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Electronics store clerk: "Can I help you?"
Me: "Good afternoon sir. I'm a developer and lifelong PC gamer. I received a second hand PS4, and might buy a next gen console at the end of the year. People tell me that in front of this soft wide desk chair people call a "couch", you need some sort of large computer monitor to enjoy console gaming"
Clerk: "Yeah, we sell TVs. What TV do you have now?"
Me: "I don't own a TV. I just want a huge 4K computer display with a good response time, excellent refresh rate, and great contrast"
Clerk: "OK so this is an entry level 55" smart TV. It's 120hz, QLED, has full array local dimming. It's great for gaming. It's €1000. We also have this LG OLED smart TV for €1200, which is a step up in terms of contrast and response time..."
Me: "Wait... Smart TV? No, I don't want a TV with an operating system. I want a computer display."
Clerk: "There aren't a lot of big computer displays. We have this ASUS ROG 55" computer monitor. It's also 120hz. Very similar response time, but the brightness and contrast aren't as great, it's edge-lit"
Me, trying really hard to make out the contrast differences under ugly fluorescent lights of the store: "So it's a worse big couch display, without smart OS. How much is it?"
Clerk: "€3500"
Me: "So what you're saying is that while the displays are similar or even better, the operating system on all these TVs is so incredibly bad, you have to give €2500 discount for people to even buy it?"30 -
Is it just me or the new dark theme on Windows 10 looks really bad?
Too much contrast and bad icons.
Why they didn't used the colors of the really nice looking Visual Studio?
26 -
Working with different nationalities is interesting, and sometimes kind of bewildering. And tiring.
I've been working with an Indian dev for a little while, and while she's a decent dev, interactions with her sometimes leave me a little puzzled. She glazes over serious topics, totally over-sensationalizes unimportant oddities, has yet to say the word "no," and she refers to the senior devs as (quote) "the legends." Also, when asked a question by her boss, like "Are you familiar with this?" Instead of a simple yes/no answer, she shows off a little. Fair, I do this sometimes too, but it's a regular thing with her. Also, like most Indians I've known and/or worked with, she has a very strict class-and-caste view of the world. It honestly makes me a little uncomfortable with how she views people, like certain people belong in certain boxes, how some boxes (and therefore their contents) are inherently better than others, and how it's difficult or simply impossible to move between boxes. My obviously westerner view of things is that you can pick where you want to be and what you want to do, and all it takes to get there is acquiring the proper skills and putting in the required effort. I see no boxes at all, just a sprawling web of trades/specialities. And those legends she talks about? They're good devs with more knowledge than me, but only one, maybe two of them are better devs. I see them as coworkers and leads, not legends. Legends would be the likes of Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie, Yukihuro Matsumoto, and Satoshi Nakamoto. (Among others, obv.). To call a lead dev a legend is just strange to me, unless they're actually deserving, but we don't work with anyone like Wozniak or Carmack.
Since I'm apparently ranting about her a little, let me continue. She's also extremely difficult to understand. Not because of her words or her accent, but I can't ever figure out what she's trying to get across. The words fit together and make valid sentences, but the sentences don't often make sense with one another, and all put together... I'm just totally lost. To be a math nerd, like the two conversations are skew lines: very similar, but can never intersect. What's more, if I say I don't understand and ask for clarification, she refuses and says she doesn't want to confuse me further, and to just do what I think is best. It's incredibly frustrating.
Specifically, we're trying to split up functionality on a ticket -- she's part of a different dev team (accounting), and really should own the accounting portion since she will be responsible for it, but there's no clear boundary in the codebase. Trying to discuss this has been... difficult.
Anyway.
Sometimes other cultures' world views are just puzzling, or even kind of alien. This Irish/Chinese guy stayed at my parents' house for a week. He had red hair, and his facial features were about 3/4 Chinese. He looked strange and really interesting. I can't really explain it, but interacting with him felt like talking to basically any other guy I've known, except sometimes his mannerisms and behavior were just shockingly strange and unexpected, and he occasionally made so little sense to me that I was really taken aback.
This Chinese manager I had valued appearances and percieved honors more than anything else. He cared about punctuality and attire more than productivity. Instead of giving raises for good work or promotions, he would give fancy new titles and maybe allow you to move your desk somewhere with a better view of your coworkers. Not somewhere nicer; somewhere more prominent. How he made connections between concepts was also very strange, like the Chinese/Irish guy earlier. The site templating system was a "bridge?" Idk? He also talked luck with his investors (who were also Chinese), and they would often take the investment money to the casino to see if luck was in the company's favor. Not even kidding.
Also! the Iranian people I've known. They've shown very little emotion, except occasionally anger. If I tried to appease them, they would spurn and insult me, but if I met their anger, they would immediately return to being calm, and always seemed to respect me more afterward. Again, it's a little puzzling. By contrast, meeting an American's anger often makes them dislike you, and exceeding it tends to begin a rivalry.
It's neat seeing how people of different nationalities have different perspectives and world views and think so very differently. but it can also be a little tiring always having to translate and to switch behavior styles, sometimes even between sentences.
It's also frustrating when we simply cannot communicate despite having a language in common.23 -
In our self-developed intranet, i added a hidden script that fires an 'event' when you enter the konami code.
Said event it's simply turning thw screen contrast to 200% and play the audio of 'omae wa mou shindeiru'.
I was planning to make some more of those, but i don't have the time to do them ;_;6 -
Client: This blue looks a bit too white against the white background, please make it more standout.
Me: But this is your corporate colour and it is one of the colours in your branding guide. In it, there is also a warning saying “don’t use colours outside our palette” and “don’t use coloured typography on coloured background”. So you should use this blue only on white and you are not suppose to change the colour.
Client: Yeah, keep the colour but make it more saturated and change the tone a bit, so it has more contrast.
Me: 🤔11 -
Dear software companies,
As much as I appreciate all the dark themes being used lately either as default, or added as options (Youtube, Discord, Postman, Windows Explorer, etc)... you guys still suck at theming.
A #000 background with #fff font is almost as bad as the reverse. Too much contrast! Then there are some apps which use grayish tones, others brown/orange stuff... pretty ugly if you use it all next to each other.
So how about just adding good theming support? Or even better: what about a global theming standard, a styling preference, a system wide json file which defines UI elements for all apps?4 -
Coding has impacted my life the biggest by having 'scrum' meetings with my family over dinner. I start with..
"What did you do today?"
"What are you doing tomorrow?"
and variations of (depending on the responses from the first questions)..
"Anything I can help with?"
It really opened up the channels of communication with my family. It's not unusual for dinner to take up to an hour.
Quite the contrast of my childhood where dinner was a "better to be seen than heard" experience and eating fast and leaving the table was a competition with my siblings.5 -
I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.
This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.
He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)
This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.
His train of thought makes no sense to me:
"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"
Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"
Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"
Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.
Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!
Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?
Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?
Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.
Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development
Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.
Him: Well, maybe.
MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.
The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.
I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.10 -
Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.
I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.
(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)
But onto the story:
Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).
I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.
However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.
But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.
That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.
Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.
But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.
Ugh.
`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`21 -
When managers look at my code, it’s shit, it’s over complicated, it’s overly difficult to read, it took too long, it’s too much for a simple ticket, i handled too many edge cases, we’ll never need most of it, why did I bother making it extensible when it’ll never need to change, how dare I use “unless”, why did I bother writing all these comments, why did I update the documentation that nobody reads because it’s outdated, etc. They say I should be more like the legendary devs and push janky code quickly, and complain that I don’t have any flops (problems in prod) like those are a good thing.
When my coworkers look at my code, they say it’s clean, amazingly easy to read, a monster feature that’s somehow still a joy to review and work on, it makes their lives easier, that it does exactly what it should in all cases, that they learned something from reading it, and thank me for the comments and documentation. And marvel that I finished it so well in so little time.
Am I bragging? Not intentionally; I’ve heard these things repeatedly since I started here, and the contrast between the above is so stark.
In reality, the managers are just idiots who were promoted far above their competence, and make everything worse. (Gee, who woulda thought?) It’s just so frustrating.19 -
Researching theme shit with UWP. They had some interesting contrast suggestions in their docs.
Actual image from Microsoft's actual website.
5 -
This one crazy:
We made an app for our client to scan some parcels via barcode.
They just created a ticket, for complaining that it's hard to scan in the storage room, because it's so dark. They are like sometimes we need to use a torge to scan. Can you increase the contrast of the app or something to scan better in darker place.
Did not know what to answer, but my thoughts were like: why the fuck you don't put enough light in that room?! 🤔🤷🏽♂️6 -
I'm partially color deficient, which means I can differentiate most colors, except when there is a low contrast between them.
The genius freshers in my company (well, they joined at the same time as I did, but I still call them freshers because they never goddamn improved since they joined). Anyway, these freshers thought it'd be a great idea to take design decisions upon themselves and chose the shittiest colors ever for designing a complicated interface with the most horrifying color palette you'd have ever seen.
Everytime I'm asked to debug this page, I have nightmares as they explain things to me in terms of colors :/4 -
About browsers and whole SSL CERT thing...
Most likely everyone here noticed, that https site with broken certificate will throw these big red warnings, in your face and there is so much wording like "ITS NOT SECUREEEE" or "ITS HACKEDDD" almost like it was written by passionate fanatic.
But when you are on plaintext http browsers reaction is like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Even if you have plaintext with password, it will for example in chromium put small little red thingy that almost no one notices.
I believe that broken cert with some error like invalid date is MORE secure than plaintext password, yet still there is this hypocracy with browsers...
I dont say that broken SSL cert is good, or something, Im just pointing out contrast of "broken" https vs plain http.... One looks for casual Joe like end of the world is coming and second is bearly noticable. Da fuck?
I disagree with this approach18 -
*Boots PC to enjoy overwatch*
I wanted to see what was new with Cortana for some reason
*Asks Cortana what I can say*
One of the options shows an example
"Turn on High Contrast"
*Clicks the mic/listen button*
"Turn on High contrast"
Cortana responds
"Sorry I can't do that yet"
Wow, I just love voice assistants. Thanks Microsoft!4 -
Ｈｅｌｌ Ｗｏｒｌｄ
So to followup with the enterprise grade goodness, I made a little prototype~
https://github.com/EnterpriseSoftwa...
Not very enterprise like yet, but a fun first 'extension' to writing a proper hello world program.
Ideas
--------
*Things that might make it more business like*
- Lots and lots of abstraction
- Tests ( not very business like but more stuff = better )
- FFI | Shared library, because why not
- Threading / workers
Hardcore:
Design a dedicated language for writing hello world programs that is compiled / interpreted on a simulated custom hello-world-cpu and displays it's content on a simulated screen.
Note
--------
I want to keep the documentation & code normal / actually helpful as a contrast to the concept itself and of course to keep my sanity.
24 -
Why must typography be the bane of my existance
Back in the day when I was trying to design websites they always looked like shit
Now I know all these rules about typography, spacing, colors, contrast... and my websites still look like shit8 -
Have been using my laptop and phone with flux on constant settings 24/7 for so long now, the pure white contrast hurts my eyes.4
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Long story short: University fucked up single sign on.
For every online service I have, I set a different password, randomly generated ~ 20 characters long. At our university we have multiple systems but they offer a single sign on service which is quite nice because it is so non-transparent which service now uses which authorization. I changed my password a while ago and around the same time they also updated our mail client. Since then I am not able to log in which is not a big deal for me because I have mail forwarding.
Yesterday however I needed another service and also got rejected with my password. I knew from a friend that the passwords are fucked up and that some services have different restrictions (only 12 chars max.), so I decided to search how to reset my password. What the fuck was wrong with these people? It takes you five different pages to get the tiniest bit of information how to reset the password. Then on one page you can login with your single sign on and change the password. On that page you can also set the single sign on password, but if you enter an invalid password (in respect of the the other services) guess what? No feedback that you just locked yourself out of half the systems. Nice job. Also the password requirements are not next to the input fields where you change the password. Noo. That would be way to easy, remember the little small one line on the wall of text three pages ago? There you go.
Ok step one done. Now it should work, shouldn't it? Ohh no not so fast. One needs to activate the seperate service. Where you ask? Perfectly fine question. On the top of page four is a fucking one line table which looks like some five year old had some fun in excel. The button which takes you to the activation page is nearly invisible because of the non existing contrast. Also it is not a button but some arrow pointer thingy. Behind set arrow you have a page listing all differnt kinds of services, the description which you find on page two btw. No padding to decipher this shit what so ever. Nearly on the bottom is your needed button. Yes finally.
Finally I want to login, no good. Try again. Still no good. Go back to the fucked up excel table look at my username and think to myself what's the difference here? The table is so small and again no margin or padding. Apparently they cut of the last character of my normal username which i have which is fucking ridiculous.
What is wrong with you people, we are a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, is it so hard for you to find someone decend to unify this shit?1 -
Client comes to me.
Client: So my business is colour matching, people visit me and I help match outfits they should wear that works with their hair and eye colour etc.
Me: Ok... and?
Client: Well. I'd like to do this online, someone sends a photo in and I assess it and send them a colour palette back.
Me: Right... How are you going to calibrate this?
Client: What do you mean?
Me: Well, it's a nigh on impossible task to ensure the exact tones and hues they send you in their photo to what you see, and likewise what you send back might look very different based on their brightness and contrast. Colour science is actually quite hard.
Client: But I don't understand they just send a picture right?
Me: Yeah, they can send one, but are you going to have a consistent baseline for your laptop, can you guarantee the brightness is at the same level each and every time?
Client: No... Why would that matter?
Me: I'm bored now, I'm not gonna take this project. -
For anyone using ms teams, prepare yourself for a ruined dark theme.
Fuckers have made it darker with more contrast 😩2 -
Do you guys think that in terms of a design, we're in a refresh loop?
Like, I don't think the goal of a design is to be user friendly and optimal for all human eyes. There's a million ways sideways to achieve that.
I think the real thing most designers go for is to just make something look "new". And every few years that needs to be redone. Forever. In an infinite loop.
Fuck actual usability, thought-out layouts, contrast rules, what-the-fuck ever. 99% of the goal is to make it look "modern"10 -
Dear fellow developers: Let's talk about the Internet. If you're reading this post, you've probably heard of it and are comfortable using it on a regular basis. You may even develop software that works over the internet, and that's fine and great! But you have to draw the line somewhere, and that line has been pushed farther and farther back as time goes on.
Let's talk about video games. The first game that really got me into FPSes was Team Fortress 2. Back in the day, it had a great community of casual and competitive groups alike, and there were hats! Underneath the hood was a massive number of servers. Some were officially hosted, some were run by independent communities. It had a built-in browser and central index where you could find every publically-available server and connect to it. You could even manually input connection details if that failed. In my opinion, this was a near-perfect combination of optimal user-experience and maximum freedom to run whatever the hell you wanted to. Even today, if Valve decided to stop hosting official servers, the smaller communities could still stay afloat. Fifteen years in the future, after all demand has died off, someone can still recover the server software and play a game with their kids.
Now, contrast that to a game like Overwatch. Also a very pivotal game in the FPS world, and much more modern, but what's the underlying difference in implementation? NO SUPPORT FOR SELF-HOSTED SERVERS. What does that mean when Blizzard decides to stop hosting its central servers? IT DIES. There will be no more multiplayer experience, not now, not ever. You will never be able to fully share this part of your history with future generations.
Another great example is the evolution of voice chat software. While I will agree that Discord revolutionized the market, it took away our freedom to run our own server on our own hardware. I used to run a Mumble server, now it has fallen out of use and I miss it so much.
Over time, client software has become more and more dependent on centrally-hosted services. Not many people will think about how this will impact the future usability of the product, and this will kill our code when it becomes legacy and the company decides to stop supporting it. We will have nothing to give to future generations; nobody will be able to run it in an emulator and fully re-experience it like we can do with older games and software.
This is one of the worst regressions of our time. Think about services like IRC, SMTP, SSH, even HTTP, how you're so easily able to connect to any server running those protocols and how the Internet would change if those were replaced with proprietary software that depended on a central service.
(Relevant talk (16:42): https://youtu.be/_e6BKJPnb5o?t=1002)6 -
Well today is my last day at my current job. I have enjoyed the last 4 and a half years here and learned a lot.
This last week of my notice period has been surreal though and quiet a stark contrast to how things have been.
Before I was the "go to" person for pretty much the entire dev team even though I am hired as a front end dev (so my remit was the companies website). This included the backend devs who worked on the internal business software.
The last few days have felt like I was a "persona non-grata". Conversations that would end up being held at my desk are now held elsewhere and what few tickets I do have have been given over to others.
I knew on some level this would happen but living through it is a different story.
Anyhow, I am looking forward to the new role I am starting Monday but will certainly miss the old team very much!3 -
I have just started working in this industry, and so annoyed by the fact that managers are insensitive to the efforts put in by the developers.
1. They ask for estimates, and sometimes consider it to be the hard line for everything and then they make you feel guilty if you are not able to live up to them.
-- I am not asking to be always lenient but they need to understand that this is problem solving and one might not be able to gage the problem at first sight. A problem might have several sub problems or a solution to one issue might raise compatibility issues with other which were tough to foresee .
2. Why do they always want an instant response to their email or query, a developer being online isn't just there to answer your damn obvious and sometimes stupid questions which can be understood just be glancing at the logs once.
-- How annoying would it be if the manager himself is being poked every other minute for trivial things. Does he have the same patience with his/her developers?
3. In tough times the manager easily delegates the responsibility to the developer and instead of standing by his/her side, interrogates them as if we have done some crime.
-- Wasn't this approved by you. Weren't you the one who had these stupid demands before and didn't let me do things the correct or optimized way. I am not saying I am always right, but you can be atleast open for feedback or discussion.
Why are you the first to take credit for the success and yet hold us responsible for any mishaps.
It's sad to see that some of these people have been tech developers.
I can go on ranting for many more things.
I am not saying all those people out there are like this. But trust me many are.
Note: I am not seasoned as you guys out there. I may even be biased by my own experiences. But this is in complete contrast to what I was expecting when I graduated from college and was excited to finally learn by working.1 -
A lot of people give Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. shit for "selling" user data although in my opinion acting as a matchmaker between advertisers and users does not really constitute selling data.
In contrast there seem to be a lot of companies that actually do sell user data that I never hear anyone here talking about.
5 -
Winforms.
Thanks to my school I was introduced to this shit and by George is it some of the most unintuitive crap I've ever used.
The drag and drop shit should be fine, but oh if ever you doubleclick on something it will add a [name]_click method, and if you think you can just remove it fuck you!
Then there's the fact that splitting stuff up is unintuitive as hell as well. That is, you can't. You can define areas you can show and hide, and then you can drag stuff into them. That should be fine but everything is still in the same page (and if you have stuff overlapping then you better not move it with your mouse because then it will belong to another of those things). Contrast that with the more ~~~complicated~~~ and ~~~not what we learn~~~ WPF which has frames where the content can be define in different files.
Oh but if thatt wasn't enough, the autogenerated code is horrible as hell.
I died a little inside when I learned someone decided to take it to the web as well D:
https://i.imgur.com/NL5ggIc.png
6 -
I was trying to improve the UX of my design by not forgetting the accessibility and by making the contrast as obvious as possible without sacrificing the look. I took my glasses off. I never thought I was doing this for me all this time.
-
Noticed how contrast between the active and inactive arrows in the new chrome update is so low that you can hardly make out if it's clickable or not?
8 -
Why do most web sites have so bright design? Aaarghgh, my eyes!
Anyone who dislike screeching default color themes? Black, red, blue, on full white?
Then I guess your editor and terminal are on low contrast light grey on dark grey, or something like that, right? Maybe even your window manager?
If your setup looks like this and the web is what hurts your eyes, try Dark Reader for Chrome or Firefox. I've tried several such plug-ins in the past, but this one is amazing.
(not affiliated)6 -
Took a web accessibility course somewhat recently. Here’s the list of typical accessibility problems according to those who use assistive technologies, from the most common to the least common:
1. CAPTCHA
2. Buttons and links that don’t work
3. Lacking/incorrect alt attribute
4. No input labels
5. Sudden layout shifts/content changes
6. Lacking/wrong headings
7. No keyboard access
8. Too many links
9. No skip link in header (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
10. Lacking/broken search
11. Complicated and/or long forms
12. No closed captions for videos
13. Bad grammar
14. Bad contrast
15. Custom checkboxes
16. Custom dropdowns
17. Font size
I never knew CAPTCHA was THE worst offender. I also never knew that font size was perhaps the least problematic aspect.11 -
Am going through documents and found an old review on a paper I wrote in semester 1. Now, I wouldn't say my paper was either good or bad. There was not enough guidance provided in the unit and I was unfamiliar to the scientific asshole community so I tried my best.
But in particular, fuck reviewer 2. He doesn't understand basics in English and he has the audacity to make judgement. Like, I am not "misspelling" you moronic asshole who doesn't even know the difference between American and English spelling.
He wrote three fucking pages. This moron wrote about half the length of my paper about why my paper is shit. I hope he chokes on shit.
He goes on to why every figure was useless or wrong; How no section is related to another; How everything is either not explained enough, or explained too much. The audacity is what he suffers from throughout the review.
In conclusion, and given the contrast between reviewer 1 and 2, I'd recommend reviewer 2 goes on to fuck himself. Moronic bastard.
It's a pity that I know this will happen again in future. God this makes me so angry. Gah.5 -
I cancelled prime a few months ago so when I was doing BF shopping on Amazon yesterday, delivery is now 1wk instead of 2-days.
And shipping apparently is $9 if you don't meet the $25 minimum and manually select free shipping; I remember it was $6 before...
So a few thoughts I had:
1. Amazon really must need the Prime memberships to cover all the shipping costs since it is now a pain in the ass to get free shipping on the checkout page.
2. Americans really want instant gratification? Waiting a week is that painful?
In contrast, stuff from China take about a month but are much cheaper
3. The only thing that's worth buying via Amazon now is electronics and stuff that are fragile... And food that's on sale because they have to uphold quality
4. Lucky for me, I get 1 week shipping, I have more time to cancel orders... Which is what I actually did8 -
What's the WORST commonly used language to use for server side web development? By this, I mean which is LEAST fit for the job, not which one do you hate the most.
I vote Java. It's lack of creature comforts like operator overloading and it's verbose and strict nature are in direct contrast with the free-form nature of the web. At least C# lets you do some crazy stuff.32 -
I hate that the general consensus to the solution of “themes” has been exclusively dark/ light.
Not only does this make it future un-proof in case “light blue” becomes a common style choice, but it already fucks up TODAY when considering high contrast themes!
Who made this shaky system the agreed standard!?8 -
Dark theme tip for windows users
Use magnifying glass set it to 100% then options invert colors. You'll get everything dark themed now but no missing stuff like you would get from a high contrast dark theme.5 -
I hate to offer some unsolicited critique of something I happily use for free... but I have to say this somewhere to just get it out. That's what this place is for, right?
The new MDN visual design fucking sucks.
It's like a purposeful example I might make for my students - of "what not to do." There were a few things they could have done to improve MDN for sure. Instead, they didn't improve it. They just "changed it." That is always a bad move. Now everything just has less contrast and is floating around with nothing to anchor it. Didn't they show it to anyone and get feedback along the way? "So, we made all the fonts closer to the same size, removed any differentiation in weight so that everything will look the same and just kinda blur out and put people to sleep, and just in general dulled everything out as much as possible - and also here's this logo thing too."4 -
Fuck accessibility.
No WAIT, before you call me an asshole hear me out.
So when you use CSS grid to create layouts you're supposed to not use the features it has (reordering items) too much, and instead keep the HTML structured the way it's supposed to be read.
When you add a picture of a cat you're supposed to put a alt="Brown cat sitting on a chair" there.
Also you should test for all kinds of sight disabilities and use high contrast colors.
All that for likely <1% of your users.
What would be the alternative? HTML is a markup language, and not supposed to be directly read by humans. Invest the time ONCE for screenreaders to understand CSS positioning and read content in a sensible order. Use image recognition to describe pictures (with selectable levels of detail). Let the browser modify colors on the fly for better readability.
Don't spend time and money to solve a problem 100000 Times that could be solved once.
Fuck accessibility.28 -
after a vast number of emails, phone calls and cross-client tests with a customer, because „the light grey background of the new template magically disappeared“.... I had one final idea!
me: „could you please turn the contrast knob on your monitor?“
reaction of the customer: „OHHH.......“
🤦🏻♂️ -
I never thought I'd reach a point where I use High Contrast theme for development O_O
Was always a user of dark theme, but now VS Code is on High Contrast and it is comfortable af but ugly af also :\6 -
Hot sunny day, trying to use my laptop in the garden, can't see shit on the screen!
Contrast to the max ☀️3 -
For those of you who want something comparable to the full Dark themes people have used on Linux for years here's a high contrast windows theme that doesn't look like garbage. I'm absolutely in love with it and will never go back. It's my favorite theme since the Windows classic theme. Also it's just a theme profile, so no worries about modding files or installing some malware infested theme manager.
https://eversins.deviantart.com/art... -
Ok, so I need some clarity from you good folk, please.
My lead developer is also my main mentor, as I am still very much a junior. He carved out most of his career in PHP, but due to his curious/hands-on personality, he has become proficient with Golang, Docker, Javascript, HTML/CSS.
We have had a number of chats about what I am best focusing on, both personally and related to work, and he makes quite a compelling case for the "learn as many things as possible; this is what makes you truly valuable" school of thought. Trouble is, this is in direct contrast to what I was taught by my previously esteemed mentor, Gordon Zhu from watchandcode.com. "Watch and Code is about the core skills that all great developers possess. These skills are incredibly important but sound boring and forgettable. They’re things like reading code, consistency and style, debugging, refactoring, and test-driven development. If I could distill Watch and Code to one skill, it would be the ability to take any codebase and rip it apart. And the most important component of that ability is being able to read code."
As you can see, Gordon always emphasised language neutrality, mastering the fundamentals, and going deep rather than wide. He has a ruthlessly high barrier of entry for learning new skills, which is basically "learn something when you have no other option but to learn it".
His approach served me well for my deep dive into Javascript, my first language. It is still the one I know the best and enjoy using the most, despite having written programs in PHP, Ruby, Golang and C# since then. I have picked up quite a lot about different build pipelines, development environments and general web development as a result of exposure to these other things, so it isn't a waste of time.
But I am starting to go a bit mad. I focus almost exclusively on quite data intensive UI development with Vue.js in my day job, although there is an expectation I will help with porting an app to .NET Core 3 in a few months. .NET is rather huge from what I have seen so far, and I am seriously craving a sense of focus. My intuition says I am happiest on the front end, and that focusing on becoming a skilled Javascript engineer is where I will get the biggest returns in mastery, pay and also LIFE BALANCE/WELLBEING...
Any thoughts, people? I would be interested to hear peoples experiences regarding depth vs breadth when it comes to the real world.8 -
Samsung Keyboard is utter shit.
GBoard (Google Keyboard) is like a ray of sunshine in comparison.
The Samsung keyboard actually changes whole words to completely different words. It even replaces words with misspellings. No, these were not words I had misspelled before. Tried to turn off autocorrect and keep suggestions. They are the SAME setting. Like if you are going to make a shitty ass version of the GBoard, at least keep the same ability to tweak settings.
In contrast I installed GBoard and was able to disable JUST autocorrect and keep suggestions.
Just like most Samsung apps Samsung Keyboard is utter shit.
FUCK YOU SAMSUNG!10 -
There's too many web apps out there that advertise having great accessibility, but whose only claim to that is that they work okay-ish with screenreaders.
There's more to accessibility, darnit! Not just blind people, also remember people with impaired colour perception, people who have to use increased font sizes, people with poor contrast perception (can we please not do light-gray text, links, or buttons on white background anymore?), and many more.
The amount of apps alone that just are impossible to use properly with increased font sizes due to cut-off unscrollable text or buttons pushed out of the visible part of the page is staggering. Or where you get permanently stuck inside a rich-text editor if you can only navigate by keyboard, or where whole parts of the page are impossible to properly use with background images turned off...
I'm aware this might sound unreasonable and I know it's extra effort to learn all the rules, but once these things are not an afterthought, but rather something to take care of starting even during first implementation, it starts to come naturally.
But would it be unreasonable to ask of an architect to not put the restrooms, conference rooms, managers office, where they can only be reached by stairs? I don't think it would be. Sure it makes placing them more complicated, but excluding people from being able to use the building due to circumstances beyond their control feels a bit elitist and snobby to me.
Saw an app last week where a lot of features were behind click-handlers on elements that are not supposed to be interactive like <div>, <li>, and <span> tags. How's someone who can't use the visual clues even supposed to know that the element is interactive?
And yes, there's some of these points where ensuring accessibility is not just the devs job but also the designer's responsibility (contrast rules for example), but in my experience if the devs notice "oh hey, this could be problematic" then the design people usually listen.
Honestly in the case of accessibility I believe that putting off some features for later to make time to ensure that what's there is accessible, even if it only affects 1% of visitors, belongs into the "social responsibility" category, and most clients I've worked with were open to the subject.
I do believe it's something that everyone should take time to learn.
PS: I don't mean to attack anyone, I just wish it were something that more people watch out for.5 -
Career fair update:
At the fair I bee-lined right to a company I'd talked to at a hackathon before. The person I talked to there was extremely enthusiastic, and called me a "really strong candidate," and even talked about providing housing for the summer near the workplace!
I'm contrast, AMD's interviewer looked extremely uninterested. Pretty sure they just grabbed some random engineer who didn't want to be there.
Microsoft had a line so long that the fair ended before most of the people even got to talk to Microsoft. Needless to say, I didn't even bother.
Qualcomm seemed cool, that went alright.
Overall, really happy with how the fair turned out, and really excited with how likely this job looks for me.1 -
My father in law uses a mac. He once asked me to fix something there for him. So I turned it on and I thought my eyes where bleeding. He had the contrast on the highest level. It was so bad you couldn't even recognize the buttons on the screen. So I changed the contrast to a degree that I could recognize something except for white on the screen. After fixing his problem I asked him why his contrast was set so high. He said that the colors on the screen were only right when the contrast is set high and that I should change it back.3
-
Oh my god, when will Firefox shut up about its motherfucking colours!? Themes have been a feature since forever, none of this is new. Also, I DO NOT want my fucking userchrome to be colourful, and I DO NOT want to be constantly bugged about this. It's a fucking browser. I want iit have a reasonably high contrast and otherwise blend into the edge of the screen, because for a web browser, the UI is not important and should not stick out.
I respect if someone has different opinions about UI, but it pisses me off to no end that Mozilla doesn't respect mine.6 -
Don't know about others.. but my clients' enthusiasm is exactly the same.
On a contrast.. what I mostly end up showing them is a blank screen with "Hello World"..
And a derp face :P
2 -
I'm fucking annoyed by low contrast bullshit all over the web!!!
Seriously, 1.9:1 contrast ratio for text on a documentation site?
FUCK YOU ASSHOLE. STOP THIS SHIT. IT DOESN'T LOOK GOOD. IT ISN'T USEFUL. IT'S GODDAMN INFURIATING THAT I HAVE TO SQUINT TO READ SOMETHING THAT I'M SUPPOSED TO BE READING AND MAKE MY EYES BLEED!
It's not cool, it never was.
#contrastrebellion5 -
Thankfully I've been lucky enough to work with many brilliant people. The best being the ones who are enthusiastic about sharing tips, tricks and helpful advice to new people. Little pieces of advice from old colleagues have followed me throughout my career, for sure.
By contrast, people who sit in a dark corner, bemoaning everything and being completely unwilling to help can have enough negative impact to cause talented people to leave. -
Client: me wants more contrast, we git complaints much
Me: stop using thin skin assed font then
Client: Impossiburu bro!
Me:
/* Excuse me */
*{
font-weight: bold;
text-transform: capitalize;
}1 -
Sometimes in our personal projects we write crazy commit messages. I'll post mine because its a weekend and I hope someone has a well deserved start. Feel free to post yours, regex out your username, time and hash and paste chronologically. ISSA THREAD MY DUDES AND DUDETTES
--
Initialization of NDM in Kotlin
Small changes, wiping drive
Small changes, wiping drive
Lottie, Backdrop contrast and logging in implementation
Added Lotties, added Link variable to Database Manifest
Fixed menu engine, added Smart adapter, indexing, Extra menus on home and Calendar
b4 work
Added branch and few changes
really before work
Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
really before work 4 sho
Refined Search response
Added Swipe to menus and nested tabs
Added custom tab library
tabs and shh
MORE TIME WASTED ON just 3 files
api and rx
New models new handlers, new static leaky objects xd, a few icons
minor changes
minor changesqwqaweqweweqwe
db db dbbb
Added Reading display and delete function
tryin to add web socket...fail
tryin to add web socket...success
New robust content handler, linked to a web socket. :) happy data-ring lol
A lot of changes, no time to explain
minor fixes ehehhe
Added args and content builder to content id
Converted some fragments into NDMListFragments
dsa
MAjor BiG ChANgEs added Listable interface added refresh and online cache added many stuff
MAjor mAjOr BiG ChANgEs added multiClick block added in-fragment Menu (and handling) added in-fragment list irem click handling
Unformatted some code, added midi handler, new menus, added manifest
Update and Insert (upsert) extension to Listable ArrayList
Test for hymnbook offline changing
Changed menuId from int to key string :) added refresh ...global... :(
Added Scale Gesture Listener
Changed Font and size of titlebar, text selection arg. NEW NEW Readings layout.
minor fix on duplicate readings
added isUserDatabase attribute to hymn database file added markwon to stanza views
Home changes :)
Modular hymn Editing
Home changes :) part 2
Home changes :) part 3
Unified Stanza view
Perfected stanza sharing
Added Summernote!!
minor changes
Another change but from source tree :)))
Added Span Saving
Added Working Quick Access
Added a caption system, well text captions only
Added Stanza view modes...quite stable though
From work changes
JUST a [ush
Touch horizontal needs fix
Return api heruko
Added bible index
Added new settings file
Added settings and new icons
Minor changes to settings
Restored ping
Toggles and Pickers in settings
Added Section Title
Added Publishing Access Panel
Added Some new color changes on restart. When am I going to be tired of adding files :)
Before the confession
Theme Adaptation to views
Before Realm DB
Theme Activity :)
Changes to theme Activity
Changes to theme Activity part 2 mini
Some laptop changes, so you wont know what changed :)
Images...
Rush ourd
Added palette from images
Added lastModified filter
Problem with cache response
works work
Some Improvements, changed calendar recycle view
Tonic Sol-fa Screen Added
Merge Pull
Yes colors
Before leasing out to testers
Working but unformated table
Added Seperators but we have a glithchchchc
Tonic sol-fa nice, dots left, and some extras :)))
Just a nice commit on a good friday.
Just a quickie
I dont know what im committing...3 -
What's with all the hate towards mongo as of late? Just a few years ago it was all the rage.
I haven't yet used it myself, I just find it to be a sudden stark contrast in opinion2 -
Finally got the opportunity to work as fullstack more oriented to backend as a side gig and I fucking love it.
Now I can say with all my heart that I hate my main frontend job and designers so much. I hate every small task like:
- change this arrow
- change this button
- change this color
- well this is not accessible.
- well this doesn't pass contrast check ( as if this is my fucking job and not the stupid fuck designer who mixes up colors )
Now I'm just trying to consider a reconversion and git gud .1 -
Due to disability I have to use a phone mostly. What possess people to create illegible web pages? Text is the opposite of bold. Links are a light blue which gives no contrast.
To top it off, some pages won't expand. Others do but don't wrap the text. How smart would a preprocessor have to be to seamlessly feed it's output to a browser? Probably GPT-3 could do it. -
!rant(maybe)
So after taking a long weekend and applying to some different companies, doing some cultural fit and technical interviews, I thought to sit down and take a different look at my situation (with the help of my partner, of course, bless her patient soul).
* My work output isn't bad; all things considered, it's the people I work for who are doing a shitty job. If my project fails, I have to remind myself it's not my fault or my team's because we're doing all we can to the best of our abilities. I mean, it's not our fault we're being mismanaged.
* The best way I can effect change is if I am in a position to do so. Instead of looking outside, I should be challenging my way up - and if no opportunities are there, then I have to make them myself.
* This is still a year of uncertainty - starting fresh isn't going to be easy. In contrast, I've already built a rep in my current company - why throw it away because I work for sucky people?
Looking at my previous rants, they were definitely coming from a place of frustration; but as the saying goes, if I'm not part of the solution then I'm part of the problem. I'm gonna see how I can fix that then without clamboring for an escape hatch.
Yes, it was a very insightful Valentine's dinner conversation.1 -
I prefer VSCode over visual studio for a ton of tiny conveniences. Some git operations can really only be done conveniently by switching rapidly between the command line and the big scrollable list of diffs. The currently open file is automatically focused in the tree, not by explicit user command. Ctrl+Tab shows the last viewed section of files and not their name, so I can find an arbitrary point in my jump chain. If I open the diff for a newly added file it's possible that I want to edit the file, but it's also possible that I didn't notice that it's newly added. Painting the whole background green doesn't hinder the first scenario nearly as much as it solves the second, in contrast to VS not showing any changes, which just has me confused because of the total lack of modification marks.3
-
I'm currently working as a new team member on an angular project. It just took me an hour to understand the data flow for one single use case. Data is passed through 4 directives and each time with two-way binding. In contrast to angular2 you cant see whether an attribute is an input/output element, you always have to check the directive code. Funny thing, the controller of the directive is in an extra function and sometimes not even directly behind the directives code. Template, directive and controller sum up to 12 code placements I have to check in order to understand everything. All the directives seem to be neccessary because my boss wants everything DRY.3
-
Just curious what done dev's would prefer screen wise for smart devices like watches and the like...
The long battery life of a colour e-ink display but have the muted colours.
Or an OLED screen with the high contrast and vibrancy, but with much lower battery?4 -
Does anybody know some good, preferrably rather high-contrast vim-colorschemes? Both light and dark.
Currently testing through tbe base16 collection. Tried solarized but aint my cup of tea.1 -
I hate eclipse due to the performance issue... switching perspectives, just everything seems too slow.
Love sublime and it’s speed, and simplicity, as well as vim ..of eclipse had the editor of vim... with key bindings of vim... speed of sublime or vim...but the ilitellisense of eclipse or visual studio ..and the ability to properly change the theme/color scheme of the entire environment without issues of contrast with certain plugs in...
I think eclipse would actually be great if someone did that... or same with Visual studio ...6 -
Exams are done, i passed some subjects that made me almost drop out.
Felt good. Now if i manage to do well again in exams i may finish the uni on time.
And now here it comes. One of my professors saw that i was coding my self in contrast of the 90% of other students, and with 2 more guys from my year, suggested us to his friend that owns a company, so we could work there.
I went there, talked about the team and the product we have to do and it seems that for now the only developers are me and 1 more girl and 1 more guy, all new commers, not even juniors.
Shiet. The team told us not to be worried since they will be our instructors and help us out and if we need more help they will hire a senior dev.
Not sure how i should react to that.
I do that mostly for experience so i can leave the country when im done with uni to go to estonia holland or finland.
One more thing, we still don't know what languages we will use and even though i told them that im pretty good with python they seem not to consider it at all. I'm the only one of the juniors that has actually made projects and coded on his own, not with university projects.
Also so that all other employees use windows machines.
Sad.
Hope all that goes well.1 -
Just typed a comment for like 5 minutes on website version of devRant.
The red of the button got marked on my eyes, so I have now an area of the eyes that sees blue tint.
Yay -
Who knew you could make (more or less) everything dark mode in windows 7?
I wish windows 10 could also give the explorer a dark mode... As far as I know you can only use high contrast mode to do that which is ugly af. Why add a dark mode to the settings and start menu but not for the windws explorer?
11 -
Working on programming a user interface so a user can select a line in a graph. I have a rotated mouse area to match that of the line to be selected. This mouse area can detect when a mouse enters the area. This seems to be working well. But then I noticed it was lopsided. Entering the area from one direction was not showing entry as soon as from another direction. Then I realized that the black border of the mouse was not being used to trigger entry into the area. It is the white area of the mouse tip that triggers this. The black area is only to provide contrast so you can see the mouse.
So on a mouse, and in mouse point selection on Ubuntu, the black border of the mouse only servers to provide contrast to the controlling white area of the mouse.
🍿🍿🍿4 -
We should bring back the death sentence by hanging for those fucking retards who show their software update notifications as fucking popups after I start the program. No, notepad++, I don't give a fuck about your update. Fuck you FileZilla, I'm on a hurry, stop shoving your almost full screen update window in my face. Oh and the visual studio installer. Don't even get me started on the visual studio installer.
Would it be too difficult to show the update notification on the bottom of the window on the status bar? Maybe with a higher contrast color so it's more noticeable?9 -
Ah, the Sunday start. It’s like being in a parallel universe where the week starts a day early. You walk into the office on a Sunday morning, while the rest of the world is still in weekend mode. The streets are quiet, and there’s a peacefulness in the air that’s in stark contrast to the hustle and bustle inside your office.
Your inbox is already filling up, and it feels like Monday came early. The code you left on Thursday, which was working perfectly, now seems to have developed a mind of its own.
And then there are the meetings. It seems like everyone saved their most pressing issues for Sunday, and your calendar is filled with back-to-back appointments.
But despite the challenges, there’s something uniquely satisfying about being ahead of the curve. While everyone else is still enjoying their weekend, you’re already gearing up for the week ahead. It’s not always easy, but it’s definitely an adventure.
So here’s to all the Sunday warriors out there. May your code always compile, your inbox be manageable, and your coffee be strong.2 -
In the first place I dont do it that often in private projects because the estimation is always wrong.
At work i just think about best and worst case scenario and the average time it could take. If the the worst case scenario is really time intensive and there are a lot of factors that could go wrong in contrast to the best case, I significantly increase the estimated time for the task. Otherwise its 1/6 best case; 1/6 worst case; 4/6 average time2 -
Why does devRant show I have 6 unread notifications?
I cleared the cache. Even downloaded the mobile app to check whether it was only a problem with the web-app.
No, that number is still there. The mobile app claims it is the comments section. I scrolled down to 2019 ( no, I haven't been all that active ) and still no unread notifications.
Why didn't you think of putting up an 'unread tab' when you were creating all those tabs on the mobile app? Please add an unread tab 🙏
Also, the read and unread markers in the dark mode could have a little more darker contrast difference in the dark mode. I don't know about light mode, because I don't use it ( but I could check once I get notifications from this rant; I'm turning light mode on for a brief while to check this )
I haven't had unread-anxiety before, but I guess I have it now ( not really though )23 -
Many memes mock frontend development, showing a beautiful and simply frontside of something in contrast to an exceptionally chaotic backside or inside of a product.
Single page applications by fullstack developers combine both sides, bringing the unpolished industrial aesthetic of backend logic to JavaScript while making sure that also the frontend isn't that shiny at least at second glance.4 -
!rant
design related.
By god if M&B bannerlord's ui isn't sexy af now!
They got the perfect design on the kill icons when a user takes out an opponent, great contrast, a couple fonts that do their job to the T and match the experience nicely.
Maybe this is all just nerd shit, but good design always gets me hot an bothered.
It's a significant improvement from the first game.
Got check it out. Music is obnoxious af so just mute it or something.
https://youtube.com/watch/... -
Could we have other dark themes on here? I was thinking of something with different combinations of colours and contrast options. What do you think?2
-
I keep having this recurring idea that I can fill in the gaps in my education by writing video games that allow me to explore those topics. This would force me to learn the subject well enough to share it with other people. So it would not be just surface level.
I keep thinking of a program that explores and visualizes math topics and programming topics. I would really like to have a program that allows me to visualize memory cells for algorithm exploration. Or a really nice graphing calculator in the computer that allows me to view multiple graphs to compare and contrast equations.
What holds me back is both math and CS are huge topics. I feel like any kind of playground would only cover a small subset. Ideally whatever I make should be extendable over time to add content and topics. It would need to be somewhat fun as well.
I can imagine an AI training program where you help your character navigate a room of hazards or die. This could be one such fun challenge.1
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