A decade ago 800x600 was pretty much the standard resolution for devices and 5 sec response time was considered fast. Animations were minimal and websites were easier to read. Programmers debated around topics like which loop runs faster, i++ or ++i, while vs doWhile and so on. In general, we were closer to understanding what happens behind the browser curtain and how code needs to be organized to make it more maintainable.

Today the level of abstraction is much higher. I don't think devs can contemplate on the finer aspects of programming efficiency; they'd rather rely on a code library to do all the grunt work. With the explosion of devices and platforms, the focus has shifted from programming to assembling. Programmers need to know their tools first, then write code. The tool is expected to work well with a millisecond response time, not the programmer's code.

Moving forward, I think programming would be more about building higher abstraction utilities/libraries that are integrated by other tools, which is already happening. Marketing an App would become more important than the actual skill needed to develop it.

A bit far-fetched, but I think the future programmer would be a lot like a stock market analyst who has a bunch of windows in front, just observing data or algorithm patterns created by an AI engine and cherry-picking a specific combination of modules that might make the next big sensational app.

I wish all open source desktop applications had the same combination of expert features and polish as Blender.

The state of FOSS applications for creating diagrams, DB management & ERD, drawing SVGs, editing video, slideshow presentations, document processing, etc -- Yeah just all of it seems to be either stuck in some 90's UX paradigm, or it's a basic-as-fuck Electron app with 12 buttons for toddlers.

I know... I know... it's FOSS, can't be entitled.

But there's a part of me that really wants to be.

Fuck it, I'm just going to be entitled.

FUCK YOU LAZY FOSS DEVS, GET YOUR FUCKING SHIT TOGETHER AND MAKE SOME MODERN APPS. THROW YOUR GTK TOOLKIT BULLSHIT IN THE TRASH, GO CHOKE ON YOUR RETARDED WINDOWS-95 THEMED TOOLBARS, AND START MOTHERFUCKING COMPETING. YOU'RE BEING SURPASSED BY VENDOR LOCKED $50/MONTH CLOUD ABOMINATIONS MADE FOR COKE SNORTING DIMWITS. DON'T GIVE ME THAT "BUT PEOPLE WORK ON IT FOR FREE" CRAP, IF BLENDER CAN MAKE A GREAT COMPETING PRODUCT THEN SO CAN YOU.

Ah, completely unjustified and unfair.

But it still feels really, REALLY great to get it off my chest.

Now that I have descended from my soapbox, I'll go drag my useless developer ass over to the nearest FOSS project and see how I can contribute to a slightly less depressing future.

I used to work for a company that had a main website and a lightweight app. LW app was distributed to partners and added to other sites using an iframe.

Someone decided a requirement was to retain the shopping cart for anonymous users. Some dev thought the best way to do that was to issue auth cookies to anonymous users.

The auth cookie issued by the LW app was actually for the main site. A few users for LW app decided to just come to main site to make a purchase. Since they already had an auth cookie (issued from LW app), they were never prompted to log in, create an account, or use guest checkout on the main site. They were still able to complete their order and we had their shipping address, but we didn’t have their email address so we couldn’t contact them about their order.

Customer service had no way to email customers if something went out of stock or if there was a product recall. CS would have to call these customers and ask for email addresses. Good luck getting anyone to answer or return a call nowadays. Customers were asking where their confirmation email was. The admin website was polluted with “users” that had the placeholder email for non-logged in users.

This happened because of a combination of an understaffed and overextended engineering department. Of course when something goes bad it’s going to be bad.

So I just got asked for a quote for developing an app for a client's friend. He wanted an app that requires me to build let's just say a combination of what you see on uber with the live tracking of your uber driver, seeing all cars around your location and determining the closest one (It wasn't necessarily cars) plus profiles and another app for another set of users (I can easily make this one and determine the logged in user and in turn tailor the features for that user but they wanted two). An admin portal also was included and I had to do various integrations with Google maps. In app purchases was also necessary. Logs as the app has to keep track of all activities basically. A wallet feature was also to be implemented, scheduling, rating and complains section was also something requested and finally a mini accounting system was also to be developed. I was going to do this singlehandly as a freelancer. Obviously this is a lot of work. I also gave them a timeline of about 3 months for development. Which meant I was going to be putting all my time into developing this. Front end and backend for the app and front-end and backend for the server and database architecture. I charged them $10,000 not only for the work but also because they were going to be making money off of the app. They go "wow and why does it cost so much"...Judging from their reactions I don't think they will move further with this with me because of costs...😂 I can't even begin to wonder why they think that isn't a fair price. I have learnt from previous work before that you always state a cost for which you are absolutely sure you would want to work for else you would start doing the work and once you see how little you are being paid for so much work you end up hating the work and completing it ends up being a difficult task.

One of my greatest personal challenges has always been to try and balance "good enough asap" and "but I know how to do this better if I spend a few more days on it". I like to think I've gotten better at it; Leaving things be if they are to spec and keeping my implementations consistent with existing work even if I disagree with it being ideal.

Which makes this new project we're taking over my trial of fire. The combination of the codebase - a Vue app from a previous rant where Vue is mostly used as a callback function to alter the dom using the document api in plain js - and the expectation for us to implement new features and minor tweaks to a user base of literally 4 people is like a charicature of the type of work I struggle with.

Even writing all this I'm evaluating if I'd be able to remake it all from scratch fast enough to sneak it in without anyone noticing.

It's an uh, "opportunity" for me to learn how to handle these situations, I suppose. Have mercy.

I really want to develop a mobile app that chooses a random combination of clothing and keeps track of the times I've used it, warning me when It's time wash them. Already decided that I want to try weex+vuejs, just need to be in the mood to start.

Project was based on Ionic3 with angular and SCSS.

Ionic has an SCSS array with colours that generates countless CSS classes for each combination of color-component.

Smh I managed to reduce the amount of colours in that array and reduced the overall size of the final CSS by 48% (from ~8MB to 4.1MB)

Of course the overall app had no performance increase BC the problem is the main.js file which is about 12MB with no lazy load

BIG QUESTION TIME:
I want to start a small web-dev project. Basically a website with different gigs like a time tracking app. Maybe extend it in the future with other apps.
First I thought of starting with a CMS (I am quite good with Joomla!) but realized it may too soon get to its' limits and personalized extensions are quite a pain with CMS.
So I had this genius idea of working on frontend using ReactNative giving the opportunity to build for mobile in the same time and backend with Python (maybe Django framework).
Here are my questions:
1) Could this be a good solution or combination? (Considering it is more of a fun project)
2) Does anyone know a good tutorial for ReactNative besides the facebook github tutorial?

Been working on pen testing an old ass web app written in a combination of 4 languages with the primary being asp, serious question for the older generation was concatenating SQL statements ever best practice or are the mob that wrote this just useless?

Hello, trying to find the best combination for a little website/app without a lot of functionalities. For now I was projecting on Materialize + Angular and I'm looking for a PHP framework because I want to get some experience. What do you suggest ?

Any good app colors combination?

ASAP plz!

I want to start learning to write a simple game server emulator in C#. The game works LAN but it gets LAN disconnected when internet drops so some sort of keepalive is implemented. I can copy the files to another device and it works online without a login etc so there is no online authentication but as soon as internet drops the LAN game goes down to so i need to emulate the online update server or something like that to prevent that from happening. (spotted with Wireshark etc)

I don't have much experience , just created a simple tcp client/server console app but in this case I ofcrs will only need a server one in combination with custom dns. Any tips on where to start? Does someone have an example game server emulator? or update server emulator?

Last week I spent a couple of days researching how to sync a CalDAV server with any Android calendar.
I downloaded several apps, and tried to connect in many ways (without HTTPS, calendar link, user link, any combination of them, with and without www, etc.)
Today I chose an option I had been trying to avoid: downloading an app that was recommended in some places but that's no longer on Google Play Store.
Got the APK from some website that didn't look too suspicious...
website.com, username, password; and it WORKED. (This also confirmed my server was well configured)
IN A MATTER OF SECONDS. Within the next minutes I could test sending events to and fro.
WHY?
WHAT- WHY IS THERE NO ALTERNATIVE FOR SOMETHING SO TRIVIAL. This future is so dumb.
One would have thought that there was something better than a dead-simple app made for Android 4.4
I really can't believe it.

QUESTION RAILS + FRONT END, COME INSIDE AND TAKE A LOOK.
In the last months I started learning Ruby on Rails because I'd like to switch my job.
I developed few small projects from The odin project and today I was trying to implement Bootstrap inside my Rails app (simple flight booker) and I had several problems.
Chatting with other Odiners, they confirmed rails+bootstrap is not an easy combination.
Sooo here my questions:
1) what would you suggest to use with rails to create the frontend?
2) what would you suggest to use to create simple websites/landing pages? WordPress?

Thanks and regards!

could anyone help me calculating costs for AWS and Google Colab Services? I find it quite intransparent...

i would like to host 1x Python App which runs once a day or week (API call, enrichment uf JSON, JSON 2 CSV, FTP transfer). runtime is probably a few seconds, something between 1 and 5.

in AWS i created a Lambda function and for scheduling i guess i need CloudWatch. what really grind my gears is the combination of free contingent and paied service - i really don't have an overview right now, so my question here: how could i calculate it and what would be the monthly/yearly costs?

in Google Colab created a notebook and for scheduling i would need Google Cloud Scheduler. as far as i understand the hosting of the notebook is for free and the costs of cloud scheduler is $0.10 per job per project per month. 3 are for free. so 1 project, 1 job = scheduler for free?

Also, i'm open for other services such as digital ocean droplets or similar.

thx in advance for your help!

!rant
So I recently started my internship with a company that has created their own CMS for web development. They are currently looking into developing a hybid app.
I'm lucky enough to be tasked with the development of it since learning their CMS in combination with the frameworks they use would take a couple of months according to them.

Now they have their eyes set on the Cordova framework with Sencha Touch, but I'm also aware of Xamarin

Anyone on devrant who has used both and what is your opinion of the two?

It's these individually tiny annoyances in products and software that together form a huge annoyance.

For example, it's 2022 and Chromium-based web browsers still interrupt an upload when hitting CTRL+S. This is why competition is important. If there was no Firefox, the only major web browsers would, without exception, have this annoyance, since they're all based on Chrmoium.

I remember Chromium for mobile formerly locking scrolling and zooming of the currently viewed page while the next page was loading. Thankfully, this annoyance was removed.

In 2016, the Samsung camera software was updated to show a "camera has been opened via quick launch" pop-up window when both front and rear sensors of the smartphone were covered while the camera was launched by pressing the home button twice, on the camera software Samsung bundled with their custom version of Android 6. What's more, if that pointless pop-up was closed by tapping the background instead of the tiny "OK" button or not responded to within five seconds, the camera software would exit itself. Needless to say, this defeats the purpose of a quick launch. It denies quick-launching while the phone is in the pocket, and the time necessary to get the phone out could cause moments to be missed.

Another bad camera behaviour Samsung introduced with the camera software bundled with their customized Android 6 was that if it was launched again shortly after exiting or switching to stand-by mode, it would also exit itself again within a few seconds. It could be that the camera app was initially designed around Android 5.0 in 2015 and then not properly adapted to Android 6.0, and some process management behaviour of Android 6.0 causes this behaviour. But whatever causes it, it is annoying and results in moments to not be captured.

Another such annoyance is that some home screen software for smartphones only allows access to its settings by holding a blank spot not occupied by a shortcut. However, if all home screen pages are full, one either needs to create a new page if allowed by the app, or temporarily remove a shortcut to be able to access the settings.

More examples are: Forced smartphone restart when replacing the SIM card, the minimum window size being far too large in some smartphones with multi-windowing functionality, accidental triggering of burst shot mode that can't be deactivated in the camera software, only showing the estimated number of remaining photos if less than 300 and thus a late warning, transition animations that are too slow, screenshots only being captured when holding a button combination for a second rather than immediately, the terminal emulator being inaccessible for the first three minutes after the smartphone has booted, and the sound from an online advertisement video causing pain from being much louder than the playing video.

Any of these annoyances might appear minor individually, but together, they form a major burden on everyday use. Therefore, developers should eliminate annoyances, no matter how minor they might seem.

The same also applies for missing features. The individual removal of a feature might not seem like a big of a deal, but removing dozens of small features accumulates to a significant lack of functionality, undermining the sense of being able to get work done with that product or software when that feature is unexpectedly needed. Examples for a products that pruned lots of functionality from its predecessor is the Samsung Galaxy S6, and newer laptops featuring very few USB ports. Web browsers have removed lots of features as well. Some features can be retrofitted with extensions, but they rely on a third-party developer maintaining compatibility. If many minor-seeming features are removed, users will repeatedly hit "sorry, this product/software can not do that anymore" moments.