Tip: Never add an execution (PHP for example) script as a bookmark in your browser..

Your browser will occasionally poll the saved URL to update the favicon or sync to the server or something like that, which triggers the script without you knowing...

Why do I do this to myself..

I opened the devRant app again in since like.. forever..

My lights starting to dim and turn off at 00:30 to remind me to go to bed.. Well.. apparently.. I've been sitting here on my couch, in the dark, scrolling through rants, stories, collabs, .. for the last 2,5 hours.. It's now 03:00.. I've only slept for like 6 hours last night in the last 3 days, so I could really use my sleep (not because I'm tired, but because I look like a pale raccoon with a hoodie when everybody else is gettin' some tan, wearing shorts and summer dresses, enjoying the summer-like weather).

Ohwell, guess I'll try again tomorrow..

For credential errors on login forms..

Do you guys follow the “OWASP standard” and won’t let the user know which field (email or password) was incorrect, just a general message or the more UX-way and let them know that it is for example the password that doesn’t match with given email (if it exists)? 🤔

Had a minor “discussion” about this with our sales-guy this afternoon why that I’m (as the full-stack, and only, developer there) not that of a fan about the UX-way.. (even thou ‘security’ is a “myth”). 😁

I’m doing my last two days at my current job. (I resigned to go work full-time on a startup project.)

While doing some last commits, I couldn’t resist to not put an easter egg in my current running project (an e-commerce web application)... I’m hoping to be able to trigger it in the future when it’s being used by a dozen of our clients.. 🌝 Hopefully, my follow-up dev will get the joke and won’t remove these lines of code..

!rant

The joys of returning from my annual leave..

My contributions after just being back from a 7-day leave.. 27 in total.. PR's, issues, bug fixes, feature fixes, requested features,..

Feels good tho.. It was a productive day today and we made the weekly update! :D

( Yes, I pushed commits while on vacation :D )

Today is my last day before my annual two-week leave. 🌝

“Can you do this quickly before leaving? 🤔”,
“Yeah, ofcourse, np. 🤷🏻‍♂️”

But why would it not.. Everything that always ran smoothly and used to work without ever giving me issues.. is now giving me issues.. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

The chief came with a new idea.. something that runs ‘a side’ of our main project as some sort of manager. The database wasn’t designed with that in mind..

Now I’m wondering if I’m having issues because I could’ve designed the database better so that this wouldn’t be an issue or if I shouldn’t “blame” myself, because that wasn’t the initial idea. 🤷🏻‍♂️

We had to do a lot of migrations to keep adding and changing for the “new ideas” and now the database is a mess.. but it’s like.. too “big” to just start a new clean database structure, but it could optimize everything and make the backend easier/cleaner instead of dirty hacks/queries to combine all the different features.

As a ‘bad’ example, but the idea started as a todo list, migrated to a social network and is now migrating to something like smartschool to be able to manage users and groups, but with different features than the ‘social network’ had... I’m wondering what’s next..

Dev-tip of the day:

Always make sure that your database table fields are long enough to hold the entire third-party API client reference ID, so that the last three characters won’t be cut off..

I’ve been “crying” here while debugging for the last hour because my API function and everything else worked, but the result wasn’t showing up in the third-party application (their API returned a 200), but when I tested it with their API sandbox application, it did show up..

How not to give support..

Me: Creates ticket on support site, letting them know their webservice returns "maintenance" page.
Support: "It works on our end."
Support: *closes ticket*

Euhm.. excuse me?

Me: Creates another ticket with a screenshot and the curl response information..
Support: Sends screenshot back that it works on their end. "Maybe check your firewall"
Support: *closes ticket*

I ain't playing these games..

Me: Creates new ticket with more curl responses from 4 different servers to prove it's not "firewall" related.
Support: ..

2 days later

Me: Sends *friendly* reminder.
Support: ..

6 days later

Me: Creates ticket again saying I'm still having issues.
Support: "I'm forwarding this to our technical support"
Support: *closes ticket*

10 minutes later.

Technical Support: "Here's the manual for our integration .pdf."

Excuse me, you say what now? I KNOW HOW IT WORKS, I'VE WRITTEN THE INTEGRATION ALREADY. THE SERVICE JUST SEEMS TO BE DOWN FFS.. pls..

Me: Sends mail to their project manager who manages the clients dossier with support history and such.
Him: "I'll check it out and let you know."

1 day later.

Support: "We had some issues this and that, wasn't publically availble, works now, .."

What a nice way to waste your time..

When you’re laughing/cringing at some of these rants and you hear that little voice in the back of your head say:

“I shouldn’t be laughing.. Screenshots of my code will probably be posted here when the next guy takes over my project..”

I’ve written fast and dirty code back in the days that still makes me nervous, but we don’t have the time and resources for a rewrite and besides.. My code works, so.. 🤷🏻‍♂️💅🏻

This whole GDPR, cookie law thing is really getting annoying.. Every website you load:

A wild large popup dialog appears, reasons this and that, options this and that, click next, are you sure, yes, yes,..

The dialog itself is annoying, but it's even more annoying if it pops-up 10 seconds after you've already scrolled and are reading stuff.

Am I the only one who didn't care that I got tracked and whatnot and analytics stuffs were stored etc?

Tfw you accidentally chmod'ed the entire root of your cloud server, because you've misplaced a "/".. Thank god, that there is such a thing called a 'backup'.

The amount of sweat and stress I had when the SSH disconnected and I couldn't log back in, the Apache and MySQL services that began to throw failures..

It's on moments like this, that you really appreciate the 24/7 customer-support! 😂

And all this while I was at my job, working for another company..

My plan/resolutions for 2018?

Have at least 1 commit per day w/ maybe exceptions like special holidays and such 😁
(No commits just to have a commit like adding a line of commentary or stuff like that)

#iwannabetheguyshetellsyounottoworryabout

My last shipment arrived faster then expected. Quality merch as always 👌 Merry Christmas to me and to every one else as well ofcourse! Thanks @dfox & @trogus. Maybe add some sort of a sweatpants and some holiday socks to the catalogue? 🤔😁

I feel bad for trying to implement emoji support in our web application, but yeah #2017..

And damn, php + mysql + emojis.. What a pain in the ass.

"Just change your table charset, they said, it will work, they said" FML

Taking a leave for 14 days from work, just to use my vacation days, really messes with my biorhythm :D My day/night cycle shifted about 12 hours.. Programming during the night for a freelance project, sleeping 1-2 hours during the day just to rest my eyes a bit..

I'm from Belgium, but the second developer, on the project, is from San Francisco.. It's quiet nice to have someone to talk to about the development process when every one else I know is asleep.

I'm not made for a dayjob at a desk, I need to be at home, in my bed or at my own desk, choosing my own hours, just.. Working on projects with some music, some snacks,.. Much more productive that way than, instead, being forced to work from 9am to 6pm.. You can't force creativity or inspiration
.

I slept 9 hours this week, spread over 4 days... I'm not the most healthy person, I know :D

!rant

Maybe a usefull function for the fellow developers here, in case you need default Avatars for your users. "UI-Avatars". Just 'discovered' this beautiful API today and it really is easy and helpful! :D It even has a PHP package if you would like to generate them yourself.. This is not an ad or anything, it's just a usefull API, like 'placehold.it' etc that could be useful for anyone out there!

FML..

I worked directly in my Github repo folder while working on a project (don't ask me why). I did my initial commit with all my code from the start until 5 hours ago. I never pushed.. A minute ago, I checked my commit and noticed that there were DB credentials in one of the files. So.. Smart me.. "revert commit"..

Result. Everything got deleted except my node_modules folder and the readme file.. I lost everything.. Fuck me, I'm going home..

Please, someone.. Can I get these files back via git or something? Can't find anything in in the history..

You've got to love Android development.. :D Just grabbed my laptop to start working on an idea I just had. Launched Android Studio to do some quick coding..

Update for the repo's..
Update for the IDE itself..
Update for gradle..

Started project. Need to update my build tools..

I.. I.. I just wanted to do some quick coding :D

*edit* Just tried to run the project.. "Acceleration driver is out of date, please update Haxm" .. Damnit..

Glad to support this awesome community! Thanks @dfox & @trogus for the quality shipment!

I'll look like a DevRant salesman with this Tee and the stickers on my Macbook :D Goto sleep, wake up covered in bitches with all this swag :D

Smart me.. Updated OS X from 10.10 to the ‘new’ 10.12 just before leaving on my vacation. I’m currently at the boarding gate, wanting to develop some bits and pieces.

Apparently, the update fucked me once more.. My XAMPP server, the Git commands, my permissions, .. Nothing works.. Now I have to google all this stuff to get everything working again, but the Wifi is sooo damn sloooow.

Doubted so many times to install ubuntu on my macbook, but I have no idea how Ubuntu handles the battery life, the led keyboard, the function buttons, … The whole OS X works for me, but once in a while, it fuckes me so hard, I would've liked it if it took me out for dinner once in a while.. :D

// Snippet
if(isUsingEdgeOrIE(window.navigator.userAgent)){
window.location.assign("https://google.com/chrome/browser/");
}

*sigh*

People laugh at it when you say Internet Explorer is a Pain in the *ss to develop for, because they think it's just a cliché or some sort and think it's not that bad.. but no .. really.. F*ck IE.. :D It f*cked me over so many times..

"Oh Hey, I don't recognize this basic html attribute value you are using, so I'm not going to report an error in the console or so, ima let you search, sweat, get angry, .. Oh Hey, you're not using the right doctype? Let me crash your entire javascript functionality, .. Oh Hey, this CSS selector? I never heard of it.. "

Today, I was so certain that all the functionalities were implemented to handle some webhook calls from a third-party service. It's a script I wrote that has been running for 2+ years uninterrupted or without any issues.

We got some "complaints/notices" today that some "special" actions weren't registered, so I thought that the third-party service just didn't send those actions via their webhook. After some research I found a part where they explained that those actions trigger the webhook like any other action etc. So..

First thought: "okay, maybe they implemented that at a later stage" (was not the case)
Second thought: "maybe this is not what the client meant" (it was)
Third thought: "Then it should have been implemented" (it wasn't)

Okay, time to look at the code to see where this could get handled but apparently isn't. All the actions look good, nice, clean handeling etc, nicely documented code (gave the 'past-me' mentally a high-five)..

I scroll further down to that specific action and it was quiet obvious why it didn't work.. I just see an empty function with the comment:

"//TODO: maybe handle this action one day. don't know what this does atm, probably unused.. Will take a look at it next week.."

.. :D

I took my 'high-five' back..I just needed to copy-paste some other code and change 1-2 parameters..

I made sure to commit all changes (from my desktop) before leaving my home for the weekend so I can continue my project at the parents house (going for a monthly visit)..

I arrived, synced all my changes to my laptop, all good and well, going perfect. Updated the bower components etc. Time to start some test runs so I started my localhost, opened my browser,..Ended up with a MySQL errors galore.. Unknown table this and that.. I forgot the export my MySQL database :'( #fml

I sometimes remember the time when I wrote a Email-inbox-exporter-PHP-script-type of application that collects all the emails from an inbox, "copied" it to a database with the attachements and stuff and moves it to a folder..

I just started at the company for like a couple of months, had no privileges to create mailboxes and such and I didn't want to interrupt our programmer to do this for me, so... I decided.. to save time and resources.. to test run it on our global, live 'support' mailbox.. :D Well.. You might guess what happened.. Apparently I mistyped the name of the move-destination folder (because imap-weird-things) that resulted in a completly empty mailbox and an empty database because the inserts failed due to bad encoding and mime-type issues..

The moment I refreshed my Outlook and noticed that all our mails where gone.. I swear, I can't describe that feeling of fear, cold sweat, intense heartbeat... I just stood up, asked if anyone wanted coffee, and just walked out of the office.. When in the hallway, I heard my collegues ask to one another "do you have any issues with outlook, all my mails are gone?". Everyone was stressing out, the chief was stressing out "what happened?!", nobody knew what happened.. :D

They could partially resolve it via one collegue who hadn't refreshed the mailbox and he could forward all the mails back to our support mailbox..

I dropped the project idea and learned to work with dev environments :D A couple of months later, I accidentially forgot a where condition in my SQL UPDATE statement, but that was the last time I seriously f*cked up.. :D Got to learn the hard way I guess.. Now everything I do runs in dev environments, I test everything before publishing,.. When I look back.. I don't even recognize the (inexperienced) guy I was back then ! :D

Ps. No one still knows what happened that day and they blamed it on server issues :D

!rant => question?

I'm hired as a freelancer for a start-up that wants to create a social-network-like platform. I've always been a "basic" PHP and javascript developer like using AngularJS, MySQL and my own kinda like PHP MVC framework etc.. But I'm worried that 'this' will come short when the platform expands on the user-base and stuff. That MySQL won't be able to keep up with the expectations and the amountof data, that AngularJS will not be enough for the Frontend,.. I've taken a look at ReactJS, RethinkDB, NodeJS and such, but this is not really within my "comfort zone" and I'm not willing to invest time in something new if it's not able to handle the platform (I don't know if it will..) and I'm afraid that I'll have to start from scratch if it all fails.. (and this is something I can't afford)

So.. What are you guys's opinions? We're not looking at millions of users, but it will have feeds, comments, connections, messages, post scopes,.. Etc. RethinkDB looks promising with the 'watchers' to get live data instantly, but it's a whole new way of query'ing and such.. It just feels like I'm wasting my time because I'm afraid that I'll reach a point in development where I'll have a situation for example like "damn.. This is impossible with angular or php.." [I've shouldn't have agreed to this project..] :D

Yesterday, I finished the front-end of a project for a client. Responsive, clean,.. Looking 'smexy' :D

Today I've got an email of the client, saying he made some small design adjustments...

I think you already know where this is going.. But inline-css everywhere, fixed widths, br's as spacers,.. (It was like an old Frontpage-like design..)

I've changed the FTP user.. From now on, he has to request his changes so that I can apply them.. Damnit.. But hey, extra paid hours of work I guess :D

!rant (kind of)

I have the bad habit of suggesting "awesome" and "cool" features for projects and stuffs.. (Mostly just for fun and won't give a lot of value to the project, but would be cool). The less fun side.. I'm the only developer (in most cases..)

Me: Hey, wouldn't it be cool if the user could do this or that, or if this was implemented etc.. ?

Boss/Leader: Oh, hehe yeah, hmm.. *thinking* [a bit later] .. You're right, go ahead, implement that feature..

Me: .. Damnit..

But hey, on the bright side.. It's an extra feature! :D

We have an API available for our customers to integrate our software with their Webshop.

A client and their developer complained because not all of the products came through. I checked the products, the validation, the parameters, the database .. everything looked fine and I was scratching my head why these articles wouldn't come through (but it did work at my end).

After some time, I checked the request logs..
Apparently it wasn't quite clear for them that a loop is required with the 'skip' and 'take' parameters to create an offset for pagination.They only synchronised the first 500 products.. everytime..

We have a limit of 500 products per batch (take) for performance reasons.

They asked if we could increase this limit, because they have "a large range of products" (not really, only 800 or so and we have clients with more than 2mil. products..) Oh pls.. I've sent them a link to the PHP manual for a basic 'while' loop..

I've been developing an Android app for a specific model of a handheld barcode scanner (almost 3 months) for our customers.. We are finally going live with this application so my boss ordered a new batch of devices. Bought the newer, fancier model instead of our test/dev model...

*Fatal error galore, different storage type, different barcode reader, deprecated functions,..*

Oooh the joys..
(Needs to be finished by tomorrow)