posts/articles as a side dish. I'm not registered as a freelancer, so everything will be done under the counter, and her friend is OK with that. I'm no web developer, but I didn't refuse because of her backlash and also that would be a positive experience for me. Now, the juicy part. She gave her my phone number without my permission and she told me straight away. Her plan was having the three of us meet, though I don't know why and I didn't want her being around. I asked her to call me immediately, which it didn't happen. After being pestered by my friend for a couple of weeks if her friend called me, she finally did it on Monday. She didn't say to me anything I didn't know, but at least I have her phone now.

What I can offer her is a website skeleton with the usabilities she's asking. What I can't offer her is graphics/banner and security. And now I have to come up with reasonable price. Teams here ask 400-600€ for a complete website the way she asks, including VAT. I'm thinking around 100€ and I don't know when I can deliver the project. I've had some experience with Ruby and Sinatra, so I'll go with that, and I'll learn CSS along the way.

Thanks for reading till the end! 😃

My dev area of focus: Desktop tools/applications
Why: Because I hate web development

So I've been maintaining our company's web products for a few years now with a great senior dev, but why would it ever make sense to have a

bool somebool = returnsBool();
if (somebool == true)
...

WTF?!?! I still fine them in the code to this day.

Sometimes I do wonder why can’t I just be content at getting best I can get at what I’m already good at - and what brings in the €€€? Why do I go ”oooh look shiny intetesting language, let’s try do shit with it” or ”hey, let’s try this thing called kernel dev/pld/program verification which are all so far outside my core expertise they might as well be in a different universe!”

Dude I mean writing a kernel in V and doing proof oriented programming in F* are fun and all, but what good’s that gonna do me when I’m in all likelihood still maintaining legacy web apps in PHP ten to twenty years from now?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m torn inside with my current workplace offering me everything I value and stuff that’s rare to find - but at the same time I’d love to be challenged more and don’t really have enough of those opportunities in my current environment. Or some shit like that.

Well fuck that, back to writing my own embedded DSL into F* in F#….

So.. There are about 4 jobs in my country that even mention golang, and only as an "advantage"

😟 Wow.. learning Go really isn't helping..

Why isn't it used widely as the main language of a dev team?? Too young? Or are there serious issues, that most companies prefer using c#/ruby/python for web dev backend?

So here we go again.
Same "web designer", same me, same website (based on wordpress, completely redone front-end UI, full of ACF to keep their fucking data).

WD: ok, I'll need you to add an information on the project page template in order to show a gallery with slider at the bottom and "film+visuals" at the top if there is a gallery.
Me: ok

1 week later, after like 40 e-mails between us deciding if it was ok or not on DEV server and pushing it to PROD

Me: ok, done
WD: hey, if it's just a film there should be written "FILM" while there's nothing showing, also the gallery must have same height as the film above

Me, internally: why the fuck didn't you fucking tell me before pushing to PROD? are you fucking dumb or something?
Me, via email: ok, i'll check it now...

Situation:

Php not loading oci8 connector for oracle database in windows server, got the all famous and feated oci_connect unknown function error.

Solution:
Check to make sure that the stupid dll is in the extensions folder ---> check

Check to make sure that the extension_dir path is done properly inside php.ini ---> check

Ensure that extension=php_oci8_11g.dll is inside php.ini ---> check

I have no fucking clue why this piece of shit would stop working all out of the sudden and would not fucking work. But here i am yet AGAIN trying to fix something for the fucking web tech department because their fucking lead dev is out.

I
Fucking
HATE

Having to deal with php configurations. Such a fucking pain in the fucking ass man.

FUUUUCKING WOOOOOORK

Some """friend""" of mine asked me help because he has trouble installing WAMP on a Linux distro.

Me: why don't you try to install a LAMP server instead, you are on Linux, you can do whatever you want.

Him: LAMP is not a thing, this doesn't exist, there's no package called like that.

Me: *sends a tutorial to setup a web dev server*

Him: You are so unhelpful, why are you disrespectful like that ?!?

Me: *having some murder thoughts*

Why do I still reply to these people ?

So in my current workplace we have an IT department of... 7-8 people, with 3 developers (or 2.5, but that's debatable)

The oldest dev is old school, over 65 now came from Visual Basic, of course, and is a father of department's director - this is a story in of itself, but besides the point of this rant

Anywho, this dev is of course in this workplace way longer than me, and historically is in charge of finance and Microsoft CRM systems.

Guess the reason why Microsoft CRM was chosen at all in the company?

Because dev said he is not good with creating web forms from scratch, and apparently with MSCRM you can craft them without much trouble.

Yes, that's it, our MSCRM is used as a web application with custom forms that store data into custom DB tables that dev creates... nothing to do with actual CRM use cases.

I have a project idea:
Web app that will automatically generate random like-a-facebook project ideas that will handle the buisness side and automatically post that offer on multiple forums, linkedin and send email with it. All using AI, Nural Networks, Big Data and VR.

Seriously, once fucking more some african or indian guy messages me to work for his awesome "its like a facebook but different" idea where he needs "just backend, frontend and mobile apps" and that he will just "handle the rest" and that "have no money now but after I sign a NDA he will give me some shares", I am gonna find him and shit on his head. Monday did not even ended yet and I already read 9 "offers" like this on my mail and facebook, only one guy white, rest indians or africans.

Why are then people suprised that we consider black and indian devs as a fucking joke 90% of the time. I have a indian dev friend and he could not find a dev job for 2 months, because everyone would rather work with less skilled asian / white guy than indian / black guy. This is not about racism, but about those retards that are acting like idiots. Hope I did not offend anyone (unless you do shit like this, then, please just smash your keyboard over your head).

Words like AI and neural networks are used just to lure the investors to our gofundme campain and steal their money after 2 years of silence.

When the project lead gave a half hour speech for why our shitty web page was similar to Elon Musk’s rocket and how we needed to work extra to get it off the ground, to justify an extra 3 months of unpaid weekend work at 10 hours a day, after already getting 6 months of unpaid weekend work when I was a junior dev.

Oh, my worst dev experience.

First of all everyone know it, people who ask you to repair there computer 🤦‍♂️
Or people who say: "Hey Windows Media player is not working now. Fix it"

But the best moment and worst too is a moment where I present my new website and a friend start to refresh the site with F5 on his browser. I ask him why he do it and he answere "Yeah, you will be rich when I do it"

I don't get it. Why rich? So I ask him and he answere that websites are paid by web request an "clicks" "views" counter.

That was the stupidest thing I ever hear. Okay when I would show ads than maybe it's "true" but without them🤦‍♂️

But that's not the end after I explained him that it's not so he fucked me up that I would be very stupid because I don't register on a service which pay you for it. I explained him that the only service could be an ad service but no he don't understand it and try to discuss with me that a service like this exist. I ask for a link to the service and he could not answer.

For me it was the worst experience because for me it was the most stupidest thing ever and he try to discuss with me and really we discuss 1 hour about it🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

the more i learn about web dev, the more i realise the reason for its mess up . There are 2 major problems in it : the people who create various important concepts and tools for web dev were 1) working on it without any collaboration and agreements on the philosophy and 2) were too stubborn on their ideology i guess.

There is no limitation to anything's functionalities, and the limits that are "defined" are badshit crazy. for eg:

====================================
HTML creator : "I am gonna make a language that would provide a skeleton to web page. it will just have the text and basic markers to let the scripting and styling engines/languages know which text is supposed to be rendered and how.
It won't provide any click or loading functionality.

someone: "So i guess opening a page or loading an image would be handled by JS or other programming language? also, bold , italic or division would be added via CSS?"

HTMLguy : Nah, my html engine would ALSO do that.

someone : what , why? won't that just be stupid and against your philosophy?
HTMLguy : WHAT? am too awesome, can't hear you
w3c , 50 yrs later : sorry can't change this, gotta support the 50 yrs of web dev and billion sites

=================================

CSS guy: I am gonna make the world's best beautifying stylesheet language to provide colors, styling, fonts and backgrounds to a page. every loadings and clicks would be handled somewhere else

Some1: cool, then clicks, hover and running of animation would be handled by JS only

CSSguy :Umm, i guess i could handle those.

Some1 wha-?

CSSguy : Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou for the nobel price!

====================================

JS guy : I am gonna make a god web programming language! It can do everything: add/remove html tags, add styling, control animations, control browser, handle clicks , perform operations, everything!

some1: cool! you must be making very large programming language with lots of modules.

JS guy: No! i am gonna keep it small. no built in classes and file imports! just use the functions directly. if someone wants the additional lib functionality, install them on your server

some1 : innovative! what's typeof NaN ?

JSguy :shut up.

Pretty late for week 86, but I just remembered my first paid freelancing web dev work.

While not my worst experience, it was a pretty horrible task given to me...

I was helping someone implement a new design on a pretty outdated (visually and technically) PHP site.

I was getting paid crap. The guy wouldn’t even let me look at the HTML, let alone touch it, so definitely no PHP work, either...

Literally the only code I was allowed to write was CSS. So, I’m supposed to be restyling, but I can’t change the structure at all, or even ADD CSS SELECTORS.

Fine, I’ll just make your site fragile as fuck by using nested relative selectors.

#main:nth-child(3) > div > div > div > button

As if that wasn’t bad enough, there were some pages...I shit you not...that had A DOZEN LEVELS OF NESTED TABLES.

WHY. DEAR GOD WHY.

For a simple checkout page.

So, on some pages I was literally trying to access elements through relative selectors, nested within levels and levels of tables. FFS

Needless to say, I did not work for him for long. Even if I wanted to deal with that crap, my time is much more valuable than what I was being paid.

Just a quick rant on JavaScript,
So there’s a lot of people hating javascript, and while not a long time ago i was part of them, but I changed my opinion a little.

I think JavaScript is a great way to deal with website programming as it is quick and efficient, but I would not say to program directly on it, use a js-compilable language (CoffeScript, TypeScript, Kotlin(I think), etc.), but then you might say: “Well, no need for js then, compile it in byte code”. That would break the point of how I see web design/dev. The main intent behind webpages is to have an easy and fast way to send code to other computers to render them, that’s why it is interpreted: “Easy to send” and “*All* computers can handle it” with the proper browser. You need to be able to change the way the website is rendered and/or works sometimes, for diverse reasons like copy/pasting data, make it render properly or use plugins/add-ons to change that code to suit your needs.

I think js should be kept as a “readable byte-code”, so that means: {

Keep comments when compiling the js-compilable code,

Add standardized machine-readable comments that will indicate to smart code viewers how to show a particular thing (Like have a higher-end function compiled in js shown as a minimized code with explanations of the function)

Keep it nicely formated and don’t obfuscate (coz that’s annoying)

Etc.
}

So you bypass the quirks and all that pesky js stuff, while keeping it’s good sides.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Part 2:

Web design for non-web:

Ok so things like node.js, electron, react-native and all that stuff; I won’t say they’re bad but...

Why we have this is because web designers wanted to make desktop apps and were like “Hey! Making web pages is easy! Let’s port it to desktop”, the problem is: Web technologies were made to work on a restricted canvas, aka a browser. It’s good on web for reasons mention earlier and more. But it’s not on desktop! You’re trying to push it outside of those boundaries. It’s difficult to make it break that canvas and go outside, make something that really works! For social media clients and that kind of stuff that you want to make a little more inclusive, yes! it’s a great idea (hello devrantron ;), but not if it’s an exact same copy of the website, just use the website. But for things that are supposed to really make use of YOUR computer; no!

I see those PWA (progressive webapps aka mobile app, but it’s an offline website”), I stand for the same positions, social media and those sort of things: yes, great idea! Games? 🤢.

I have way more to say but I have difficulties to remember them while reading, so feel free to comment your thoughts

Lol, “just a quick rant”

SHORT: BEST 1st WEB DEV LANGUAGE? READ FOR CONTEXT

So my gf became even more of the girl of my dreams last night by confiding to me she wanted to learn web development like actually learn it and do freelance work, this evolved from just wanting to start a blog. (We have a dream of being digital nomads and traveling the world together)

Now I am but a simple innocent C++ dev not trying to start a flame war buuuutttt... What web language would be most beneficial for her to learn as her first main language? And Why?

She's done some simple html is the past (not myspace), she took a web design class in high school years ago. Thank you for all the help! 🖒

hi, i have a question of a darker note, hope you won't mind.

How do you deal with monotony at work ?
The more experienced i get, the more my work becomes monotonous. I understand that it's impossible to know everything, but i feel as if there's not that much knowledge left for everyday work.
Sure there will always be new scenarios and more advanced/marginal stuff, but they don't appear that often.
i get depressed (not clinically, just very bad state overall) when i stop learning, which is why i've been strugling quite a bit recently.

i have ~3 years in web dev. So i'm not some kind of guru or anything even close, but this is the problem i have right now.

i've been thinking about switching languages or specialisation (i do enjoy DevOps/sysadmin work), but i'm afraid i'll have the same problem pretty soon...

!rant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am still finishing the app, though :)

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

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

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

Peace out folks. Good night...

Damn. I am so blessed to have friends that i have. 90% of them don't even care if you live or die (60% of them would be the first to throw me in fire if that's benefitting to them) remaining 10% would be someone that slightly care, but will move on pretty quickly.

But the best thing about 1 of them is that he is bluntly honest , and willing to share his opinion.
Today we were just talking about stuff when i see this placement offer in my mail.

I have been recently feeling bad about my grades, my choice of persuing android , my choice of leaving out many other techs (like web dev or data sciences , whose jobs are coming in so much number in our college) and data structures, and my fear of not getting a good career start.

This guy is also like me in some aspects. He is also not doing any extreme level competitive programming. He doesn't even know android , web dev, ai/ml or other buzz words. He is just good in college subjects. But the fascinating thing about him,is that he is so calm about all of this! I am losing my nuts everyday my month of graduation , aug2020 is coming . And he is so peaceful about this??

So i tried discussing this issue with him .Let me share a few of his points. Note that we both are lower middle class family children in an awful, no opportunity college.

He : "You know i feel myself to be better than most of our classmates. When i see around , i don't see even 10 of them taking studies seriously. Everyone is here because of the opportunity. I... Love computer science. I never keep myself free at home. I like to learn about how stuff works, these networking, the router, i really like to learn."

"That's why i dont fear. Whatever the worst happens , i have a believe that i will get some job. Maybe later, maybe later than all of you , but i will. Its not a problem."

me: "but you are not doing anything bro! I am not doing anything ! So what if our college mates suck , Everyone out there is pulling their hairs out learning data structures, Blockchain, ai ml , hell of shit. But we are not! Why aren't you scared bro? Remember the goldman sach test you gave ? You were never able to solve beyond one question. How did you feel man? And didn't you thought maybe if i gave a year to that , i will be good enough? Don't you too want a good package bro? Everyone's getting placed at good numbers."

Him : "Again, its your thoughts that i am not doing things. I am happy learning at my own pace. Its my belief that i should be learning about networking and how hardware works first , then only its okay to learn about programming and ai ml stuff. I am not going to feel scared and start learning multiple things that i don't even wanna learn now."

"My point is whatever i am doing now, if its related to computers , then someday its gonna help me.
And i am learning ds too , very less at a time. Ds algo are things for people with extreme knowledge. We could have cleared goldman sachs if we had started learning all this stuff from 1st year, spend 2-3 years in it and then maybe we could have solved 2 -3 questions. I regret that a little, but no one told us that we should be doing this."

"And if i tell you my honest thoughts now, you ar better off without it. You are the only guy among us with good knowledge of android , you have been doing that for last 2 years. Maybe you will get better opportunity with android then with ds/algo."

"You know when i felt happy? When we gave our first placement test at sopra. I was thinking of going there all dumb. But at 11 am in night i casually told my brother about this ,and he said that its a good company. So i started studying a little and next day i sat for placement. And i could not believe myself when they told me that am selected. I was shit scared that night, when my dad came and said " you don't even want that job. Be happy that you passed it on your own". And then i slept peacefully that night and gave the most awesome interview the next day."

"Thus now i am confident that wherever my level of skills are, it is enough to get into a job . Maybe not the goldman sachs ,but i will do well enough with a smaller job too."

"Bro you don't even know... All my school mates are getting packages of 8LPA, 15LPA, 35LPA. You see they are getting that because they already won a race. They are all in better colleges and companies which come there, they will take them no matter what (because those companies want to associate themselves with their college tags). But if worst comes to worst, i won't be worried even if i have to go take 4lpa as job offer in sopra"

Damn you Aman Gupta. Love you from all my heart. Thanks for calming me down and making me realise that its okay to be average

When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.

Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.

When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.

Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!

Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?

When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:

1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.

Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).

Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.

When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:

(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".

Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.

There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".

It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?

I need help!

This is gonna be a long question/story.

I'm a Syrian based in Malaysia working as a lead web dev in a good company.

I have a friend in trouble and I want to help him.

Here's a summary:

My friend is a project manager at a gaming studio he happens to be an Iranian atheist with around 2 years of experience in the game making industry.

He worked on and delivered a couple AAA games at his current place of employment as a project manager in one of the teams that made those games.

He stood up for his team when the management was overworking team till after midnight sometimes and forcing them to work on weekends without any tangible compensations ( basically they gave them things like free lunches, movie tickets, etc).

The result of his standing up to his team was the management handing him a notice telling him that he'll be fired within 2 months due to "underperforming".

This was a month and a half ago.

He looked around in Malaysia for a job that can get him a working visa, but his niche background couldn't help.

After his termination in few weeks he can extend his stay at Malaysia for approximately 2 - 3 months.

Now the reason why I mentioned that he's an "Iranian atheist" is the fun part of this story (sarcasm), Iranian government considers him as an "infidel" and he's banned from Iran.

His Iranian passport can't get him anywhere where he can make a living.

So basically he has close to no options.

Now to where I come into all of this:

I want to help him.

I'm going to dedicate my free time for the next 2 - 3 months teaching him web development, the problem is, I don't know how to teach web development in such a short time, in fact I've never taught anyone programming from scratch.

If he can show promising results I know that I can make a case for him get him a position in the company I work for.

I already convinced him today to try and learn web development because I can tell that in Malaysia there's always demand on good web developers.

Now to my request:

how can I best teach web development to someone with no programming background ? I'm thinking about teaching him front end development, so: HTML, CSS/SASS and JavaScript. maybe react js as well if possible ( high demand is usually on React/ Angular front end developers)

Did anyone here teach programming to someone else before?

Did anyone here learn web development in such a short time?

If you've read all this... Thank you :)

¿Why people hate PHP so much? I love it since it was my first web dev lang and I fell in love with it, however, I decided to move to another language since apparently It's going to die, not saying tomorrow but eventually. I'm not sure which language to pick (between Python (django, pyramid), Elixir (Phoenix) or Ruby (RoR). Any suggestions?
Also, what language you use and do you like PHP?

tl;dr Why Linux?

So yeah, another Linux question. I love C# and been doing some WPF and Xamarin stuff and planning to learn ASP.NET, but why do I hear that Linux is better than Windows for web dev. Why should I learn it especially if I want to specialize in .Net? Sorry just a student and I heard Microsoft is bringing a lot of Linux goodness to Windows and I wonder why.

Where do I start...

I have seen a QA load local code to a machine, run it and then say it was ready to deploy. Little did we know she wasn’t following the deployment process at all and didn’t even realize she had to. We were a week trying to figure out why the deploys wouldn’t work until she spoke up.

I knew a dev/founder that said to me “source control is only for large projects”, I tried to convince him and his cofounder to use github or bitbucket. Nope, they weren’t into it (fresh out of school listening to professors who hadn’t worked a development day in 20 years) One cofounder got disgruntled, thought he was doing most of the work and decided to quit, he also decided to wipe the code off his co-founders machine. I literally saw a grown man come out of a meeting crying knowing he would never gain back the respect of those mentors and advisors.

I once saw a developer create a printed ticket receipt for a web app. Instead of making a page and styling it to fit a smaller width, he decided to do everything in string literals. More precisely, he made one big long fucking strong literal and then broke it up using custom regex to add styling to different sections. We had a meeting and he was totally convinced this was the only way. In the end we scrapped the entire code and the dude didn’t last very long after that.

Worst of all! I once saw a developer find a IBM Model M keyboard and said “I’m gonna throw out this junky keyboard”. I told him to shut his stupid fucking mouth and give the the keyboard.

He did

This is a place for ranting, right? It's "Dev"-"Rant", right?
So, why so much hate when people do actually rant?
Kinda defeats the purpose, doesn't it? Or maybe the name is just misleading...
Or maybe y'all just gate-keeping ranting - which is... ya, okay - you do you, you preppy tosser.

Anyway, on that note:
I fucking hate web-development.
I fucking hate CSS.

CSS isn't a tool, it's a curse.
It's like a soft black magic system:
This specific behavior can sometimes be created by combining these specific elements, but will fall apart if you're a gemini - unless you wore a colorful hat at your fifth birthday party. If you didn't have a party, it'll produce some random behavior of the deer-god's choosing.

Best
typescript - I needed to learn it for a project and I like it, I know java and javascript and it is something in between of those two that makes writing enterprise web applications easier, it’s nice that you can debug it directly in chrome, it makes things easier

Worst
docker, Dockerfiles - devops tools - amount of shell commands inside them and mangled && to make everything running in one file layer makes those unreadable mess that you need to think twice to understand, there is no debugger for it, you do everything with try and see what happens, there is actually no real dev toolset for devops and that sucks, since you got builder images that makes things more mangled than before, it’s clearly missing some external officially approved scripting language or at least
FUNCTION and
WITH LAYER and indentation / parentheses syntax and they still trying to make it flat, why are you doing that ?
as a result next to Dockerfile cause you can’t import multiple ones you get bunch bash scripts with mangled syntax and other crap that is glued together to make a monster - and this runs most of current software on this planet

Alright so I've been thinking of taking my skills to the next level and would like to know a few things from PRO C++ DEV out there

1. Is it possible to set up a production level web server with c++, if so why don't i see many and why are there so many with nodejs etc..

2. Client side web pages without Javascript, possible?

3. Well I forgot the other questions I wanted to ask, if I do remember you'd be able to find them in the comments

I believe in a single universal language for coding, hence I place forth such questions

HELP, ITS A MESS!!

Here is a thing : 30 hours ago, i was completely free nd useless .Had a lot of reminders to open source & learn new techs for upcoming summer vacations .

But day before yesterday my friend called me to say that he got a 6 month internship in web from some (not so big) startup and they were looking for some Android dev too, so he gave my name and wanted me to mail him my resume.

I did, and within half an hour he called, discussed about the work and wanted to test me.(as i said i didn't had plans for internship , leave alone a sudden test, but the company was work from home so i didn't denied ) The test was a big one but easy, he wanted me to design 15 UI activities for an app by looking at the wireframe. I asked for next 6 hours, did it in 4.5 and submitted him the repo...

THE TROUBLE STARTS NOW...
1) He seemed impressed i guess, coz the next day when he saw my message, he Created a group of 5 people within a few minutes and started assigning tasks(?!) And in the personal chat what he said was just weird : "You are the lead for this project" (WTF??!?)

2)I had already mentioned him that i currently had exams so won't be doing any much of practical work but after every few grp messages, he was trying to assign me some task and a deadline. Weirdly, the test was actually a wireframe based on the project idea from some of their client , and just to show my skills, i have designed layouts of 15 of their activities of their app.

3) The negetive part comes like this: THERE IS NO MONEY AND ITS A 6 MONTH INTERNSHIP !! Fed up of this continues indirect deadlines, i asked him What's my responsibilities as a team dev, what will be my tenure and what will be the pay to which he replies that:

"there is no stipend for this, we have multiple projects lined up in which you can contribute and your internship period is 6 months which could be increased/decreased on the basis of your performance. You will get a PPO, Internship certificate , mentor support and intellectual code rights (which i am guessing means my 2 word name in the about pages of the apps i develop for them ) .And as a lead , you will be getting an experience in leadership skills "

I am really confused. Work from home seems like a relaxing thing , and being a team lead for the first time definitely would make me a little more confident. But why does it feel to be kind of fraud plan? Plus there is no pay and i would be ignoring my creativity ideas for this (not completely but i am sure anyone giving a job would expect some work from me eceryday ).

WHAT SHOULD I DO???

android development is shitty af, it will make you super zombie computer nerd that sit on his chair for fking several hours just to find the where the fk is null pointer exception is coming from not only this but for all kind of errors,logcat looks like someone just hacking nasa, you know what im the one who is shitty af i would have opt web dev instead of android dev , this retarded studio and emulator takes too much time to just load a simple fking thing & if i make some change in it i've to install that application again ,it's so pathetic and horse shit thing i've ever encountered , kotlin is fun it's actually great language most of the features are so helpful in it,but the google codelabs,it's all documentation , adding dependencies whole concepts are trash imo, why can't we install the dependencies using terminal what's problem in that ,but no they chose the hard way for no fuking reason, i've successfully wasted a year learning this shitty tech stack, hopefully this NY i will choose different stack , will work till ass off .gonna build some cool projects and will eventually try for internships and all. done with android dev, idk how senior dev's are alive in this field

Web development is a fucking mess. Why is there hundreds of things to download, manage, and all of them depend on another tool? Framework dev teams, can you stop creating dev tools for dev tools that is intended to alter development? How the fuck do people even handle this pile of mess? They must be superhumans.

I really like my position as the head of my department. But I am most definitely hitting walls(and in some way breaking them) concerning the way the CTO(my direct boss) deals with a lot of the things that his management team wants to do.

For example, the previous manager could only do so much in terms of directing a software team since she did not have a formal background in computer science or engineering, thus the developers that she had would tell her the different deals with many things and she would have to take their word for it. Nothing necessarily bad with this, but it just meant that a lot of things could have gone smoother had she the knowledge to fix said items. Whenever she would try to use resources(dev time or such) the CTO will resort to the all powerful manthra of "if it ain't broke don't fix it!".

but it was about more than fixing things that were breaking, our internal services and admin boards were built using all of the WRONG proper development practices, it feels as if they took the book of best practices.....and said fuck it and did whatever the fuck they wanted. It is the worst PHP/Java/JS code I have ever seen in my entire life and the reason why even though I do not concur with it I will always understand the dislike from other developers. Our services look like something that came out from the 90s, no style, no engineering concepts in place, no versioning no testing NADA zip(these are all web based services)

One in particular, it was an admin board used internally to let students evaluate their professors, the entire app is shit, and it was broken, for some UNGODLY reason, the original dev decided to use some weird external libraries he got from some blog somewhere and as such something that would take about 5 or 6 files is now a mess with over 200 php/js files all over the fucking place. The CTO insisted on fixing them, they were all broken, and I continuously told him that redesigning the application would be faster.

Mofo fought me on it, and in the end I did what I wanted and rebuilt the app.

It took me one afternoon. One fucking afternoon, over possibly 2 weeks of fixing it.

See, I am not one to just do whatever he pleases, but I am firm in my belief that if I know a better way I will do it and save precious time. The dude had to agree with me on this and promised to consider this shit on other items that will undoubtedly come up. He was lying out of his ass but oh well..........

W

Is there any other programmer that started as an architect (building architect, not IT)?

I'm divided between two different careers and working around 15hours a day because I can't focus on one. Is this a normal thing?

I work as an architect for the past 6 years and were always interested in the technology part of it.

Soon I got to be a BIM coordinator and started using Dynamo for Revit.

After that, I got involved in learning Python and now start studying web dev (front-end)

Programming is very addictive! I get it now why IT people stay in their dorm like it's a cave

In architecture there's always a client you need to make happy, while in programming I create things the away I want them to be, without all the boring formalities that I am used to.

I can learn it for free and there's a huge community to help on it. All careers should be like this.

I'm happy, but really tired 😪 my social life is resumed to hanging out with my dogs

Omg I loath path separators. Been working on windows most of the time (bought a surface pro for some reason) and my colleagues work on Linux. We just do standard web dev stuff nothing special but. I started having issues with my windows build getting weird function.prototype.bind.apply is not a constructor issue. Which is valid because apparently my colleagues started using the fat arrow function everywhere and on places where not needed.......

But on Linux they never had an issue because babel fixed it to the old function during the transpileee. So why the fuck am I getting this problem. After some tedious debugging and asking my colleagues. (colleagues only responded with just use Linux) I found the the issue to lie in the webpack loader for the Javascript in which the path regex used a single / :(. So I changed that to a group to be / or // and bam the whole bloody project works on windows now.

....... My colleagues still don't understand that they over use the fat arrow in the wrong places unfortunately

!dev but working via a Dev firm..
So these dudas hired me to cut and edit videos for them and get to know them (considering to work as web dev after studies, good way to start they said..) sure bit of an extra income..why not..

First clips I get, butthurt ass image quality with low ass sound that not even my grandma with here hi-tech super eardevice could hear a shit..

secondly who the fuck films a company video with a mobile phone in hands.. not even a fucking tripod... The angles are all over the shitfaced scene and your shaking like a fucking dildo vibrates.. "oh fix it with warp, it's easy".

FUUCK YOU! If I tell you these pieces of shit clips aren't even worth posting on Snapchat stories, how the fuck could you even consider using them for companies?!

Every god damn client video has shitty as dildo vibrating Slenderman light quality... Come one! And you want me to consider working for you as a front end developer (where I probably still will have to go through these pills of shit videos)?! Mate.. you better think twice about that...

Ps. Yes I have consulted them regarding these issues and no.. considering that these piles of shit still come my way they haven't taken my advices..(╯°□°）╯︵( .o.)

(Had to steam out somewhere.. ☕)

Now i am given a task to refactor some piece of Predicate code and then update the unit test so it can be compatible and work with new data

WHAT. Is the Fucking point of unit tests if you have to modify them to adapt to new code anyways???

Unit tests exist just so u can stroke ur sausage??? Just so u can give ur ego an orgasm to tell others "hey look at me how good code i wrote that even unit tests are passing!" ???

I always found unit tests sketchy. almost as if its useless and unnecessary. I still get why they are used (some other dev working on feature 2 might break my shit and unit test can save the day) but if thats the only reason then that doesnt seem like a strong enough reason for me

By now im talking about java!

No wonder i have never seen a single nextjs developer ever write a single unit test. Those people have evolved beyond unit testing just as the nextjs technology itself!

This is why nextjs is the future of web and the Big Daddy Dick King 👑 of technology!

I'm so frustrated right now.
I put a lot of effort in a (voluntary) web project where its main component is based on a html table. Everything tested in dev (Chrome, FF), demo deployed and now I open it in Safari (macOS) just to discover that the rendering is broken. A Google search revealed some people with similar problems and many unanswered StackOverflow questions. It's unfixable.
Why Apple? Even MS got its sh** together.
It's unpaid work... I just wanted to something good.

Being a native Android dev for most of my college days(yet to start a full time professional life), i often feel scared of my life choices.

Like, i chose to go into a field in which am totally on my own . Android is not a subject taught or supported by colleges, so a virtual shelter that every fresher gets, i.e that of a "he's just a college passout, he wouldn't know that" is not for me. I am supposed to be a self learner and a knowledgeable android dev by default.

Other than that , idk why i feel that am having a very specific skillset which would be harmful for me if am not the best at it.

I feel the same for entire Android dev. I mean, its nothing but a very specific hardware device with a small screen and a bunch of lmited sensors. Our tools and apps are limited to just manipulate them to do little fancy stuff offline. Other than that everything (and sometimes even this too) could be achieved by a website/webapp of a web dev.

A particular native android dev don't know how the ML/AI stuff works, don't know how backend stuff works don't know how the cloud stuff works, jeck we don't even know how those unity games work!

We are just some end product makers taking data from somewhere handled by someone and printing them in fancy gui.
(But we are good at ranting about stupid mobile hardware manufacturers, i tell u that)

So am not sure if being an Android dev is a going to be good for me in the future. I mean , a web dev always gets to interact at every level of products, but we can't.

I always feel my future will end up being limited to being good in Android, later shifting to IOS to being completely unemployed because everything is controlled by js and web dev tools and native programming is no longer a thing anymore :/

Feeling over stressed, over worked and highly underpaid for all this effort. Worst of all I feel the passion leaving me for this work.

I graduated a boot camp last April and was blessed to contract part time at a startup learning how to work in the unity game engine. The team is two other guys, both super smart snd been working in this field for a long time. Since then I’ve added personal projects, finished a data structures and algorithms course and started the Leet code grind. I told this startup that I’d start looking for full time employee positions soon and they understand. They couldn’t offer me much money, or stock options, just experience they said. I feel like I’ve basically been grinding 24/7 since May. I’m going to run out of money soon and it’s all starting to take a toll on my body and mind. I never really sit on the couch or watch something anymore because I feel I should be doing something productive. This just makes me feel like everything I’m doing is meaningless and without impact. I feel like a wheel turning endlessly in sand and not moving forward. I even feel it zapping my passion for developing.

I just can’t help but feel that I’m burning out here. I have a new experimental feature to do for the startup and the amount of things to learn seems overwhelming. Especially with Leet code and interviews coming up. The two other devs on the team are extremely busy as this is a part time endeavor for everyone. I’m also in a relationship I started to feel detached from which causes it’s own stress. I love VR and AR which is why I chose this startup to learn Unity. Now I just feel like I’m dividing my efforts too much. I’m shitty at unity and also less good at web dev than I would have been if I focused on it purely after boot camp grad. On the plus side I will say I’m doing what I want. I just can’t help but feel like that damn tire in the sand turning without traction. And I feel the patience in me for self learning the basics and iteration over a complex project is waning. Without patience the learning is rushed and I don’t learn shit. I also make dumb mistake and “hope” I don’t run into errors. I feel I’m just trying to bang it out for the startup instead of use it learn cool shit. Anyways it feels good to rant. I can’t wait for a full time job, established work hours, and decent pay so I can live life and have off time.

I assume wherever I go I’ll always be in a spot where I need to figure how to get xyz done with minimal help or oversight. I just would like to be paid for it.

I feel like IE is an example of a deep rooted demon beast that spawns fucktarded bloat transpilers like BABEL.
When companies try to invent their own wheels, or do their own thing is when the pits of developer hell start to spawn such fucking convoluted fucktarded bullshit.

Abstract to Design:
I'm trying to think of a world where things are standardized, as boring as it sounds... Imagine if companies weren't so fucktarded with greedy smoke and mirrors, and they all contributed to making a single product standardized and workable, and improve on that product... Like a physics "Standard model" but for each product invented.

But no... here we are... 20 million ways to accomplish one similar task, with 20 million different designs, with majority adhering to their own flaws... or planned obsolecence... 10 million booby traps of consumer remorse.

Why do we do this as a society just to make some bastard company's profit margin go up, so they can keep competing in the "free market" of fuck all fuckery?

I get it.. yea... innovation... sure..
but sometimes innovation is just a means to and end of sanity, especially when they are proprietary, and especially when that proprietary shit turns to, well... shit!

In a perfect world, things will be designed open-sourced, compatible, and improved upon without "breaking" changes... but this is virtually impossible without standardization of the VERY fundamental components. But then those components can be improved, and might be smaller/lighter/more efficient by design, and simply wont work with the old versions without drastic "TRANSPILATION"

I suppose this is the way it is always going to be... Neverending stream of design "improvements". I suppose being a developer in todays world is a bittersweet existence... unless you're just trying to make ends meet... in that case. I think I might be in hell.

Take a look at web-dev today with all the "improvements" ... it's literally turned into a jungle of FUCK MY LIFE. A giant dick waiving contest with all these dicks colliding against each other in cluster fuck bombardment.

God help us all.... and now back to coding.

Those of you with an app or productivity web service, do you charge monthly? If so, why? I understand if it is your primary source of income, but do you have ethical or integrity reasons related to price? I've been contemplating this lately and I'd like more Dev input.

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...

I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.

Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.

In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.

As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.

The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.

It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).

We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.

Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.

This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.

The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.

Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.

And... Fucking and!

Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.

Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.

Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.

What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").

Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.

This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?

Outlook web

Empty white page, 1 line of text:
"The custom module does not recognize this error"

Refresh, all good. Exit, enter again in an hour:
"The custom module does not recognize this error"

Then why the hell is there a custom module for errors for fuck's sake? Microsoft, just let the error pass through in that case, so we can read it.

Some self-disrespecting dev wrote that with a gun to their temple.

P.S. Don't ask why I use Outlook web

Please, dear god, is there a browser extension to answer all these shitty cookie/data storage/privacy popups with MY SPECIFIC ANSWER?
As a web dev I understand that websites need cookies, and as a tech company employee I understand that essential cookies as well as functional cookies are okay-ish (most of the time). I just don't want marketing cookies/tracking.
All those extensions just block the popup or block all cookies. This is not what I want!

And why the hell on earth didn't they come up with one single solution for all websites beforehand, so we dont have 6.388.164.341 different popups/bars/notifications/flyouts/drop-ins/overlays???
THIS. IS. JUST. ANNOYING.

Thank you for your attention.

Good Morning Folks!!!

I haven't been posting in a while, besides the fact that I went thru a crazy psychiatric crisis 6 weeks ago, there have not been much news to share here.

Now, recovering and working again luckily, I have to face again the stupid pointy haired boss.

So, this fucker asked me for an estimation to build a simple web app.
He: Hey, can you make an estimation for this app
Me: sure, here it is.
He: *to the client*, here's the estimation for the web app you requested
Client: Uhmm, can I haz desktop for winbug$??
He: Let me check with dev
Me: Sure why not, we can do F# using MVU which is basically the same as using modern web frameworks
He: Sure, I'll tell that to the client.
Client: Oooohhh, C#, we lovez C#, can I haz discount?
He: Client wants discount to make it in C#.
Me: Oh, you can give him a discount to make it in F#, I never said C#
He: But your cv says you used C# ten years ago.
Me: Sure, but is not keeping up with functional design patterns, which is what I do.
He: Ok, so I'm offering him the discount in F#
Me: Great.
He: So, project is approved, thanks for the discount, you have 3 weeks to present the product in C#.
Me: Sure, I'll start when I get the downpayment.

Me: I'm considering saying that I didn't understand that he wanted it in C#, and just do F# and not let him know until the project is done.

Thoughts??

HOLY FUCK! Why is JS world so fucking confusing? I haven't even started learning it and its already giving me a headache. I feel like there are a billion different things i have to learn that aren't just "vanilla js". All i want to do is learn some web dev, take on freelance work, become a digital nomad. Im a simple C++ and ios/android developer things are so straight forward. JS seems like a clusterfuck of just stuff 😧 Id like to say this isnt a my language is > than yours rant. This is a "like what the fuck" rant. My brain was like Html, Css, JS cool thats all i have to learn... boy was i wrong. Can someone give me a word of wisdom as i go down this apparent rabbit hole?

Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm the Charlie Brown of development and Lucy with the football is the XAMPP/MAMP/WAMP software in this world. EVERY. TIME. I. TRY. TO. SPIN. THIS. UP. IT. FAILS. It doesn't matter which tutorial I follow for which technology stack or CMS, the result is always the same. Something about the database or htaccess or some other stupid setting makes it impossible for me to create a simple dev environment on my system.

I have been doing this dance for 24 YEARS NOW!!!! The original programmer of Apache is a 2nd-degree acquaintance who used to be available to help me with this, but no more. I feel like a complete and utter failure as a web developer every time I try to set up XAMPP, and, the rare times I've succeeded and gotten a basic CMS up and running, I fail again and again with all these build/run/task tools I'm now supposed to be using. After a week of fiddling with my local dev environment, I give up and delete it all. I go right back to on-server development "the old fashioned way". WHY!? WHY IS THIS SO HARD?

I'm stepping on rakes here and about to quit. I'm probably just too OLD and STUPID for all these stacks and frameworks and tools and maybe even for this career now. I should probably quit and become a "facilities manager" at a tech firm somewhere, cleaning up the bathrooms and sweeping floors and watching all these young geniuses tut-tut about "Poor StackODev. I hear he had 24 years as a web developer, but then he snapped and he's never been the same."

Never doubt myself.
Never questioned my skills...

Because I have few skills.
I'm no dev, an amateur programmer who learned in school (best part, learned logic programming) and stopped programming for years because I had no future without an engineer University course... How mistaked I was.
So I know that I'll spend more time on google on every project I start.
Still doesn't stop me... Until I find out that I can't do what I want (like the time I made all the UI of a web app in JavaScript to use in electron and then found out that I couldn't use a file database, sq lite on that case... one month almost wasted... Almost, kept the UI as a mock up. Did the same mistake two years latter, only to remember like one week latter why I didn't use JS the last time. Doing it in python+Kivy now) I'll just keep pushing, and trying, and learning.

Never stop, never quit, only death is impossible (for now).

I have a question, but first some background. When I got my first job, it wasn't clear cut what I would do, but I ended up doing frontend. I really liked doing frontend, so I continued doing so and I still do to this day. I even work alongside designers in a design studio, so I feel very much like a frontend developer.

Obviously, the term "frontend" these days implies someone, in some ways, writing a web, mobile or desktop app using javascript. For me, frontend is also about stuff like accessibility, design, code delivery, and understanding the end-users and the designers that may have prototyped something for you.

I have not been active in any other dev communities than this place, but it seems to me like a frontend developer is pretty much the lowest common denominator ( I guess in terms of skills). If I am right, I do not know why, which is why I'm hoping someone could explain.

Budding Developer here...

I've tried to teach myself Web Dev over the past 10 yrs on/off... Sad. But now I'm actually in a developer role moved up from IT helpdesk a year ago.

In the past year I've learned SQL, SSRS, SSIS, database concepts, and.... VB6. I am a master at none due to having to cram so much in a year while taking on various projects, issues, and learning the organizations software infrastructure and processes. I also taught myself current HTML, CSS, and basic Javascript. Learning the different basic concepts with each.

Over the past couple months I've been given a new project and now learning ASP.NET and C#. Actually trying really hard to get adept at these as I'm finally doing Web Developing in my role...

I am also dealing with multiple major family issues and a near 2 yr old that we cosleep with that still doesn't sleep through the night.

Why the crap is it so easy to convert an enum to a string but takes 50 functions to convert a string to an enum???
Cast, convert, parse... Why so much logic???
When the online teacher says type why do I have to rifle through 7 different meanings in my head before I know what kind of type he's referring to??

ScalaJs React compiles Scala to React.js.
There's some cool typing involved but I haven't done web front-end since nested tables were meta, so there's lots to learn.

There's exactly one senior dev at my company who is fluent in this ScalaReact, so I tag him in the PR for my project. Every day at 10:00 am, slack publicly posts a reminder with @mention that he hasn't reviewed my PR.

Three days later I haven't heard anything so I send a DM over slack asking for feedback... No response.

Four days after the PR I beg for 10 minutes of pairing time, because something in my component hierarchy smells funny. He doesn't have time for me until 5:00 .

I've now built almost a weeks worth of work on the original PR and the feedback I get is 'this works, is performant, and has no obvious bugs, but you can't merge it until you restructure the underlying component hierarchy'

It takes me and another senior dev an entire day of pairing to implement the changes without breaking anything. But, I asked for the feedback because I wanted to learn and write good clean code so I'm irritated but willing to move on.

Yesterday I posted in slack that I was having a hard time following my callback chains to find where the color was assigned to a <td (because I had to add a coloring rule). I wanted to know if I could change the type signature of a component from Tagmod (one or more HTML tags) to VdomTagOf[TableCell] so that it would be clear where the color was assigned.

Instead of just telling me 'no' and giving some context, the react dev gives me:

"Why would a dev need to know about the type unless they’re actually trying to use the thing ? Those are all great questions, but id suggest trying not to prematurely optimize for those until they actually come up"

I flipped my shit. After you couldn't make time for me for a WEEK I had to justify to the CEO why I was spending a day on PURE refactors to accommodate your PREFERENCES. Meanwhile when I'm being VULNERABLE and exposing that I am confused and struggling to complete my task you DISMISS my concerns and attack my motivations.

Unfortunately, this is all happening in the public slack channels and I start defending readability and my premise while triggered. Now I'm riding the shame train for fighting in public slack and trying to pretend none of this ever happened.