Off to meet one of our customers next week. Requires my first long haul flight ever! 22hrs on a plane (with a wee stop in the middle!) Planning to buy a new set of noise cancelling headphones in the airport before I go! Duty Free Electronics FTW!!

See you down under!!

https://github.com/devRant/devRant/...

Another little something I've just seen that may or may not be useful to the members here (most of whom may already know, but I thought I'd share anyway).

https://education.github.com/pack

Given the number of people on here who say "I'm learning" or "I want to learn", I saw this and thought I'd post it. Sorry if a repost or advertising or otherwise not really acceptable, but might be of use to someone.

https://deals.gdgt.com/sales/...

What the actual fuck? Person (or people!) who devised this password policy, you are an idiot (or idiots - all of you). You are stupid and insane and have no idea about security or user experience.

I don't profess to know the whole story, but what is it with the (what seems to me to be) overly-fragile, cry-bully mentality of the Node.js community and its various branches? The current mess is not the first time strongly opinioned, overly zealous loud-mouths have driven the ship.

Throughout the history of time, teams/groups of people have been made up of different characters. Some are nice, some aren't really and everyone has varied characteristics. There seems to be a drive to completely flatten the behaviour, beliefs and attitudes of any sort of gathering, and it makes me so mad. Some people are so obsessed with their ideas of equality, diversity, inclusivity and safe spaces that they can't see how negative and discriminating those attitudes actually are.

I fully accept that certain behaviours should not be tolerated and should be called out. And communities and societies will organically decide what those are.

But when you raise an issue, approach it like grown up and thrash it out to a resolution - don't throw your toys out of the pram and put on a real public show, targeting and scapegoating other individuals when you don't get your way! This is childish and narcissistic. If this is your only course of action, you should realise you haven't a strong argument.

I've ranted here before about how the mainly social media discussions on any subject drive us all to extreme ends. And this is just another example. It's wrong and narrow minded and not remotely progressive - the opposite of what those who should loudest claim to be.

Proper rant tonight... I was getting an upgrade to my home entertainment today. It needed an engineer visit. What a useless clown he turned out to be.

2 hrs after arriving, he left and things weren't working remotely right at all. But it was Saturday and he was off the clock so I had to suck it up. No option to back out either - it was all activated and I had to accept it.

He spent most of the time arguing with me about my home network was set up and how it was wrong and how it was important for the overall system to work. Being a geek and having done research, I couldn't understand this - that wasn't how it was meant to be, I knew. I accept my home wiring is a bit odd, but I've had a working system for years because it's all necessary.

After all the faffing about and purchase of some new powerline units (which I accept I needed anyway but where unrelated to this set up), looking more into it myself, it is now up and running correctly.

I am thoroughly pissed at the ineptitude of the engineer. He clearly doesn't understand how the system works. He doesn't understand how powerline works and how it's a life saver for people with awkwardly shaped houses or thick walls where Wi-Fi is useless. If he had, we would have had far fewer issues and I wouldn't have had the stress of thinking I'd killed our home entertainment and internet and there was nothing I could do about it.

I don't blame the provider (besides them clearly not providing adequate training). But this was arrogant uselessness. At least I had the knowledge to understand how it was meant to work and get it sorted myself.

Maybe it could be a useful sideline job if I get fed up with developing.

I'd been considering buying a stress ball, but never quite got round to it (don't see myself contributing a 500+ worthy rant). Then I saw this and now I have a dilemma. If only I had a stress ball to squeeze while I decide...

It takes a satire news site to make this point.

http://waterfordwhispersnews.com/20...

The sooner the UK Brexits, the sooner we can get rid of these stupid EU mandated warnings!!

Started vacation today and arrived at our glorious holiday lodge. It is lovely. All very modern and funky. And it has a lovely cooker hob with touch controls... ooooo!!

And I swear I've never seen anything as complicated and confusing in all my life. It's a fucking cooker!! But it has no knobs you turn to set how hot a fucking cooking ring is. This thing has 2 pages of instructions to fucking turn it on - and they don't bloody help!! Want a ring on at heat 6? That's 9 fucking touches - but not like a smartphone touch, each a fucking 1sec+ touch!!

UX is about conventions and thinking of your users. The people who designed this obviously think they're visionaries and pioneers when everyone who actually uses their gear just curses them up and down for being stupid. Cookers are cookers and everybody knows how they work and how they use them?!?!

Holy shit designers, stop being too fucking clever for yours and everyone else's good!!

You can tell how nice and relaxed I am having started my vacation today... and read the rest of my rants to see how little I swear. But, by God, this thing is ridiculous. I blame the influence of @Letmecode for my reaction!! 😂

What is it with the endless "algo strikes again" rants? Isn't it... just... working?

Disclaimer: I should know what I'm doing but I don't. 😢

I'm a very experienced full stack dev (15+ years), but I don't know the more modern JS frameworks. I'm trying to learn React and I have a little project I'd like to do.

I have database (in both SQLite form and JSON form). I'd like to read from it, parse it and run various displays in a shared hosting environment (that doesn't have node). So webpack. And either an API to get the data or a React compatible SQL component.

But dagnamit, I cannot find a tutorial or example with this kind of set up and I can't figure it out. What packages do I need and what kind of config?

I genuinely thought this would be a traditional and simple architecture but I'm obviously mistaken. And I'm about to turn in my developer card because I'm clearly a stupid twonk.

Has anyone done this? Do you know of any tutorials or examples of this kind of thing? Is there somewhere else I should ask this question? Thanks anyway...

Worst legacy experience...

Called in by a client who had had a pen test on their website and it showed up many, many security holes. I was tasked with coming in and implementing the required fixes.

Site turned out to be Classic ASP built on an MS Access database. Due to the nature of the client, everything had to be done on their premises (kind of ironic but there you go). So I'm on-site trying to get access to code and server. My contact was *never* at her desk to approve anything. IT staff "worked" 11am to 3pm on a long day. The code itself was shite beyond belief.

The site was full of forms with no input validation, origin validation and no SQL injection checks. Sensitive data stored in plain text in cookies. Technical errors displayed on certain pages revealing site structure and even DB table names. Server configured to allow directory listing in file stores so that the public could see/access whatever they liked without any permission or authentication checks. I swear this was written by the child of some staff member. No company would have had the balls to charge for this.

Took me about 8 weeks to make and deploy the changes to client's satisfaction. Could have done it in 2 with some support from the actual people I was suppose to be helping!! But it was their money (well, my money as they were government funded!).

Just went to book something online. About to click the "Pay" button and noticed the page wasn't secure. Who the hell, in 2017, captures credit card details via insecure 'http'??? And 'https' worked on the home page but not the payment page!! Backed out of that, messaged them and we'll see if anything comes of it.

Let me see his code and I'll tell you whether he learned or not!!

Debugging like a boss...

Support devRant feature - is it geographically restricted? Every time I try to enable it (like, every time over various days from various networks/places), I get an error...

I need to create a very simple, 2 page website with a simple form on the first page which is processed and a results page shown. It will run on a shared hosting platform.

I've created a few of these over the years for the same client and will have more to do. They started as .NET WebForms (yes, that long ago!) and morphed into more client-side driven but not particularly flexible.

So, is there a front-end framework which will simplify my life and continue to generate accessible, cross-platform output, or would such a choice be overkill and I should keep spitting out reasonable HTML?

Minimise (or if possible, eliminate) free-text interaction in deployment scripts. You *will* type in the wrong value.

Most intense day for me was at the very start of my career. Internship... went with product manager to client's office while PM installed new test version of our product for on-site integration testing. Shortly after deploy, client manager came over to ask why production had gone down...

Turns out that manually typing DB name as part of deployment script is not, erm, risk free. PM entered production DB name and took out a very busy call centre for a few hours. Agents in tears, customers raging on phones, etc! After we restored and got everything back up and running, he reached me the keyboard and said "You're doing it this time."

My attempt was problem free, thankfully. Earned many brownie points that day.

What one piece of advice would you give to a developer starting their career?

First job was as a student, but paid, which was great! Started with some training which taught me more about programming in 7 weeks than I'd learned in 4 years at school/college. Started with some proprietary systems, then moved on to proper web dev/browser based apps using tech you're all far too young to remember. I was instantly at home. So became my career (with lots of full stack experience picked up along the way).

About 3 months in, my team lead said to me (the n00b student) "I'd ask and trust you to do things now that I wouldn't ask people who've worked here for years to do." Meant the world to me... (thanks DH!)

At the end of my time as a student I was invited straight back full time.

When you work with a client who will only use Fireworks for graphics but you only have one dying old machine with a licensed copy and Adobe won't give you keys even though you bought them years ago (and can prove it!) and you can't buy new keys because they don't sell them and even if we had them we can't download it any more.

WTF Adobe!! It's a dead product! We don't want support or anything. Just give us the feckin' keys and the bloody installer!!

I feel the need to take a different approach to this week's rant. I think someone needs to defend teachers, for a number of reasons. Obviously this is probably out of place on devRant but it is a kind of rant against those who think they know everything and have nothing to learn.

1) Teachers are not industry specialists. They do not spend their lives keeping on top of the latest framework or project management methodology or code management tool. They are educators and that brings its own set of out of hours challenges and training exercises.

2) They have a course to teach and have probably used the same one for quite some time. Years probably. They (should) teach the fundamentals of programming not a particular language or syntax or quirk. Those fundamentals don't really change. Logic, problem solving, precision, structures, etc.

3) They need to provide a course which will cater for different skill levels. There are always class members who are bored because it's too easy and others who struggle in any subject.

4) Teaching is like any profession - there are really, really good ones, OK ones and there are shit ones.

5) They have probably never developed a detailed project or solution in their lives. They don't know the pitfalls and challenges that teams face in this kind of environment. Should they - maybe. But the probably don't.

I think that's all... I'm not a teacher (although I did fancy the idea at a time) but just feel they get a rough ride sometimes (particularly on here).

When you're writing a function to check whether a record exists before you create it, make you sure check *before* you create it!!

Spent ages debugging something earlier which was always returning a hit even though I wasn't expecting it but then I realised the record was being added before I ran my check, therefore always said it was found.

Sometimes I'm an idiot.

Being asked (or more accurately made!) to travel Mon-Fri (i.e. staying away from home) for at least 2 months to a customer's site to work on a completely insane project that had no design, formal requirements, preparation or support. It was just a "friendly side project" 2 friendly managers concocted.

After some research, the project wasn't actually technically possible, but the customer wanted it so I had to try to find a solution.

The complication for me was that my wife was almost 8 months pregnant with our first kid and I made it clear I really wanted to be at home. Was left to feel I had little choice but to go. Project runs over but damnit I'm taking my 3 weeks parental leave entitlement.

Day before I'm due to go back to work, I get an email saying "You'll be travelling tomorrow for the next few weeks". At that point, I replied with the most angry work email I've ever sent and threatened that if that was the case I wouldn't be back. Plans were changed.

I ended up leaving within a couple of months anyway.

"You must use FrontPage"

Found this gem in a comment from a couple of years previously:

// This shouldn't be here - needs moved to a separate handler. Likely to cause all sorts of weird bugs

No shit, Sherlock! Like the one I'm bloody trying to make sense of now!

I think it's safe to assume from the #wk27 posts that all enterprise software is pure dung... It might also be worth noting that what some people consider crap might just be misconfigured!! 😝

Over the years I've written in C, Java, .NET, SQL, php and JS. Past year has been exclusively JS. Had to pick up some C# a couple of days ago and DAMN!! Forgot everything!! Putting single quotes for strings and using === everywhere!! Am I just getting old or do others struggle to switch back to a language that's not their primary one any more?