37
kevbost
6y

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

Comments
  • 1
    @g-m-f I hadn't planned on telling them so early. I came to an agreement with my new employer that I'd finish out the year and start in Feb. But both front-enders leaving was going to leave a pretty massive hole in the development team.
  • 3
    I just discovered that the html I'm working on now has a <ul> where each <li> has an ID.

    And that ul has been copy/pasted 8 times.
  • 1
    @kevbost , I feel you bro! I'm a junior front-end dev who got assigned to another junior front-end devs project after he left.

    It was a disaster of epic proportions. No helper classes, bootstrap CSS classes overridden, most everything inline and the worst is that the same styles were written multiple times in multiple other CSS files.

    Luckily, we are scraping that and moving to a new front-end for the product.
  • 2
    I code reviewed a project with senior developers that did this on another team. It’s so important to have frequent code reviews and someone that enforces best practices. Maintenance nightmare waiting to happen.
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