We have a bunch of white people in human resources that are trying to hire "diverse" people because the company sets HR diversity targets. Which is an inherently racist way of hiring someone.

I am told to interview this guy who claims to have Angular experience. Before the interview I ask to see a form that he has built in Angular. He sends me a repo which is ripped off of an open source project and has the readme and git commits removed. A quick web search shows that it isn't his work. He shows up to the interview and I find out he is from a Southern African country. I deliberately ask some questions about code that I can see he didn't write that I prepared ahead of time. He lies to me and tells me all about how he wrote it which showed me that he has no idea what the code does. I tell HR they better not hire him because he was very comfortable lying to me, and I'm confident that he doesn't understand any of the code that he showed me. I do not trust this guy and would never choose to work with him. HR lady says "Ah okay."

Today he walks in with a big grin on his face. HR lady fucking hired this guy. I can see his monitors from my desk and he spent his whole first day looking at a soccer website on his second monitor. I call up HR, "Why would you even ask me to interview him if you refuse to listen to my feedback?". Lady tells me "You need to be open minded about diversity. Probably most of the things you observed were either cultural differences or language barrier." I tell her definitely not. He lied to me multiple times, and he took credit for other people's work." She tells me that they will keep an eye on me because I'm not being open to diversity.

Are you kidding me? This white lady is literally stereotyping me as a racist because I'm white.

So this fucking HR lady called me a racist because she decided to hire someone that we shouldn't trust. Then she put this asshat on my project. Now I have to be cautious about my position because HR is "watching" my racist ass. Even though I am literally the only one on the development team that is white and speaks English as my first-language. I called a team meeting before the on-boarding is over so I can tell the other developers what is happening. We restructured our code review process so that I will never give him feedback. Then when the time comes that he slips up the "diverse" developers will kick him out so I won't be reprimanded as a "racist".

This company that I work for is a special kind of stupid.

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.

Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.

In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.

Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.

I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.

"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop

"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"

(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)

Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.

During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.

And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.

NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.

Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT

SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE

Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK

"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS

being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.

So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?

You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)

This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS

* gays away into the night

You know what's the difference between
- static page written purely in HTML with inline styling
and
- dynamic page generated in PHP, that actually loads data from MySQL database and is correctly styled in separate CSS document
on national level exam necessary to earn a title of technician?
ONE HACKING PERCENT!

Ok, backstory. So, few days ago I got results from that exam. To be honest, it was very, very easy so I wasn't worried at all, unlike some of my classmates who just don't understand programming at all (you need at least 75% to pass). Our task was to create database, write website in PHP that shows contents of that database and use CSS to give it a look that of example web page and run it on XAMPP. I've got result of 96% and while I was wandering what I've done wrong i hear my colleague almost screaming with joy "I passed! And I haven't even touched PHP. I was soooo sure I'll fail." So I asked him what's his result and he says 95%. And then another colleague said he got 95% without PHP. So, in other words what I thought to be the main task was worth 1%. Apparently, what was more important was for the page to look identical to the example, so I guess some examiners didn't even look into the source. And don't get me wrong, I don't wish my classmates had failed. That's not why I'm ranting. But why in the name of Ada Lovelace the task said to use PHP and all that if it weren't supposed to check our knowledge of programming in PHP? Sometimes I think the people who design these tests don't even know what they're doing.

1998 talk: Copy the Internet

I was surfing the web on my good old windows 98 pc, a younger friend comes to my place and sees me using IE. Sudently he asks:
Friend: What is that program?
Me: It's Internet Explorer.
Fr: - What is it for?
Me: - Well, you can write something here, (url), to go to different sites, search for stuff you like, participate in foruns, etc...
Fr: - Oh yeah, I know what that is, my cousin also has that in his PC, but I don't.
...(Little pause)...
- Can you copy the internet for me? Because I don't have it.
Me: You can't copy the Internet! You need a phone connection.
Fr - But I'll give you a floppy disk, you put that program there, and then I can use it too.
Me - The shortcut won't give you Internet!

I think I ended up copying the shortcut of IE to him, just to prove my point.
The funny thing is that the link really worked because he also had IE in his machine, while not in the workspace, however it was exactly in the same folder location as mine, but obviously he didn't had a wired phone connection.

Fr - "Maybe I need to copy something more! The program opens but it doesn't show anything."

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.

Although I love developing I always thought that there was something missing.
I learned Java but didn't really like it. I had spent quite some time with web development and enjoyed it but I felt like developing with JavaScript was too high level and I felt the same for Python.

So I started learning the most awesome programming language: C

I just love that I have so much control over everything and that the language is so compact and gives you just the right amount of tools you need.

I also love physics and electronics a lot and it feels awesome to first build something and then program it.

I am looking forward to design a PCB (printed circuit board) and write code for an AVR microcontroller like the Atmega328 (most arduinos use this one).

Picture of the project I am working on.

tl;dr
A former colleague of mine, who used to suck at web development is now a kick-ass who knows how to get things done.

We are of the same age. We got hired on this company at the same time. He was a front-end guy, and I am a full-stack. So, we were like a yin and yang in development roles.

Initially, we have this big gap of skillset. I was solely assigned on a project which I worked on from ground up, while he was barely able to make an HTML table look properly on a separate existing project. My impression of him that time is that he's kind of a simpleton. But, I was wrong.

Few months passed, our seniors left the company, and I was promoted to be a team lead. Eventually, I was teamed up with this guy. I had a hard time working with him, but I was able to share him some of my knowledge.

Every time I teach him something new, he's exploring more. From proper indentation, writing SASS, using streaming build system (GulpJS), etc., he's making sure that he applies it on every project he's assigned to — even practicing it on his personal projects during break time. I can see him improve each day.

After a year in the company, he became so much better. I even ended up teaching him more than just front-end stuff. I shared the gospel of Jesus of PHP community (Jeffrey Way), tought him how to set up his own server, how to configure DNS, etc.. Again, it's tough for him even to write a simple for..loop statements. But, after a lot of consistent practice, he became better and better. We've done quite a number of projects together. He's fun to work with because of his "hungry" spirit.

Unfortunately, he was laid-off from the company, and I worked on the company til the very end. We parted ways.

He went back to his hometown to launch his own e-commerce business — apparently, this was the "practice" project he was working on the whole time during breaktimes.

Another year has passed, that project worked out and got a funding. And now, he's launching his second project. The best thing is, when I lookup his projects on builtwith.com, every damn stack I tought him, he used it. It's like a project built by me.

To be honest, I am a little jealous of him, but at the same time, I am so proud of him. I thought him how to make things work, he thought me how to get things done. He's my inspiration now.

Waaaay too many but let's go with this one for now.

At my previous job there was a web application which was generating about 1gb of log data a second. Server was full and the 'fullstack engineers' we called had zero clue about backend stuff and couldn't fix it.

Me and another engineer worked our asses off to figure this out but eventually the logging stopped and it went back to normal.

Great, right?

For that moment. I was the on-call server engineer and at like 3am I got called awake because this shit was happening again.
Sleep drunk with my phone I ssh'd into the server, not sure about what to do at first but then suddenly: let's chattr the goddamn log file...

$ chattr +i /var/log/logfile

Bam, worked, done, back to sleep.

(this comment + param marks the file in a way that it can only be read until the mark is removed, so you can't write to it or move it or remove it or whatever)

Always makes me laugh that if you don’t have a Mac you clearly aren’t a proper web developer to most people 😂 (I used to use Mac but switched)

Me: *Pulls out my windows laptop to do some web development work*

Friend: How can you use that to develop with, you’re supposed to use a Mac everyone knows that. What do you even code in?

Me: I write everything in word and then transfer it to a Mac to test as obviously the internet only works on Mac.

Friend: oh right .. that makes sense, probably easier just to buy a Mac though isn’t it?

Me: ....

Time to get a new friend 😩

"Hey nephew, why doesn't the FB app work. It shows blank white boxes?"
- It can't connect or something? (I stopped using the FB app since 2013.)

"What is this safe mode that appeared on my phone?!"
- I don't know. I don't hack my smartphone that much. Well, I actually do have a customised ROM. But stop! I'm pecking my keyboard most of the time.

"Which of my files should I delete?"
- Am I supposed to know?

"Where did my Microsoft Word Doc1.docx go?"
- It lets you choose the location before you hit save.

"What is 1MB?"
- Search these concepts on Google. (some of us did not have access to the Internet when we learned to do basic computer operations as curious kids.)

"What should I search?"
- ...

"My computer doesn't work.. My phone has a virus. Do you think this PC they are selling me has a good spec? Is this Video Card and RAM good?"
- I'm a programmer. I write code. I think algorithmically and solve programming problems efficiently. I analyse concepts such as abstraction, algorithms, data structures, encapsulation, resource management, security, software engineering, and web development. No, I will not fix your PC.

How did I start:

It was 1994. I had been kicked out of school on academic behavior. I was working at as a telemarketer to pay the bills. I got drunk on St. Patrick's day and over slept my shift. My boss was going to fire me but said he wanted to give me a second chance. He asked if I knew anything about computers. I said no. He said if I was willing to learn, our IT guy was burning out and needed help. I said ok. Next thing I know I'm learning how to write SQL and importing data to print call cards. I read the manual for Foxpro and started building small desktop apps as labor saving devices. 6months later in knew more than our IT guy. Later a friend showed me "the Internet". I went back to our IT guy in amazement. He said it was just a fad. He called it the CB Radio of the 90s. Our network we ran was called Lantastic.

I immediately quit went back to school and changed my major. I have been a full stack Java Web developer will the heavy emphasis on UI since 1999.

I'm 20, and I consider myself to be as junior as they come. I only started programming seriously in June 2016,and since then, I've been doing mainly Android Work, and making my own servers and backends(using AWS/Firebase nd stuff).
For the first time in life, I was approached by a recruiter for a company on linkedIn. They "stumbled upon" my Github profile and wanted to see if I was interested in an internship opportunity. This company is an early stage start up, by that I mean a dude with an idea calling himself the CEO and a guy who "runs a tech blog" and only knows college level C programming (explaination follows).

So they want me to make the app for their startup. and for that, I ws first asked to solve a couple problems to prove my competence and a "technical interview" followed.
They gave me 3 questions, all textbook, GCD of 2 numbers, binary search and Adding an element to the linked List, code to be written on a piece of paper. As the position was that of an Android Developer, I assumed that Java should be the language of choice. Assumed because when I asked, the 'tech blogger' said, yeah whatever.
But wait, that ain't all, as soon as I was done, Mr. Blogger threw a fit, saying I shouldn't assume and that I must write it in C. I kept my cool (I'm not the most patient person), and wrote the whole thing in C.
He read it, and asked me what I've written and then told me how wrong I was to write 2 extra lines instead of recursion for GCD. I explained that with numbers large enough, we run the risk of getting a stackoverflow and it's best to apply non recursive solution if possible. He just heard stackoverflow and accused me of cheating. I should have left right then, but I don't know why, I apologized and again, in detail explained what was happening to this fucktard. Once this was done, He asked me how, if I had to, I'd use this exact code in my Android App. I told him that Id rather write this in Java/Kotlin since those are the languages native to Android apps. I also said that I'd export these as a Library and use JNI for the task. (I don't actually know how, I figured I can study if I have to).
Here's his reply, "WTF! We don't want to make the app in Java, we will use C (Yeh, not C++, C). and Don't use these fancy TOOLS like JNI or Kotlin in front of me, make a proper application."
By this I was clear that this guy is not fit to be technical lead and that I should leave. I said, "Sir, I don't know how, if even possible, can we make an Android App purely in C. I am sorry, but this job is not for me".
I got up and was about to leave the room, when we said, "Yeah okay, I was just testing you".
Yeah right, the guy's face looked like a howling monkey when I said Library for C, and It has been easier for me to explain code to my 10 year old cousin that this dumbfuck.
He then proceeded to ask me about my availability, and I said that I can at max to 15-20 hours a week since my college schedule is pretty tight. I asked me to get him a prototype in 2 months and also offered me a full time job after I graduate. (That'd be 2 years from now). I said thank you for the offer, but I am still not sure of I am the right person for this job.
He then said, "Oh you will be when I tell you your monthly stipend."
I stopped for a second, because, money.
And then he proceeded to say 2 words which made me walk out without saying a single word.
"One Thousand".

I live in India, 1000 INR translates to roughly $15. I made 25 times that by doing nothing more than add a web view to an activity and render a company's responsive website in it so it looks like an app.

If this wasn't enough, the recruiter later had the audacity to blame me for it and tell me how lucky I am to even get an offer "so good".
Fuck inexperienced assholes trying shit they don't understand and thinking that the other guy is shitsworth.

Straight from a marketing analyst (we didn't have a PM) I once had the displeasure of working with:

"Can you write a JavaScript that will scan a user's hard drive for credit card numbers and autofill the checkout form on our client's web site? I think it will increase their conversion rate."

The guy didn't believe me when I told him it was impossible (barring exploits that would break the browser's sandbox), unethical, and probably illegal. I had to escalate all the way to the CEO to get him to drop it.

Hello again devRanters! This is linuxxx again. A quick update regarding the privacy site!

Right now we're up to the following:

Ewpratten
- Converting what we have right now on frontend to Bootstrap.
- Working on a page with a description as to what this is going to be exactly.

linuxxx (me)
- Converted the static stuff we used before to a simple MVC based PHP web application.
- Created a DB scheme for the custom CMS I am going to write for this.
- Starting to work on the custom CMS right now!

We'll update as soon as we've got a well working description/introduction page :)

We won't be creating rants every day/new tiny feature/change or anything but as this is our first productive night, it seemed like a nice idea to update what we already got done/started on :).

Stay tuned!

So before today, I'd never used GoDaddy before. Not even once. My supervisor walks in and happily informs me that I'm going to be adding photos to a website that she does editing for. Okay, fine, that's stupidly easy. What I did not realize, however, is that this entire website had been built using GoDaddy's site builder, and if you're not familiar with it, thank whatever gods you worship that you've dodged that bullet. I hardly want to go wandering around somebody else's web hosting, so I search about for a bit praying that there's SOME semblance of a normal text editor someplace, because text editors make me happy and all, and find very little on the regular site. Already not thrilled. So I figure, how bad is this site editor? Really, how bad can it possibly be?
Oh, you poor misguided son of a -
Anyway, I go in and look at the site. Slideshows everywhere, nothing is aligned correctly, it's a web designer's nightmare. Thankfully, I'm not a web designer, so I press on and reorganize a little bit. I try slapping a new slideshow on their, and discover that unlike the way it SHOULD work, elements do not move to allow for other elements, they just sit there and let you throw things on top of them. I stare at my neatly-stacked slideshows for a second in utter disbelief, knowing but not really accepting that I'm going to need to take every last one of those slideshow elements and slide those little so-and-so's down by hand. ....why? Who designed this? Who decided that was a good idea? I do some Googling to see if there's anything out there to make this less horrid, and lo and behold I find a GoDaddy page about their FTP file manager! It's under web/classic hosting, which apparently means it's deprecated because I spent the next ten minutes hunting around for the "web hosting" link those chicken-lickers were so proud of and it's nowhere to be found.
Alright, so they want to do this the hard way.
At this point I'm screaming internally and PRAYING that I'm just being stupid and not seeing anything to make it easi-
No, not even easier. Just less stupid. This website builder makes no sense. It's like hiring a contractor to build a bridge and handing him a box of Legos and a banana.
So I do more googling and find instructions on getting to the file manager. FINALLY. The first step is find "Hosting" under "My Products." I rush over to My Products joyfully, hoping I can get this stupid website up and running reasonably quickly, and...!
There's no hosting tab.
No button.
Not even a little hard-to-see link. At this point my brain is screaming. WHY would you give me a website builder but absolutely no way to actually write the website? Do people actually use this thing? I mean, I get it if they want to make it nice and accessible for people to make websites without overwhelming them with HTML but if they know how to edit the website and they don't want your help, why would you force me in to this? Why? Then it occurred to me that maybe the organization just hasn't ever had a web developer in it, ever, or at least not one who was willing to help out with the website, so they purposefully signed up for hosting that deprived them of any kind of HTML editor. Then on top of all of that, I noticed that on the home page, which had been edited by someone else long before I ever looked at it, ALSO had one of these stupid slideshows that I had to reorganize by hand, and some sad, angry little man had put in one of the photos sideways. It was SIDEWAYS. Just sitting there on its side, the photo's occupants staring at me with sad eyes begging me to turn them facing up again. I sat there and stared at a badly-designed website in a questionably-designed editor. And I wondered. I wondered who put this all together, and I wondered why *I* was the one doing it, when I work for a university and the website was for some beach homeowner's association. And I wondered if this job was a task that my supervisor had agreed to do and just passed off onto an office monkey. And I wept bitter tears at the realization that I am that office monkey.

Just before you, my fellow system programmer, scroll past this, let me say this:

🍬 The web is actiually simple. 🍬

Both HTML and CSS is declarative. It's all easy when you understand the concepts, learn how to be idiomatic and quit trying to do that imperative bullshit in languages that aren't imperative.

HTML is simple. You know the boilerplate: doctype, head, body, that's all. Just mark it up and do NOT look at it before you end, mark it up as it were article or something. The appearance is up to css.

CSS is simple. You may even forget bem or rscss, you're already a skilled software developer. Use common sense and your code-splitting and naming skills you gained reading The Code Complete or doing software development for years.

Forget mockups. Forget absolute positioning, forget setting width and height in pixels. Go to awwwards, find some inspiration. Draw some buttons and fields on paper with your good old pencil. Then go and write some css. Feel free to steal some shadows and transitions from codepen.

Read about 8-pixel grid system. Let every element push away from others by setting something like margin: 16px; and whoops! You've just got fully responsive and got great vertical rhythm without even using media queries!

Oh my god, do NEVER set width and height explicitly! Type something like button { width: 120px; } and bang! The entire web page is broken. Quit that shit. Let it resize as it should. It will resize itself to fit its contents.

HTML is by default ready for your template engine. That's how you receive data from server — as server-side rendered, plain old HTML page. On the other hand, the form element is the most axiomatic and simple way to send the data to server. That's how you send it — as plain old GET or POST that every webserver can handle.

All of there are true:
1. It's easy to get great 100% responsiveness without media queries.
2. It's easy to align items in row, it's just one line of css. Maybe two, if you still want elements to wrap, but want to use flexbox:
.parent {
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
}
3. HTML and CSS are fast by default.
4. You don't need mockups to achieve great visual experience. Mockups is imperative, web is declarative.
5. You may not even need JavaScript to make great website.

Go on, ask me a question about web! I'll ready to answer everything.

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.

Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)

Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.

So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.

And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.

Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...

People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.

Summary

PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.

That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.

Enjoy.

In Russia we have a huge techno-nazi community. They often can be found on some programming forums and a website called Habr.

They’ll shame you if you’re a web developer and don’t write in Asm or C. They spread toxic memes and insulting “stupid humanitarians”. One particular guy constructed the whole ideology that is focused on technological enthusiasts being the “master race” and implies recycling non-technical people in so-called “bioreactors” for energy.

Please don’t be like them.

Dev checked in code (I suspect purposely not inviting me on the code review invite) saying he "fixed" the authentication bug in the web service.

Um no, like I told you last week, the authentication error is because the load balancer wasn't passing the user's authentication to IIS.

If I didn't overhear him telling a user "Still getting the error? I don't know, we might have to re-write that service", he might have gotten away with it.

Me: "Wait, that doesn't sound right. If I hit the server directly, authentication works. Its an issue with the load balancer, not the service"
Dev: "Admin said the load balancer is fine and it has to be the service."
Me: "I don't buy it. IIS is returning the authentication error, not the service."
Dev: "I added exception handling and nothing is being logged. Must be something in the service configuration."
Me: "No, IIS performs the authentication, not the service. I explained that last week, remember?"
Dev: "Oh yea. What changes do we need to make to the service?"
<my blood pressure starts to spike>
Me: "None. Give me a sec.."
<we have other apps on the same server farm that work just fine, so I re-configure the service pool settings to match theirs>
Me: "See, now going through the load balancer, the service works fine. For some reason, the admin had our service set up differently."
Dev: "OK, I'll let the users know the service is fixed."
Me: "Service was never broke and I'm not leaving it in its current state. In the morning I'll talk to the admin and see what he can do to fix."

Most ignorant ask from a PM or client?

So, so many. How do I chose?

- Wanting to 'speed up' a web site that we did not own, in Sweden (they used a service I wrote). His 'benchmark' was counting "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" while the home page rendered on his home PC and < 1MB DSL connection (he lives in a rural area).
- Wanted to change the sort order of a column of report so it 'sometimes' sorted on 'ABC' (alpha) or '123' (numeric) and sometimes, a mix of both. His justification was if he could put the data in the order he wanted in Excel, the computer should be smart enough to do the same thing.
- Wanted a Windows desktop application to run on an android.
- Wanted to write the interface to a new phone system that wasn't going to be installed for months. Even though we had access to the SDK, he didn't understand the SDK required access to the hardware. For several weeks he would send emails containing tutorials on interfacing with COM libraries (as if that was my problem).
- Wanted to write a new customer support application in XML. I told him I would have the application written tomorrow if he could tell me what XML stands for.

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.

Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.

I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.

I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.

Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.

Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.

The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!

Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.

I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.

I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.

Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!

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

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

I guess I was just ahead of my time?

Allright, I'm pissed.

Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.

Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *

-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.

> Shit, Regret

Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.

> Big shit

Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"

Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.

> Fuck

* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *

* Feels save *

Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *

> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)

> Nope

* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"

> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"

* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)

My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...

Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).

Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.

* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *

For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed

> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)

"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app

> FML

* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *

> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)

UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());

C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.

Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe

I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!

Wish me luck for today!

I'm leaving my job.

That had already been decided when I learned that the only other front end guy at the company put in his two weeks notice. I immediately decided that I was morally obligated to put in my 4 months notice to give the company enough time to find a replacement (because, contrary to the beliefs of some programmers, front end plays a critical role in web dev).

With only 2 weeks left, I was put on his project to do some "simple design work".

Jesus christ in heaven alive and dead...

I've never in my career seen CSS with such an intense level of specificity -- nobody on that team should have ever let that code get so out of control.

I've spent the past week cursing, walking out of the room, whispering "I can't believe you've done this", ranting to non-developer friends.

Here's an example: the application has a panel used all over the place with a header and a body. Every Single View has it's own duplicated panel, each with its own unique class names and CSS. And that's just one element.

Every view has hundreds of lines of duplicated CSS. Every button, link, list, all with unique styles.

To any junior developer reading this, please hear me: Write one block of CSS for any element that will be reused. DO NOT duplicate your code when it can be used over and over.

/rant

Went to an introductory session for the new version of the lousy CMS my organization uses and on the second slide of the presentation WRITTEN BY THE BIG BRITCHES OF THE IT DEPARTMENT they informed us that the CMS removes the necessity to learn languages for web programming like HTML, CSS, and Java. My first thought is "huh why would I need Java for... wait..." You could see the thoughts crossing my mind.
"Wait a minute... Who writes Java applets anymore? Java isn't.... but what if... no... they wouldn't..."
For the holy love of Bill, YOU ARE THE IT DEPARTMENT. Please don't tell me you misguided cactus-heads just mixed up JavaScript and Java on an official document you're using in presentations for everyone using the system? It hardly did anything to inspire overwhelming confidence. And even if it was handled by somebody whose entire job is to write PowerPoints for these things, who reviewed this thing? Dilbert's boss? And that wasnt even the only soul-scorching error. Sweet mother of Tux, people, I'm a student using your system, your professional presentations shouldn't make me cringe.

Just wrote a (PHP based) proxy which can cache resources being requested and serve them to clients.

The idea is that (I'm going to write a firefox add-on for it too, yes) you can install the add-on and any resource (js/CSS, general web resources which would be downloaded off of googleapi's etc) hosted with Google would be proxied through the server running the proxy, meaning that one wouldn't have to connect to the mass surveillance networks directly anymore as for static resources.

I think checksum verify stuff would still work as the proxy is literally a proxy, the content will be identical to the 'real' resource. (Not sure about this one, enlighten me if this isn't true)

Input appreciated!

WASM was a mistake. I just wanted to learn C++ and have fast code on the web. Everyone praised it. No one mentioned that it would double or quadruple my development time. That it would cause me to curse repeatedly at the screen until I wanted to harm myself.

The problem was never C++, which was a respectable if long-winded language. No no no. The problem was the lack of support for 'objects' or 'arrays' as parameters or return types. Anything of any complexity lives on one giant Float32Array which must surely bring a look of disgust from every programmer on this muddy rock. That is, one single array variable that you re-use for EVERYTHING.

Have a color? Throw it on the array. 10 floats in an object? Push it on the array - and split off the two bools via dependency injection (why do I have 3-4 line function parameter lists?!). Have an image with 1,000,000 floats? Drop it in the array. Want to return an array? Provide a malloc ptr into the code and write to it, then read from that location in JS after running the function, modifying the array as a side effect.

My- hahaha, my web worker has two images it's working with, calculations for all the planets, sun and moon in the solar system, and bunch of other calculations I wanted offloaded from the main thread... they all live in ONE GIANT ARRAY. LMFAO.If I want to find an element? I have to know exactly where to look or else, good luck finding it among the millions of numbers on that thing.

And of course, if you work with these, you put them in loops. Then you can have the joys of off-by-one errors that not only result in bad results in the returned array, but inexplicable errors in which code you haven't even touched suddenly has bad values. I've had entire functions suddenly explode with random errors because I accidentally overwrote the wrong section of that float array. Not like, the variable the function was using was wrong. No. WASM acted like the function didn't even exist and it didn't know why. Because, somehow, the function ALSO lived on that Float32Array.

And because you're using WASM to be fast, you're typically trying to overwrite things that do O(N) operations or more. NO ONE is going to use this return a + b. One off functions just aren't worth programming in WASM. Worst of all, debugging this is often a matter of writing print and console.log statements everywhere, to try and 'eat' the whole array at once to find out what portion got corrupted or is broke. Or comment out your code line by line to see what in forsaken 9 circles of coding hell caused your problem. It's like debugging blind in a strange and overgrown forest of code that you don't even recognize because most of it is there to satisfy the needs of WASM.

And because it takes so long to debug, it takes a massively long time to create things, and by the time you're done, the dependent package you're building for has 'moved on' and find you suddenly need to update a bunch of crap when you're not even finished. All of this, purely because of a horribly designed technology.

And do they have sympathy for you for forcing you to update all this stuff? No. They don't owe you sympathy, and god forbid they give you any. You are a developer and so it is your duty to suffer - for some kind of karma.

I wanted to love WASM, but screw that thing, it's horrible errors and most of all, the WASM heap32.

After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.

A day in the life of BoyBiscuit.

PM: Please zip up any local changes and push them to a temp folder on the repo and I will manually check to see what you have changed.
Me: *glaring at the download as zip button*

PM: Who broke the repo?
Me: *checks commit history*
Commit History: *last commit PM*

Me: Could you add the files to your commit before pushing because you've only pushed changes on tracked files.
PM: No not possible, I did 'commit -a'.
Me: ....

PM: Could you all delete your forks so that It isn't anywhere on the web
US: but it's private with only us as collaborators
PM: No because I can see it
Me: srysly?

PM: Could everyone try to write more effective code?
Me: Looks at his code
Code: Boolean b = getbooleanVal ? True : False;

Tl;Dr: PM doesn't know anything about git or working as a team.

See you tomorrow!

Indian web dev companies suck ( for developers )

when I finished 3 year grad program in computer application here in my country (India), I thought life's gonna be fun working as a developer. Oh boy, I was so wrong.

I started out working for a small service based IT company, followed by 2 more. I realized really quickly that they're nothing short of a scam. If your company's only agenda to somehow survive in the market and showing no signs of growth in 8 fucking years, then I'm sorry you're working for scamsters.

Now I'm not saying that all of them are alike. But most of them sorta are.

They don't give a shit about quality, not one bit. Quality means no money in the short run. And they haven't been able to develop any strategy to deal with that. Hence, no growth.

They promise 100 things on their website but only provide shitty services in 10.

There is no pair programming, no code review, no code quality check, no architect, no database designer. They won't give you extra time to write test cases. They use git as a storage device.

They don't put their developers (especially the ones who are learning) under any sort of managed development framework to ensure smooth work.

At the end of the day, their main objective is to somehow NOT deliver a project but finish a milestone and make money out of it.

After cashing out for a milestone, they want you to put your current project on hold and start working on a new project until you have like 10-15 projects in the pipeline and you're severely overwhelmed and you just wanna fucking QUIT.

They would say YES to literally every fucking thing, only to disappoint the client later.

I can't believe someone in the US, or UK thought it'd be a good idea to approach these companies
for their brand new app ideas. They're so fucked.

They're rarely finishing any project.

I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I had to get it out of my system.

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

That's actually something that happened fairly recently.. just that I didn't have the energy left at the time to write it down. That, or I got my ass too drunk to properly write anything.. not sure actually.

So on paper I'm unemployed, but I do spend some time still on pretty much voluntary work for HackingVision, along with a handful of other people.

At the time, we were just doing the usual chit-chat in the admin channel, me still sick in my bed (actually that means that I wasn't drunk but really tired for once.. amazing!) and catching up to what happened, but unable to do any useful work in this sick state. So, tablet, typing on glass, right. I didn't have any keyboard attached at the time.

One of the staff members (a wanketeer from India) apparently had an assignment in a few hours for which he needed to write a server application in Java. Now, performance issues aside, I figured.. well I've got quite a bit of experience with servers, as well as some with client-server protocols. So I got thinking.. mail servers, way too overengineered. Web servers.. well that could work, I've done some basic netcat webservers that just sent an HTTP 200 OK and the file, those worked fine.. although super basic of course. And then there's IRC, which I've actually talked to an InspIRCd server through telnet before (which by the way is pretty much the only thing that telnet is still useful for, something that was never its purpose, lol) and realized that that protocol is actually quite easy to develop around. That's why I like it so much over modern chat protocols like XMPP, MQTT and whatnot. So I recommended that he'd write a little IRC server in Java. Or even just a chatbot like I attempted to at the time, considering that that's - with a stretch of course - a sort-of server too.

His fucking response however, so goddamn fucking infuriating. "If the protocol is so easy, then please write me down how to implement it in Java."

Essentially do his fucking work for him. I don't know Java, but as a fucking HackingVision admin, YOU SHOULD FUCKING KNOW THAT HACKERS CAN'T STAND LAZY CUNTS THAT CAN'T EVEN BE ASSED TO GOOGLE SHIT!!! If I wanted to deal with cunts like that, I'd have opened the page inbox with all its Fb h4xx0ring questions, not the fucking admin chat!

And type it on a goddamn fucking piece of glass, while fucking sick?! Get your ass fucked by a bobs and vegana horny fuck from the untouchable caste, because that's where you fucking belong for expecting THAT from me, you fucking bhenchod.

But at least I didn't get my ass enraged like that to say that to him in the admin chat. Although that probably wouldn't have been a bad thing, to get his feet right back on the ground again.

Just give me a link to the web font man. Oh, there isn't one? You used a font that we can't legally use? Do you understand how that works? I don't want your 300MB photoshop document. I don't want to comb through your ridiculous stack of insane layers and artboards and deal with the images you didn't bundle into the project or try and make sense out of your arbitrary spacing and random font sizes. You're not an artist, you're just a crappy visual designer handing off an unthoughtful glorified wire-frame - and now I have to sort out all the things that you were paid to do. It's really easy. 1. Pick a color, 2. Pick 2 fonts that are legal and available to use on the web, 3. build a few patterns for font sizes and weights - write them down. 4. Pick your images. Make them double the size you expect them to be on the site + put them in a folder, 5. add readme and list the font patterns and the link to the webfont, 6. quickly scribble the wire-frame out, 7. take a photo of it, 8. put it all in a folder and send it to me.

I think I ranted about this before but fuck it.

The love/hate relation I have with security in programming is funny. I am working as a cyber security engineer currently but I do loads of programming as well. Security is the most important factor for me while programming and I'd rather ship an application with less features than with more possibly vulnerable features.

But, sometimes I find it rather annoying when I want to write a new application (a web application where 90 percent of the application is the REST API), writing security checks takes up most of the time.

I'm working on a new (quick/fun) application right now and I've been at this for.... 3 hours I think and the first very simple functionality has finally been built, which took like 10 minutes. The rest of the 3 hours has been securing the application! And yes, I'm using a framework (my own) which has already loads of security features built-in but I need more and more specific security with this API.

Well, let's continue with securing this fucker!

A LOT of this article makes me fairly upset. (Second screenshot in comments). Sure, Java is difficult, especially as an introductory language, but fuck me, replace it with ANYTHING OTHER THAN JAVASCRIPT PLEASE. JavaScript is not a good language to learn from - it is cheaty and makes script kiddies, not programmers. Fuck, they went from a strong-typed, verbose language to a shit show where you can turn an integer into a function without so much as a peep from the interpreter.

And fUCK ME WHY NOT PYTHON?? It's a weak typed but dynamic language that FORCES good indentation and actually has ACCESS TO THE FILE SYSTEM instead of just the web APIs that don't let you do SHIT compared to what you SHOULD learn.

OH AND TO PUT THE ICING ON THE CAKE, the article was comparing hello worlds, and they did the whole Java thing right but used ALERT instead of CONSOLE.LOG for JavaScript??? Sure, you can communicate with the user that way too but if you're comparing the languages, write text to the console in both languages, don't write text to the console in Java and use the alert api in JavaScript.

Fuck you Stanford, I expected better you shitty cockmunchers.

➡️You Are Not A Software Developer⬅️

When I became a developer, I thought that my job is to write software. When my customer had a problem, I was ready to write software that solves that problem. I was taught to write software.

But what customers need is not software. They need a solution to their problem. Your job is to find the most cost-effective solution, what software often is not.

According to the universal law of software development, more code leads to more bugs:

e = mc²

Or

errors = (more code)²

The number of bugs grows with the amount of code. You have to prioritize, reproduce and fix bugs.

The more code you write, the more your team and the team after it has to maintain. Even if you split the system into micro services, the complexity remains.

Writing well-tested, clean code takes a lot of time. When you’re writing code, other important work is idle. The work that prevents your company from becoming rich.

A for-profit company wants to make money and reduce expenses. Then the company hires you to solve problems that prevent it from becoming rich. Confused by your job title, you take their money and turn it into expensive software.

But business has nothing to do about software. Even software business is not about software. Business is about making money.

Your job is to understand how the company is making money, help make more money and reduce expenses. Once you know that, you will become the most valuable asset in the company.

Stop viewing yourself as a software developer. You are a money maker.

Think about how to save and make money for your customers.

Find the most annoying problem and fix it:

▶️Is adding a new feature too costly? Solve the problem manually.
▶️Is testing slow? Become a tester.
▶️Is hiring not going well? Speak at a meetup and advertise your company.
▶️Is your team not productive enough? Bring them coffee.

Your job title doesn’t matter. Ego doesn’t matter either.

Titles and roles are distracting us from what matters to our customers – money.💸

You are a money maker. Thinking as a money maker can help choose the next skill for development. For example:

Serverless: pay only for resources you consume, spend less time on capacity planning = 💰

Machine Learning: get rid of manual decision-making = 💰

TDD: shorter feedback cycle, fewer bugs = 💰

Soft Skills: inspire teammates, so they are more productive and happy = 💰

If you don’t know what to learn next — answer a simple question:

What skills can help my company make more money and reduce expenses?

Very unlikely it’s another web framework written in JavaScript.

Article by Eduards Sizovs
Sizovs.net

Just because you can learn HTML in a day doesn’t mean that you don’t need a degree.

Did you know that your browser, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and even your operating system use linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, and other so-called “useless” data structures?

It’s important to understand the roots and fundamentals of computer science even if you won’t use that knowledge day to day.

It changes your perspective on programming once you learn what actually goes on under the hood, and makes you think twice about the impact of what you write.

It’s relatively easy to get a programming job without a degree nowadays, but it often leads to web developers claiming that degrees aren’t important to their web apps.

There is much more than just the web to computer science, and that’s something to always keep in mind.

“sEniOr tEcHniCiaN”: “I don’t know what Blazor is. I write my projects in ASP.NET. You should just use ASP.NET”

Me: …”Blazor *is* ASP. This project is running on ASP.NET 6.”

“seNioR tEchNiCiaN”: “As previously stated, I don’t use Blazor. I don’t care what version it is.”

Yes, this is a real exchange from my ongoing problems with this idiot.
His attitude is what ticks me off the most.
He doesn’t know what CORS is.
He doesn’t understand that “ASP.NET” covers Blazor, Razor Pages, the old MVC stuff, web APIs, and more.
He doesn’t understand the difference between a web request being initiated from the browser via Fetch and a web request being initiated from the server. (“My ASP site is shown in the browser, so requests to the third party API aren’t originating from the server.”)

And yet has the arrogance to repeatedly talk down to me while I try to explain basic concepts to him in the least condescending way possible.

After going around and around in circles with him, he finally admitted to me that “he doesn’t actually know what the CORS configuration looks like or how to modify it, to be honest.”

I just wanna go home.

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

do you have a GREAT eye for design?!

can you write a bubble sort algorithm in binary?!

do you know native, desktop, embedded, AND web programming languages?!

do you know you can go fuck yourselves?!

good luck unicorn searching 🤡 companies. there is no human that can do all of those on a level that you want. but, go ahead and set yourself up for failure. i'll remain firmly grounded on planet earth 🌎

How to comply with GDPR on any website and web application:
- download the law and store it in some folder
- if you have money, pay a lawyer and a security consultant to write something about GDPR. Download reports and papers and store it in some folder
- Don't touch your code, nor your database nor your infrastructure. If you don't have anything encrypted, leave it like that.
- Write somewhere a popup that says: "we are fully compliant with GDPR". If you have still money left you can also buy such a popup.
- DONE.

I am mentally burned out from web development.

Physically I'm fine, but it's getting more difficult each day to open my laptop and write code, documentation or do code reviews.

Web development just seems so meaningless, where my day to day job has me trudging through one web form after another. I'm sick of implementing business logic on the backend and tired of listening to the product owner bitch about users who are demanding.

My productivity has fallen to the level where I'm feeling guilty for spending my time on nothing!

Don't give me advice, I know I need a change of scenery.

I just need to find the motivation to work on another hiring test which has nothing to do with the actual job.

You know what really grinds my gears? As a junior webdeveloper (mostly backend) I try my hardest to deliver quality content and other people's ignorance is killing me in my current job.

Let's rant about a recent project I had under my hood, for this project (a webshop) I had to restructure the database and had to include validation on basicly every field (what the heck, no validation I hear you say??), apperently they let an incompetent INTERN make this f***king webshop. The list of mistakes in this project can bring you close to the moon I'd say, seriously.

Database design 101 is basicly auto incremented ID's, and using IDs in general instead of using name (among a list of other stuff obv.). Well, this intern decided it was a good idea to filter a custom address-book module based on a NAME, so it wasn't setup as: /addressbook/{id} (unique ID, never a problem) but as /addressbook/{name}, which results in only showing one address if the first names on the addresses are the same. Lots of bugs that go by this type of incompetence and ignorance. Want to hear another joke? Look no further, this guy also decided it was a great idea to generate the next ID of an order. So the ordernumber wasn't made up by the auto incremented id on the order model, but by a count of all the orders and that was the next order number. This broke so many times, unbelievable.

To close the list of mistakes off, the intern decided it was a great idea to couple the address of a user directly to an order. Because the user is able to ship stuff to addresses within his addressbook, this bug could delete whole orders out of the system by simply deleting the address in your addressbook.

Enough about my intern rant, after working my ass of and going above and beyond the expectations of the customer, the guy from sales who was responsible for it showed what an a**hole he was. Lets call this guy Tom.

Little backstory: our department is a very small part of the company but we are responsible for so much if you think about it. The company thinks we've transitioned to company wide SCRUM, but in reality we are so far from it. I think the story below is a great example of what causes this.

Anyway, we as the web department work within Gitlab. All of our issues and sprints are organized and updated within this place. The rest of the company works with FileMaker, such a pile of shit software but I've managed to work around its buggyness. Anyway, When I was done with the project described above I notified all the stakeholders, this includes Tom. I made a write-up of all the changes I had made to the project, including screenshots and examples, within Gitlab. I asked for feedback and made sure to tag Tom so he was notified of my changes to the project.

After hearing nothing for 2 weeks, guess who came to my desk yesterday? F**king tom asking what had changed during my time on the project. I told him politely to check Gitlab and said on a friendly tone that I had notified him over 2 weeks ago. He, I shit you not, blantly told me that he never looks on there "because of all the notifications" and that I should 'tell him what to do' within FileMaker (which I already had updated referencing Gitlab with the write-up of my changes). That dick move of him made me lose all respect for this guy, what an ignorant piece of shit he is afterall.

The thing that triggers me the most in the last story is that I spent so much free time to perfect the project I was working on (the webshop). I even completed some features which weren't scheduled during the sprint I was working on, and all I was asking for was a little appreciation and feedback. Instead, he showed me how ignorant and what a dick he was.

I absolutely have no reason to keep on working for this company if co-workers keep treating me like this. The code base of the webshop is now in a way better condition, but there are a dozen other projects like this one. And guess what? All writen by the same intern.

/rant :P

I can't figure out shit..
To be honest I created this profile just so I can write down somewhere what I am going through.
So, once upon a time I had graduated from college and went right into a corporate (has only been 2 years since). I was fortunate enough that I got assigned a project that was just starting, and even though I had no clue what was going on, I started doing whatever was assigned.
I initially worked in java and then finished all my tasks earlier than expected, so they switched me to another C++ project that builds on top of it.
Fast forward 2.5 years, I'm now the team lead of the CPP project and all my friends who were in the core team have left the company.
As usual, the reason behind it is shitty management. These mfs won't hire competent people and WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT retain the ones that are. I can feel it in my bones that it is time for me to leave, but fuck me if I understand what I am good at.
I have been able to handle all the tasks that they threw at me, be it java or c++ - just because I love logic and algorithms. I have been dabbling in ML and AI since 4-5 years now, but could never go into it full time.
Now I'm looking at the job postings and Jesus Christ these bitches do not understand what they want. I have to be expert in 34567389 technologies, mastering each of whom (by mastering I mean become proficient in) would need at least 6-8 months if not more, all with 82146867+ years of experience in them.
I don't know if I am supposed to learn on Java (so spring boot and stuff) or I'm supposed to do c++ or I'm gonna go with Python or should I learn web dev or database management or what.
I like all of these things, and would likely enjoy working in each of these, but for fucks sake my cv doesn't show this and most of the bitch ass recruiter portals keep putting my cv in the bin.
Yeah...
If you have read so far, here's a picture of a cat and a dog.

New feature on the Cuntbook. Want to write a post to a page? Poof, and it's gone! BILLION DOLLAR FUCKING FEATURE!!! BILLION DOLLAR FUCKING COMPANY!!!

CERTIFIED MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!

Oh and just to load our pages it takes 20 seconds. Because fuck you, this is Web 2.0. FUCK!!!

My new start training at my current place of work.
Learned how to use Linux, terminal, ssh, git, MySQL, how to create basic web apps with Spring, how to write unit tests and UI tests. All in the space of 4 weeks. Best training I have ever been on.

Today we had our "web technology" University exam. One question was to write a sample html program for our university's website.

I swear I could've built a fully functioning website on MVC and hosted it on some cloud service in far less time than that I spent scribbling 5 pages of writing HTML/CSS/JS so that I can "pass the exam". But nooooo. Our university syllabus takes IE and Java servlets as standard and apparently you get bonus marks if you could implement IE's Active-X on paper.

So much for the future web development

So, today a client said: "If you are a web developer, well you can make me a damn mobile app. It's the same fooking thing, you just write code and make it go on my device. I want a whatsapp-like app for my company."

I really, really wanted to punch him on his godamn face... At the end I spent tbe rest of the meeting explaining that I don't develop mobile apps since I'm a web developer and that it is NOT THE SAME THING. He went angry and said "Well, I think I'll find a better dev somewhere else. You are a useless one"

I'm exhausted.
After one and a half year after my last rant, I'm here again. I left the previous job as web developer after almost 12y. At the time I found 3 new jobs as developer; I chose the one with the largest company, the premises were really good. My 3 interviews were excellent. But what I found next was almost a nightmare.
I was literally "confined" for the first 2 months, no internet connection, no email address, very little communication with colleagues. My near colleague was sharing the code were I would work via a usb key. All this for "safety" purposes, because "here you start this way".
For me it was not so bad, I could take my time to study my work and do it (without Stack Overflow and only by reference guides, when needed - I felt proud in an old way). But the next months were really tough: no help to understand what I missed about the work I was doing (consider that I was working on a large database, previously used by an old ERP, on which other developers - prior me - wrote a lot of code, to make the company continue use all the data after the expiration of the ERP licences - speaking about a year 2000's Java application).
Now I find myself struggling, because the main project on which I was working has been set aside (apparently for some budget decisions); my work team constantly make me do some manteinance on the old code, but the main tasks are done by the old mate, "because deadlines are always pressing and there would not be enough time to explain you anything". I'm not growing.
I'm really becoming reluctant to write code, and whenever I do it, I constantly feel under pressure, and this makes me nervous and inclined to make errors.
Don't take me wrong, I was/am good at my work, but it's like I'm loosing that sparkle I had till a few years ago.
When I'm at home I try to study or write code, just to keep training my mind, but I'm really struggling and I'm worried about losing my brain for doing this job. I constantly forget things and lose focus.
Never felt this way. I am thinking about the chance to switch again and search for another company.

PORTFOLIO INFLATION

when every junior is writing algorithms, the next step up, the only way to keep up is writing apps. When every junior is writing apps, the next leg up is writing an entire SN.

Eventually junior full stack devs are writing microservice streaming cloud backend content delivery optimized social networks wrapped in virtualization with load balancing, proper CI, public accessible analytics apis, written in custom webaseembly compiled scripting backend utilizing both the latest graphql and every single feature of postgres, while also being a web site builder, an in browser app, mobile optimized, designed to transmogrify your asset pipelines linearflow functional-oriented modular rust cratified turbencabulator while cooking your turducken with CPU cycles, diffusing your gpt, and finetunning your llama 69 trillion parameter AI model to jerk you off all at the same time.

And then the title "wizard" becomes a reality as the void of meaning in our lives occupied by the anxiety of trying to reduce the fear of rejection in job hunting, is subsumed by the brief accidental glance into the cthulian madness-inducing yawning abyss of the future which is all the rest of our lives we have to endure existing for until at last sweet sweet death consumes us and we go to annihilation never having to configure one more framework or devops deploy of another virtual environment.

And it dawns on us that we no longer develop or write code at all. No, everything has become a "service" in this new hellscape future. We slowly come to the realization that every job is really just Costco greeter, or eventually going to be reduced to something equivalent, all human creativity, free will and emotions now taken care of by the automation while we manage the human aspects, like sardines pushing against one another not realizing their doom has been sealed along with the airless can they have been packed into, to be suffocated by circumstance and a system designed to reduce everything to a competition of metrics designed by the devil, if the metrics were misery", and "torture", while we ourselves are driven by this ratfuck wheel to turn endlessly toward social cannibalism, like rats eating their babies, but for the amusement of wallstreet corporate welfare whores who couldnt turn a dime if it wasnt already stolen.

And on our gravestones, those immortal words are carved, by the last person who gave up the ghost, the last whose soul wasnt yey shovelled onto the coal fires driving the content machine consuming the world:

Welcome to costco. I love you.

TLDR; Go to bottom of post.

Around this time two years ago was the start of my group project in University. The project was to write an app in android and have a web side to it too. The group was to be overseen by a member of staff. The first meeting was introductions and to look at the spec, during the second we were to decide a group leader (PM) and other positions.
A person I shall call BD and I volunteered for PM. I didn't have experience with leadership but wanted some, and was the only one with confidence in android, the biggest part of the system. I got four of the votes.
BD, with his scouts experience, not being afraid to breathe down people's necks and bash some heads together, and having been PM last year, with his group receiving 69% (he failed the year and was resitting), earned 5. One guy was missing.
When it came to sorting out roles and responsibilities, BD confessed to not being a strong coder but that he'd help here and there. His role was planning our deadlines, doing our Gantt chart for deliverables, and was supposed to write a really detailed spec. He didn't have it at the meeting of the next week, as it was still in the works, and never messaged anyone. Next week he turned up with a Gantt chart of 1A4 page that only included the deadlines and deliverables in the spec, with three colours. One for android team, one for DB guy, and one for web team.
The guy who didn't turn up for voting got a girlfriend, a job at mcdonalds and did barely a thing. One guy in the web team did everything, carrying his friend who wouldn't do work (and also got swept out to see in a rubber boat with one of his bros lol (he was rescued)), and even though I'd done android dev I wasn't as quick a learner as two others in the team. Out of 10 people, 6 did real work.
The web guys stopped coming to meetings as they were taken over by android talk, and as we were quite behind, BG tried yellow carding them. They turned around with the website pretty much done, this one guy doing more than the 4 of us on android had. Yellow card lifted. We'd already complained about BD and his lack of everything (except screen brightness as he sat at the front of the lecture theatres with his wide brimmed hat looking at 9gag and videos (remembering he said he was resitting that year)) but grew a stronger dislike. Found out that he spent most of his time with his gf at our secretary/fellow android dev's house. Come coding week, he disappears entirely, only to attend meetings. He gave us a shell of the android code used for his previous year's project (along with documentation, complete with names and dates of updates, most of them (including the planning ones BD was supposed to do) bearing either one of two names. It was behind where we were at the time and had a lot of differences to our spec, and if we had used it BD may have used that to pull us down with him if things went wrong. He resurfaced at the end with the final documentation of how we'd all done, including reports on how each member had performed, which we were supposed to have reviewed. Our main, most proficient dev he accused of being irritable and brash, and a bad communicator. He was Norwegian, his voice was just a bit gruff, and he was driven and didn't waste time. He bashed the web team for not turning up, and had already been rude and unhelpful to everyone who voted for him in the first place.
In our own reports we all devoted paragraphs to delicately describing his contributions, excluding his suggestion that we use the code he gave us. Before we had our results and our work was completed, he individually kicked us from our group's facebook group and unfriended us.
Our 43% mark at the end, coupled with his -40% penalty from the red card we had him on, felt good, but not as good as a better result would have, especially as the fool that was BD would be inflicted on a group a third time. He changed to some other course after that year finished, so he must have failed his resit of second year.
During third year, a friend of mine who was PM for a group that passed well passed other things with too slim a margin to be happy, so chose to resit the year. He didn't have to do the group project again, and had that time free. But BD had to resit. His group had 69%. A yellow card with a 20% deduction wouldn't do it, so he MUST have had a red card as PM his previous year. Well that didn't come up when he claimed credit for his team's 69% during elections... My housemate's compsci boyfriend 2 years up overheard me talking about him, he was in 1st year with BD. BD failed and resat 1st year too. 4 years and he couldn't make anything stick. I feel bad for him through understanding the pains lack of work and internet distraction bring, and unfortunately I can't wish bad things on him because he brings them on himself. I wish I never see his face again though.

TLDR; Guy in group project lies and is dishonest from start to finish, getting PM pos by 1 vote. Gets what he earns.

Not directly a dev related rant but needed to write it somewhere. (Also, long long rant, be aware).

I am currently working on a project for a client who is going to launch a new product. He wants us to create the brand and choose the logo, colours, communication... BUT before everything we have to deliver the website design.

We told him several times that the design has to be created AFTER the brand is created, however, he insisted. Then, we offered him to develop the UX/UI patterns but the colors and a few more things would be delivered after, so his 3rd party dev could make the job.

After working on the first draft, we sent it to him and he refused it, calling it "poor designed". We insisted that it was a draft for the UI which he ignored.

He asked for another design by taking as example a website from another (unrelated) company. We worked for another 2 days and delivered a more finished design, which he automatically refused again.

He called us to his office in order to provide us exactly what he wanted in every part of the site. He only gave us the home page and the product page, and ordered us to work through the weekend (Which we didn't as he is being quite petty about everything and bullying us).

We delivered this third draft and he made changes, sometimes going back to things that he refused before.

Now his 3rd party dev has things to work, but he called yesterday today telling us that the rest of the site must be before friday, date in which we will be showing him how the brand will be and what we have created. He didn't care about and demanded the designs.

I helped the designer to develop the designs of the website as I can work in Photoshop (I am mostly front web developer but can design UI) but he is now busy working on the brand and I had to make ALL the remaining designs, knowing that the client will reject them as soon as they are sent to him, since he hasn't given us any indication on how and what he wants.

We developers sometimes make futile work which will be used a few days or months or in order to provide demos, however, the time I wasted today made me get behind other deadlines, which makes me feel bad for not being able to accomplish them.

Picking the web development field and becoming more of a business person than a dev.

I want to develop more interesting things (like games, AI, etc) rather than corporate websites and web apps. Now, I can't even write a mobile app ffs.

I can't even work on my hobby project lately.

When the department’s large plotter printer broke down, the users demanded they still be able to execute their large reports. The area manager understood reality, if we are waiting on parts, not a lot we can do, but one developer decided to re-write the report/application as a web/.asp application. Mind you, he wasn’t a web developer, mostly VB experience, so the ‘report’ executed the same queries and filled up simple html tables. Did it work? Sort of. The output had none of the specialized formatting like headers, grouping, summary calculations, etc. Since the users could see the data in the web browser and scroll left/right, they were OK with the temporary fix. When I heard this:
Me: “You do know the application could output the report in HTML exactly the way it prints to the printer. All we would have to do enable that feature in the application.”
Dev: “Yea, but I thought it would be cool to do it as a web app.”
Me: “OK, but we should just update the app.”
Dev: “Um...that is going to be difficult, the boss liked my idea so much, he wanted the report replaced with my asp application. I deleted the application from source control and from the network. Sorry.”
Me: “OMFG!…tell me you make a backup!”
Dev: “Ha!...no…boss said you would fight innovation. Web is the future.”
Me: ”What is going to happen when the printer is fixed!? Users are going to flip”
Dev: “Oh, we didn’t think of that. Oh well, that’s your problem now.”
Me: “WTF? My problem?”
Dev: “Yea, you are moving to the team responsible for those legacy applications, since innovation really isn’t your thing. I just got promoted to senior developer.”

Not sure if you'd call this an insecurity but regardless; frontend.

Much of the stuff I develop is meant to be user/privacy friendly.
Like, at the moment I'm developing an end-to-end encrypted notes web application. The backend is a fucking breeze, the frontend is hell for me. I'm managing mostly but for example, I need to implement a specific thing/feature right now and while the backend would take me about 15-30 minutes, I've been only just thinking about how I'm going to do this frontend wise for the past few fucking hours.

My JavaScript skills are quite alright, html is manageable, css only the basics.

And before people tell me to just learn it; I. Fucking. Hate. Frontend. Development. My motivation for this is below zero.

But, most of the shit I write depends on frontend regardless!

I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.

My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.

Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.

So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.

I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.

Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.

AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.

There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.

But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.

This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.

But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.

I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.

I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.

But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.

I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.

On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.

Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.

Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.

So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.

One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.

I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.

There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.

commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).

it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.

It really irks me when I see 'web developers' and 'front-end developers' write CSS like a bunch of first-timers. Not considering hierarchy, specificity or even following a proper naming convention (who the fuck mixes camel case AND lowercase for class names?!) It's worse when you already have Sass or SCSS and they still write their style rules WITHOUT PROPER NESTING or keep using !important like it was a goddamn semicolon.

This is fucking basic shit for a web or front-end developer, and God help you if I ever conduct your technical interview and decide to ask you on a whim to write an Angular app WITHOUT USING BULLSHIT SYSTEMS LIKE CLARITY, ANGULAR MATERIAL OR BOOTSTRAP for your UI. But if you can explain to me the pros and cons between using CSS grid and flex, I'll be fucking impressed.

I wish these 'UI experts' I keep encountering would learn to build an optimal static site without a fucking framework or build manager before doing advanced shit, for the love of Jeebus.

This is the first time I have inherited a project. ever. I have always seen people on devrat ranting about inherited projects. Never had I experienced it.

Now, the design agency that hired me would outsource web projects to developers before hiring me. I was recommended to them.

Now then. Today I was tasked to fix a couple of issues a previous outsourced developer had abandoned. I had a look at the issues and started fixing them one after the other. Its a wordpress project. Coding for wordpress is super fucking easy by the way.

You create a default page by going to the admin dashboard.

You can create a custom page by creating a page-PageName.php file. and place all the bullshit you have for the custom page IN THAT FILE.

So this developer who i assumed claimed to be a professional. PASTED ALL THE FUCKING HTML IN THE WYSIWYG TEXTBOX. WHO THE FUCK EVEN DOES THAT?

THIS WAS A FUCKING SIMPLE TASK. THIS ASSHOLE CREATED A CUSTOM PAGE CALLED HOMEPAGE AND PASTED THE HTML IN THE TEXTBOX. WHY THE FUCK?! ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY DUDE? AND OH MY GOD DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW TO WRITE HTML WHAT THE FUCK IS ALL THAT &QUOT CRAP. YOU MY FUCKING FRIEND IS THE FUCKING REASON THIS PLATFORM EXISTS. BE PROUD. YOU MADE A DIFFERENCE. YOU CAUSED A PLATFORM TO BE CREATED.

PLEASE DO ME A FAVOR AND NEVER FUCKING TOUCH A COMPUTER EVER AGAIN! YOU ARE NOT WORTH IT.

It was not until 20 that I had access to regular computing. In school I had to take up Finance as my Maths was weak. I couldn't take Sciences including computers and how could I , my childhood wasn't as fortunate as my peers.

When I entered college I got my brothers old gaming pc as we had a couple of work laptops at home. I was always the inquisitive one. I got interested in web development just because of curiosity while I was on my first job and I hated it. I used to write article and freelanced and ran a website for friends where I learned a lot by trial and error. I single handedly learned mySQL, PHP and basic web development.

The main job was a core night from 11pm -8 am . Drained me and my social life drowned. I lost my brother in an accident. Silver Lining: I quit my job.

I understood I was interested in computers like nothing else. I single handedly learned a programming language. After leaving the job I took up classes to learn from root level in a structured manner: Web design and Development.

Now though I am jobless and I am searching for my second job it is for something I love. :)

As a pretty solid Angular dev getting thrown a react project over the fence by his PM I can say:

FUCK REACT!

It is nigh impossible to write well structured, readable, well modularized code with it and not twist your mind in recursion from "lift state up" and "rendercycle downwards only"

Try writing a modular modal as a modern function component with interchangeable children (passeable to the component as it should be) that uses portals and returns the result of the passed children components.

Closest I found to it is:
c o d e s a n d b o x.io/s/7w6mq72l2q
(and its a fucking nightmare logic wise and readability wise)

And also I still wouldn't know right of the bat how to get the result from the passed child components with all the oneway binding CLUSTERFUCK.

And even if you manage to there is no chance to do it async as it should be.
You HAVE to write a lot of "HTML" tags in the DOM that practically should not be anywhere but in async functions.

In Angular this is a breeze and works like a charm.
Its not even much gray matter to it...

I can´t comprehend how companies decide to write real big web apps with it.

They must be a MESS to maintain.

For a small "four components that show a counter and fetch user images" - OK.
But fo a big webapp with a big team etc. etc.?

Asking stuff about it on Stackoverflow I got edited unsolicited as fuck and downvoted as fuck in an instant.
Nobody explained anything or even cared to look at my Stackblitz.
Unsolicited edit, downvote, closevote and of they go - no help provided whatsoever.
Its completely fine if you don't have time to help strangers - but then at least do not stomp on beginners like that.
I immediately regretted asking a toxic community like this something that I genuinely seem to not understand. Wasn't SO about helping people?
I deleted my post there and won't be coming back and doing something productive there anytime soon.

Out of respect for my clients budget I'm now doing it the ugly react way and forget about my software architecture standards but as soon as I can I will advise switching to Angular.

If you made it here: WOW
Thank you for giving me a vent to let off some steam :)

Look, I get that it's really tricky to assess whether someone is or isn't skilled going solely by their profile.

That's alright.

What isn't center of the cosmic rectum alright with the fucking buttsauce infested state of interviews is that you give me the most far fetched and convoluted nonsense to solve and then put me on a fucking timer.

And since there isn't a human being on the other side, I can't even ask for clarification nor walk them through my reasoning. No, eat shit you cunt juice swallowing mother fucker, anal annhilation on your whole family with a black cock stretching from Zimbabwe to Singapore, we don't care about this "reasoning" you speak of. Fuck that shit! We just hang out here, handing out tricks in the back alley and smoking opium with vietnamese prostitutes, up your fucking ass with reason.

Let me tell you something mister, I'm gonna shove a LITERAL TON of putrid gorilla SHIT down your whore mouth then cum all over your face and tits, let's see how you like THAT.

Cherry on top: by the time I began figuring out where my initial approach was wrong, it was too late. Get that? L'esprit d'escalier, bitch. I began to understand the problem AFTER the timer was up. I could solve it now, except it wouldn't do me any fucking good.

The problem? Locate the topmost 2x2 block inside a matrix whose values fall within a particular range. It's easy! But if you don't explain it properly, I have to sit down re-reading the description and think about what the actual fuck is this cancerous liquid queef that just got forcefully injected into my eyes.

But since I can't spend too much time trying to comperfukenhend this two dollar handjob of a task, which I'd rather swap for teabagging a hairy ass herpes testicle sack, there's rushing in to try and make sense of this shit as I type.

So I'm about 10 minutes down or so already, 35 to go. I finally decipher that I should get the XY coords of each element within the specified range, then we'll walk an array of those coordinates and check for adjacency. Easy! Done, and done.

Another 10 minutes down, all checks in place. TEST. Wait, wat? Where's the output? WHERE. THE FUCK. IS. THE OUTPUT?! BITCH GIMME AN ANSWER. I COUT'D THE RETURN AND CAN SEE THE TERMINAL BUT ITS NOT SHOWING ME ANYTHINGGG?! UUUGHHH FUCKKFKFKFKFKFKFKFUFUFUFFKFK (...)

Alright, we have about 20 minutes left to finish this motorsaw colonoscopy, and I can't see what my code is outputting so I'm walking through the code myself trying to figure out if this will work. Oh, look at that I have to MANUALLY click this fucking misaligned text that says "clear" in order for any new output to register. Lovely, 10/10 web design, I will violate your armpits with an octopus soaked in rabid bear piss.

Mmmh, looks like I got this wrong. Figures. I'm building the array of coordinates sequentially, as a one dimentional list, which is very inconvenient for finding adjacent elements. No problem, let's try and fix that aaaaaand... SHIT IM ALMOST OUT OF TIME.

QUICK LYEB, QUICK!! REMEMBER WHAT FISCELLA TAUGHT YOU, IN BETWEEN MOLESTING YOUR SOUL WITH 16-BIT I/O CONSOLE PROBLEMS, LIKE THAT BITCH SNOWFALL THING YOU HAD TO SOLVE FOR A FRIEND USING TURBO C ON A FUCKING TOASTER IN COMPUTER LAB! RUN MOTHERFUCKER RUN!!!

I'm SWEATING. HEAVILY. I'm STEAMING, NON-EROTICALLY. Less than 10 minutes left. I'm trying to correct the code I have, but I start making MORE dumbfuck mistakes because I'm in a hurry!

5 minutes left. As I hit this point of no return, I realize exactly where my initial reasoning went wrong, and how I could fix it, but I can't because I don't have enough time. Sadface.

So I hastily put together skeleton of the correct implementation, and as the clock is nearly up, I write a comment explaining the bits I can't get to write. Page up, top of file, type "the editor was shit LMAO" and comment it out. SUBMIT.

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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."

types of programmers on social media from my school

#1: that bitch with a mac who barely knows enough python to write a keylogger or web scraper and implies they could make full on applications

#2: that other bitch who has windows and learned a little bit of html and flexes screenshots of their website

#3: the one who runs a club and promotes it on social media, they know java and run windows

#4: the knowledgeable, friendly linux user who's got a bomb ass personal website or plain as to their liking, and retweets cool news on twitter

#4 is the best.

tldr:
first year in college we programmed 24 hrs straight to fix somebody's mess before the deadline. Decided not to screw him over, instead he claimed to have done everything and we failed the assignment.

Long version:
var group= new[]{"Mike", "Gavin", "Gus", "I", "Ben" };
var client = "Jack"';

First year of college we had an assignment to make a web program for somebody.
Ben wanted to join our group and he already knew a client so we let him join.

After joining Ben wanted to be project lead, but we already decided Mike based on his experience.
Ben claimed to be much better in every way than Mike at and kept coming with stuff the following weeks why we should make him project lead. He kept pointing out when Mike did something wrong and he even came with an audio file where he clearly made jack say that he wanted Ben to be project lead .
After that we were all a bit pissed and told him that he should get it in his head that he was not going to be project lead and just start working on his part of the assignment.

We also found out that Ben was a documentation addict, what we could write in a small paragraph, he wrote a whole page about it. No joke, I rewrote a page of his in 5-6 rows with the same information in it.
No problem you thing, wrong! Because of this he kept bothering us arguing and claiming that our documentation was wrong because it was to short.

In the week of the deadline we asked Ben if he was also done, and told us that he was done for a while now.

The day before the deadline we came to school thinking we only had to do some merging and finishing up documentation.
Then we found out that Ben has almost nothing, and what he had the IDE was screaming that it was incorrect, spaces in Id's and css class names for instance. A really good programmer, my ass!
We were so pissed off at this point, but we had 24 hrs and needed to come up with a plan to fix it.

We decided that Mike and I were going to fix Ben his shit in the coming 24 hrs and Ben was going to make our last bit of documentation because we would not have the time for that, Especially if we had to argue with him like we had to do for each bit of documentation. Gus did not have time and Gavin could not program on his own yet, he wanted to help, but helping him help us would cost more time than we had.

We all went home after that and Mike and I started to program 24 hours straight while in a Skype call, making what Ben had 2 months for. Shortly before the deadline Mike looked at our finishing up documentation received from Ben and told me it was "Okay" and zipped everything up and uploaded it to school with a few minutes to spare.

After that we thought everything was good, we made Ben's part work and delivered it in time. We also decided not to throw Ben under the bus, because this would hurt all our grades because we did not work good as a group since we should have noticed it earlier.

A few weeks go by till the assessment.
The assessment start with asking if we want individual grades or as a group when you all think you did equal amount. We choose as a group, because if we chose individual not only Ben but also Gavin would get a lower grade and we did not think that was fair because he tried so hard.

We demo the product and the teachers are positive. When the teachers start about the documentation, the first thing they tell is that they found something interesting in the documentation, and they read it to us:

"I, Ben, have made all the documentation because my group did not want to."

That was so far from the truth, we all did make our documentation about the parts we made. Yes he did do overall a little bit more because every single bit of documentation we had to argue with him, so every time he volunteers to make it, we would all agree. And he made Mike's and i's last bit of documentation.

Telling the teachers on that point would not have mattered, it would only have hurt is in another way, so we did not and all failed the assignment. And we all felt like to strangle him.
This is now a few years back, but i still want too.

Half a year ago, I got fired in my job. The reason was the same always bullshit; we have very little clients, economy nowadays is terribly bad, our priorities are different now than when we hired you, etc.
The last week I spent there, I heard something about my poor performance and programming skills, and that pissed me off a lot. For six months I worked on a laravel web app for managing customers, tasks and invoices, a fucking CRM, but made specifically for that company just because they didn't know sugar, odoo, prime or whatever.
Parallel to the crappy CRM, I was told to patch some PrestaShop, WordPress and plain sites, and it was hard to communicate with customers, management ignored every email I sent, and all I was told to do was "do as they say".
The result was shit, obviously, and my work showed much less skill, knowledge and expertise than I really have.
After that, I spent a few months unemployed, studying and working as a waiter just to survive, because my contract didn't comply with unemployment office requirements for a pay.
Then I got this job, on an analytics company where guess what, I'm told to write a fucking laravel web app for managing customers, invoices and tasks. In the meantime, I design websites, and communication with customers is shit, and management ignores every single mail I send.
My salary is eight hundred putos euros again, and will contract is wet shit.
I know, maybe I am "not that good" to earn a 3000€+ salary and have a good team support.
But I'm not */that/* bad.

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?"

Angular is still a pile of steaming donkey shit in 2023 and whoever thinks the opposite is either a damn js hipster (you know, those types that put js in everything they do and that run like a fly on a lot of turds form one js framework to the next saying "hey you tried this cool framework, this will solve everything" everytime), or you don't understand anything about software developement.

I am a 14 year developer so don't even try to tell me you don't understand this so you complain.
I build every fucking thing imaginable. from firmware interfaces for high level languaces from C++, to RFID low level reading code, to full blown business level web apps (yes, unluckily even with js, and yes, even with Angular up to Angular15, Vue, React etc etc), barcode scanning and windows ce embedded systems, every flavour of sql and documental db, vectorial db code, tech assistance and help desk on every OS, every kind of .NET/C# flavour (Xamarin, CE, WPF, Net framework, net core, .NET 5-8 etc etc) and many more

Everytime, since I've put my hands on angularJs, up from angular 2, angular 8, and now angular 15 (the only 3 version I've touched) I'm always baffled on how bad and stupid that dumpster fire shit excuse of a framework is.

They added observables everywhere to look cool and it's not necessary.
They care about making it look "hey we use observables, we are coo, up to date and reactive!!11!!1!" and they can't even fix their shit with the change detection mechanism, a notorious shitty patchwork of bugs since earlier angular version.

They literally built a whole ecosystem of shitty hacks around it to make it work and it's 100x times complex than anything else comparable around. except maybe for vanilla js (fucking js).

I don't event want todig in in the shit pool that is their whole ecosystem of tooling (webpack, npm, ng-something, angular.json, package.json), they are just too ridiculous to even be mentioned.

Countless time I dwelled the humongous mazes of those unstable, unrealiable shitty files/tools that give more troubles than those that solve.

I am here again, building the nth business critical web portal in angular 16 (latest sack of purtrid shit they put out) and like Pink Floyd says "What we found, same old fears".
Nothing changed, it's the same unintelligible product of the mind of a total dumbass.

Fuck off js, I will not find peace until Brendan Eich dies of some agonizing illness or by my hands

I don't write many rants but this, I've been keeping it inside my chest for too long.

I fucking hate js and I want to open the head of js creator like the doom marine on berserk

FUCK! The fucking previous dev on this project who set up the fucking web service that he knew would be shared among multiple platforms set it up to use an audio format that's only supported on one platform. Now I'm faced with either doing some fucking JS black magic to decode the fucking base64 audio, convert it to another audio format, and then possibly re-encode it or attempting to re-write the fucking web service and already in production app! Fucking hell!

For the Project Management exam, my university requires us to install a program on our PERSONAL laptops that is meant to take over the control over the entire system during the exam, monitor any “suspicious activities”. The software is closed-source (it’s called Schoolyear Exams), does god-knows-what in the background, takes the control over the entire system and can be summoned through any Chromium web browser.

Don’t get me wrong, I get that you want to make sure nobody is cheating - but at this point, I’d rather write it with pen and paper. Or just provide us with computers for the time of exam.

I decided to whip out my old laptop instead, installed a Windows 10 on a separate SSD, and installed that software on it.

Also it’s very amusing that this software is also mandatory for the Linux exam… But the program can’t run on Linux (it’s Windows and Mac only and doesn’t even support M1 chips).

EDIT: typos

Fucking jesus christ, for some reason in chromium-based browsers if you have a table that fills up to the full height of the parent using flexbox rules, if you go to print it, it will fucking

i forgor 💀

and give it a height of minimum content height. The solution is to ALSO give it height: 100%;

Google completely unhelpful (I guess it's too specific and most people don't write web services specifically made for printing out?) but luckily it only took me like 3 guesses to figure out on my own.

But I could have easily seen this completely pissing me off to the point of quitting. FireFox doesn't have this issue.

RELATED TANGENT RANT:

Why the fuck is the default to use headers, footers, margin, and no background images (colors) ?!?!?!? The default printing for browsers COMPLETELY FUCKS UP THE PRINT

God FUCKING damnit.

I was reminded of people's posts about preferred text editors in another post, so I thought I'd do the same, but also add some super old technology that I used along the way.

The first text editor I consistently used was pico. I used it to write my first webpage at school.edu/~username. It was a natural choice, because the it was the default text editor in pine, which is what we would all use for our email after opening a serial connection to the college's Digital Unix server. Or if we were the lucky ones who had a computer in a wired dorm, telnet. My dorm was not wired until my sophomore year.

I got my first job in tech in 2001, working as a night shift tier-one support technician. By this time, most people were using web based email, or POP3, but I wanted to keep using pine (or elm, or mutt) because I was totally in love with the command line by this time, and had been playing with Linux for two or three years by now. I arranged a handshake deal with a guy in my home town who had a couple well-connected NetBSD servers, to let me have an account on one for email and web hosting (a relatively new idea at the time).

I recall telnetting into my shared hosting account from the HP-UX workstations we had in the control room. I would look at webpages on HTML conventions and standards, and I kept seeing references to this thing called vi. I looked into it more deeply, and found that it was a text editor, and was the reason I always had to CTRL-Z out of elm. I was already finding pico to be lacking, so I found a modern implementation of vi called vim that was already installed on the aforementioned NetBSD server, and read through vimtutor on it. I was hooked instantly. The modality massively appealed to me, and I found editing files to be an absolute delight, compared to pico, and its nascent open source offspring/successor, nano.

My position on that hasn't changed in the years that have passed since then.

What's your text editor origin story?

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.

!devButAlsoKindaIsDev

Alright, time to do some explanation.

TL;DR: JavaScript is a fucking nightmare. May god help every web developer out there. Essentially, I was gone because of JavaScript.

Q: where tf are you bruh
A: in your mo-uhhhhh alright, so I was chosen to be the main developer for an interactive promotional video for my school (every year the school holds something called an open day, where kids from 8th grade can come to the school and have a tour in the school first hand. Because of the coronavirus (just gonna call it “the rona” from here) this is now impossible so we are losing the interest and the first impressions so the school decided to make an interactive virtual one). They asked me if I want to do it and I said yes.

Boy, was that ever a mistake... (hint: it was a huge mistake)

So the guy who talked to me and asked if I wanted to do this was my grade’s manager, and he gave me the phone number of my PM. So we talked and stuff, and then this happened: (bruh = PM)

bruh: I’ll send you the API and documentation for the thing that we are working with! They have lots of examples and stuff and they’re Israeli too!

Me: Okay! What language are we talking about here?

bruh: JavaScript.

Me: (questioning life choices) Okay!

I didn’t write any JavaScript for the last 3 years or so. It had to be done because I promised and I can’t let down people who count at me and ask me to show where I shine.

So, what was the objective for me? Build a Firebase client that sends the user’s score and choices to Firestore after he chooses something in the interactive video (for example, go to chemistry or go to physics) while learning JavaScmeme (ECMEMEScript) as I go.

Deadline? A week and a half.

After working almost 12 hours a fucking day, I made it work. Sorta. In order to reconcile with small exceptions and edge cases in the interactive video, I had to hard-code some IDs in the code. I had no choice, since I couldn’t allow myself to spend more and more time to make my code more dynamic than it was because I simply didn’t have time. The code absolutely STINKS but it works.

Today is the day where we (aim) to finish all of the cosmetic things that we need to fix. All of them are non-essential for everything to work, but we want to make this thing presentable because we want to put this on the school’s website.

CONCLUSION:

JavaScript is literal shit. Dynamic weakly-typed languages are cursed AF and need to die in a fire.

Lots of questions going on about devRant. Just want to make devRant better.

1. Please tell the update intervals of upvotes and downvotes. Is there a delay? Doesnt really matter but i see many times i got a upvote notif but my score didnt increased...

2. Duplicate image algo is so poor. I know it is only in beta, but i see so many reposts which has the same pic but only with the resolution different or the image with the devrant watermark.

3. Minor, tags should be also saved when exitting the post rant activity.

4. Feature request : go to top, bottom in rant

5. Please make web app accessible in mobile. I think you check the user agent for the web app, but can you make it available to mobile users who cant download the app?

6. When accessing the web app in mobile, i type devrant.io/feed
Then, by the wonderful intent you made, it opens the app automatically. I was writing a rant, but it was all deleted.

7. Any new podcasts and cartoons planned?

8. Still bug not fixed.
Write a comment in a long rant.
Delete the comment you just wrote.
You cant reply to the last person comment.

Thanks.

LinkedIn recommends putting jQuery and Git as 'skills' on my profile.

I thought if you write code for the web, these two skills are a given?

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

Got my first legit side-gig as a developer (like had to write an SOW and everything): my kids' pediatrician is amazing, but shes switching to a concierge practice, meaning she wont take any insurance, and shes going from about 1500 patients down to about 200. I already pay my mortgage-worth in insurance on a monthly basis, so we were prepared to say adios to her. At my daughter's last appointment, she pulled me aside and said "what can we do to keep you guys as patients?" and i somewhat jokingly suggested "I dunno, need any websites written?"

As a matter of fact, she did: she just fired her practice's web developer, who gave her a shitty wordpress site and fought like hell to avoid any further maintenance or updates for her. She hates the site's current layout (no surprise there) so she is basically giving me full control over a rewrite.

No user logins, no worries about compliance with PII or any of that. Literally just turning a brochure wordpress site into an angular app, hosting it on her own server and eventually building an admin page where she can change the banner text and upload new images.

And my kids will get free, top-notch health care.

Having to write Swift and Kotlin for a while at work and now switching back to working on web technologies (for a different job), I would say JavaScript is ugly.

>Wanted to become a hacker because I thought it was cool and fun
>Googled how to become a hacker
>Read a lot of articles
>Talked about it with nerdy friends who ended up helping me with a few resources
>Found Hack Forums
>Stayed on Hack Forums for a while and learnt a lot about malware and hacking and realized I needed to learn how to code to build my own hacking programs
>Got a book from a friend (It was a dev book based on basic)
>Got fascinated with programming and quickly moved on to C++
>Got frustrated with C++ and quit programming for months
>Got introduced to VB.Net and I finally could write codes and development a lot of applications, mainly malware creators and crypters as they were called on HE
>Quit HF and hacking and got into coding seriously and learnt web dev , then java and developing android apps and I have been happy since.

So, I work in a game development studio, right?
We're trying to launch the title on as many platforms as reasonable, because as a social VR app we're kinda rowing upstream.
So far, Steam and Oculus have been fairly reasonable, if oddly broken and inconsistent.
Enter store 3.
Basically no in-game transaction support (our asking prompted them to *start* developing it. No, it's not very complete). No patch-update system (You want an update? Gotta download the whole fsckin' thing!). No beta-testing functionality for most of their stuff ("Just write the code like the example, it will work, trust us!"). No tools besides the buggy SDK (Wanna upload that new build? Say hello to this page in your web browser!).
So, in other words: Fun.

We've been trying to get actively launched for two months now. Keep in mind that the build has been up on Steam and Oculus for over a year and half a year (respectively), so the actual binary functionality is, presumably fine.

The best feedback we get back tends to be "Well, when we click the Launch button it crashes, so fail."
Meanwhile we're going back and forth, dealing with other-side-of-the-world timezone lag, trying to figure out what is so different from their machines as ours. Eventually we get them to start sending logs (and no, Windows Event logs are not sufficient for GAMES, where did you even get that idea????) except the logs indicate that the program is getting killed so terribly that the engine's built-in crash handler can't even kick in to generate memory dumps or even know it died.

All this boils down to today, where I get a screenshot of their latest attempt.

I just can't even right now.

OK so... project I've been working on! It's a virtual processor that runs in the browser coded in JavaScript. OK so I know, I know, you must be thinking, "this is crazy!" "Why would she do this?!?!" and I understand that.

The idea of Tangible is is to see if I can get any tangible performance over JavaScript. I've posted a poorly drawn diagram below showing how tangible works.

The goal for tangible is to not use html, javascript, or CSS. Instead, you would use, say for instance, c++ and write your web page in that, then you compile it using my clang plugins and out pops your bytecode for Tangible. No more CSS, no more html, and no more javascript. Instead everything from a textbox to a video on your web page is an object, each object can be placed into a container, each container follows specific flag rules like: centerHorizontal or centerVertical.

Added to all of this you get the optimization of the llvm optimizer.

can we all take a moment to appreciate the developers of flutter. they're smart, and they took the time to make flutter the *right* way.

they used an easy to learn language that's ideal for mobile development, which means hot reload/restart is possible (because dart supports aot and jit compilation)

the way it's designed is beautiful. everything is a widget, and it's easy to customize them via named parameters.

the community is great. it's not large, but it's supportive, with two active subreddits. yesterday i asked a question on r/flutterdev, and a member of the flutter team at google answered the question with a comprehensive answer.

flutter is very consistent across platforms. if it works on android or ios, you can bet it'll work on the other just as well, with the exception of platform-specific code.

it is VERY performant. unless you write a major bottleneck, 60fps is easy to achieve.

animations are EASY. define a tween and animation controller and then write a callback function. not to mention it's straightforward, and complex/combined animations are easy, too.

you can get almost direct access to the canvas, should you need it, with custompainter.

oh my god, this is revolutionary in the programming world. development is quicker than it is with native android alone, and for people who have no access to a mac, like me, i can develop for ios and compile via code magic. if you haven't checked it out and you develop for mobile, check it out.

oh yeah, did i mention it's not just mobile. hummingbird - flutter compiled to web - is already in experimental public betas, and will likely be released by the end of the year. there's also experimental desktop support, which is amazing, and much better than electron. not to mention flutter is the future, as it will be the primary way to make apps on fuchsia os.

I got an extremely hard task in the morning, I asked for some clarification and I got them at 13.23.
Boss ask for updates at 13.45 (during lunch pause).
I work on it 2 hours like never before, he calls me and I said I can manage to finish in half an hour + testing.

I work more 10-15 minutes, time is around 16.15.

2 other enormous bugs shows up on the same project, boss ask me to take care of them, and I manage in only 2h to look up something like 40 web pages and correct each of them, write reports and inform the affected people. After it I work more 15 minutes to report and finish small tasks. Ended up working almost 1h more on a non paid extra time working contract.

In the morning, while my boss was aware I spent that time

In the morning boss ask "everything went fine with the big project, right?"

Because
The
Client
Is
Angry.

I already got a burnout from this job, I really can't go on like this.

In today's episode of kidding on SystemD, we have a surprise guest star appearance - Apache Foundation HTTPD server, or as we in the Debian ecosystem call it, the Apache webserver!

So, imagine a situation like this - Its friday afternoon, you have just migrated a bunch of web domains under a new, up to date, system. Everything works just fine, until... You try to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.

Such a mundane task, done more than a thousand times already... Yet... No matter what you do, nothing works. Apache just returns a HTTP status code 403 - Forbidden.

Of course, what many folk would think of first when it came to a 403 error is - Ooooh, a permission issue somewhere in the directory structure!

So you check it... And re-check it to make sure... And even switch over to the user the webserver runs under, yet... You can access the challenge just fine, what the hell!

So you go deeper... And enable the most verbose level of logging apache is capable of - Trace8. That tells you... Not a whole lot more... Apparently, the webserver was unable to find file specified? But... Its right there, you can see it!

So you go another step deeper and start tracing the process' system calls to see exactly where it calls stat/lstat on the file, and you see that it... Calls lstat and... It... Returns -1? What the hell#2!

So, you compile a custom binary that calls lstat on the first argument given and prints out everything it returns... And... It works fine!

Until now, I chose to omit one important detail that might have given away the issue to the more knowledgeable right away. Our webservers have the URL /.well-known/acme-challenge/, used for ACME challenges, aliased somewhere else on the filesystem - To /tmp/challenges.

See the issue already?

Some *bleep* over at the Debian Package Maintainer group decided that Apache could save very sensitive data into /tmp, so, it would be for the best if they changed something that worked for decades, and enabled a SystemD service unit option "PrivateTmp" for the webserver, by default.

What it does is that, anytime a process started with this option enabled writes to /tmp/*, the call gets hijacked or something, and actually makes the write to a private /tmp/something/tmp/ directory, where something... Appeared as a completely random name, with the "apache2.service" glued at the end.

That was also the only reason why I managed fix this issue - On the umpteenth time of checking the directory structure, I noticed a "systemd-private-foobarbas-apache2.service-cookie42" directory there... That contained nothing but a "tmp" directory with 777 as its permission, owned by the process' user and group.

Overriding that unit file option finally fixed the issue completely.

I have just one question - Why? Why change something that worked for decades? I understand that, in case you save something into /tmp, it may be read by 3rd parties or programs, but I am of the opinion that, if you did that, its only and only your fault if you wrote sensitive data into the temporary directory.

And as far as I am aware, by default, Apache does not actually write anything even remotely sensitive into /tmp, so...

Why. WHY!
I wasted 4 hours of my life debugging this! Only to find out its just another SystemD-enabled "feature" now!

And as much as I love kidding on SystemD, this time, I see it more as a fault of the package maintainers, because... I found no default apache2/httpd service file in the apache repo mirror... So...

I don't know what to do with my life anymore, as a self taught web developer, I started like anybody doing HTML, CSS and js, and then I met PHP and WordPress.
why the fuck PHP is ugly ? and why WordPress is uglier ? I tried to learn how to build a simple plugin in WordPress but the hooks system make me want to kill my self, how the fuck PHP powers 80% of the web ? every time I write PHP I wish I was never born, the problem is that I can't change job because I am old and I live in a fucking country who is technologically primitive, they fucking know only PHP and JAVA, no Node, No Ruby, No Python, only fucking PHP.
I learned React, I learned Node but you know what I did this last year ? I raped a themeforest theme for about dozen plus websites, A SINGLE THEME FOR MORE THAN DOZEN CLIENTS, my boss does not care, only me who is not sleeping at night because a tried to customize a Prestashop theme and it gave me cramps in the stomach, I feel depressed and useless, I want to quite my job but I can't, I have mouths to feed, WHY THE FUCK DID I FELL IN LOVE WITH PROGRAMMING, I was happy fixing computers, what can I do if the only project that I have are WordPress and Prestashop?
how did you do to stay sane when working with wordpress and prestashop ? are you not human ?I can't take it anymore.
I need a new road map, fuck it I will focus only on JS and Node and fuck PHP.

In my previous company we developed a CRM web app for the company to use internally and it was in my humble opinion really easy to make sense of, but for some freaking we kept getting calls whenever someone got an error, and our default response was always to send us an email, then we will get back to you, as it was mostly stupid things they called about, for example, a customer might have to be status terminated, before you can click button A, button A would then be disabled and employees would call asking why. Apparently, people got annoyed by our response and went to the management, to get some guidelines as to when they could call the "development apartment" for help, so the management sends out some guidelines as to when they could call, write or whatever... The following was done without consulting us in any way ANY WAY AT ALL!... Because we all know management knows fucking best, and why bother asking the people that sit with it every day, and the way it was done was by saying:

If the background color on your error is red, it means the error is fatal and you can call the developers immediately, if its orange send an email and they will answer within 48 hours LIKE WTF... Seriously???. That was basically it, and honestly we had just been using colors, without much thought to it ofc red, was an error etc. But they we're not "OMG EVERYTHING IS BREAKING" alert, so we decided to use a couple of hours refactoring the color of the flash errors, and after that, we did not have many red alerts(None, yes none what so ever) We changed all the red ones to orange, and introduced some new colors. That worked for some time around 6 months or so, but then people obviously started calling again like, why even bother... So we created a simple service desk, blocked all incoming calls to our phones that were from regular employees, heard a lot of complaints about this from the employees, management was mad, we had so many meetings with those top paid management fuckers that know everything (way better than you and me), about how to handle this. As it took way too much of our time, that people couldn't bother trying simple things, or make some sense as to why a button is disabled etc. We ended up "winning", was allowed to block calls for some time, till the employees had learned to use a freaking simple service desk, it's not fucking rocket science Okay, stop being a pain in the ass... And it actually fucking worked! Most relaxing time after people got a hang of using the service desk instead of calling life was good after that... <3

The company that I work for has recently recruited a team for Web Development, so they don't have to pay a monthly fee to the previous team who designed their website.

They have over 3000+ products in the old website, and no logical way to import them to the new website. The old team was asking for 300$ to give them an API which would return the product details in an XML format.

Obviously, paying that amount of money wasn't logical for a dying website, so the manager decided to hire someone to manually copy the content from the old admin panel to the new one, that is until I stopped him.

My solution? Write a simple web scraper to login to the old panel and collect data. Boom! 300$ saved from going to waste.

Now, the old team found about this and as much as my manager was happy, they were quite angry. So they implanted a Google reCaptcha to prevent my bot from scraping the old panel.

I spent about 20 minutes, and found out once you're logged in to the old panel, the session is saved in a cookie and you are no longer greeted by a Captcha.

So I re-written a small portion of my bot, and Boom! Instant karma from manager. We finished publishing the new site, and notified the old team, only to see the precious look on their face. Poor guy, he thought I was a wizard or something 😂😂

That's what you get for overcharging people!

TL;DR: Company's old website team wanted to overcharge us writing an API to fetch 3000+ records.
Written a basic web scraper to do the same job in less than an hour.

JSF: Yeah, we make it so can focus on what's important and you never have to write HTML or CSS like those lowly web developers.

Also JSF: You can't nest <h:form> components because nested forms are invalid HTML. Oh, that breaks the composite component you were trying to use? Ha, fuck off.

Primefaces: You know how you can just provide an ID and OverlayPanel will open on its own? Well, for a Dialog, the API is completely different. Here's a glob of JavaScript in an onclick event.

I swear this entire thing was regurgitated by a murder of seagulls.

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?

On the beginning of a project I'm not yet ( 😒 ) taking part of I questioned the use of firebase because I understood the client was gonna ask for the web app to be hosted on their servers lately, but people told me not to worry.

Today... Only 2 fucking months later they are asking for the specifications/technologies used so they can prepare their server to host it and I was laughing my ass out internally while saying to my boss:

Well, looks like you are gonna need to rewrite huge parts and probably write a back end from scratch if you are gonna use postgresql.

Lol, why do people never listen to me? This is becoming ridiculous....

Hello fellow developers!

I know this is devRant, but I don't know of a better community with such diversity of developers like you guys and I need your input.

I decided to go on a language journey. I come from a background of php/javascript and feel the need to expand my horizons.

I'm going to write the same app in each language to get the feel of it and become familiar with the syntax and language concepts.

Since I'm a web developer I'll focus mainly on languages used on the web like: Java, Python, Ruby, etc.. But I want to cover others as well, like Objective-C/Swift, C++/C#.

I'm having trouble figuring out what kind of an app would cover most of the ground. I know the basic guideline for this is a TODO app for web frameworks, but I
don't feel like writing a TODO in Swift or C# really cover what the languages are intended for.

I don't know enough about the environments yet to come up with a good idea.

I want something, that can be language independent but would utilize the power of each language in one part or another and is still simple enough not to require weeks of development.

Does anyone have a brilliant idea what that could be?

I think I need some "programming detox", a couple weeks away from any kind of software development. It's just not fun anymore, I have lost my drive, I'm lazy to learn new stuff, I never finish my projects, I don't even know if I enjoy web development anymore.

Actually, I'm kind of lost on what to do with my life.

I don't want to become a full time web developer because it's boring, it's always the same shit: write frontend with some sort of framework, design database, write backend, rinse and repeat. There's nothing new, all projects seem to have the same requirements.

I don't want to get into machine learning and whatnot because it's a lot of math and theory, I like math but idk if I would like doing that all day. Same goes for basically anything related to research.

Low level stuff: on paper I like it, it's interesting, but I'm too lazy to learn and whenever I come up with a robotics project I end up making a shopping list and forgetting about it because either 1) stuff is too expensive or 2) I can't make the parts I want without spending a lot of money on tools. Also from what I can see in school, VHDL is boring af.

I just don't know what I like anymore, nothing gets me excited, not even video games. I used to like csgo but I just suck at it and I only play it because there's nothing else to play and deep down I still have a little bit of hope of becoming a decent player, even though I know I never will.

I just don't know what I want out of life. Sometimes I just like having tons of school assignments (especially calculus ones) just to keep me busy.

It seems like I'm going on an assignment to a company working with Angular. Reading through the documentation I just want to ask all Java developers to get their greasy hands out of JavaScript. It feels like GWT all over again with Google reinventing core JS technologies just so that it looks like Java. Dependency injections? Observable wrappers? RxJS in general? WHAT IS THE POINT? Why can't I do this in a way adhering to web standards? Why can't I simply use fetch() or axios or whatever? Why can't you support reactivity without forcing me to write more boilerplate than I had on my central heating boiler? I just want to code and not be forced to discover what Google developers think web should be like.
Please, let me out of this hell.
Fortunately, it's not gonna be a long assignment.

Aren't you, software engineer, ashamed of being employed by Apple? How can you work for a company that lives and shit on the heads of millions of fellow developers like a giant tech leech?
Assuming you can find a sounding excuse for yourself, pretending its market's fault and not your shitty greed that lets you work for a company with incredibly malicious product, sales, marketing and support policies, how can you not feel your coders-pride being melted under BILLIONS of complains for whatever shitty product you have delivered for them?
Be it a web service that runs on 1980 servers with still the same stack (cough cough itunesconnect, membercenter, bug tracker, etc etc etc etc) incompatible with vast majority of modern browsers around (google at least sticks a "beta" close to it for a few years, it could work for a few decades for you);
be it your historical incapacity to build web UI;
be it the complete lack of any resemblance of valid documentation and lets not even mention manuals (oh you say that the "status" variable is "the status of the object"? no shit sherlock, thank you and no, a wwdc video is not a manual, i don't wanna hear 3 hours of bullshit to know that stupid workaround to a stupid uikit api you designed) for any API you have developed;
be it the predatory tactics on smaller companies (yeah its capitalism baby, whatever) and bending 90 degrees with giants like Amazon;
be it the closeness (christ, even your bugtracker is closed and we had to come up with openradar to share problems that you would anyway ignore for decades);
be it a desktop ui api that is so old and unmaintained and so shitty, but so shitty, that you made that cancer of electron a de facto standard for mainstream software on macos;
be it a IDE that i am disgusted to even name, xcrap, that has literally millions of complains for the same millions of issues you dont even care to answer to or even less try to justify;
be it that you dont disclose your long term plans and then pretend us to production-test and workaround-fix your shitty non-production ready useless new OS features;
be it that a nervous breakdown on a stupid little guy on the other side of the planet that happens to have paid to you dozens of thousands of euros (in mandatory licences and hardware) to actually let you take an indecent cut out of his revenues cos there is no other choice in a monopoly regime, matter zero to you;
Assuming all of these and much more:
How can you sleep at night with all the screams of the devs you are exploiting whispering in you mind? Are all the money your earn worth?

** As someone already told you elsewhere, HAVE SOME FUCKING PRIDE, shitty people AND WRITE THE FUCKING DOCS AND FIX THE FUCKING BUGS you lazy motherfuckers, your are paid more than 99.99% of people on earth, move your fucking greasy little fingers on that fucking keyboard. **

PT2: why the fuck did you remove the ESC key from your shitty keyboards you fuckshits? is it cos autocomplete is slower than me searching the correct name of a function on stackoverflow and hence ESC key is useless? at least your hardware colleagues had the decency of admitting their error and rolling back some of the uncountable "questionable "hardware design choices (cough cough ...magic mouse... cough golden charging cables not compatible with your own devices.. cough )?

Guys should I quit my CURRENT job ? I feel like I should find another job because of the following reasons

a. I suck. I know I can't complete the task given. The task given is to build a trading bot. I can't complete it because of my incompetent trading knowledge and i find it difficult to understand trading logic and I tried my level best even paying someone to private tutor me but the tuition fees are too high and I still don't understand. Btw I am from a web development background

b. It has been 3 months in this company. I feel like I am not doing anything. I feel like a loser who has been eating free salary without contributing anything. Sure I have managed to write few strategies on pinescript.

c. I dread everyday to even do anything. I use to feel accomplished in my previous job. Nowadays I cant hope to feel like a complete idiot.

d. I don't have the motivation or fire that I use to have when I was a web developer. I just hate looking at code nowadays.

e. Algo Trading is too difficult for me. I don't feel like I am progressing anywhere.

f. Nobody in my company knows how to build a bot or have any knowledge on this.

g. Python dataframes , plots, charts bores me to death and I am really no interested to even look at it.

I am just so frustrated as I am typing this and I am becoming tired and exhausted to go to work everyday because everyday I am so clueless on what to do. You need at least some idea where to go to but I don't. Everyday I feel like a complete clueless moron.

Old story, happened some way back. I worked part-time for a small web development company that did between other things something called SharePoint development, basically .net webforms with shit glitter on top of it.

The most weird part of it, was the fact that we were working on vms that hosted the app, it was our dev, test and staging environment, as well as were we showed the client the polished turd.

Did I say that it was on a vm? Well it was on a remote vm, that each of use had access to it, through our domain accounts, and they couldn't configure the windows server to accept more than two or three users at once to be connected.

That was our test enviroment and dev enviroment, sooo showing the app to the client meant for the rest of us to not write any code because it might crash or get stuck.

The app was accessible and discoverable by url and through google search from outside, I dont think that should have been allowed.

The most disastrous part was that we had NO source versioning whatsoever, just plain old copy and paste in different folders.
Deploying to client meant remoting to the clients host or whatever it was, and manually copying the source files

If someone wanted to debug the application you had to shout, and you also could hear it, in the office: "I'm debugging!" or "I'm deploying!". Because we were on the same machine, there was only one process with the server and it meant that if you debug or deployed it would block it for the others.

Should I talk about code quality? Maybe not.

I had a guy ask me to write a simple script for a simple card memory game. He wanted it scripted in JavaScript. Already I hate my life but I say alright and spit it out to him quick. Now he wants it on the web, Android, and iOS...in JavaScript 😓😅😂

I like how software is smart so I have to do things twice instead of once.

Automatically putting quotes works only if you put quotes and then paste inside it, the problem is I usually paste then put first quote and then need to remove second quote and put it on back and remove second quote from back.

Video start from where you left automatically fires and shows closing credits because you obviously want to see them.

Evaluate variable removes old evaluation because why you want old one when you have new.

Collapsing imports or functions in ide so you need to expand them all the time because who needs to look at functions when we have ai

AI models suggesting and adding meaningless annotations and code suggestions to distract me.

Randomly running some console command because I entered keyboard shortcut I don’t know even exists.

Literally every web browser address bar becomes advertising network instead of showing me history results.

Shadowing browsing history when you click back and forward button.

Search results are now buy results.

Suggesting me useless crap to watch because I watched one video in that topic.

Showing me 10 minutes videos as a solution to my problem where I want to find exact line of text to copy paste it. If I’m lucky I need to write text from video into my computer.

Stack overflow infinite loop of answered in #some-different-question

I think it’s about time for me to slowly retire from programming and software as a whole or switch to notepad because I don’t want to use this crap anymore.

Looks like software is now meant for entertainment and distraction instead of doing actual work where you need precise data and information.

Luckily if everything goes good I can retire soon and throw everything away for a while.

One day, one of my clients asked me to re-design their website that is running on Wix. I thought It was not a big deal... Just a couple fucking drag-drops & boom.

But while designing, I realized what a fucking piece of shit Wix developers made over time. I've never used to suck a disgusting website builder ever in my entire life.

I write codes to build any type of website, web app etc. I was happily living my dev life. But, after using Wix for 24 fucking hours, I hate my job as a web developer.

Wix is so bad that I lose all my confidence & doubt about my 5 years of web development career.

Fucking piece of shit.

I actually forced myself to write documentation for my current project. So I have spend hours writing guides and stitching together guides I've found all around the web 😐 On the other hand, now I'll be capable of re-setting up the server in about 30 to 45 minutes 🙃

2 hour meeting to brainstorm ideas to improve our system health monitoring (logging, alerting, monitoring, and metrics)

Never got past the alerting part. Piss poor excuses for human being managers kept 'blaming' our logging infrastructure for allowing them to log exceptions as 'Warnings', purposely by-passing the alerting system.

Then the d-head tried to 'educate' everyone the difference between error and exception …frack-wad…the difference isn't philosophical…shut up.

The B manager kept referring to our old logging system (like we stopped using it 5 years ago) and if it were written correctly, the legacy code would be easier to migrate. Fracking lying B….shut the frack up.

The fracking idiots then wanted to add direct-bypass of the alerting system (I purposely made the code to bypass alerting painful to write)

Mgr1: "The only way this will work is if you, by default, allow errors to bypass the alerting system. When all of our code is migrated, we'll change a config or something to enable alerting. That shouldn't be too hard."
Me: "Not going to happen. I made by-passing the alert system painful on purpose. If I make it easy, you'll never go back and change code."
Mgr2: "Oh, yes we will. Just mark that method as obsolete. That way, it will force us to fix the code."
Me: "The by-pass method is already obsolete and the teams are already ignoring the build warnings."
Mgr1: "No, that is not correct. We have a process to fix all build warnings related to obsolete methods."
Mgr2: "Yes. It won't be like the old system. We just never had time to go back and fix that code."
Me: "The method has been obsolete for almost a year. If your teams haven't fixed their code by now, it's not going to be fixed."
Mgr1: "You're expecting everything to be changed in one day. Our code base is way too big and there are too many changes to make. All we are asking for is a simple change that will give us the time we need to make the system better. We all want to make the system better…right?"
Me: "We made the changes to the core system over two years ago, and we had this same conversation, remember? If your team hasn't made any changes by now, they aren't going to. The only way they will change code to the new standard is if we make the old way painful. Sorry, that's the truth."
Mgr2: "Why did we make changes to the logging system? Why weren't any of us involved? If there were going to be all these changes, our team should have been part of the process."
Me: "You were and declined every meeting and every attempt to include your area. Considering the massive amount of infrastructure changes there was zero code changes required by your team. The new system simply worked. You can't take advantage of the new features which is why we're here today. I'm here to offer my help in any way I can with the transition."
Mgr1: "The new logging doesn't support logging of the different web page areas. Until you can make that change, we can't begin changing our code."
Me: "Logging properties is just a name+value pair dictionary. All you need to do is standardize on a name and how you add it to the collection."
Mgr2: "So, it's not a standard field? How difficult would it be to change the core assembly? This has to be standard across all our areas and shouldn't be up to the developers to type in anything they want."
- Frack wads smile and nod to each other like fracking chickens in a feeding frenzy
Me: "It can, but what will you call this property? What controls its value?"
- The look I got from both the d-bags I could tell a blood vessel popped.
Mgr1: "Oh…um….I don't know…Area? Yea … Area."
Mgr2: "Um…that's not specific enough. How about Page?"
Mgr1: "Well, pages can cross different areas, and areas cross different pages…what do you think?"
Me: "Don't know, don't care. It's up to you. I just need a name."
Mgr2: "Modules! Our MVC framework is broken up in Modules."
DevMgr: "We already have a field for Module. It's how we're segmenting the different business processes"
Mgr1: "Doesn't matter, we'll come up with a name later. Until then, we won't make any changes until there is a name."
DevMgr: "So what did we accomplish?"
Me: "That we need to review the web's logging and alerting process and make sure we're capturing errors being hidden as warnings."
Mgr1: "Nooo….we didn't accomplish anything. This meeting had no agenda and no purpose. We should have been included in the logging process changes from day one."
Mgr2: "I agree, I'm not sure why we're here"
Me: "This was a brainstorming meeting as listed in the agenda. We've accomplished 2 of the 4 items. I think we've established your commitment to making the system better. Thank you all for coming."

- Mgr1 and 2 left without looking at me or saying a word.

When I was in University, there's a group project on web development. We decided to make a simple game.

Out of 5 students (including me), one was missing for the entire semester.

Another one don't know anything about any kind of programming. We asked him to write us a json file of characters' attributes. Taught him how and gave examples. Turns out that most data is missing.

Luckily the other two was great. Altogether, we covered frontend, backend and design. Finally we got the highest mark :P

Best (and worst) team ever

As a new freelancer I didn't have much clients , so I paired with a web designer +10 years exp. who work with me as a pm and that was a bad decision.
Although I am a back-end dev , half of the projects were frontend/WordPress theme (less price than back-end projecrs) - so 30% of the projects were cancelled .
sometimes I receive project's which have requirement, like magento, I don't know anything about ,
I tried to push myself but I burned out after six month.
he deals with clients, partner with other companies ,and I don't know anything about the terms.
at the end I was like an employee without any benefits from his company .
moreover I get my money after 45 day!!!
and not all my money .
this is a project I work for another company through him
A requirement for mobile back-end server was integrating with parse and that was my first time working with Facebook parse so ....
after two weeks ..
we received email from parse that they'll shutdown their service after a year .

so we moved to Amazon sns again my first time working with aws .
at the end I can't charge for extra money but my pm became a gold partner for that company .
the only thing that made me hold is that I need some high quality projects for my c.v.
-----------
he didn't show on hangout because I need my money .
this will be my last project with him.
wow I write too much ... I feel better now .😥

I am a Technical Lead in the department in my company that writes code for our clients that have money but doesn't have the technical expertise to handle the complexities of our own software.

Part of my tasks involve taking care of a few projects written by employees that have left after using third-party tools rather than using our own software. No one else in this department knows these third-party tools, they only know our own, and my *still limited* web development experience means I get dumped these things in my lap.

And I'm SO pissed at these projects and their authors and the manager that let these ex-employees write these things. There is this one project that was managed by two different "developers" (I don't know they deserve this title) at two different times, and it is so riddled with different technologies it makes me want to throw up almost daily.

Don't believe me? Here is a complete list of the dependencies listed in the package.json of this project: babel-polyfill, body-parser, cookie-parser, debug, edge, edge-sql, excel-to-json, exceljs, express, html-inline, jade, morgan, mssql, mysql, pug, ramda, request, rotating-file-stream, serve-favicon, webpack, xlsx, xml2js

What this doesn't even show, is that one part of this project (literally one page) is made using react, react-dom, react-redux, and jade. The other part (again literally one page) is made using Angular and Pug. In case you missed it while picking up your jaw, there's also mssql, mysql, edge and edge-sql. excel-to-json, exceljs, xlsx.

Oh you want *more* juicy details? This project takes the entire data object used by the front-end, stringifies it into JSON, and shoves it into the database *as a single field*. And instead of doing WHERE clauses in the SQL queries, it grabs the entire table, loops, parses the json, and does a condition on it. If even one of those JSON entries gets corrupted, the entire solution breaks because these "developers" don't know what try/catch is.

The client asked for a very simple change in their app, which was to add a button that queries the back-end for a URL, shows it in a modal dialog, after which a button is clicked to verify the link by doing a second query to the back-end before modifying a couple of fields in the page.

This. Took. Me. Two. Months*. Save me. Please, save me.

*between constant context switches between this and other projects that were continuously failing because of their mistakes.

No matter how many times, or whichever way I explain, he still doesn't get it. Are people so fucking blinkered they do not want to listen, or even read what you write. Back story, produced some web design visuals for a client, and fortunately he had the good sense to listen and employ a copywriter. She had the first draft done when i was putting together the styling, so i placed actual copy on the visuals. 2 weeks pass, still no answer. I send the same email to him, every 4 days and cc his PA for good measure. Finally, he says he wants to make some tweaks to the copy. I explain that any copy changes can be done via the CMS once the site is built, and can I proceed and build the site? He replies I need to make changes to the copy first. I explained again about the difference between the visual and the actual website, same response. You Fucking Infuriate me! Cunt!

I really need to get out of this clusterfuck of a mess I got into, A.K.A. our website projects. Now, it feels more and more like all these problems and issues we're having are all my fault.

Here's the thing: I had 0 experience on web development before I got this job. I started as an intern, expecting to learn all the right practices and techniques on building websites. Nope. What happened was I was thrown in this big project, responsible for almost every functionality that it was supposed to have.

A junior-level guy. Doing a huge project on his own. Hell, I'm probably even lower than a junior. But here I am, pigeonholed in this shittard. My boss even said to me, "you know more about the website than I do." Fucking hell. He's not even aware of the clusterfucks I've done on the codebase because, fuck, what did I know? I don't even get feedbacks about my code. I don't fucking know if I'm doing all of these shit right. I don't know if this function is supposed to be here, or if it's supposed to behave that way, and, shit, the concept of test-driven development is probably something my boss has never heard of before.

So right now, I'm a bit obsessed with web development best practices, and how to write clean, maintainable code. I would probably get more learning from going to meetups than I will ever have from this place.

This has been a very shitty start of my career. I hope a much better learning experience will be plentiful at my next job (if anyone's willing to hire me). It would be like starting all over again. Sorry for the long post. I would like to put this as a blog post, but it's probably not a good idea, specially since I'm looking for a new job. Thank God for devRant.

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.

go fuck yourself with your fucking communities. i went into computing because i like being left alone. who are all those fucking freaks building their communities? this is capitalism mother fuckers, everybody in the world agreed on it, on each person being an independent individual doing their job to the best possible standard, instead these low-skill low-iq oversocialised sheeple started conglomerate into communities and brainwash everybody that this is what it is about. get stuffed alright. all my life i've been introverted, just leave me alone to write code alright? take my library i don't mind i'll take yours no strings attached, just push the code and forget about it. but no, all these degenerate morons without CS degrees have occupied our safe space, pushed us out of it and just can't get enough of using the buzzword "community-driven" "volunteers" volunteer my ass assholes you can't even make software nobody in real industry needs you because you have no skill at all you learn a bit of js which is any 14-15 yo can do and now think you're some kind of prodigies, unsung heros of humanity who selflessly bring the progress. nothing can be further from the truth - because of you we don't have real software, we don't have investment we don't get no respect everybody walks all over software engineers treating us like shit, there's an entire generation of indoctrinated parasitic scum that believes that software tools is grown for them on trees by some development teams that their are entitled to automatically, because some corporation will eventually support those big projects - yeah does it really happen though - look at svelte, the guy is getting 50k a year when he should be earning at least 500k if he had balls to start a real businesses, but no we are all fucking prostitutes, just slaving away for the army of people we never see. are you out of your mind. this shit should be fucking illegal alright it's modern day slavery innit bruh, if a company wants to pay their engineers to work on open source this is fine, i love open source like java or google closure compiler, but it's real software made by real engineers, but who are all these community freaks who can't spend a 10 seconds on stage in their shitty bogus conferences without ringing the "community" buzzer? you're not my community i fucking hate your guts you're all such dumb womenless imbeciles who justify their lack of social skill by telling themselves that you're doing good by doing open source in your free time - mate nobody gives a shit alrite? don't you want money sex power? you've destroyed everything that was good about good olde open source when it was actually fun, today young people are coerced into slavery at industrial scale, it's literally impossible to make a buck from software as indie unless you build something really big and good, and you can't build anything big without investment and who invests in software nowadays? all the ai "entrepreneurs" are getting fucking golden rained with cash while i have to ask for a 5$ donation? what the actual fuck? who sanctions this? the entire industry is in one collective psychotic delusion, spurred by microsoft who use this army of useful idiots to eliminate all hounour dignity of the profession, drive the abundance and bring about poverty of mind, character, as well as wallet as the natural state of things. fucking amatures of course you love your shitty little communities because you can't achieve anything on your own. you literally have no personality, just one homogenous blob of dumb degenerates who think and act all the same. there used to be a tool called adobe flash builder, i could just buy it, then open and make a web app, all from start to finish in one program, using tutorials of adobe experts on youtube, sure it might have had its pitfals but it was a product - today there's literally no fucking product to make websites. do you people get it? i can't buy a tool that i need to do my job and have to insult myself by downloading some shitty scripts from some shitty unemployed devs and hope my computer doesn't blow up in my face in the process because some freak went off his nut and uploaded some dodgy ass exploit on npm in his package. i really don't like. it's not supposed to be like that. good for me i build by own front/back end. this "community" insanity is just a symptom of industrial degeneration, they try to sell it to us like it's the "bright" communist future but things never been worst, i can't give a shit about functional programming alright i just need to get my job done mate leave me alone you add functional because you don't know how to solve the problem properly, e.g., again adobe flex had mxml where elements had ids and i could just program to id, it was alright but today all this unqualified morons filled the whole space after flash blew up and adobe execs axed flash builder instead of adapting it to js runtime, it was a crime against humanity that set us back to 1000s

How to manage updates on production as web agency

1: Update the GitHub private repo with your changes
2: Write an email to the customer sysadmin and ask to sync in staging and later production
3: Wait 2 weeks and do another ping about it
4: The sysadmin later will do that
5: In the meantime there is a security update of your CMS and a lot of plugins to update
6: Try to update from the CMS panel and there are no write permission
7: Cry a lot and write another email to go back to point 2

i wrote a website, a server in go, a small os in c, a game in js, a game and server and web scraper and other desktop apps in java, mobile apps with flutter, a website with php also, implemented aes in go, wrote a parser in java. done sysadmin stuff on my vps and pihole/openvpn/nextcloud on my rpi. learn about c vulnerabilities and used metasploit. attempted to write an interpreted language. did some led displays with arduino. currently learning tensorflow.

i have never...
- written a driver
- made a game with a game engine
- created a file encoding
- implemented an oauth2 server
- made an api
- worked with vr

what am i missing? i want to be a very well rounded dev.

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

devrant.io a site designed for developers and aimed at a platform they don't use for rants.

The desktop website is a quick bodge of a job, but they spent allot of time on the mobile app instead...
I would of thought that devs would prefer to write their messages on keyboard since it is second nature to most.

Correct me if I am wrong, but has no one else thought about this? I mean the web app is literally just a letter box view so that the format is the same as mobile...

My first job as a '"dev"' (I really need some kind of super quotation mark for this).
I was young and too stupid too know how stupid I really was, I jobbed at a small recruiting firm and one day my boss complained about her database system and that she needed to hire a student to remake it. Suffering from the problem to be too incompetent to even recognise I'm incompetent I obviously offered my services as a python wizard I mean I could write a program that saves fibonacci numbers to a csv file, how much more could there possibly be? Fast forward two months and I proudly presented a GUI written in VB (it had an wysiwyg GUI editor) that was loosely frankensteined onto a bunch of together copy pasted python scripts running on a Windows Server. No web interface just accessible via vnc. It was slow, sluggish and soo ugly but it worked and did exactly what she wanted it to do. Sure the database was a bunch of csv files but non the less, to say it in pm, it resolved the user story. I quit shortly after because of her tendency to not pay the last bill after something was done (and tbh i deserved it) but she never removed my account from the server. So I copied my "magnus opus" from there... Let's just say whenever I look back at it I feel ashamed and yet it serves as a reminder to never be content with how good you are.

So we have a course this semester called "Programming the web".
First lab:
Write a program using JS to take an int input using a alert box and then print it's multiplication table using ANOTHER ALERT BOX.
Yes, not even display on a page.

Next lab:
Print fibonacci numbers on a web page using JS. Because why not. Let's teach students JS how we taught them C and let's ignore the awesome stuff we can do with JS

Btw all this for a class that has never had a JS course and half the people don't even know what JS is. They just directly throw the program and are done with it.
I'm so gonna hate this semester

I have always been interested in computers. when I was in second grade, I decided I was no good at electronic circuits, and decided I wanted to program instead. My dad told be to check out free basic, and I immediately downloaded FBIDE, and followed tutorial videos on YouTube. once I finished the videos, I started to write mad libs programs. I made various types of calculators, etc. and loved it, so later I learned a bit of VB. I messed with that a bit, but didn't like it too much, and started web developing. The moment I saw some JS code, it was like an instinctive second language to me. I learned js and started making some ugly, but cool interactive web pages. When computercraft came out for minecraft, I learned lua and got a deeper understanding of programming. Now, I am using node to build a personal-use IoT server and currently making a drone flight program using a raspberry pi

Did A big stupid thing right now

Deleted a web page, which took me three days to write. Very pissed right now. Should have added to GitHub repo

I started working on a new file on my project. After I finished working on the project I started doing something which didnt worked out. So I deleted the local version of the repo since the repo was backed up on the server. But the file that I completed last night was not yet added to the repo.

I write web apps that show system health information, for support purposes. Whenever I talk to my boss about the general direction of what I'm writing he says, "I want one page that shows me everything."

This is an enormous company, with tens of millions of customers, and an infrastructure so big that there are literally millions of potential points of failure.

I hear this from management softs all the time: one page that shows me EVERYTHING. To me, that means he wants a red or green indicator that he can quickly check on his iphone while he's skiing.

I'm afraid that managing this kind of infrastructure is a bit more complicated than that. If it was that simple, you wouldn't have anyone to manage.

In my experience, any BE dev or old architect/lead programmer that says they “can do frontend” does shit like writing Ajax calls in script tags directly in the html. They are the ones who add style attributes directly in html. They are the ones who google how to center a div and they still use float positioning because all of them are old, arrogant BE devs who get caught in a single framework who convince themselves they are an expert. They can’t give any good UX advice. They don’t know how to use a screen reader. They don’t know what WCAG means. They don’t constantly keep up to date on what browsers are supporting and what’s being released in the unstable versions. They don’t know what a web component is. They don’t know what a closure is. They don’t know anything about optimizing web perf metrics. They couldn’t tell you what web crawlers look for. They couldn’t tell you anything about design principles and anti-patterns. They don’t know how to manage a web application that will be seen by millions AND keep it nice, shiny, and refactorable on the code side. What do they really fucking know? how to write an MVC app? How to connect APIs and integrate code that other people wrote? I do full stack all day and writing anything not-client-facing is super easy.

Take that stick out of your ass and get over yourself you asshole. You haven’t written anything close to amazing even though you constantly act like you’re a god-tier programmer and your shit doesn’t stink.

Hit the books like the rest of us you fuck.

The Frontend is anything but fucking easy.

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 really miss having a team. Don't get me wrong, right now I do what I love and I got into a position where I can actually do Quality Assurance instead of just testing and I enjoy being able to actually change things instead of just repeating what problems there are and acting surprised when the same processes produce the same bugs over and over again but I really hope that we'll interview anything else than mouthbreathers soon.

I'm aware of the fact that QA isn't sexy and that few people who could become "Software ninja Rockstars" choose to go into it but can it be that hard to find at least two or three people who can write and read code at least on a junior level and understand how web protocols work? I get the feeling my entire branch is nothing but shit talkers clicking around blindly on pages.

I just want to exchange ideas again, come up with innovative tools, tweaking processes, learning from and teaching each other while we watch the entire operation get more and more efficient.

My friend/partner told me on the first week that he "can code" and he will "do the front end of the web page" (its a web application design mod)

Needless to say I had to carry the whole work because he couldn't design nor write php.

Or write a report
He submitted the wrong report

He had one job
And now we arent friends anymore

I have a web app that is currently running on a production server with no issues, but at the same time, it isn't working on my machine which I used to write, test, and deploy the app. The thing is, I haven't touched the code for a full month.

Now, I know this has to be logical and that there must be an reasonable explanation for all of this that I do not know yet.

However, and out of frustration, my mind wants to believe that there's some sorcery involved here or that a cosmic ray has actually penetrated the machine and messed its registers.

Damn the cosmic ray!

Some of you know I'm an amateur programmer (ok, you all do). But recently I decided I'm gonna go for a career in it.

I thought projects to demo what I know were important, but everything I've seen so far says otherwise. Seems like the most important thing to hiring managers is knowing how to solve small, arbitrary problems. Specifics can be learned and a lot of 'requirements' are actually optional to scare off wannabes and tryhards looking for a sweet paycheck.

So I've gone back, dusted off all the areas where I'm rusty (curse you regex!), and am relearning, properly. Flash cards and all. Getting the essentials committed to memory, instead of fumbling through, and having to look at docs every five minutes to remember how to do something because I switch languages, frameworks, and tooling so often. Really committing toward one set of technologies and drilling the fundamentals.

Would you say this is the correct approach to gaining a position in 2020, for a junior dev?
I know for a long time, 'entry level' positions didn't really exist, but from what I'm hearing around the net, thats changing.

Heres what I'm learning (or relearning since I've used em only occasionally):

* Git (small personal projects, only used it a few times)
* SQL
* Backend (Flask, Django)
* Frontend (React)
* Testing with Cypress or Jest

Any of you have further recommendations?

Gulp? Grunt? Are these considered 'matter of course' (simply expected), or learn-as-you for a beginner like myself?

Is knowing the agile 'manifesto' (whatever that means) by heart really considered a big deal?

What about the basics of BDD and XP?

Is knowing how to properly write user-stories worth a damn or considered a waste of time to managers?

Am I going to be tested on obscure minutiae like little-used yarn/npm commands?

Would it be considered a bonus to have all the various HTTP codes memorized? I mean thats probably a great idea, but is that an absolute requirement for newbies, or something you learn as you practice?

During interviews, is there an emphasis on speed or correctness? I'm nitpicky, like to write cleanly commented code, and prefer to have documentation open at all times.
Am I going to, eh, 'lose points' for relying on documentation during an interview?

I'm an average programmer on my good days, and the only thing I really have going for me is a *weird* combination of ADD and autism-like focus that basically neutralize each other. The only other skill I have is talking at people's own level to gauge what they need and understand. Unfortunately, and contrary to the grifter persona I present for lulz, I hate selling, let alone grifting.
Otherwise I would have enjoyed telemarketing way more and wouldn't even be asking this question. But thankfully I escaped that hell and am now here, asking for your timeless nuggets of bitter wisdom.

What are truly *entry level* web developers *expected* to know, *right out the gate*, obviously besides the language they're using?

Also, what is the language they use to program websites? It's like java right? I need to know. I'm in an interview RIGHT now and they left me alone with a PC for 30 minutes. I've been surfing pornhub for the last 25 minutes. I figure the answer should take about 5 minutes, could you help me out and copypasta it?

Okay, okay, I'm kidding, I couldn't help myself. The rest of the questions are serious and I'd love to know what your opinions are on what is important for web developers in 2020, especially entry level developers.

Even if he's a younger guy than most other examples, my mention is:

Jordan Walke

He's the inventor of React, which probably changed the way to write (web-)apps for a lot of people and was based on a prototype written in StandardML.

He's also created ReasonML which is not only in many ways a more fitting language to write React, but also a good systems language (props to OCaml and it's unbreakable type system). Many React concepts/patterns have their origins in functional language concepts, including reducers and hooks.

Hello everbody!

For college I'm doing a small research project. The goal of my research is give advice to web developers on using JavaScript frameworks to create mobile applications and help them decide which framework to use by comparing 3 popular frameworks. I decided to compare React Native, Ionic and NativeScript. I myself have only used React Native to build a mobile application. I would like to get some opinions from other developers on this matter. I want to compare the frameworks based on the following categories: developing time, performance, debugging an learning curve. Are there developers here who would be willing to write their experience with these frameworks? Or maybe some of you know a forum or other place where I can ask for some help:)

Hello, everybody! Recently, I've decided to switch from Android development to web-development, mainly JavaScript. Ok, it is clear what to do and what to learn in frontend part. But what about backend? I have a some kind of a dream to learn Go. It is clear language it is a great pleasure to write on it, and I've started to learn it. In parallel I'm trying to study JS + Angular... Well, now I have some douts: is it effective to learn two different languages, which are quite new to me? Maybe, I should learn Node.js instead of Go? Right now it is clear, that this technology (node) is much more demanded. What path should I choose? To follow heart and learn Go? To follow mainstream trend and learn Node.js?

So recently i got a message from aa person asking how to (these are exact words) ,
:break into insta's database using Sqlmap"
I then proceeded to tell them to "f*ck of ya c*nt ".
Afterwords it inspired me to write this rant

annoying classmates:" hahaha GuYS bEtER wAtcH OuT he's GonnaA hack Us"

me: " yea I can program I also do some ethical hacking and cybersecurity "

annoying classmates: "hahaH Bro your a Hacker OhHHhHHOOO BrO CaN yoU hACk inSta FoR mE I NEEd MoRe FolloWeRs "

me:" tf no one that's illegal and two it's waste of my time "

annoying classmates: "BrOooo CaN yoU gEt Me SoMe HacKs fOr CsGo"

me: "can you just please f*ck off , i'm not hacking for you everything you've asked me is extremely unethical and a huge waste of time, Also if you suck so bad at a game you need to cheat I recommend just stopping "
annoying classmates: "DUdE whAt ToolS dO i HVAE to DownLOad To Be A haCkEr"
me: *trying hard not to murder them* " I told you to f*ck off"

being a hackers isn't downloading tools it isn't typing at 90wpm into a terminal with green font its not about games or fame or anything its about coming up with creative solutions to problems , thinking outside the box its about individuality and breaking from the heard , looking at things from a different viewpoint,
it's about endlessly seeking knowledge.
It's about freedom though creation that's what being a hacker originally was. But because of big media and movie company's (and script kiddies) people now confuse hacker with cracker and think of us as jobless fat kids sitting in a dark room in there parents house breaking into bank accounts and buying drugs on the dark web (which people see to think there a hacker just because they can open tor browser. they then proceed to use google to look up "fresh onion links 2020") .
My classmates and really my generation has a huge case of smooth brain. They a think we can just look at someone and hack them they also seem to think using a gratify link to get a persons up is hacking and using the inspect element is hacking and that opening a terminal is hacking ! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH"

Anyways ima end this here thanks for reading :)

German public service digitization. Websites celebrating the new "digital functionality" of the federal ID card, but if you need to prolong the actual card, you have to visit a public administration center in person, no way to prove your existing valid ID in a zoom meeting although that's de-facto standard accepted even when opening a bank account, plus they have all of my data so they should know I have a valid ID and they could just send the new one to my postal address.
So I have to appear in person at their offices, so I need an appointment, but in times of covid pandemic, appointments are rare and only offered on a day-to-day basis in my hometown, that's why I have to visit their online appointment web app at 7 a.m. in the morning to grab one of the few appointments when they are released.
Don't tempt me to write a script that squats all the other appointment slots to resell at the highest prices...

Situation reminds of the times when it was even harder to get a vaccination against covid, and the media kept reporting about the minority that refused to get vaxxed, so they didn't have to admit there wasn't enough vaccine anyway.

This rant is not about politics, it's about the failure of bureaucracy, but if it was about politics, I would just quote Rezo that it shows who had governed this state for sixteen years.

When I rant about German internet connectivity, people usually reply that the web is much better in Taipeh, Bangalore or Guadalajara, so I can still have some hope that it's not all of the world that's totally lost.

So give me some hope, folks.

I have a few projects on the go at work at the moment which could be successful, but only time will tell:

1. We have a requirement to monitor or SQL servers for any long running queries (anything that runs longer than 3 minutes). Company didn’t want to pay for enterprise grade solution so as the only SQL Developer I created a small system that involves a database, 2 tables a stored procedure and scheduled job. It goes off every 10 minutes queries some system tables etc and write the results to the tables. Still waiting for it to be deployed to one of the test servers. I have plans for a web front end in the future.

2. My company currently use source safe for version control. They’ve lost the admin password so only 1 person can log in. I’m running he project to plan the migration to GitLab. It’s getting close to completion and soon someone is going to be tasked with creating 100s or projects etc.

3. We use an ERP system which is huge with thousands of tables, but no FKs or anything like that. The current data dictionary is a spreadsheet, as a side project I’m creating a web app so that this information is easily available and searchable.

All 3 projects have the potential to be successful, for my team at least, but stuck waiting for other people to do their stuff first.

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?

I have this fried that gives me some advice on how to find work, he said i need to come up with a project idea as something to put on my CV and also as a way to learn front-end dev.

Easy enough if not for the fact that this project should be something that's actually useful and has some concept behind it (like, something that might seemingly work for a startup)

I've been raking my brain for a week now, and all i can come up with is small meme projects, neat but sort of inconsequential experiments, or things that might be useful to me but have no reason to be web-based.
I never realized how hard it is for me to come up with professional-sounding project ideas :D

I'm just not that kind of guy, i don't really have the drive or motivation to do anything professional: If people wanna use my rice or whatever spaghetti software i create they are welcome to, i'll even write them some documentation, but its just kinda out there on the internet because i like sharing. I don't really have any grand product ideas, nor do i really care about what other people think or need.

Tech lead: so for this sprint, please implement this HTML page in Angular

Me: do we know what kind of Angular table we are using yet?

Tech Lead: just use the Angular UI one

Me: do we know if that supports drag and drop and custom filters?

Tech Lead: that's not needed for this page

Me: yeah but like 5 other pages of this web app does

Tech Lead: so? We will find a different table then.

Me: but they will look and feel very different and it will be totally obvious that it's patchwork, and we will need to rewrite this page you want me to write now...

Tech Lead: so what if they look completely different. Stop thinking about future sprints. can you have it done next week?

Me: ummmm.....

... this is going to be a fun project. Oh, not to mention I'm only supposed to work on it for 20% of my time....

I hate it when my bosses approve of a design and then after some time ask me to make some annoying changes. I love programming, but I don't like being bothered by boring tasks.. and the worst part is that my bosses expect me to take care of building the backend, front-end, complete the design of the screens available, make up designs for the screens that are not, test the Web app, solve the bugs created the people who also worked on the project, solve the bugs created by me, and if something is not clear, to ask the client directly, like dude.. I'm just an intern here... and the most annoying of all this is when they take a screenshot of something they don't like and simply write: "change this".... CHANGE IT TO WHAT? if I knew what you would like I would have already done it!!!