One day a client sent me gifts and a sweet letter just because they loved their new website so much. I just about cried. I work in an industry where acknowledgment and thankfulness by clients are extremely rare. 😱😭

A client called me today saying their custom website I built for them is down. It just shows a 403 error now. They said they just wanted to update the prices. I asked what changes they made before it crashed. She said, "I couldn't figure out how to change the prices, so I just installed Wordpress, and now it doesn't work!" They completely deleted the entire website using cPanel and replaced it with a partially installed Wordpress.🤦

When your client has BrowserStack 😫

Manager: Why did you clear the data from the database? The client is now specifically requesting it and we don’t have it anymore!

Dev: You told me to.

Manager: Well why did you listen? It’s obvious now that that data was very important and should have been kept!

Dev: Last time you told me to do something that wasn’t a good idea I tried to explain why and told me not to question you ever again and that doing so was “disrespectful” and then threatened to have me fired. So now I just go along with what you say and let you suffer the consequences of not listening.

Manager: Well don’t do that then! It’s obviously not working very well! It’s ok to disagree with me you just have to make sure that what you think is something I agree with!

Dev: …

Dev: What do you think of the new version of the app?

Client: It’s great! We just have a couple notes of feedback we are working on compiling. We should have those to you by next week.

*Next week*

Client: We need another week to compile all of this feed back we are generating

*Another week goes by*

Client: Still working on it, it’s going to be a really thorough review when you get it though. No stone will be left unturned!

*2 weeks later*

Client: Here it is!

Attached: A word document with a single line of text “can’t nobody log in” next to a picture of the login screen with a red circle drawn around the login button

Client: Can you hurry up and action our feedback? We want to go live next week

Dev: …

A story about the shittiest boss I ever had.

We were a consulting company, I was leading the dev team. We're on the phone with a client who needs a change to the software we're maintaining for them.

Boss (mouthes at me): How long?
I (hold up 3 fingers, mouth back): 3 days
Boss (to client): You have it by tomorrow. *hangs up*
I: What the actual fuck?
Boss: You said 3 days, 3 times 8h is 24h, better order some pizza and Red Bulls for your guys.

He pulled stunts like this all the time and yet genuinely seemed surprised when I quit.

Client: *Notices a css glitch with a draggable box*

Me: *Looking through LESS*

Me: Did someone write "opac-titties" on purpose?

Co-worker: *literally falls on floor*

Dev: * In the middle of pushing to prod *

Manager: Hey btw I forgot to mention the client asked for these 5 features awhile back as a part of this update and they just reminded me about them, I haven’t created tickets yet or told anyone about this. Will these features be included in the update that’s going out today?

Dev: …

Dude
The client has a giant database with all credit and debit cards

ALL INFOS IN FUCKING PLAINTEXT
THE CARD NUMBER
THE CVV
THE EXPIRY DATE

I'M SHAKING AF

We had a mega rude, pompous asshat client come in who's company was SO disliked that someone made a hate site about them that was out ranking the client's actual site. They hired us to re-do their site and SEO to try to get back to the top results. We redid the site but we didn't improve the SEO. We also visited the hate site so many times we probably improved their ranking. 😂🖕🏻

Client: When will you give me an update on this feature

Me: In two weeks

Client: okay that’s fine

Client proceeds to call me everyday asking me for an update🤨🤨

Fuck you sir.

*In teams meeting with client*

Manager: Yes we can do all of that and it will be actioned very quickly. We will make all of these feature requests top priority. We will set aside everything we are currently working on in order to get this done!

Dev: ...Are you writing any of this down?

Manager: I don't need to, I always remember everything!

Dev: Just so you are aware, I'm not writing anything down. You're going to need to create a ticket with requirements spelled out for each one of these promises you're making otherwise they won't get actioned by the team.

Manager: I know that!

Dev: ...

*Later that day*

Ticket Title: Action client feature requests TOP PRIORITY!!!

Ticket Description: *empty*

Dev: ...

Me in 1996:

<html>
<head>
<body>My first website! I'm gonna be a website developer!</body>
</head>
</html>

Me in 2021: I have no idea what all that stuff in Node is for. All I know is that my boss says I need Node and gulp to compile this website to add a comma to a paragraph on a page for this client.

gulp

*a metric ton of errors appears*

@%#$!

At the data restaurant:
Chef: Our freezer is broken and our pots and pans are rusty. We need to refactor our kitchen.
Manager: Bring me a detailed plan on why we need each equipment, what can we do with each, three price estimates for each item from different vendors, a business case for the technical activities required and an extremely detailed timeline. Oh, and do not stop doing your job while doing all this paperwork.
Chef: ...
Boss: ...

Some time later a customer gets to the restaurant.
Waiter: This VIP wants a burguer.
Boss: Go make the burger!
Chef: Our frying pan is rusty and we do not have most of the ingredients. I told you we need to refactor our kitchen. And that I cannot work while doing that mountain of paperwork you wanted!
Boss: Let's do it like this, fix the tech mumbo jumbo just enough to make this VIP's burguer. Then we can talk about the rest.

The chef then runs to the grocery store and back and prepares to make a health hazard hurried burguer with a rusty pan.
Waiter: We got six more clients waiting.
Boss: They are hungry! Stop whatever useless nonsense you were doing and cook their requests!
Cook: Stop cooking the order of the client who got here first?
Boss: The others are urgent!
Cook: This one had said so as well, but fine. What do they want?
Waiter: Two more burgers, a new kind of modern gaseous dessert, two whole chickens and an eleven seat sofa.
Chef: Why would they even ask for a sofa?!? We are a restaurant!
Boss: They don't care about your Linux techno bullshit! They just want their orders!
Cook: Their orders make no sense!
Boss: You know nothing about the client's needs!
Cook: ...
Boss: ...

That is how I feel every time I have to deal with a boss who can't tell a PostgreSQL database from a robots.txt file.
Or everytime someone assumes we have a pristine SQL table with every single column imaginable.
Or that a couple hundred terabytes of cold storage data must be scanned entirely in a fraction of a second on a shoestring budget.
Or that years of never stored historical data can be retrieved from the limbo.
Or when I'm told that refactoring has no ROI.
Fuck data stack cluelessness.
Fuck clients that lack of basic logical skills.

A repressed memory just popped into my head:

At my former job I tried to explain a problem I was having to the tech lead. Then, without fully understanding the problem, he decided to rewrite my code that I had been working on for weeks. His code, that took him 2 days to write, went straight to master without peer review.

He introduced about 10 regressions…

Queue the client meeting where the client says “These bugs came back, and we thought they were fixed already…” (They demo the bugs)

So obviously I say “I’ll let Techlead address that one.”

He just mumbles some stuff, and goes quiet for the rest of the meeting. Finally, when the meeting was wrapping up we hear “It’s Fixed!”

Everyone was like ???

“That bug from earlier, it’s fixed, it should work now….”

Would you believe this guy decided to code during the entire meeting, clearly missing important feedback and information that would help him understand the problem. Again, pushing to master without review….

Not to mention that we were talking about 10 regressions…

Let's see here, we have:
🤡 Creepy Cackle Guy: watches videos all day and cackles like a hyena, plus constantly farts, and complains a lot. He gets everyone gassed up, no pun intended.

😤Bitchy PM: argues with you about every little thing, lies to pad her metrics while screwing the dev's metrics over. Also lies about what clients say to force launch or what she feels client should do. Rude to clients & co-workers. Runs and tattles to higher ups when people call her out on her shit. Nobody can stand her, she get's the entire office upset.

🙉Darth Vader: I don't think this one needs explaining. He breathes SO freaking loud you can hear it across the room. He also won't talk to anybody. Ever.

🤐The Non-Stop Flapper: nice person, but chats you non stop about their mundane life events, even when your status is set to busy or they know you're swamped. Asks irrelevant questions all day, every day. Heart of gold but needs to reel in the chatting.

🤬 Mr.Rage: whines about EVERYTHING. I mean everything. Has also thrown his food on me once over a joke about pizza. Wants to move up to programming but cant program.
---
So between them all, I scream on the inside daily. 🙊😫😢

My most f*cked up client process I ever had to deal with:

Digitalizing E-Mails.

I seriously asked if they were joking on me… Wasn't the case.

The process was: Get E-Mail, print out, scan, archive (digitally).

Nobody could explain to me the necessity for this bullsh*t.
"Hmm... Kinda always worked this way, I guess"
The client was a big company. My coworker aged 5x faster during that project. I swear to god, I'm not joking.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME.

I've got a client that is complaining a long sentence is on multiple lines on a mobile device.

You literally cannot make this stuff up. They are literally saying, "move this specific word up to the line above."

Boy do I hate office politics...

A client asked our company to fix perf issues on their product. Our coleagues had been picked for the job [being led by another 3rd-party, as per client's request]. Aaand they dropped the ball. The deadline is in 2 weeks, nothing is working.

Mgmt engaged us to put out the fire, but strictly at the scope the other guys were working in.

On the first day of testing we've revealed an elephant-sized perf issue that's as easy to fix as brainlessly changing 4 values in config. And that elephant is masking all the other perf issues.

We got a firm NO for config changes as that is out of the defined scope. And we're asked to continue testing.

I mean, the elephant is THAT huge that any further testing is moot - all other bottlenecks are hidden behind it. And just changing those 4 values would reduce the resources required by a magnitude of ~10.

But that's out of scope...

Client is desperate, lost and honestly asking us, pros in the field, for help.. We know how to help.. It takes 10 seconds to apply the fix..

But our mgmt forbids us to step out of the scope :/

as a result we have to pretend to be dummies hardly knowing what to do and hide the truth from the customer they so desperately want.

This is frustrating. And wrong. And imo unprofessional

Client: please be sure to let us know with enough notice if you plan on taking any time off so we can anticipate how to operate during your absence.

Me to client 4 months before vacation: "I’m going to be on vacation in July for such amount of time".
Client: OK thanks

Client 3 months before vacation: are you taking any time off this summer?
Me: yeah I’m taking such amount of time in July.
Client: Ok

Client 2 months before vacation: are you taking any time off this summer.
Me: yeah I’m taking such amount of time in July.
Client: Ok

Client a month before vacation: wait you’re taking time off this summer?
Me: yeah, in July.
Client: oh, we need to start figuring out how to manage your absence.

…client has enough time to figure things out.
——-

Client two weeks ago: we’re switching you to a another project where you’ll be replacing someone who’s leaving; and you’ll be developing alone. You’ll be working closely with our software architect. He’ll be the one who can answer all your questions.
Me totally lost on new project as it’s barely documented, sql tables are a mess with barely any relations between them and data structures are totally inconsistent. Supposed to be getting info from partner APIs but I can’t test them and don’t know exactly what data to expect. Only the software architect has the necessary knowledge.

Client a week ago: hey don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions. We can’t afford to fall behind from schedule.
Me: oh don’t worry, I’m already flooding your guy with questions.

Me last Monday to client: hey do you know what’s up with your architect? I’ve been waiting for him to answer some important questions and it’s going to be hard to move forward without him getting back to me.
Client: you’re telling us you’re not going to be able to move forward efficiently until our architect gets back from vacation in two weeks?
Me: wait, he’s on vacation?
(on the inside: when the fuck were you guys planning on telling me he would be gone???)

rant¡

Client: "Can you add some logos to the homepage?"
Me: "Sure, I've just added it, take a look at staging."
Client: "Great, we can move it to live"

** 5 days later after it being moved to live and telling them I'm going on holiday. **

Client: "EMERGENCY change logo now, we need to change x logo. These logos look crappy too. How did this happen?"

Fuck this. I'm not employed by you, you don't have any right to speak to me like that. Especially after working tirelessly for your company.

**sent email back explaining how to upload files**

Told them not to contact me unless it's technically related.

During a company wide status meeting where all product managers, architects and directors assemble:

Me: *A product architect leading a team of devs*

Directors: So are there any issues or risks you see in delivering the next build in target time for Client 1?

Me: There are too many changes in feature requirements. First they said we can use a shared NFS for storage. Now they are asking to switch over to SFTP pull mode.. blah blah..

Directors: Oh I see.. well we can support both solutions then.

Me: But the deadlin..

Directors: *ignores what I say* Will be a good marketing point for future.

Me: But there are too many regressions in integra..

Directors: *ignores what I say* We should also meet deadlines. That is the most important thing.

Me: Its not as easy as 1+1=2.. The team needs more time to..

Directors: *ignores what I say* Ok lets move on to the next point. What about Client 2?

Me:

~ Freelancer.com Week #1 ~

Project: I need someone to debug an application's code and review it. Budget 30 bucks.

Bid: I am an experienced developer I can probably review it in an hour.

client: Hi, need you to check if app is contains virus [link to scam website]

me: sure, download supposed "social Bitcoin miner" and run some AV tests...8+ positive flags for a Trojan virus.

>Me: It's a Trojan virus mate it's not legitimate😟

>Client: Can you remove the Trojan virus so that the legit not stays?

Me: Umm there is no bot mate it's just a virus 😕 I wouldn't open it outside a sandbox

Client: But here it says Bitcoin faucet bot [links shitty how-to youtube video]

Me: 😒 it's not real dude you are about to get scammed, I can test it in a VM if you. . .

Client: I opened it already, it's working

Me: 😮 r u sure?

Client: yes, can you install VM for further testing?

Me: sure, in your computer?

Client: yes

Me: just download the windows image and text me when it's done

Client: My disc is full! Only 3 gb left

Me: 😑 call me when you clean it

Client: [ offline ]

I am a machine learning engineer and my boss expects me to train an AI model that surpasses the best models out there (without training data of course) because the client wanted ‘a fully automated AI solution’.

I SENT YOU THE EXACT SIGNUP URL ON NETLIFY

I TOLD YOU STEP BY STEP WHAT WOULD HAPPEN, AND HOW I CAN TRANSFER THE SITE TO YOU

AND NOW YOU COME TO ME COMPLAINING YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND??!?!?!?!

fucking toxic clients I swear, never again

this is what I get for doing something for free for an acquaintances friend

if you can't handle ownership of your own website, maybe get the hell out of the internet

🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡🎪🤡

I'm a tech lead for a digital agency.

Digital agencies are universally known for being shite. Why? Because they typically push through sub-optimal code with very little testing over tiny deadlines for maximum profit. Maybe I've just had bad experiences but this is the 5th digital agency that I've worked at that does this bollocks.

I am currently sitting on a Teams call at 8:39pm because the fuckwit project/account managers are unable to face up to the big scary client and ask them terrifying questions like "Is this bug a blocker for the deployment?" or "We don't have enough time to fix/change these things, can we delay another day?". They just assume that A - We will work into the evening, and B - that all the issues are P1 and that we should all 'pull together' as 'team players' to get this done in time.

No, Me and my team have to work into the evening for seemingly free because these pricks can't do their jobs properly.

The funniest thing of all? When I speak to the CTO about overtime payment he tries to make me feel bad about "we don't typically pay for overtime..."

Fuck Everyone.

Time to find a new contract.

told client to buy this particular plugin.

he bought another plugin (totally useless) because it was cheaper.

like wtf.

I get a call from a client at 7 PM:
- Client: We have a business partner that just visited the website you just made for us and he said it was absolutely terrible, things are not showing up, layout is all messed up... *sends photo*. This is a VERY important new business partner and this will affect our relationship and image. Fix it NOW!
- Me: ok? I will check ... *proceed to check on several browsers and versions*
- Me: I checked on all modern browsers, cleaned cache, tried from multiple devices, it seems to be fine. What browser is your partner visiting the site from?
- Client: Idk, let me ask ...
- Client: Internet Explorer
- Me: ... that browser is not even supported anymore wth?!
- Client: We need it fixed!
- Me: ... *proceeds and hacks for IE website until 6 AM*

After creating a logo *for free* for a client who I thought was a friend, they started getting really ungrateful and demanded me to do things in a not very calm way ("DO THIS", "DO THIS RIGHT NOW") (yes, it was actually in caps). I kindly asked them to stop using the graphics while informing them that the license used didn't let me actually force them to remove it. After that, they started yelling about how "he'd have to redo all the graphics again". All he did was put the vector logo inside a raster circle and change the font. Yes, he really did convert vector graphics to raster and didn't use the originals at all. Not only this, but he also used *aliased* raster images.
He ended up using them anyway, informing me in a cheeky way after being kicked out of a group chat (which I wasn't even the moderator of). See the picture attached for how he did that, red is the client, orange is the moderator who banned him.
TL;DR: Don't do free stuff, regardless of how bad you think your skills are.

Designer sends me mock up. I send out to client to review before we start to develop. (Mock up has lorem ipsum for paragraph text in one spot) A few minutes later client calls freaking out "Why is my whole site in Spanish, I don't speak Spanish!"

I work for healthcare client project in a start up, worked two years straight without a break.

Client is very inconsiderate about developers work-life balance, he always wants to release every features yesterday.

Never had a reasonable deadline, worked late nights most of the time. No one had backbone to control this client from our side.

Its only developers team, no project management, scrum masters or anything, everything has to be taken care by Dev's.

I decided to take a week break from work.

The first day of my leave he pinged me 3 times to change an "from email" address for notification email which no one give a damn about.

I never replied or did anything. But the part of myself is dying of guilt.

Now I can't relax myself completely.

Re-thinking of my life choices atm.

I loved programming since high school, I can work on computers 24/7 without tired. That's how much I love it. Now I'm just tired of it.

If anyone who read this till here. Thank you.

Why does it take a client, who needs the bug fixed immediately, over 24 hours to respond to my query about what the problem is?

Dev: What are the requirements?

Client: I want to make my boss happy so that I get lots of money and promotions.

Dev: What does your boss want?

Client: He wants to be happy

Dev: …

Client: Also I don’t want to expend any effort or resources to achieve this

Dev: …

Worst part of being a dev?

THERE'S A NEW FREAKIN FRAMEWORK EVERYDAY.

Where are we supposed to get time to learn everything the job applications require? And even worst, have 2 years of experience with the thing?

And how about when developing a responsive dynamic website? If you are crazy, like me, and you are the kind of dev that always wants to deliver something great, customized to the needs of your client, and that doesn't smell bootstrappy, you probably can't stand too when people ask you about time guesstimates. Especially when you are the ONLY DEV in your company.

Also, our gear is EXPENSIVE.

Sorry, I guess I'm stressed... Had to bring some work home, due to the bosses deciding to deliver a project one week early to the client, without consulting me first.

Still, luckily for me, all this bullshit can't take my love of coding away.

Customer has thousands of clients - puts each client site under a subdomain of the main domain on a shared server. What happens to every single website when the server runs out of space?
But that'll never happen, right? We have lots of space. It certainly won't happen on day one of the main tech dev's holiday.
...twice...
It's fine, there's a backup, or atleast a redirect, right
.....right?

Got this rude ass email from an idiot client who thinks I'm solely responsible for figuring out how to link his 3rd party email/newsletter sign up form to his new website without any access to the account. He "doesn't have the time to research". Newsflash asshat, I'm not responsible for your 3rd party shit. Go contact their support. 🙄😑

I’m fucking done….
I don’t even know what to tell.
I’m a CTO in a startu. We have pretty good traction, my salary is about average senior dev salary (plus 10%).
I’m good financially.
But I have no more pleasure in work. Like at all.
“This API call performance is bad”
Yeah I know, maybe you shpuldn’t try to call it for 1000 objects at the time ?
“We need to reduce Azure cost”
Yeah I know, but are you ready to live with performances downgrade it will generate ?
“I don’t understand on what thing you worked past week, where is a devops card ?
Fuck you, I’m in extenuating fire mode, I don’t have time for a fucking devops card
“We should migrate whole stack to modern technology, like JavaScript”
Thank you for your imput, Blazor WAS created to avoid JabaScript
“The client has only 1.000.000 records and API doesn’t return them all”
Use fucking paging moron. And BTW, I’m adding “number of authorized requests” shortly.
I can go on and on and on for hours. But the idea is : I completely lost the will or motivation to do anything. I’m considering just to quit and go back to be Junior dev for a random company.

- Be me (Dev)
- Develop website for client that has an online payment integration.
- Notice there is no one for QA and testing.
- Try to raise voice about it but get shot down by management.
- Get order to push the project to production (because the deadline has arrived, therefore the project must be ready)
- Production performance has an error margin of 15% (customers getting their card over/under charged)
- Get blamed and flamed for everything cuz well, its all the dev's fault.

FML

Dear Client,

Being a complete and utter asshole does not make your website get developed any faster, so you can kindly fug off.

New client: can we go live next month?
Me: do you think you are our only client, or do you want to pay an extra priority fee?
New client: what?
Me: what?

*Crickets"

Sales: "There is a problem in complicated feature A, in a client system!
Dev: "What is the problem"
Sales: "I don't know exactly"
Dev: "which client system? What version is installed?"
Sales: crickets.
Dev: "Do you a Jira ticket, or an email with more details?"
Sales: "It is urgent that we fix the problem ASAP!"
Dev: "what problem"
Sales: "The problem! I talked to the VP RnD, So he can make sure you are on it!"
Dev: "What exactly do you me to fix"
Sales: "The Problem!"

!rant

boombodies here. Just wanted to thank this community for being there over the last year. This place has been an absolute haven that has welcomed my frustrations with open arms. As much as I love to bitch, it has been an absolute privilege working in this profession. After spending my 20s in a completely different field host to a vastly different set of values, learning to dev and continuing to hone my skills finally feels like home. And by home, I mean like hearth-coaxed sweat dripping from the balls of a blacksmith and the cocoa at the cottage in the middle of nowhere patiently waiting for his return. I wish each and everyone of you a treacherous and catastrophically dreadful 2023…A burden in which you all bear successfully, and emerge greater and grander than ever.

Actually can you action that by EOD instead? I already promised it to the client.

Client gets an error message. Proceeds to write the error message on a piece of paper, scans the paper in as PDF and attaches the document to an email to tech support.

Client company will only move to the cloud once they learn their competitor has, in fact, moved to the cloud. Way to compete guys.

You ain't shit.

Web Devs - How many projects do you typically work on at once? I am currently developing 24 websites at once, most of them custom (homepage). I just feel like that is absurd and my company is absolutely insane. Not to mention I'm the front line for client communication as well, pretty much the project manager AND developer. We're a huge company too, not a start up. Just feel like not having project managers for web dev industry is unprecedented except for freelance. 😡👎🏼

Client: Too many of our business processes take place on excel and paper! We need to modernize our business processes. Build an app that can do the main things we do with excel and paper in app form.

Dev (4 months later): Here it is

Client: Ok some of our users want to still use excel and paper so build the ability to print the app and export/import to excel so they can continue working the way they always have alongside our new app.

Dev: …

Follow-up on my previous rant:
My "friend" recently removed all credit to me which is breaking the license of the graphics I made for him. I have given him 7 days before I will take legal action, hope the warning scares him into either not using the graphics or adding credit back.

Boss quoted Yoda today, to my answer to if I would be able to deliver today a freaking huge project I've been working on, 14 days before the rescheduled deadline I was given, just because the client is pissed with them.

Send help..

The project we're currently working on:

- an angular codebase that's broken beyond recognition - nothing's working as it should

- user stories are estimated in hours, but estimations are treated as hard facts. Since the app is so broken, everything takes longer than usual and it's almost impossible to consider every potential hardship during refinements, therefore, we constantly need more time than we have estimated

- retrospectives (intentional plural here, since one time isn't enough) are used to discuss why we cannot manage to finish tickets within the estimations

- the design was made beforehand and is extremely inconsistent and inaccessible

- if you open a new ticket, you need to add a reason for why this ticket is needed - in addition to the ticket description..

- The moment you move a ticket to QA, the "Scrum Master" breathes down your neck, shoving new tickets in your face. Despite having to finish up the other two you're still working on

- multiple teams are working on the application, but - of course - communication is overrated.

I could go on, but I'm too tired..
We were supposed to help the client for a couple of months - we're close to a year now and still nowhere near done.

Client: can you filter boats by location?
Me: Let me see... As you know, there are three remote systems that feed data into your database. I'd have to make a connection between the location records. But I can't rely on coordinates, name, ID or anything else. You'd have to manually create those links for me by remote systems records IDs. Telling me that record XY from system A is identical to record YX from system B, etc...
Client: How many records are we talking about?
Me: 504.

Three days later...

Client: Got it, is that enough for you in excel?
Me: Let me see... Very nice work, I can work with that.
Client: I almost died on it!

An hour later...

Me: Got it, test it and let's run it on the production version.
Client: It works beautifully.

A minute later...

Can we filter the ships by ports?
Me: Let me see... Yes, it's theoretically possible, but it's the same situation as with places...
Client: How many records are we talking about?
Me: 12,647.

Skype relayed to me the sound of something heavy falling, something grunting. Something dying.

I'm glad I handed in my notice. So long, client-database-update.xlsx. I will never again have to suffer your absurd inconsistencies

client: I don't want our stuff in git, it's the single point of failure that ruins everything.

me: (weeps)

The never ending struggle between my need to do things the right way and the way client wants them

*About to start an important call with the client*

Neighborhood dogs: "Now is a good time for us to start barking for no reason"

Coming back here after years to rant about... myself.
TLDR: I fucked up and now have to call a thousand people as a dev, I'm not even getting paid for it and they all get crazy about a random ID that got assigned to them, so now I want to throw away all my electronics and become a skilift operator.

Stupid me deployed a project shortly before we have the largest amount of orders in the year. (Like 90% of yearly orders in a couple minutes cause they are sold out fast and people wait to order first)

I got this horrible legacy "plain self written framework php" project which I tried to upgrade state of the art.
There was one piece missing to upgrade everything and nicely deploy it to some fresh new servers which can handle the high load which peaks at the time orders open.

So I did it the day before orders open and... everything worked well! Nothing crashed.
I wrote my client to wait a little before he confirms the orders, since after confirmation each of the people who ordered will receive an email where they can choose a unique number which they'll receive as a sticker with the order.

Since it's an event my client is promoting, people will meet each other wearing those unique stickers and being able to identify each other online and in person with this number.

Suddenly my clients call me that "customers are complaining about that there is something wrong"
Turned out he confirmed all orders straight away and that part of the application which makes the number unique was broken on the update.
So everyone could chose any number (also taken ones) as his "unique" number.

In my panic, I told my client "It's my mistake, I'll deal with it of course and call the affected people in my free time, since it's my mistake you don't have to pay for it". (it's my largest client by far, am a freelancer)
Realizing when people can chose any number it'll not be a few ones who have the same, it's like almost everyone did chose "69", "1", "420", "88 (a scary amount of people)",... (with 69 being the number being chosen by most people btw, even more then "1")

So now I have to call about a thousand people telling them a new random ID will be assigned to them. I thought of course about mailing them, wrote a script that deals with the issue automatically, and FUCKED IT UP TOO so everyone is confused and the only way to deal with it is by a call basically.
And while I'm sitting here now for 2 days straight calling people in my free time about their random ID will have to change, I realized that some people are quite crazy about random ID's.
I'm talking about yelling and threatening because "is it too much to ask for a working website when ordering this expensive product".

I hate my life right now and am getting quite serious about throwing all my electronic devices away and become a skilift operator instead. Fuck the higher pay, it's not worth the shit, I wanna have only responsibility about one button to press while watching people fall on their face.

Optimization trick.
The client shared this!

How the fuck am I going to make a fucking email signature appear the same everywhere when the client insists in using a piece of shit software called Outlook and I am a goddam backend developer.

I don't give a shit about spacing and color and stupid fucking fonts.

Thank for listening. Have a great day.

A client came to the startup I was working at, to discuss a potential schools/universities based project. Their requirements were as follows

1. Full control of every class's daily routine (based on teacher's availabilities).
2. Multiple-choice exam feature (Timed).
3. Individual dashboards for teachers, head of departments, the Headmaster for every school onboarded on the platform.
4. Scores analysis of every student in every class (Report card).
5. Attendance feature for every student.

And so on.

Guess their budget for the above.

200 USD. FUCKING 200 US Dollars !!!!

My stomach hurt that day from laughing.

So...Worked my butt off to have a website developed by a certain date client and I agreed on. Finished the site 3 weeks ago and sent dev link. Client has been completely silent; unreachable by email (I sent 5 in past 3 weeks) and phone (left 2 voicemails and a message with his receptionist today). In ALL five emails I told him I needed the email addresses he wants used to route his sales leads to...Got nada.

So today I seen that the lead forms have been tested on the website. Dude can't get back to me for 3 effing weeks, BUT can test his lead forms.. You know, without the lead email addresses that i asked for 5x. Ugh, idiot!!!

Boss: we can't accept your MR request until you fix the problems we highlighted, everything is blocked and the client is getting angry

My brother in Christ, I understand your concerns but I need you to understand: you decided to block a perfectly working and documented PR because you didn't like having "<!-- -->" in a couple of HTML files and menial bullshit like that.
It may not be the most elegant thing ever but don't put on me the responsibility of your blocks or I'll smash your face with the coffee mugs I've used to work until midnight so that you could deliver the product in time after someone else delayed the deadline twice already.
Thanks and get fucked ASAP.

Interviewer: Yeah so we're hiring you as the person who would build out and own our client-facing web application and related stack.

Dev: Perfect, that's what I've been doing for the past 10 years, I'm your guy.

Interviewer: GREAT SO WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FORK AND EXEC ON A PROCESS ON A LINUX MACHINE!?!?!?!?

Dev: I don't... know immediately at this moment?

Dev: Sigh

Dev: I hate my life

Dev: Somebody please help me

RETARD MASTER: So how did you feel about this sprint DEV?

*nothing is planned, new tickets added each day and old ones removed - inconsistent sprint*

DEV: Well, it’s a bit chaotic, but it’s understandable. I’m used to it. Nothing’s to blame here. Client can’t produce their end of the bargain on time.

*3 week later*

DEV MANAGER: So RETARD MASTER gave a feedback. He told me you insulted him.

DEV: Can I please die now? Not funny.

I'm having an existential crisis with this client.

We are spending millions of $s every year to make sure the product's performance is perfect. We are testing various scenarios, fine-tuning PLABs: the environment, application, middleware, infra,... And then we provide our recommendations to the client: "To handle load of XX parallel users focusing on YY, yy and Zy APIs, use <THIS> configuration".

And what the client does?
- take our recommendations and measure the wind speed outside
- if speed is <20m/s and milk hasn't gone bad yet, add 2x more instances of API X
- otherwise add 3xX, 1xY and give more CPUs to Z
- split the setup in half and deploy in 2 completely separate load-balanced prod environments.
- <do other "tweaking">

- bomb our team with questions "why do we have slow RTs?", "why did the env crash?", "why do we have all those errors?", "why has this been overlooked in PLABs?!?"

If you're improvising despite our recommendations, wtf are we doing here???

One day I will crack. Hopefully, not sometime soon.

Monday morning: The last straw.

After talking about in a previous rant about how my client wants to fix bugs that keeps popping out after bug fix.

Today I discovered, that all C-levels, worked all Saturday to "fix my code" because it "didn't work" and we "needed bug fixes not pretty things".

The app version I was working on for the last week is gone. Without mentioning that their "CTO" wrote a fucking crappy code to disable features that I added, breaking the build step.

This shit is enough for me, I'm done!

Most useless feature:

Once we had to create a Learning Manager System to a small university. One of the (useful) features was a "file system" to people upload, organize and share documents (like a Google Drive prototype). This was the "student portfolio".

However, we had to create a page to act as a "cover" to it, that should allow the student to change the background, add exactly 2 images, and up to 9 "post-its". The image shows the notebook of our client while he was thanking us praising it as the greatest innovation of the decade.

The post-its was kinda nice, but what's the point of those images??

Anyway... On the same meeting of that picture the client asked us to include a "canvas" on that same page, so people could draw whatever they want. The words used was "just like [MS] Paint".

We postponed it, hoping he would forget about it, but on the end of the project he was still asking about it.

I found a lib that did the job and integrated with the project, but I also included a long comment for the next devs saying that I'm sorry they would have to support such thing 😅

The client loved but we never knew anyone that really used that Paint

HOW

FUCKING

HARD

IS

IT

TO

DOCUMENT

HOW

YOUR

LIBRARY

WORKS

ONE

EXAMPLE

FOR

A

FUCKING

POSTGRES

CLIENT

LIBRARY

IS

NOT

SUFFICIENT

Me; Develops website. Website is done.

Client; we want an english version as well!

Me; implements english version.

Client; we want to go live but without the english version for now

*Fkc gmfbl gdddmn*

[CMS of Doom™]
Gotta love the fact that the fuckers who originally "coded" this abomination of a CMS implemented a method which replaces some text before sending the HTML to the client.
Guess what fucks with my code?

A Java hard client that had be abused by countless developers, the task was "make it faster". It was a simple dead locking issue and the Delivery date was one week.

It took one year and I rewrote it from scratch.

I'm a perfectionist and like things done the right way, but had to learn to let go and remind myself it's the clients site and their choice. No amount of logic and reasoning is going to stop a hellbent client from wanting the dumb things they want, even when it's bad for design, performance, usability and/or SEO.

Worst hack/attack?

Probably developing a complex food ordering website and client just stole the website and didn’t pay as it turns out our PM didn’t let the client sign a contract. Can’t sue as we have no legal binding documents.

We did managed to get access to the database and decided to change our passwords manually, but like I don’t get paid much for this

A gigantic codebase of several tens of millions of loc [prolly hundreds of mill's as we don't see all of it] in java EE.

Very complex business logic where bells have their own whistles with their own bells with .... You get it.

Very fine-tuned performance to make app so performant that the only bottleneck becomes the db. The beefiest rds instance becomes too laggy [orm, so sqls are immutable]

Client moves to rewrite the whole thing in PHP. Motivation: lower TTM

:facepalm:

this client couldn't figure out pagination.

and whenever items moved to next page

he could not find it.

He would create a new one.

no caption needed🤣🤣🤣

Fuck this client's IT department. They're a bunch of Microsoft asslickers.

How am I supposed to push code to your self-hosted GitLab instance if you restrict me to Citrix RDP????? No OpenVPN access because I'm on Linux?? Seriously? Because I am not using any of your laptops?

FUCK YOU DUMBASSES, I COULD DO A BETTER JOB THAN YOU AND I JUST PLAY WITH LINUX.

When I said I only needed terminal access I would have never imagined they were thinking of Putty inside an RDP. What a steaming shit.

Oh you guys don't have a secret management service as any enterprise should? Oh I cannot add a secret management service as part of the solution I am building for you guys because "Hurr Durr yOu HaVe NoT pUt ThIs In ThE pRoJeCt PrOpOsAl sO nO"

Fuck you guys. You guys only don't want to move to the cloud to not lose your jobs. I would be far more productive than relying on you pieces of dumbassery.

They are all having each others back in using shit technology and practices.

Client says the styling of a particular component on their website is wrong. It looks fine to me. They can't give me an example of how it should look, or tell me what's wrong with the way it looks currently, but they want me to fix it.

Hop on a call without taking a shower....

Client requests to turn on video for a face to face conversation......

Happened twice

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I am SO sick of RED.

our company's brand color is red.

and for some reason.

e
v
e
r
y

client ever.

also conveniently..

has R.E.D brand color.

what is going on. fr.

I will never understand the need people have to lie about their knowledge or make shit up. Seriously am I the only one to despise that ?!

If you don’t know about something stop trying to make shit up on the go, it’s useless and it will give the wrong idea to people listening to you thinking you know what you’re talking about.

Last example in date:
Me: Here’s this cool repo I found, it’s a discord client implemented in cpp, so it runs natively
Techbro: oh cool, hey @everyone you should download this, it runs natively so there will be no leaks like the normal client

😤

NO, YOU ABSOLUTE DISGUSTING GREMLIN OF A JS HTTP CLIENT, I DON'T WANT YOU TO "JsOn.StRiNgiFy" MY PAYLOAD OR DOING ANY WEIRD SHIT

I NEED TO SEND THIS THING EXACTLY AS IT'S WRITTEN, STOP TRYING TO GUESS WHAT I'M TRYING TO DO I'M A DEV WITH SOME 7 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE WRITING CODE, I'M SENDING A STRING CUZ I NEED TO SEND A STRING

Leaking an API access token to the web client... oh no no noooo...

Recieved on LinkedIn.

I hope you are doing well.

My name is XXX, and I work for XXX, an expert network company.

Our client is currently conducting research on ChatGPT Study, and would like to get a better understanding of ChatGPT platform.

Searching on LinkedIn, I came across your profile, and I believe your area of expertise matches our client's needs.

If you are interested, we will set you up a 45–60-minute phone consultation with our client.

Note: Just to point out that nothing private or confidential would be discussed, nor anything related to your current company.

You will be paid for the time you spend on the phone with our client at a rate you set for yourself upon your registration (it takes only 4-5 minutes).

The average rate is 300$/hour.

In case you have any questions, please feel free to XXX.

You think I can bullshit my way around and get paid 300 bucks to explain them how chatGPT is overhyped BS

"Yesterday "
Client: ''Perfect! How did you do this do quickly? "
Me: "I used a library"
"Today "
Me: "I'm still debugging. It will take some time"
Client: "well, It has already taking too long.... I can hear Mozart in the background. Maybe you need to go to a library to get some quite and get it done fast. Visit the one you used yesterday. "

Me: "library?Ahh... I meant plug in like.... Code, a library is a bunch of packed code. "

Trying to communicate with a client's former "web guy" to transfer the clients domain back to my client so I can make changes to the design and make it mobile friendly.
He emails me "it's on Wordpress, so it's already responsive"

Go to double check on iPad and my phone. design is unresponsive...

I’m working at an architecture firm these days, so I don’t have many “dev” stories to tell. However, I’d like to share this anecdote to reassure (or demoralize) you all that the kind of nonsense we’ve all dealt with as software developers isn’t limited to the software industry.

I’ve been working on a project to build townhomes and apartments on vacant lots in an urban environment.
Space is limited, so the client assured us early on that they would be centralizing all the mechanical equipment (water heaters, air conditioners, etc.) in the basement of each building. We finally got all the apartments laid out and presented them to the client last week. During that meeting, we get a casual “oh, by the way, we need a 3-foot by 3-foot mechanical closet in each apartment.” Did the project manager push back? Of course not. Have our deadlines been adjusted as a result of changing requirements? Don’t be silly! Starting tomorrow morning, the team gets to feverishly search for an extra 9 square feet in each of a couple dozen different apartment layouts that are already “cozy” in time to meet our next deliverable.

Clients suck.
Changing requirements suck.
Pushover PMs suck.
In every industry.

I am a weird dev. No urge to rant really, mostly internal frustrations if any.

Today I had my first meeting with the client and it went smoothly - I showcased demo in the current state, they approved, asked a bit more about the technology and that's pretty much it...

I know, I know... I'm just starting and it's gonna change but, idk why, I think I'm in a good work environment.

A few months a couple of my colleagues, a business consultant and a developer, worked on a big project. The project capsized because the client is an A-hole and the developer was way over his head.

To save the project I was brought on board. The entire code base was a fucking mess of duplicated code. Shortly after, the developer called in sick with stress, simply because the whole thing was too much.

Fast forward to now; we just launched. The client is expressing concerns about the quality of the work because of the bumpy road (rightly so). I try to explain why my way of doing things is better, but to "paint the picture" I had to compare my approach to my predecessor. This results in the business consultant shooting me down, right in front of the client.

I fucking saved your job, your project, and about $1M in profits. I'm allowed to tell the story of why my incompetent coworker messed everything up.

I'm so done walking on egg shells because some just don't realize they are not cut out for software development.

Love when the client knows more than you and tells you to create a report on an imaginary tool they are 100% sure it exists because their friend is an SEO expert and thinks all pages should be running at a 100 percent on lighthouse. Fml.

Looking over a clients website to see what they paid for from the guy the previously paid thousands of dollars for.

End up with a personal dilemma of whether or not to let them know all they did was charge them a few thousand to host their Wordpress website on a godaddy server and it's just a generic theme not even customized for the client.

Lets get some shit crystal clear:

- Angular is amazing.
- If you're complaining about it, then you're not experienced enough with it and you need to learn more
- Im using Angular for years, i built personal, professional and client projects with Angular as frontend and got paid thousands of USD
- I have never had any problems with angular in terms of performance, slow load time or insufficient documentation
- Angular is perfect for large projects. The structure is extremely robust and Easily lets you scale the project no matter how complex the project is
- You can have a trillion components and still be able to easily understand what each component does and add up to it because of how all the components are modularized and decoupled

That lovely moment when a client calls out of the blue at 4:30PM (we close at 5), 3 weeks before scheduled launch and says, "My website goes down tomorrow so where are we at with the new site?" So...I scrambled all day today to get the site done and it turns out they don't even own their domain or control their DNS. (facepalm) They put in a 30 day cancellation with their current provider and didn't bother to mention we had barely 2 weeks to develop a full custom site.

Kinde messed up my first contract.

I am a senior frontend dev who until now worked only on full time gigs. For the first time I picked up a short term gig of 1 week that consisted of 2 packages and I wanted to share my mistake that I made so hopefuly its useful to you.

So last week I started working on this gig. First package went through fine, I delivered in 2 days and collected the first half of the payment.

However I messed up with the second package. Not messed up the implementation per say, but I didnt manage the communication well.

Before implementing it I raised a discussion about a missing backend endpoint that is required to implement the perfect solution. Client got cold feet, had a discussion with his manager and now decided to postpone the second package and even got mad at me that I already did and pushed half of the work of the second package without waiting for his decision from his manager. So now obviously Im not getting paid for half of the work of the second package (I dont mind, I should have waited for clients response), anyways it took me like 20min to implement so thats fine.

My takeaways:

1. As a short term contractor you are hired to solve a concrete problem. Scope out what you can, agree on a task list and stick to it. Anything out of scope will cost the client extra.

2. Your priority is to get paid. Not to deliver the perfect solution that confuses the client and potentially can impact your delivery. If he wants something and you see its only a half of what he really needs, deliver it anyways. Keep that idea of improvement for the future. More work for future = more invoices = more money. I know its not ethical but your priority should be to get paid and in order to do that you need to deliver. Dont shoot yourself in the foot with unnecesseraly overcomplicating things.

Me: I've not done this before, so any guess would be pure assumption.

Client: Okay, but still, you would have some idea, right?

Me: It might get done in 3 days or may take even 30.

After 3 days:

Client: But you said that it will be done in 3 days. Now you are saying there MVP is not ready. Do you even know, your part is the most critical one in the project. We believed in you. We trusted you. This is insane. It was a wrong decision to choose you.

Me (in my head): Didn't I say, this is the first time I am trying to scrape Coles? It might take time?

Me (in actual): I understand, it is getting delayed. Am trying to get this up ASAP....

Anyone else experienced toxic clients but still didn't lose their cool?

Do you also feel dirty when a client asks for something that completely defats the purpose of the main feature?

yet you "patch " it because "it's a big client after all" and they can't be bothered to do a simple two number addition.

"Ok, so if you want this thing to show up here you need to set this property, ok?"

Client: "Ok, but how about I just don't and complain that it doesn't work?"

Someone asked "What's a sad reality for devs?"

Let me add one to that cuz I'm too lazy to find the actual thread.

A sad reality of devs is to be dependent on the management's mercy for them to be in the team/company. Your years of work can be thrown out the window just like that when management feels like it and there is almost nothing devs can do about it.

This sprung to mind cuz I experienced that today. My client cut my dev team in half to "make up for the recent losses the company faced". Obviously my team wasn't responsible for it.

This shit sucks man.

Riddle me this

Client wants solution based on open source software.

Any additional software that I write (let's say, an offline store plugin for Feast feature store) to add missing functionality has to be closed source.

Fuck you. Intellectual property my ass. You and me wouldn't even have projects if it werent for OSS.

Good luck maintaining the plugin after I am gone.

I'm doing a lot of work and will have close to nothing to show to future employers.

(BTW, if it were for the old Microsoft model of code source, I would have never become a programmer of any sort. God bless OSS)

The client: "I'm trying to export as HTML a few data we collected in 1 month with your software, why does it take so much???"

The length of the generated HTML file for the "few data":

Boss: How long will it take to finish the project?

Me: (Gives date for finishing dev and deployment.)

Boss: great, sound reasonable.

Me: ...

Boss: wait. Aren't you on vacation the two weeks after that.

Me: jup.

Boss: yeah we are not doing that again. Client can wait another two weeks.

Before someone says no Boss/PM is like that, he was/is a developer too so discussing deadlines and efforts is usually pretty relaxed since he knows our codebase and how long it takes to do things.

I think I’m going to lose my mind. This stupid website I’m working on keeps going down and at the worst times possible. Nothing we do seems to help. I’m again awakened in the middle of the night to attend to it and still have no good answers why. My anxiety is through the roof because I can’t get back to sleep after tonight’s outage. The client is beyond pissed even though a ton of problems would be solved if they would just get off of some legacy software and onto something more modern. But they insisted it be this way and the budget is already blown and then some even if they changed their minds. If it’s going to be that I continue losing so much sleep and sanity, I may just have to quit this job. I hate the thought of that because I always want to see things through to a happy conclusion. And I like my teammates and don’t want to let them down. But I’m too old for that kind of no-sleep development lifestyle now. Nobody’s shitty website is worth my physical and mental health.

Today we've discovered that our (western) client (or slack? we don't know yet) actively removes all messages if they contain some forbidden words.

Apparently, 'graphql' is one of the forbidden words.

Talk about censorship in the east... right...

- client announces that they are reducing the number of employees since Dec31
- I'm among the ones relieved from duty
- hours before the end date I receive a 'your account will expire in 7 days. Reset your password' email from that client

riiight, that's one chore I no longer have to worry about.

What the hell is wrong with using GitHub, or Git??? A client told me he’s concerned because it’s been, in his words, “compromised” and the admins can “see our code for trouble shooting purposes” and he doesn’t feel comfortable with that…🤨 like…no one wants this code my dude, like the fuck!?! We’re already using a skeleton project from someone else’s git, yet you dnt want this project on there??? Ooooor, is it because you dnt know how to use it??? Nor do you want to take the time to learn it??? 🤨 fuck boy. 😡😡😡😡😡😡🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

I started a new job about a week ago in an R&D software house which is a completely different world from what I am used to.

I worked as a coder in small teams, sometimes with Agile but always sunk in multiple projects at once - requiring constant switching of sprint goals week to week.

Now, I am alone (first person in a "maybe-in-the-future" team), doing research and preparing a demo for the client. It's hella lot of responsibility yet I found it weirdly liberating - being on my own, in control of what I do.

It may change in the future when project will inevitebly grow, but for right now, a week in, I started smiling while coding and learning, which I apparently haven't done in years.

INTERVIEWER: Let’s say client wants a gif in the EDM design but older outlooks don’t support it. How do you solve it?
ME: Maybe we can try using iframes if outlook supports them and host gif somewhere and use iframes to show it.
INTERVIEWER: Any other solution?
ME: We can probably also detect the email client and just show gif for all other email clients but a picture for outlook.
INTERVIEWER: No but the client wants the gif to show on all email clients
ME: But outlook doesn’t support gifs!!!
INTERVIEWER: yeah
ME: …..
INTERVIEWER: …..

I thought maybe I missed something having been a junior dev and never developing edms. So jumped on the internet after the interview and my second answer is literally how everyone does it. What even was the point of that question? At no point she said yeah that’s a good solution and that’s how we do it in the industry. If outlook doesn’t fucking support gifs then what the fuck kind of solution am I supposed to bring to the fucking table in 5 fucking minutes.

I'm supposed to be the introverted, non-people person! But the client meetings I'm in for my college senior project go off the rails into awkward mumbling unless I step in and take the tiniest bit of effort in driving a meeting.

Am I doomed folks to become a BA or other person dealing with clients all day, pls end me now

Webmin because why not ✓
Lamp stack ✓
Dynamic DNS client ✓
PhpMyAdmin X

Dear DigitalOcean. SINCE WHEN do you consider a PMA installation
without Https SECURE?
And why the fuck do you make me install an aptitude package that skips both file system AND Apache config cleanup on purging?
It's just a raspberry, but if it runs lamp I want PMA, and if it runs anything, I want Https. Is that too much to ask for from a tutorial source otherwise so reliable that I do anything you say without a questioning thought?

I just can't... 😑 You bought a template, you get a template. PS: Learn English!

What you could have:
- simple project structure
- common lib with modular logic
- import logic as needed in you services

What you do:
- waste months to write an opinionated framework that works only if used in a super specific way
- have a fat sample project as example
- use a code generator to copy and rename the said sample project whenever you create a new service
- have everything break whenever something new is added in the framework
- oh and keep the framework in active development while others work on the client services, so lots of things will break often and out of nowhere

Fucking god, i hate when people make pet projects out of work projects

Client: We are completely unable to plan a construction project successfully. We want you to use AI to do all of our project planning for us. Our requirements are that instead of needing to spend any money or time planning we just want to press a button and have a computer instantly put together all of our project plans for us. The program also needs to identify optimizations on it’s own and change all related plans enterprise-wide. All copies of the plans should be able to be kept up to date at all times so we’re never looking at an old plan again. We also want the ability to print.

Dev: …

Hate these managers.

I started working on a company 6 months back. When i joined i was told such amazing things about this place. I was given a job to develop a tool for a client. I did that alone. Now that the final deployment is done i am not needed there any more. I can start looking for outside work. WTF why would you hire a guy if you want him to work for only 3-4 months when you can hire a consultant or someone on contract or mention that in beginning. Fuck you even i want to leave this place now as soon as possible but still have to see their stupid faces for next 2 weeks.

Ok soooo boss asks me: "When is the website going to be ready?"
me: today i'll be through
----------------------------------------
4 hours later:
Site 90% done
- messed up theme
- try reinstalling theme
- 2 try
- 3rd try
- 4th try
- 5th try: success , time 6:00pm
-----------------------------------------
SENDING DAILY REPORT:
Site is 90% complete and waiting for content from client
- projects
- logo
- images

After the 4th time of being reminded to log all possible hours, including those for which I’m mostly researching and not producing code or deliverables, I’m finally just doing it. I hate billing for low impact activities. A) Because I’m slow at everything and B) If I were the client I’d be pissed that I got charged 2 hours for what amounted to 10 minutes of actual coding and launching the feature.

Alright, it looks like everyone at this bank, a client, I work for will now start avoiding me. I'm usually the only person that takes the time to review PRs and give a feedback. Everyone just seem to click accept because they can't be bothered.

A few months down the line, they begin to wonder why there is so many tech all over the place.

Good luck to anyone that wants me to review their PRs. I pledge to continue to take the time to review PRs and give feedback. I will not be pressured to click the accept button on what I perceive to be sub-optimal code. So help me God.

IT department of client still doesn't get its shit together. Previously, I've ranted that they insist I access their GitLab through a fucking RDP.

Me: requests an account to their Confluence space

Them: give me a Confluence account. Naturally, Confluence requests that I confirm my email. That needs to be confirmed in the inbox of my.name@theircompany.com. Mail servers hosted by Azure, using Outlook.

Me: ok, let's configure my Outlook, 2FA as they configured to demand it from me... install MS's authenticator app, ok so far so good... Now I'm ready to login and find that email from Confluence and... ERROR 500 INVALID LICENSE

Fucking hell. You just love your siloes so much you actually make it impossible to access it and feel good about my own good will.

"Hey, our client proposed a new feature, can you take a look at it?"

Come on guys, use those JSON schemas properly. The number of times I see people going "err, few strings here, any other properties ok, no properties required, job done." Dahhh, that's pointless. Lock that bloody thing down as much as you possibly can.

I mean, the damn things can be used to fail fast whenever you misspell properties, miss required properties, format dates wrong - heck, even when you want to validate the set format of an array - and then libraries will throw back an error to your client (or logs if you're just on backend) and tell you *exactly what's wrong.* It's immensely powerful, and all you have to do is craft a decent schema to get it for free.

If I see one more person trying to validate their JSON manually in 500 lines of buggy code and throwing ambiguous error messages when it could have been trivially handled by a schema, I'm going to scream.

I'm fucking tired of putting my efforts into bug fixes.

5 years of web. I never had a client that likes to keep it's crappy slow piece of shit product on the market in the exact same way it is.

If they didn't sell it to state employees (and good luck for them if they do not use it) their product would be dead.

That's the only way they get money: bids. And the minimum a state pays is 15 MILLION.

And they don't have 90K to pay another dev to help creating a new product.

Their CEO fucking REJECTS anything that's not a bug fix. Once he said to our PM:

"It's pretty and more fast, but wasn't this way that made me rich"

I'm thinking I'm getting another client, seriously. Everyday the same thing breaks and they already know the fucking answer:

WE NEED TO FUCKING REFACT

CREATE A NEW FUCKING PROJECT

This shit is making crazy. I can't sleep. I can't eat and I'm always fucking tired, no matter what I do.

I need to stop working for Brazilians.
I'll try US, Canada or somewhere in Europe.

long time listener, first time caller. I love designers. seriously. I love getting a nice juicy Figma file and not knowing how the heck I'm going to do half the wild stuff in it, but it's beautiful, so I'll figure it out. Go ahead, send it to the client. But designers who learn how to use something like Elementor or one of those crappy kitchen-sink themes, call themselves developers, and win work with clients I share with them. I'm the one fixing everything when that crap breaks. I would never in a million years present myself as a designer, even though I know I know a damn sight more about design than they do about dev. I get it, everyone needs to make a buck, but every time this happens it makes me sick to my stomach. We're on the same team. I always, ALWAYS, go to the mat for good design. Why don't more designers have an equal amount of respect for us? Design phase always goes over deadlines and we always have to pick up the slack to make the hard launch date. Well, now I'm just rambling.

I develop websites for car dealerships..

Client: "I love the site, but it needs more sparkles.. to class it up"
Me: facepalm

Client: I need you to fix my website
Me: Okay, can you send me your existing website files for me to fix.
Client: here is the screenshot
Me: -_-

I am currently working as a consultant and I like it. It also makes upset/happy/schadenfroh (not entirely sure how I feel about it) when we tell the client what work needs to be done in which order and why just so they can throw it all overboard and we do it the way they want it and it bites them in the ass a few month down the line.
They hire us for the external professional experience that we bring, so listen to us. We did this before, we know what works, and we know way your way does not work.

Why are banks so absolutely archaic and stupid when it comes to tech? I work in a Services based company and currently engaged with a very famous bank to build accounting software for Mutual Funds. The day to day stupidity of this client is driving me absolutely crazy.

They couldn't give us proper requirements, and my company was stupid enough to kickoff the project without official sign off. Not only did they change the requirements, but they added a shit ton MORE features, and essentially bullied us into completing it all in the same timeline. Their attitude is pathetic, they shit talk our dev team, they make us build the worst possible UX, and then complain that it's not looking good and not working well. They have absolutely no idea about any of the technical stuff and think that software is a magic box that will give them what they want.

I swear I have a lot of examples but I'm so angry right now that my words are fumbling and I can't think straight. Stand up is in 45 minutes and I'm just dreading it. Idk how to tell everything, it's just... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Had design call with designer, myself and client. At end of call we tell client we're going to send a mock up and that it's just going to be a flat image/JPG, because we don't start developing the site until mock up is 100% approved. I sent mock up to client once it's finished.

Client: "Why isn't this working? I can't click anything and nothing moves."

What is the most ridiculous client idea that u had to help make ?🤣

I work as a freelancer and one time I had a client that needed some work done on a crypto website. I was so hyped up because the money was good so I jumped on it. Fast forward 2 weeks later I still couldn’t figure what the shit I was doing as the client kept asking for update.

Yes, I have experience with blockchain but my skill on Javascript just couldn’t help. I did google and also ask questions on S.O. but it wasn’t enough to get me on track.

At the end, I reached out to the client and apologized for not being able to meet up with their request and then recommended someone else.
So I’d say “I lost faith” on my skill as a Javascript dev at that moment for not being able to use some blockchain APIs effectively and also look forward to improving my catalog.

I was temporarily involved in one project. During the handout I made sure to write a rather comprehensive readme file. Yesterday I got a message from the client asking about basically the first thing written in the readme :")

Probably had my worst half-week ever this week.

Customer's CRM system, the read and edit masks just...stopped existing on last week friday. CRM fell back on some default masks for the dataset. No way to create new masks directly without putting the whole system upside down.
We couldn't do anything anyway because they reported the issue literally as we all were about to leave for weekend and our boss was like "Ah nah, well do it next week."
Our brains were already fried anyway...
I mail the reporter that we've registered their issue, will investigate and report back ASAP once we've got news.

Monday rolls around, I'm whacking my head against their system trying to figure the fuck out, what went wrong and how to solve it, I come up empty; Not that terrible since the masks only stopped existing in the webclient version of the system and they can still use the windows client, so they can still work.

Tuesday rolls around, I'm at an on site training for an ERP system with my boss at a remote company. Get an email in midst of the training, I was doing protocol.
Guy from the afflicted company goes and tells me that the issue has somehow spread to his colleague and him...IN THE WINDOWS CLIENT.

I'm fucking flabbergasted, so to speak, since the masks for the windows client and the web client are totally isolated from one another.
After we're back at our company, I investigate, less efficiently this time because my brain got fried at the training. I come up empty again.

NOW TODAY: Discuss further proceedings with my boss, he's not pissed at me or anything, just to say, but we're both worried, obviously.

Then at 10:20, a guy from the afflicted company mails me in an annoyed tone that the masks are still broken.

11:00, we figure out a workaround so the windows client users can at least work again, albeit limited.

11:10, I mail the guy, telling him that although we're still not able to fully work everything out and are still investigating, we've made a workaround so they can at least work again.

11:20, the guy mails me in a pissed tone around the lines of "This is very very important and must be fixed ASAP or else we'll not be able to work at all [...]"
And I think like "Dude I literally just told you like 8 minutes ago that there's are workaround so you'll be able to at least work again..."

Forward the mail to boss, we meet up quickly to discuss how in God's name we can deescalate this mfer.

11:31, the guy mails me again, all apologetically this time "Stop! All is good, I just now fully read you mail, thanks for implementing the workaround, nothing will come to a standstill [...]"

BRUH CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ BEFORE ESCALATING SHIT

Fuck customers. Dumb fucking cretins unable to fucking read.

The issue is still unresolved. Support of the CRM software lets us sit on our collective asses and wait.

There is no such thing as stable software, it's a myth.

Every corporate software is like an ever-decaying semi-corpse of a brain dead patient slowly getting worse and worse but not fucking dying.

Rant over.

This was originally a reply to a rant about the excessive complexity of webdev.

The complexity in webdev is mostly necessary to deal with Javascript and the browser APIs, coupled with the general difficulty of the task at hand, namely to let the user interact with amounts of data far beyond network capacity. The solution isn't to reject progress but to pick your libraries wisely and manage your complexity with tools like type safe languages, unit tests and good architecture.

When webdev was simple, it was normal to have the user redownload the whole page everytime you wanted to change something. It was also normal to have the server query the database everytime a new user requested the same page even though nothing could have changed. It was an inefficient sloppy mess that only passed because we had nothing better and because most webpages were built by amateurs.

Today webpages are built like actual programs, with executables downloaded from a static file server and variable data obtained through an API that's preferably stateless by design and has a clever stateful cache. Client side caches are programmable and invalidations can be delivered through any of three widely supported server-client message protocols. It's not to look smart, it's engineering. Although 5G gets a lot of media coverage, most mobile traffic still flows through slow and expensive connections to devices with tiny batteries, and the only reason our ever increasing traffic doesn't break everything is the insanely sophisticated infrastructure we designed to make things as efficient as humanly possible.

Oh, as a noob dev my team was using a dropdown library for our filters in the website. The code was messed up cause they kept changing the design halfway through dev and after releases and then finally after some releases, the client wanted multilevel options as a new requirement.
So I scrapped the whole thing and made my own multilevel dropdown component (there were no decent libraries then) and we used that from then on. It has many issues now that I look back (who cares about keyboard interaction right?). But that is a refactor for another day.

How to make own img tag in html:
(This wasn't me)

It's funny how you start feeling bad for the next dev taking over your project because it turned into a total spaghetti code shit show that will be impossible to maintain in the future with new features coming in.

Honestly... if a projects starts out with a certain scope which then gets extended EVERY FUCKING WEEK with requirements that can't even be met in the initial timeframe it's no wonder the code quality will decrease over time.

This just reminds me daily how important good project management (and I'm not talking about suit wearing pain-in-the-ass-managers) and the inclusion of devs in the planning process really is.

It's so fucking crazy that companies run like that with people up front that have NO FUCKING CLUE what they are doing, nor do they understand the mechanics, tech and effort that go into certain features. They're like "beep, boop, it's done by Friday you fuck!".

The funniest part of this stupid charade is that the closer we get to a new "deadline" (we will not meet the deadline anyways) the more nervous the "managers" get. WHY didn't you properly plan this shit in the first place? WHY didn't you care for the last six months where all this fucking bullshit could still have been prevented?

Meanwhile I'm just so sick and tired of this shitty project and this sucky company that I just don't have any motivation left to keep on working. It's so fucking hard and painful to work on projects that suck ass, are poorly designed. I just got to the point where coding is no fun any more. Thank god I'm out of here soon... fml

!Dev related but still freelance.

So.. I do 3D stuff, scenes, animation and so on. The e-sport pub manager I know told me about this guy that wanted to start a local organizations around FIFA, hold tournaments at the pub and so on. He had some finance, contacts and needed a 3D scene of a stadium to highlight top placers as 3D Fifa cards.

Gotcha, so I hooked him up with said stuff, he was happy, manager was happy, first tournament went well. Now to the shit show:

He wrote to me a couple of days later asking if I'm up for more jobs, which k respectfully declined because l was on a bigger project that took about 2months to complete. Since that day, he spammed both me and the pub manager with request and wishes on wanting to do more.. and I mean SPAM!

Like the dude can't take a no, sorry. He tried to call on phone and messenger, messeged me several times / week and asked the manager of he heard from me.

Both the manager and I were perplexed of his attitude and after asking several times to stop and we both had other things for now (events / projects).. he.. he didn't stop. So.. blocked and that's that, right? Fuck now.. other clients of mine asked me if I knew of him because he tried to contact them to get to me.. like WTF?! How hard is it to take a no and move on?! Jesus.. client of hell in a nutshell

On the one hand I really wish there was a good open-source self-hosted file sharing and collaboration service which made use of modern web technologies to provide most of its features inline as well and not just through APIs consumed by client applications.

On the other hand, I tried writing a WebDAV server once, and I fully empathize with the people who have to deal with this madness.

Today a client opened a ticket saying that all the content for a customer returns 404. Turns out it's kinda important to end a prefix on a separator if you plan to recursively delete all data /user/<user_id> or you might end up deleting a bit of extra data

I am able to work 15 hours on my pet project then take a short walk outside and feel like a balanced man, but even just an hour on a commercial project is a massive effort even though the code is clean, the stack is modern, I'm good friends with the client and I also like the concept. The mere fact that I'm doing it for money takes the fun out of it.

In a real-time multiplayer competitive game where you control a vehicle, is it feasible to simulate the whole thing on server side, such that the client only sends controls and receives sensor results? I mean like the client doesn't even know its own precise rotation, just the readings of a gyroscope and an accelerometer which are both susceptible to errors, and deduces the "down" direction from those two and approximate control forces. This would both solve hacking (writing a good robot is just as challenging) and lead to fun results like an attitude indicator going crazy from a gust of wind.

I am embrassed.. :(

Situation was..

It was 3-4 months ago I written the process but now client was saying it is not working so I just need to update value in array..

I spent 2-3 hours everything was good..
only in the statement where I am assigning the value is not working.
I was like dude wtf call your senior why its not working .. everything is correct.. then suddenly my eyes catch the rubbish thing I did..

this is what I used mistakenly for assignment "=="

:( and I was looking at statement from 1-2 hour.. it just wasted my time

Told my client last october that I would not be doing a migration.

Two weeks ago they wanted me to do the migration and I told them I will do my best to create estimates but that it was the first time.

Gave them a resonable estimate to migrate the content.

And last meeting they cut the time by 70% to meet the budget.

Fuck the budget, can't pay then you don't get the shiny new toy.

I'm a contractor, not a fucking employee. So all the extra hours are on me.

Going to give them a piece of my mind today.

If I lose this client, i don't give a fuck.

Client wants some CMS text to be automatically translated. So I checked and Google seems to have a solution for that. I thought to to be as simpel as doing a request and parsing the response. That's how API's work, right?

No. First I must create an account, that account must have a credit card, then I need to setup credentials, the default ones working with path variables, an API key... etc etc etc.

I feel so stupid for just not understanding their docs. I'm just a dude that installs a CMS and makes pretty CSS for it. I've worked with REST APIs before (Mollie, Carerix) but none of them ever demanded the level of knowledge and setup the Google Translate API demands.

Am I just a bad developer or is this shit just too complex for your average web developer?

We specified a very optimistic setup for a data science platform for a client....

Minimum one machine with a 16 core CPU with 64GB RAM to process data.....

Client's IT department: Best we can do is an 8 core 16GB server.

Literally what I have on my laptop.

Data scientist doesn't use any out-of-memory data processing framework, e.g. Dask, despite telling him it's the best way to be economical on memory; ipykernel kills the computation anyway because it runs out of memory.

Data scientist has a 64GB machine himself so he says it's fine.

Purpose of the server: rendered pointless.

Today is the release of one of the projects I’ve been working on. It was a chaotic project, where I’ve had to contact many people just to get pieces of information necessary to complete the project. Anyway, today the manager ask what the URL of the web app is to give it to the client except I already warned him prior that since we don’t have the domain name for the web app it wouldn’t go past the authentication. But guess what happened? Yep that’s right it’s my fault yet again.

I keep warning my manager about potential issues with the projects I’m working on but they fall on deaf ears, and when the actual problem happens it’s all my fault because I didn’t check it earlier, I didn’t make a mail, I shouldn’t use Teams to tell him about it, I should monitor more closely, etc, despite having no time allocated whatsoever.

In short I work 7 hours a day but should have 9 to even get close to what I need to do, and I’m blamed with problems that I warn about

Thursday afternoon. Client gives us the go to deploy the latest release to production.
Friday late afternoon; my colleague - "wait, did we ever deploy"? Me - "uh, nope".
"Alright have a good weekend"

Urghhhhhh not Java again!

(uni project wants a java client for a section. Kill me plz.)

Just keep getting the dumbest tickets from a client as a Frontend dev.

I told them I am a backend and even my contract says backend but I made the mistake to help them with some themes.

So fucking ready to take other interviews where I don't have to deal with bullshit colors and fonts anymore.

Was working on a system we planned on to deliver to a hospital
basically it was meant for controlling and monitoring pactions coming in and attendance time from the staff

Got it off the ground well and got to where the system was supposed to update room status
occupied/free then horror started
the db was not setting the room free after clearing a client off the list... room remained occupied and this kept on happening for 6 months and I was so focused on fixing the db models thinking thats where the problem was....

1 day after leaving the project for several months i just revisited the project randomly and started going through the whole code base trying to make sense of what was happening as there where no errors generated..
I had to verify the whole system logic... and that day i figured out what was happening...
upon adding a client to a room the system was also creating a duplicate room so when the function for setting the room free executes it would set the duplicate room free and not the actual room and the system would pick the room with occupied state causing the user not being able to assign new pactions to the room

Solving this brought so much relief coz it required so much work just to solve what seemed to be a minor issue

"Please help, when I login as a client somehow the name gets updated to my name. Pls help, ai really don't know why"

How about you be careful and don't hit save to overwrite their names

CORS is shit
Stupid useless shit that protects from nothing. It is harmful mechanism that does nothing but randomly blocks browser from accessing resources - nothing more.

Main idea of CORS is that if server does not send proper header to OPTIONS request, browser will block other requests to that server.

What does stupid cocksuckers that invented CORS, think their retarded shit can protect from?
- If server is malicious, it will send any header required to let you access it.
- If client has malicious intents - he will never use your shit browser to make requests, he will use curl or any ther tool available. Also if server security bases on something as unreliable as http headers it sends to the client - its a shit server, and CORS will not save it.

Can anyone give REAL examples when CORS can really protect from anything?

After 3 weeks of being interviewed on upwork she replied today and told me

"Sorry, the only reason we cant hire you is because the client wants only EU passport devs"

.....

Is this my fault? How is this my fault? EVERY FUCKING TIME WHEN I TRY TO SUCCEED AT ANYTHING LIFE JUST FORCEFULLY REJECTS ME FROM SUCCEEDING AND IT IS ALWAYS BECAUSE OF THE LUCK THAT I DONT HAVE. HOW IS IT MY FAULT FOR BEING BORN IN A GARBAGE BULLSHIT PIECE OF SHIT COUNTRY AND IMMEDIATELY HAVE HUGE DISADVANTAGE IN LIFE? HOW IS THAT FUCKING FAIR??? WHY DO YOU GIVE A FUCK FROM POLITICAL REGIONS WHERE I AM BORN IF I CAN DO THE DEV JOB RIGHT????? WHST RHE FUCK IS THIS FUCKING LOW LIFE ABOUT IF I ***NEED*** LUCK TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL. NO MATTER HOW SKILLED OR HARD YOU TRY YOU WILL ALWAYS APPARENTLY FAIL IF YOU ARE MISSING ***LUCK***

Client calls saying there's a problem with their site that he just noticed at home....

Recreating Devrant client for both Android and IOS

Slack's android app crashes if I hold a message to put my emoji reaction on it.

A Microsoft Teams call link needs to be opened in 4-5 tabs only one of which works and actually lets you join the call.

Droidcam's Ubuntu client suddenly stops working even when you're using a wired connection instead of WiFi.

Modern software is in the gutter. Change my mind.

When a client reaches out to me, I'm like:

404 Fucks Not Found. This is not the web developer you're looking for.

So, I turned on my old phone to transfer all my p̶o̶r̶n̶ photos, and it crashed from the notifications.

And I understand that it's an underpowered device and notifications aren't expected to come by the hundreds, but how terribly misdesigned must a pubsub system like Push be for the client to crash?

Someone please explain to me how error messages such as
"Something went wrong" or "Critical error" are valid and provide little to no follow up explanation in the GUI, Logs, or client logs.

I get that not all error cases can be displayed on a GUI, but at least have decent error handling. Especially if your $8+ billion company.

Today I wrote a python messenger bot which listens to only one command;
get ip
It then replies with its public IP address. I figured this would be the easiest hotfix until I fix my dynamic DNS client.

Now thinking of it I could also make an "update domain" command for doing the API call, and then link the two with a loop and minute delay. Marvelous.

Don't you love when the designer can do their pretty shit without consulting you and then the client ask you why the shit the designer made looks so different.

Classic Microsoft, pushing you to download and install the client to join a Teams meeting, click on the big "launch Meeting" button nothing happens, next there is a "download now"" button ... and only in the end there is a way to join from the browser, but is suggests to do it only if you have issues with the client... oh wait this is not Teams

Client breaks website and i’m the one trying to fix things. For two unplanned hours i’ve been trying to help and instead of a thank you i get a thanks for nothing message. I’m not responding to this client next time. Fuckn bitch

Update on my devRant client SwiftUIRant:

I’m experimenting with some UI changes compared to the official app.

* vote buttons are laid out horizontally and placed above the rant to not waste space on the left side.
* comments count shows 0 comments instead of disappearing.
* rants are not cut off but visible in full length (I plan to add a toggle setting for that)
* creation date/time is present in the feed
* date/time formatter uses the current system region and the language english. So no more awkward American dates for non American users.

What do you think?

I once resigned the ui of our banking application on my own initiative without consulting with any clients. I then left that job before our next release. Apparently the product owner got flak because a client measured the header with a ruler pressed to their monitor and found the new header was sightly bigger.

I had this amazing boss. He had 25 years of experience in the sector covered by our software, an ERP. He knew how to be a programmer, a boss, a sales manager, a support person.
I learned most of the best practices from him: do not shout in the office, it makes impossible to work. Don't hide something to your coworkers, nobody was trusting him. Be clear with your clients, his subtle mind tricks pissed off a lot of clients. Your client needs to see an economic advantage in your offers, trying to sell gold priced shit is not a good way to stay in the market. The list could go on and on and on.

I learned what happens when you do everything in the wrong way, and I will never forget.

I hate how React is used almost everywhere nowadays. Especially when single-page applications are used for purposes that don't actually benefit from them.

Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned, but I want websites to work even with client-side JS disabled. At least sites like Amazon don't rely on it, and work just fine. Progressive enhancement is the way to go.

Where to start...
1) them initially expecting us to do 15+ custom websites at once while also doing the Project Management work (including all client communication) for all projects, for $33k a year....
2) Having to pull teeth to get a feeble raise
3) Rude clients

Today, I used NAT in a way I never before thought of as a solution to a problem - Exposing a service listening only on an internal address, to the internet, to a selected list of hosts.

For some reason, it made me a little sick in my mouth. It feels... Ugly, to solve this as such. But I was only copying this solution from a different server of the same client, so no reason to implement it differently and thus complicate future administration...

Is it normal to use DNAT like this?