I like backend development because I love how rewarding it feels to write systems that are consumed by multiple frontends. It always feels like a lot is at stake and small optimization can make a lot of user experiences faster.

To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.

All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.

The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.

Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.

So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.

Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?

The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.

But... the ocean of chaos will never end.

You must learn to swim in it.

All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.

Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.

So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.

You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.

You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.

There is no such thing as clean code.

There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".

Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.

You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.

You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:

"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".

Me talking to a recruiter (even though I am not looking for a job)

Me: If I walk into an interview, and they ask me to reverse a binary tree for a frontend Reac or Vue position or something along those lines, I will end the call and/or walk away from it.

Him: I get similar feelings from other programmers, I don't quite understand why the notion is as common

Me: Because it is fucking useless, it servers no purpose to a dev to know about that when building frontends with react, I link my github profile, for which they can find advanced backend-frontend related projects, compiler and interpreter projects, plus the title I currently have at my workplace and a bunch of other shit, I am not interviewing for a teaching position at an institute, but an actual place of work, for which if they want to know about DS and A they can review my profile which has a repo of DS and A in about 5 different languages including plain C++. I do not need to be offended by such notions since they server no purpose on the frontend, and neither do other devs. If anything it should be a casual conversation during the interview, not a basis for employment.

Recruiter: .........thank you for explaining this to me, I am sure I can bring it up to the agencies doing the reviews and interviews. Are you still interested?

Me: Are they going to give me a coding assignment for a project or a bs question like what I mentioned?

Him: I don't know

Me: then I am not interested

I'm a backender, Linuxer (servers + cli included) and security person.

For some projects I do need to write my own frontends and that, in general, IS my worst css experience.

HTML is quite manageable but CSS, except for the basics, is fucking Chinese to me.

So yeah, about every goddamn project that includes ME having to do frontend stuff is/has been the worst HTML/CSS experience.

Gf: "Why are you such a typist"

Me: "I promise not to buy more keyboards with blue switches..."

Gf: "No, I mean like being racist or sexist, but you discriminate types"

Me: "Uhhh"

Gf: "You are always bitching about how awful date/time types are, with timezones, leap seconds and daylight savings"

Me: Face turns pale, thousand yard stare, vietnam-flashback to when I was writing a calendar scheduling/meeting/matching tool which used 3 databases, with timestamps in different formats, and web frontends for people in offices around the world.

Me, with a soft broken voice: "So?"

Gf: "You've been working on that palette tool this week, and you keep talking about how interesting all these colorspaces, white balances and conversion formulas are"

Me: 🤔

I had a coworker that was an Air Force pilot (99% certain he was telling the truth as I was working for a government contractor and he had security clearance so I'd be a little surprised if he fooled HR and our whole team). Thing is... He genuinely believed the earth is flat. Whenever anybody would ask "haven't you seen the curvature of the earth? Like... More than once?" He'd respond with "yes I have, what's your point?". Uh.... Okay.

Didn't help that he also was convinced cpp is the only language you ever need for any project. Like, "what if instead of building a web API and two separate native mobile app frontends (Swift/Java)... We instead build our own proprietary C++ framework that somehow runs on IOS and Android and we can also use it for our Backend instead of .Net?"

I'm not saying I love Java or Swift or that at some point I haven't thought about why we can't just use cpp in both, but you're supposed to grow out of that kind of thinking. I think every noobie or college students thinks "oh there's got to be a way". But at some point in your career you realize even if you could, it wouldn't be any easier to use and the performance gain would crazy small compared to amount of effort and you'd be playing catch up with both IOS/Android forever.

But no matter how many times we'd shoot it down, he'd keep bringing it up. And he wasn't straight out of school or something. He had like 20 years of programming experience.

I don't have a lot of memorable co-workers that were positive but honestly I think that's because usually if they're good at what they do I don't have to interact with them a bunch or spend time thinking "Jesus what am I going to have to fix next from this guy". I definitely have worked with good/great programmers, they just don't stand out as much as the shitty ones.

Karma Story

2 motherfuckers that were absolute shit as managers applied for a position for the web tech manager at my institution. I was the one that Xed both their applications.

Now, I didn't do it out of pettiness, I did it because both of these assholes lied about their positions, responsibilities and knowledge.
One of them washed his hands on a project stating that he had no knowledge of web development, but stated on his resume that he was working as a web dev at the time(in node and asp.net) as well as angular frontends <--- fking bullshit

The other stated that he has been coding all his life. Yeah shitbag, that is why you were selling phones at a company and when i mentioned to you that i studied comp sci you said that it sounds interesting but you had no idea what development is or how computers even work.

There were many. Might say fuck it and just take the position for myself. Shit got funny af and it is amazing how being a shit person and a liar will get back to you and bite you in the ass.

Fuck them

Our company maneuvered themselves into a classic technical debt situation with a project of a second team of devs.

They then left, signing a maintenance contract and now barely work on the project for exorbitant amounts of money.

Of course management got the idea to hand off the project to the first team, i.e. our team, even though we are not experts in that field and not familiar with the tech stack.

So after some time they have asked for estimates on when we think we are able to implement new features for the project and whom we need to hire to do so. They estimates returned are in the magnitude of years, even with specialists and reality is currently hitting management hard.

Code is undocumented, there are several databases, several frontends and (sometimes) interfaces between these which are all heavily woven into one another. A build is impossible, because only the previous devs had a working setup on their machines, as over time packages were not updated and they just added local changes to keep going. A lot of shit does not conform to any practices, it's just, "ohh yeah, you have to go into that file and delete that line and then in that other file change that hardcoded credential". A core platform is end of life and can be broken completely by one of the many frameworks it uses. In short, all knowledge is stowed away in the head of those devs and the codebase is a technical-debt-ridden pile of garbage.

Frankly I am not even sure whom I am more mad at. Management has fucked up hard. They let people go until "they reached a critical mass" of crucial employees. Only they were at critical mass when they started making the jobs for team 2 unappealing and did not realize that - because how could they, they are not qualified to judge who is crucial.

However the dev team behaved also like shitbags. They managed the whole project for years now and they a) actively excluded other devs from their project even though it was required by management, b) left the codebase in a catastrophic state and mentioned, "well we were always stuffed with work, there was no time for maintenance and documentation".

Hey assholes. You were the managers on that project. Upper management has no qualification to understand technical debt. They kept asking for features and you kept saying yes and hastily slapped them into the codebase, instead of giving proper time estimates which account for code quality, tests, reviews and documentation.

In the end team #2 was treated badly, so I kinda get their side. But up until the management change, which is relatively recent, they had a fantastic management who absolutely had let them take the time to account for quality when delivering features - and yet the code base looks like a river of diarrhea.

Frankly, fuck those guys.

Our management and our PM remain great and the team is amazing. A couple of days a week we are now looking at this horrible mess of a codebase and try to decide of whom to hire in order to help make it any less broken. At least it seems management accepted this reality, because they now have hired personnel qualified to understand technical details and because we did a technical analysis to provide those details.

Let's see how this whole thing goes.

Wish all JS frontends were built with webpack and ES6 and Vue. That's the world I dream of 😙

We started a project in January for which I was the sole developer, to automate tedious interaction with a vendor's ticketing system. We have a storage environment with about 400,000 commodity disks attached(for this vendor-- there are other vendors too), in sites around the US and Canada. With a weekly failure rate of about 0.0005%, that means about 200 disks a week need to be replaced.

This work-- hardware investigation through storage appliance frontends, internal ticket creation, external ticket creation, watching the external ticket for updates to include in our internal ticket --was all manual, and for around 200 issues a week, it was done by one guy for two years. He was hopelessly behind. This is all automated now, and this morning, I pushed this automation from dev/test to production.

It feels great to see your work helping people around you.

I might be fucked up, but I have a tendency to gravitate towards the shit that everyone else dislikes for the sake of knowing if their bias against is actually because shit is truly fucked up or if shit is legit plain WRONG.

From all technologies that I have worked with professionally I can count:

Java(currently in the form of old JSP services for an "enterprise level application")

Java for Android development - i was the lead engineer for a mobile project

Swift with IOS dev, same gig as the above.

C++ for Android development in the form of OpenCV with Java as well.

Javascript in all possible forms, basic input validation, ajax services, jquery datatables, jquery animations and builders.

Css/sass heavily

Clojure for an ldap active directory application

Python for glue scripts

Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript

VB Net forms

C# For ASP.NET MVC

Bootstrap for multiple intranet frontends

Node+Express for a logistics warehouse management tool

Ruby on Rails freelancing small gigs

Php in all ways possible from complete standalone php apps to Laravel and just php+composer apps aaaaall the way to wordpress

Django consulting

I have found that the one that I dislike the most is wordpress. And the one that I like working with the most is Node. Don't know why, i just do really fucking like messing around with Javascript, the language has changed a fuckload throughout the years and continues to increase and change. It was my first scripting language following a stint in me trying to learn cpp way when i was starting and royally FAILING

Never really got the hate for it, even when I used JScript with classic ASP i just enjoy working with Javascript a lil too much. And from all the above mentioned stacks safe from Php is the one, or one of the ones in which i don't royally suck :V

I really wish i was a good designer. Id love to put together attractive frontends with cool and unique ideas.

I also wish i wasnt colorblind.

I promised myself not to fuck too much with new JS frontends. But Sveltes premise seems interesting enough to check it out and the concept of reactive blocks of code in JS sure is interesting.

This language keeps evolving as well as its tooling. I think shit is pretty amazing.

It is incredible how Google got big with good webdesign and now manages to build the shittiest frontends.

It's not enough that YouTube is super slow and breaks every other time I use the "back" button in the browser. When it only forgot my language & theme settings every couple of months that was still too high quality for Google's dogshit standards, so now they made another downgrade: Whenever I set another language it immediately resets it to the language Google thinks I should speak, and at the same time resets the region to where Google thinks I live. Oh, and I have to disable autoplay for every video individually now cause who the fuck uses cookies nowadays right?

Do they also change the language if I travel to another country because those fucks never leave Silicon Valley and can't comprehend that concept?

Google is the Microsoft of web design.

I've been out of the loop with websites and frontends for a while. Now, is it me or is it just overengineered to make a static website that's not a blog these days?

I mean, I need to make a landing page. 6 sections + footer. And I don't want to end up with a 600+ lines html file. With tailwind possibly.

JEKYLL
I've used it a few times, and after 3 years I still get some weird error when installing everything. Maybe it's trivial, but I know shit about ruby. Plus, I don't need ruby for anything else, and the official Docker image just doesn't work, exactly like the quickstart tutorial. 3 years later, same issues.

HUGO
I like this guy but god, the docs are just unreadable, it's not compatible with tailwind 3.x (or smth) and it's been a pain to build a user-configurable homepage. Plus, it does more than half of the work by itself, Fair enough, it's supposed to be used for blogs.

ANY OTHER "JAMSTACK" BULLSHIT
Anything is either a blogging engine or delivers some crappy javascript blob from hell. I just need an html document, that weird thingie the whole World Wide Web was built upon, broken into pieces so I can keep my sanity.

Looking forward to get the fucking AWS Solutions Architect. Looking even more forward to build my farm.

Omg I have to check 2350 svn commits.

We have 2 seperated frontends, one for maintaining old UI and one for new UI which is going to production in one month. So now I have to check if any CR/bug was implemented/fixed only on old UI. Frontend2 was created last year on july. Fuck my life

I'd like to propose that we pivot the saying "there are no bad ideas" into " it's okay to have bad ideas".

Having worked with web frontends the last couple of years I can confirm with reasonable certainty that there are indeed several bad ideas, and "no bad ideas" is not a veto that will make me implement a 3d carousel calendar.

!rant

Gotta start learn react. Only two frontends in my company know react and it seems my Vue knowledge don't mean nothing... I'm kind of excited, mainly because for a long time I wanted to make mobile apps and with react native I'll be able to do so.

I remember on my first project which was Angular 1.* there was a file in the frontends repo called ShimOfShame.
The first few lines of that file was a comment apologising for its existence.
"My soul cries everytime i add a line to this file"

I wanted to show our DBA an example of a web api using .net core 3 in regards of how easy it is to create such things. The reason? he has been wanting to get back into programming after many years of just sticking to dba related stuff. The dude has talent and brains, he had worked years ago as a delphi dev and a vb6 dev and we had the same employer at one point, none of this man's apps have been faced out on account of how complete they are and easy to maintain for other devs was after he left. Regardless of the ancient tech stacl, the man shows ample promise and well.

Thing is, the apps I make on the Microsoft stack usually tend to C#, and my frontends are using TS, so I am more on the curlt bracket side of things and he said he was to convert my app(very basic crud example, but with auth, authorization and everything in between to plug into the frontend) to VB.NET. I thought it wouldn't be that much of a problem but apparently microsoft does not hold templates for webapi for vb.net

I thought it was shitty. VB gave Microsoft a lot of developer market back in the VB6 days, and even though I really love c# I see no reason why they would just say fuck you like that to vb.net. Shit still polls pretty high in terms of dev popularity and you can apply the same design ideas to VB without much effort.

I just think this is very shitty from Microsoft's part. Much like how Apple is forcing people to adapt to Swift when there is a huge amount of obj c out there.

I dislike when companies shift focus on tech stacks like that.

Alright, I need an advice.

I have legacy Angular client. It’s impossible to refactor it. The only real option is to rewrite everything from scratch, however, while the team does it, it needs to be accessible to our clients.

The approach I am thinking of is making micro-frontends out of original client and rewriting each of them (in React, Vue, don’t know yet.)

Anyone has experience with that? I would appreciate any advice or suggestion.

I tried Appgyver over christmas, since it promised easy front-end (no-)coding I was looking forward to getting rudimentary frontends done faster.
Well, the first real project that I wanted to start didn't compile anymore (internal error from the service), the page told me to reload and try again.
It failed again... And again.
Fine with me, I only spent 10 minutes on the project at this point.

I then searched for the bugreporting page and found it. The sad thing is that when I wanted to open a ticket the server crashed. It didn't even return a HTTP error, just a JSON saying there is a error and a GUID.

I have to say, if a Dev decided to have holidays without new issues that's one way of getting that done.

I don’t know if they really don’t want Sass or if they’re just scared to try it.

Not all new techs are horrible.

Hope one day they will realize that using CSS preprocessors is way better. And it’s not that as complicated as it sounds. Jesus Christ.

@ pro-CSS frontends, any thoughts?