Everything works fine locally and at *herokuapp.com. Push to prod on release day and random bits of the HTML starts missing. Goes to senior developers, everyone scratches their heads. Finally inspect missing element.

Turnes out optimizely was still running an experiment in the background adding display:none to different HTML elements.

Fuck Optimizely.

Not because the software/service itself is inherently bad, or because I don't see any value in A/B testing.

It's because every company which starts using quantitative user research, stops using qualitative user research.

Suddenly it's all about being data driven.

Which means you end up with a website with bright red blinking BUY buttons, labels which tell you that you must convert to the brand cult within 30 seconds or someone else will steal away the limited supply, and email campaigns which promise free heroin with every order.

For long term brand loyalty you need a holistic, polished experience, which requires a vision based on aesthetics and gut feelings -- not hard data.

A/B testing, when used as some kind of holy grail, causes product fragmentation. There's a strong bias towards immediate conversions while long term churn is underrepresented.

The result of an A/B test is never "well, our sales increased since we started offering free heroin with every sale, but all of our clients die after 6 months so our yearly revenue is down -- so maybe we should offer free LSD instead"

Hot tip: if you are a company, don’t ever ever ever ever spend your money on an Optimizely academy course. They have the worst course material I have ever seen in my life, and the material is outdated by several years from exercise to exercise. And the training videos are literally just a recording of a live class with a couple students. They should pay me to sit through this fucking shitshow. It is not worth a single cent, but guess how much they charge for the course and certification?!?! $2300 😱🫣😂. It’s so fucking bad I want to kill myself. Whoever decided to pour as little effort into this as possible over at Optimizely, I hereby curse you to a 2300 painful deaths and I hope someone shoves a ice cold rod up your ass to wake you up. *slams keyboard*

How the fuck would u be so fucking stupid enough to create a site with EPiServer/Optimizely and it’s piece of shit organization, community, developers, etc… is this some sort of fresh hell I have been banished to? Why am I cursed with working with this horrible, slimy, awful platform. It’s giving me an aneurysm just fucking thinking about how shitty this ecosystem is setup. Someone needs to burn it. Burn it all to the fucking ground, I have had enough and it is a stain on our society.

EPiServer Forms is probably the worst fucking thing to ever exist in terms of Nuget packages. I would rather shove an entire daikon radish up my asshole than trying to debug the stupid fucking mystery that code is. Wanna tie into the JavaScript events to handle payment validation? Go fuck yourself - u can’t use any external functionality.

Howdy, guess who's back motherfuckers?

Which one of you developed this utter piece of shit called Optimizely/EpiServer? We need to talk.

Optimizely/Episerver is such a fucking piece of shit I want to fucking kill everyone who made this god forsaken mound of rotting garbage. I don’t even know what the history of it is because the documentation is convoluted as shit and poorly written. Whenever I Google something about it, the top answers are fucking 10+ years old and have not a god damn thing to do with the original problem. But guess what, they still use the same fucking useless error messages as they did 10+ years ago. Fucking idiots. The community for it doesn’t help at all. It’s fucking impossible to learn anything about it. Even the experts in this don’t have any idea what they are doing. Fuck this shit. ANYTHING that’s related in any way to Microsoft, or even mentions Microsoft, can suck my cock. FUCKKKKKKKKK.