About 10 years ago my wife and I were buying a house. We found out late that we needed a lot more cash than we had previously thought we needed, and the deadline to deliver it was just a few days away. After returning home from my full-time gig at about 6pm, I took a break for a bit and then worked all night on a job for a client to make up the extra money. When 7am rolled around I had just finished up. Then I went back to work at my full-time job, and later met with the client to present my work. It was roughly 27 hours at a keyboard for me. That effort made it possible for us to successfully buy our first home. If you want something badly enough, make it happen!

Client: we need you to give us access to the code ASAP. We don't like this black box approach.

Me: You have always had access to the code. It is here on this bitbucket repo and your usernames have admin access.

Client: We want the code moved to our GitHub before EOD.

I check out how to move repos over and it's fairly easy.

Me: just give me access to create a repo on your GitHub account and you can have the code moved over.

Client: Sorry it's late in the day and we stepped out to get drinks. (It was 2:30 pm). Not sure why you think there is a rush on this, we'll handle it first thing next week.

Me: WTF

Me : Here is your website. So, when can I expect my pay.😊
Client (wants to skip the pay ) : Site is not loading first fix this we can discuss later.
Me : Please conncet to internet and reload. 😒😎

Truestory 🍻

Client: I know other developers who would do the same and much more for much less.

Me: I am glad you chose to work with me instead.

Client: I mean I like the site but I still feel that the development process has taken longer than it should have.

Me: Well, it is within the time frame I had said I would be able to have the first version of the site running. I have also implemented quite a number of new features that we had not earlier agreed on.

Client: I think I'll pay (quotes less than 20% of the total cost ).

Me: That is less than the amount that you were to pay as the first instalment ages ago!!

Client: I mean I like the site, but I think it still lacks the X factor. I want ...*goes on to mention other features*

Me: While I take pride in making my clients happy, I believe this process should be mutually beneficial. You are constantly making requests for new features but are making no attempts to meet your end of the agreement.

Client: FYI, there are people begging me for this job.

Me: *Takes down the site.* I wish you all the best, I hope the other developers are up to your standards.

Client: *Literally ignoring the fact that I just quit*. I want (makes more requests).

I am simply going to ignore this one!!!!

First time I heard a client say: "You've done a phenomenal job, but you've over-delivered. You should have come to me. We could have worked it out." after we had to ask for an extension.
That's a keeper.

Roughly 180 days, 5 months and 29 days, 4,320 hours, 259,200 minutes, I devoted myself to a client project. I missed family outings with my daughter and my wife. People started asking my wife if we had broken up. My daughter became accustomed to daddy not being around and playing with her. Sometimes only sleeping 4 hours, I would figure out solutions to problems in my sleep and force myself to wake and put them into action. My relationship with my wife became very fragile and unstable. I knew I had to change but I just needed a little bit more time to complete this client project.

Finally, the project was ending there was light at the end of the tunnel. I “git add –-all && git status” everything looked good. I then “git commit -m “v1.0 release candidate && git push beanstalk master”

I deployed the app to the staging server where I performed my deployment steps. Everything was good. I signed-up as a new user, I upload a bunch different files types with different sizes, completed my profile and logged out. I emailed the client to arrange a time to speak remotely.

“Hello” says the client “How are you” I replied. “Great, lets begin” urged the client. I recited the apps url out to the client. The client creates a new account and tries to upload a file. The app spews a bunch of error messages on the screen.

The client says

“Merlin – I do not think you really applied yourself to this project. The first test we do and it fails. If you do not have the time to do my project properly please just say so now, so I can find somebody else who can”

I FREAKED THE FUCKOUT on the client!!!!!!! and nearly hung up. My wife was right next to and she was absolutely gobsmacked. I sat back and thought to myself “These fuckers don’t get it”. All that suffering for nothing!

Thanks for reading my rant….

BTW: I did finish the project, the client was amazed on how the app worked and it is has become an indispensable tool for their employees.

After a long battle with CSS I give up and show the client a preview.
Client: I like how you made this first row a bit wider. Really makes it stand out.
Me: Yeah...right, that was intentional... 😎

I once worked until 8am to get a demo ready for a client of the client. I knew the client was a bit thick, so I made some comprehensive video demos and sent them over to him, to save him trying to demo it himself. I wake up at 11am with him screaming down the phone at me:

“It doesn’t work, none of it works!”

“What do you mean?”

“I go to login and I can’t enter anything.”

“I haven’t sent you anything to log into...wait, are you trying to log into a video? Tell me you’re not trying to log into a video of a login page.”

“Uh...oh hang on, it just worked. Ok no pr-“

“No wait, what do you mean it worked?”

“I logged in fine.”

“It’s a video. You can’t log into a video.”

“Uh...alright, bye mate, thanks!”

The moral of the story is: never assume any level of intelligence on the part of a client, even if they exhibit signs of it at first. If they are paying you they will forget how to tie their own shoelaces.

My last internship. When acquiring a new project and having to give an estimate the boss/sales guy always went to the programming team first to ask them what the estimate was and then communicated that back to the client(s).

Asked him why he does that because many companies don't:

Well, the programmers are going to write the software so why the hell would *I* be the one who gives the fucking estimates?

Yes that was a good boss.

Got the first payment from my client! Cheers 🍻

Other people : she said yes :') :')

Me: the client accepted the first draft without asking for changes :') :')

I finally told my first client "It's not a bug, it's a feature" 😂

First day at new web dev job:
Me: what IDE do you guys use?
Coworker: Notepad/notepad++
M: Okay... Any version control?
C: Oh we don't need it. We just update the server pages.
*Boss walks in*
Boss: Heres the project for you to do just need you to rebrand this web app we made for client A for client B just need to change some scripts. Should only take afew hours.

I take a look. No comments. Not formatted. Missing braces and brackets. Semicolons at odd places and missing at others. 7802 lines of code...

First job.

CLIENT: It's just a small website, 15-20 pages 2,500$, what do you say?

ME: Sure, sounds easy.

CLIENT: oh, and I need you to sign this contract that you won't copy or competete with me for the next two years.

ME: Sounds reasonable.

-- A year later --
I had finished building a huge CMS system that serves 420+ organizations, the entire thing copied from his competitor.

CLIENT: So there is only about two weeks left of work...

ME: Goodbye, I have a new job that actually pays money.

CLIENT: Don't forget our contract...

ME: Sure..

At least he paid me, but 2,500$ for a whole year's work isn't such a good deal anymore.

In my previous company, I used to work for a client company which had a terrible website. It was about financial data and people would have to wait too long before the page loaded because there was a freaking 1.2 megs of minified, compressed JS file that needed to load before you could do anything.

Everyone knew that was a pain in the ass and nobody wanted to touch spaghetti code and mess up something they didn't know.

I wanted to however take a shot at it. So an architect from client side and I discussed how we were gonna go about it and how we were gonna find the stuff that needed to load on page load and stuff that could be loaded later.

So we plan for it. We broke everything down from a globals polluting JS, found out the variables and functions that needed to run during first load by literally putting a console statement for each function and finally came up with two bundles.

The primary bundle was 120kb and would during first load and then every module would call it's own secondary bundle when the user interacted with it.

In the process, we removed half a meg of JS and the site became blazing fast.

I did it with a team of two members who, my manager thought were useless, learned a ton of stuff, setup proper process for the transition.

When the client didn't appreciate the amount of brain and effort we had put into it, these two members came forward to tell the client to acknowledge my effort and attributed the success of it to me.

I was totally moved. There was so much respect that I didnt care what anybody else thought. I was just so happy to work with those two humans.

When i left the company, i gifted them stuff they always talked about or wanted. :) Feels good.

Boss: "I know we just finished the first part of Client A's project but they also want this extra work done that wasn't in the contract."
Me: "Can't do it without pushing back Client B's work"
Boss: "Well we don't want that. We need to hit that deadline."
Me: "Cool"
Boss: "But Client A was really hoping this new feature which wasn't in the scope would be in."
Me: "Then we're pushing back Client B's work"
<<loop continues >>

My very first meeting with a new client:

Client: We need to launch in 6 weeks. Do you think you can hit that deadline?

Me: Do you have a spec for what needs to be done?

Client: No we don't.

Me:

Someone please shoot me right now.Or better a blackhole could just collide with earth right now and annihilate everyone and everything!
We are supposed to launch the app this coming Friday and as of Monday this week everything was OK.
Just yesterday this client came up with dozens of changes that demand a major rewrite of the backend.

The thing with this client is that she doesn't realize I deal with the mobile apps and not the APIs.Right now am headed to the management office to explain why the app is not updated after she sent this email today morning.
This is not the first time she has demanded changes a week to the launch and i feel like i should stand up to her but you know, i have bills to pay.

When doing first level support....
[windows desktop software]

Me: How can I help you?
Client: I installed the latest update from your website yesterday, but the version number hasn't changed
Me: You downloaded version *** ?
Client: Yes
Me: And you installed it?
Client: Yes
Me: Did you get an error message during the installation?
Client: No, everything worked fine, no errors
Me: And the installation process was completed?
Client: I think so
Me: Hmmm... Lets try it again. I will assist you.
Client: Ok
Me: Start your browser and open the website.
Client: ..... did it
Me: Good. Now click on the link to the download page.
Client: .... did it
Me: Do you see the the update package at the top of the list?
Client: Yes.
Me: Ok. Now click on it.
Client: Why?

Client: Extend string size for that URL field. I have to input a really large URL in there.

Me: Please show me the URL first.

Client: Here it is //randomurl.com/random-route/15363783?i=jfjfjfjjfjfjhf&shit=jfjfjkfkfkgjfjjhh74747jdjh&you=kfjfjbhgg779hdhhd&not=jfjhdh63737#fuckingKiddingMe

Me: You can leave the whole part after the question mark. Insert it like //randomurl.com/random-route/15363783

Client: Ok, great. Thanks.

#####

Me later checking the data inserted:

//randomurl.com/random-route

I hate humans.

*creates a freelancer account on some website.
*builds portfolio and gets things running.
*meets his first client.

Client: Hello. so your profile says you are an experienced full stack developer. You are just the kind of person i've been looking for.

Me: Yep.

Client: Okay I have a project for you. I am looking at developing a simple website that has a few functions and the budget is 100$.

Me: Okay smooth. Hit me with the descriptions.

Client: it's going to be a dating website. Once a user signs up; the website would automatically take control of the user's media devices in his/her home; automatically playing something romantic. You get me?

Me: Em... Idk about that it seems a bit...

Client: it can be done! Develop the algorithm.

Me: Em... Ok.

Client: Well, next the website uses some complex sorting algorithm and sorts existing members based on their past real life relationships. It puts the best people above the messy ones.

Me: o.0

*client goes on with his bullshit in like another 10 lines of messages.

Me: -_-

Client: so what do you think? How soon can you begin and how soon can we be done?

Me: Do you also want a "butt scratcher" feature? Like a hand pops out of the monitor and asks to scratch the user's anus?

*client leaves the chat.

Me: Oh. I guess he a thing against family guy.

We have an API which returns 600 MB of JSON.

Because client "Wants to see everything first and then apply filters, just like Excel".

FML
Edit and ofc thier laptops with core i3 and 4GB of ram can't even process that.

First rant, so here goes:
def initialize
@rant = 'when the contractor your boss brought in to help, whose weekly rate exceeds your monthly salary, doesn't know the difference between server side and client side technologies.'
end

I have a client (a friend of a friend of a friend) who came to me to build them a "simple" booking solution for their home cleaning business. Easy enough, I first thought.

Having taken a deposit based on my initial quote and contracts all signed, roll on exactly 8 months to where I find myself today.

It turns out, there is no cleaning business as the business will be totally reliant on the website. The original goalposts have now been moved to a completely different fucking country. The (now) required functionality has STILL yet to be finalised (I told client I'm not writing another line of code until EVERYTHING has been mapped out and made crystal clear), as every single face-to-face meeting / back and forth email turns into the client requesting hundreds more brilliant, essential features that make absolutely ZERO fucking sense. And now, to top it all off and push me into writing my first ever rant on here, I've just received an email from the client this morning saying "what I would like to have is like an online restaurant live booking system". WTF?!?!?

I work from home and have only my dog for company today, so please don't judge me. Just needed to let it all out.

Me: "If today's demo to the client goes well,i will get my first cheque"
My server:"If today i stop working,it will be great"
Android Studio: "If i force a gradle update,it will be just fine".

*crying*
Fuuuuuck.Why nothing goes my way when I want it to????Whhhhyyyyy??

Friday morning, taking a sip of coffee reading mails. (nb: I started the job on Monday, and this is my very first job excepted internship)
*wild manager appears* : come with with me a second.
Me: wtf is that
Him: close the door
Me: shit what did I do
Him: so we're closing this really big deal with a big client/investor
Me: ok cool, what is the point to tell me that ?
Him: remember when we discussed your salary and we couldn't afford to hire you as high as you wanted ?
Me:... Yes ?
Him: well now we can
Me, starting to understand: ... And ?
Him: well your new salary is higher than what you asked in interview

And that's how I got a 8% raise after 4 days at my first job :')

'lashed out' to a client for the first time yesterday.

Clients have the habit to call after tickets and while its annoying, it's manageable if it happens *sometimes*

It was happening the entire fucking morning and when a client called for an update about a ticket for the second time, I couldn't help but sound frustrated.

"how far are you with the ticket?"
"i have other things to do as well, you know, you're not the only customer i have to help right now"
"i understand, do you possibly have an eta?"
"no. You're next in line, is that clear enough?"
"okay" *hangs up*

*crap*

He e-mailed me afterwards apologizing, that was nice.

I'm sorry sir 😥 nothing personal but it can become so fucking annoying sometimes.

Me: So here's the completed website.

Client: *goes to Google and searches for media agencies india* What the hell is this ? I was told that my name would come on the first page in Google.

Me: Sir, we had quoted to build SEO friendly pages and not for doing SEO.

Client: This is fraud. How the hell could you cheat me by using these technical words. I want my name on the first page in Google.

Me: *types companyname.com in Google* Here Sir, your website is on the first page in Google.

Client: I very well know fraudsters like you. If I wouldn't have checked it then you'd have charged me for this later on. Here's your cheque.

Worst part of being a dev is handling less techy people than you 😫

A fun experience with a client:
Client: We want to use a database in the cloud without internet.
Us: Uhm that's not possible.
Client: Why not? You don't need internet to use a cloud database, because it's in the sky right?
.....
We will never forget our first client.
p.s. he also wanted to use his wifi printer without internet and cable

I pray for a future where clients have a better understanding of IT related concepts🙏

The scariest client from hell by far is...

my wife.

FML

Recruiter: Hi practiseSafeHex, I’ve looked at your LinkedIn profile and you look like a perfect fit for my new client. The role is a lead Java developer with experience in .......

Me: Where on my profile have I listed or mentioned Java in any way?

LinkedIn Notification: a person who chose to remain anonymous, with the title “Recruiter” just viewed your profile.

Wow, I wonder who could it possibly be? I’m stumped!

Also probably the first time he did look. Getting fed up with these asshats

Ok I have 2 more hours to work today. I bet I will get these 3 important things done.

*important email comes in*
*laptop runs out of batery*
*client finally calls back after 4 weeks*
*data structure has to be reorganized urgently due to new requirements*

After dealing with all of that, I close all windows in order to go home. The last window is the thing I wanted to do in the first place.

Client (not for the first time): Your work sucks. I had to have this email formatting re-done before I sent it out.

Me: *sees that the email sent matches the work I did exactly with no changes*

Client (months later): I need you to do maintenance on my website.

Me: *does quick maintenance for free but sends update on status of work done and amount left in retainer agreement*

Client: You're too expensive! You started working with me for $X/hr, then you went up to $Y/hr and now you're all the way up to $Z/hr! You're not worth that!

Me: *fires client by refunding the remainder of retainer and sends client a list of local, cheaper providers*

Client: But now I don't have anyone to maintain my website until I find a new provider! Why have you done this to me? Waaaahhhhh!

Me (in the most professional language I can muster): Because you're a biotch and I'm tired of your verbal abuse. Maybe try not to be such a dbag to that next provider, mmm'kay?

Generic-IT
--------------
Client:"So we would like to found a new company and offer IT and network consulting. Would you be able to build our website?"

Me:"Absolutely. What will be the name of your company?"

Client:"The name is going to be 'Generic-IT'. The website is going to be 'generic-IT.com' . We checked that with google."

Me:"I am sorry to tell you that generic.com is already taken by another company. Incidentally that company offers the same services, that you intend to offer. They also seem to be quite big an have businesses in 5 different countries.
Because of this I advise you to pick a different name that does not get you into trouble and makes positioning your own brand easier."

Client:"We want to neglect that problem for now."

Me:"0.0 ..... -_-""""
"Well, listen. Apart from the possible branding and copyright problems imagine how people will find you on the web. ...What will happen if you google 'generic IT'?"

Client:"Yeah well, we want to neglect that. And with SEO you can do something about that."

Me:"..........Welllll, you that SEO is not a cure all, right? The older an bigger company will come up first. Why not avoid that missunderstanding and come up with a unique name?"

Client:"......"

Me:"Please tell me. Doesn't any part of my argument make sense to you?"

Client:"..."

Me:"Well, ok. I will send you the estimate on monday."

___________

Then over a back channel I hear that the client is ...bewildered, why I would not stick to my area of expertise.

There I was now. Left bewildered myself, being the one with the webagency that does frontend design and branding.

received a bug report from a client on a mobile app.

title: bug on information page.
description: all text field make first​ letter capital.

*what! this is your keyboard, stupid!

after he didn't understand, I made a text change listener, and make the first letter lowercase, he is happy. heheh 😨

My boss asked me to do tech support today as one of tech support employee was not feeling well.

The very first call i attended, went like:

Me : Sir, this is xyz support desk. How may i help you?

*Listening his problem*

Me : Sir solution is pretty simple. Just do a Right click on application shortcut icon and then select "Open File Location".

Client : where can i find "Right Click"?

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*

@%#$!

PM: I spoke with x client, they really like x feature and want to continue.
Me: great, I'll let the team know.
PM: Yeah, I told your team already.
Me: Oh. What did they say?
PM: They all told me to tell you first, so you can tell them.
Me: 😏

What's your favorite console ? I love my switch, it is portable, has great games and HOMEBREWS.
I've been wanting to start making stuff on it for a while but didn't want to get banned, finally it's possible so here it is my first project : a Devrant client for switch !
It took me a bit cause i was unexperienced with the platform and there are a few technical issues i had to workaround ( like no support for ssl rn and devrant api is only https :/ ) but nevertheless it's here. I'm happy now.

Android and Full Stack dev here. Also first post.

No boss, i won't call that client to tell him how to configure ssl for his Outlook.

Just published first iOS app for client at apple store. 😎🙏🏼

I got a call at 12:30 one night a few months back. Apparently some back-end scripts I edited to fix an automated test setup crashed around 75 test pc's and halted somewhere around 2000 tests. I quickly jumped on, fixed the issue, and got everything back online.

I was up all night certain I would get fired. First thing in the morning the client says welcome to the club some, of the best have done the same thing.

Best: got my first client during my birthday

Worst: my laptop was stolen 😭

So we hired an intern and his first task was to change a few things in email layout for our client, which is an investment bank.

I told to one of my developers to make his local database dump and setup the project for an intern. When intern completed the task, my developer thought that title "Dow Jones index crashed" was pretty funny title for a test.

What he didn't thought through enough, is that he forgot to configure fake SMTP server and he had production database dump with real email addresses.

I had really awkward 20 minutes conversation with our client. Fuck my life.

Client: How's our B2B data lookup platform coming along?
Me: All done, your clients can now search by first/last name as well.
Client: I just search "fuck" as first name and 5 results came up, our data is not cleaned up properly.
Me: Fuck
Client: Fuck

Best: My first app for Windows 10, "devRant unofficial".

Worst: A website for a client using Facebook APIs which don't want to work properly.

Well on my first job we had to integrate payment gateways in client apps for online payment. On my second week in office I published an app on the play store with payment gateway credentials for a different client cause they were there as default values. So the money for one client would go to the other. Nobody noticed it for two weeks and when they did, I thought I had just lost my job and also I would now have to pay all the losses out of my pocket but fortunately I didn't have to cause no transactions​ had yet been made. After that I always checked my integrations atleast five times before publishing. The incident scared the shit out of me but taught me the value of developer responsibility.

Here is a preview of my Python devRant client

The client supports both CLI and GUI modes.

This is the CLI mode using the rant command.

CLI mode currently supports dynamic importing of custom commands (and creating your own command is documented already too).

If you do not like my rant command? Download or make another one.

Also, the command execution, import, and registration process all send events to the application object. This is in preparation for allowing mods!

Unfortunately, emojis are technically 2-width, so they totally fuck up the box I draw around the rant. Lots of work to do, but I was pleased with my first visual payoff today.

On my first dev job ever, I got sent to the client's office after studying CSS on my own for 2 weeks.
Client: "So, you're the great expert your manager told me about?"

this.isRant === True
Salute to everyone who can handle clients (the dumb ones).
So the client I'm freelancing for gives me this website and asks me to scrape entries out of it. It had about 45 items. I did that sent the file. Next day he says my file had the wrong data. He wanted data which satisfies X but the URL given was for Y. The least he could have done was to let me know in the first place instead of giving random URL to scrape and then blame me.

Back in college.
We had this course in which we gathered in teams and worked the whole semester for another teacher building a product. We had roles, like QA, devs, PM...all the works.
I was PM and during our first presentation of the product to our teacher and the client we showed the work of our first month of work. At the end, our teacher asked our QA, who have been silent the whole project and hadn't answered my mails asking for tests, if he had found any problems. "Oh, yes. The whole site is broken. I can easily break throught it"
The faces of the rest of the group showed a level of surprise that made the teacher ask if he had informed us: "No..."
Our client, another SE teacher, started to laugh and that was that.
It was awful

This happened in my first internship I was working for a small company. They had a knack of redefining policies at short notices.

The had this shitty time tracking site which was hosted internally.

We were working on client location for 25/30 days so we didn't have access to the time tracking site. And there comes a memo that everybody has to fill the time tracking or their salary will not be credited.

So when we reach office we hear this "News". We thought they would consider people on client location. But then on salary day we don't get any and are called into VP's office for a verbal lashing. We literally had to fight for two weeks for the salary.

Worst Experience Ever

made my first dollar(actually $4) on internet.
got a gig on fiverr.

client wanted his joomla website to be unresponsive so website looks same on all devices.

never touched joomla.
it took ne 2.5 hours but actual work was only 10-15 minutes.

yippiiiieee.....😀😀😇😇

When the stupid client is unable to explain the requirements correctly the first time and drops a frickin bomb 3 days before the deadline and boss still want to "meet" the deadline.

Me: "if this goes on, I will be dead on the line by the deadline"

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.

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.

This big multi-million consulting company hired me as freelance. They did it in a hurry, because "the project already started, it is a very important client (a bank) and we need your expertise by YESTERDAY".

In the first THREE WEEKS I had meetings with their own project managers, their client's project managers, techies, sales people. No one was able to tell me what do I have to do, but:

1 - they asked me for very detailed estimates plus a release plan
2 - f**k your estimates, we need this BY JANUARY 16th

First time going to AMERICA to work with the client! PORTUGAL CARALHO

(Instant Message)
Client: Are you there?
Me: Yes speak please.
(Why don't you just leave the message? It's not like having a phone call…)
Client: The contract is ready. I'll send it to you.
(Waited for an akaward 10 minute…)
Client: ???Can you receive it???
(Omg are you doing SSL handshake or what? Just send the file!)
Me: Yes I can pleasre send it to me thank you so much.

So after promoting Flutter to the clients (for whom cross plateform solution are perfect match) for almost a year, today I finally got the first ever Flutter App contract. I believ e time for Flutter is really coming. Wish me luck!

client: We need a system that will monitor the items from warehouse X from a distant location

us: Okay then first, we need to setup a server for that. So, we need a downpayment for labor.

client: I'll pay you when the system is done. 100%.

us: ...

we don't shit money to handle the costs given that we're still starting out our business. Fts.

I GOT MY FIRST CLIENT!! I'm not charging too much since it's my first client and I'm just focusing on the experience rather than pay. Were having a meeting Friday so he can tell me what he wants cause he didnt have all the info at the time. It's just a simple website and if he requests more when I present it I'll ask for more muns

“Get the code working first, then worry about how to clean and optimize it.”

For me when I learnt about optimization and how one thing was better than something else, I tended to focus on that. I’d have a picture of that in my mind, and would try to write as clean of code with less hacks in the middle and as optimized as I could in the first go, which slowed me the way fuck down.

After he said that to me, I realized I was stupid and just wasting time if I worried about that from the start. Would waste time, and just cause more headaches from the start than it was worth.

——

Oh also another one, I knew never to trust the client from the start but the way he said it was funny. “Never ever trust the fucking client, don’t trust them with anything. I trust Satan more than I trust the client.” 😂

First rant. 3 years in my first job as a developer. It's been great. I've learned a ton. But the past 6 months have been awful. Our client is forcing us to remote into a cloud pc, which we then use to remote into Ubuntu. All development must be done this way. Everything is extremely slow. To the point that you can type faster than the screen can update. I want to jump out of the window. I'd basically have to move to get a new job, which Im not really into. Just bought a house a year ago, family is here, blah blah. Just hoping if I ride it out, client will wise up and let us use our own computer again.

Do you ever spend an hour editing an email reply to a client before you send it? Trying something akin to alchemy when you attempt to convert snark, veiled contempt, and shock at how stupid the client is into something professional and polite? It’s like trying to bottle farts as fancy perfume.

Like the first draft is:

“Dear idiot,

Please disconnect your computer from the wall and return it to where you bought it from and then never use a computer again you dopey fuck.”

To

“Dear Client,

Yes sir. I’ll have it done for you by tomorrow.”

God it hurts.

Why are clients so ignorant and stupid?!

Send them the software with specific instructions WHERE to install it. Location is important as it is a plugin for AutoCAD.

First mail with complains about the plugin doesn't work. Find out (in the mail they sent internal) that they installed the plugin somewhere else than I instructed them.

Sent an email back with (again) an explanation why it doesn't work and where to install the plugin.

Email from client: So I put the plugin here [incomplete and invalid location] and create the last folder myself...

FOR FUCK SAKE SRUPID ASS IGNORANT DOWN SYNDROM (sorry folks) MOFO CLIENT!!!!
I SENT YOU UP TO 3 TIMES WHERE TO PUT THE GODDAMNED PLUGIN!

Just looked at my emails for the first time since 23rd (self imposed blackout to get some rest) and found an email chain from a co-worker and a client.

At 5.30pm on Fri 23rd (half an hour after our usual quitting time) we got an email from a client who has taken 2 years to write content for their 10-page website, asking us if we could push the website live.

My colleague succinctly replied with "No. Best Regards, [name]" and then replied to just the company with a photo of him grinning and holding a beer.

Merry Christmas!

Note to self: if you work on a logo concept that you know it won't work and it's hard to implement/loses meaning in monocolor, don't show it to your client as part of the first round of concepts.

Because that's the one they'll choose.

After solving a lot of problems in codeforces and participating in ACM to make my code the most optimised..
* In my first real job. *
Client: Your program run so fast!! I can't feel if it's doing something or not. Please make a delay of 1 second in your program! 😇
Me: 🙂🙂🙂🙂

Me: *implements design given by client*
My boss: *opens ticket*
"This is not acceptable. this looks like a child made his first website"

k thxbye

Look at the image first, please.

Me: "What's that?"
Closed devRantron.
"Hmm, still there."
Closed browser.
"Nope, that wasn't it neither."
Closed everything that is somehow connected to the internet: FTP client, SSH connections, even the VM.
"There's still something! What is it?!"
Bashed my head against the wall.
"I am listening to music right now... music from the NAS..."

So one rant reminded me of a situation I whent through like 10 years ago...
I'm not a dev but I do small programs from time to time...
One time I was hired to pass a phone book list from paper to a ms Access 97 database...
On my old laptop I could only add 3 to 5 records cause MS access doesn't clean after itself and would crash...

So I made an app (in vb6) , to easily make records, was fast, light and well tabbed.
But now I needed a form to edit the last record when I made a mistake...
Then I wanted a form to check all the records I made.
Well that gave me an idea and presented the software to the client... A cheesy price was agreed for my first freelance sell...
After a month making it perfect and knowing the problems the client would had I made a admin form to merge all the databases and check for each record if it would exist.... I knew the client would have problems to merge hundreds of databases....
When it was done... The client told me he didn't need the software anymore.... So I gave it to a friend to use as an client dabatase software... It was perfect for him.
One month later the client called me because he couldn't merge the databases...
I told him I was already working in a company. That my software was ready to solve his problem, but I got mad and deleted everything...
He had to pay almost 20 times more for a software company to make the same software but worst... Mine would merge and check all the databases in a folder... Their's had to pick one by one and didn't check for duplicates... So he had to pay even more for another program to delete duplicates...

That's why I didn't follow programming as a freelance... Lots of regrets today...
Could be working at home, instead had a burn out this week cause of overwork...

Sorry for the long rant.

About to go talk with my first client. Wish me luck🤞

I will give a prize to the first one that explains something to a client this way

When I see someone from the sticker club I always has to imagine the reaction of client at the first meeting on which he shows up with his laptop.
Professionalism < 0
Ridiculousness > 9000

Sacrificed my Diwali and made a website for my first client and did not get any payment.
I was new and less confident.

Well this is my freelance horror story.

Now I fucking demand money from client UPFRONT.

client first. lols. should probably take care of your health first.

Pro: I have got my first client. 😄
Con: most of his multiple websites use WordPress. 😥

LPT: NEVER accept a freelance job without looking at the project's source first

Client: I have a project made by a company that is now abandoning it, I want you to fix some bugs

Me: Okay, can you:
1) Give me a build to test the current state of the game
2) Tell me what the bugs are
3) Show me the source
4) Tell me your budget

Client: *sends a list of 10 bugs* Here's the APK and to give you the project I'll need you to sign an NDA

Me: Sure...

*tests build*
*sees at least 20 bugs*
*still downloading source*
*bugs look quite easy to fix should be done under an hour*

Me: Okay, so, I can fix each bug for $10 and I can do 2 today

Client: Okay can you fix 8 bugs today for $40??

*sigh*

Me: No I cannot.

Client: okay then 2 today for $20 is fine, I want a refund if you can't fix them today

*sigh*

Me: Look dude, this isn't the first time I am doing this, aight? I'll fix the bugs today you can pay me after check they are done, savvy?

Client: okay

*source is downloaded*
*literal apes wrote the scripts, commented out code EVERYWHERE
Debug logs after every line printing every frame causing FPS drops, empty objects in the scene
multiple unused UI objects
everything is spaghetti*

*give up, after 2 hours of hell*
*tfw averted an order cancellation by not taking the order and telling client that they can pay me after I am done*

Attached is an image of a level object pool
It's an array with each element representing a level.
The numbers and "Final" are ids for objects in an object pool
The whole string is .Split(',') into an array (RIP MEMORY BTW) and then a loop goes through each element in the split array and instantiates the object from an object pool

In one of my first jobs i developed an (ugly and heavly under-payed) e-commerce/media platform for a customer.
That customer was constantly making fun of his bald partner telling how he was gay, liked dicks, etc., drawing dicks and bananas as sample website logos or uploading dildo/penis images as images, he was always like this.
Once the website was ready for production i removed all the "testing" posts and images and told the client to insert some real content and alert me when it was ready for release.
Well some time after the release i got a call from that client, for the first time he was serious:

C: Hi, why there are dildo images on the server? (the website in production was full of dildo/penis images instead of actual product images, he even photoshopped the head of his partner on a penis and uploaded it!!!)
R: ehm... i told you it was on production and to stop uploading bad content....
C: Ummm ok, please fix it immediatly, thanks!

Fuck this, fuck that, fuck the buffer, fuck AES, fuck crypto, fuck node-forge, fuck IV and browsers, once I am done with this fucking cryptographic wrapper on both client and server, the first person to say decrypt and Javascript in the same sentence in front of me will get their own dick in their ass. The guy that said mixing computer and crypto was a bad idea was fucking right

Client:we want dynamic mapping of network and packet flow visualization like;packet tracer simulation
Us: is 2D visualization enough.
Client:yeah
*fast forward after first demo*
Client: now make it 3D with pipes representing cable.and packets flowing through them like water.
Me: fucccccck

Me and my manager throughout 2020

January:
Me: So umm, we can release the new app version
Manager: No we promised client X app first go build that
Me: umm, ok.

February:
Me: so the app is done, but client hasn't setup area L so there is no data there
Manager: ok, I'll have them setup area L soon ™️

March:
Manager: area L is too much work to setup, use workaround L thats way better
Me: ok ...

April:
Manager: client is nitpicking on design and layout please make this mess even greater
Me: ok, anything else?
Manager: yeah also start on app for client Z!
Me: and our app update?
Manager: later son! Risk tooo muchos!

May:
Me: the mess for client X is done, and first version for client Z is also ready for test
Manager: ok good work, here is a new set of things to mess up
Me: but... Seriously, wtf?!
Manager: clients want quality
Me: ah ok, not nitpicking, cool

June:
Manager: client X went MIA, but client Z will send you a weekly list of things they don't understand and want to change
Me: ah great, truly worth postponing my February holiday to release nothing

July:
Manager: so, how we doing on all them changes
Me: well, I am a loyal custodian with alot of pleasure in my work!
Manager: ah ok good!
Me: any news from client X??
Manager: who
Me: mkay ... n.v.m

August:
Me: can we release yet?
Manager: change, we can!!!
Me: are you Obama?
Manager: ambitions
Me: fuck you pay me

September:
Me: I am confident we can now release all 3 apps as promised mid september
Manager: great!! Good work

Also manager: you know that immensely complex area within the app? That needs a complete rewrite because we have bad ux there!!!
Me: ok... To which requirements?
Manager: good ux, we must have standards
Me: but the layout of page R id generic as page F so then we need to align there as well
Manager: go! Do!
Me: ok I'll come up with my own requirements then
Manager: we also need documentation
Me: really!!!! How clever of you to fire colleagues T & P and we now have zero workforce for that
Manager: things will get better someday
Me: ah, great! Put it on my calendar

October:
Me: I need a sabbatical biatch
Manager: a what?

Just received a client who wants an updated wordpress theme, Thank God he came to me. I feel sorry that he had to run a site with this font.

Going to the site for the first time gave me goosebumps.

First and foremost: do more to show my wife that I love and appreciate her. Not dev but damned important.

Write my own web version of the taskwarrior client.

Run a 5K in June with my wife.

Java dev here. I rewrote an app and replaced a system call to ssh with a modern jaxrs post for uploading a file and (new) some additional data.
I even used a stream.

1 hour in production, first client doesn't get his file. Log says OutOfMemoryError: heap.

Me: wtf? I already use streams.
Looking at the Jersey library. Docs say nothing. An issue from 2013 says: oh if you silly don't use the Apache httpclient addon, we disable chunking and buffer the whole body, because our tests fail with the jdk included http client otherwise.

Me: meh.

No warning in the logs. Thank you soooooo much! Who could have known?

Got my first serious project about a year ago. Made it clear to the client that we are developing a Windows app. After around 80-100 hours of work client just goes "how about we make this a web app?" Got a "financial support" instead of the agreed payment. Got around 4 times less money than agreed upon. They never ended up using some parts of the software (I ran the server so I knew that they weren't using it)

I once had a nightmare explaining to the client that he cannot use a 30+ MB image as his home page background. Average internet speed in my country is around 1-2 MB/s. I even had to do the calculation for him because he couldn't figure out the time it took for the visitor to load the image.

Once again:

BOSS and Client IT’S URGENT IT’S CRITICAL

ME: IT’S 4:30pm on FRIDAY AND THIS IS THE FIRST I’VE HEARD OF IT IT IS NOT THAT HOT

Had my first phone meeting with my first client ever. My experience so far is nothing like the rants here!

My former team had an "ux expert" who made ux templates for new features.

For years since he started his job, the team was told that there will be a first face-2-face meeting.

It never came to this point.

Instead all the team know about this guy is that his name is Thomas and that he does all the talk and decisions with our client without a word with the team, bringing their imaginations to li(f|v)e...

Genius! xD

No wonder the team got mad after some water had ran down the river.
At first they only questioned really poor design decisions.
But after a while the productivity of the team dropped, because they weren't willing to accept any of those design decisions.

Boi o boi.
Things escalated pretty well ;)

Okay. So this Is my first rant. Don't you hate it when a client provides you with really crappy res images for a project? this tends to happen a lot...

Me: Hi, I finished X and Y, will finish Z tomorrow and be able to push it to the staging server for you to test!
*Client 15 hours later*
Client: I don't see it, where is it?
Me: It's not there yet, I need to finish Z first, it's right now on the development server, not the testing server
Client: Yes, but I don't see it?
...

New project, sent a 7 page contract to the client. First day of work and client begins to ask things outside scope and terms.

I explained what is written in contract and he interrupted me saying "I READ THE CONTRACT".

One minute later, he starts asking the same things again.

Client: can you spice it up a bit
Me: ok
Client: more spicing
Me: alright
Client: i liked the first one.....

Working with client at different timezone (+3 hours difference). Client time: 5 P.M.

C: a blocker issue found
Step to reproduce:
Step 1: import the attached file
Step 2: blabla

Please get this fixed today.

Me: *where's the attached file?* Opens up ly*c, type his name and.... status offline.

Okay then, time to post my first rant. And get depressed until cob. 😔

We started working with some pretty big (in data volume) client. Around 4.000 projects with about 10 to 15 deliverables by project. Our software helps them plan/manage that.
US : Hey, so on this page we only display first 10, so it is fast and you can adjust using filters.
Client: No, I want to see all 4.000 projects on the same page
US : Well, for one year it will generate : 4000x10(deliverables)x12 editable fields. Your browser will crash. (No time to add virtual scroll)
Client: No, I want to see all 4.000 projects on the same page
US : Ok, here is pagination to help you.
Client: No, I want to see all 4.000 projects on the same page
US: …
Tomorrow is going to be fun.

My story about ego boost was when client came one day that they want some system that was prommised to him but guy who promissed him it forgotten about it.

Well, i quickly estimated things in head (i wasnt on meeting, was next to this room so i heared whats up), i pulled out my boss from meeting ("hey i need you urgently for sth") told him that i can make proof of concept to show him for next day (it was +-15) and sure enough, next day 10:00 first version that worked but was kindda rough around edges and with TON of technical debt was created. Than I told client that I just need a little bit more time to work on this as he can see it is here, it works, and it does what he needs, but it would be good to add some polish to it.

He bought my version and i saved company a client, that was lost becose some moron forgotten about him hah

Oh, yes, i got all i needed in return, day off and some extra $$

I'm on my first free lance project, and devRant asks me for my horror story. -_-
Well, I undersold myself and gave such a stupid time estimation. Fortunately, the client was smarter, and he wants just half the work in same time period and will still gave me the same amount xD

What a silly end of the week. Have to continue developing at a project a student started at our company. Today I had a phone conference with the client. They told me there where missing several data. At first I thought it is only a frontend issue but now I know it is a database issue so I have to work through several database procedures which are all undocumented and the student who build those is not reachable. Business integration ftw

My highschool computer eng. teacher works in IT and he was telling us about one of his first days of working for a company and he said "Whenever we had a stupid client or customer, we'd tell each other that we had a 'one D ten T' as a code because it sounds professional. But really, it spells 1D10T"

Lame but it cracked us up and I thought I might share lol

In 2010, it was my first client project. Our architect was not from iOS background, we had editable pdfs in our app. Those were pretty rich pdfs with inline HD images. iPads that time were not too fast and couldn't handle big gb pdf loaded into memory. App would crash randomly running out of memory. We fixed it by paginating pdf, it wasn't out of the world but considering it was my first mobile project and no one to guide, I thought it was pretty cool what we did there

True story, honest to god.
Developed a state or the art SOA web app. Front end communicates with backend through API.
Client meeting, this guy looks me right in the eyes and blurts out : « why does the submit button get disabled after first click ? Clicking it a few times gets my request high priority »
I folded back my laptop and left the meeting without saying a word. Pretty sure I’m getting fired tomorrow.

#10

After I did some work on this nightmare codebase, the client kept switching goals. He Changed the task a few times, so I always told him that he will have to pay for all changes.
After a time he requested another change, so I stated that he has to pay the first invoice I sent him first. He started bitching around, that I didn't complete the work yet and so on. I saw where this was going. He didn't wanted to pay me, so I cancelled the work for this bitch.

😤

Read my revenge in #11

I got my first appointment with my first freelance client today as I'm trying to earn some money on the side. She contacted me after the guy before me hasn't delivered in more than 2 months.

Her: So how much do you think its gonna cost me.

Me: Well the minimum rate for a site like this is like €1000. But since you are my first client, I'm willing to do it for €700.

Her: The guy before you only charged €250...

Me: I'm sorry I can't do that. I might get to 500 if I cut some corners, but I can't make any promises.
Inner me: Look where you're 250 has got you... You haven't seen anything in return...

Her: Proceeds to whine about how it's still waaay to much ... And how she will get me more clients etc. (Yeah right...)

First I write a list of all the features that the client wants on their website, then I break down the features into tasks, then I estimate the number of hours required for each task, then I sum all the hours and multiply the final number by 3.

I was tasked by a client to build a blogging / News website.

Client's first request: remove any reference of a publish date from the blogs, it ages our content.

About to start coding my first complete website. Oh boy. Everything I learn up until this point. Just basic HTML is all about to be put to the test. Lol. Grant it. It's not for a client. Just school assignments but man I'm nervous.😂😂🤷‍♂️

Just got the first payment from the first client we approached. And we are charging a lot less upfront money, compared to how much time we spent on customization, since it is the first client. Though, today we just got 25% of upfront money we will be charging. And we are still into development phase. Also he will be paying money every month for our service to continue.

The first ever earning of my life. The wheel had started rolling today

PS - Money don't excite me much, and infact I am not much excited right now. Still thinking about the project.

Currently working on my first real REST api and I've arrived at the authentication part.

I'm not sure how to do this one, the client will have to login using username/password but then, what's the most conventional way of authentication logged in users through a REST api? (no oauth (yet))

This should be usable for anything like ajax requests to calls from the backend to curl requests.

Looking forward to ideas!

First it was the "set up WampServer so the client can use our database", to which I told her we should use an embedded database, to which she told me to do.

Then the "Just give the client a .jar file and install the JRE in his laptop" to wich I told her we can make a native installer, to which she fucking assigned to me.

Then the whole fucked up management thing with no design whatsoever and the "we don't need version control".

To just a few hours earlier, when she got mad because I set up a Slack for us to exchange information easily, she told me she was already mad because I shared the project by Google Drive and that she worked in security and knows the risk... AND AT THE SAME TIME, she uses Gmail to share the project.. BRILLIANT !

So today is my first meeting with my first client for my first ever project...
Any suggestions?

> move out
> few months to get married
> get a client
> get another client
> first client starts to get messed up
> tell the first client to cancel the contract
> second client cancels my contract because the first client is pissing me off and making my productivity decline
> first client don't wanna cancel the contract nor pay me
> brings a lawyer
> 3 weeks to get married
> no job
> bills to pay
> lawyer to pay

great to be me

When a client sends you an email with multiple question marks "????" Just because you havent answered an email solely stating "ok thanks" in the past 24 hours.

What am I even supposed to do with that dude?

PS we need to fix some stuff on his wordpress website thingy to which we agreed literally a day ago. First of all do you really expect we magically fixed everything today even or ehm at least try to be friendly instead of just sending a bunch of question marks thank you very much

Two tasks at the top of the backlog that was approved by the scrum master, and pm. We finish them in a few hours. Pm comes out.

Pm: Why are you guys working on those tickets!?!?!
Us: because they are the first things in the list.
Pm: but the client hasn't agreed on the work yet.
Us: then why is it the top of our list!!!
Pm: cause it's important.

Client: THIS IS CRITICAL, SOME DATA HAS BEEN DELETED, WHAT ZE FUUK HAPPENED, UNDO THIS FAST
Us: so after carefully reviewing the code, related resources and the network traffic we conclude that was never sent in the first place.
*closes issue*

I'm glad we got such a meaningful bug report on the same day a production system started failing, one big deployment that that was like a boss with 3 phases, an unnecessary long meeting and an app developer that that wanted me to break HTTP standards.

Receive several documents of blog posts from a client, each one titled "Blog $n - $category - $title." Cool, the client gave them to me in order and I just have to plug them in.

Enter blogs on site starting with Blog 1.

Client sees the blogs on the site and loses their shit. "I specifically numbered the blogs so you knew what order to put them in! How hard is it to put them in numerical order? Blog 1 is the newest blog and should be first on the page."

The site displays the newest post first, but because any normal person would have named the oldest blog "blog 1" and counted up from there the blogs are in the reverse order the client expected.

What the hell kind of dense motherfucker numbers their blog files in a manner which requires them to rename every file each time they write a new blog post?

Reviewing code for applications after not working on it for six months.

Client: so what is the first step to adding our new feature.

Me: I really think we need to redo the entire architecture from the ground up. It won't work any differently than it does now, but the code will be cleaner.

Client:😓

Me:😅

When you get a project ready for launch and the client finds a huge error that has to be fixed first, except it's not a huge error, it's something they requested two months ago and forgot about.

Wk78

My worst dev experience was my first software as freelance...
1 month codding
When delivering the app the client didnt want it anymore...
Two years latter the client calls me because he had a problem... Merging hundreds of access 97 databases... Exactly what my software did (besides editing, filters and remove duplicates)
Told him I got mad, deleted the source code and was already working on a company...
He had to pay for a software company to do the same 10 times the cost

So after months of self study my company finally appoints me as a junior developer with a major client as the intermediate dev on the project resigned. My tech lead assures me that junior devs only fix bugs and do other minor changes. One week in and in our first sprint planning session the client decides to priorities a Major update to the app. Now I have 2 weeks to deliver what will either make or break my immediate career. And I have no idea how to implement any of the changes. Stack overflow you're my only hope (and many hrs of YouTube tutorials)

I did it. I finally fucking did it.

After a year of anxiety, entire months of wasted time, bashing my head against the wall trying to solve stupid issues that should not have been there in the first place, and learning a lot of stuff for the first time, I have finally finished my first real project.

All I have left is to polish up some documentation and then ship it. And then I will actually get paid for the first time.

There are no words to describe the joy of seeing all the pieces falling into place and the project coming to life.

Now, how do you tell a client that you went overtime as fuck?

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.

Client A

At the first few meetings, told us they are giving sponsors to World Cup 2018 and we should totally talk about it loudly on media.

Then when we submitted our plan, they said things have changed and they no longer can mention about World Cup. We had to redo everything.

Now, they blame us that our service quality is so bad that we should learn from *some refernce* company. Said company is only talking about their sponsorship for World Cup.

---

Client B

Bought smallest package from us. Demand services greater than our largest package.

Gave us an information of a name spelled in "Barbu". We used that spelling and used it for various tasks in past few weeks. All approved by client.

Blamed us we are giving such a poor service that we cannot even spell "Babu" correctly this morning.

So I've opened myself to new software engineering positions and was recommended one where the first *benefit* stated:

- High engagement opportunities across our global client base

Am I the only one for whom this is a gigantic red flag and con rather than a benefit? wtf

I took like 3 years to my company to get this huge-ass client to ask us to remake their website (the client is already our client for other purposes).

The old website was hosted on their local machine, behind a proxy that was there for other 30 website servers.

The old website took like 30-40 seconds to load on a browser and had a google score of 3-6/100.

We made the new website in wordpress, since it was basically a blog and managed all of the older links to redirect to the new pages so that SEO wouldn't get affected.

We then asked the previous developers to let their domain redirect to the new one (it was like example.com => ex.example.com and now it's just example.com, so we needed them to make ex.example.com redirect to example.com).

What they did was making a redirection to the 404 page of the new website, making everything go to fuck itself.

Damn this might be the first time I despise other developers, but this move was fucking awful.

I mean, I get it, we stole your big client, but it's not our fault if we made the google score go up to 90/100 in a week just by changing server and CMS.

Last time, working on a project with two mates at school.

I'm the one who knows how to read and understand correctly a doc for low-level c libraries (portaudio, opus) and working on sockets.

I make the barebone of our server. Co-workers should work on socket client.

After a week, the socket client is ugly, and almost unusable.
I rewrite the socket client in two days.

Co-worker, for a week : "the only contribution of Orionss is deleting my code" (it wasn't the first time)

In these moments, I would like to kill this guy

Security fail here. I've just started a PPI claim and have been provided a link to a so called "very secure" client area.

There are no username or passwords and the screenshot is not a first time sign up screen.

All I need to login is a surname, postcode and DOB - all information easy enough to find online.

Pretty bad IMO, esp, so considering the effort required to add a proper login using a username/password combination.

I mean I'm logged in now and have no option to set an account password :|

Didn't realize buttons will submit the first form on a page, coded without this assumption, went into production without anyone noticing. Cost the client about 8 grand in work that had to be redone.

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?

this happened two months before,
there's a UI designer guy at my office when I was about to leave the office he gave me a web page UI which has to be done by the next day.

Next day I started working on that page when I was halfway done he came to my desk and said: "there're some changes in design, the client doesn't like this part and this."

I'm like, why the fuck you didn't take client confirmation on the first place that's a fucking basic and first thing need to do. Just like the client you are a fuckin idiot. And now we don't hang out anymore.

My first freelance project - happened to be with the worst client. They didnt wanna pay more than $500 and also had no clue what they want, so each time i present something they request additional features or changing the ones implemented. In the end i kept the half downpayment for my time and bailed without deploying or anything. I introduced them to another freelancer to take the project and never went near them again.

To clarify, it was not my first project/ just my first time dealing with clients for projects instead of doing them at work. Ever since then i have a strict no dealing with clients directly policy.

My first C++ app for a client was leaking so much memory that Windows kept crashing too.
So I had to press Ctrl-Alt-Del every few runs.
But the laptop running the app was enclosed in a box, so the keyboard was inaccessible.
My hack was to set up an Arduino, a push button outside the box and a wire. Asked the steward to push the button every three people trying the system. So the Arduino sends Ctrl-Alt-Del and the app was running again.

The client was happy :)

* Teams meeting, doing some early testing with the client *

Dev Team: This is an early build, so please be aware that bugs can occur at this stage. (That's why we didn't want to show it but you insisted)

Client: Sure, don't worry.

* 15 minutes later, first bug happens because some state management at the front end was not tunned yet *

Client: Can you solve this bug?

Dev Team: Sure, just let us replicate it and we come back to you as soon as...

Client: Can you solve it now?

Dev Team: ... Okay, let us ser whats happening and we will come ba...

Client: You don't need to hang up, just solve it.

*Dev Team internal chat*

Me: Fuck
Other dev: Fuck
My leader at the time: Fuuuuuck

PS: This happened in two separate occasions. I hated that project.

Don't give me Mobile First! Fuck That!

I dev on desktop, most users are on desktop, my client thinks desktop is most important, so why the hell should I put mobile first??

And doublefuck "Offline First".

Get back to earth Google!

I'm about to quit my job this week to start my own software company... I have a meeting this friday with the first potential-client and I feel very anxious about it. I also feel scary because if this doesn't work probably I will stay unemployed with a 30K debt because of my Mac

Scary but anxious... Feel pretty excited, wish me luck guys!

So my boss run 2 different companies, the one that hired me and the one that I work for like 40% of the time (through the first one).

This second company is now having a client that's asking for educational qualification for both my boss and me (?)

I mean, even if I didn't study, why would you need that? The product is up and running and works, so wtf do you want?

So I'm a freelancer celebrating my second year at this one client (yes, times are good). When I first got to my current (not customer-facing) project, lots of "externals" (other freelancers) had come and gone, "internals" had been assigned and reassigned to and from this project and nobody knew exactly what was in the (angularjs) codebase.

One of my first
"quick win" assignments was to see if load times could be reduced. After some looking around it turned out someone had used moment.js (with locales, 67k gzipped) for some feature that had since been abandoned... and then accidentally dropped it into the source folder, checked it into source control (svn!), from whence it was happily packaged by the CI job and released every month.

Removing it reduced the pre-render javascript by about 40%. (also yes, that said "nobody knew exactly what was in the client-side codebase")

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.

A client send me his firm logo in .png after .pdf in the first time. The background is white not transparent ... 😓

So I just experienced my first "last minute client change" boy do I understand everyone's frustrations now

I was hired to make a little app, alone, for iOS, Android and I had to code the server and the database. At first it was only à little app on Android and I had to do it in one month and go back school after.
Finally, the client was upset that the app was buggy and asked me to stop school because it was my duty because he paid me

Spent 20h working non stop on a project we were presenting to customer on the next day. Had a shower at 6 am and drove to the client with a colleague. We were presenting the features one by one. As he was presenting I was finishing the missing features and we switched every couple of minutes. Never again working for a company that sets deadlines on the first meeting with customer

Specifications called for user logins to be stored in a session and not be persistent. When the session ends, you need to login again. The system deals with insurance policy information and persistent login was deemed a security risk.

First ticket submitted by the client after go-live? "Please make the login page remember my user name and password, or that I've logged in previously."

If you give the client a choice of:
- Quick and dirty solution which results in tech debt
- Better solution that would be cheaper in long run

They will always choose the first without fail..

Client insisting on Vanilla JS instead of using a existing framework to design a reporting dashboard, because "first I want to build one dashboard page and see how people react to It and what all changes they want. Once we have complete picture in mind we will go for a framework". Sure, let's do the entire work twice for peanuts.

Client : you are hired as a developer.

Me : we need more developers as there's more work and less time.

Client : Ok, here's another dev

(Meanwhile me doing my work...)

ON THE DAY OF DEMO :

Me : Here's the demo.

Client: it's incomplete, where's more work?

Me: that's the part of 2nd dev you hired before

Client : I don't care, I fucking need a work!

Me inside: (Why the fuck would the first dev becomes a task/team manager just because is the first one to join the project! Arrrgh!!! Hire a fucking scrum master to manage your fucking tasks/team, am just a fucking dev! )

Agency hires me to convert a 4 column + sidebar + pattern backgrounds email to responsive, for a big client, I make a redesign, simplifying it (less columns, flat...) to avoid issues, client insists, exactly the same design is needed.

I tell him its almost impossible but I will try, and try, and try, many times, but on their old Outlook, some email parts are not aligned (just that), try, and try, many hours, many days beyond budget... all the times since first explaining that perfection is not possible with all possible email clients, and like 7% is using outlook... At that point, and before, email was so well.

Finally I put an end to this, tell them to pay and leave me alone, as they didn't take my advises and warnings serious, not my fault.

This story is nothing until the discovery I made today: the agency had signed a contract with the client, a bank, in that contract there was the obligation to replicate exactly the same design and should be perfect in all email clients...

Great (but clueless) client. I went to a meeting with the client to discuss a way forward for his website revamp. First off he showed me his idea, which was a visual of the Windows desktop, with folders for different sections of the website, click on a folder and it opens revealing the different website pages. It went on basically describing how windows works. When he'd finished I said, with a cheeky smile, "that must be one of the fucking shityest ideas I've ever heard". We both started laughing.

Client: Can I see an update of the work?

Me: Mails the client the first update has been published.

Me: Mails the client the second update has been published.

Client: Can I see an update of the work?

Me: Did you see the last e-mails I sent this morning?

Client: *crickets*

Yet another client that expects we do cheap and fast work, mails us daily he wants to see updates, and constantly requests new features... but can't be bothered to give us the feedback we need for those features, or even read his e-mail.

Next week we'll get an angry mail that the features aren't exactly what he expected, mark my words.

Client calls me requesting a new simple feature.
Connect to FTP server.
Edit some PHP pages and upload them back, check if the changes actually worked.

Basically implementing and testing a new feature on a live production website...

PS. It didn't work the first or second time

My first gig straight out of uni was on a project where my role required fixing an FTP client to upload files from a clients machine to our server. It was a spreadsheet. VBA. An excel spreadsheet. FTP client. A spreadsheet.

Me: "why are we using VBA for this?"
PM (was a dev 10+ years ago and started the basics of this 'ftp client'): "VBA is great." *Stern face*

Brilliant

I remember when I had my first "website job" and I put it on a test domain to show it to the client.

But when I changed things up in the css or something, the client wouldn't see the updates.

It took me a whole bunch of time to figure out it was caching. So I told him to use an anonymous tab. Fun time, back then..

How do professionals manage these things? :D

A few years ago, i had a task to implement a webservice of an insurance-company into our .NET Development.

The security requirements of this insurance-company webservice were top notch.
As a client you had to build a request that used a negotiated certificate, canonical header structures, security timestamp, a secret token in header, ...

To configure all this stuff via web.config WCF was pure pain in the ass.

After many phonecalls and emails, i finally managed to meet all security requirements to send a valid request.

First, i didn't recognized my breakthrough, because my client still had thrown exceptions while calling the insurance-webservice.

Why was that?

The exception told me on the most possible gentle way, that .Net isn't able to process an unsecured response, when there was a secured request before.

So there was top notch security for requesting, but dumbass unsecured responding with all the precious customer information.

*epicfacepalmnuclearexplosionfollowing*

I even had to raise the. Net Version of our. Net client, because i wasn't able to configure that it is allowed to process an unsecured response after using a secured request.

Whyyyyyyy?!!?!!1el even!?!

So the story. I got a job as an Android developer in a consulting company. I didn't have any certificates and even degree. Just some easy apps on Google Play which I created to combine learning and practice. After 5 Months I got my first client project and company gave me a senior with 6 years of experience so he can teach me. That guy is a complete shit and I have to teach him how to do stuff. So I am doing the most worm in the project. Sometimes I don't even manage with my tasks because I have to fix his code and explain him why so and when it won't work. As a result, the client subestimates me. Makes me work harder and I have 10$/h and him 60$/h. What shall I do ?

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 :")

Fuck you, previous lead architect dictator! I spent a year arguing against your rigid nonsense custom built bullshit, and a year and a half after the client finally caught on and got rid of you I just got bitten yet again from one of your retarded over-complicated "solutions" to problems that never existed in the first place.

I wish I could send you an email and tell you about how I have thrown out all the useless shit you created and that we are all clearly better off now, but instead I will just share my frustration on DevRant and hope you read it and know exactly who you are.

I feel sorry for your current client.

Skype password lost -> reset email -> new password given -> login failed on skype client -> login via website -> invalid password -> reset password -> first enter code by email -> done -> assign new password -> login via password -> someone else is using your account, you have to change the password -> first ensure you are you by enter a code -> code entered -> change password -> password changed -> finally login works
Way to go Microsoft!

so I just changed my password 3 times in the last 5 minutes to get access to skype... for a call we finally made via whatsapp... now I will remove skype again until next year, when I have to make that famous "once a year" call with skype

If you guys remember, i was teasing from time to time, that i'm working on some Rust Project in my free time.

Well here it is, i put up a whole bunch of Editor Windows in it, to showcase it a little bit. (It also reminded me, that i need to update the Version to 2024.01).

It's essentially a toolkit, with which i can create all the content, that is later used as a data basis, that is being fed into the Client + Server Combo of the actual Game. My Plan for this year is to go beyond the Editor and create a first version of the Client + Server to be able to playtest the stuff.

And sorry if it kinda sounds like an ad, but i'm more posting it here to show, how nice it actually is to build stuff with rust.

Let me know what you think ^^

Just got my first job as a junior front-end developer. I am currently working on coding emails and holy crap trying to code for all different email clients. Never thought each client rendered stuff differently. (Outlook is the worst!)

But I am loving the job!

Been engaged in a silly-client-request VS stubborn-developer war since last week. They wanted a textbox where they enter decimals - generally in the form 1.234 - to automatically put the decimal point after the first number.
"What if it's 10.xxx or 100.xxx?"
"That won't happen"
"How much time will it really save them having to press another key?"
"Why, how long will it take you to do the fix?"
Etc, ridiculousness and rage increasing exponentially...
Common sense finally prevailed today. Just think of all those wasted milliseconds having to press the "." key.

so a client yesterday decides they need a site built by eop Friday, that has been quoted today. if approved first thing tomorrow gives about 1.5 days to get it done. Thanks boss

Bug on trouble ticket system:

"I get a Nullpointer when i call this REST API *stacktrace*"

- It's not a Nullpointer
- It's a problem on your client http
- *Copy message exception, paste on google, first result is the solution"

And he's a DEV!!!!!

Our new project is a responsive mobile-first web system coded with HTML, CSS, jQuery and AJAX that connects to MySQL, but the main tasks runs trough a huge application written in Visual FoxPro, per client request...the web version could manage the whole business but no, it has to be Fox.
Oh, and it's the version 6, not even using the latest version 9 with all it's "improvements". What are we, back to the past milleniun?

Not dev, but a perf-eng confidence boost.

Our company was hired by a client to onboard perf-testing process and do some perf-related go-live stuff. Basically, make sure the app meets the SLAs.

Our company mobilized some internal resources for the task. The had 3-4 months. 2 months later they realized they won't pull it off. What a shame...

When the threat of dropping the ball and losing the client and recommendations became very real, they engaged us. Half the time, half the resources, a worried and annoyed client who now wants to control the whole initiative.

During the first 2 meetings we get the general idea of what they have, what they want. We take some time to prepare a plan to make it on time. The client argues our plan, mostly because one of the main points was mocking downstream dependencies [integrations]. He asks, then demands to do it all with live integrations. We explain why this is an incredible risk and why we should do it the proposed way. He disagrees.

Alright then... Maybe he knows smth we don't. Let's do it the risky way...

A month later test results are far from the target. I did my best with app de-bottlenecking and fine-tuning. But since the live integrations do not deliver, they hide other bottlenecks. The initiative is stuck.

Finally, the client agrees to do it with mocking. But now there's no time left as it will take almost a month to prepare mocks...

The client agrees we should have done it our way from the start. They postpone the go-live and we carry out our testing and tuning the right way.

That was one expensive and long "I told you so". But it boosted our [perf team's] confidence to the top and beyond :)

don't tell us how to do our job, unless you do want extra expenses

At my previous job I was working with cliets as a support for our application. One client had problem printing invoice so they caled. Was web application so invoice was first converted to PDF then you would print it.
I ask client if they have Abobe Reader installed. Her response was some thing like that: " I don't know what are you saying. Its is like you are talking chines."
I asked for remote access, fix problem.

Still don't know how they managed to use application.

Gotta love it when your client tells his whole company that they can contact you for any question related to computers. I'm a fucking developer and no first level Microsoft Windows support.

A while a go, we got a Feature Request by our client, which was a bit of a stretch. and by a bit of a stretch i mean horrible shit which is totally unusable, a technical nightmare to implement with almost no accessable data.
well, the pm gave me the Ticket. when I First read it, I wanted to puke.
since the pm wasnt in a good mood, i just wrote a large comment on where to implement that Feature to be a much less pain in the ass.

many discussions with the pm and the Client later, i Had to implement it the way, they wanted. so i started.

after one and a half week, i was almost ready, just a few hours left and the nightmare would be over
what i didnt know is that the Client came over to discuss a few things with my Boss
suddenly my Boss walks in and asked, how much im ready
then He told me THE message

i should should Revert everything ive done the last 1 1/2 weeks and implement the Feature the way, i told was better

worst friday ever

Well... Just last week one guy somehow completely broken our production server while creating an WordPress using Ghostscript for some reason. First this CMS users 100% CPU, then something has happened and whole server couldn't get up. Admin had to restore it from a backup. There are around 7 client on this server and all of our projects.

*background: client has told account manager he's not paying any more money till his site is done, not only is it the most in-depth WordPress site we've made, but we'll beyond the scope of the signed contract. He sent a few more edits over the weekend which I ignored because we have a team meeting later to discuss he client and where to go from here.

account manager comes in and says he has a call from client looking for me. I tell him that he should probably take a message as I'm not in the mood to be belittled by the client and we have a meeting later to discuss him anyways, we'll call him back.

AM: Come on, he says it'll only take a second and I'll be here so we can do it on speaker.

he transfers the call and we start talking in my office, before the client has even finished his first remark, the AM has left the room. Now we have the least social person in the office talking to the client when both parties are less than happy.

I managed to keep my cool and not tell the client to fuck off, and made sure I was clear about not promising any of his new edits.

Phrases like "that will take time and money" were used a lot.

There may be shots fired at the meeting later.

Website for a gallery that wanted a 10k website for just 1k ... Must haz super CMS so that they could send me word documents each week so I could manuallly copy paste that shit into the CMS, and somehow extract and restore the lowres embedded images in full resolution ...

I guess it was safe to say this was my first client from hell 😅😂😂😂

The second was a website for some ballroom dude that got my referral from gallery X ... Yup, same shitty type of client

Have you ever committed to an impossible deadline simply because your client would have been completely FUCKED if you didn't?

this would have been remotely doable if the existing code base that was handed over was just mildly reasonable. But how could this shit ever have worked the first time?!

Gilfoyle would just have said no. Why can't I be more like Gilfoyle >.<

In the third month at my first job, a batch processing script I wrote DDOS'ed my company's API servers on a saturday and caused hours of client-facing issues