How does a front-end developer get away with murder?

$('body').hide();

//I'll see myself out

The right mood.....

About a year ago, I did an e-commerce for a client who wanted to sell electronic goods. It was a custom design, so the team prepared a mock-up and we showed it to the client who absolutely loved it. The specs were that he was going to sell only a few products (like 50 or so) so the website had to showcase the categories and didn't need to put a lot of products on page. Also the design had to be unique as he wanted to be different from his competitors.

A few weeks later, during the dev phase the client checks again the design and starts doubting about it. We redesign it adjusting to his oppinion. A week later he schedules a meeting where he starts complaining that the deadline is late and that the design doesn't accomplish his specs. At that meeting he tells us that he wants to sell thousands of articles since he's doing dropshipping.

We start from scratch and make a third design, which he approves after quite a lot of changes. He also asks for a dropshipping plugin which we install in its free version, when he complains about having to update manually, we answer politely that he has to purchase the paid version.

Fast forward, we deploy the website and the design has a few issues related to responsive development. We fix it quickly and the site starts working.

He also has a physical shop, however, since he's competing with big corporates like Amazon or eBay and he can't offer any difference, neither his phisical address or his on-line shop manages to be profitable.

He decides to close the business but before, he calls my PM saying that the website has "never worked" (There were a couple of people who bought with 0 issues and we tested the site countless times). And that we shouldn't have recommended a custom design because the website never worked. He also implied that we should compensate him because of that.

I've never seen my PM to tell someone to "fuck off" as fast as he did.

Google's API docs are some of the worst I've ever seen... :(

Well, I didn't know they did "HTML5 Hardware"

You should always use png instead jpg in your websites because it won't lose quality.

Me: I don't need to print the city on each row of the excel file, it already appears on the top of the document.

PM: DO IT ANYWAY! THEY'RE IDIOTS!

Not directly a dev related rant but needed to write it somewhere. (Also, long long rant, be aware).

I am currently working on a project for a client who is going to launch a new product. He wants us to create the brand and choose the logo, colours, communication... BUT before everything we have to deliver the website design.

We told him several times that the design has to be created AFTER the brand is created, however, he insisted. Then, we offered him to develop the UX/UI patterns but the colors and a few more things would be delivered after, so his 3rd party dev could make the job.

After working on the first draft, we sent it to him and he refused it, calling it "poor designed". We insisted that it was a draft for the UI which he ignored.

He asked for another design by taking as example a website from another (unrelated) company. We worked for another 2 days and delivered a more finished design, which he automatically refused again.

He called us to his office in order to provide us exactly what he wanted in every part of the site. He only gave us the home page and the product page, and ordered us to work through the weekend (Which we didn't as he is being quite petty about everything and bullying us).

We delivered this third draft and he made changes, sometimes going back to things that he refused before.

Now his 3rd party dev has things to work, but he called yesterday today telling us that the rest of the site must be before friday, date in which we will be showing him how the brand will be and what we have created. He didn't care about and demanded the designs.

I helped the designer to develop the designs of the website as I can work in Photoshop (I am mostly front web developer but can design UI) but he is now busy working on the brand and I had to make ALL the remaining designs, knowing that the client will reject them as soon as they are sent to him, since he hasn't given us any indication on how and what he wants.

We developers sometimes make futile work which will be used a few days or months or in order to provide demos, however, the time I wasted today made me get behind other deadlines, which makes me feel bad for not being able to accomplish them.

Metroid meets Calvin & Hobbes.
Do I really need to explain why?

Me: This time I'm going to use proper indexing!
Also me: z-index: 9999999999999999999

Not a dev related rant but more of a workplace rant.

I work in a business center with around 30 small offices. We share the common areas like kitchen, meeting rooms and bathroom.

Today, the cleaning lady told me to use the bathroom on the other side of the workplace because she spread bleach all over the men's restrooms floor.

The reason? Someone peed completely outside the toilet. I understand men can miss a couple of drops but a complete load? It's not the first time it has happened but I can only think he enjoys doing it.

I wish I had my own bathroom...

Why does safari hate me so much? And why does it hate everything?

I work with a designer who provides me with the mockups of the websites we do where I work. We use Figma, which is a tool similar to Sketch. I do design myself and with this tool is quite easy to mockup sites.

This designer is the worst person I've ever met in terms of document organization. He never organizes the layers of the documents, or even cares to assign names to each layer. It's not that hard with simple designs but when it comes to develop a full website it becomes awful.

I've been asking him politely to organice those documents into layers and groups for almost three years to which he never does.

I'm not able to find the proper words to ask again politely and when I do, he just puts the layers without order into a bunch of groups and calls the job done.

How hard is to be a bit emphatic to your coworkers and spend 5 minutes of your time making their life easier?

"Calvin: You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood." - Calvin & Hobbes

That moment when you restore a backup from a completely different site into production.

God bless my paranoids and multiple backups.

when you fixed a bug but then introdue many other new one's.😆😆😆

Sometimes I get amazed about how CSS allows this kind of things:

.searchandfilter ul li:nth-child(1) ul li:nth-child(1) {
display: none;
}

Calvin and Hobbes bot

Giving yourself WordPress admin capabilities via phpMyAdmin.

Do you also write long detailed emails to clients when working freelance / distance that your clients ignore and keep asking questions or inquiring things that are already answered in that email?

Sometimes I have to ask for the same thing three times in order to get an answer

!rant

Since I'm a front-end developer I've been working on PHP quite a lot lately, not only for front-end but also for back-end stuff, data conversion and image manipulation.

I've found that it's quite pleasant to work with thanks to the tons of documentation around and how straightforward it is.

I don't get how much hate it gets but I assume it's because I'm only starting to work with but damn, you could even build a car with it!

I'm beginning to understand that thing about useless meetings that can be sorted out with an email.

We don't need maintenance

So basically a client's website still works on PHP 5.4. I manage the site's content which works on an old server that takes around 5-6 seconds each time I work on the backend (WordPress).

Asked the client's sysadmin to upgrade but he doesn't want in case some old and non updated plugin would break the site. (Which did about a year ago and I had to fix it).

Feels like working on a minefileld.