Front End programming is the worst of all worlds.

I am a Full Stack developer that during every interview says "i can do front end stuff if needed". Something gets lost in translation and becomes "I do only front end stuff".

I don't mind front end development, but i hate urgent nitpicking that happens every time. Everyone else on the team works by regular tasks and deliveries (sprints and release dates), but my work consists of being the brush of the creative mind of someone else, that could not figure out how to make a good design before sending it out to me.

I am not a designer, a designer job is a creative one, i am just a brush that the team uses to complain why this button looks wrong on this not designed platform.

I left my previous company because my tech leadership was insensitive and agressive.

However, I am in a start-up right now and CTO is a nut job.

He creates random Slack threads and keeps messaging me like crazy. The co-founders have shut him down multiple times and yet his only success metric is "number of deliveries".

The other day something broke in production and teams were discussing about resolving the bug in one of the Slack channels.

CTO literally wrote this and I wish I was making this up, "let us not look at the logs and trust our code to work fine."

I was baffled and confused. I realised me leaving my previous organisation because of such tech leadership was a stupid decision.

Crows are black everywhere.

So now that Covid is apparently "gone", management wants us to come to the office to participate in daily team building events to hype up people to commute full time...
but still gotta finish those milestone deliveries while having too many meetings and deadlines.

Murphy is watching us from above with a shit-eating grin.

This is what you're in for when you go for THE state-of-the-art "React stack". What you see in the screenshot below is the hellofresh.be website (it's the same as .com). It uses Next.js, React, emotion & styled-components (2 CSS-in-JS libraries). It uses 140MB of RAM for a single tab with some product cards and a slider, logs 70 console errors in production, and fails to load 3/4 times on Firefox.

On mobile, opening a meal card to view its recipe literally takes up to 10 seconds (and I have good connection and performant devices) and you can't choose the last meal card because a f*ing overlay hides the "add" button. And this is a global company with millions in revenue.

All this bugginess has already resulted in incorrect or missed deliveries and they're not doing anything about it. F* you Next.js & F* you HelloFresh IT management

Somewhere in the svalbard vault where github buried all our code is about two hundred megabytes of pictures of my ass and other pornography stenographically hidden in innocous pictures hosted on github. Why? Because I can.

I did the same thing with stock photography back when I used to be a photographer. If you've used pixabay or a dozen other stock sites theres a good chance you've unwittingly looked at my magnificently sculpted ass (and other parts of me).

Future shenanigans include massive (and unsolicited) deliveries of half finished dildos (courtesy of dildo factory dumpster rejects), public accesible blue tooth speakers put in inaccesible spots, deepfakes of opposing politicians banging uglies, public book burnings not because we hate books but because who the fuck reads anymore?

And orgies, lots of orgies.

Its the end of the world. Let loose with the craziness and party.

!rant
protip == true

TL_DR = "exec mail ceo jeff@amazon.com"

The laziness of devs, including myself, goes hand-in with the crazy deliveries (groceries, etc) that Amazon delivers without having to leave home.

But...Amazon isn't prefect, occasionally I have issues and usually support is great. But when support isn't what you expect and you're more frustrated than before, send an email response and include jeff@amazon.com

And no, I don't work there... I'm just happy my issue was resolved and I got a nice credit added to my account. (Mileage may vary)

!dev but definitely a rant.

Ordered a lovely new UHD HDR tv for the family on Monday.

MFW I see the courier is Hermes (notoriously bad).

It arrived today.

Any guesses as to the condition it was in?

Yep. Lovely crack on the screen.

Took all day to clear it up with Amazon.

And the best they could bloody do was a refund, but I have to organise the collection and pay for that (which they said they’ll refund).

FFS.

There was a problem in my enterprise last week that I couldn't repair because it was my school time. So, for a week, the person in charge of deliveries couldn't import directly the adresses because the csv generated by the site had an error. I came back this morning and managed to correct the error.
In fact, the whole csv was generated in PHP, with code like:
$txt .= $code.";";
But for an unknown reason at the generation, the csv decides to crop 5 characters at the end of the documents, so the last semicolon and the country code were absent. So I had to add a string at the end of the document ("dgdgdgdgd") so it crops useless characters.
I really hate when I don't understand.

Context: This team has been constantly behind on deliveries, ignoring advice from other teams or more experienced colleague, making mistake after mistake and now, just revealed they have major performance issues, as warned...

So, in the most recent Sprint review they were, once again, criticized for their bad approach and inability as a team to receive feedback and work on that feedback, resulting in mediocre development...

As I left the room I heard one of them say:
"We make this huge rocket that most wouldn't be capable of doing and they cry that it's blue and not green... Others make a ls on a command line and everybody applauds"

Now, this is for everyone to whom the shoe fits...

Listen here you little entitled snotty prick, where do you think you are!? Yes most should not make a rocket when the requirement was a bike! That's overengineering and besides that most of your decisions were arguably wrong!

I will never applaud you or anyone else for doing your fucking job and being mediocre about it... What we applaud is value added! Value to the project, to the process or to the team... Bring value and I will applaud, do your job and you get a salary. Be a snotty childish dipshit and you might find yourself forcefully searching for new professional challenge!

We have a delivery specification. It's documented and it tells every developer how deliveries have to be done. Every *FUCKING* *SINGLE* *STEP*. For most deliveries you don't even have to think much, just check the steps.

Why do I always stumble across deliveries that are missing vital parts so if you want to reconstruct some project status, because someone is on vacation or has quit, you can't or need hours of investigation? Am I a private investigator, or what?

Am I the only one who tries to make his work comprehensible?

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

Can someone explain to me the need of a "technical management"? I know my question is naive, but try to explain it like to kindergarten kid.

Case 1. When team is good, and has a good tech leader(s) then the software director/manager makes more harm with his silly ideas, pompous cliche "calls to arms" etc.

Case 2. On the other hand, when software team is shit, it means that the management is responsible for assembling such team. Then it further means that they can't distinguish impostors from really good talents, which leads to bad quality, missed deliveries, bugs, frustrations, etc.

I saw many times when good technical lead (aka architect, staff, principal) made a positive difference. But I NEVER EVER saw that things were bad and "manager/director" made a positive change. This concept is soooo flawed....

... any one explain please?

Hi all, how do you deal with imposter syndrome?
I just joined a new job 3 mths back and am struggling with feeling productive. I feel my manager thinks I might be incompetent as my project deliveries are getting delayed.

I was burnt out as last job and it hasn't been easy picking up domain knowledge in a new workplace esp with wfh.
Any advice on how to deal with such a situation ?

"Copy the file sent to our warehouse management system to another folder so we can keep track of the deliveries we sent data for."

Why these geniuses think that having a folder with file names containing timestamps (and not delivery numbers) would make their job easier is beyond me...

The ability to track all deliveries in real time using gps of the exact location is sort of creepy. Just spend about 10mins watching my dasher seemingly lost and trying to locate the restaurant...

But sorta feels like being an overlord watching his serf do his bidding...

The project that our client is providing as a service to Heathrow Airport as main system for handling any deliveries from and to the Airport and also other big companies in UK. But the code sucks :(

Get the requirements cleared, create stories and tasks for them, decide what you wanna do everyday for the rest of the sprint, and then procrastinate. Give a half meaningful update in every stand up so that it seems like you kind of know what you're doing.

The Pressure of last minute deliveries gets the blood pumping so hard that you don't need any other stimuli.

Seriously though, clear requirements and expectations and peaceful music

I am currently weeks apart from releasing my pet project, which I am working on for almost 6 years now. Of course, there were a few stops here and there, but overall I've spent a lot of time and effort on this to make it work. It is far from complete but I am really happy with the results.

Now, since I am not a professional by any means - it is all a hobby for me - I was wondering, that how much my work would cost, if it were to made by professionals. Below the details so you can get a grasp of the thing.

The whole system is for our family business. We are selling parts for an old-timer truck model. The website was pretty much done already, people like it, it only needed some polishing and adding of the new features. But the thing behind it is monstrous (at least for me).
Apart from the custom-made CMS for the website (most of it was done already and didn't need to change), we can handle orders, partners, prices, stocks, overdue partners, pretty much anything a CRM would do.
There is a logic to automatically make orders based on import prices, or give the customer a custom discount based on the price gap of each product. There are products, which can contain other products, and their prices are dynamically changed based on a given formula, once an underlying product price changes. We can send e-mails when an order status changes, and there is also a page, where a user can interact whit their order, like changing the shipping or the delivery address. The system is (or will in the following weeks) also connected to multiple shipping companies' API, so we can order deliveries and print labels directly from our system. The whole thing is a custom made Laravel project by the way. There are countless more features, but I've just spent 2 hours explaining all to my father and was only be able to cover like half of it.

And why it is all custom made, you ask? Well, the business logic is a bit twisted, so it would be hard to operate as a regular web shop, since the availability of the products are uncertain, given the fact that it is a model, which isn't manufactured in 30 years. So, we can't just accept and send orders without confirming. It is also a thing, that people usually don't know what they need to order for their truck, so we have to help them, so they don't waste their money and the precious last pieces of a part unnecessarily.

Sorry for this rather long post, and it might feel like I just want to brag (well, I kinda do), but I am honestly interested in what such a custom product would cost in the market.

Thank you for your time answering.

How do you deal when you are overpromising and underdelivering due to really shitty unpredictable codebase? Im having 2-3 bad sprints in a row now.

For context: Im working on this point of sale app for the past 4 months and for the last 3 sprints I am strugglig with surprises and edgecases. I swear to god each time I want to implement something more complex, I have to create another 4-5 tickets just to fix the constraints or old bugs that prevent my feature implementation just so I could squeeze my feature in. That offsets my original given deadlines and its so fucking draining to explain myself to my teamlead about why feature has to be reverted why it was delayed again and so on.

So last time basically it went like this: Got assigned a feature, estimated 2 weeks to do it. I did the feature in time, got reviewed and approved by devs, got approved by QA and feature got merged to develop.

Then, during regression testing 3 blockers came up so I had to revert the feature from develop. Because QA took a very long time to test the feature and discover the blockers, now its like 3 days left until the end of the sprint. My teamlead instantly started shitting bricks, asked me to fix the blockers asap.

Now to deal with 3 blockers I had to reimplement the whole feature and create like 3 extra tickets to fix existing bugs. Feature refactor got moved to yet another sprint and 3 tickets turned into like 8 tickets. Most of them are done, I created them just to for papertrail purposes so that they would be aware of how complex this is.

It taking me already extra 2 weeks or so and I am almost done with it but Im going into really deep rabbithole here. I would ask for help but out of other 7 devs in the team only one is actually competent and helpful so I tried to avoid going to him and instead chose to do 16 hour days for 2 weeks in a row.

Guess what I cant sustain it anymore. I get it that its my fault maybe I should have asked for help sooner.

But its so fucking frustrating trying to do mental gymnastics over here while majority of my team is picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them but they manage to look good infront of everyone.

Meanwhile Im tryharding here and its no enough, I guess I still look incompetent infront of everyone because my 2 weeks task turned into 6 weeks and I was too stubborn to ask for help. Whats even worse now is that teamlead wants me to lead a new initiative what stresses me even more because I havent finished the current one yet. So basically Im tryharding so much and I will get even extra work on top. Fucking perfect.

My frustration comes from the point that I kinda overpromised and underdelivered. But the thing is, at this point its nearly impossible to predict how much a complex feature implementation might take. I can estimate that for example 2 weeks should be enough to implement a popup, but I cant forsee the weird edgecases that can be discovered only during development.

My frustration comes from devs just reviewing the code and not launching the app on their emulator to test it. Also what frustrates me is that we dont have enough QA resources so sometimes feature stands for extra 1-2 weeks just to be tested. So we run into a situation where long delays for testing causes late bug discovery that causes late refactors which causes late deliveries and for some reason I am the one who takes all the pressure and I have to puloff 16 hour workdays to get something done on time.

I am so fucking tired from last 2 sprints. Basically each day fucking explaining that I am still refactoring/fixing the blocker. I am so tired of feeling behind.

Now I know what you will say: always underpromise and overdeliver. But how? Explain to me how? Ok example. A feature thats add a new popup? Shouldnt take usually more than 2 weeks to do my part. What I cant promise is that devs will do a proper review, that QA wont take 2 extra weeks just to test the feature and I wont need another extra 2 weeks just to fix the blockers.

I see other scrum team devs picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them. Meanwhile Im doing mental gymnastics here and trying to implement something complex (which initially seemed like an easy task). For the last 2 weeks Im working until 4am.

Im fucking done. I need a break and I will start asking other devs for help. I dont care about saving my face anymore. I will start just spamming people if anything takes longer than a day to implement. Fuck it.

I am setting boundaries. 8 hours a day and In out. New blockers and 2 days left till end of the sprint? Sorry teamlead we will move fixes to another sprint.

It doesnt help that my teamlead is pressuring me and asking the same shit over and over. I dont want them to think that I am incompetent. I dont know how to deal with this shit. Im tired of explaining myself again and again. Should I just fucking pick low hanging fruit tasks but deliver them in a steady pace? Fucking hell.