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Search - "form fields"
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My First name, is also my Last name.
So it gets kinda akward whenever i fill out a form and when the lady at the booth notices i have the same names on both the First and Last name fields.
She points and explains to me which is which and everybody looks at me like im some 6 year old hahaha.12 -
I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.
The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.
Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.
There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.
I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.
I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.
If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.
pour another glass
Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.
When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.
Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.
The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)
Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.
Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.
The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.
If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.
I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.
We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.
sip
Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.
Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.
The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.
For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.
Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.
Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.
Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.
Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.
Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.39 -
Client: Please remove the address inputs from the inquiry form. Our marketing strategist said that more people will fill out the form if there are less input fields.
Me: But you are required by law to include the address in the generated inquiry PDFs!
Client: Can you remove the fields and still include the address in the PDF somehow?
Me: No. How would the website know the users address without asking for it.
Client: Okay. Wait! Can we change the form to just one large input where the user has to enter everything at once? That is even less inputs so more users would do it, right?
Me:...6 -
Stupid annoying client want me to add 2 new fields on a form. Ok I said, my estimation is that I need 2 days to make the changes on form, database and all the scripts that posting and getting data, plus testing. His reply was, come one do you really want 48 hours to just add 2 fields, its sooo easy!!!! WTF dude... if it is sooo easy why are you fucking bother me??? Do it your self!!!!9
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Just before you, my fellow system programmer, scroll past this, let me say this:
🍬 The web is actiually simple. 🍬
Both HTML and CSS is declarative. It's all easy when you understand the concepts, learn how to be idiomatic and quit trying to do that imperative bullshit in languages that aren't imperative.
HTML is simple. You know the boilerplate: doctype, head, body, that's all. Just mark it up and do NOT look at it before you end, mark it up as it were article or something. The appearance is up to css.
CSS is simple. You may even forget bem or rscss, you're already a skilled software developer. Use common sense and your code-splitting and naming skills you gained reading The Code Complete or doing software development for years.
Forget mockups. Forget absolute positioning, forget setting width and height in pixels. Go to awwwards, find some inspiration. Draw some buttons and fields on paper with your good old pencil. Then go and write some css. Feel free to steal some shadows and transitions from codepen.
Read about 8-pixel grid system. Let every element push away from others by setting something like margin: 16px; and whoops! You've just got fully responsive and got great vertical rhythm without even using media queries!
Oh my god, do NEVER set width and height explicitly! Type something like button { width: 120px; } and bang! The entire web page is broken. Quit that shit. Let it resize as it should. It will resize itself to fit its contents.
HTML is by default ready for your template engine. That's how you receive data from server — as server-side rendered, plain old HTML page. On the other hand, the form element is the most axiomatic and simple way to send the data to server. That's how you send it — as plain old GET or POST that every webserver can handle.
All of there are true:
1. It's easy to get great 100% responsiveness without media queries.
2. It's easy to align items in row, it's just one line of css. Maybe two, if you still want elements to wrap, but want to use flexbox:
.parent {
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
}
3. HTML and CSS are fast by default.
4. You don't need mockups to achieve great visual experience. Mockups is imperative, web is declarative.
5. You may not even need JavaScript to make great website.
Go on, ask me a question about web! I'll ready to answer everything.21 -
So, a rather unfortunate bug on the Minecraft website.
Minecraft allows you to change your name every 30 days. I was reverse engineering their API so I could use it personally.
On the username change form there are two fields: your desired username, and your password.
To protect myself from actually changing my name, I purposefully put in password123 so that it would fail. Then, I clicked "Change name" to monitor the network traffic.
Well that's when two unfortunate things combined.
#1: I used my last name to test. It's a unique word that is relatively short and very easy for me to type out of habit.
#2: That password field doesn't actually get validated.
So imagine my shock when I clicked "change username" and it WORKED.
And now my username is doxxing me for at least 30 days + the permanent name history
FUCK me6 -
Was working on a Django thing (server-side, so no dynamicness as far as I'm aware?) under a contractor at my company.
Needed a popup to display results of a subprocess, so I asked "We're going to need to AJAX it, right?" and give brief justification. Guy says no - pretty much "Django 10/10 supports this, let me Google". Proceeds to send me a link to a python package that enables using popups as a way of inputting values for form fields. I see as much on the couple of images for the package demo/introduction, so I'm kind of just like "It doesn't look like it's what we need though..." But the guy says to trust him, and implement it.
A day later, after scrutinizing the demo code, and trying to figure out how to implement the package, I go back to him and say "I really really really don't think this is going to work" and give the same justification from the day before. He opens the demo code himself and follows the long trail of confusing methods and stuff.
After an hour of my sitting there watching him read the code and disappearing for 10 minute periods a few times, he comes to the conclusion "Okay you need to understand the code to implement it. But go ahead and use AJAX"
This is abridged and a few other super annoying things have been cut out, but I TRUSTED HIM.
I. TRUSTED. HIM.3 -
So i am the process of working on improving my personal brand and have created myself a new logo.
I thought it would be interesting to see what you all think?
"As a developer/designer hybrid i wanted to create a identity that was able to form a symbolic reference.
My initials (nb) are formed into one continuous line making a connection to two seemingly different fields that represent both design and development."
Full Resolution: https://dribbble.com/shots/...34 -
You motherfucking piece of shit application form...
I was filling a long form in a tab and I had another part of that form open in another tab.
They fucking logged me out of the 2nd tab and didn't notify or prevent me from filling up hundreds of fields in the 1st tab.
Now I have to fill them up again.
Fuck you and your stupid form. Die in hell you fucking stupid cunt. -
Client sends me support email concerning the CMS.
There's not enough details to go on, esp. browser info, so I ask her to fill out a support ticket.
She does, but doesn't enter any browser info, AND mistypes her email address so I have to correct it to reply to the right email.
I send her to whatbrowseramiusing.co and ask her to send the info to our support email address.
She emails support directly with these words: "I am using Google bowser".
I reply: click "Send to my designer" on whatbrowseramiusing.co and I give her exact steps to fill out the three form fields
She replies: "There is no 'Send to my designer', I only get the option to buy the domain."
I'm like "Whut?!" Did you mistype the URL? Why don't you click the link in the email? (Paraphrase)
This time I get an official email from whatbrowseramiusing.co, telling me that the client is using Safari 5.0.5. Which is five years old.
At that point I replied and said we really can't support this older browser, and included a link to the Firefox download page.7 -
On the screen: four text boxes cycling through rainbow color backgrounds and spinning wildly in circles.
Manager walks in.
Here's the context.
We were pair programming and working on a simple form. We were just finishing up the style, and I suggested we use a CSS3 animation to make the invalid fields pulsate a light red once.
I'm the young guy in the office, so I am most familiar with the "new" front end stuff like flex and CSS3.
My colleague was unfamiliar with CSS3 animations, so I implemented the red flash quickly and showed him.
He was curious what else you could do with CSS3 animations, so I changed my "to/ from" to a "0%/ 25%/ 75%/ 100%" style animation to show how keyframes worked. Then I made the animation iterations infinite so it went on forever. Of course, I didn't have any normal colors on hand so I just went with my debug colors: red, green, blue, yellow, etc.
We submitted the form with invalid inputs and sure enough, they flashed rainbow colors. It looked pretty funny so I thought "haha, lets quickly add rotation while we're at it"
That's the point where the education turned to a little fun but it wasn't going to take more than a second.
So we did it and it looked pretty funny and it actually made me laugh. Then we started discussing next steps on the form (back-end). Discussion lasted maybe five minutes before our manager visited to update us.
As we were discussing, the invalid controls were still spinning and rainbow colored in the background. Whoops.
The words we managed to say were just "It's invalid" and then we broke out laughing.3 -
My code review nightmare?
All of the reviews that consisted of a group of devs+managers in a conference room and a big screen micro-analyzing every line of code.
"Why did you call the variable that? Wouldn't be be more efficient to use XYZ components? You should switch everything to use ServiceBus."
and/or using the 18+ page coding standard document as a weapon.
PHB:"On page 5, paragraph 9, sub-section A-123, the standards dictate to select all the necessary data from the database. Your query is only selecting 5 fields from the 15 field field table. You might need to access more data in the future and this approach reduces the amount of code change."
Me: "Um, if the data requirements change, wouldn't we have change code anyway?"
PHB: "Application requirements are determined by our users, not you. That's why we have standards."
Me: "Um, that's not what I ..."
PHB: "Next file, oh boy, this one is a mess. On page 9, paragraph 2, sub-section Z-987, the standards dictate to only select the absolute minimum amount of the data from the database. Your query is selecting 3 fields, but the application is only using 2."
Me: "Yes, the application not using the field right now, but the user stated they might need the data for additional review."
PHB: "Did they fill out the proper change request form?"
Me: "No, they ...wait...Aren't the standards on page 9 contradictory to the standards on page 5?"
PHB: "NO! You'll never break your cowboy-coding mindset if you continue to violate standards. You see, standards are our promise to customers to ensure quality. You don't want to break our promises...do you?"7 -
I am much too tired to go into details, probably because I left the office at 11:15pm, but I finally finished a feature. It doesn't even sound like a particularly large or complicated feature. It sounds like a simple, 1-2 day feature until you look at it closely.
It took me an entire fucking week. and all the while I was coaching a junior dev who had just picked up Rails and was building something very similar.
It's the model, controller, and UI for creating a parent object along with 0-n child objects, with default children suggestions, a fancy ui including the ability to dynamically add/remove children via buttons. and have the entire happy family save nicely and atomically on the backend. Plus a detailed-but-simple listing for non-technicals including some absolutely nontrivial css acrobatics.
After getting about 90% of everything built and working and beautiful, I learned that Rails does quite a bit of this for you, through `accepts_nested_params_for :collection`. But that requires very specific form input namespacing, and building that out correctly is flipping difficult. It's not like I could find good examples anywhere, either. I looked for hours. I finally found a rails tutorial vide linked from a comment on a SO answer from five years ago, and mashed its oversimplified and dated examples with the newer documentation, and worked around the issues that of course arose from that disasterous paring.
like.
I needed to store a template of the child object markup somewhere, yeah? The video had me trying to store all of the markup in a `data-fields=" "` attrib. wth? I tried storing it as a string and injecting it into javascript, but that didn't work either. parsing errors! yay! good job, you two.
So I ended up storing the markup (rendered from a rails partial) in an html comment of all things, and pulling the markup out of the comment and gsubbing its IDs on document load. This has the annoying effect of preventing me from using html comments in that partial (not that i really use them anyway, but.)
Just.
Every step of the way on building this was another mountain climb.
* singular vs plural naming and routing, and named routes. and dealing with issues arising from existing incorrect pluralization.
* reverse polymorphic relation (child -> x parent)
* The testing suite is incompatible with the new rails6. There is no fix. None. I checked. Nope. Not happening.
* Rails6 randomly and constantly crashes and/or caches random things (including arbitrary code changes) in development mode (and only development mode) when working with multiple databases.
* nested form builders
* styling a fucking checkbox
* Making that checkbox (rather, its label and container div) into a sexy animated slider
* passing data and locals to and between partials
* misleading documentation
* building the partials to be self-contained and reusable
* coercing form builders into namespacing nested html inputs the way Rails expects
* input namespacing redux, now with nested form builders too!
* Figuring out how to generate markup for an empty child when I'm no longer rendering the children myself
* Figuring out where the fuck to put the blank child template markup so it's accessible, has the right namespacing, and is not submitted with everything else
* Figuring out how the fuck to read an html comment with JS
* nested strong params
* nested strong params
* nested fucking strong params
* caching parsed children's data on parent when the whole thing is bloody atomic.
* Converting datetimes from/to milliseconds on save/load
* CSS and bootstrap collisions
* CSS and bootstrap stupidity
* Reinventing the entire multi-child / nested params / atomic creating/updating/deleting feature on my own before discovering Rails can do that for you.
Just.
I am so glad it's working.
I don't even feel relieved. I just feel exhausted.
But it's done.
finally.
and it's done well. It's all self-contained and reusable, it's easy to read, has separate styling and reusable partials, etc. It's a two line copy/paste drop-in for any other model that needs it. Two lines and it just works, and even tells you if you screwed up.
I'm incredibly proud of everything that went into this.
But mostly I'm just incredibly tired.
Time for some well-deserved sleep.7 -
So I have seen this quite a few times now and posted the text below already, but I'd like to shed some light on this:
If you hit up your dev tools and check the network tab, you might see some repeated API calls. Those calls include a GET parameter named "token". The request looks something like this: "https://domain.tld/api/somecall/..."
You can think of this token as a temporary password, or a key that holds information about your user and other information in the backend. If one would steal a token that belongs to another user, you would have control over his account. Now many complained that this key is visible in the URL and not "encrypted". I'll try to explain why this is, well "wrong" or doesn't impose a bigger security risk than normal:
There is no such thing as an "unencrypted query", well besides really transmitting encrypted data. This fields are being protected by the transport layer (HTTPS) or not (HTTP) and while it might not be common to transmit these fields in a GET query parameter, it's standard to send those tokens as cookies, which are as exposed as query parameters. Hit up some random site. The chance that you'll see a PHP session id being transmitted as a cookie is high. Cookies are as exposed as any HTTP GET or POST Form data and can be viewed as easily. Look for a "details" or "http header" section in your dev tools.
Stolen tokens can be used to "log in" into the website, although it might be made harder by only allowing one IP per token or similar. However the use of such a that token is absolut standard and nothing special devRant does. Every site that offers you a "keep me logged in" or "remember me" option uses something like this, one way or the other. Because a token could have been stolen you sometimes need to additionally enter your current password when doings something security risky, like changing your password. In that case your password is being used as a second factor. The idea is, that an attacker could have stolen your token, but still doesn't know your password. It's not enough to grab a token, you need that second (or maybe thrid) factor. As an example - that's how githubs "sudo" mode works. You have got your token, that grants you more permissions than a non-logged in user has, but to do the critical stuff you need an additional token that's only valid for that session, because asking for your password before every action would be inconvenient when setting up a repo
I hope this helps understanding a bit more of this topic :)
Keep safe and keep asking questions if you fell that your data is in danger
Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee5 -
Just got a lection from my manager.
Today he sent me an email with request to change validation on one field validation from decimal(5,3) to int which will be 5 digit number. Ok i did that, I changed it on UI, changed validation, changed mappings, changed dtos, created migration files, and changed it in databse. After i did all of that I replied to his email and said that ive changed validation and adjusted it in database.
After my email here comes rage mail from manager with every fuckin important person in cc I kid you not. Manager is asking why the fuck did I change database when Ive could only use different validaton for that field on UI.
I Almost flipped fuckin table. What does validation good do if you wouldnt be able ti save that form? And form has like 150 fields. And if I left validation only everthing would fuckin break.
Sometimes i think that its better not to think.
FML7 -
I’m trying to add digit separators to a few amount fields. There’s actually three tickets to do this in various places, and I’m working on the last of them.
I had a nightmare debugging session earlier where literally everything would 404 unless I navigated through the site in a very roundabout way. I never did figure out the cause, but I found a viable workaround. Basically: the house doesn’t exist if you use the front door, but it’s fine if you go through the garden gate, around the back, and crawl in through the side window. After hours of debugging I eventually discovered that if I unlocked the front door with a different key, everything was fine… but nobody else has this problem?
Whatever.
Onto the problem at hand!
I’m trying to add digit separators to some values. I found a way to navigate to the page in question (more difficult than it sounds), and … I don’t know what view is rendering the page. Or what controller. Or how it generates its text.
The URL is encrypted, so I get no clues there. (Which was lead dev’s solution to having scrapeable IDs instead of just, you know, fixing them). The encryption also happens in middleware, so it’s a nightmare to work through. And it’s by the lead dev, so the code is fucking atrocious.
The view… could be one of many, and I don’t even know where they are. Or what layout. Or what partials go into building it.
All of the text on the page are “resources” — think named translations that support plus nested macros. I don’t know their names, and the bits of text I can search for are used fucking everywhere. “Confirmation number” (the most unique of them) turns up 79 matches. “Fee” showed up in 8310 places before my editor gave up looking. Really.
The table displaying the data, which is what I actually care about, isn’t built in JS or markup, but is likely a resource that goes through heavy processing. It gets generated in a controller somewhere (I don’t know the resource name so I can’t find it), and passed through several layers of “dynamic form” abstraction, eventually turned into markup, and rendered as a partial template. At least, that’s how it worked in the previous ticket. I found a resource that looks right, and there’s only the one. I found the nested macros it uses for the amount and total, and added the separators there… only to find that it doesn’t work.
Fucking dead end.
And i have absolutely nothing else to go on.
Page title? “Show”
URL? /~LiolV8N8KrIgaozEgLv93s…
Text? All from macros with unknown names. Can’t really search for it without considerable effort.
Table? Doesn’t work.
Text in the table? doesn’t turn up anything new.
Legal agreement? There are multiple, used in many places, generates them dynamically via (of course) resources, and even looking through the method usages, doesn’t narrow it down very much.
Just.
What the fuck?
Why does this need to be so fucking complicated?
And what genius decided “$100000.00” doesn’t need separators? Right, the lot of them because separators aren’t used ANYWHERE but in code I authored. Like, really? This is fintech. You’d think they would be ubiquitous.
And the sheer amount of abstraction?
Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.11 -
These bloody form designers.
I was filling in this form earlier and there were some fields which were not marked mandatory so I didn’t fill them in (because why should I ?)
And then later, I received a dozen automated e-mails one for each non-mandatory field I did not fill asking me to provide them that information.3 -
Tldr; my "this is not bug, its a feature" moment actually turned my bug into a feature.
Today we were presenting a project which has imposible deadline. I am developing this small project alone (which is probably good). I implemented core features first but I know project still have bugs and a lot of tech debts. Another friend started to presenting our demo and a wild bug appeared as expected. He was adding rows to a table. To add a new you gotta open new modal by clicking + button and fill the form. One of the fields had a bug. When you add row by clicking Ok button, the value of the field stayed there after you open modal again. So its basically a state problem in React. I forgot to clear previous state of modal. When they see that and my friend said "oh we got a bug there". Then I enabled my mic and said "thats not a bug, thats a feature. I didn't want to enter that field again and again when I adding multiple rows and made it persistent." and you know what? They liked the idea! They requested to add that bug to two more fields. I was just joking and my "this is not bug, its a feature" moment actually turned my bug into a feature. Instead of fixing it, I'm creating more of this bug. LOL!5 -
FUCK ME!!
For a job, I have to create a form with more than 20 fields!! FUCK!!
The most shitty part is that I need to gather all the shit users fill in (if they even fill it in) and place in a shitty e-mail and send that to the client!! FUCK!!16 -
Can you guess where the form fields are?
It's the grey area.
Not, not that one, the other grey area.2 -
One of my classmates was working on a login form, and the fucker handtyped a 100+ character email validation regex but forgot to add a check to make sure no fields were blank.
It was funny when I was able to create an account with no username, breaking his website, and even funnier when I told him html forms have a built-in email pattern5 -
I think that two criterias are important:
- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind
1) Some simple anti examples:
- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-
2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.
E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.
Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.
When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.
It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo
Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.
Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.
My worst enemies....
Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(
Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.
I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.
Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?
XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????4 -
wrote some JS to make sure that eForm fields which are hidden/disabled via checkboxes are nullified before the form submission. Checking the request and the fields are definitely empty. But the tester says the data is still appearing in the DB. So i am moving immediately to Nepal where i intend to live as a goat.
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That moment when code reuse makes you reuse reused code and you actually reuse a BUG.
You decide to go for code reusing when your boss asks: "Can you add an edit popup besides that 'add customer' popup button?". You do some little tweaks to the "new customer" code and it allows that to save over an existing entry, cool.
However, after a lot of time spent on reviewing the resulting PR, turns out there was a dormant bug on the code you reused, and it woke up with its new use.
That code was a bad copy-pasta from another, bigger form, which included a whole bunch of optional fields. As it was only used to save new entries, those now missing fields were simply being saved as empty. But as you reused that to save existing entries, you were now cleaning up all those optional fields without noticing.1 -
God fucking damnit automating a client's "Job applicant form" system is the most boring shit l've ever done.
Get me some damn monkeys to do this
"Oh OK so I just have to take this form and turn it into HTML. Oh shit, 25 check box's, let's just copy paste this shit in over and over. Oh damn, forgot I have to change the name and value fields for each one. God damnit this is boring, I guess I have to"
Fucking hell it's annoying work, Boring, easy, no thought needed. Ended up turning this task into a drinking game. Every time the word "Management" came up, I took a shot. Got me pretty fucked up.
Client emails back; "Oh ya, I forgot to tell you, we have these 3 other forms we want you to automate".
Well fuck at this point I feel like more of an alcoholic than a developer.5 -
To the front end dev that 'finished' his part of a web form with a Hundred pluss fields. You left every id, name, and label-for as 'first-name'.
I know it saves you time to copy paste and only change what's visible on the page, but FUUUUUUCK YOU! -
Fuck Captcha. Seriously. Am I blind to that shit or are you supposed to fail entering that goddamn letter soup like 5 times before getting it right? Of course you have to re-enter your form fields every time you fail because you don't deserve better, you illiterate fuck.5
-
Since my first post was a success, here's another shameless hack-- in this case, ripping a "closed" database I don't usually have access to and making a copy in MySQL for productivity purposes. That was at a former job as an IT guy at a hardware store, think Lowes/Rona.
We had an old SCO Unix server hosting Informix SQL (curious, anyone here touched iSQL?), which has terminal only forms for the users to handle data, and has keybindings that are strangely vi based (ESC does commit changes. Mindfsck for the users!). To add new price changes to our products, this results to a lengthy procedure inside a terminal form (with ascii borders!) with a few required fields, which makes this rather long. Sadly, only I and a colleague had access to price changes.
Introducing a manager who asks a price change for a brand- not a single product, but the whole product line of a brand we sell. Oh and, those price changes ends later after the weekend (twice the work, back at regular price!)
The usual process is that they send me a price change request Excel document with all the item codes along with the new prices. However, being non technical, those managers write EVERYTHING at hand, cell by cell (code, product name, cost, new price, etc), sometimes just copy pasted from a terminal window
So when the manager asked me to change all those prices, I thought "That's the last time I manually enter all of this sh!t- and so does he". Since I already have a MySQL copy of the items & actual (live) price tables, I wrote a PHP backend to provide a basic API to be consumed to a now VBA enhanced Excel sheet.
This VBA Excel sheet had additional options like calculating a new price based on user provided choices ("Lower price by x $ or x %, but stay above cost by x $ or x %"), so the user could simply write back to back every item codes and the VBA Excel sheet will fetch & display automatically all relevant infos, and calculate a new price if it's a 20% price cut for example.
So when the managers started using that VBA sheet, I had also hidden a button which simply generate all SQL inserts for the prices written in the form, including a "back to regular price" if the user specified an end date, etc.
No more manual form entry for me, no more keyboard pecking for the managers with new prices calculated for them. It was a win/win :)1 -
When a client asks you to make a form.... With 6 input fields and about 9 output fields.
Cheers buddy, I'll just make the rest up shall I?!?
FFS!2 -
I really hate sales people. My stakeholder wants to buy an address verification service but is hesitant to purchase now because the dev time needed would be substantial. Now the sales rep has planted seeds of doubt in my SH and SH thinks I grossly overestimated the labor I quoted.
Sales rep is all “major corporations have installed this in a weekend.” 🤬🤬🤬 Major corporations also have more than one developer and probably aren’t dealing with a website that has a dozen address forms that all work differently. Oh, and I DON’T WORK WEEKENDS MOFO.
My SH originally requested a labor estimate for installing the AVS on all address forms and that’s what I delivered. My audit revealed a dozen different forms. I’m working with a legacy code base that’s been bandaged together and maintained by an outside dev agency. The only thing the forms have in common is reusable address fields. They all work differently when it comes to validating and submitting data to the server and they all submit to different api endpoints. At least a quarter of those forms are broken and would need to be fixed (these are mostly admin-facing). I also had to provide an estimate on frontend implementation when I have no idea what they want the FE to look like.
My estimate was 5-8 weeks for implementation AND testing. I wrote up my findings and clearly explained the labor required, why it was needed, and the time needed. All was fine until the sales rep tried to get into SH’s head.
My SH is now asking for a new estimate and hoping for 1-2 weeks of labor, which is what will SH to buy the AVS. Then go to the outside dev agency you used to work with and ask for a second opinion. I’m sure they’d also tell you at least month if not more for testing, implementation, and deployment because you have a DOZEN FORMS you want to add this to. 1-2 weeks is only possible for a single form.
My manager doesn’t work in the same coding language I do, but he read my documentation and supports my original estimate.
I honestly want to ask my SH if this sales rep is giving a very good price for the AVS. If not, are there other companies in the mix? Because right now you have a sales rep that’s taking you for a ride and trying to pressure you all so he can get another notch in his belt for getting another “major corporation” as his account. I don’t think it’s a good idea to be locked in with a grimy sales rep.3 -
I just finished designing an entire asset management pipeline and christ on a fucking pogo stick, if it isn't convoluted.
Theres a lot of game engines out there, but all of them do it a little different. They all tackle a slightly different problem, without even realizing it.
1. asset management
2. asset change management
3. behavior change management
4. data management
5. combinatorial design management.
6. Combinatorial Behavior management
7. Feature completion
ASSET MANAGEMENT is exactly what it says on the tin.
ASSET CHANGE management can be thought of handling the import, export, formatting, platform specific packing, and versioning (including forking) of an asset.
BEHAVIORAL CHANGE management is a subset of asset management, because code is a subset of assets (depending on how you define 'assets'). The oldest known example of this is commenting and uncommenting code.
Or worse, printf debugging.
This can be file versioning, basic undo services, graph management of forks and mergers, toggles for features or modules, etc.
DATA management is about anything that doesn't fall into the other categories, everything from mission text to npc dialogues, quests, location names, item stats, the works. Anything you'd be tempted to put in a database, falls under this category. Haven't yet seen many engines offer this as an explicit built in tool as of yet, because the other problems are non-trivial as is, so this is a bit of low hanging fruit that gets handled by external tools, or loaded from formats as simple as json.
COMBINATORIAL DESIGN management is the idea of prefabbing, blueprints of broader object design using nested prototypes of existing game objects, to create more complex, reusable set pieces. Unity did this well. GM does this in part.
COMBINATORIAL BEHAVIOR management is entity-component systems, plus tooling to make it easy to add, remove, and configure components and their values on entity blueprints, also not uncommon. Both stencyl and unity do this. GM has a precursor to this in the form of configurable fields, but these fields are not based on component scripts attached to objects.
FEATURE COMPLETION is that set of gameplay mechanics or styles of design that an engine naturally makes easier to include or build in a game.
I don't think I'm aiming for all that, but I think at minimum a good engine has to do asset management, behavioral change management, prefabs, and entity-component systems with management tools for that. And ideally, asset change management.8 -
I FUCKING love it when I try to understand how to simply fucking connect to my server via SSH, and seeing tutorials from cocksuckers that just screen some form fields without telling where I can find them, and juping from steps to steps like I'm in your fucking head
CAN'T YOU WRITE SOMETHING THAT WOULD MAKE SENSE, YOU FUCKING MORON???3 -
We just got a new web dev with 10+ years experience with the goal of helping out our rather inexperienced small team.
His first PR was for a rather large form with 30+ fields.
He. used. a. <table/>......To layout the entire thing! With inline floats no less!
How the f do you spend the last 10 years not bothering to pickup any modern css?6 -
This is the story of the API documentation.
Which btw I couldn't find on the producent's website anywhere. I had the pdf shared with me by a coworker.
I knew the api was fucked up the moment I looked at endpoint documentation.
GET params? WHERE, ORDERBY etc. Literally make a SQL select in a GET request.
Returned stuff? The whole thing. Not some DTO, you literally get everything you can get.
Eg if you get IP in your response, you get it in several formats: dotted form, as hex, and as int. In 3 different json fields.
Oh, and regarding IP - one would imagine you can use masks or prefixes for subnets, right? Nope. The only param you can use there is the subnet size. So you have to calculate the power of 2 every time you want to make a request.
That's from the endpoint documentation. But what about some general info on the API, before all that?
As I was looking for something, I decided to read that intro and general info about the API.
Okay, so there was a change log between API versions. "removed [endpoint which sounds like correct REST design], please use [this generic thing with SQL-like GETs]"... Several of them.
And there was also this sentence which said that the API is not restful, "it's REST-like". <facepalm>
If it was a bad attempt at REST API, I would let it go. But this sentence clearly showed they knew they did everything wrong. And the changelog showed they didn't stop there, they were actively making it worse.1 -
1. It's gonna be more and more specialized - to the point where we'll equal or even outdo the medical profession. Even today, you can put 100 techs/devs into a room and not find two doing the same job - that number will rise with the advent of even more new fields, languages and frameworks.
2. As most end users enjoy ignoring all security instructions, software and hardware will be locked down. This will be the disadvantage of developers, makers and hackers equally. The importance of social engineering means the platform development will focus on protecting the users from themselves, locking out legitimate tinkerers in the process.
3. With the EU getting into the backdoor game with eTLS (only 20 years after everyone else realized it's shit), informational security will reach an all-time low as criminals exploit the vulnerabilities that the standard will certainly have.
4. While good old-fashioned police work still applies to the internet, people will accept more and more mass surveillance as the voices of reason will be silenced. Devs will probably hear more and more about implementing these or joining the resistance.
5. We'll see major leaks, both as a consequence of mass-surveillance (done incompetently and thus, insecurely) and as activist retaliation.
6. As the political correctness morons continue invading our communities and projects, productivity will drop. A small group of more assertive devs will form - not pretty or presentable, but they - we - get shit done for the rest.
7. With IT becoming more and more public, pseudo-knowledge, FUD and sales bullshit will take over and, much like we're already seeing it in the financial sector, drown out any attempt of useful education. There will be a new silver-bullet, it will be useless. Like the rest. Stick to brass (as in IDS/IPS, Firewall, AV, Education), less expensive and more effective.
8. With the internet becoming a part of the real life without most people realizing it and/or acting accordingly, security issues will have more financial damages and potentially lethal consequences. We've already seen insulin pumps being hacked remotely and pacemakers' firmware being replaced without proper authentication. This will reach other areas.
9. After marijuana is legalized, dev productivity will either plummet or skyrocket. Or be entirely unaffected. Who cares, I'll roll the next one.
10. There will be new JS frameworks. The world will turn, it will rain.1 -
I wish I could declare variables IRL so I wouldn't have to repeat myself 6 times in a row before being acknowledged. Yes, the client left these fields empty, that's why the form returned an error as it should have. No, it's not the code's fault. For once.
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I worked with this hack of a backend dev that was too lazy to add a complex(ish) object to our CMS tool. His solution?
One giant-ass text box with the label "put JSON here".
If tech people were using it I wouldn't mind, but our poor content managers have no idea what json is. Plus like... no examples, no schema... they would have to change shit then go look at the website to see if it worked. Fucking asshole.
Plus.. I mean SHIT, MAN! This was in a Node.js tool... if you have the Json parser you could just GENERATE the respective form fields. DO YOUR JOB2 -
Our company hired a "Human resource consulting" to help with our internal processes and policies. Yesterday they showed us an Excel that we should fill when we travel to attend meetings, events, courses, etc.
This spreadsheet... OH, THIS SPREADSHEET... you should've seen that.
Most of the "labels" of the "fields" were writen with terms that we do not use in our daily basis. The fields were ambiguous. You shout put a number on the Transportation quantity (ex.: 5) but have no space to describe which transport you will use (bus, metro, uber... so... 5 what?). When we asked which name shoud go on the field "superior" (director, pm, scrum master...) the woman from this consulting said "oh, I don't believe you're asking about this" (and since then, she became more rude by the end of the meeting).
We care for quality in our apps, and UI/UX is a big thing in our company. The last thing we want is need to read a f*#1n manual to fill a spreadsheet. Make it intuitive and you will not need an hour and a half to explain how to fill this obsolete form.
It's sad to think that this person was hired to improve our company, but did not bother to understand the company's culture (and values, and terms) first. -
GitLab, why do you don't want to have my money? I just wanted to pay for GitLab Bronze to enable Pull Mirroring. The problem is that I cannot register for billing without having a company. GitLab, I am a single private person. I am not a company! Why do I have to fill out these form fields? So if you don't want to have my money, then you will not get it.4
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Interesting password recommendation here...
Translation:
- A form with to fields: Surname and password.
- Below the form is a text: "For signup please enter your name and a password (e.g. your email address). With your name and password you can change your data anytime and may get access to the memberlist."
Bonus: There is a "help"-button (outside of the cutting) which even *recommends* the use of the email-address as the password!
Extra bonus: The password field is a normal text one.
IF THE EMAIL ADDRESS HAS TO BE SUBMITTED, WHY NOT JUST ADD ANOTHER FIELD OR AT LEAST LABEL THE FIELD CORRECTLY!
Update: After this form, you get to another form, to enter you email address...3 -
Client email: so you know that custom thing I wanted on my website that you made and I refused to pay for? Could you just send me the code, I'm gonna write my own.
*Staring at screen in disbelief and laughing*
Even if you were an awesome client, and you had paid, I still wouldn't just "give you my code" so you can write your own. You hired me to do it because you CAN'T not because you didn't want to, not because you're lazy, but because you are not mentally capable of making your own.
Me: I'm sorry, but I'm not sure you would even know where to start with this, what was wrong with the one built?
Client: I wanna put the code in my Salesforce so it can run the API request and automatically make a lead for me.
My code takes fields from a form, runs the data over to the API, gets the response, allows for user confirmation that the information is correct, and then sends all the relevant data to Salesforce as a lead.
Me: But that's exactly what mine does, just does it from your website where users will be entering the info, and once they've confirmed it you get a Salesforce lead.
Client: well some of my leads come from other places and I want to simplify everything.
Me: no, not possible, sorry.
If you didn't have 25 different websites for one company then all your leads would come from the same place and it would be simple.2 -
* Gets handed additions to current software platform (web)
* Gives back estimte of time after meeting with everyone and making them understand that once the testing phase of the project is reached there will be no changes, tests should be exhaustive and focus on SAID FUNCTIONALITY of the new additions. NO CHANGES OR ADDITIONS AT THIS POINT IN TIME
* All directives, stakeholders, users etc agreed on my request and spend an additional hour thinking of different corner and edge cases as provided by me in case they can't think of them (they can't, because they are fucking stupid, but I provided everything)
* Boss looks irritated at their lack of understanding of the scope and the time needed, nods in approval after he sees my entire specification, testing cases, possible additions to the system etc
* All members of the committee decide on the requirements being correct, concrete and proper.
* Finish the additions in a couple of weeks due to the increased demand for other projects, this directly affects the user base, so my VP and Director make it a top priority, I agree with their sentiment, since my Director knows what he is doing (real OG)
* I make the changes, test inside of my department and then stage for the testing environment. Everything is ready, all migrations are in order, the functionality is working as proper and the pipeline for the project, albeit somewhat lacking in elegance is good to go.
* Testing days arrive
* First couple of hours of test: Oh, you know what, we should add these two additional fields, and it would be good if the reporting generated by the system would contain this OTHER FORMAT rather than this one.
* ME: We stated that no additions would be done during the testing environment, testing is for functionality, not to see if you can all think of something else, even then, on June 10 I provided a initial demo and no one bothered to check on it on say something.
Them: Well, we are doing it now, this is what testing is for.
Me: Out of this room, the software engineer is me, and I can assure you, testing is not for that. I repeatedly stated that previously, I set the requirements, added corner cases, tables charts everything and not one single one of you decided to pay attention or add something, actually, said functionality you are requesting was part of one of my detailed list of corner cases, why did you not add it there and then before everything went up?
Them: Well I didn't read it at the time (think of the I in plural form since all of these dumb fucks stated the same)
Then my boss went on a rampage on their dumbasses.
I fucking hate software development sometimes.
Oh well. Bunch of fucking retards.4 -
marquetting department: i need a new for on the website its urgent drop everithing else
dev: sure can you give me the text and the fields that should be on the form?
....1 week later
dev: do you havr the info
marketing: can you have ot online today
dev: yes just get me that content
1week later
.... you know where im going with this -
Question about google crawler (?)
So, got a question, hopefully you have an answer.
I have a personal website that went up about 2 months ago that has a contact form.
Today I got two emails sent to me. This is the way I have coded it up.
But take a look at the name and message fields. I wonder if this is a google crawler submitting the form by any chance. I also got another email around the same time where the message and name field are reversed.
Anyone else experience this?10 -
When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.
Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.
When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.
Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!
Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?
When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:
1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.
Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).
Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.
When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:
(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".
Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.
There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".
It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?2 -
My code works.
Well, it should, but not like this.
I've set some datas to a nested form, saved by a variable named 'stat1', however the code won't work unless I use a variable named 'fields'. Not 'stat1'. I'm only 24 years old and I already feel too old for this shit.3 -
Fun fact: If you ever want to see the password you are typing or view the contents of a password field in a form, just pull up the web inspector. You can change the input type from "password" to "text" with no ill effects upon submission.
The lesson? When populating password fields, put junk values in there instead. Will present the right appearance, and doesn't risk exposing something that should be stored as a salted hash anyway.3 -
Last week: Build out a landing page and contact form in Pardot. Deliver to client after a quick QA pass through.
Friday: Get nasty message from client via basecamp about how the entire page looks like complete crap. We're also very unprofessional and can't deliver a simple request, while we charge a premium for our services.
So I, wondering what I managed to screw up so horribly, hop on to the test page I sent them. Except, its different and looks like crap.
They edited the page after it was sent to them and are pissed it doesn't match the comps they sent over. So I edit it back - except for the form. The one they added selects and textarea boxes to. Fields they didn't include in their comp and there was no mention of them wanting to use.
Today: Phone call with client. Every single complain they have about the page template they delivered all goes back to one of 3 things.
1. Their designer doesn't know how to use their global styles in his designs. So when things match their global styles (as they specifically asked for) they don't understand why they don't match the comp in a side by side view.
2. They change their mind on a design after the page was built. They won't admit this is the case and want to blame someone else for it not looking the way they want it. You know, "Spirit and Style of their current site"
3. They're idiots.
So now, I put aside a much more fun React project for an Amazon owned grocery chain and work on this nonsense. -
To the developer of jobomas.com (I sent this while I canceled my account):
Seriously, a platform that confirms my password in clear text in an email is a risk for my privacy and data.
One more story: I wanted to change gender to male and you asked me for my phone number, birthday etc. (required form fields)?
I should be able to decide myself what I want to share with you and what not!
This platform isn't even fully translated to english (Gender selection for example...).
Consider hiring a UX-Designer so I don't press cancel, when I want to cancel my account.... what a finish, sigh!1 -
I wonder what is going on in the minds of inexperienced developers. It must be very interesting.
I just read this bit of code
The task was to implement a certain schema into a database. They were given an ORM library, and several tutorials explaining what an ORM was and how it did it.
The result were these 3 models:
- A defaultUser with all of the defaults values for the User model. It wasn't even supposed to be instantiated, just accessed by `defaultUser.fields.username.default`
- another default table for another model.
- The "main" model, containing all other models in the form of JSON fields that would contain an array with other JSON objects that would represent the instances themselves.
I will say though, they made a home-brew ORM with (most of) all the logic a normal ORM has by parsing through the "main model", except, of course, common sense2 -
Work wants me to scroll to invalid fields after validation on a form. Is there actually a use case for that? Because it sounds terrible.21
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Finally looked at the client who overbuilt his WordPress site that I'd gladly build him a new dedicated custom site for $150k and 12 months.
Even if he says he'll take the offer I have no intention of helping this person. Every time I say edits will be done in two days, he spends the next two days sending me emails with more edits to do on top. Today alone I received 78 emails from the client, 46 from the PM which were forwards of other edits. The entire project was handled wrong from the start and no one has the balls to tell him he needs a better solution than WordPress or what our agency can provide. We have a few hundred clients, he's lucky to get one week turn around time on anything more than copy changes. He wants form functionality changes weekly because he's always got a new idea, the current form has over 30 fields for users to fill out, all required, and he's always asking for more.4 -
So I spent 2 hours trying to debug my HTML form with data pulled from database. I kept updating the data in the database but the forms weren't changing. Then it finally struck me, Firefox fucking caches form fields on page reload. I use to think this was a convinient feature but now it's just a pain in the ass.1
-
Been using LastPass for a couple of years, but I'm looking for an alternative because good lord how slow its become. Suggestions?
Needs to be cross-platform/browser and be able to autofill user credentials, don't care about form fields.8 -
I used to manually pass form fields to Redux and back 😖
Of course I discovered redux-form later but now I’m using final-form and it’s a breeze3 -
More from my big black book of ai and neuroscience:
I think if trace theory is true to any degree it would go some distance in explaining phenomenal consciousness, assuming I haven't misunderstood anything.
In fuzzy trace theory (FTT) it is posited that people form two types of mental representations about a past event:
*verbatim traces: detailed representations of a past event.
*gist traces: fuzzy representations of a past event.
People can reason with verbatim *and* gist traces but prefer gists.
*vision was suggested to work similarly in 1999. With human vision, two processes could be used: one that aggregates local receptive fields and one that parses the local receptive spatial field. It was suggested that people used prior experience, gists, to decide which dominates a perceptual decision.
Gist processes form representations of events, semantic details, where verbatim reinstates the context found in the surface details of an event.
__notes__
Parallel storage: asserts encoding/storage of verbatim/gist traces operate in *parallel*, not in serial.
I like to think of verbatim traces as databases, and gists as queries constructed by recognition.
Several studies have found that the meaning (gist) of an item is encoded even *before* the surface details (verbatim).
This might be important as a survival mechanism but should not be taken to mean strictly that gists are formed wholly *without* details or important and recognizable features of the item in question. It may well be for high level el processing and classification efficiency this may be an important reprocessing step, in the same way that many functions of the brain are duplicated throughout.5 -
The frontend developers in my company are the reason why I have anxiety. Here are few things that grinds my knees:
1) for a long time in projects, they deleted the auth token from their storage without integrating the logout api. They thought why use an API for that. :)
2) most of them had no clue that form fields could accept javascript as inputs and work as XSS vulnerabilities. This actually happened with a client, he got so fucking pissed.
3) One of them asked me to convert a PATCH request to DELETE cos fuck REST and HTTP methods.
For fuck’s sake. I need to get out of this place.4 -
Starting the day with Management complaining about budget and how R&D spends a lot. I start talking about the form to get a machine to a developer, that requires detailed information about the specs, proper justification, provide price comparison, fields of text which I know their departments will not check or fully comprehend BUT administration type departments always get the latest MacBook when their work literally involves little more than read emails, PDFs, write word documents and not high demanding software tools. R&D colleague suggests that a Raspberry pi would suffice for what administration personal needs out of a PC.
Management didn't comment.1 -
I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.
I want a logic check.
I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.
In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.
College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...
Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*
Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"
Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.
In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.
Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".
I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'
Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.
The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.
So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.
Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.11 -
HTML Writers Guidelines
When designing your web site you want to make the visiting experience as enjoyable as possible and at the same time make it so that if the site needs to be changed in any way, the changes are not too difficult to make. You want the look to be as appealing as possible for all browsers and also make the site accessible to users with disabilities. In order to accomplish all this there are some general guidelines when creating your HTML code.
1. The first thing that will really make your life easier is through the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - CSS is used to maintain the look of the document such as the fonts, margins and color. HTML directly on the page is not a good choice to handle these aspects because if say, the font color you are using for certain paragraphs needs to be changed from blue to red, you would have to go in and change each color tag manually. By using CSS you can designate the color for each of those paragraphs just once in the CSS file. That way if you have to change the font color from blue to red you make one change instead of the countless number of changes you might have to make, especially if your web site contains hundreds of pages. This is a big time saver and a must for all professionally designed web sites.
2. Don't use the FONT tag directly in your HTML code - This becomes a problem when using some cheap authoring tools that try to mimic what a web page should look like by using excessive FONT tags and nbsp characters. These tools end up creating web pages that are impossible to keep maintained. There is a program you can use, if you've created one of these disaster pages, called the HTML Tidy Program which you can actually download here . This will clean up your code as well as possible.
3. You want your web pages readable to people who have disabilities - People who surf the Internet depend on speech synthesizers or Braille readers to interpret the text on the page. If your HTML markup is sloppy or isn't contained in CSS the software these people use to read pages have a difficult time in interpreting these pages. You should also include descriptions for each image on your page. Also, don't use server side image maps. If you are using tables you should include a summary of the table's structure and also associate table data with the correct headers. This gives non visual browsers a chance to follow the page as they go from one cell to another. And finally, for forms, make sure you include labels for form fields.
By following just these three guidelines you give your visitors, especially disabled visitors the best chance of having an enjoyable visit to your site while at the same time making it so that if you have to make changes to your site, those changes can be made easily and quickly.2 -
Ugh. So for one of my classes (Projects In Computer Science) we have to break up into groups; Around 4-6 people per group and build some software for different local companies in the city that I live in.
Well.... the company that my group chose is so damn frustrating. Essentially we are making a glorified Applicant Form system for their website (there's more to it than just that). So you would think that the company knew what sort of fields would be needed for these forms.... Well no, we are over a month into this project and still have barely began coding shit because they are so fucking slow to respond to our emails, don't pick up our calls, or put off doing absolutely anything related to our project! Our professor asked that we would have a written copy of the project requirements made and signed off by the client within the first 2 weeks of classes starting. Took them over a month to get around to that, and still even after signing off on the requirements said that they were missing key forms that we needed to account for... Its your damn fault for not telling us that. We completely wasted our time planning out the database and structuring the front-end/back-end to work for the forms they had given us, and now there's yet another one with inconsistent fields, meaning we need to rethink out most of our system to account for this data. We only have 3 months total, 1 which is already gone and practically wasted, and even still we don't have any sort of confirmation on what form fields we have to account for.
Fucking hell just spend a little bit of time for both our sake, and your own to get us the finalized forms fields and requirements for this project. Honestly at the rate things are going we probably wont be able to finish, which sucks ass since this project is perfect resume material.
Seriously this company desperately needs us to make them this program since their current system is absolute shit. They are literally getting a system that would cost upwards of $20,000 for free, yet they don't seem to care much that we probably wont be able to finish due to their faults. If we didn't have a time cap on this project I wouldn't really care, but the fact that we only have 3 months, plus school work in other classes, exams and a personal life, its making this project a lot more stressful than it needs to be.
Its not like we have a project manager either, so all the emailing and communication is being done by myself. Honest to god, all they have/had to do was sit down for 1 hour of time to decide what they all needed and we would probably have been able to finish this project.5 -
A Website where the user alterts us about a defect on his printer.
There are predefined categories (things like error messages in the printer display, issues with the prints, issues with paper jams, issues with noise and so on) maybe around 10 to 20 categories.
They decide which fields are shown when the user selects it.
Should I do a Dropdown? List field? Radio buttons?
Tech: PHP, Slim Framework, fontsawesome, resulting in a mail sent to our ticket system to pre-fill form items to avoid 1st level support...1 -
So I'm testing a co-workers code and doing regression scenarios when suddenly it "loses" data in two fields after I save the data and go out/come back into the form. That's weird says I, lets have a look....
And I find the following conditional::
if (field empty) then failValidation("hey stoopid user")
else blank field value
Say what???
Happy Friyay everyone.... -
Well I did a stupid thing the other day. I was so pissed at myself. I had a form on my website for people to email me and it was working fine. I was tired of the form variables staying filled out so I decided to use some Javascript to clear the values when they click the button. I didn't think about the fact that the Javascript would fire before the backend code and so I was getting blank emails. I finally figured this out and instead just gave users a button to clear the form's input fields.4
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Remember dear web developers, don't be a lazy are and just reuse existing web endpoints. You can only do that to a certain extent. Don't expose a form URL encoded endpoint with dozens of fields and potentially kill the productivity of your mobile dev.
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Something I've been thinking about for some time: many sites allow you to hit Ctrl+Enter to submit a form (while the focus is on some of the form's input fields) and I think it would be nice if DevRant does the same. Right now, to submit, I have to either use the mouse and click the button or hit Tab two times and then Space.2
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At old e-commerce job, some orders were coming through with most of the shipping info missing. The only info filled out was the State. When we looked at Heap, we could see the user was filling in those fields. There was both frontend and backend validation for required form data, so the user shouldn’t have been able to checkout without an address.
When I looked at the BE logic, I saw addresses were retrieved from our database by using a method called GetOrCreateDefaultAddress. When the website couldn’t find the address in the db, it created a new one where the only address field that was filled in was the state.
Unfortunately, this default address creation was happening after the submit button had been hit. There was no logic to validate the address this late in the checkout because the earlier form validation in the process should have caught this.
The orders did have email addresses, so customer service did have a way to contact the customer. I have no idea what happened to the user’s address. Was it never saved? Did it get caught up in a cron job to delete old users and addresses from the db??2 -
Jesus God. This feels kind of tacky!
(Yes, I use "thee" and "thou", as well as the "-st" suffix. They maximise the clarity of statements.)
People who resemble me are rare, but I intend to form with someone who is extraordinarily similar to me an alliance. Because I have failed to locate anyone who meets my criteria by simply performing on-line searches for people who bear a resemblance to me, I am publicising this document.
I have an unusually dry sense of humour, one which is dry to the extent of often being interpreted as being extremely malevolent. I am a polymath who studies ornithology, various fields of computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, general biology, neurology, physics, mathematics, and various other things. I am more than capable of withholding from others information, i.e., I am capable of keeping a secret. Being politically correct is hardly an act of which I am guilty, and, in order to provide an example of my politically-incorrect nature, I cite in this sentence my being a eugenicist. I am the servant of the birds. I greatly appreciate the breed of philosophy which concerns interactions and general wisdom, as opposed to questioning the purpose of existence and otherwise ultimately unimportant things. I have been described as being paranoid about security. I do not in the slightest like meaningless crap, e.g., art. I often venture in an attempt to shoot tiny birds, because I adore them and wish to develop a greater understanding of them. I am proficient with most computer systems when a manual is available to me. This was a small assortment of pieces of information concerning me which could be used as a method of judging whether or not thou art similar to me.
Thou art, however, required to possess some specific qualities, which include being able to maintain confidentiality, i.e., not being a whistle-blower or anything similar. In addition to this, consciously believing that logical reasoning is better than emotionally-based thinking, and thou needest to be capable of properly utilizing resources which are available on-line, e.g., Encyclopedia Britannica. I also demand that thou writest coherent English sentences.
If thou believest that thou bearest some resemblances to me, please send to me an e-mail which describes thee and is encrypted with the PGP public key which is available at the following URL: http://raw.github.com/varikvalefor/.... I can be reached at varikvalefor@aol.com.17 -
Settle an argument for our development team. We have infrastructure to report crashes when they occur, via a simple online form submission. The form provides basic fields for a description and an email address, and also posts some basic telemetry (rebuilding what it can of call stack, variables etc). Currently the email address is optional (you can submit the form and leave it blank). The form is not mandatory (the user can hit 'send' to submit online, 'save' to save the crash report to transfer in other ways, or 'cancel' to just ignore it entirely (irregardless of their choice, depending on where the crash has occurred, they may be able to continue using the application or it might exit).
A suggestion has been put forward to make the email address mandatory. Surprisingly, this has kicked off an incredibly polarising debate, so I thought I would put it to devRant to see what is the consensus here.
I'm trying not to bias the discussion by stating with the considerations at play, but would encourage you to think about them before chiming in!4 -
Any recommendations on a jquery/js plugin that saves form fields in the scenario where the user left the form or page they can come back and still have the values from when they left. I wrote up some thing for a small form on an old site using sessionStorage api but I need something that can work with any form or perhaps multiple forms at once. any good plugins out there?6
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Website updates make me sick. Changing a color button, increase/decrease paddings won't make any differences. Why people are not focus on technical stuff like a 40 fields form instead ? Oh I know my boss is a web designer . Feeling alone as Web Developper.
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I need some advices on how to do a react multiple steps form. A form allows student to submit their previous study and exchange credit in my univwrwity. Username and password at start. Then text fields, date selection, drop list with lots of data from backend, upload files. Click next to next steps or previous steps. It seems complicated. Thinking to use react and redux. Any advice...
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I’ve built a ’self-serve’ inline-app/widget for our customers to book a moving quote appointment themselves. One of the ‘pages’ has a couple address autocomplete form fields. I went with a service called placekit, but used a CDN they offer. There is a more robust node.js library they offer, but couldn’t get it working. To be fair, I am completely new to node.js. I want to learn it, any recommended tuts, or readings? The company I work for is really invested in old technologies, we use SVN still. Does node play well with SVN? The IT lead for my department is opposed to connecting node to our DB, but I think we will be forced to for our upcoming automated testing project, it too is node, that’s what prompted my goal to learn it.2
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To the UI/UXs... Which of these approaches is more Mobile User Friendly?
- A single screen with all 12 form fields visible to the user, where only four of these fields are optional and inputs are validated on submission.
----- OR -----
- A single screen with fields split into 12 sub screens, a form progress bar at the top, a next and previous button with "skip" button for optional fields, with inputs validated progressively.
You can imagine the contents of the form like the ones on surveys. I have already implemented the second option but in doubts of its friendliness, I also had previously implemented something similar to the first but with criticism from colleges stating it's too much fields in one screen.
I would love to see from your view and learn from your experience... What do you think?8 -
9 Ways to Improve Your Website in 2020
Online customers are very picky these days. Plenty of quality sites and services tend to spoil them. Without leaving their homes, they can carefully probe your company and only then decide whether to deal with you or not. The first thing customers will look at is your website, so everything should be ideal there.
Not everyone succeeds in doing things perfectly well from the first try. For websites, this fact is particularly true. Besides, it is never too late to improve something and make it even better.
In this article, you will find the best recommendations on how to get a great website and win the hearts of online visitors.
Take care of security
It is unacceptable if customers who are looking for information or a product on your site find themselves infected with malware. Take measures to protect your site and visitors from new viruses, data breaches, and spam.
Take care of the SSL certificate. It should be monitored and updated if necessary.
Be sure to install all security updates for your CMS. A lot of sites get hacked through vulnerable plugins. Try to reduce their number and update regularly too.
Ride it quick
Webpage loading speed is what the visitor will notice right from the start. The war for milliseconds just begins. Speeding up a site is not so difficult. The first thing you can do is apply the old proven image compression. If that is not enough, work on caching or simplify your JavaScript and CSS code. Using CDN is another good advice.
Choose a quality hosting provider
In many respects, both the security and the speed of the website depend on your hosting provider. Do not get lost selecting the hosting provider. Other users share their experience with different providers on numerous discussion boards.
Content is king
Content is everything for the site. Content is blood, heart, brain, and soul of the website and it should be useful, interesting and concise. Selling texts are good, but do not chase only the number of clicks. An interesting article or useful instruction will increase customer loyalty, even if such content does not call to action.
Communication
Broadcasting should not be one-way. Make a convenient feedback form where your visitors do not have to fill out a million fields before sending a message. Do not forget about the phone, and what is even better, add online chat with a chatbot and\or live support reps.
Refrain from unpleasant surprises
Please mind, self-starting videos, especially with sound may irritate a lot of visitors and increase the bounce rate. The same is true about popups and sliders.
Next, do not be afraid of white space. Often site owners are literally obsessed with the desire to fill all the free space on the page with menus, banners and other stuff. Experiments with colors and fonts are rarely justified. Successful designs are usually brilliantly simple: white background + black text.
Mobile first
With such a dynamic pace of life, it is important to always keep up with trends, and the future belongs to mobile devices. We have already passed that line and mobile devices generate more traffic than desktop computers. This tendency will only increase, so adapt the layout and mind the mobile first and progressive advancement concepts.
Site navigation
Your visitors should be your priority. Use human-oriented terms and concepts to build navigation instead of search engine oriented phrases.
Do not let your visitors get stuck on your site. Always provide access to other pages, but be sure to mention which particular page will be opened so that the visitor understands exactly where and why he goes.
Technical audit
The site can be compared to a house - you always need to monitor the performance of all systems, and there is always a need to fix or improve something. Therefore, a technical audit of any project should be carried out regularly. It is always better if you are the first to notice the problem, and not your visitors or search engines.
As part of the audit, an analysis is carried out on such items as:
● Checking robots.txt / sitemap.xml files
● Checking duplicates and technical pages
● Checking the use of canonical URLs
● Monitoring 404 error page and redirects
There are many tools that help you monitor your website performance and run regular audits.
Conclusion
I hope these tips will help your site become even better. If you have questions or want to share useful lifehacks, feel free to comment below.
Resources:
https://networkworld.com/article/...
https://webopedia.com/TERM/C/...
https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/...
https://macsecurity.net/view/...